Christmas Completion

Epiphany (January 6) commemorates when the Magi met the infant Jesus as portrayed in the gospel of Matthew. It also celebrates the baptism of Jesus and the wedding at Cana, the sight of Jesus' first miracle. 

It sometimes is treated as the end of the Christmas season. The "twelve days of Christmas" are 1/25-1/5. The event, honored by creches, often is portrayed as involving the baby Jesus. 

The gospel account does not say this. It actually implies (e.g., the killing of the innocents involving children under two) that it happened later. The later portrayals are part of the attempt to combine the different accounts of Matthew and Luke into one.

Around one in eight Christians are Orthodox. They use the Julian Calendar, which led Orthodox Christians to celebrate Christmas on the same day. The day now falls on January 7th. A reason to extend the Christmas season, including taking down decorations, for one more day.  2025 will truly begin all the same.

The new Congress and certification of the electoral vote are means to dip the toes in the water. 2025 will be for real politically at noon on January 20th.  

Meanwhile, one thing that people do for the new year is to have resolutions. I have not done too well with resolutions over the years. One way to go is to see what works and connect it to some tradition's new year. There are various dates there including in March (Spring) and September (Jewish). 

The 9th is a national day of mourning for Jimmy Carter. Martin Luther King Jr. Day falls on 1/20. 

Trump/Vance Electoral Victory Confirmed (One Is Still Disqualified)

Trump aided and abetted the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, which was an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power. 

After a violent attempted insurrection, the electoral votes were counted early the next morning. The 14th Amendment specifically addresses keeping such people out of federal and state office:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The Supreme Court, not even showing up to announce the unsigned opinion (5-4 on some points), blocked a state attempt to keep his name off the ballot in Trump v. Anderson. Later, they split by ideological lines regarding criminal immunity for such presidential acts. The case was well named: Trump v. U.S. 

As Rep. Jayapal noted:

I know that many Americans across the country are still processing how it is possible that a President, who resisted the peaceful transfer of power four years ago and is also the first ever convicted felon elected, could enter the Oval Office.

Since the days of John Adams in 1793, vice presidents have presided over official counts even if they were one of the candidates. Vice President Humphrey skipped it in 1969. Might be the best policy.  

There often were a small number -- not a majority of one party as with House Republicans in 2021 -- electoral vote challenges. 

There was a proud but bipartisan tradition of using Jan. 6 to make technical objections within the byzantine electoral college system. And I think all of that got washed away with the attempted political coup and the mass insurrectionary violence of January 6 the last time around,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who had made a symbolic objection along with other Democrats to Trump’s victory in 2017.

Such challenges were not "election denial" generally speaking. They might have been picayune or wrongminded in certain cases. I think there was a reasonable ground to challenge after the 2000 elections. But, it is quite different when it is done after the Capitol is attacked as in 2021. 

A majority of Republican House members (under 10 senators) furthered the lies that motivated the violence. That was wrong. We now will bend the other way. For instance, it would have been appropriate for someone to go on record to argue Trump was not constitutionally qualified.  

They did not but a peaceful token resistance would not be what happened last time. As Jayapal reminds:

What we do today will be in stark contrast to what happened four years ago, when insurrectionists—fueled by sitting President Donald Trump — attacked the U.S. Capitol in the most violent attack since the War of 1812. That day, U.S. Capitol Police officers were killed, and hundreds — including over 140 law enforcement officers—were injured.  

We still are processing "how it is possible" that Trump will be in power in two weeks. We should not just move on and congratulate ourselves on a peaceful transfer of power (when one specific side wins). 

On a basic level, Trump won in the end, even if it took a few years.  Rick Hasen continues the effort -- oh so reasonably -- of helping him to resist even largely symbolic consequences. For instance, reference to Trump's sentence "hanging over him" is some reason to block even an unconditional discharge.  

(Hasen opposed the prosecution in the first place. I'm not going to shade his analysis generously here.) 

What was the New York trial judge supposed to do? If he sentenced Trump before the election, there was a reasonable concern that it would be deemed problematic. Maybe wrongly, but his fears were well founded. So, he waited.

The sentencing process then involved some more procedural stuff that would take time. The appellate courts, especially the Supreme Court, have not shown much inclination to speed things along. Months upon months of appeals would still have occurred. 

Same result: he runs out the clock. We failed as a nation in November 2024. It was a joint effort. We should at least remember what happened and still is happening. The voice of the people is not god.  

We saw that in 2016. The person who tried to violently overturn the election last time gets a peaceful transfer of power this time. Rightly so, putting aside the whole 14A, sec. 3 issue, though I think it was a bit too easy. Still, shades of ...

Two more weeks of sanity.

Ingraham v. Wright: Justices Ignore Reality Regarding Corporal Punishment (sic) In Schools

When I was writing the Substack version of yesterday's entry on the Eighth Amendment, Justice White's dissent in Ingraham v. Wright again came to mind. It adds some context to his Harmelin dissent. 

The oral argument and opinion also still offend me. A contemporary law article adds more details, including how another student admitted the wrongdoing one of the punished students allegedly did. 

The case involved corporal punishment in public schools. The students were seriously harmed, including one boy having his hand broken. Fifty "licks" with a paddle would be likely to cause problems even if it is done on a sizable butt. 

The oral argument needed more bluntness and less hairsplitting or asinine comments like a justice punching another justice. The bottom line for five justices was that CORPORAL PUNISHMENT of students is not "punishment" for Eighth Amendment purposes. The amendment only applies to punishments obtained by criminal trials.  

I place the words in caps since the dissent is right to be bothered by the majority's denial of the basics. The students were punished. School punishment was involved. It wasn't just some assault by a government agent. It is ridiculously formalistic to ignore this. 

If a person is punished in the open, they retain the same constitutional rights. OTOH, it was supposed to be different for students. They go home, which provides a check. It didn't help the students here much. They were still harmed.  

We can argue that corporal punishment of all kinds is not unconstitutional. Appeals to the past, however, only go so far. We do not think the types of corporal punishments (whipping, ear cropping) acceptable in earlier days are unacceptable now. 

(Some think all corporal punishment in schools, or maybe even out of schools, is wrong.) 

The question was if the corporal punishment here was "cruel and unusual." We should also mix in that school punishment is unlikely to be applied evenly. Certain students, including those of a particular race or class, are likely to be treated differently than others. 

The other issue was the need for a hearing before someone was corporally punished. It is telling that Justice Powell wrote the opinion. He opposed past efforts to provide a hearing when suspensions were involved. Justice Stewart did not provide him with a fifth vote. He silently did so in this case.  

(Note that Powell appealed to history to uphold traditional school discipline. A few years later, he dissented and spoke of a "living constitution," when a habitual criminal was involved.)  

Justice Stevens during the oral argument proposed a situation where a student is confined in a school basement. Stewart answered that was clearly a deprivation of "liberty." Where was that here?

Again, the oral argument did not seem to be blunt enough. The students did not just willingly submit to being hit. They were held down. Their bodily integrity was violated. The government deprived them of "liberty." This is not a complicated issue. 

Rehnquist sneered when the advocate listed various bodily integrity and privacy-type interests. Where was this in the Constitution? Case law honors such interests. I would also reference the Fourth Amendment. People have the right to be secure in their persons. Being held down and being corporally punished is not something to handwave. 

If a student obtains a hearing of sorts before being suspended, they should receive one before being paddled. How could they obtain true relief after the fact? The boy's hand cannot magically be unbroken. 

The only thing offered is an after-the-fact possibility of financial relief. The dissent notes that if the school acted reasonably, even if mistakenly, the student would not receive even that. 

And, it is not like the child gets money for a new bike. The parents get the money. The oral argument was more concerned about so-called trivial (just one smack with a ruler?) corporal punishments (again, sic) requiring some sort of hearing. 

These days any type of touching of students, even a sympathetic hug, can cause problems. Teachers should carefully follow state and federal guidelines. 

I am open to a simple rule that corporal punishment should not be allowed. Do we still give lashes to sailors? Why should we similarly give licks to preteens and teens? It's barbaric on a basic level.

I understand that setting in place a national rule, especially in the mid-1970s, might not have allowed us to go that far. Nonetheless, there was cause for basic safeguards. And, basic acceptance of real life.

This opinion saw fit to do neither. Thus, even forty years later, I am outraged by the whole thing. 

Three Films

There are a ton of Hallmark Channel films and even more films like that during the Christmas season. 

Time For Them To Come Home For Christmas has an intriguing plot about a woman who loses her memory. Jessy Schram, a familiar face, also was in it. So, when it was on one morning -- holiday films are on all day on multiple channels -- I DVR-ed. 

I enjoyed it. The film has some mystery and earned pathos. The love interest turns out to have a burden he has to bear that is somewhat more serious than you might expect. Their road trip has a few interesting stops, including a cameo of another familiar Hallmark actress. The ending is satisfying.  

Jessy Schram is the best thing in the film. The actor is decent too. A film with a similar title also was enjoyable -- I watched it multiple times.  

The Prince and the Showgirl is summarized in a review book as Laurence Olivier (the prince) romancing Marilyn Monroe (the showgirl). This is somewhat misleading. The film has more weight than expected. I liked it overall.  

Monroe bought the rights to the story. Olivier co-starred and directed. She reportedly was some trouble during the production. This was during the later years of her career when she had fewer films and more personal problems. My Week With Marilyn (in the queue to watch) portrays the production.  

The prince regent expects to have a pleasant "dinner" with the showgirl (an American in Britain) but she is more self-aware than expected. He plans to cut his losses but she keeps on hanging around. 

In the end, she turns his offer to return with him down. She also gets involved with politics, including after she overhears something in German, that she speaks. Monroe does well with a complex performance. 

The film mixes romance, satire, and travelogue. It takes place in 1911, which adds an edge to the whole thing, especially when the British want to keep the Balkan country he is from happy. 

Hotel Berlin is from the same author as the famous Greta Garbo film Grand Hotel. This story takes place during the final days of Nazi Germany. The film was released in early 1945 before the war was over.

I liked the film. The DVD was glitched so I could not see the whole thing. Nonethless, the story kept my interest and there were various interesting characters. 

Some of the actors were also familiar including another role for Peter Lorre and Raymond Massey, who played various dramatic roles, including Abraham Lincoln. He played a proper German general who was part of the plan to assassinate Hitler. He could not realize his time was up. 

The storyline had many German characters with dubious goings on. The central story involved an escapee from the Dachau concentration camp. He was able to escape though some drama was mixed in until the end there too. So the plot summary tells me. 

Some reviews apparently were annoyed the film treated certain German characters sympathetically. Such is the path to a good drama. The book was written in the middle of the war. It is somewhat different when things are occurring c. 1945.  

(The assassination plot took place in 1944.) 

Vicki Baum, the author, was a Jewish German refugee. She wrote several books and screenplays. I will check one or more out. If they are of interest, as with the Marilyn film, I will say more.  

Enforcing the Eighth Amendment is a Job for All

Clickbait stories pop up on my feed or whatever when I check online. It is somewhat annoying. It also can be found on social media and blogs. 

Sometimes a new story is liable to bother us. Maybe it should. It often is a bit more complicated than it first looks. Single court opinions can be the same way, especially when we click the links and do some research. They often also have interesting content.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Rummell v. Estelle (1980) involved a 19th-century Texas statute that provided life imprisonment with the possibility of parole to three-time "habitual" offenders. Three non-violent felonies were involved, showing the open-ended nature of the policy.

I re-listened to the oral argument and the 5-4 opinion is understandable. The lawyer for the petitioner kept on putting in so many caveats that it suggested he was asking an almost ad hoc approach be applied. The state's reply also came off as rather reasonable.

The parlor game in constitutional cases is often line drawing. It is going to be somewhat arbitrary. Choices have to be made. Still, the lawyer probably tossed in too many. And, they repeatedly were dubious. 

Okay, so the test is non-violent felonies? Not quite. Maybe drug crimes are especially bad. Or non-violent financial crimes had really sympathetic victims (the little old lady with their social security checks). Three was too few but what about seven? 

The majority granted the possibility of extreme cases but generally, courts should not decide punishments were disproportionate to the offense. The exceptions were extreme punishments for traffic tickets or the like so that caveat was not exactly convincing. 

Justice Stewart concurred to say bad policy is not by rule an unconstitutional policy. Justice Blackmun went along without comment. Then Justice Rehnquist wrote the opinion with the usual suspects like White and Burger going along. White, by the way, was not a default conservative vote but he was unsurprising. 

Justice Powell wrote a strong dissent noting we cannot rely on parole and wanting proportional review with some teeth. He quoted an old Eighth Amendment case to show we cannot rely on what was acceptable when the amendment was ratified. I should have a "wider application than the mischief which gave it birth."

Powell explicitly supported a "living Constitution," a term critiqued by some as making shit up. A principle that applies the text in a logical way deemed appropriate over a hundred years ago is not illegitimate adjudication. Originalism is "living" in real practice as well. And I don't say that critically. 

Justice Powell got Blackmun's vote a few years later in Solem v. Helm, which involved a seventh offense but no possibility of parole. Powell argued the possibility of executive commutation wasn't the same thing. The main core of the opinion, however, was to make his Rummell dissent the law of the land. 

The opinion had this little Easter Egg: it turned out that Rummell was paroled less than a year after his appeal was denied! We usually do know what happens to people after a Supreme Court opinion. It would be a useful exercise for someone to research the end results of cases, including ten or more years afterward.

Consider Harmelin v. Michigan, which watered down Solem. The case involved a first-time offender of drug possession with an amount assumed to be for distribution. Recall how Rummell's lawyer granted maybe a drug charge would be different. 

Harmelin received life without the potential for parole. What happened to Ronald Harmelin? I did some online digging and it turns out he was paroled less than a decade later. Michigan changed the law. State court rulings sometimes often result in relief.

Harmelin was a fractured decision with Scalia (for not the first or last time) traveling where a majority did not want to go (only Rehnquist went along) and rejecting proportionate analysis at all. Three justices, the same who co-wrote the Planned Parenthood v. Casey abortion plurality, agreed Harmelin's punishment was constitutionally acceptable. Only extreme punishments would be problematic. 

Their position became the new rule with the reality of the situation only special situations will result in penalties being struck down on Eighth Amendment grounds. The two key reasons would be capital punishments with problematic aspects and minors. 

How much this holds today after every member of the plurality resigned is unclear. Anyway, in a bit of a curious result, a strong dissent was written by Justice White, who joined Rummell and dissented in Solem. 

Justice White turned out to have a strong defense of proportional punishment analysis, even for drug crimes. White regularly was a stare decisis guy and could be found having some moderate takes in criminal cases. Still, this was a tour de force: 

While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal substances. For example, in considering the effects of alcohol on society[.]

Justice White isn't exactly the person you think would be the writer of a "let's not have a drug exception to the Constitution" opinion. 

He also noted Scalia's argument that the original understanding of the constitutional point at issue is far from clear.  The partial concurrence rightly noted that ultimately original understanding (even if we can clearly determine it, which we cannot) is not the only thing we use. 

Overall, extreme punishments logically can be found to be cruel and unusual. And, the Supreme Court said so multiple times, not just in capital cases. That should often be the end of it. 

Justice Stevens added a few words in dissent to argue that if death was different (it completely ended matters), life imprisonment was pretty different too. Not being able to get out of prison was rather extreme too. It should also be handled sparingly.  

I agree. The lack of even possibility of parole -- Charles Manson had that -- is ridiculously extreme. We can grant that in reality, it is not always final. This only shows how a rule that allows for periodic reviews (perhaps every ten years) is logical and workable.

The Harmelin trio split 2-1 when three strikes returned to the Supreme Court with Souter writing for the dissenters in one of the two cases. The latest Eighth Amendment case involves criminalizing sleeping in public places. Some were quite appalled. 

A constant theme in these cases was the need to allow legislatures to have discretion in formulating criminal policy. The line drawing would often be subjective or at least open to reasoned debate. On some level, this has a broad reach when applying constitutional text.

Back to the origins of the Bill of Rights, there was some talk about the role of judges to be independent checks on the majority. Chief Justice Roberts appealed that theme in his end-of-the-year report. 

As many noted, his argument left something to be desired. For instance, here and abroad, rights are protected by judges without having (good behavior) life tenure. Justices also repeatedly (selectively) appeal to the need to rely on the elective branches.

The line drawing is going to be complicated with both sides having something of a point. The Eighth Amendment along with other commands that apply to the criminal justice system is often honored by legislative and executive decision-making. 

Constitutional demands are lessons for the government as a whole. Legislative policies promoting sane penal policies as well as careful prosecutorial discretion honor the amendment. 

Constitutional rights are also lessons for the public. Madison in his speech in support of the Bill of Rights recognized this:

[T]hey had a tendency to impress some degree of respect for them, to establish the public opinion in their favor, and rouse the attention of the whole community, it may be one mean to controul the majority from those acts to which they might be otherwise inclined.

Before the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms beyond a limited militia function, the public at large understood the words that way. We honor freedom of speech and equal protection. 

The current Supreme Court still finds cases to hand down liberal-minded criminal justice opinions. They might not be big fans of the Eighth Amendment but find some limits. For the rest of the time, it is up to others to honor its principles. 

The past was prologue in that campaign.  

Republicans Control Congress (Justice Thomas Rejoices)

Sen. Patty Murray as Senate Pro Tempore gaveled the Senate term to completion at around 11:45 A.M. The Democrats no longer controlled.

New Congress (119th)

The new congressional term began at noon. After two clowns held up the works, Mike Johnson was later chosen as Speaker of the House. 

The vote took longer but no repeat performance of the clown show multi-day process last time. The Republicans have 219 and the Democrats 215 members. Matt Gaetz would have been #435.

[Gaetz's seat will be filled by a special election in April. Two others will resign to join the Trump Administration, including as National Security Advisor, which does not require confirmation.]

The Republicans will have a 53-47 majority in the Senate with West Virginia, Pennsylvania (only non-red state), Ohio, and Montana thrown their way. Sen. Vance will soon resign and be replaced. Ohio will have two new senators this session.

[The new senator from West Virginia is completing his term as governor and will be sworn in later in the month. Rubio is also likely to resign soon to become Secretary of State. Rubio and Vance will be immediately replaced by the governors.]

Trump should be deemed constitutionally unqualified as an insurrectionist, should have been impeached and removed from the running, and the voters should have not voted for him (him being a sexual predator is just part of the list of reasons why). The count will be final on Monday.

Mike Johnson started things off by implying the House will go after LGBTQ+ people. 

Clarence Thomas

A major benefit is for those who want conservatives to control the Supreme Court. Likewise, for Thomas et. al. whom do not want real oversight and consequences for Supreme Court wrongdoing.  Republican senators, while aiding and abetting Trump, opposed ethics reform. Something that should be bipartisan. 

A largely symbolic moment occurred when the Judicial Conference (led by Chief Justice Roberts) refused to submit complaints about Thomas to the Justice Department. As Senator Whitehouse noted:

The judiciary’s response contains a number of inconsistencies and strange claims, and ultimately doesn’t address the only real question the Judicial Conference should’ve been focused on for the nearly two years it spent on this matter:  Is there reasonable cause to believe that Justice Thomas willfully broke the disclosure law?

Fix the Court has more. As does the Senate Judiciary Committee which released a report last month on the Supreme Court's ethics and lack thereof. 

Comments to this entry (by a conservative who continuously sucks up to the conservative justices) add more details on the substance, including the argument the law doesn't apply since the justices are not members of "circuits." Not only are they assigned circuits to oversee, but also other people (e.g., tax judges) do not have specific circuits.  

Congress needs to explicitly pass binding ethics legislation to check the justices. The House is not going to impeach, even when that extreme sanction is warranted. Often a lesser response is justified as applied now to lower court justices. Republicans refused because they liked the conservative membership. One more reason they do not deserve to be entrusted with control of the government.

The voters thought otherwise. We will suffer the consequences. I find this both aggravating and infuriating. For now, at least, a non-disgusting dangerous predator is not in the White House. 

Trump Sentencing 

Said predator's biggest fan on the Supreme Court continues to get away with it. Something they can bond over if they get a chance. 

Trump was found guilty of crimes in the state of New York. Some concern trolls opposed this trial, which would have meant he would be brought to criminal trial for NOTHING. They were wrong. 

The trial judge has scheduled sentencing for January 10th after rejecting various claims in an order that repeatedly criticizes crybaby arguments against the judge in particular. Given his upcoming term, the judge won't give him any prison time, which might not have been warranted overall. 

Since the guilty verdict is the main concern here -- Trump serving a minute in jail was unlikely ever to happen -- expect an appeal nonetheless. 

Supreme Court Watch: Welcome to 2025 Edition

TikTok briefing continues but the Court overall taking advantage of the holiday. Still, there is some court stuff to discuss. It is 1/3 of the government after all.

Jimmy Carter

President Carter was the only full-term president who did not appoint a Supreme Court justice. He still put his stamp on the federal courts:

In addition to the 41 women judges Carter named to the federal judiciary, he appointed a record 57 people of color to the bench, including those who would become prominent federal appellate judges such as Leon Higginbotham, on the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit; Amalya Kearse, on the New York-based 2nd Circuit; and Damon Keith on the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit.

President Biden, correctly, was proud of his judicial picks. He followed in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter. 

The Supreme Court also declared:

In recognition of the President’s announcement of a National Day of Mourning for James Earl Carter, Jr., the Chief Justice has ordered that the Supreme Court building will be closed on Thursday, January 9, 2025. 

President Biden also declared the same for executive departments. Retired Justice Breyer was originally appointed to the Court of Appeals by President Carter. 

Amanda Tyler has a nice essay focused on his views on religious liberty with a Baptist touch. 

TikTok/Trump

A miscellaneous order was dropped on New Year's Eve granting the petitioners divided argument time in the TikTok cases. The various sides are keeping busy during the holidays to be ready for 1/10.  

There are two cases involved here. The order means that each party will have a chance to have their say.  The two cases involve TikTok itself and a group of people who use and benefit from the platform. 

Federal legislation bans TikTok in the United States on January 19 (interesting date) unless they are separated from China. The president can delay this but President Biden has not. The Supreme Court, especially given the nature of the law, sped along an appeal and will have oral arguments in early January.  

Chris Geider and Steve Vladeck are two people who have reported and analyzed the legal developments. Also, as usual, Amy Howe is a person I go to for a basic summary of events with less personal opinion.

One notable development is a brief from the president-elect, which Vladeck in particular finds problematic. One thing that bothers Vladeck, other than the legal arguments, is the "puffery" (Geidner):

President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.

The author of the brief is the presumptive solicitor general. A few things. (1) Yuck. (2) President Biden is the current president. His "electoral mandate" was more sizable than yours. (3) Vomit.

I'm embarrassed and disgusted these assholes are going to be running the federal government. Professor Vladeck shows how it is not just distasteful but bad lawyering. They are bullshit artists. We know this.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court upheld E.J. Carroll's judgment that held the President-Elect sexually assaulted and defamed her. 

Chief Justice End of the Year Report

"Trump re-elected. Mission accomplished." No, that wasn't the theme. Would have been truthful.

Chief Justice Burger started the release of end-of-the-year reports. Each Chief Justice had their own style. Roberts has a specific theme, tossing in some historical vignette, and then ends with a few pages summarizing the case data for the year. 

The 2024 report begins with King George III threatening judicial independence. We then have a paeon to an independent judiciary. Criticism is acceptable but a few things are not:

(1) violence, (2) intimidation, (3) disinformation, and (4) threats to defy lawfully entered judgments.

There is a tired feel to this standard line, including this statement of what "intimidation" entails:

Public officials, too, regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges—for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations. 

Is this a subtweet to people like Senator Whitehouse, who has provided evidence? Sometimes, bias is wrongly alleged. Other times, it is well-founded. The lack of a binding ethics code is still a problem. 

The reference to bots and such is concerning though too thin to fully judge the problem. And where is the modern-day evidence of defiance? 

Chris Geidner has more, including an apparent reference to Judge Aileen Cannon being treated unfairly. Allegedly. He argues the report is a bit chilling. I found it more tiresome on the first read.  But he makes some good points on why it's more.  

The last pages of data do not seem too noteworthy. Others can analyze the data. The conservative Supreme Court helped Trump win. They well deserve a lot of criticism. Do it accurately and peacefully. 

Some people will note that we want an independent judiciary in the times of Trump. It will often arise in lower courts, which have binding ethics codes. Judicial independence fits in a wider system of checks and balances. Roberts provides a slanted version.  

Odds and Ends

The Supreme Court has recently sped along the preliminary bound copies of its opinions. The process has already begun for this term. There were a few opinions left from last term. Checking, it is done now.

Note how each opinion has a volume and page number. The process is not done for 2023 orders.

Justice Breyer (retired) will hear some lower court cases next year. O'Connor and Souter (last in 2020) also did that. Tom Clark did so back in the day.

The new (completely Republican) Congress begins at noon on January 3. Senator Bob Casey, who lost re-election, presided over a pro forma session on the 30th. We will also have someone replacing Vance. 

So, Ohio will have two new senators. 

Two Books

This book has potential, and its success as a first effort is not surprising. Overall, though the writing was readable and had some nice touches, I was not satisfied. The final conflict was annoying.  

There is a lot of interlocking stuff here. The author "writes what she knows" because she is a Peruvian-American who moved from the South to New York City. And, that is what her main character does. 

The two love interests also write a book together, which is clearly a sort of roman-a-clef of their relationship. In fact, it is darn obvious, and you would think the other characters would say more about that. She's a doe-eyed romantic while he doesn't like romance and favors darker literary fiction.  

They fall in love.  

Katie Holt nicely includes bits and pieces of their work in progress, which helpfully provides insights into what the male side of the love match is thinking. The excerpts are well done and make you want to read the book being written.  

The book is fully otherwise from the woman's point of view, someone who relies too much on true-life romance to succeed in writing. The sex scenes are a bit much at times but expertly done. The romance overall was not satisfying and well-rounded though perhaps some will like it as a fantasy. 

Ultimately, a major problem is that the main character seems immature, and the male character is more fantasy than a complete well-rounded character. The writing of the book sputters (she just stops working with him, not even reading the finale before they submit it) after a stupid complication arises that makes her love interest and advisor/mentor both look bad.

I read the whole thing and it kept my interest. Nonetheless, the main characters eventually got to be somewhat annoying, and the ending complication annoyed me. And, the idea was that they would not just write a "happily ever after," and it sounds like they did. A cheat! 

Why didn't the instructor, who set the guidelines, find this a problem? The whole thing comes off somewhat incomplete. Again, an imperfect first effort.  

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was a book, film, and television series. Each version was somewhat different from the last one taking place in America in the modern day and tossed in an "&." It is a sitcom.

Josephine Leslie wrote the book in her forties and it appears to be her first. The Wikipedia entry on her is a short "stub" though online you can find a picture. An essay on the different houses used provides a bit more information. "R.A. Dick" is a pseudonym. 

The book edition I have is a special version connected to the film with a short introduction largely focused on the movie version. The book title pages references three other books by "R.A. Dick," including one that Amazon tells me is about the devil.

I read the book before and saw the film and television series (a bit silly). The book and the film are alike in various ways though the ending changes as I recall (I won't confirm -- I plan to watch the film again) and the annoying son is dropped out. Various other bits are changed. Overall, the film works quite well. 

The book is pretty good too. It has some interesting ideas of the afterlife and the captain also has some interesting things to say. Mrs. Muir is a bit too weak-willed at times, with the captain firmly in control (he is older and dead, which provides him the ability to know things she cannot). Still, she comes off as a pleasant character with independent views.

The setting of the book (written in the 1940s) is a bit vague though there are references to trains, phones, and radio (suggested perhaps not present early on). It can be many times in the past, Lucy Muir (a word meaning "sea") finding happiness in an isolated home near the sea. The taste of the modern era is there.  

There should be at least one world war mixed in there, which the captain at least would seem to find notable. None is referenced though perhaps it's possible to fit the main portion of the book before WWI.  A war would challenge the book's mood. 

The book has a somewhat old-fashioned feel with a pleasant overall pace from when she is first a widow and before you know it her children are adults, and then she is an old lady. All in less than two hundred pages. Those who like the film should enjoy it.

The passing of time is a suitable theme as we finish another year. I personally did not find this year too pleasing, symbolized by my sleeping through its beginning. We shall see how 2025 goes. The year does have a mathematical simplicity to it.