Black Friday 2018 iPhone deals: $150 off iPhone XR and XS, $400 iPhone X gift card - CNET

The Federalist Society is convening in Washington on Thursday for its annual convention, a Comic-Con of sorts for the conservative legal movement. It’s been a blockbuster year for those in attendance. The confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh last month cemented a reliable conservative majority on the Supreme Court for at least a generation. Judicial nominees for the lower courts are sailing through the Republican-led Senate at a breakneck pace. Those victories made George Conway’s announcement on Wednesday all the more striking.

Conway, a prominent Washington lawyer with deep conservative ties, announced the formation of Checks and Balances, which describes itself as “a group of attorneys who would traditionally be considered conservative or libertarian.” This is a bit of an understatement: The group’s 14 founding members are a medley of high-profile academics, litigators, and former government officials, including a former Cabinet secretary. Its brief mission statement is a straightforward summary of the basic tenets of small-r republicanism. Though President Donald Trump is not mentioned by name, he is unmistakably the target.

“We believe in the rule of law, the power of truth, the independence of the criminal justice system, the imperative of individual rights, and the necessity of civil discourse,” the statement says. “We believe these principles apply regardless of the party or persons in power. We believe in ‘a government of laws, not of men.’” It closes with a rallying cry: “We seek to provide a voice and a network for like-minded attorneys to discuss these ideas, and we hope that they will join with us to stand up for these principles.”

There’s always been an inherent contradiction in the conservative legal movement’s relationship with Trump. On one hand, the president has delivered them an unparalleled string of victories and decisively shifted the federal judiciary to the right. At the same time, the president has weakened the American rule of law, campaigned to turn the Justice Department into a political weapon, and used his office to threaten journalists and political opponents.

It’s been an open question when—or even if—the movement would reach a breaking point with him. That day may now come sooner rather than later.

“Some of us have been raising these concerns for a while,” Jonathan Adler, a Case Western University law professor who signed the mission statement, told me. “I’ve been open about criticizing the administration where I thought that was necessary from the beginning, and being positive where there are things to be positive about. But I think some people have needed a few straws on the camel’s back before they’re willing to be more open about it.”

Conway, as the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, may be the most recognizable name to the general public. But the rest of its members are all prominent figures in conservative legal circles and veterans of past Republican administrations. Tom Ridge served as the first secretary of Homeland Security. Peter Keisler was tapped to replace Chief Justice John Roberts on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005, only to be rejected by Democratic senators for his conservative background. Orin Kerr, a University of Southern California law professor, is the Supreme Court’s go-to scholar on Fourth Amendment matters.

The question is whether other Federalist Society members, who have been hesitant to speak out, will answer the group’s call. There’s reason to believe so—precisely because they have been gotten what they wanted under Trump. As his first term—and perhaps his presidency—winds down, Trump may become a victim of his own success, as diminishing returns in judicial policy make it harder for the conservative legal community to stomach him.

The Checks and Balances group sprang from informal conversations between him and the other members over the past year, according to Adler, who helped craft the legal argument behind the Affordable Care Act challenge in King v. Burwell. Over the “last several weeks,” he said, those discussions turned toward forming an organization and making some kind of public declaration. The goal was to provide a space for other like-minded conservative and libertarian legal figures to express concerns about the Trump administration and its threats to the nation’s constitutional order.

Other conservative legal figures have been outspoken about Trump in recent weeks. Ted Olson, a former solicitor general and the victor of Bush v. Gore, signed on to represent CNN in its First Amendment lawsuit against the White House for revoking correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credentials. John Yoo, who took a maximalist approach to executive power under President George W. Bush, wrote in The Atlantic that Trump violated the Constitution by naming Matthew Whitaker to be acting attorney general after his boss, Jeff Sessions, was forced to resign. (George Conway published a similar argument in the New York Times last week, co-written by Obama DOJ veteran Neal Katyal.) Adler and others criticized Trump’s threat to end birthright citizenship by executive order on originalism grounds.

With few exceptions, liberal members of the American legal community have warned since the beginning that Trump posed a threat to American democracy. Many nonpartisan law professors also joined criticism of the travel ban directed at Muslim-majority countries, the administration’s separation of migrant families at the border, and other extreme policies. Legal critiques from the right, however, have been more sporadic until recently. Trump, as a presidential candidate, had struck a Faustian bargain of sorts with top figures in the conservative legal movement: In exchange for outsourcing judicial nominations to them, they would not oppose his takeover of the Republican Party.

His rise to power came at a fateful time for the movement. Since the 1960s, legal conservatives have dreamed of building a Supreme Court that mirrored their ideological worldview. Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death in 2016 imperiled decades of work to reshape the federal judiciary in their own image. The possibility that President Hillary Clinton would name his replacement kept the fracturing Republican Party together even as Trump assumed control of it. On Election Night, the gambit paid off. Instead of witnessing the first five-justice liberal majority on the court since Earl Warren, Republicans have now installed justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, securing the court’s ideological makeup for decades. More than 80 federal judges have also been confirmed over the past two years, steadily reshaping the lower courts.

Those accomplishments thrilled conservatives of all stripes. They also kept quiet many in the conservative legal community who had concerns about the Trump administration’s other policies, Adler said. “Last year at the Federalist Society conference, there were press reports about the ‘But Gorsuch’ stress ball,” he noted. “And it’s significant that they were ‘but Gorsuch,’ not ‘and Gorsuch,’ right? And it was a stress ball. The reason I think it was so popular is because there are a lot of people in FedSoc who are happy about judicial nominations, and were hoping that the judicial nominations would outweigh other things.”

The American left tends to picture the Federalist Society as a monolithic institution, one that grows originalist judges from giant cloning vats in its basement. In reality, it functions more like a decentralized social network and debate club, one where reputation is the coin of the realm. Checks and Balances’ members are effectively using that currency to provide cover for others who may fear professional reprisals from a vindictive White House, and to preemptively defuse attempts to paint members as conservative apostates.

“Concerns that I endorsed about the birthright citizenship proposal are based on the original public meaning of the constitutional text,” Adler noted, referring to Trump’s threat not to guarantee citizenship to everyone born in the U.S. “Criticism about the Justice Department not being sufficiently nonpartisan are based on traditional principles about what the role of the Justice Department is and what the role of law enforcement is.... We’re not abandoning our prior ideological affinities. In many ways, we’re seeking to reinvigorate them and see that they are upheld in this more challenging environment.”

It’s worth noting that liberals are no stranger to devil’s bargains themselves. Many Democrats brushed aside Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct in the 1990s because of their support for his policies and desire to keep Republicans out of the White House. Today, the American left might be skeptical of making common cause with their ideological adversaries, and rightly so. Many of those adversaries stayed silent over the past two years as Trump relentlessly weakened American democracy—and quietly applauded as he delivered one staunch conservative to the courts after another.

But if, as 2020 nears, Trump’s reelection chances are slim and no Supreme Court justices retire or die—two very big ifs, admittedly—the number of conservative critics may well grow. “I think there are quite a number of people that do have conflicts, and I think for a lot of people that conflict’s grown over time,” Adler said. “I think there are also people who think the administration’s ability to produce silver linings that outweigh the cloud is diminishing. If that means more people who are willing to criticize the administration when it does wrong, that’d be good.”

Perhaps some of these people will feel that the rule of law has become significantly more imperiled than it was in Trump’s early years. Others may simply conclude that, after the decisive rightward shift of the Supreme Court and the transformation of the most important lower courts, it is time to burnish their reputations for the post-Trump era. Whatever their reasons, the left ought to welcome them to the resistance.

I’m reminded of a high-school math teacher who would penalize me on a test when I got a question correct but used the wrong method. Sometimes, how one gets to the right answer matters less than getting there at all.

Rescue teams are still searching through burned rubble for bodies after a massive wildfire devastated Butte County, California, last week. About 100 people are still missing. But already the Camp Fire, which continues to burn, has gone down in history as the deadliest blaze ever recorded in the state, during one of the deadliest fire seasons in several decades.

On Wednesday, Butte County officials said they had discovered the remains of six more people, bringing the overall death toll from the fire to 48. These are not the only wildfire fatalities in California of late. South of Butte County, the ongoing Woolsey Fire has so far been blamed for two deaths. One firefighter was killed in the Mendocino Complex fire in August, and two firefighters died battling July’s Ferguson Fire. That same month, three firefighters and five civilians died in the Carr Fire.

In all, California’s 2018 wildfire season so far has taken 61 lives—a staggering number compared to the last 10 years, according to data from California’s state firefighting agency.

To understand how severe this problem has become, it’s useful to compare California’s fatal wildfires to other causes of death. A mass shooting in a bar in Thousand Oaks last week left 13 dead—the third mass shooting in the state this year, according to a Mother Jones database. But more people have died in wildfires than in mass shootings in California this year, continuing a trend that started in 2016. (Thousand Oaks was also hit by the Woolsey Fire.)

For the first time in years, the number of people killed by wildfires in California is about the same as the number of people who got hit by a train and died, according to Bureau of Transportation data.

If wildfire deaths in California continue at this rate, the number will soon be comparable to the number of people who die in the United States due to terrorism, the Global Terrorism Database indicates. (That database doesn’t include numbers from 2018, but a list put together by physicist Robert Johnson puts this year’s number about the same as California’s wildfire deaths.)

Civilian deaths from wildfires are supposed to be relatively rare because they burn, primarily, on wildland. But wildfires are increasingly jumping from nature into populated areas. This is what happened with the Camp Fire, and it explains the high death toll. The blaze moved so quickly that residents in Butte County barely had the chance to evacuate.

There’s reason to worry that wildfire deaths will only increase as climate change worsens, causing more extreme blazes. All of the 30 largest wildfires in the state, by acreage, have occurred since 2000; ditto for nine of the state’s ten most-destructive blazes ever. But a rise in wildfire deaths wouldn’t be attributable to climate change alone.

As I reported last year, real estate developers keep building—and government officials keep allowing—homes to be built in the Wildland-Urban Interface. Otherwise known as the WUI, these areas make up 9 percent of the contiguous United States and contain approximately 45 million homes, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The town of Paradise, California, which was largely wiped out by the Camp Fire, is in the WUI.

It’s tough to tell people not to rebuild after a tragedy, especially those who were insured against their losses. And perhaps that’s not the solution anyway. A Bloomberg article on Wednesday detailed a less-drastic idea for neighborhoods in the WUI: stricter building codes. Ray Rasker, the executive director of a wildfire risk consulting firm, told Bloomberg that many municipalities across California aren’t implementing such codes because of the high upfront cost to homeowners. “Yeah, cost matters,” he said. “But the cost of not doing the right thing is tragedy.”

At the very least, the reality of California’s wildfire deaths should give pause to people looking to move to vulnerable areas. And there are a lot of people looking to do that. The Forest Service expects the number of homes within the WUI to rise another 40 percent by 2030. These homes won’t be cheap to protect. As Fortune reported this week, “[Insurance premiums] are on the rise for homeowners in areas at risk of wildfires, and some insurers are refusing to renew policies for people in danger areas.”

There may come a time when no company will insure homes in California’s most wildfire-prone areas, or the cost will be too high for all but its wealthiest residents. These financial disincentives may achieve what policymakers could not: convince humans to retreat to safer ground. But one would think that the ever-rising risk of burning to death is a compelling enough reason.

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court identified America’s system of public education as “the very foundation of good citizenship.” An educated public is critical to a system that relies on popular elections, which is why Justice Felix Frankfurter referred to public school teachers as “the priests of our democracy.” Yet in recent decades, politicians and educators have downplayed this reality, viewing public schools primarily as places to equip students to become skilled workers. “A world-class education,” President Barack Obama argued in 2011, “is the single most important factor in determining not just whether our kids can compete for the best jobs but whether America can out-compete countries around the world.” Educators adopted the mantra that schools must enable students to be “career and college ready,” with little thought for preparing them to be good citizens. 

How do we go about putting democracy back into public education? Two new books from University of Chicago professors—one a legal scholar, the other a sociologist—offer important answers. The law professor Justin Driver traces the efforts of the Supreme Court to uphold the principles of the Constitution in the education system in his engaging and absorbing new book, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. “No civic task is more essential,” he writes, “than ensuring that the Constitution is viewed in public schools not as some abstract piece of parchment” but as “a vital, meaningful document whose principles inform students’ lives every time they step within the schoolhouse gate.” Yet in tackling issues from the use of corporal punishment to a student’s right to equal educational resources, the courts have fallen short.

Eve L. Ewing, like Driver, takes on big issues of education, race and democracy in her book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. But Ewing, a sociologist in the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, a poet, and a former schoolteacher, takes a very different tack, focusing on Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2013 proposal to close a large number of public schools, most of them in African American communities. Emanuel’s rationale was that the schools were underutilized and struggled academically. The proposal caused an uproar, including a lengthy hunger strike at one school. Ewing’s book asks a poignant question: “If the schools were so terrible, why did people fight for them so adamantly?”

Ewing makes a powerful case that the mayor and Chicago Public Schools officials failed to understand that the importance of a school couldn’t be reduced to test score results and utilization rates. Community members, she writes, had “a different understanding of what evidence should count in determining the value of a school.” Ewing and Driver share a commitment to the principles of equality, but they emphasize different routes toward that end, with Ewing making a close study of how a community works to uphold these values and Driver telling a history of the arguments and institutions that can bring change down from on high. Together, these two approaches provide paths to restoring public education as the fountainhead of our democracy.

For much of its history, the U.S. Supreme Court shied away from intervening in school affairs, reasoning, says Driver, that “it would be improper for the judiciary to reach into public schools, overturning educators’ independent decisions.” The Supreme Court should not be the nation’s school board, the justices said. 

Yet by the 1950s and 1960s, the justices came to appreciate that only by vindicating the democratic rights of students could schools effectively educate pupils to be good citizens, and the Court issued a series of rulings on a range of cases. The First Amendment allowed students to wear black arm bands to protest the Vietnam War, for instance, because the Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the school-house gate.” A student has had the right to refrain from saluting the American flag since West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette because to disregard this liberty would “strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” Likewise, when the Court upheld the due process rights of an expelled student to know the reason for his being disciplined in 1975, The Chicago Tribune asked, “Where is a better place than at school for young citizens to learn to expect justice?”

The most consequential of the Court’s rulings on education, however, is Brown v. Board of Education, to which Driver devotes his longest chapter. For Driver, this ruling demonstrates in a variety of ways how closely education is intertwined with democracy. Integrated schools promote democratic values because they affirm that in America, we are all political equals; they make demagogic attempts to scapegoat minorities less likely to be effective; and they promote educational achievement and attainment, which increase democratic participation rates. Segregated schools undermine each of these goals.

The 1954 decision striking down de jure racially segregated schools, writes Driver, “stands alone as the most revered judicial opinion of the twentieth century.” Yet its meaning has never been entirely clear: Some readers see it simply as an invocation not to treat students differently based on race; for others, it was meant as an effort to dismantle a racial caste system. The decision famously faced massive resistance after it was handed down and went largely unenforced for more than a decade. The biggest fear of its white opponents, Driver dryly notes, was that “integrated classrooms would lead to integrated bedrooms.” Over time, the decision also met resistance from parts of the black community, which claimed that integration was “based on the false notion that black children are unable to learn unless they are in the same setting as white children.” 

The U.S. Supreme Court finally became serious about enforcing Brown in a 1968 decision, when it called for the elimination of segregation “root and branch.” But just six years later, the Court pulled back when it overturned a lower court desegregation order that would have integrated the northern city of Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. The Court majority reasoned that the separate suburban districts were not implicated in the original wrongdoing, though critics said political considerations had crept into the Court’s jurisprudence. Skeptics suggested the Court was not guided by the law but by fear of white backlash against cross-district busing and the judges who ordered it.

As a result of the 1974 decision, many Northern city desegregation orders were restricted to urban areas. In Boston, the limited, city-based racial desegregation order received enormous pushback and was widely regarded as a failure. The order spawned white flight to the suburbs, leaving behind groups of working-class white and black students, who didn’t experience the achievement benefits associated with broader socioeconomic integration. Moreover, white working-class families seethed at the double standard under which wealthy white suburban liberals lectured them about the importance of integration but did not involve their own children in the enterprise.

In contrast, many Southern desegregation plans included both cities and suburbs because, in that region of the country, the two tend to lie within single county-wide school systems. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there was no easy escape hatch for white flight, because suburbs were part of the plan. And because more affluent suburban students were included, the plan brought about socioeconomic as well as racial integration. This was critical because research had long found, going back to the 1966 congressionally-authorized Coleman Report, that the “beneficial effect of a student body with a high proportion of white students comes not from racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites.” The Charlotte plan produced strong achievement gains, and in 1984, when Ronald Reagan came to town and harshly denounced busing, his remarks “fell utterly flat and met only silence.”

America’s experiment with desegregation was short-lived, as the New York Times reporter Nikole-Hannah Jones has demonstrated in her writing on the state of today’s schools. In the 1990s, the William Rehnquist Court began releasing jurisdictions from desegregation orders. And in 2007, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the John Roberts Court went further and struck down racial integration plans that had been voluntarily adopted by school boards in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington. In order to promote school diversity, the plans treated students differently based on race, which Roberts saw as a violation of Brown. “Before Brown,” he wrote, “schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again—even for very different reasons.” 

Driver, who clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer at the time of the Parents Involved case, quotes Breyer’s powerful response: “Segregation policies did not simply tell schoolchildren ‘where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin’; they perpetuated a caste system rooted in the institutions of slavery and 80 years of legalized subordination.” Breyer wrote that efforts to continue racial segregation are not “constitutionally indistinguishable from efforts to achieve racial integration.” Breyer was reaching back to the larger meaning of Brown: that separate schooling for America’s most vulnerable populations undermines the democratic purposes of public education. 

Driver goes further to point out that the rationale for using race is even stronger at the K-12 level than in higher education—where the Supreme Court has upheld racial preferences in admissions. The benefits of diversity in the K-12 classroom, Driver observes, apply “even more compellingly during the students’ most formative years of schooling.” Moreover, a white or Asian high school senior rejected for racial reasons from a selective college after years of hard work surely has a stronger claim than a five-year-old whose race is a factor in not being admitted to his or her parents’ preferred Kindergarten.

The New York Times denounced the Parents Involved decision with an editorial entitled, “Resegregation Now.” But, Driver says, the practical effect of the decision has been limited in some areas because a number of school districts, from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, have shifted to socioeconomic status (such as eligibility for subsidized lunch) as a basis for integration. These plans provide successful “workarounds” to Parents Involved because it is perfectly legal to classify students by socioeconomic status, and because class-based integration produces a lot of racial diversity.

The socioeconomic plans are not merely a clever legal ploy by which to circumvent the Supreme Court. They are also consistent with the social science research finding that the economic status of classmates drives achievement more than race. Today, 100 school districts and charter school chains educating 4 million students use socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment. Among them is Charlotte, which adopted a plan in 2016 to admit an equal number of low, medium, and high socioeconomic status students to its magnet schools. (The plan, which I assisted Charlotte in creating, was adopted one day after Donald Trump’s election.) 

When it comes to the critical issue of private school vouchers, Driver is far less persuasive. A central plank in the Trump and Betsy DeVos agenda, vouchers have been found to increase racial and socioeconomic segregation in numerous societies where they have been tried, from Sweden to Chile to Denmark. Yet Driver endorses the idea, against the wisdom of his former boss, Justice Breyer, who noted that vouchers threaten to balkanize American society along religious lines. Driver argues that it is unfair to trap low-income students in failing schools and that vouchers offer those children a way out. Here, he may be reflecting on his own experience as a young student who, living in a poor neighborhood in Washington D.C., had the chance to attend a public school in an affluent area where, he says, “the educational outcomes were much brighter.”

But a system of public school choice—like the one Driver availed himself of—is crucially different from a voucher system. It answers the plea for better opportunities, without taking the dangerous step of outsourcing the teaching of democracy to private institutions.

Ewing pays closer attention to the importance of a school not just to individual students but also to a whole community, as a source of meaning and pride. In a book brimming with insights, she traces the long history of black struggle with Chicago officials who purposefully created an “invisible fence” to keep parts of the city—including the Bronzeville section on Chicago’s South side—cordoned off from the rest. The NAACP valiantly fought school segregation but, facing resistance from the powers that be, many black leaders eventually shifted their focus to community control of black schools, and despite enormous obstacles, a number of Bronzeville community members thrived. Over the years, the neighborhood produced Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, jazz musician Nat King Cole, and novelist Richard Wright.            

The school closings took that control away from the community again. Ewing cogently argues that the closings were particularly painful, because in African American communities they are “part of a broader pattern of disrespect for people of color.” Against the background of slavery, in which black families were routinely dispersed to different communities, she says, the division of school communities rang with an unfortunate familiarity. “I feel like I’m at a slave auction,” one black resident tells school officials, “begging you to keep my family together. Don’t take them and separate them.” One community member pleaded with school officials: “You are destroying a family for many children who don’t always have the easiest family situations at their homes.” 

One practical concern for Chicago students, Ewing notes, is the way in which new school feeder patterns can force students to traverse different gang territories. In 2009, for example, one student was beaten to death during a fight, which Ewing says, was “attributed to a student conflict after a school closure and consolidation.” To add insult to injury, many of the schools closed in Chicago were named after prominent African Americans. A school named for black suffragist Mary C. Terrell became ACE Technical Charter School, Sojourner Truth Elementary School became the Chicago International Charter School, and Ralph J. Bunche Elementary School became Providence Englewood Charter School. Ewing sharply points out the effect: “That’s how you get black history to go away.”

The closings might have made more sense if the new schools that students attended were clearly superior, but that was rarely the case. A 2009 study found that after an early round of school closures in Chicago, only 6 percent of students transferred to top performing schools. Almost half went to the lowest performing schools where their scores in math and reading on average declined. Finally, unlike in any other Illinois jurisdictions, the Chicago School Board is not elected by the public. (Members are appointed by the mayor). This unusual arrangement added to a sense of powerlessness.

Ewing’s stunning account of this recent history underlines the staggering challenge we face in creating the schools necessary to sustain our democracy. We have moved so far away from the concept of equal opportunity for disadvantaged African American students that parents are no longer just fighting for high-quality integrated schools, or even high-quality segregated schools. They are fighting for the right to preserve mediocre schools because what they are likely to be provided in the event of school closure is even worse. 

At a time when our democracy is under stress, Ewing and Driver outline two important paths for strengthening America’s commitment to democratic values. Both require schools to reinforce the lessons about democracy found in textbooks by doing something much harder: asking the adults to model those values. Ewing’s detailed on-the-ground reporting calls on leaders to give basic respect to vulnerable communities and give them a voice in important decisions. Driver goes even further, as he calls on schools to challenge the racial and economic inequality in the broader society. He has the audacity to contend that low-income, black, and brown children have an equal right to share space with more privileged students in a system of public education. Anything less would be undemocratic.