Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has suffered a number of setbacks in the last couple of months:
Republicans’ determination to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court marks an escalation of the politicization of the judiciary in the United States.
Kavanaugh faces unanimous opposition from Democrats due to allegations of sexual assault, his extreme views on presidential power (Kavanaugh does not believe a sitting president can be indicted or tried) and his partisanship. (more…)
Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of attempting to rape a young woman in prep school and Democrats have been denied the chance to read tens of thousands of documents from his time as a lawyer in the George W. Bush Administration. Yet Republicans are rushing to confirm his nomination.
Why? Because they worry this may be their last chance to defend their majority on the Supreme Court. (more…)
Politico reports that President Donald Trump’s crackdown on opioids is backfiring.
Hundreds of patients told the political news website they have been suddenly refused prescriptions for medications they relied on for years — sometimes just to get out of bed in the morning — and have been left to suffer untreated pain on top of withdrawal symptoms.
Many … described being tapered off narcotics too quickly or, worse, turned away by doctors and left to navigate on their own. Some said they coped by using medical marijuana or CBD oil, an extract from marijuana or hemp plants; others turned to illicit street drugs despite the fear of buying fentanyl-laced heroin linked to soaring overdose death numbers. A few … contemplated suicide.
There have been two developments this week in the attempts of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party to subject the judiciary to political control:
Ezra Klein makes an excellent point in Vox: the stakes of Supreme Court nominations in America are too high.
Candidates serve for life — which, given modern life spans and youthful nominees, can now mean forty years of decisions — and no one knows when the next seat will open.
No other democracy in the world allows judges to serve for life. And in no other democracy is the process of appointing high-court judges so broken. (more…)
Politico reports that Donald Trump is eying common-sense drug reforms — as well as the death penalty for drug dealers.
Here is the good, bad and ugly in the president’s plan to fight America’s opioid epidemic.
The good:
The bad:
The ugly:
Tough-on-drugs policies like these have only made America’s opioid crisis worse.
There is little evidence criminals are deterred by high minimum sentences.
If anything, they may have encouraged the spread of fentanyl, a drug that is highly potent in small doses. Under current law, it can be sold without triggering mandatory minimums. (more…)
Axios reports that President Donald Trump envies countries that execute drug dealers, tells confidants a softer approach to drug reform will never work and that America needs to teach its children they’ll die if they take drugs.
His administration is looking into triggering five-year mandatory minimum sentences for traffickers who deal as little as two grams of fentanyl. Currently, the threshold is forty grams.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that can be lethal in extremely small doses. Overdose deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids have increased sixfold since 2013, outstripping those from every other drug.
But a crackdown won’t help. (more…)
Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party is forcing through judicial reforms that the Supreme Court’s president, Małgorzata Gesdorf, has said would “end” the Supreme Court and “break” the Constitution.
The changes are expected to be enacted next week after a parliamentary committee voted for the legislation on Thursday.
During a hearing, lawmakers from the ruling party rejected all amendments from the opposition, refused to hear independent legal counsel and ignored warnings from parliament’s own lawyers, who said the reforms might be unconstitutional.
Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of the opposition Civic Platform, has called for demonstrations in the streets.
“This is no longer a creeping coup,” he told Polish television. “This coup begins to strike.” (more…)
One of the few silver linings to last year’s presidential election in the United States was that candidates from both major parties recognized that opioid addiction should be treated as a public-health, rather than a law-enforcement, problem.
Which makes it all the more disheartening that Donald Trump is taking exactly the wrong approach to this crisis.
Politico reports that the new president believes in a “tough law-and-order approach” to arrest the rise in drug overdose deaths.
142 Americans die from opioid abuse every day. That is more than die in car accidents or from guns.
The crisis is concentrated in postindustrial states like Kentucky and West Virginia: the heart of Trumpland. (more…)
Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has surprised observers by vetoing legislation from his own Law and Justice party that would have defanged the judiciary.
Closer scrutiny suggests Duda’s opposition is less meaningful than it is made out to be, though.
The president has said he will sign the bills if they are amended and Leonid Bershidsky argues at Bloomberg View that his proposed changes don’t deviate from the legislation’s objective: “to put the judiciary, which the party argues has turned into an elitist caste, under more political control.” (more…)
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party pushed through more changes to the court system on Wednesday:
Has there been a worse government failure in American history than the war on drugs? At least Prohibition was abandoned after thirteen years.
Despite governments around the world and states across America recognizing that drugs are better treated as a public health rather than a law-and-order issue, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s attorney general, is determined to give repression another go. (more…)
