MAX BOOT: Rightfully Reversing Decades of Secessionist Rehabilitation:

But there is a big distinction to be made between remembering the past — something that, as a historian, I’m all in favor of — and honoring those who did bad things in the past. Remembrance does not require public displays of the Confederate flag, nor streets with names such as Jefferson Davis Highway — a road that always rankles me to drive down in Northern Virginia. Such gestures are designed to honor leaders of the Confederacy, who were responsible for the costliest war in American history — men who were traitors to this country, inveterate racists, and champions of slavery.

In this regard, honoring Jefferson Davis is particularly egregious, or, for that matter, Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. But I believe even honoring the nobler Robert E. Lee is inappropriate. True, he was a brave and skilled soldier, but he fought in a bad cause. Modern Germany does not have statues to Erwin Rommel even though he — unlike Lee — turned at the end of the day against the monstrous regime in whose cause he fought so skillfully. Thus, I don’t believe it is appropriate to have statues of Lee, or schools named after him, although I admit in his case it’s a closer call than with Jefferson Davis.

This is not “rewriting” history; it’s getting history right. The rewriting was done by Lost Cause mythologists who created pro-Confederate propaganda (such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind) to convince their countrymen that the South was actually in the right even as it imposed slavery and then segregation. This required impugning those Northerners who went south after the Civil War to try to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. They were labeled “carpetbaggers,” and their memory was tarnished while the actions of the white supremacists they opposed were glorified.

Boot is exactly right. I wasn’t kidding when I said before that I am glad to see Nikki Haley get the Stars and Bars removed from government buildings. Eric Foner and other historians like James Oakes and Richard Sewell are to be credited with correcting the historical record from the pro-Confederate revisionism that is still accepted by all-too-many on the right. Where the “Lost Cause” fable might once have been justified as a useful fiction to unify the country, lying about the Civil War and Reconstruction now only serves those who wish to sully the reputation of those who opposed slavery and promoted the civil rights of blacks when doing so took real courage (as it did for the civil rights activists of the ’50s and ’60s). In this way, like the Southerners of old, they can claim that there is a moral equivalence between North and South, between the USA and the CSA.

MORE HERE: I highly recommend the books I link to above about the men who opposed the pro-slavery reading of the Constitution before the Civil War, and who established the Republican Party to see their vision of the Constitution affirmed in its text. You can also read my articles on antislavery constitutionalism here and here. The more I learn about the history that has been concealed by pro-Confederate revisionism, the more I find to admire in our past.

Cross posted on The Volokh Conspiracy.  h/t Eugene Volokh

WAIT UNTIL 2017? OBAMACARE LIKELY TO LIVE FOREVER NOW, Jonathan Tobin writes at Commentary. “Any attempt to overturn a law that would have already been in operation for years will be a perilous undertaking fraught with political danger for Republicans. Their presidential candidates will all pledge to throw it out in the coming campaign, but that will be easier said than done. The odds are that John Roberts has ensured that this legal monstrosity will live forever:”

By twisting itself into a pretzel in order to let the law stand, the court has allowed the Democrats to massively expand the power and the reach of government in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. The ObamaCare mandates create a dynamic that does more than offer cheap insurance to more people than would have otherwise been covered. It also allows the federal government to embark on a path in which it will be making far-reaching decisions about the future of American health care. It has already created rules that infringe on religious liberty and create distortions in the marketplace that will lead to massive increases in premiums while also losing jobs. While many, especially among the poor, are net winners, it has also created a large number of net losers who will never be compensated for the president’s broken promises about keeping their insurance and doctors if they liked them.

President Obama’s legacy as the man who pushed a health care law through Congress that few understood is now secure. Some Americans will benefit from this, but many others will be paying dearly for this unwieldy law. Most of all, future generations will recognize the court’s decisions as a crucial moment when our liberties were diminished. That is something for which all those involved in passing and preserving this disaster should be held accountable by history, if not the ballot box.

See also, postwar England. You remember England, right?

RELATED: “All of this was perfectly predictable, so much so that Ted Cruz made this very point in trying to justify the 2013 shutdown. Stop it before it starts, Cruz warned, or else you’ll never have the political will to stop it again. And he was right,” Allahpundit writes at Hot Air. “The only real chance we had to stop it was SCOTUS’s 2012 decision. Once Roberts voted with the liberals on that, the die was cast. Today’s ruling by comparison is a fart in the wind.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG, CITIZENS: Number of Islamic Terror-Related Arrests in 2015 Surpass Previous Two Years Combined.

TAX ANALYSTS SUES IRS FOR REFUSING TO RELEASE INFORMATION ON BONUSES PAID TO TOP EMPLOYEES: “It’s déjà vu all over again,” said Tax Analysts President and Publisher Christopher Bergin. “We’ve been at this game a long time. They’ve delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed, and they will continue to delay. And we think this is important information to keep them transparent and to keep them accountable.”

INTO THE PANTHEON OF MEMORABLE SUPREME COURT SAYINGS: “WE SHOULD START CALLING THIS LAW SCOTUSCare.” — Justice Antonin Scalia.

JONATHAN ADLER: In King v. Burwell, Chief Justice Roberts rewrites the PPACA in order to save it (again)

Today’s decision in King v. Burwell is notable in many respects.  It is a significant legal victory for the Obama Administration, a victory for purposivist statutory interpretation, a loss for textualism, and a loss for an expansive Chevron doctrine.  In these latter respects, the decision is something of a double-loss for Justice Scalia (which may explain the last line of his opinion).  King also means that, in many respects, the PPACA is now the law that Chief Justice Roberts wrote as here, as in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Chief Justice has decided it is the Court’s job to determine what the statute means — even if this requires ignoring or rewriting text — if such is necessary in order to save it.  The umpire has decided it’s okay to pinch hit to ensure the right team wins. . . .

Just as the Chief Justice rewrote the individual mandate into a tax, and rewrote the Medicaid expansion to sever it from traditional Medicaid, the Chief Justice has rewritten Section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code to excise the repeated reference to exchanges “established by the State.”  Justice Scalia, in dissent, said Obamacare should now be known SCOTUSCare. Whatever we call it, the PPACA is now, in many respects, the law that Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

I know what Jonathan is going through today having to write about this case he did so much to design and advocate for the past couple years. I well remember what a kick-in-the-gut this feels like.

GLASS HALF FULL PART 3 – I’ve previously covered how the revolution in American law will benefit consumers and the legal profession.  Today I argue it will even help law schools.

The challenges law schools face are very real, but when we reach the other side of the tunnel the law school experience itself will be cheaper and better.  As fewer students apply to law school, there will be increased competition for students in terms of tuition and scholarships.  Today’s more clear-eyed students haggle over tuition and try to borrow less.

As some law schools focus less on U.S. News rankings and more on the serious business of staying open, the student experience may also improve.  There will be pressure to spend less on faculty scholarship and more on teaching practical skills.  Competition has already created some small innovations, like Northwestern’s two year program or Washington and Lee’s experiential third year of law school.  Any changes that break up the current, monolithic approach to law school will be a positive overall, even if some of the innovations are less successful or simply cost saving measures.

Happier law students should make for happier faculty.  But even if it does not, a correction in the salaries and perks for law school professors has been a long time coming.  Brian Tamanaha’s recent book Failing Law Schools is at its most powerful in its chapter on a law professor’s job (“Teaching Load Down, Salary Up”), precisely because legal academics have been so slow to recognize their own role in the trends of the last thirty years.  Law professors work less and are paid more than they used to be, and law school administration has grown exponentially, and yet we seem mystified over why tuition and debt loads have risen so precipitously.

Some law professors have a “let them eat cake” response to the suffering of recent law grads, noting that law has always been a competitive market and these graduates are just poorly suited to it.  Others think that the cost of law school is fair enough in a free market, conveniently forgetting that much of the “demand” for law school comes from the government requirement of graduation from an ABA accredited law school in order to take the bar.

These attitudes should fade somewhat as the pain in the legal market is shared by legal academia.  If it is true that the worst part about living a lie is wondering when everyone will find out, the hardest part is over for legal academia.  The law faculty that survives the retrenchment should, like the students who are happy to be employed, experience gratitude for what they have, rather than jealousy for what they do not.

OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS: Glenn loves to welcome them.  I prefer to mock them: here is a minute and thirteen second video compilation of robots falling over from the 2015 DARPA Robotics Competition.

CAMPUS SEXUAL ASSAULT AND THE “PROVE YOURSELF INNOCENT” APPROACH: FIRE’s Joe Cohn examines the problems with New York’s “affirmative consent” bill. Supporters call it the “yes means yes” bill, but maybe it’s more accurately called the “prove you are not a rapist” bill. Joe concludes:

In sum, this legislation is an unwelcome development for people who believe in fundamental fairness—one that doubles down on the failed policy of steering sexual assault complaints away from law enforcement and into amateur campus tribunals that are ill-equipped to handle such serious matters. New York’s approach will probably not reduce the prevalence of sexual assault on campus, but it will likely lead to more unjust punishments.

Scott Greenfield ​also blasted the new NY bill over at Simple Justice. His title makes no bones about what he thinks of the law: “Sex At New York’s Colleges Is Screwed.”

COVERING THE IMPORTANT ISSUES: The 20 Hottest Conservative Women In The New Media For 2015.

THE PRESSURE NOW SHIFTS FROM REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS TO THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES TO SAVE US FROM OBAMACARE:  My take on King v. Burwell: However King was decided, the future of American health care was going to come down to 2016:

One consolation is that, were President Obama to have vetoed whatever the Republicans would have proposed, nothing good would happen until after the next election, which is where things now stand. Now Congressional Republicans cannot be bull-rushed into simply extending the subsidies to federal exchanges, while implicitly accepting the rest of the ACA, which is how things were shaping up. Now the voters will truly get at least one more crack at saving American health care from Obamacare. (And, with the health care cases in mind, candidates can debate the sort of justices they will nominate to the Court.)

Supporters of the law have already telegraphed that their next move is to end the political debate by urging a Pax Obamacare to which all Americans must acquiesce. Last week the president said, after “five years in, what we are talking about it is no longer just a law. It’s no longer just a theory. This isn’t even just about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare . . . This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another.”

While the ACA is certainly the “law of the land,” as it has been since its enactment, nothing in the Court’s decision today imparts any additional legitimacy on this law as a public policy meriting political acquiescence. To borrow from the president’s words, it is still “just a law.” So nothing in this decision should deter Republican presidential and congressional candidates in the 2016 election from continuing to press their campaign to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.

RELATED: 2016 GOP Presidential Hopefuls: Now It’s Up To Us To Repeal Obamacare. The candidates are impressively united on this issue.

Cross posted on The Volokh Conspiracy.

RIP, PATRICK MACNEE: “His son Rupert said in a statement that Patrick Macnee died Thursday at his home in Rancho Mirage. The British-born actor was best known as dapper secret agent John Steed in the long-running television series” The Avengers, AP reports. “His son says Macnee died of natural causes with his family at his bedside,” at age 93.

https://twitter.com/walterolson/status/614152537797709824

PBS YANKS BEN AFFLECK’S ROOTS: “Non-leftist Americans can be forgiven for thinking that the media has become one giant progressive racket for people who all share exactly the same social and political attitudes. So good for PBS for yanking, at least temporarily, Finding Your Roots after it was learned that Harvard professor Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates deliberated excised Ben Affleck’s slave-owning ancestors from the genealogy program.”

RELATED:

.@BenAffleck finally makes up for Gigli by killing a PBS show.

We're good now, Ben.

— John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte (@NolteNC) June 25, 2015

Heh.™

ON THE NET’S LOST ISLAND, THE INTERNET COMES ON A THUMB DRIVE: Backchannel’s Susan Crawford has a fascinating report from Cuba.

By way of an informal but extraordinarily lucrative distribution chain — one guy told me the system generates $5 million in payments a month — anyone in Cuba who can pay can watch telenovelas, first-run Hollywood movies, brand-new episodes of Game of Thrones, and even search for a romantic partner. It’s called El Packete, and it arrives weekly in the form of thumb drives loaded with enormous digital files. Those drives make their way across the island from hand to hand, by bus, and by 1957 Chevy, their contents copied and the drive handed on.

In a sense, El Packete is a very slow high-capacity Internet access connection; someone (no one knows who) loads up those drives with online glitz and gets them to Cuban shores….

 The real riddle is why this rogue system can operate under the tight governing regime. The Cuban government has to know that this underground operation impinges on its monopoly on information. The secret police calls people in all the time to find out what’s going on. But for some reason El Packete isn’t a problem, while actual Internet access is.

Why?

Read the whole thing. (How long before Hollywood starts campaigning for a crackdown on this blatant piracy?) Here’s the documentary she mentions at the end.

[youtube PlPiG-pDvGA]

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND’S ASSAULT ON REALITY: “Curse those long, thorough investigations with facts and evidence! We demand mob justice NOW!”

“FEELING ISOLATED AND CAST ADRIFT IN THE HOME OF THE FREE”: In the Daily Beast, Nick Gillespie explains the Reason.com subpoena case and why it matters. Then Ken at Popehat schools Daily Beast commenters on how subpoenas actually work. (Hint: the citizens on the grand jury aren’t particularly involved.)

UPDATE: Scott Greenfield has some choice words, including “Niketh Velamoor brought humiliation down on the office.”

THE DNC-MSM’S DESPICABLE, RACIST ATTACK ON BOBBY JINDAL: “As a fun test, let’s take these quotes from the Post and TNR about Jindal, D’Souza, and Haley [and] replace their names with Obama’s (along with “left-wing” instead of “right-wing,” etc.). I’ll invite my liberal friends to tell me if any of these sentiments are remotely okay to voice.”

UPDATE: Question asked and answered:

Why US Presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal’s speech sparked a #BobbyJindalsSoWhite mockery http://t.co/j5138sAUDV pic.twitter.com/TDgYu0Va49

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) June 25, 2015

https://twitter.com/KevinNR/status/614058812761227264

TWO LaHOODS In ONE! Darin LaHood, Campaigning: ‘I’ve Been Very Critical of D.C. GOP.’ Darin LaHood, Fundraising: ‘Come Hear Boehner, Scalise Endorse Me For $1000s a Plate.’

“The GOP establishment wannabe shows he’s learned the First Rule of Fight (Conservatives) Club,” David Steinberg writes at PJM. Via LaHood’s opponent Mike Flynn, voters have got two weeks “to make this race a national strike on party leadership, just as Dave Brat was.”

THE IRS SCANDAL, DAY 777:  IRS Erased Computer Backups After Officials Realized Tea Party Emails Were Lost.

BRANDEIS BETRAYS STUDENT RIGHTS: Minding the Campus’s KC Johnson has a great piece about a student’s due process lawsuit against Brandeis; the student charges that he was disciplined under a procedure different from the one that existed when he arrived on campus, while Brandeis defends the procedure as a mere “tweak” to its rules.

WE’LL JUST HAVE TO PASS THIS NEW BILL TO FIND OUT HOW IT WORKS. A 1947 “Grin and Bear It” cartoon that seems eerily like Nancy Pelosi’s “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

The cartoon was described and misquoted a bit in today’s Obamacare case, but The Chief Justice can blame Felix Frankfurter for the misquote, and Felix can blame the Columbia Law Review editors. Didn’t they check the quotes meticulously back in 1947? Anyway, big thanks to Ben Zimmer at Language Log for putting that up today and to Tobias A. Dorsey at The Periwig Squiggle for digging that all up 5 years ago, when Pelosi uttered her most famous quote.

ADDED: “Grin and Bear It” — it brings on a flood of memories of reading the funny pages when I was a kid. I read everything on the page — “Nancy,” “Blondie,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Li’l Abner,” all of it, including “Grin and Bear It.” I didn’t want “Grin and Bear It” to be there, because it had no panels. It was just one picture, like a political cartoon, so why was it there in the company of Nancy and the rest, demanding that a little kid read it to complete the page? Complicated drawings of adults standing around, someone with a mouth open, indicating talking, but emitting no word bubble. There was just a caption, a caption full of words that meant something, but nothing that was funny from the perspective of kid eyes.

STUDENT SUES COLLEGE FOR VIOLATING HER FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO ADVOCATE FOR HER SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS: In Texas, of all places! Last month Blinn College student Nicole Sanders filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the public college after being told by an administrator that she would need “special permission” to display a gun rights sign and collect signatures for her student group on campus. The lawsuit, part of FIRE’s Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project, also challenges Blinn’s policy of restricting speech to this absurdly tiny “Free Speech Area.” Learn more about the case here.