Ammonite review – a chilly love among the fossils

‘Superbly flinty’: Kate Winslet as Mary Anning, with Saoirse Ronan in Ammonite. 

Photograph: See-saw Films\bbc Films/Allstar

Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan’s 19th-century romance showcases their talents but doesn’t warm the heart

Mark Kermode Observer film critic

@KermodeMovie

Sun 28 Mar 2021

This handsome second feature from the writer-director of 2017’s brilliant God’s Own Country is another hesitant love story set against the backdrop of a bracing British locale: the sea-battered Dorset coast around the famous Cobb of Lyme Regis harbour. It has been the setting for some overcooked screen moments in the past, although the emotional weather forecast here is frosty with occasional storms.

Kate Winslet is superbly flinty as Mary Anning, the 19th-century palaeontologist whose under-attributed finds have graced the display cases of the British Museum since her childhood. An early image sees a handwritten label for the historic “Sea Lizard, found by Miss Mary Anning” being tuttingly replaced by a floridly embellished sign reading “Ichthyosaurus, Lyme Regis, Presented by H Hoste Henley Esq”. It’s a concise way of illustrating both Anning’s outsider status (her role in the discovery is effectively usurped) and the snobbery of an establishment averse to inclusivity.

Anning runs a shop selling “Fossils and Curios”, which she gathers from the rugged coastline, striding purposefully over rocks and foam. Like Daniel Plainview in the opening movement of There Will Be Blood, Winslet’s heroine is a figure of few words and imposing stature, driven by an internal engine that seems to require no human contact. Her mother, Molly (the redoubtable Gemma Jones), is equally insular; theirs is not a household filled with warmth and laughter. Watching this, I longed for a shawl to wrap snuggly around my shoulders.

Things change when Mary meets Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan, excellent), a young woman in the throes of a debilitating depression whose husband wants her to stay with Anning, albeit temporarily. Perhaps the invigorating air and the chance to observe Anning at work will restore the once-vibrant spirit that has withered in his company. Mary is not keen, but payment is promised and arrangements made. Soon, Charlotte’s fine clothes are becoming muddied and torn on the rocks. Gradually, the pair’s growing friendship gives way to passion – strangely desperate couplings amid the stark silences of the house.

The real-life Murchison was an accomplished geologist and illustrator who became close to Anning, although Lee’s decision to portray them as lovers has inevitably ruffled some feathers. In response, Lee has stated: “After seeing queer history be routinely ‘straightened’ throughout culture, and given a historical figure where there is no evidence whatsoever of a heterosexual relationship, is it not permissible to view that person within another context?”

It’s a powerful point, eloquently made, although, in the end, issues of class and gender, rather than sexual orientation, seem more central to Lee’s film. It’s no accident that Ammonite opens with a woman industriously polishing a floor, only to recoil in head-bowed subservience as “gentlemen” march by. While Ralph Fiennes’s archaeologist Basil Brown was snubbed in The Dig for being largely self-taught, Winslet’s Anning faces the double whammy of being both an autodidact and a woman. Wisely, Lee lets these events speak for themselves, rather than hammering home any sociopolitical message through needless expository dialogue.

Stéphane Fontaine’s crisp cinematography perfectly captures the bleak chilliness of the environment, while Dustin O’Halloran and Volker Bertelmann’s sparingly used score is as notable for the gaping voids in which it doesn’t appear as for those carefully chosen moments when it does. It adds up to an expertly crafted film that nonetheless feels somewhat distanced and removed, like an exhibit under glass. At times, I was reminded of the austere atmosphere of Michael Winterbottom’s Jude, another critical triumph for Winslet. Both films have much to admire artistically; both left me just a little cold

 Ammonite is available on various streaming platforms

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Mormon leaders accused of fraud, misusing tithes in lawsuit filed by brother of former Utah governor

A prominent former church member filed suit after reading an IRS whistleblower report claiming the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had $100 billion in assets that were not being used for charity.

A man walks past the Salt Lake Temple at Temple Square in Salt Lake City on Sept. 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

March 23, 2021

By 

Bob Smietana

(RNS) —  A former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has accused the church of misusing millions of dollars in donations.

James Huntsman, a filmmaker who is the son of a prominent philanthropist and the brother of a former governor of Utah, claimed in federal court that the corporate arm of the church — known as the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — used donations, known as tithings, to develop a mall in downtown Salt Lake City and to bail out a troubled insurance company.

According to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, church leaders “defrauded Mr. Huntsman out of millions of dollars by falsely misleading him into believing his tithings would be used solely for charitable pursuits around the world” but instead using those donations for commercial purpose.

Latter-day Saints, like other Christian groups, believe in the idea of tithing, or donating a set percentage of income, usually 10%, to the church. According to the LDS church’s website, tithing is a “natural and integrated aspect” of the beliefs and practices of Mormons.

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RELATED: Why I stopped tithing to the LDS Church

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“All funds given to the Church by its members are considered sacred,” the church’s website states. “They are voluntary offerings that represent the faith and dedication of members and are used with careful oversight and discretion.”

The complaint cites a number of statements from church leaders, saying no tithings were used for the City Creek Mall in Salt Lake City.

A spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints told The Washington Post that accusations in the lawsuit were “baseless” and that tithes were voluntary religious contributions.

“They are used for a broad array of religious purposes, including missionary work, education, humanitarian causes and the construction of meetinghouses, temples and other buildings important in the work of the Church, as reflected in scripture and determined by Church leaders,” according to a statement from the church spokesman.

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RELATED: God cares a lot about money. Maybe you should too.

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The lawsuit is part of the fallout from a whistleblower complaint filed with the IRS in 2019 by a former employee of Ensign Peak Advisors, which manages more than $100 billion in the church’s assets. Those assets came from both church tithings and investments, according to  Religion Unplugged, which first reported on the whistleblower complaint, and were used for the mall project and the insurance company bailout.

James Huntsman. Image courtesy of IMDB

After reading about the whistleblower, Huntsman, who is no longer a member of the church, approached LDS leaders about returning millions of dollars in donations. That request was refused, according to the complaint.  

Huntsman is seeking more than $5 million in damages. In the suit, he stated he intends to donate any recovered funds “to benefit organizations and communities whose members have been marginalized by the Church’s teachings and doctrines, including by donating to charities supporting LGBTQ, African-American, and women’s rights.”

Brazil’s business elite demand stronger Covid action – leading macroeconomic influencers

Economists believe that the Brazilian government should take stronger Covid-19 action.

Credit: 3dartistav, Shutterstock.com.

Economists and business leaders believe that the Brazilian government should take stronger Covid-19 action on policies and restrictions to curb the rising number of infections in the country.

Adam Tooze
26 March 2021 

Adam Tooze, a historian and director of the European Institute, shared an article on the rising conflict between hundreds of Brazilian private sector leaders and president Jair Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis.

Prominent leaders including the central bank chief, economists, and bankers, signed an open letter to the Brazilian government demanding stronger Covid-19 action such as implementing a mask mandate and speeding up vaccinations, as the country’s death tolls mounts. According to official data, approximately 300,000 Brazilians have died from Covid-19, the second highest toll after the US.

Brazil is currently witnessing a brutal second wave of Covid-19 infections, with overwhelmed hospitals and some even facing shortages of critical equipment and oxygen. The country’s data reported 3,251 deaths in a single day this week, the highest daily toll since the Covid-19 outbreak in March 2020.

The business leaders’ letter was published after Verde Asset Management criticised the government in a letter to investors for failing to acquire coronavirus vaccines on time. Experts from the financial sector believe that the government should follow science and implement the necessary steps to tackle the pandemic. For example, the federal government should implement effective lockdowns, increase the supply of vaccines, and distribute masks for free.

Data further revealed that less than 8% of the Brazilian population has received the first dose of the vaccine, despite rapid immunisation programmes. Critics have stated that slow implementation and disorganisation within the country’s health ministry has led to the mishandling of the crisis.

Guntram Wolff

German economist and think tank leader, Guntram Wolff, shared an article that compared the unemployment increase in the US as against the increase in the euro area.

He stated that the increase in the euro zone was not as much as in the US. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly affected both the nations, experts believe that the number of Covid-19 cases has been higher in the US than in the euro area, particularly between mid-November 2020 and February 2021.

According to Goldman Sachs’ Effective Lockdown Index (ELI), the higher incidence of Covid infections in the US is indicative of the effectiveness of the lockdown policies.

Not only did the country have fewer restrictions than the euro area, but the latter also implemented more small-sized targeted policies to fight the Covid crisis.

The euro zone also covered the substantial increase in employed workers by job retention schemes that left the unemployment rate unchanged, while temporary layoffs in the US caused the unemployment rate to rise.

The employment in the euro area by the end of the fourth quarter 2020 was 1.9% below its fourth quarter 2019 levels, while in the US it had declined by 5.5% for the same period.

Claudia Sahm

US economist Claudia Sahm, shared a discussion on the US federal government’s efforts amid the coronavirus pandemic being pointed at the right direction.

According to Sahm, the Fed is bringing its maximum employment mandate that it got from Congress on par with its stable price mandate after over 40 years. Therefore, she does not believe that one is being prioritised over the other, and that the government is trying to get both of them right.

Experts also state that both Fed chief Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seemed positive about the economic recovery during their second day of hearings. In fact, Yellen believes that the US economy could return to full employment as soon as next year.

However, Chairman Powell stated that the Fed will continue to support the economy as long as it is required.

Meanwhile, Sahm believes that the US is still short of 9.5 million jobs that have been a direct repercussion of the Covid-induced recession. As a result, people would have to be incentivised towards employment.

Long Covid: could chronic fatigue syndrome be taken seriously at last?

Chloe Kent

26 March 2021

‘Long Covid’ has become shorthand for a wide range of post-viral symptoms experienced by some patients following a Covid-19 infection. Cases of chronic fatigue after acute respiratory illness are far from unprecedented, but the scale at which they are now occurring is unprecedented. Advocates for patients with similar illnesses are now hoping that the attention being given to long Covid could help improve care for these illnesses as well. Chloe Kent reports.

Around one in ten recovered patients are experiencing ‘long Covid’ symptoms at least three months after being infected with COvid-19. Credit: Shutterstock.

Post-viral fatigue is a fairly common occurrence following any type of viral infection. After a bout of flu or battling off an Epstein-Barr virus, many people find themselves experiencing persistent fatigue for a few weeks, or even months, after supposed recovery. Unpleasant as this prolonged experience is, most people can expect to make an eventual return to full health.

But for some patients the fog never lifts. Viral illnesses are thought to be one of the primary causes of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), aka chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). This long-term condition is characterised primarily by extreme tiredness, along with brain fog, sore joints and flu-like symptoms.

Following the worldwide spread of Covid-19, around one in ten recovered patients are experiencing post-viral symptoms like these at least three months later, according to the UK Office for National Statistics. Many media reports and online support groups feature personal accounts of illness which carries on for much longer.


Christened ‘long Covid’, the condition appears to mirror post-viral ME in a number of ways and is distinct from the Covid-19 patients needing rehabilitative treatment for respiratory and cardiac damage caused by the virus.

“Any viral infection can cause a short-lived period of fatigue,” says ME Association medical adviser Dr Charles Shepherd. “That’s extremely common. What’s less common, but still reasonably so, is people who get a viral infection followed by post-viral fatigue syndrome, where you’ve got other symptoms like brain fog, feeling fluey, glands up, that sort of thing. That follows a lot of viral infections and goes on for a few weeks, and then people get over it and get better again.

“Then there’s the third group, where post-viral fatigue doesn’t resolve for three months or more and has a significant effect on what you can do – you can’t get back to work or normal life. At that point, most people would get a diagnosis of ME. That’s paralleling what’s happening for quite a few people with long Covid. There clearly is a lot of overlap between the two.”

ME has been historically neglected by clinicians and researchers

The sheer number of people now presenting with long Covid has forced clinicians and researchers to sit up and take notice of post-viral illness on a mass scale for the first time – something many ME patients have found frustrating after years of having their symptoms dismissed by doctors.

Shepherd says: “There’s still an awful lot of doctors out there who either don’t believe in ME or believe it’s all in the mind and are pretty dismissive and in some cases quite nasty to patients.”

Mindset coach Rachel was diagnosed with ME in 2008, but her doctors believe she has had the condition since 1998 when she was nine years old. She also has Ehlers Danlos syndrome and fibromyalgia.

Rachel says: “For years, I’d been told there was nothing wrong with me and it was all in my head. You do feel mental because there is no evidence to diagnose the condition, you can’t have a blood test, it’s a process of elimination.

“My GP turned around after diagnosis and said you can only have CFS for three years and then it becomes psychosomatic, and I went ‘oh great, that means I’m already psychosomatic then.’”

From 2006-2015 global research spending on ME averaged just $6.5m a year. This received a boost in 2017 when the US National Institutes of Health committed to doubling its spending in this area, allowing the figure to jump to $15m in 2017. When the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate that as many as 17 to 24 million people worldwide have ME the money being spent on the condition starts to look like small change.

Funding for long Covid research is surging

The $15m figure starts to look even slimmer when compared to the research funding now available for long Covid. In the UK alone, the National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation have funded four studies to address the long term physical and mental effects of Covid-19, for a total of £18.5m.

It’s not yet possible to say whether long Covid is clinically distinct from ME or simply the same condition arising en-masse from one clearly identifiable cause, warranting its own signifier. What is clear is that the significant overlap of symptoms mean a lot of long Covid research will have implications for the wider treatment of post-viral fatigue.

Marketing assistant Becky was diagnosed with ME 16 years ago, and also has EDS, postural tachycardia syndrome, asthma and interstitial cystitis.

“For me personally there’s a deep sadness, a sort of grief, about what could happen in terms of research or treatment options,” she says. “I’m happy that maybe this is the turning point for the condition, options will be available and hopefully one day soon people won’t have to be forgotten, but at the same time, I find it strangely upsetting that I never had that opportunity.

“I think a lot of people in the chronic illness community feel this way; it’s almost guilt for feeling that way as well, but it’s hard not to feel some level of resentment.”
An overactive immune system could be the cause of post-viral illness

There’s currently no universally accepted explanation for why viral illnesses, Covid-19 included, can trigger these long-term symptoms.

Shepherd says: “Because ME is a multi-system disease and there are these various different pathological tracks going on within it, there are different therapeutic interventions going on in relation to the different components of it.”

Some clinicians think CFS could be the result of an overactive immune system failing to switch itself off again once it has fought off an infection, leading to increased levels of chemicals called cytokines. There continue to produce symptoms of illness even though no pathogen is present.

“There’s quite a lot of emerging evidence of a range of dysfunction across the whole immune system orchestra, but in particular the role of cytokines. This may link in with some of the neuroimaging findings on what we call neuroinflammation,” says Shepherd. “This has led to various small studies as to whether drugs which can dampen down this type of immune system activation could be of help in people with ME and long Covid.”

Dr Raymond Perrin takes an osteopathic approach to CFS, attributing the symptoms of CFS to a build-up of lymph in the recently-described glymphatic system, a pseudolymphatic system in the brain and that plays an important role in the removal of interstitial metabolic waste products.

“It’s literally manually pushing the lymph out using certain techniques,” he says. “It’s cytokines, large protein molecules, that need to drain away. If they’re not draining properly the whole control mechanism drains backwards instead of forwards and you end up with a build-up of inflammatory toxins in the brain.”

Perrin, who has detailed these methods in his book The Perrin Technique, has been treating patients with ME and fibromyalgia in this way for 30 years and has been treating long Covid patients in the same way since last year.
Histamine and mitochondrial dysfunction could also be to blame

Long Covid and ME could also be down to something known as mass cell activation syndrome, where infections can destabilise the mass cells where histamine is produced. This could explain the allergy-type symptoms like rashes and hives experienced by some long Covid patients.

There is also evidence of mitochondrial dysfunction in people with CFS.

“Mitochondria are sort of the Duracell batteries within muscle cells that are where energy is produced,” says Shepherd.

“We’ve now got quite a lot of evidence showing that there’s a defect in metabolic energy production at a cellular level in people with ME, so there is a biochemical explanation for the fatigue that is going on.

“Whether there’s mitochondrial dysfunction going on in long Covid I don’t know, because no one’s really had the time of the opportunity to study it, but it’s certainly another possibility for therapeutic intervention.”
Could the attention given to long Covid improve things for ME too?

Fortunately, research into the causes and corresponding treatments for long Covid is moving very fast, as is recognition and acceptance of the condition.

Shepherd says: “Although there’s all this great overlap between ME/CFS and long Covid there’s been a great reluctance in the long Covid patient community especially, especially among doctors involved in its treatment, to actually accept this overlap. They don’t want long Covid people to just get landed with all the problems people with ME have had with recognition.

“There’s this sort of tension between the two communities, a lot of quite understandable anger if you look on social media. People are constantly saying ‘look, we’ve been living with an illness like long Covid for 30 years and no one’s taken us seriously’, and now there’s all this money ploughed into research and all these clinics set up overnight.”

Nonetheless, a step in the right direction is a step in the right direction, even when some patients may feel it’s too little too late.

Shepherd says: “As time goes on there’s going to be much more acceptance about this overlap between the two conditions. It may well be that some of these long Covid clinics, once they’ve got a component that deals with Covid-type symptoms, are more help by becoming an ME/CFS service than they are a service primarily dealing with people who have long term respiratory and cardiac problems.”

'Be aware': The Pentagon's target list for extremist infiltrators — right and left

An internal "training module" singles out a range of groups, ideologies and symbols seen as primary insider threats.


Members of the National Guard patrol the area outside of the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 11, 2021. | Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo


By BETSY WOODRUFF SWAN and BRYAN BENDER
POLITICO
03/27/2021 

Extremism and Insider Threat in the DoD

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Original Document (PDF) »

Contributed by Evan Semones (POLITICO.com)

Flags from the left-wing Antifa movement. Depictions of Pepe the Frog, the cartoon character that's been misappropriated by racist groups. Iconography from the far-right Proud Boys, including the phrase "stand back and stand by" from former President Donald Trump.

They are all signs that extremists could be infiltrating the military, according to internal training materials that offer a more detailed view into the array of radical groups and ideologies the Pentagon is trying to keep out of the ranks.

“There are members of the [Department of Defense] who belong to extremist groups or actively participate in efforts to further extremist ideologies,” states a 17-page briefing obtained by POLITICO that was compiled by the DoD Insider Threat Management and Analysis Center, which is part of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

"Be aware of symbols of far right, far left, Islamist or single issue ideologies," it warns, stressing that members of the military and civilian personnel have “a duty and responsibility” to report extremist behavior or activity.

The materials were prepared as part of a broader Pentagon effort to crack down on extremists who may be lurking inside the military after dozens of ex-service members were arrested for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the presidential election.

The prevalence of extremists in the Defense Department appears to be small. For example, the 222,000-strong Marine Corps recently reported that it kicked out four members last year for extremist activity.

But the Pentagon says one is too many and the true numbers are not known because adherents who have been recruited by extremist groups or encouraged to enlist often organize and communicate in secret.

“No one truly knows,” Audrey Kurth Cronin, the director of American University’s Center for Security, Innovation and New Technology, told a House panel this week. “No serious plan can be built without defining the scope of the problem.”

The internal training materials focus on extremist behavior and symbolism — of all different stripes — and point out the risk of making false assumptions about people who do not pose any threat. This includes pointing out that religious conservatives are often mistakenly lumped together with white supremacists or other extremists.

The Department of Homeland Security has said white supremacist extremists are the most lethal terror threat facing the U.S. And while Republicans accused far-left groups such as Antifa of taking part in the insurrection, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers this month there's "no evidence" those groups played a role.

Last month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a force-wide stand down requiring all units to discuss the threat of extremism within 60 days.

He called it the first step in "a concerted effort to better educate ourselves and our people about the scope of this problem and to develop sustainable ways to eliminate the corrosive effects that extremist ideology and conduct have on the workforce."

The stand downs also include "listening sessions" to hear from Pentagon personnel about their experiences with activity, such as one held on Friday by a unit of the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

The Pentagon is cracking down on extremists who may be lurking inside the military after dozens of ex-service members were arrested for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. | John Minchillo/AP Photo

The department published broad guidance for commanders to address address extremism, which focuses on reinforcing the military's core principles enshrined in the oath they take to the Constitution and several case studies of military members who were prosecuted for engaging in extremist activity or plotting with radical groups.

But those materials did not identify specific threat groups, and Austin has provided wide leeway for individual units and commands to address the challenge as they see fit.

The internal briefing shared with POLITICO was compiled by the human resources office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a small Pentagon agency of several hundred military personnel, civilian employees and contractors that manages research into breakthrough technologies.

Pentagon spokesman Jamal Brown noted that military units and individual components have been given broad authority to tailor their own approaches to addressing the extremist threat with their employees. He could not immediately say how many personnel have received this specific information and deferred questions about it to DARPA.

Jared Adams, a spokesperson for DARPA, explained in an email that "our training module was copied verbatim from the material provided by the DOD Insider Threat Management & Analysis Center of the Defense Counter Intelligence and Security Agency.

"We did not add any symbols and used all the imagery provided," Adams said.

The briefing was sent to civilian employees as part of required training across the department for "Extremism and Insider Threat in the DoD." Adams said it is required training to be completed by this month. Employees have to digest the material and then answer some questions.

The more detailed materials break down extremist movements into three main categories, including “Patriot” extremism, anarchist extremism, and ethnic/racial supremacy.

DEFENSE
House Republicans downplay the military's extremism problem
BY NICK NIEDZWIADEK

“Patriot” extremism, according to the document, holds that the U.S. government “has become corrupt, has overstepped its constitutional boundaries or is no longer capable of protecting the people against foreign threats.” Adherents reject the government’s authority to tax and govern, believe they don’t have to follow the law, and, in some cases, form militias and call for the government to be violently overthrown.

It cites as examples the symbols of the Oath Keepers and Boogaloo Boys, both of which took part in the Capitol attack. It also lists groups such as the Sovereign Citizens and Proud Boys.

Anarchists  extremism, meanwhile, opposes all forms of government, the document says, along with capitalism and corporations. It cites as examples the left-wing Antifa and Occupy movements, as well as the Workers' Solidarity Alliance,

The third main category of extremists is organized around "Ethnic/Racial Supremacy," which blames the U.S. government for “forcing race mixing.”

“While the vast majority of these groups hold white supremacist views," the document states, "a wide array of ethnic and racial groups hold similar beliefs about the supremacy of their ethnicity or race." Its examples include Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan, Evropa and Atomwaffen Division.

The document also singles out violent Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and the conspiracy movement QAnon.

The slides list other radical ideologies that don’t specifically target the military, including religious extremism, environmental extremism, and “Anti-feminism."

It says religious extremists espouse purity through subjugation or elimination of other religions. But it also warns that "Christian extremism is often conflated with white supremacy for a joint ideology focused on racial and religious purity which they believe to be God's intention."

Anti-feminists "openly call for the attack, raping and killing of women,” it reads.

“Primary target: Women, especially women they perceive as attractive (referred to as ‘Stacys’) who sexually reject or would likely reject unattractive men; attractive men (referred to as 'Chads') who are not sexually rejected by women; feminists; men who don’t stand against feminism.”

But how to spot extremists is proving to be exceedingly difficult because the language, symbols, tattoos and other identifiers they use are regularly replaced with new ones.

"The landscape of home grown extremist ideologies is constantly evolving," the briefing slide explains.

The slides reflect the challenge of cracking down on extremists without singling out political views. Just this week, Republicans in Congress raised fresh concerns that the Pentagon effort could be overreaching and singling out conservatives.

“I’m very concerned that we’re seeing people through all walks of society lose their jobs and other things simply because of a Facebook post or some other post that was made when somebody was mad,” Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) said during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee on the issue.

Marine Corps veteran Michael Berry, general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit organization that defends religious liberty, told the panel that he has seen Defense Department publications "indicating that people who identify as evangelical Christian or Catholic or of other faith groups are at least considered possibly extremist."

"You're essentially telling those who are, according to data, most likely to join our military, that they're unwelcome that they should look somewhere else," he said.

Some Democrats also expressed concern over the military inadvertently punishing troops for their political opinions or religious views. "It is not the case that extremism is simply anyone who disagrees with your political views and I think increasingly I've seen some who sort of take it to that level," said the panel's chair, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.). "People who serve in the military are entitled to have political views. Those views will undoubtedly be different from each other."

Other Republicans on the panel also downplayed the warnings that the ranks have been infiltrated because the Pentagon lacks hard data and has been relying mostly on anecdotal information.

“We lack any concrete evidence that violent extremism is as ripe in the military as some commentators claim,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the committee’s top Republican. “While I agree with my colleagues that these numbers should be zero, this is far from the largest military justice issue facing our armed services.”

The US Supreme Court’s coming war with Joe Biden, explained

The Supreme Court is poised to give itself a veto power over much of the Biden administration’s authority.

By Ian Millhiser Mar 27, 2021

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Christina Animashaun/Vox


One of Justice Antonin Scalia’s final acts was to strike down President Obama’s plan to stave off the climate crisis.

On February 9, 2016 — the last Tuesday of Scalia’s life — the Supreme Court handed down an unexpected order announcing a stay of the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon emissions rules for many power plants. The vote was 5-4, along party lines, with Scalia joining his fellow conservatives in the majority.

This essay is adapted from the author’s book.

The environmental regulations blocked by this order were commonly known as the Clean Power Plan, and they were the Obama administration’s most ambitious effort to fight climate change. Had the Clean Power Plan taken effect, the EPA predicted that by 2030 it would have reduced overall carbon dioxide emissions from utility power plants 32 percent from where they were in 2005.

But the Clean Power Plan never took effect. Though the Supreme Court’s order halting the plan was temporary, Donald Trump’s 2016 victory all but ensured that it would not be revived. Even if the Trump administration hadn’t replaced this Obama-era policy with a significantly weaker rule, the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s vacant seat signaled the Supreme Court would be highly likely to strike down the Clean Power Plan permanently if given the chance.

The problem for Democrats is that the legal defeat of the Clean Power Plan is likely not a one-off. This fight over the federal government’s power to address a slow-moving catastrophe is just one battle in a multi-front war over federal agencies’ power to regulate. As Stephen Bannon, then the White House’s chief strategist, told the Conservative Political Action Conference a month after Trump took office, one of the Trump administration’s primary goals would be “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Enter the Roberts Court, fortified by Trump’s appointees. With six conservative justices, the Court has the votes it needs to make Bannon’s goal a reality — and at least five members of the Supreme Court have already endorsed a plan to erase much of the executive branch’s authority.

It wasn’t always this way. In the late 1980s, Justice Scalia was one of the Court’s staunchest defenders of a strong administrative state. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush delivered three landslide victories in a row to Republicans, and the GOP was at the apex of its ability to gain power the old-fashioned way — by winning elections.

So conservatives benefited from court decisions that gave the Reagan and Bush administrations broad leeway to set federal policy. Both administrations could use this leeway to deregulate

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President Ronald Reagan talking to then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Antonin Scalia in the Oval Office, circa 1986. Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images

President George W. Bush and then-federal appeals court Judge John Roberts in 2005. Brooks Kraft/Corbis via Getty Images

But the right’s approach to federal agencies shifted drastically during the Obama administration. With the GOP’s grip on the presidency waning at the very same time that they had a firm hold on the judiciary, conservatives had an obvious interest in increasing the judiciary’s power to strike down new rules pushed by federal agencies. By Obama’s second term, the conservative Federalist Society’s national lawyers convention became a showcase of proposals to deconstruct the administrative state.

All of this culminated in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Gundy v. United States (2019), which called for strict new limits on federal agencies — and for the judiciary to even strike down many federal regulations as unconstitutional. Though Gorsuch’s opinion was a dissent — that is, he didn’t yet have a majority for it — five justices now on the Court have largely endorsed his framework, which relies on a conservative legal principle known as “nondelegation.”

In other words, it may be only a matter of time before the Court starts striking down Biden administration regulations that rely on legal arguments that would have been treated as nonsense just a decade ago.

At least since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, federal agencies have had wide latitude to implement the policies the president campaigned on. And agency-initiated regulations answer such important questions as who has access to health care, how much workers are paid for their labor, and a wide range of environmental questions that go well beyond the Clean Power Plan.

So, no matter what issue you care about, there is likely a federal regulation that shapes the nation’s approach to that issue. If the Supreme Court strips the government of much of its power to promulgate these regulations, it could effectively grind down the Biden presidency — not to mention dismantle much of American law.

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Federal regulation, explained

Before we can understand how the Supreme Court might remake the balance of power between the executive and the judiciary, it’s important to understand what it means for a federal agency to regulate.

As a general rule, Congress can regulate businesses in two ways.

The most straightforward approach is simply to command industries to conduct their business in a certain manner. Thus, if Congress wants to reduce certain polluting emissions, it could enact a law that orders power plants to use a particular technology that reduces emissions.

But Congress is a slow-moving body, and federal laws are difficult to amend. If, in the 1970s, Congress had commanded power plants to use the best emissions reduction technology that existed at the time, it could have potentially locked these plants into using obsolete tech that is vastly inferior to the technology available now. At a minimum, Congress would have struggled to stay on top of new developments and to update this law as new methods of reducing emissions were invented.

For this reason, Congress may also regulate businesses in a second way. It can pass a law that lays out a broad federal policy but leave the details of how to implement that policy up to a federal agency. Often, such delegation means giving that agency a fair amount of authority to determine how businesses operate, so long as the agency uses this authority to advance the policy goal enacted by Congress.

When Congress wrote the Clean Air Act, for example, it made sure that the rules governing power plants could evolve as technology improves. Under this law, power plants must update their systems for reducing emissions to ensure that they achieve the same “degree of emission limitation achievable through the application of the best system of emission reduction” that currently exists, while also accounting for factors such as cost.


Congress also gave the job of figuring out what the “best system of emission reduction” is at any particular moment to the EPA administrator. As a practical matter, that means that EPA employees who are experts on environmental regulation and the energy industry will study which new technology is available and will update the rules governing power plants as that technology evolves.

And that’s exactly what EPA did when it created the Clean Power Plan. EPA determined that, to achieve the “best system of emission reduction,” at least some energy companies would need to shift from fairly dirty coal-fired electricity production to cleaner methods such as natural gas, or to renewable methods that result in no emissions at all.

Rules such as this one, which are promulgated by a federal agency pursuant to a federal law permitting them to do so, are known as “regulations.” When Bannon spoke of deconstructing the administrative state, or when the Federalist Society showcased proposals to diminish the executive branch’s authority, a major thrust of that project involved stripping agencies of much of their ability to regulate.

Ideally, laws like the Clean Air Act make complex lawmaking possible without having to sacrifice democratic accountability. Regulation allows our laws to be both democratic and dynamic. Such laws are democratic because the goals of federal policy — goals such as ensuring that power plants use the best emission reduction technology available — are still set by the people’s elected representatives in Congress. But they are dynamic because it allows federal rules to be updated without requiring Congress to enact a new law every time a new innovation is developed.

Yet, despite these advantages, the very idea that Congress should be free to delegate power in this way has many enemies within the conservative legal movement. In a 2016 opinion, for example, then-Judge Gorsuch wrote that two foundational Supreme Court decisions preserving agencies’ ability to regulate “permit executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design.”

After his elevation to the Supreme Court, Gorsuch called for strict new limits on the federal government’s power to regulate in his Gundy opinion. And since then, five members of the Court’s Republican-appointed majority have signaled, albeit in two different cases, that they agree with Gorsuch’s plans to restrict agency power.

Judge Neil Gorsuch delivers brief remarks after the announcement of his nomination to the Supreme Court on January 31, 2017. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Gorsuch and his allies do not simply view Congress’s power to delegate rulemaking authority to agencies as undesirable. They view broad delegations of power as inconsistent with the Constitution itself. And their narrow vision of federal power has profound implications for workers, consumers, patients, and the environment.
The future of federal regulation

There’s a name for this vision that Gorsuch and the Court’s conservatives are invoking: “nondelegation.”

Nonedelegation is the largely defunct idea that the Constitution places strict limits on Congress’s ability to delegate power to federal agencies. Although the Supreme Court briefly wielded the nondelegation doctrine to strike down New Deal policies that gave a simply extraordinary amount of regulatory power to President Roosevelt, this doctrine largely lay dormant for generations. And the Court’s decisions prior to Gundy emphasized just how reluctant courts should be to strike down laws permitting agencies to regulate.

Longstanding Supreme Court precedents hold that Congress has a broad authority to delegate power. As the Court explained in Mistretta v. United States (1989), “in our increasingly complex society, replete with ever changing and more technical problems, Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives.”

Thus, the Court has explained, Congress may delegate regulatory power to agencies so long as it “shall lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise the delegated authority] is directed to conform.”

While Reaganism was ascendant, conservative judges were often the biggest cheerleaders for broad judicial deference to federal agencies, frequently justifying such deference as a way to keep an unelected judiciary from undercutting democracy. As then-Judge Kenneth Starr wrote in a 1986 article on administrative law, “in part because federal judges are not directly accountable to any electorate, I believe they have a duty voluntarily to exercise ‘judicial restraint.’”

But these conservative calls for judicial restraint have since been replaced with bold demands for judicial intervention against federal agencies once Reaganism faded and Obama’s liberalism gained steam. A new conservative approach to administrative law, which seeks to concentrate power within a judiciary dominated by Republican appointees, is now ascendant.

In early October 2019, just a few days before Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the eight remaining justices heard Gundy v. United States (2019), a case brought by a convicted sex offender who challenged his conviction for failing to register as a sex offender when he moved to New York. Herman Gundy’s case went after a federal statute that allowed the Justice Department to determine which sex offenders, who were convicted before a certain date, had to register with their state governments (the Justice Department determined that all eligible offenders must register).

Gorsuch used his opinion in Gundy to criticize the longstanding rule laid out in cases like Mistretta. Warning that permitting Congress to delegate power to agencies risks giving those agencies “unbounded policy choices,” Gorsuch proposed a vague new limit on Congress’s power to delegate.

According to Gorsuch, delegations of power to agencies must be struck down unless Congress put “forth standards ‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain’ whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”

This vague new standard is inconsistent with the framers’ understanding of the Constitution. As explained below, early American lawmakers — many of whom were the same people who drafted the Constitution — delegated tremendous power to executive branch officials.

And Gorsuch’s rule would effectively consolidate an enormous amount of power within the judiciary.

As a practical matter, when the Supreme Court hands down a vague and open-ended legal standard like the one Gorsuch articulated in his Gundy opinion, the Court is shifting power to itself. What does it mean for a statute to be “sufficiently definite and precise” that the public can “ascertain whether Congress’s guidance has been followed”?


The answer is that the courts — and, ultimately, the Supreme Court — will decide for themselves what this vague language means. The courts will gain a broad new power to strike down federal regulations, on the grounds that they exceed Congress’s power to delegate authority.

In theory, that could mean that federal regulations will simply receive more scrutiny from an impartial judiciary. But, in practice, the judiciary is only as good as the judges who staff it. If five justices get behind it, the nondelegation doctrine would give a Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court the ability to veto nearly any regulation handed down by a Democratic administration.

Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett arrive for the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021. Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images

It should be noted that Gorsuch’s opinion in Gundy was a dissent — the opinion was joined only by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas. But Justices Samuel Alito and Kavanaugh have both signaled in other opinions that they share Gorsuch’s desire to revive the nondelegation doctrine.

And in Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania (2020), five justices signed on to an opinion by Justice Thomas, which strongly suggests that many of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) provisions requiring health insurers to provide a minimum level of coverage to their customers are unconstitutional under the nondelegation doctrine.

Little Sisters considered a provision of the ACA allowing a federal agency to determine which forms of “preventive care and screenings” for women must be covered without copays or other out-of-pocket costs by health insurers. Among other things, the agency determined that contraceptive care must be covered.

Yet Thomas’s majority opinion strongly suggests that this provision of the Affordable Care Act violates the nondelegation doctrine. He accuses Congress of giving “virtually unbridled discretion to decide what counts as preventive care and screenings” to a federal agency. Thomas’s decision lays the groundwork for the Supreme Court to eventually strike down the requirement that health insurers cover birth control (and possibly other, similarly worded provisions of Obamacare requiring coverage of immunizations and pediatric care).

Indeed, in late February, a conservative federal judge in Texas cited Little Sisters to suggest that multiple provisions of the ACA may be unconstitutional under the nondelegation doctrine.

And it won’t be just the ACA. Literally any regulation pushed during the Biden presidency, dealing with a wide range of matters from the fight against climate change to the protection of workers, could be vetoed by a Republican Supreme Court under this doctrine.
The constitutional arguments for the nondelegation doctrine are quite weak

This consolidation of power within a conservative judiciary could happen despite the fact that the nondelegation doctrine rests on the thinnest of constitutional reeds.

The Constitution gives Congress the “legislative” power, and the president and the various federal agencies that answer to the president the “executive” power.

The legislative power, according to Gorsuch, is the power to “adopt generally applicable rules of conduct governing future actions by private persons.” And proponents of nondelegation claim that the Constitution places strict limits on Congress’s ability to delegate this power to agencies merely tasked with executing existing laws.

Often, proponents of the nondelegation doctrine quote a passage from the political philosopher John Locke, who claimed that “the legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands; for it being but a delegated power from the people, they who have it cannot pass it over to others.”

But there are many problems with this account of Congress’s ability to delegate power. For one thing, it misunderstands Locke. As law professors Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley note in an important paper, Locke draws a distinction between the legislature’s ability to “transfer” power and a “delegated” power.

Transferring a power requires a “permanent alienation” — that is, for Congress to “transfer” legislative power, it would have to give up that power forever to some other person or body. But Locke raised no objection to a legislature delegating a power, meaning that lawmakers may assign the ability to make certain binding rules to an agency, so long as the legislature retains the ability to take that power back.

Indeed, if anything, Locke’s quote undercuts the argument for the nondelegation doctrine because it recognizes that the legislative power has already been delegated once — to the legislature itself. Locke describes the power to make laws as “a delegated power from the people.” That is, it is the people, not the Congress or some other representative body, that has the inherent power to make rules that bind the whole of society. When the Constitution created Congress, it delegated the people’s power to make laws to that Congress. And Congress may, in turn, delegate a portion of that power to federal agencies.

Congress’s early history supports this reading of the Constitution, as the very first Congress enacted numerous laws giving vast discretion to other government officials. It allowed officials overseeing the Northwest Territory to “adopt and publish in the district, such laws of the original States, criminal and civil, as may be necessary, and best suited to the circumstances of the district.”

And it delegated Congress’s entire power to provide patents to inventors to executive branch officials, allowing the secretary of state, the secretary of war, or the attorney general to grant patents so long as they “deem the invention or discovery sufficiently useful or important.”

The First Congress didn’t simply give executive branch officials the power to issue licenses that would allow merchants to trade with Native American tribes, it also allowed the executive to promulgate regulations that would govern license holders “in all things touching the said trade and intercourse.”

The First Congress allowed the president to identify wounded or disabled soldiers, and to place them on “the list of the invalids of the United States, at such rate of pay, and under such regulations, as shall be directed by the President of the United States, for the time being.”

And it delegated to “any common law court of record” the power to grant citizenship to any free white person who resided in the country for two years, provided that the court was satisfied that the new citizen is a “person of good character.”

So the framers understood the Constitution to allow Congress to grant broad authority to federal agencies, and the position outlined by Gorsuch’s opinion in Gundy and Thomas’s opinion in Little Sisters is tough to square with this history.

But in the Supreme Court of the United States, history and constitutional text matter little if a party has five votes. And the nondelegation doctrine almost certainly has five votes.

President Biden will hardly be the first president to face lawsuits challenging his administration’s regulations. But he is likely to be the first president since Roosevelt to face a judiciary that’s so eager to rein in agency power.

Al Drago/Getty Images

This essay is adapted from the author’s book, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America.