Author: Andrew Sullivan

Will recently defended his controversial column on sexual assault (covered here on the Dish):

Allahpundit has the play-by-play:

When asked to respond to one critic who accused Will of trivializing the crime of sexual assault, the conservative columnist said he takes sexual assault more seriously than his critics do. “When someone’s accused of rape, it should be reported to the criminal justice system that knows how to deal with this, not with jerrybuilt, improvised campus processes,” he asserted. Will went on to dismiss those for whom he said “indignation is default position.” He added that the outrage over his column will, like “summer storms,” dissipate as rapidly as it arose. In conclusion, the columnist said that he would not take one word of his column back if he had the chance.

Ramesh sticks up for Will:

It takes an extreme lack of charity to read Will as saying what the Post-Dispatch claimed. What he was actually saying is that rape is being defined too broadly on college campuses. He wasn’t criticizing “victims of sexual assault” but rather saying (for example) that women who had consensual sexual encounters they later regretted shouldn’t be counted in their number. There’s a legitimate debate about this question. Op-ed pages should air it, not suppress it — and I’d like to think that I would say so even if I didn’t agree with Will.

Friedersdorf is on the same page:

Will is not talking to rape victims and saying, “Boy, are you guys lucky.” Will’s argument is that perceived victimhood of all sorts confers a coveted status on college campuses. In context, it is clear that Will only finds this unseemly in cases where the status afforded to victims winds up generating fake victims.

Meanwhile, on a related note, Cathy Young is critical of California’s college sexual assault bill:

The bill, sponsored by state Senator Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles) and developed in collaboration with student activists, does nothing less than attempt to mandate the proper way to engage in sexual intimacy, at least if you’re on a college campus. It requires schools that receive any state funds through student aid to use “affirmative consent” as the standard in evaluating sexual assault complaints in the campus disciplinary system. …

In a Slate.com article defending “affirmative consent,” feminist writer Amanda Hess stipulates that such laws should be “broad enough to include nonverbal cues.” But that would leave fact-finders, in real courts or campus pseudo-courts, to try to decide such questions as: Was a head motion a nod that indicated a “yes”? Does pulling someone closer during an embrace amount to consent to sex? Does a passionate response to a kiss amount to a “nonverbal cue”?

David Bernstein snarks:

Two obvious questions arise: (1) Why just on campus? If this is a good idea, why not make it part the tort system? If that’s too drastic, let’s start, with say, members of the California legislature. For internal disciplinary purposes, their sexual activity should be governed by the same standard they want to impose on students. What plausible grounds could they have for rejecting application of a standard they would impose on students to themselves? (2) If we’re limiting things to campus, why just students? Why should students be judged under this standard, but not faculty and administrators? It’s hardly unheard of for professors, administrators, and even law school deans to engage in sexual relationships of dubious morality.

The answer is that it’s not a good idea, and it’s a product of the current moral panic over the hookup culture.

But Alyssa isn’t having it:

It is one thing to suggest that proponents of a particular social reform have overstepped by seeking out a legislative remedy. It is quite another to suggest, in rather nasty terms, that because the tactics are inappropriate the cause is ridiculous, or to misattribute the push in question to “the current moral panic over the hookup culture.”

Nobody seems particularly happy with the current sexual climate on college campuses, whether their priority is the sexual assault rate or the state of university disciplinary procedures. And it seems to me that people of all political persuasions could see many of their concerns addressed in a discussion about consent that focuses less on law and regulations and more on manners and customs.

If you are worried (statistics to the contrary) that men will be falsely accused of sexual assault, what possible harm can come to them from talking about how to communicate effectively with their partners, both to obtain their consent and to ensure everyone’s pleasure? If you are worried about the decisions that girls make, why not frame the discussion in terms of helping them assess their own comfort levels and asserting them confidently and clearly?

Michelle Dean also shakes her head:

Bernstein isn’t speaking from careful study or thinking. He’s speaking from his “understanding,” as when he offers his own I’m-from-Mars view on how consent in sex really works:

The vast, vast majority of “sexual contact or behavior” is initiated with only *implicit consent.* [UPDATE: There is one type of sexual relationship that, as I understand it, involves primarily explicit consent—the relationship between a prostitute and her (or his) clients, with exact sexual services to be provided determined by explicit agreement in advance.]

Oh dear. It’s hard to pick the most wrong-headed part, though the “UPDATE” might take the prize. I am not sure the “vast majority” of sexual consent is implicit in the way he suggests here at all. I do not think we are looking at any real danger of people being marched off to death camps for kissing each other. I am absolutely certain that sex workers are not the only people who prefer that consent be clear, open and well-stated between the parties.

Bernstein, meanwhile, is partaking in the privilege of victimhood with a post about the “smear machine” that is now targeting him thanks to Dean’s article.

#ThadCochran Incumbent Senator THAD COCHRAN (R) Won via large number of BLACK Voter Support http://t.co/cUJZ3sz9rQ pic.twitter.com/ehA7M4GF0D

— blackpolbuzz378 (@blackpolbuzz378) June 25, 2014

Cillizza sizes up the significance of Cochran’s narrow win over his Tea Party challenger:

He bet on incumbency. … Look at Cochran’s message on TV in the closing days of the race. It’s a Republican message circa 2004: I have tons of seniority in the Senate and that means good things for the state. Vote me out and you can kiss all of that goodbye. (Hell, he brought Arizona Sen. John McCain in to campaign for him in the final days of the contest!)  There is absolutely no evidence — before this victory — that a longtime incumbent running on being, well, a longtime incumbent could win in the modern day Republican party.  And especially not in a runoff!

Aaron Blake adds:

[I]t’s rare for an incumbent to improve his or her performance in a runoff, as Cochran did. And more often than not, the challenger surges in a big way. Of the last seven incumbents facing primary runoffs in big-ticket races, all but two have fared significantly worse in the runoff, ceding around 75 percent (or more) of the “up for grabs” votes to the challenger.

Like me, Josh Marshall is struck by the sectarianism within the GOP underscored by McDaniel’s loss:

[I]t seems clear that Democrats played some role, quite possibly a very important role in Cochran’s victory. And the fact that almost by definition a lot of them were black Democrats, courted by the Cochran camp, is going to put gas and kerosene and everything flammable on the bonfire of intra-party recrimination. This will not go down easily.

Or as one very prominent Tea Party activist put it:

If Cochran wins this #mssen race, the GOP is done. They teamed up with Dems to steal a race. Kiss the base goodbye. — Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) June 25, 2014

Ben Jacobs has background on that “teaming up”:

As Cochran appealed to Democrats, particularly African Americans in the racially polarized state, McDaniel’s campaign cried foul and talked about using election monitors to discourage Democrats from voting. At issue was a Mississippi law that mandated that any voters in a party primary would have to commit to supporting that party’s nominee in November. However, the law was nigh on unenforceable and would have also presented challenges for McDaniel himself who had refused to commit to support Cochran if he lost his primary.

And now McDaniel will challenge the election results, likely along the lines of that Mississippi law. Tim Murphy has more on the runoff’s racial character:

Team McDaniel’s [poll-watcher] tactics seemed to bolster Cochran’s outreach strategy. “The tea party intends to prevent blacks from voting on Tuesday,” read one mailer distributed in black neighborhoods. It noted that McDaniel had once hosted a controversial radio show and had voted against a civil rights museum. “Mississippians cannot and will not be intimidated to the bygone era of intimidating black Mississippians from voting,” this campaign flyer declared. The mailer asserted that McDaniel “made racist comments on his radio show.” It was a point Cochran’s campaign had been hammering for months, seemingly without affecting a sufficient number of white Republican primary voters. As a right-wing radio host in the 2000s, McDaniel had blamed hip-hop for gun violence. He had mocked poor blacks for craving “big screen plasma TV’s, Randy Moss jerseys, Air Jordan sneakers or any type of ‘bling-bling.’” He had decried discussion of reparations for slavery—pledging to move to Mexico, if such a law were ever passed. He also had spoken at events held by a neo-Confederate group that bashed Abraham Lincoln and celebrated secession.

His incendiary comments, some of which were first reported by Mother Jones, gave Cochran a bona fide reason to ask African-American voters, who comprise 36 percent of the state’s electorate, to keep McDaniel far from Washington’s halls of power.

A few other Tea Party candidates lost last night, but Weigel warns against over-interpreting the results:

Having narrowly bailed out Thad Cochran and avoided disasters in Colorado and New York, “the establishment” is thumming on war drums and predicting victory everywhere. It’s certainly possible! But a narrow defeat of Tom Tancredo doesn’t auger anything spectacular; a narrow Mississippi victory that dependent on mobilizing the hates of the Tea Party and lovers of SNAP is not necessarily applicable to turnout models in the swing races.

And how much was really at stake for the GOP? In Oklahoma, the winner of the Senate primary was always assured to become a senator (Democrats are heading for a runoff between a state senator and a crazy perennial candidate), but the rise of an ambitious thirtysomething black conservative has been halted. In Mississippi, McDaniel was strongly favored over Childers. In New York, had Hanna lost, his Tea Party foe would have been elected by default — no Democrat was running.

Molly Ball zooms out:

If there’s any segment of the GOP that ought to have egg on its face, it’s national Tea Party groups and figureheads. Dave Brat, the obscure college professor who took out Cantor, won largely without the help of these groups. Meanwhile, when they were the most heavily involved, in races that should have been favorable to them, they couldn’t close the deal. The organizations claiming to speak for the Tea Party nationally do not appear to be plugged into the real grassroots or have the ability to mobilize effectively in support of the candidates they favor.

In a shockingly unanimous decision handed down this morning in Riley v. California, SCOTUS ruled that police must obtain a warrant to search the contents of your cell phone in all but the most extraordinary circumstances:

In broad language, Chief Justice John Roberts carved out protections for privacy in the digital age, saying that “more substantial privacy interests are at stake when digital data is involved” than in the past, in part because a cell phone collects “in one place many distinct types of information that reveal much more in combination than any isolated record.” …

Law enforcement officials are still free to search the immediate area of an arrest to ensure their safety and protect evidence without a warrant. Police can also seek a warrant to search a cell phone from an arrested suspect. But the decision is notable because the court has struggled in past cases to define clear and broad rules where digital technology and constitutional rights collided.

Ian Millhiser outlines the court’s argument for why a “search incident to arrest” – a general exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement – can’t be applied to the contents of your phone:

As Roberts lays out, few of the traditional justifications for a search incident to arrest authorize a full search of a suspect’s cell phone.

The data stored on a phone “cannot itself be used as a weapon to harm an arresting officer or to effectuate the arrestee’s escape.” If the phone conceals a weapon, officers can search the physical phone itself without actually accessing its electronic contents. And, if police fear that a suspect may delete incriminating evidence on the phone, in most cases they can alleviate this fear by taking the phone from the suspect and waiting until they obtain a warrant to search it. If they fear that any data on the phone may be remotely wiped, they can store the phone in a place where cell phone signals cannot reach it.

These reasons, combined with the distinct character of cell phones as compared to the kind of objects people used to carry on their person when the Court’s Fourth Amendment doctrines developed, justify requiring police to obtain a warrant before they may search a cell phone. As Roberts lays out, “[p]rior to the digital age, people did not typically carry a cache of sensitive personal information with them as they went about their day. Now it is the person who is not carrying a cell phone, with all that it contains, who is the exception.”

Ilya Shapiro comments on the court’s “really surprising” unanimity:

Sweeping rulings on high-profile subjects tend to split the Court, whether ideologically or, in criminal procedure cases like this one, between formalists and pragmatists. Unanimous rulings, meanwhile, tend to be cautious, splitting the baby in a way that doesn’t significantly change the law. Yet here we have a loud and unified “bright-line rule” that sets a major standard for the digital age. Kudos to the Court—and raspberries to the federal government, which has now had its expansive arguments rejected unanimously 11 times since January 2012.

And Drum cheers:

See? I told you the Supreme Court was a remarkably agreeable place. And in this case, they were remarkably agreeable even though lower courts had split on this issue and it could easily have broken down along normal left (yay civil liberties!) and right (yay law enforcement!) lines. Instead, all nine of the justices did the right thing. For a brief moment, we can all celebrate.

Read the ruling in full here. The Dish covered arguments in the Riley case here.

Desperate Cochran pleaded w/ black Democrats and welfare recipients that he “brings home bacon.” Cochran is symbol of everything wrong w/USA

— Wayne Allyn Root (@WayneRoot) June 25, 2014

It appears that the sectarianism is deepening:

In essence, tea party activists are the RINOs. A Republican Party campaigning on making the Senate “conservative,” used liberal Democrats to preserve an incumbent Republican and defeat a conservative. The actual conservatives are the outsiders with the GOP establishment doing all it could to preserve its power at the expense of its principles.

The problem for those who call themselves Republicans is that it is harder and harder to say exactly what a Republican is these days. The great lesson from Mississippi is that Republican means, more or less, that if elected the party will reward its major donors, who are just different than the Democrats’ major donors. Policy differences are about different donors, not an actual agenda to shift the country in a different direction. The Republicans have become the party of lobbyists, most of whom were on twitter celebrating their purchase.

And we have arguably the most incendiary sectarian tactic yet – deploying African-American Democratic voters to beat back the Tea Party, with an extra-nuts-making flier making a difference:

In Jackson’s Hinds County, where two-thirds of the population is black, Cochran won 73 percent of the vote, 7 points higher than his performance in the primary. Turnout was up significantly in heavily African-American counties in the Mississippi Delta, like Quitman, Sharkey, Humphrey, and Coahoma, where Cochran increased his primary-election margins over McDaniel. Over 347,000 voters cast ballots in the runoff, a higher total than in the primary—marking the first time in 30 years that has happened in any Senate race.

“Looking at county data, Cochran’s #MSSEN win is almost entirely attributable to a large turnout increase among black voters b/t 6/3 and 6/24,” tweeted Cook Political Report analyst David Wasserman.

Here’s a little nugget from the NYT that will send every Drudge reader up the wall:

Kino Sintee, 17, and three black friends waved “Thad” signs on a street corner in a black Hattiesburg neighborhood. They said the preacher from Mount Olive Baptist Church asked them to help out. “They’re talking about taking everything away from us,” he said. “People still need stuff.”

And the entire legitimacy of the process is being challenged by an infuriated base:

“As you know today, folks, there were literally dozens of irregularities reported all across this state,” McDaniel said. “You know why. You read the stories. You’re familiar with the problems that we have. Now it’s our job to make sure that the sanctity of the vote is upheld. Before this race ends, we have to be absolutely certain that the Republican primary was won by Republican voters. We will stand with courage, we will stand with judgment, we will stand with integrity. This is our fight conservatives. This is necessary. We are not prone to surrender, we Mississippians. A strong and sturdy people we are, a brave people we are, a people that can still lead the conservative revival in this country. We will lead the resurgence. That begins right here in Mississippi.”

This party is deeply fractured; and this run-off election has taken every factor deepening those fractures and intensified them. And the insurgency rages on …

(Graphic from Nate Cohn)

The latest machination:

[Yesterday] the Russian president made a request to the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, that they revoke his right to stage a military intervention in Ukraine. [Today] they will undoubtedly approve his request, just as they approved his request for that questionable authority several months ago. Although Ukraine’s president welcomes Putin’s move as a “first practical step,” skepticism remains with good reason. After all, Russia last week began to regroup thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border, less than a month after promising to remove troops. And, the separatists, some of whom claim to be Chechen mercenaries on official orders, have an uncanny ability to get their hands on tanks, rocket launchers, and other military equipment, and earlier [yesterday] they broke a ceasefire they agreed to several days ago.

Anna Nemtsova tries to get in Putin’s head:

Why would Putin want his hands tied (however loosely)? One likely reason: He made the request a few days before European leaders are to discuss new sanctions against Russia, this time covering the banking sector. Another possibility: He can get the reversal reversed any time he wants, and may be trying, once again, to wrong-foot the West by talking conciliation while stepping up covert action to support the rebels in eastern Ukraine.

Bershidsky also makes clear why Putin’s gesture is bullshit:

Given his rubber-stamp parliament, Putin can gain permission to send troops back to Ukraine at any time. Besides, if Putin’s goal is to keep Poroshenko off balance, an invasion isn’t necessary. Russia has already succeeded in drawing out the conflict, arming rebels and making it possible for Russian citizens to fight on the separatists’ side. So much for “deceit.”

As for “bargaining,” it has now started in Donetsk, with Ukrainians from both camps searching for compromise. [Viktor] Medvedchuk’s ties to both Putin and Poroshenko — along with the possible backing of one of Ukraine’s richest men, Rinat Akhmetov — suggests a resolution with the armed rebels is in sight. The rebels have been useful to Putin, but they are unreliable over the long term. The Kremlin prefers to work with familiar pro-Russian politicians and businessmen in Ukraine’s east to make sure Ukraine doesn’t end up in the Western bloc.

In effect, Putin is now ready to enter the quiet phase of his Ukraine operation. The West will acquiesce to his game — but only after claiming that sanctions have been a success.

Keating’s take:

With more international sanctions potentially on the way, Putin lately seems to be playing the unlikely role of good cop in this conflict, voicing support for reconciliation and peace while the pro-Russian rebels keep fighting with what certainly seems like tacit support from Moscow, and his foreign minister and the national gas monopoly keep up the pressure on Kiev. Some of the rebel groups may also have gone rogue – some members of the recently formed militia group Russian Orthodox Army recently expressing irritation with Putin’s on-again-off-again support.

In any event, the good news is that the worst-case scenario – full Russian invasion – now looks extremely unlikely. But the volatile mess in Eastern Ukraine still looks a long way from resolution.

(Photo from Getty)