Vox Sentences: Justice Breyer declares, "It's a TRAP!"

The Supreme Court strikes down Texas abortion laws; is Brexit inbrexorable?; several stabbings in a melee between white supremacists and counterprotesters.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

TRAP queens

Pete Marovich/Getty Images

• On its last decision day of the term, the Supreme Court struck down two provisions of a Texas state law imposing new regulations on abortion clinics, finding that the law created an "undue burden" on women trying to get abortions in the state.

  [Vox / Emily Crockett]

• The decision is likely to have a cascading effect, as lower courts strike down similar laws (which pro-choice advocates call "TRAP" laws) in the other 24 states that have them.

  [Guttmacher Institute]

• The lower courts will have a slightly easier time deciding what makes a TRAP law unconstitutional thanks to Justice Stephen Breyer's technical and thorough refutation of the idea that such restrictions promote women's health, as Texas had argued in the case.

  [Slate / Dahlia Lithwick]

• (By that token, the fact that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott mourned the decision by saying Texas was trying to "protect life" struck many as letting the mask slip — the stated goal of the laws wasn't to protect the unborn but to protect women.)

  [Huffington Post / Marina Fang]

• Most of the social media attention, however, went to the two-page concurrence of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose fiery rhetoric seemed a little like fan service for the cult of the "Notorious RBG."

  [Huffington Post / Laura Bassett]

• The outcome of the case, of course, was determined by Justice Anthony Kennedy — who's been extremely ambivalent about abortion in past cases but appears to have been content to sign on silently to Breyer's opinion this time.

  [Democracy / Scott Lemieux]

• But while the Supreme Court ruling is good news for abortion providers overall, it's still going to be extremely hard for the clinics that closed under Texas's law — and others like it — to reopen.

  [The Atlantic / Olga Khazan]

Hyperbrextension

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

• England's shoddy strategy, cluelessness, and failure to show up got it kicked out of Euro. (In soccer. By Iceland.)

  [SB Nation / Rodger Sherman]

• Ironically, the actual Brexit — the one England voted for last week — hasn't gotten started yet. And it might never. This blog post offers the clearest description I (Dara) have seen about what would have to happen to trigger the formal withdrawal process, and why no one might actually want to pull that trigger.

  [Jack of Kent / David Allen Green]

• The EU is playing hardball. The leaders of Germany, France, and Spain have declared they won't start negotiations with the UK until the latter formally — and irrevocably — says it's leaving the EU (rather than hashing out "informal" terms and seeing whether the UK still wants to go through with it).

  [BBC]

• The credit ratings agencies aren't waiting around, either — both S&P and Fitch downgraded their ratings of the UK's credit to AA Monday.

  [CNBC / Everett Rosenfeld]

• UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is facing a vote of no confidence from Labour MPs who thought he didn't do enough to campaign for staying in the EU.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• (That's a fair complaint — Corbyn apparently refused to answer when an MP asked if he'd voted to stay, and his advisers' argument that his ambivalence about the EU reflected many voters' attitudes confirms that he wasn't interested in persuading them.)

  [Huffington Post / Paul Waugh]

• Of course, fault for the defeat begins and ends with lame-duck PM David Cameron; Politico.eu has the juicy postmortem details.

  [Politico.eu / Tom McTague, Alex Spence and Edward-Isaac Dovere]

• Regardless of the political finger-pointing — and even if the UK ends up calling "Bracksies" — the most worrisome outcome of the vote is this: There's substantial anecdotal evidence that immigrants are facing more hostility and harassment now that the UK has voted Leave.

  [Mashable / Gianluca Mezzofiore]

Is there such a thing as a fascist peaceful assembly?

AP Photo/Steven Styles

• Ten people (including seven stabbing victims) were hospitalized Sunday after a rally by the white supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party on the steps of the California state Capitol was met by a counterprotest, resulting in widespread fighting between the two groups.

  [CBS News]

• It's unclear which side started the fighting. There's suggestive evidence of counterprotesters beating white supremacists (and in one case a press crew), but that could simply be because there were 300 counterprotesters and only 30 white supremacists.

  [LAT / Jazmine Ulloa, John Myers, Emily Alpert Reyes, and Victoria Kim]

• One local official, though, said the counterprotesters came "ready for a fight" and armed with bats, which certainly implies they didn't have a problem with escalating.

  [LAT / Jazmine Ulloa, John Myers, Emily Alpert Reyes, and Victoria Kim]

• And some of the counterprotesters were unremorseful at the outcome: One told a news crew, "We would do it again."

  [RNN]

• This isn't an anomaly. Many of the young activists protesting Donald Trump and his supporters believe the politics of their enemies are so noxious that the best thing they can do is to dramatize a confrontation and force people to choose — or to scare them off and prevent them from recruiting anyone to the cause.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Ultimately, this means they're rejecting the idea that fascists can ever engage in "peaceful assembly" — which is an important First Amendment principle.

  [ACLU]

• It might be a particularly unhelpful attitude in the case of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which appears to be using respectability politics to come across as the "thinking man's" white supremacist group, and could attempt to garner sympathy by posing as the victim of vicious anti–free speech protesters.

  [Reason / Elizabeth Nolan Brown]

MISCELLANEOUS

The case that Game of Thrones' Varys is a merman is surprisingly strong. [Slate / Jacob Brogan]

• AI is only good as the data it's trained with. And the data it's trained with now has led to substantial racial biases.

  [NYT / Kate Crawford]

• The Boston Globe's Spotlight team has a long look at the failure to build real community-based mental health care in Massachusetts — and at the human costs of that failure.

  [Boston Globe / Michael Rezendes]

• Concrete and steel require a lot of energy to create, generating a lot of emissions. So an engineer at Cambridge is working on building houses and apartment buildings out of artificial bone instead.

  [Cambridge / Sarah Collins]

• Limb-lengthening surgery is completely unrelated in India — and it's taking off.

  [The Guardian / Vidhi Doshi]

VERBATIM

"The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job." [Jesse Williams via Vox / Victoria Massie]

• "I don't think a pornography palace can make it in this neighborhood. This neighborhood is far too united. We have everybody here from the Republican leader to the local Communist, and we're all against it."

  [Carolynn Meinhardt to NYT / Judy Klemesrud]

• "I am sick and tired of watching folks like Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and others appeal to the worst racial instincts of our species, only to be shushed by folks telling me that it's not really racism driving their popularity. It's economic angst. It's regular folks tired of being spurned by out-of-touch elites. It's a natural anxiety over rapid cultural change."

  [Mother Jones / Kevin Drum]

• "Dying is not an occasion for you to stop by to unburden yourself of things unsaid and things undone. The dying person does not care. They have more pressing matter to attend to."

  [Time / Nora McInerny Purmort]

• "As for Baylor’s pattern of protecting star athletes who abused women at the university, Mr. Starr claimed he 'didn’t know what was happening.' Maybe it depends on what the meaning of the word 'was' was."

  [NYT / Mimi Swartz]

WATCH THIS

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Vox / Johnny Harris

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