April 2

April 2. Facebook Friends, The Jourmudgeon resisted the temptation to launch an April Fool’s post yesterday. Actually, it wasn’t much temptation at all. The Jourmudgeon hates April Fool’s jokes, and hereby grants blanket amnesty to anyone who kills anyone who plays an April Fool’s joke, thinking that it somehow passes for wit. (The Jourmudgeon Blanket Amnesty Defense has yet to be tested in court, by the way. The Jourmudgeon is just saying. But the odds of your finding a sympathetic jury are probably pretty good. And The Jourmudgeon has already made one exception to April Fool’s violations: Alex Trebek, who appeared on “Jeopardy” last night in his undershorts. That worked.) Anyway, as The Jourmudgeon and his willing cast of characters have already demonstrated week after week, trying to launch an April Fool’s joke in the current civic environment is pretty much carrying coals to Newcastle. Why try to compete? And so to this week’s News Theme: Backlash. In response to all the news committed recently in the shallow end of the gene pool, Americans were backlashing for all their might throughout the width and breadth and depth and heighth of this great nation of ours. Some were backlashing so lustily that The Jourmudgeon was afraid they would do themselves a mischief:
1. A week after North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law a hastily passed bill forbidding local governments from protecting gay and transgender people by ordinance, many of the state’s captains of industry joined others in dumping a Category Five shit storm on the governor and Republican-dominated legislature. The head of Bank of America, the state’s biggest private-sector employer, joined about 80 other corporate honchos in condemning the new law. Three governors and several big-city mayors banned most official travel to North Carolina. The National Basketball Association hinted that it might move the 2017 All-Star Game out of the state. The Obama administration said the state might lose all its federal funding because the law violates non-discrimination requirements. And as groups including the American Civil Liberties Union sued to overturn the law, the state’s attorney general, who is planning to run for governor, said he would not defend it. Supporters of the law, including McCrory, did get defensive about it, and pointed to its effectiveness already in preventing hordes of slavering ogres in lady costumes from accosting women and children in public restrooms. The Jourmudgeon does not know what life is like where you live, Facebook Friends, but apparently you cannot swing a dead cat in a ladies room in North Carolina without hitting one of these faux-transgender threats to female purity. They are also rumored to squeeze the Charmin when no one is looking. The new law makes that a Class IV felony as well, but only if committed by gay or transgender people.
2. In Georgia, meanwhile, Gov. Nathan “What’s the Big” Deal vetoed a controversial bill meant to protect religious organizations that refuse services that clash with their faith, particularly same-sex marriages. “I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith-based community in Georgia, which I and my family have been a part of for generations,” Deal told a news conference, according to The Washington Post. Deal, who should lend his copy of the Constitution to Gov. McCrory, was undeniably under pressure to act. The National Football League had talked of giving Georgia a pass in future Super Bowls if he signed the law. And a bunch of Hollywood filmmakers said they, too, would go somewhere else, like Vermont, when it’s time to remake “Gone with the Wind” or “Deliverance.”
3. In Wisconsin, a cunning strategy by Donald Trump to rub House Speaker Paul Ryan’s nose in it by holding a rally in Ryan’s hometown suffered a bit of backlash after a) Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was charged with roughing up a female reporter a few weeks earlier; b) Trump defended his guy by victim-blaming the reporter; c) surveillance video of the encounter showed Trump and Lewandowski had both lied about what happened; and d) Trump not only called for a ban on abortions but called for punishing women who violated it. He backtracked later the same day. Ted Cruz, meanwhile, gathered his wife, Heidi, former candidate Carly Fiorina and other prominent Republican women around him in a sort of coed fireside chat to show how women love all his enlightened positions on the issues. Demonstrating better judgment than perhaps at any other point in the campaign so far, Cruz kept his mouth shut much of the time. The backlash against Trump reached a howl as Wisconsin’s conservative radio talk-show hosts stopped drooling on their shoes long enough to notice that their fair-haired boy, Gov. Scott Walker, does not like Trump, and joined the cacophony. One poll showed Trump trailing Cruz by 10 percentage points as Tuesday’s primary nears. It should be pointed out, though, that pollsters avoided interviewing the I’ll-Kick-Your-Ass-If-You-Come-Near-Me’s who make up a big part of Trump’s core constituency.
4. Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, a 73-year-old family values guy and church deacon – oops, make that former church deacon – resisted calls for his resignation after tapes emerged of him having what amounted to phone sex with a top aide, who resigned this week. At Backlash Central in Montgomery, many of Bentley’s fellow Republicans said it was time for the governor to go. “It’s totally humiliating,” State Representative Allen Farley told The New York Times. Bentley was said to be in meetings with Apple executives over a method to encrypt his phone records. Inexplicably, Bentley’s wife of 50 years filed for divorce last year.
5. The Supreme Court was not immune to backlash, either, but in this case the word might have been a pastiche of “backtrack” and “whiplash.” This week, the eight surviving justices attempted to wrestle with the consequences of their 2014 Hobby Lobby decision — when Antonin Scalia was still on the court — in which the conservative majority pretty much gave private companies and religious groups the power to interpret federal law. In the current case, the federal government had given religious groups a pass on providing birth control coverage to employees under the Affordable Care Act. All the groups had to do was notify their insurance carriers, and the carriers would provide coverage directly. But the issue was before the court because a couple of religious organizations argued that even providing that notice to insurance companies is an undue burden on their religious exercise. And, they argue, they get to decide what constitutes an undue burden. With Scalia gone, last week the court deadlocked 4-4 on an unrelated case that resulted in protection for public employee unions, and the court’s four remaining conservative justices began to see the handwriting on the wall — oodles more 4-4 votes in the coming months – or years — as Senate Republicans stonewall filling the court’s vacancy. So the justices took the unusual step of asking the parties, essentially, to try again to figure out an alternative solution for the problem that prompted them to go to the court in the first place. Given the years of lower-court litigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs already over the dam, you’d have thought the parties would have exhausted all those options already. For the justices, though, punting is obviously a safer option than risking it on fourth-and-four.
6. But the winner of this week’s Backlash Award (and only bad timing took it out of the running for last week’s Bonehead Retrograde Legislation Award) is the state of Kansas. Lawmakers there, upset by a number of state Supreme Court rulings that didn’t go their way, pushed for a bill that would allow them to impeach a justice any time that justice makes a ruling the legislators don’t like. At the same time, Gov. Sam Brownback has proposed taking power away from a nonpartisan panel that proposes state Supreme Court nominees based on merit and giving more of that power to – get ready – Gov. Sam Brownback. Observers traced both initiatives to whoever it was who apparently spilled coffee all over the “Separation of Powers” section of the state government’s how-to manual, rendering it illegible.