Sea-Level Rise, Uncivil Supreme Court Dissension and Loyalty Tests for Palestinians

I. Sea-Level Rise in Miami
When The New Yorker writer, Elizabeth Kolbert toured Miami, Florida, she was shown numerous places where sea water was located where it had never been before in anyone's memory. In Miami, the daily high-water mark has been increasing at the rate of one inch a year, much faster than the average rate of global sea-level rise.

In the coldest part of the last ice age, about 20,000  years ago, so much water was tied up in ice sheets that sea levels were almost four hundred feet lower than they are today. As temperatures climb again, so, too, will sea levels. The reason for this is that water, as it heats up, expands. Globally, it's estimated that a hundred million people live within three feet of mean high tide and another hundred million live within six feet of it. [1]

It has been revealed that Florida's governor Rick Scott instructed state workers not to discuss climate change, or to even use the term. The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting has said that the Scott administration also tried to ban talk of sea-level rise; in contrast, the workers were supposed to speak of "nuisance flooding." In October, 2015, Florida filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to block new rules aimed at limiting warming by reducing power-plant emissions.

II. Justice Scalia's Nasty Dissensions
Michael O'Donnell describes Justice Antonin Scalia's dissents as :"overflow[ing] with outrageous insults to his colleagues." Scalia said of a Justice Antony Kennedy opinion that it was filled with "straining-to-be-memorable passages," equivalent to "the mythical aphorisms of the fortune cookie." O'Donnell also says that "corrosive rhetoric like Scalia's does more than fray relationships on the Court, it convinces the public that the justices are political stooges." [2]

Michael O'Donnell believes that "if dissenters placed the Court above themselves, they would want its decisions to have legitimacy before the public, but these days, some justices would sooner light a fire." "And yet it's hard not to conclude that after studying its decisions like Obergefell that dissent is both too common and too nasty. Justices have so accustomed to having their own say that they rarely put the Court's prestige above their own reputations."

III. Palestinian Loyalty Oaths
Aluf Benn wrote in Harretz in 2010 that hard-right figures like Avigdor Lieberman have waged a campaign to pass loyalty oaths. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is insisting the Palestinians recognize Israel as :"the state of the Jewish people," emphasizing, his critics say, the primacy of its ethnic character over the ideal of extending equality to all its citizens. Lieberman, foreign minister for most of Netanyahu's tenure in office, and an advocate of "no loyalty, no citizenship" policies, has been the driving force behind the law limiting the Arab presence in the Knesset, raising the barrier for representation from 2% to 3.5%. [3]

Footnotes
[1] Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Siege of Miami," The New Yorker, December 21/28, 2015.

[2] David Remnick, "Seeds of Peace," The New Yorker, January 25, 2016.

[3] Michael O'Donnell, "Dissenters in Chief," The Nation, February 8, 2016.