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Only Surendra stands ready to teach me how to do things I will never, ever do, such as: decorate my walls with elaborate calligraphy chalk art; use hand-woven dishcloths on the vintage silver I don’t have; and wrap my gifts not with commercial wrapping paper (garbage) and tape (abomination), but in vintage maps, sealed with imported sealing wax (French only). And let’s be real here: Surendra is certainly the only lifestyle influencer I trust to have his own beeswax guy on call for when he feels like hand-dipping some new candles. (The beeswax guy, of course, is French.)

Since 2021, Surendra’s craft videos have been showing up on the HGTV YouTube channel Handmade. They’re 15-minute snippets of pure beautiful nonsense, as relevant to my daily life as dispatches from 18th-century Versailles, and I watch them religiously. In a world of chaos, thank god Rajiv Surendra is there, fussily measuring the exact dimensions of his wool sweater before he demonstrates proper sweater-washing technique in his marble sink. He gives me faith that order and structure exist, and that someone, at least, is refusing to let his standards slip.

In January, Surendra launched the pilot for a planned lifestyle show, Homeboy, streaming on Discovery Plus, and I need the full series like I need air. It is the only thing I ever want to watch while I fold my laundry. (No air date for the full series has been announced.)

The premise of Homeboy’s pilot is that Surendra is having some friends over for dinner. Naturally, he needs to source large amounts of flowers to arrange for the occasion, as well as replenish his supply of homemade candles. So we follow Surendra through his flower arranging process, which he assures us can be done for the low, low price of $40, and then through his candle- and candle-label- making process.

The latter chore makes up the bulk of the episode and is where the true joy is to be had. First Surendra designs the stamp he will use to label his candles, and then he takes us to his stamp guy at an old Irish shop in New York’s Village to get it made. Then he calls up his aforementioned French beeswax guy. (This one’s based out of the Upper East Side, so Surendra spends a lot of his travel time on a vintage bicycle with a prim little straw basket.) Once he’s supplied, he gleefully begins dipping candles.

“Dipping beeswax candles is very meditative,” he muses. “It’s why nuns do it. Do they do it? I don’t know. I would imagine they do.” He explains that his candles pay for themselves when you consider that buying a pair of beeswax candles from someone else would cost $12 at least, whereas his beeswax connection charges only $40 for enough wax to dip 50 candles.

Anti-climactically, the only food Surendra makes for his planned dinner is spaghetti with tomato sauce. He does buy a basil plant specifically for this purpose, so I reluctantly allow it, but pasta with red sauce is not exactly up to the levels of snootiness that Surendra has taught me to expect from him. The pasta isn’t even handmade!

Still, Homeboy’s pilot does end on the kind of cliffhanger that will generally earn my forgiveness. We see Surendra pursuing one of his favorite hobbies: handwriting in calligraphy a letter to a friend of his in France, all about the next craft project he has planned.

This time, he’s planning a visit to a specialty hardware store. He’s getting a new faucet for his bathroom sink, and he wants it to be “in the shape of a swan’s head or some other mythological sea creature; I haven’t decided yet.”

Swans are my favorite mythological sea creature, too. I’m glad I can trust in Surendra to explain why the faucet of his choice is the only possible accompaniment to his homemade beeswax/goat’s milk soap with hand-designed stamped labels.

Homeboy’s pilot episode is available to watch on Discovery Plus and Amazon Prime. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

  1. Hall (1994), however, Thomas argued that the Court should abolish vote dilution claims, and effectively allow states to deny voting rights to certain racial groups so long as the state does it with a degree of subtlety.

In Holder, a majority of the Court concluded that vote dilution claims could not be used to challenge the number of people who sit on a governing body, but only Justice Antonin Scalia joined Thomas’s opinion seeking to shut down vote dilution lawsuits altogether.

“Properly understood,” Thomas claimed, the Voting Rights Act only forbids “practices that affect minority citizens’ access to the ballot.” “Districting systems and electoral mechanisms that may affect the ‘weight’ given to a ballot,” Thomas continued, “are simply beyond the purview of the Act.”

Thus, a state would be free to lock voters of a particular race out of power entirely, just so long as those voters were allowed to perform the meaningless act of submitting a ballot in an election that their preferred candidate cannot possibly win.

More recently, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), Thomas joined an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch which suggested that no private party is allowed to bring a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act — only the US Justice Department could do so.

As the Supreme Court explained in Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969), such an approach would severely hamper the law’s effectiveness, even if the Justice Department is committed to protecting voting rights. “The Attorney General has a limited staff,” the Court noted in Allen, “and often might be unable to uncover quickly” new state policies that target voters of color.

And there’s no guarantee that the Justice Department will be led by people who care about voting rights. One result of the approach Thomas endorsed in Brnovich is that, in a Republican administration, the Voting Rights Act could cease to function altogether.

Thomas was also an early proponent of the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine,” a theory that would allow state lawmakers to ignore their state constitution altogether when writing the laws governing congressional and presidential elections. In its strongest form, this doctrine would allow a state legislature to simply gift a state’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate (or, in theory, to any presidential candidate), regardless of what the people of the state, the state’s governor, or the state’s supreme court has to say about it.

Thomas would dismantle the freedom of the press

Even if states hold nominally free and fair elections where every vote counts equally, elections lose much of their import if voters cannot learn which candidates support their preferred policies or know what choices politicians make once elected. This is why a free press is essential to any democracy, because the right to vote means little if voters can’t determine who to vote for.

And yet, Thomas called for his Court to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the single most important decision enabling journalists to report the news without facing intimidation or sanction from government officials.

In 1960, civil rights activists aligned with Martin Luther King, Jr. ran an advertisement in the New York Times, which alleged that Alabama police used brutal tactics to suppress student protests. The ad, however, contained some minor factual errors. It misidentified the song that protesters sang at a particular demonstration, for example, and it also claimed that police had arrested King seven times, when he’d in fact only been arrested four times.

Pointing to these small errors, a Jim Crow police official won a $500,000 verdict against the Times in an Alabama court — close to $5 million in 2022 dollars. Had this verdict stood, it would have chilled journalism of all kinds, because it would have meant that any newspaper or other outlet that prints even very small factual mistakes could have been hit with a verdict large enough to bankrupt the outlet.

The New York Times decision, however, prevented this outcome by holding that the First Amendment imposes limits on defamation lawsuits. When someone speaks about a public figure and about a matter of public concern, the Court held, they cannot be held liable for making false statements unless that statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Thomas argued in McKee v. Cosby (2019) that New York Times should be overruled. Indeed, Thomas’s opinion suggests that states should be free to define their own defamation law free of constitutional constraints. “The States are perfectly capable of striking an acceptable balance between encouraging robust public discourse and providing a meaningful remedy for reputational harm,” Thomas wrote.

If this approach were to prevail, state officials could once again use malicious defamation lawsuits to target journalists. Suppose, for example, that I mistakenly report that “500 people attended a rally protesting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis,” when in fact the rally was attended by only 450 people. If states can set their own defamation laws, free of constitutional constraint, then DeSantis could sue me and Vox Media for millions, endangering our ability to continue reporting on DeSantis — and potentially bankrupting Vox in the process.

Thomas would make the winner of a federal election largely irrelevant

Thomas’s final avenue of attack on American democracy is perhaps even more subtle and insidious.

Under Justice Thomas’s approach, the winner of a federal election is largely irrelevant, because the federal government would be stripped of its authority to do nearly anything that the current majority on the Court disapproves of.

That’s because his views on the balance of power among the three branches of the federal government, and on the balance of power between Congress and the states, would leave the national government little more than an empty husk.

To back up: Numerous federal statutes lay out broad policy objectives — such as power plants should use the best available technology to reduce emissions or health insurers shall cover vaccines that are recommended by medical experts — then delegates the task of implementing these objections to a federal agency. One advantage of this approach is that it allows the government to be dynamic. As new emissions reduction technology emerges, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency can update the relevant regulations to ensure that power plants remain state-of-the-art. Another is that it allows democratically elected lawmakers — with a diverse set of backgrounds — to set policy goals, but also leaves the difficult details of implementing these goals to officials with specialized expertise.

In recent years, however, the Court’s Republican appointees have given themselves a veto power over all of these agency regulations. Relying on vague doctrines that appear nowhere in the Constitution, such as the “major questions” doctrine or “nondelegation,” the Court has claimed the power to strike down regulations that a majority of its members disapprove of.

Thomas, however, would go even further. In a 2015 opinion, Thomas argued that any federal law that permits an agency to exercise “policy discretion” is unconstitutional. Thus, Congress would be forbidden from creating a modern environmental protection regime, or a dynamic regime where medical experts can quickly make new vaccines available to the public, no matter how the American people vote in congressional elections.

Thomas would also strike down huge swaths of federal law governing the workplace and other private businesses.

The Constitution permits Congress to “regulate commerce … among the several states.” This provision is what allows the federal government to protect the right to unionize, to ban child labor, to set the minimum wage, to prohibit discrimination by private companies, and to regulate health insurers — among many other things.

Concurring in United States v. Lopez (1995), however, Thomas endorsed the legal reasoning the Court used in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), an anti-canonical decision striking down federal child labor laws. And he’s restated this view in at least three other opinions since Lopez.

For those who want a deep dive, I’ve written about the full implications of Thomas’s opinion in Lopez at considerable length. But the short version is that Thomas’s approach endangers much of the New Deal, the Great Society, and decades of other regulations of private businesses which now form a backbone of American society.

Again, under Thomas’s approach, it is highly doubtful that the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters, which the Supreme Court held was a valid exercise of Congress’s power to regulate commerce in Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), could survive.

Thomas, in other words, imagines a world where state lawmakers have broad authority to skew elections in their party’s favor. He would strip journalists of the First Amendment protections they need to do their job safely. And, if a left-of-center government somehow did emerge despite these constraints, Thomas would strip that government of most of its authority to govern.

Ultimate power would rest with the Supreme Court, and its panel of unelected judges who serve for life, not with the American people. And Thomas would wield that power to turn back the clock on American law nearly an entire century.

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