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Carson v. Makin: The Supreme Court Decision That Tears Down the Wall of Separation Between Church and State

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2022 //
24

The United States Supreme Court released a 6-3 decision called Carson v. Makin that reverses many decades of precedent. The decision requires the state of Maine to provide public funding to religious schools because the state funds private schools in areas where population is so sparse that public schools are not available.

The two religious schools at issue are Temple Academy in Waterville, Maine, and Bangor Christian Schools. Temple Academy expects its teachers to “integrate biblical principles with their teaching in every subject” and “to spread the word of Christianity.” Bangor Christian Schools seeks to develop “within each student a Christian worldview and Christian philosophy of life.” Both schools deny admission to students based on their gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion. Both schools require their teachers to be born-again teachers.

Why should the state of Maine or any other state be required to fund schools that practice discrimination and violate federal civil rights laws? Why should people who do not share the religious ideas of these schools be compelled to underwrite them? Why should a Catholic or a Buddhist or a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist pay taxes for schools that will exclude their own children and will refuse to hire them or their children as teachers?

Although the conservative majority likes to claim its loyalty to an “Originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, this decision cannot be called “Originalist.” The founders were very clear about their commitment to separation of religion and the state. They were keenly aware of the centuries of bloodshed in Europe that religious strife caused. They wrote the First Amendment to the Constitution to protect freedom of religion, but also to prevent any establishment of religion by government. These two phrases have often been in tension, and the Court has typically balanced them so that everyone is free to practice their religion but without government subsidy. There is literally nothing in the Constitution that supports this majority decision. It is hard to imagine a Supreme Court decision that departs more radically from the explicit, unambiguous statements of the Founding Fathers.

Some religious groups have fought for many decades to gain government funding for their schools, which are used to indoctrinate children into the tenets of their religion. It is somewhat ironic that at the very time that so many conservatives are criticizing public schools and teachers for “indoctrinating” their children into liberal views about racism and gender, they would nonetheless enthusiastically endorse the idea of public subsidy for religious organizations that explicitly indoctrinate children into their views.

There is a simple solution to the issue at hand: Maine and other states that fund private schools should stop doing so. They should use public funds only to support public schools. Public schools should be subject to all state and federal laws governing civil rights, health, and safety. Any private or religious schools that accept public funding under this ruling should be required to comply with the same state and federal laws that apply to public schools.

Here is the full decision.

I will separately post the dissents by Justice Breyer and another by Justice Sonia Sotomayer, which of course are included in the full decision.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Extremism, History, Religion, Separation of church and state

Jill LePore: Alito Was “Shocked” to Discover That Abortion Is Not Included in the Constitution

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2022 //
37

Jill LePore is a professor of history at Harvard and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. In this article, she analyzes the absurdity of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Alito was unable to find anything in the Constitution that supports a right to abortion, nor can he find support for a right to privacy. LePore points out that he won’t be able to find anything in that 4,000 word document written by 55 white men that mentions women at all. At the time the Constitution was written, women had no rights. Neither did fetuses. Nor did slaves.

She writes:

Within a matter of months, women in about half of the United States may be breaking the law if they decide to end a pregnancy. This will be, in large part, because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is surprised that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787. As it happens, there is also nothing at all in that document, which sets out fundamental law, about pregnancy, uteruses, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is nothing in that document about women at all. Most consequentially, there is nothing in that document—or in the circumstances under which it was written—that suggests its authors imagined women as part of the political community embraced by the phrase “We the People.” There were no women among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. There were no women among the hundreds of people who participated in ratifying conventions in the states. There were no women judges. There were no women legislators. At the time, women could neither hold office nor run for office, and, except in New Jersey, and then only fleetingly, women could not vote. Legally, most women did not exist as persons.

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About as wholly speculative as the question of who leaked this decision is the history offered to support it. Alito’s opinion rests almost exclusively on a bizarre and impoverished historical analysis. “The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text,” he argues, making this observation repeatedly. Roe, he writes, was “remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text” and suffers from one error above all: “it held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned…”

Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor…

If a right isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, Alito argues, following a mode of reasoning known as the history test, then it can only become a right if it can be shown to be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” As I have argued, the history test disadvantages people who were not enfranchised at the time the Constitution was written, or who have been poorly enfranchised since then…

Categories Accountability, History, Justice

I Am Woke. You Should Be Too.

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2022 //
216

I am tired of rightwing politicians distorting our language to suit their bigoted ideology.

They have the nerve, for example, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 and said he hoped for the day when his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Dr. King was projecting a vision of a world without racism, when people would see each other as friends, neighbors, and fellow human beings.

But rightwing politicians twist his words to insist that we should ignore racism right now, stop teaching about it, and pretend it does not exist. They use his words to justify prohibitions on teaching about or discussing the racism in the here and now. They use his appeal for an unrealized future to blind us to a cruel present.

I propose that we make a conscientious effort to reclaim the plain meaning of words.

One of the hot-button words that has been appropriated by rightwing politicians is “woke.” They are trying to turn it into a shameful word. I looked up the definition of WOKE. It means being aware of injustice and inequality, specifically when referring to racism. I strive to be aware of injustice and inequality and racial discrimination and to do whatever I can to change things for the better. Shouldn’t we all do that?

My acronym for WOKE is “Wide Open to Knowledge and Enlightenment.”

What would you say about someone who is not WOKE? They are “asleep,” “unconscious,” “indifferent.” They are “Mind Closed, Mouth Open.”

Yes, I am WOKE. I want Dr. King’s dream someday to be true. It is not true now.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida believes it is terrible to be woke. He demeans those he says are woke. He claims that the woke are politically correct and are intimidated by organized efforts to reduce racism in schools and the workplace. He thinks that being woke is so dreadful that it must be made illegal.

He urged the Florida legislature to pass “anti-woke” legislation in March. And they did. The so-called STOP WOKE” Act means “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act.”

This legislation is intended specifically to silence discussions and study of racism. It bans the teaching of critical race theory in schools and colleges and bans diversity training in the workplace.

Governor DeSantis doesn’t want people to be opposed to injustice and inequality. He doesn’t want them to be opposed to racism. Such awareness makes some people feel uncomfortable, he says. We should teach nothing that makes anyone uncomfortable.

Who is uncomfortable when racism is discussed? In my experience, the people who don’t want any discussion of racism are either racist or are embarrassed by their acts of racism in the past.

To protect the tender sensibilities of white people, we must avoid any discussion that makes them or their children uncomfortable. We must not take the risk that they or their children might feel uncomfortable for terrible things that happened long ago. So don’t talk about them. Don’t read books that discuss slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, or segregation. Don’t mention the distant past or the wrongs of the present. Don’t dare to talk about discrimination against black people, or the passage of laws that impair their right to vote, or the persistence of racially segregated schools.

Not only is it wrong to be woke, in the eyes of those who prefer to stifle all recognition of racial discrimination, it is absolutely forbidden for teachers or professors to examine the causes of racism and its persistence today in our laws and policies. Making a conscientious effort to understand the causes of racism and to seek remedies is called “critical race theory” (CRT).

The attacks on critical race theory are intended to intimidate teachers and to prevent students from learning about racism, past or present.

In states that have banned the teaching of critical race theory, the legislators can’t define CRT, so they make it illegal to teach “divisive concepts” or anything that makes some students “uncomfortable.”

When a white supremacist massacred ten Black people in Buffalo, New York, teachers in anti-CRT states were not sure if they were allowed to teach about what happened. Would they lose their jobs if they taught the truth?

The states that prohibit the teaching of critical race theory are banning the teaching of honest history, for fear that someone might be uncomfortable when they learn the facts about what was done to Black people in our history. Some states have explicitly banned Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “The 1619 Project,” because it might make some white people uncomfortable. I may be wrong, but I can’t recall a state that ever passed a law censoring a single book. This book is obviously very powerful and very frightening to those who feel the need to ban it. It cannot be refuted by the DeSantis faction so it must be banned.

The same states that want to ban honest teaching about racism are also banning books about gender identity and sexuality. The legislatures in Republican states think that the schools are filled with pedophiles. The rightwing zealots claim that teachers are “grooming” their students to become gay or transgender. They pass laws like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans teaching about gender identity and sexuality in grades K-3 (where gender identity and sexuality are not taught) and tolerate only “age-appropriate” discussion of gender identity and sexuality in other grades.

Like the STOP WOKE law, the “Don’t Say Gay” law is vague, which makes teachers fearful of teaching anything related to gender or sexuality. If schools can’t teach about gender identity, then they cannot teach about married couples of any gender. If you take them literally, you should not refer to Moms and Dads, men and women. Dare we teach young children about heterosexuality? Apparently not, if you follow the letter of the law.

The groups that are behind these attacks are familiar to us. They are Moms for Liberty, Moms for America, Parents Defending Freedom, and a bevy of other groups funded by rightwing billionaires.

Not coincidentally, these are the same groups that are fighting to pass funding for charter schools and vouchers.

What is their motive? They want to destroy not only freedom of thought but public schools.

Recently, I watched the far-right provocateur Chris Rufo give a speech at Hillsdale College. He called on his audience to act in a speech titled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” (Please watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Hh0GqoJcE). Rufo claims credit for making CRT a national issue. He boasts that a few years ago, CRT had virtually no public recognition. Thanks to his lies and distortions, most people have heard of it and some think it is a radical, Marxist plot to destroy America by turning race against race. Because he says so.

This is absurd.

For the past four decades, CRT was known as a law school study of the origins of systemic racism and the extent to which it is embedded in our laws and institutions. Its founder was Derrick Bell of Harvard Law School. He was a friend of mine. He was not a Marxist or a radical. He was a great American who wanted America to live up to its promises. Unlike Rufo, he didn’t believe in gag orders and bans. He believed in study, scholarship, debate and discussion.

Chris Rufo offers one solution to all the problems he sees: school choice.

To him, the public school is the most dangerous of all institutions, because it teaches equality, justice, and critical thinking. It teaches students to respect others. It teaches them to abhor racism and other forms of bigotry. It teaches students about American history without censoring the unpleasant and horrifying parts. The laws passed to ban CRT and to gag teachers have one purpose: Teach lies, not honest history.

Here is what I suggest.

Fight censorship.

Fight privatization of our public assets.

Read without fear.

Read “The 1619 Project,” which will open your minds. Read critiques of “The 1619 Project” by reputable scholars, not by rightwing ideologues.

Think about it. Discuss and debate the issues.

Say gay.

Stand up to the craven politicians who attack your freedoms.

Vote against them when you have the chance.

Fearlessly defend the freedom to read, the freedom to teach, and the freedom to learn.

Work towards the day when we treat each other with respect.

Wake up.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bias, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, History, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Parent Groups, Privatization, Racism, School Choice

Robert Hubbell: The Death of Outrage

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2022 //
152

Robert Hubbell is a blogger who writes consistently insightful, common sense commentaries. In this one, he makes an important point. What happened to outrage?

I recall when presidential candidate Senator Gary Hart of Colorado dropped out of the race after the press got photos of him on a boat with a woman who was not his wife. Imagine that! I remember when a president (Nixon) was forced to resign his office because he lied about his role in burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee. At least official Washington had public standards of behavior. Republican Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee was as appalled by Nixon’s behavior as members of the other party. Yet Lamar Alexander, who claimed Baker as his role model, twice refused to vote to impeach Trump for violating his oath of office and for actions far more dangerous than anything Nixon did, even though Alexander was retiring.

Hubbell wrote this before the Uvalde school massacre. Watch the process: Americans are outraged. The media are outraged. What happens next? Our attention shifts. Uvalde fades, as Sandy Hook faded, as Parkland faded, as Buffalo will fade.

The capacity for outrage—in the political class, in the media, and in the public— seems to have vanished.

Hubbell writes:

“The apparent death of outrage is one factor driving many Americans to distraction, if not despair. Stories that would have shaken the foundations of democracy a decade ago barely reverberate for a single news cycle today. Quick! Answer this question: What was the biggest story of last Friday (as in two days ago)? It is that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice actively encouraged Arizona legislators to overthrow the Constitution by appointing fraudulent electors. The January 6th Committee previously discovered that Ginni Thomas forwarded emails from other election deniers to members of the Trump administration, but the most recent revelation clarifies that Ginni Thomas was a direct participant in the plot to subvert democracy. But by Sunday evening, the story has dropped from the pages of every major newspaper in America.

And, of course, Justice Clarence Thomas reviewed Mark Meadows’ request to block the disclosure of emails and texts from Ginni Thomas about the attempted coup. Before the endless stream of Trump scandals killed outrage, those facts would have prompted Justice Thomas to submit his resignation and spend the remainder of his life in solitude and shame. Instead, Thomas is on a revenge tour at the Antonin Scalia School of Law, where he is scolding women for protesting an impending decision that will grant state governments control over their reproductive choices.

Over the weekend, Senator Rick Scott couldn’t find the decency to say that leaders of the GOP should condemn white supremacy. Talking Points Memo, Scott Deflects On Whether GOPers Should Condemn White Nationalism. Scott agreed that racism was bad and that “all Americans” should condemn “any hate” and “any white supremacy,” but repeatedly dodged the question of whether Republican leaders had a responsibility to do so. Instead, he volunteered that “We have to stop asking people on government forms for their skin color” and “every Senate candidate on both sides is going to decide what is important to them”—evasions that leave room for his Republican colleagues to wink-and-nod to white supremacists on the campaign trail.

Also over the weekend, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its annual meeting in Hungary so that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán could lecture aspiring American autocrats on how to subvert “illiberal democracy.” The panel of speakers included Trump, Tucker Carlson, and a Hungarian journalist infamous for writing that Jews are “stinking excrement,” that Roma are “animals,” and that Black people are [unprintable]. See Times of Israel, Hungarian journalist who called Jews’ stinking excrement’ addresses CPAC conference. Do either Trump or Carlson feel any need to distance themselves from the reprehensible views of their co-presenter? Ha! It was not worth the electrons to type that rhetorical question on my laptop.

On Friday of last week, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy attempted to explain away the high maternal mortality rates in his state. Cassidy made the following repugnant statement:

About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear.

See Business Insider, Maternal death rate isn’t as bad if you don’t count Black women, GOP senator says. Cassidy’s statements were so offensive it is difficult to know where to begin. To be clear, Louisiana’s maternal death rate among Black women is worse than the maternal death rate for Black women in other states, so Cassidy’s racist statistics are wrong. But what does Cassidy mean, “if you correct our population for race?” By “correcting” for race, Cassidy clearly implies that the “correct” race in Louisiana is white. But Cassidy’s comments have been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

And then there is Dr. Oz, who went out of his way on election night thank Fox News personality Sean Hannity for helping his campaign. That would be the same Sean Hannity who was busy trashing one of Dr. Oz’s opponents in the primary (the late-surging Kathy Barnette) as Hannity acting as a a “behind the scenes advisor” to Oz. See Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner in Steady, Crossing the Line. Rather and Kirschner write that Fox News “is a functional arm of the Party of Trump.” Does anyone care? As Rather astutely observes,

Needless to say, if a reporter at a news organization other than Fox supported a candidate with half as much complicity as Hannity did Dr. Oz, it would be grounds for immediate termination. Not surprisingly, at Fox News, Hannity’s actions don’t even earn a slap on the wrist.

And therein lies the problem: The capacity for outrage is becoming a one-way street. Hannity can break all rules of journalistic independence, and no one cares. Senator Cassidy can suggest that Blacks are not part of Louisiana’s “correct” race, and no major mainstream sources bother to report on the comments. The wife of a Supreme Court justice can encourage insurrection, and the justice goes on the attack against “liberals.” But . . . If any of those situations were reversed such that a liberal journalist, Democratic Senator, or liberal justice was involved, the outrage from the right would be unending, unforgiving, and shrill.

We must not lose our capacity for outrage. We cannot allow insurrection to be normalized. We cannot allow the sheer volume and velocity of GOP scandals to overwhelm and exhaust us. Indeed, we must recognize that conservatives try to turn outrage to their benefit by making more of it—to provoke “outrage fatigue.”

The wife of a supreme court justice participated in an attempted coup. That fact is outrageous and should matter to every American and should remain on the front pages of every newspaper in America until the justice resigns or recuses himself from all election-related cases.

More one-sided reporting in WaPo.

The Washington Post is running a story in its Monday edition, Democrats See Headwinds in Georgia, and Everywhere Else. The subheader says that Democratic candidates will “be running against President Biden’s low ratings as well as their G.O.P. rivals.” The article accurately reports on the challenges facing Democrats but does not acknowledge that Republicans are led by a twice-impeached failed coup-plotter who insists on absolute allegiance to a disproven conspiracy theory and has led the effort to deny women the right to control their reproductive choices.

About two-thirds of the way through the story, the author makes a nod to the difficulties faced by the GOP—but only by describing comments from a Republican voter:

[Democrats] need to do more to communicate clearly with voters that they are a steady hand at the wheel of getting the economy back on track for people.” Ms. Bourdeaux said. But she, too, saw a chance to draw a sharp contrast with what she described as ascendant far-right Republicans. “The other side, candidly, has lost its mind,” she said, pointing to efforts to restrict voting rights and abortion rights.

Hmm . . . if a Democratic voter had said that the Democratic Party “has lost its mind,” that would be the headline in the article. Oh, and here is the clincher: The author concedes near the end of the article that “Most polling shows a close race for [Georgia] governor and Senate, with a slight Republican advantage.”

Got that? The races for Governor and Senator in Georgia are “close,” but the story focuses on “headwinds” faced by Democrats because of the economy and Biden, with almost no mention of the challenges for the GOP created by an out-of-control Trump, reversal of Roe v. Wade, and unrestrained concealed carry of handguns by June.

More accurate headlines for the article could include, “One reporter’s attempt to trash the Democrats by rehashing the economy and Biden’s favorability ratings” or “According to one Republican voter, ‘The GOP has lost its mind.’” I will let you choose your favorite headline or suggest alternatives in the Comments section or by reply email to me.

Concluding Thoughts.

There is an old joke that goes like this: “I just flew into Las Vegas and, boy, are my arms tired.” My wife and I just spent forty-eight hours taking care of one granddaughter while simultaneously pinch-hitting with a second granddaughter for eight hours on Saturday, and boy, are my arms tired! It was tough writing the newsletter tonight because I could not get the words of the literary classic Good Dog Carl Visits the Zoo out of my mind. (Reading a book out-loud dozens of times over the course of forty-eight hours will do that to you.) A sign of my desperation is that I was delighted to take a mental break by watching The Little Mermaid after failed multiple failed attempts to get our granddaughter to take a nap. Let me say that The Little Mermaid is an underappreciated classic that deserves a place alongside The Godfather and Citizen Kane (at least that’s how I feel tonight).

In lieu of my own closing thoughts (which are often the most challenging part of the newsletter to write), I include a list of Democratic candidates to support, supplied by Ellie Kona. Many of you may know Ellie as a frequent commenter on Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter on Substack, Letters from an American. Per Ellie, “Here is a handy-dandy list of Dems to support, along with their Twitter handles (courtesy of Nick Knudsen):

PA Gov: @JoshShapiroPA

PA Sen: @JohnFetterman

PA Lt Gov: @AustinDavisPA

NC Sen: @CheriBeasleyNC

NC-01: @DonDavisNC

NC-13: @wileynickel

OR Gov: @TinaKotek

OR-04: @ValHoyle

OR-06: @AndreaRSalinas

Provided by NickKnudsen at DemCast

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Fascism, History, International, Propaganda, Racism, Republicans

Does the Alito Decision Set the Stage for a National Ban on Abortion?

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2022 //
30

Now that conservative justices have a solid five votes on the Supreme Court (assuming that Chief Justice John Roberts will not join them on the most divisive issues), no prior decision is safe. American women had abortion rights for 49 years, and that right is on the verge of being nullified by Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

Milton J. Valencia of The Boston Globe warns that the anti-abortion movement will not be satisfied until all abortions are ended, in every state.

The strongly worded legal language used in the draft Supreme Court opinion that appears to overturn nearly 50-year-old abortion-rights protections could provoke conservative efforts to enact a universal, nationwide abortion ban, according to legal and policy analysts on both sides of the political debate. They say the case has already galvanized advocates who want a federal law criminalizing abortion.

The Supreme Court, based on the draft opinion, appears set to not only uphold a controversial Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy but also overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected a person’s right to abortion. The court opinion suggests the question over abortion restrictions should be legislated at the state level.

The draft opinion was written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito and leaked to Politico, and legal analysts say it remains unclear whether the language will survive in a final court opinion. Even if it does, the ruling itself would not necessarily affect liberal states such as Massachusetts, which have built what are known as Roe protections of abortion rights into state law.

But the legal arguments cited in Alito’s opinion could give political momentum to efforts to enact a federal abortion ban similar to what Mississippi enacted — or, potentially, even more restrictive — on the grounds the fetus is an unborn human being with its own rights. Attempts to pass a federal ban have been proposed before but always failed under the protections of Roe v. Wade.

In his ruling, Alito argues a woman has no constitutional rights to an abortion and suggests that fetuses deserve protection. A federal ban based on the ruling could set up legal challenges of state laws that protect an individual’s right to decide. Massachusetts’ Constitution grants far broader legal rights than the federal Constitution allows, say legal observers, who point out the state was the first to legalize same-sex marriage. But federal law trumps state law.

“The court ruling signals to those in Congress that it’s providing a blueprint for those who want to take away the reproductive rights of all people,” said Carol Rose, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Massachusetts. “It suggests Justice Alito is providing something of a legal road map for people trying to criminalize abortion.”

Priscilla Smith, a former litigator in reproductive rights issues who now runs Yale Law School’s Reproductive Rights and Justice Project, said Alito appears to be “putting all the bread crumbs on the trail,” for what she called the decades-long conservative effort to ban abortion.

“This opinion is as outrageously conservative and extreme as it could get,” she said.

Here, according to Rose and Smith and other analysts, are the key concerns among abortion rights advocates with Alito’s draft opinion:

— The justice, and others who appear to be joining in on a majority decision, argue that there is no right to abortion spelled out in the Constitution, rejecting the argument — granted in Roe v. Wade — that a woman’s right to choose is an inherent, fundamental right built into broad due process rights to liberty. Alito’s determination, legal analysts say, undercuts the same legal principles that have affirmed other rights, such as the rights of people to choose whom they marry, or have sex with. Smith accused the court and antiabortion advocates of “cherry-picking” which fundamental rights they want to challenge, arguing that many rights are widely accepted even though they are not built into the Constitution.

Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe wrote on Twitter: “If the Alito opinion savaging [the Roe decision and similar cases] ends up being the opinion of the court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.” Tribe added, “Predictable next steps after the Alito opinion becomes law: a nationwide abortion ban, followed by a push to roll back rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, sexual privacy, and the full array of textually un-enumerated rights long taken for granted.”

— Alito appears to refer to fetuses as human beings as a matter of traditional and common law and refers to a fetus as an “unborn human being,” which could give constitutional rights and protections to the fetus and set up legal challenges of state laws that do protect abortions. He refers to a fetus as being destroyed by abortion rights. Rose said the opinion fails to discuss the viability of a fetus. “They don’t distinguish whether you’re pregnant for one day or 24 weeks,” she said.

— The judge also appears to follow the originalist legal theory that matters not involving federal constitutional law should be decided by the states, writing, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” But legal analysts say that reference to elected representatives, rather than state officials, opens the door for a Republican-controlled Congress to get involved. “This is not an originalist document, it’s an ideological document,” Rose said.

— The opinion would effectively call for what is legally known as a “rational basis for review” of future abortion restrictions, which is considered the lowest level of legal scrutiny, and it allows for little consideration of a person’s reproductive rights and factors an individual must consider in choosing whether to have an abortion. “It never talks about pregnant people’s bodily integrity, or autonomy, or forcing somebody to go to term. That’s really the huge shift,” Rose said.

Elizabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy organization, said in a statement that, “Any scenario in which Roe v. Wade is overturned would open the door to a national ban — and we know that is the ultimate goal of the anti-abortion movement. For them, overturning Roe is just the beginning. They are determined to ban abortion in every state in the US.”

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Freedom, Health, History

Heather Cox Richardson: The Historical Origins of America’s Gun Lobby

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2022 //
70

Heather Cox Richardson writes a valuable and informative history of the politics of guns in America. She makes clear that the current Republican interpretation of the Second Amendment is not rooted in American history.

Please open the link to see the footnotes.

She writes:

Today, a gunman murdered at least 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. 

For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution, on which modern-day arguments for widespread gun ownership rest, is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia.

As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”

Today’s insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places.

One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation.

By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. “Riflemen” competed in the Olympics, in colleges, and in local, state, and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunition and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him.

NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade.

But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors. Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government.

In 1972, the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time.

When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew.

In 1981 a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, then-representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it.

After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

In 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.

Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012 the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent over $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million.

The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. Even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—support background checks, Republicans have killed such legislation by filibustering it.  

The NRA will hold its 2022 annual meeting this Friday in Houston. Former president Trump will speak, along with Texas governor Greg Abbott, senator Ted Cruz, and representative Dan Crenshaw; North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson; and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem—all Republicans. NRA executive vice president and chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre expressed his enthusiasm for the lineup by saying: “President Trump delivered on his promises by appointing judges who respect and value the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and in doing so helped ensure the freedom of generations of Americans.”

Tonight, President Joe Biden spoke to the nation: “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?… It’s time to turn this pain into action. For every parent, for every citizen in this country, we have to make it clear to every elected official in this country, it’s time to act.” In the Senate, Chris Murphy (D-CT) said, “I am here on this floor, to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues….find a way to pass laws that make this less likely.”

But it was Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors basketball team, whose father was murdered by gunmen in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1984, who best expressed the outrage of the nation. At a press conference tonight, shaking, he said, “I’m not going to talk about basketball…. Any basketball questions don’t matter…. Fourteen children were killed 400 miles from here, and a teacher, and in the last ten days we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California, and now we have children murdered at school. WHEN ARE WE GONNA DO SOMETHING? I’m tired, I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families…. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough. There’s 50 senators…who refuse to vote on HR 8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple years ago…. [N]inety percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want…universal background checks…. We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote despite what we the American people want…because they want to hold onto their own power. It’s pathetic,” he said, walking out of the press conference. 

“I’ve had enough.”

Categories Guns, History

Heather Cox Richardson: The Radicalization of the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2022 //
58

This post by Heather Cox Richardson aims to explain the bizarre transformation of the Republican Party. To those of us old enough to remember Republicans such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Earl Warren, Howard Baker, George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, and Jacob Javits, today’s GOP is incomprehensible. Long ago, the GOP was the party of fiscal conservatism. Today it is the party of Trump and the religious right. An odd combination. Please open the link to see the notes at the end of the post.

She writes:

The modern Republican Party rose to power in 1980 promising to slash government intervention in the economy. But that was never a terribly popular stance, and in order to win elections, party leaders wedded themselves to the religious right. For decades, party leaders managed to deliver economic liberties to business leaders by tossing increasingly extreme rhetoric and occasional victories to the religious right. Now, though, that radicalized minority is driving the party. It has thrown overboard the idea of smaller government to drive economic growth and embraced the idea that a strong government must enforce the religious and social beliefs of their base on the rest of the country.

This religiously based government wants to control not just individuals, but also businesses. We are seeing not only the apparent overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, but also the criminalization of contraception, attacks on gay and trans rights, laws giving the state the power to design school curricula, fury at immigrants, book banning, and a reordering of the nation around evangelical Christianity.

Today, when the Senate voted on the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill protecting the constitutional right to abortion as originally recognized in Roe v. Wade, all of the Republicans voted against it, along with Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin said the bill was too broad, although he did not say in what way.

Modern Republicans are not limiting this strong state to the policing of individuals. They are using it to determine the actions of businesses. Even two years ago, it was unthinkable that Florida governor Ron DeSantis would try to strip its longstanding governing power from the Walt Disney Company to force the company to shut up about gay rights, and yet, just last month, that is precisely what happened.

Similarly, in his quest to weaponize the issue of immigration, Texas governor Greg Abbott drastically slowed the trade routes between Texas and Mexico between April 6 and April 15, costing the country $9 billion in gross national product and prompting Mexico to change the route of a railway connection worth billions of dollars from Texas to New Mexico. And now Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is proposing to use the government to strip Disney of its copyrights, a plan Professor Paul Goldstein of Stanford Law School, who specializes in intellectual property, calls “blatantly unconstitutional.”

This is no longer your mother’s Republican Party, or your grandfather’s… or his grandfather’s.

Today’s Republican Party is not about equal rights and opportunity, as Lincoln’s party was. It is not about using the government to protect ordinary people, as Theodore Roosevelt’s party was. It is not even about advancing the ability of businesses to do as they deem best, as Ronald Reagan’s party was.

The modern Republican Party is about using the power of the government to enforce the beliefs of a radical minority on the majority of Americans.

After more than a year of emphasizing that he could work with Republicans, President Joe Biden yesterday went on the offensive against what he called “the Ultra-MAGA Agenda.”

He focused on Florida senator Rick Scott’s “11-Point Plan to Rescue America,” which offers a blueprint for creating the modern Republican vision, beginning with its statement that “[t]he nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated.” To protect that family, Scott not only wants to end abortion rights, but also proposes requiring all Americans, no matter how little money they make, to pay income taxes, and to make all laws—including, presumably, Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and so on—expire every five years. Congress can then just repass the ones it likes, he says.

Yesterday, Biden laid out the difference between his economic plan and Scott’s. He pointed out that his policies of using the government to support ordinary Americans have produced 8.3 million jobs in 15 months, the strongest job creation in modern history. Unemployment is at 3.6%, and 5.4 million small businesses have applied to start up this year—20% more than in any other year recorded.

Now, he says, the global inflation that is hurting Americans so badly is his top priority. To combat that inflation by taking on the price of oil, he has released 240 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to boost supplies, and increased domestic oil production. To lower prices, he has untangled supply chains, and now he wants to reduce our dependence on oil by investing in renewables, to restore competition in key industries (like baby formula) now dominated by a few companies, and to take on price gouging. And he has asked the wealthiest Americans “to pay their fair share in taxes,” since “[i]n recent years, the average billionaire has paid about 8% in federal taxes.”

Biden wants to take on household finances quickly by letting Medicare negotiate prices for prescription drugs to lower prices—as other developed nations do—and cap the price of insulin.

In contrast, he said, Republicans are proposing to raise taxes on 75 million American families, more than 95% of whom make less than $100,000 a year. “Their plan would also raise taxes on 82% of small-business owners making less than $50,000 a year,” he said, but would do nothing to hold corporations accountable, even as they are recording record profits. The plan to sunset laws every five years would give Republicans leverage to get anything they want: “Give us another tax cut for billionaires, or Social Security gets it.”

Biden pointed out that while Republicans attack Biden’s plans as irresponsible spending, in fact the deficit rose every year under Trump, while Biden is on track to cut the deficit by $1.5 trillion this year. Reducing government borrowing will ease inflationary pressures.

Republicans responded to the president with fury, recognizing just how unpopular Scott’s plan would be if people were aware of it. They suggested that it is a fringe idea; host Dana Perino of the Fox News Channel tried to argue that Scott “is eating alone at the lunch table.” Scott promptly called Biden “unwell,” “unfit for office,” and “incoherent, incapacitated and confused,” and said he should resign.

While Republicans have not championed Scott’s program, they have let it stand alone to represent them. White House press secretary Jen Psaki pointed out that Scott’s plan is the only one the Republicans have produced, since Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has said he will not release any plans before the 2022 midterm elections, preferring simply to attack Democrats. Until he does, Scott is speaking for the party. And Scott is hardly a fringe character: as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he is in charge of electing Republicans to the Senate. Psaki went on to read a list of Republicans who supported Scott’s plan, including the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, who applauded Scott’s “real solutions to put us back on track.”.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) also called out Republican far-right extremism yesterday in her defense of abortion rights, hitting again and again on how their stripping away of a right established almost 50 years ago is dangerous and radical. Polls show that a majority of Americans want the court to uphold Roe v. Wade, while a Monmouth poll published today shows that only about 8% of Americans want abortion to be illegal in all cases, as new trigger laws are establishing.

The unpopularity of the probable overturning of Roe v. Wade also has Republicans backpedaling, trying to argue that losing the recognition of a constitutional right that has been protected for fifty years will not actually change abortion access. Ignoring both the move toward a national abortion ban and the voting restrictions newly in place in 19 states that cement Republican control, they say that voters in states can simply choose to protect abortion rights if they wish. Wisconsin Republican senator Ron Johnson said, “It might be a little messy for some people,” but Wisconsin women could obtain an abortion by driving to Illinois. “[I]t’s not going to be that big a change,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

If overturning Roe v. Wade is such a nothingburger, why has the radical right fought for it as a key issue since the 1980s? In any case, Republicans are no longer able to argue that their extremists are anything other than the center of the party. As Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the third officer in Republican leadership in the House, said after Biden spoke: “I am ultra MAGA. And I’m proud of it.”

Categories Accountability, History, Republicans

An Off-Broadway You Should See—If You Can

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2022 //
14

We saw an off-Broadway show that we highly recommend. It’s a four-night only show. We saw the first. The others are May 19 and 25 at 7 pm. May 21 @2 pm.

“Margo & Juliette: A Dance on the Volcano in Weimar Berlin”

A two-woman cabaret of songs from the Weimar period. It’s risqué but no nudity.

It was wonderful!

The parallels to today are powerful, sometimes frightening.

It was akin to going to a cabaret during Weimar. Songs in English and in German. A simple production. Two beautiful singers and a piano.

In the end, very moving.

Only three more performances at the Triad Theatre on West 72 and Amsterdam in Manhattan.

Categories Art, History

Buffalo: Racism Is a Poison in America’s Bloodstream

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2022 //
195

The horrific massacre of at least 10 people in a supermarket in Buffalo should be a wake-up call to the nation: Racism is a poison in our nation’s bloodstream. People were doing their shopping and were mowed down by a white supremacist who drove for hours to kill Black people. Proud of what he was doing, he live-streamed his monstrous actions. Only 18 years old, but his heart was already twisted and warped by racism. The early reports say he avidly consumed racist social media. He absorbed the Great Replacement Theory, the fear that white people like him were losing control. So he murdered innocent people in a supermarket.

There was a time, however briefly, when white supremacists hid under a rock and kept their loathsome views to themselves. But then Trump told them that “political correctness” was dead. It was okay for them to spout their venom, and he encouraged them.

It didn’t start with Trump; racism has been part of our nation’s history for hundreds of years. Our history is full of lynchings, massacres, systemic cruelty to a people whose only “crime” was their skin color.

And yet we dared to hope that racism was a thing of the past. In the 1960s, with elected officials passing laws to punish it, and the courts upholding those laws, we imagined we had driven it out of our social fabric and delegitimized it. We did not.

Racism is not in the past. It never went away. It is out in the open, supported by white supremacists like Tucker Carlson, by FOX News, and by racist social media. Racism is legitimated by the states that passed laws banning “critical race theory” (that is, discussions of racism) from their schools and universities. It is openly endorsed by states banning the teaching of “The 1619 Project,” which explores in painful detail the history of racism.

How can we begin to understand what happened Sunday in Buffalo?

Read “The 1619 Project.” Engage wholeheartedly in critical race theory. Read and discuss the systemic racism that encouraged an 18-year-old man to strap on battle gear and go in search of innocent black people to kill. Vote against the legislators who have tried to suppress knowledge of and teaching about racism.

Search your conscience. Ask why so many states are banning books about racism, preventing teachers from talking about it, preventing students from learning about it, and criminalizing the study of its roots.

This mayhem will not stop until we white people look honestly at our history and into our mirrors.

Categories Accountability, History, Racism

Ohio: The State Constitution Requires Funding of Common Schools

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2022 //
16

Bill Phillis, retired state education official, is campaigning relentlessly to block the expansion of the state’s voucher program. He is a staunch opponent of privatization. He frequently writes about the low academic quality of the state’s charter schools, their fiscal irresponsibility, and their drain on the state’s public schools. If you live in Ohio, you should join his organization to support public schools.

He writes:

EdChoice Voucher Scheme Does Not Align with the Intentions of the Delegates of Ohio’s 1850/1851 and 1873/1874 Constitutional Conventions Regarding the Public Common School System—Part 1*

The EdChoice voucher scheme is contrary to the intention of the Delegates’ vision of the state system of common schools. During the 1873/1874 Constitutional Convention, when a delegate proposed to alter the 1851 constitutional provision for education to fund private schools, Delegate Asher Cook stated:

Here the children of a district, and often those of an entire village, are united in one school, where all cause of strife and contention is removed, and their minds, true to the instincts with which they are endued, rich and poor, mingle together, for a loving group of little friends, who, hand in hand, march bravely up the rugged hill of science, making the ascent easy by each other’s aid, and smoothing its rugged surface by glad peals of laughter, which ring out merrily and clear over hill top, across valley and up the mountain side, until their echoes wake up a joyous community to thank God for the common schools.

The Delegates to the 1850/1851 Constitutional Convention were intentional in selecting the word “common”. Delegate Archibold expressed that the meaning of “common” at that time might change and thus, suggested the word “useful” to replace “common”. An 1828 dictionary defines “common” as “belonging equally to more than one or to many indefinitely.” Delegate Humphreville stated his belief that “common” as they intended it to function in the clause would never be misinterpreted, and thus, responded to Delegate Archibold’s concern by stating “[C]ommon schools in the future will be common schools—that is to say they will not be uncommon schools.” The inclusion of the word common was intentional.

During the 1874 debates, a discussion ensued regarding the meaning of “a system of common schools.” The discussion led to the question of whether public school funds should be provided to private religious schools. Delegate Root informed the discussion, saying, “Common schools to be successful must be the union of schools. The 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language defines “union” as, [c]oncord; agreement and conjunction of mind, with affections or interest.” Delegate Root asked:

What kind of a common school system would you have but for uniform rules and uniformity of discipline, and by whom are these prescribed? By the legislative power– the highest power in the State. They may relegate the details to certain officers, but it must come from them.

Regarding the same issue, Delegate Miner stated:

I am utterly opposed to a constitutional provision, or to any legislation, having in view the allotment of anypart of the common school fund to any schools except those established, maintained and controlled by, or under the authority of the state. The moment we consent to do so, we deal with a death blow to the system of common schools, upon which, expanded and improved by increasing experience and wisdom, more than upon anything else, it is my profoundest conviction, depends on the perpetuity and efficiency of our American institutions and government.

It is clear that those who established the Constitution language for a system of schools meant that only one system of common schools was to receive public funding for the support thereof.

*Research for this post and much of the content of it is credited to Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Juris Doctor Candidate, Kira Sharp.

Learn more about the EdChoice voucher litigation

Learn About Vouchers Hurt Ohio
8 Lies About Private School Vouchers

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VOUCHERS HURT OHIO

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 |ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.org

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, History, Ohio, Resistance, School Choice, Vouchers
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