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Archives for category: Justice
I endorse Stacey Abrams for Governor of Georgia, with enthusiasm.
Abrams is running against a rightwing extremist who happens to be Secretary of State and in charge of elections. This guy Kemp is using his position to suppress the votes of African Americans, Hispanics, and other potential voters for Abrams. She has called on him to resign, but of course he won’t.
If you live in Georgia and you want your state to move forward, please vote for Stacey Abrams.
We all remember the beautiful young woman, Mollie Tibbetts, who was brutally murdered while jogging in her hometown in Iowa. Various politicians seized upon her death at the hands of an immigrant to reinforce their political arguments for a ban on immigration or a wall.
Mollie’s father wrote this article for the Des Moines Register.
He wrote, in part:
Make no mistake, Mollie was my daughter and my best friend. At her eulogy, I said Mollie was nobody’s victim. Nor is she a pawn in others’ debate. She may not be able to speak for herself, but I can and will. Please leave us out of your debate. Allow us to grieve in privacy and with dignity. At long last, show some decency. On behalf of my family and Mollie’s memory, I’m imploring you to stop.
Throughout this ordeal I’ve asked myself, “What would Mollie do?” As I write this, I am watching Sen. John McCain lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda and know that evil will succeed only if good people do nothing. Both Mollie and Senator McCain were good people. I know that both would stand up now and do something.
The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise is a lie. Justice in my America is blind. This person will receive a fair trial, as it should be. If convicted, he will face the consequences society has set. Beyond that, he deserves no more attention.
To the Hispanic community, my family stands with you and offers its heartfelt apology. That you’ve been beset by the circumstances of Mollie’s death is wrong. We treasure the contribution you bring to the American tapestry in all its color and melody. And yes, we love your food.
My stepdaughter, whom Mollie loved so dearly, is Latina. Her sons — Mollie’s cherished nephews and my grandchildren — are Latino. That means I am Hispanic. I am African. I am Asian. I am European. My blood runs from every corner of the Earth because I am American. As an American, I have one tenet: to respect every citizen of the world and actively engage in the ongoing pursuit to form a more perfect union.
Given that, to knowingly foment discord among races is a disgrace to our flag. It incites fear in innocent communities and lends legitimacy to the darkest, most hate-filled corners of the American soul. It is the opposite of leadership. It is the opposite of humanity. It is heartless. It is despicable. It is shameful.
We have the opportunity now to take heed of the lessons that Mollie, John McCain and Aretha Franklin taught — humanity, fairness and courage. For most of the summer, the search for Mollie brought this nation together like no other pursuit. There was a common national will that did transcend opinion, race, gender and geography. Let’s not lose sight of that miracle. Let’s not lose sight of Mollie.
Instead, let’s turn against racism in all its ugly manifestations both subtle and overt. Let’s turn toward each other with all the compassion we gave Mollie. Let’s listen, not shout. Let’s build bridges, not walls. Let’s celebrate our diversity rather than argue over our differences. I can tell you, when you’ve lost your best friend, differences are petty and meaningless.
They come to America as immigrants seeking freedom. They are arrested, separated from their children, and imprisoned.
Their children are sent to distant facilities. Some will never see their parents again.
ICE has ordered 60 full-body restraints for the immigrants who resist.
Is this America?
The editorial pages of the New York Times have been an echo chamber for school choice for years. The editorials regularly applaud charter schools as escape hatches from public schools and repeat the talking points of the billionaires and hedge fund managers who have gleefully replaced public schools with privately managed schools. I can’t recall an editorial that acknowledged the importance of rebuilding, revitalizing, and strengthening public education as a major responsibility of our society. I can’t recall one that criticized the onslaught of privatization against public education in our nation’s urban schools, where parents of color have lost not only their public schools, but their voice as citizens in creating public schools that serve the entire community. The editorial board has steadfastly ignored the coordinated and bipartisan assault on democratic governance of public schools in cities and states across the nation. The op-ed page, which was created to provide a space for views different from the editorial page has seldom challenged school choice orthodoxy. Almost every regular opinion writer has lauded the “miracle” of charter schools, including David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and David Leonhardt. The op-ed page recently included an article urging liberals not to give up on charters even though Betsy DeVos likes them too, even though they are segregated and non-union.
But now comes a new and welcome voice.
Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes that school choice is the enemy of justice. She has been selected as a regular opinion writer, which is more good news. She writes about her personal experience as a child in California, a state that is controlled by Democrats but purchased by the billionaires who sneer at public schools and want to replace them with charter schools. She reminds us that school choice was the battle cry of segregationists. In many states and cities, it still is.
Her article poses an essential question: Is public education, democratically controlled, still part of the social contract? And she writes that many white liberals, including Jerry Brown (and in New York, Andrew Cuomo) have said no.
She writes:
“LOS ANGELES — In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.
“In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.
“Still, I believed, even as a fifth grader, that education is a social contract and that Los Angeles was uniquely suited to carry it out. Los Angeles would surely accomplish what Louisiana could not.
“I was wrong. Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.
“This has happened all over the country, of course, but California has led the way — it has 630,000 students in charter schools, more than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 154,000 of them. Charters are associated with choice and innovation, important elements of the good life that California is famous for. In a deep-blue state, that good life theoretically includes diversity, and many white liberals believe charters can achieve that, too. After all, a do-it-yourself school can do anything it wants.
“But that’s what makes me uneasy, the notion that public schools, which charters technically are, have a choice about how or to what degree to enforce the social contract. There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice.
“Integration did not happen. The effect of my father’s and my foray into those white schools was not more equality but white flight. Largely white schools became largely black, and Latino schools were stigmatized as “bad” and never had a place in the California good life.
“It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind. This is in direct contrast to the risky, almost revolutionary energy that fueled past integration efforts, which by their nature created tension and confrontation. But as a society — certainly as a state — we have lost our appetite for that engagement, and the rise of charters is an expression of that loss.
“Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration.
“This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience. It seems particularly so in Los Angeles, a suburb-driven city designed for geographical separation. What looks like segregation to the rest of the world is, to many white residents, entirely neutral — simply another choice.
“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in 2010, researchers at the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found, in a study of 40 states and several dozen municipalities, that black students in charters are much more likely than their counterparts in traditional public schools to be educated in an intensely segregated setting. The report says that while charters had more potential to integrate because they are not bound by school district lines, “charter schools make up a separate, segregated sector of our already deeply stratified public school system.”
“In a 2017 analysis, data journalists at The Associated Press found that charter schools were significantly overrepresented among the country’s most racially isolated schools. In other words, black and brown students have more or less resegregated within charters, the very institutions that promised to equalize education.
“This has not stemmed the popular appeal of charters. School board races in California that were once sleepy are now face-offs between well-funded charter advocates and less well-funded teachers’ unions. Progressive politicians are expected to support charters, and they do. Gov. Jerry Brown, who opened a couple of charters during his stint as mayor of Oakland, vetoed legislation two years ago that would have made charter schools more accountable. Antonio Villaraigosa built a reputation as a community organizer who supported unions, but as mayor of Los Angeles, he started a charter-like endeavor called Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.
“This year, charter advocates got their pick for school superintendent, Austin Beutner. And billionaires like Eli Broad have made charters a primary cause: In 2015, an initiative backed in part by Mr. Broad’s foundation outlined a $490 million plan to place half of the students in the Los Angeles district into charters by 2023.
“I live in Inglewood, a chiefly black and brown city in Los Angeles County that’s facing gentrification and the usual displacement of people of color. Traditional public schools are struggling to stay open as they lose students to charters. But those who support the gentrifying, which includes a new billion-dollar N.F.L. stadium in the heart of town, see charters as part of the improvements. They see them as progress.
“Despite all this, I continue to believe in the social contract that in my mind is synonymous with public schools and public good. I continue to believe that California will at some point fulfill that contract. I believe this most consciously when I go back to Westchester and reflect on my formative two years in school there. In the good life there is such a thing as a good fight, and it is not over.“
The “GranniesRespond” campaign is enroute to the southern border to speak up for justice and decency and family reunification.
They stopped in Reading, PA., and Louisville. Next stop, Montgomery, Alabama.
Check their schedule here. Meet and greet them.
Sorry that I didn’t notice that this article was published in November 2017.
Now that the far-right will have a five-man Majority on the Supreme Court, it May no longer matter what happens in the lower courts. If one of the four liberal judges should retire or die, the rightwing stranglehold would be secure for many decades to come. Five is enough, and the oldest is not yet 70.
This column in the Washington Post reports on a frankly terrifying Republican Plan to expand the number of judicial seats and fill them as rapidly as possible before the 2018 election.
Conservatives have a new court-packing plan, and in the spirit of the holiday, it’s a turducken of a scheme: a regulatory rollback hidden inside a civil rights reversal stuffed into a Trumpification of the courts. If conservatives get their way, President Trump will add twice as many lifetime members to the federal judiciary in the next 12 months (650) as Barack Obama named in eight years (325). American law will never be the same.
The “outer turkey” in the plan is the ongoing Trumpification of the courts. In the final two years of Obama’s presidency, Senate Republicans engaged in tenacious obstruction to leave as many judicial vacancies unfilled as possible. The Garland- to-Gorsuch Supreme Court switch is the most visible example of this tactic but far from the only one: Due to GOP obstruction, “the number of [judicial] vacancies . . . on the table when [Trump] was sworn in was unprecedented,” White House Counsel Donald McGahn recently boasted to the conservative Federalist Society.
Trump is wasting no time in filling the 103 judicial vacancies he inherited. In the first nine months of Obama’s tenure, he nominated 20 judges to the federal trial and appellate courts; in Trump’s first nine months, he named 58. Senate Republicans are racing these nominees through confirmation; last week, breaking a 100-year-old tradition, they eliminated the “blue slip” rule that allowed home-state senators to object to particularly problematic nominees. The rush to Trumpify the judiciary includes nominees rated unqualified by the American Bar Association, nominees with outrageously conservative views and nominees significantly younger (and, therefore, likely to serve longer) than those of previous presidents. As a result, by sometime next year, 1 in 8 cases filed in federal court will be heard by a judge picked by Trump. Many of these judges will likely still be serving in 2050.
But even this plan — to fill approximately 150 judicial vacancies before the 2018 elections — is not enough for conservatives.
Enter the next element of the court-packing turducken: a new plan written by the crafty co-founder of the Federalist Society, Steven Calabresi. In a paper that deserves credit for its transparency (it features a section titled “Undoing President Barack Obama’s Judicial Legacy”), Calabresi proposes to pack the federal courts with a “minimum” of 260 — and possibly as many as 447 — newly created judicial positions. Under this plan, the 228-year-old federal judiciary would increase — in a single year — by 30 to 50 percent.
Never mind that Republicans saw no urgency in filling judicial vacancies while Obama was president. Never mind that they ignored pleas from conservative Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to fill positions in courts facing “judicial emergencies.” Now, conservatives want a 30 to 50 percent increase in the number of federal judgeships. And they have a clear idea of who should fill this massive number of new posts: “President Trump and the Republican Senate will need to fill all of these new judgeships in 2018, before the next session of Congress.”
Almost overnight, the judicial branch would come to consist of almost equal parts judges picked by nine presidents combined — Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama — and judges picked by one: Donald J. Trump. The effect on our civil rights and liberties would be astounding. And a continuation of the pattern of Trump’s nominees to date — more white and more male than any president’s in nearly 30 years — would roll back decades of progress in judicial diversity.
But even that isn’t enough for the Turducken Court Packers. They have jammed one more “treat” inside this turkey.
Calabresi has also proposed that Congress abolish 158 administrative law judgeships in federal regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission, and replace these impartial fact-finders with a new corps of 158 Trump-selected judges who — unlike current administrative law judges — would serve for life.
These new Trump administrative law judges would have vast power over environmental, health and safety, fair competition, communications, labor, financial and consumer regulation for decades. Unlike the existing administrative law judges, selected as nonpartisan members of the civil service, Calabresi’s replacement corps would all be picked in a single year, by a single man: Donald J. Trump.
And if this breathtaking transformation of our federal judicial system isn’t jarring enough, Calabresi has one final treat: a proposal that Congress do all of this in the tax-cut bill that Congress is trying to pass before it leaves for the holidays.
Progressives need to mount a more cohesive and effective plan to slow down the Trump train of judicial transformation. Otherwise, we’ll have a court-packing turducken for Thanksgiving, and a revolutionary rollback in rights and regulation for Christmas.
Randi Weingarten wrote this commentary in Education Week about the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which ruled that people do not have to pay agency fees to unions, thus allowing them to collect benefits negotiated by the union without paying dues.
The final day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 term may have been overshadowed by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement, but in one of two important cases decided that day, the court overturned four decades of precedent to bar public-sector unions from charging fees to nonmembers who enjoy the benefits of a union contract.
On its face, Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31 claimed to be about free speech. But the right-wing forces behind it admitted a detailed plan to “defund and defang” unions and dismantle their political power. That’s according to documents obtained by The Guardian from the State Policy Network—a national alliance that includes the primary Janus-backer, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, as an associate member.
As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, the precedent established by the court’s 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education ruling was embedded in the nation’s law and its economic life. It ensured the labor peace that gave teachers, firefighters, nurses, police, and other public-sector employees a path to a better life. It made communities more resilient and kept public services strong.
In Janus, the plaintiffs weaponized the First Amendment from its original purpose of securing the political freedom necessary for democracy by arguing compulsory union fees violated free speech. By a 5-4 majority, the court put the interests of billionaires over established law and basic principle—just as Justice Kennedy did with his deciding vote in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010. The right wing’s thirst for power again trumped the aspirations of communities and the people who serve them.
Janus will, of course, hurt unions, but most importantly—and by design—it will hurt workers. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.
Unions are still the best vehicle working people have to get ahead. Workers covered by a union contract earn 13.2 percent more than comparable workers in nonunionized workplaces, and they are far more likely to have employer-sponsored health insurance, paid leave, and retirement benefits, according to a 2017 report from the Economic Policy Institute. Unions negotiate everything from manageable class sizes to safety equipment for emergency personnel.
Unions help make possible what would be impossible for individuals acting alone.
For the American Federation of Teachers’ 1.75 million members (our largest membership ever, and growing—we’ve added a quarter million in the last decade), Janus poses opportunities as well as threats. In the face of right-wing attacks on public education and labor, we have come to understand that when we walk the walk with the community, we become exponentially more powerful.
Years before Janus, the AFT embarked on a plan to talk with every one of our members on issues that matter—supporting public education, creating good jobs that support a middle-class life, securing high-quality and affordable health care, pursuing affordable higher education, fighting discrimination and bigotry, and defending democracy and pluralism. Whether you lean conservative or liberal, higher wages, a voice at work, safe schools, and a functioning democracy are American values.
Since January, all over the country, more than half a million of our members signed new cards recommitting to the union, and that number is growing. Many of the AFT’s 3,500 local affiliates are reporting that 90 percent or more of their members have recommitted.
After the Janus decision hit, groups funded by the Koch brothers and the DeVos family launched their own campaigns, urging Los Angeles Unified School District teachers to “give themselves a raise” by dropping the union. Think about it—not only did U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos attend the Janus oral arguments at the Supreme Court (while not bothering to put it on her public schedule), her fortune is funding the post-Janus assault on unions.
When our members at AFT discover the special interests behind these “opt out” campaigns, they get extra mad. You only need to look at Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia to show that when salaries and benefits are stripped away, the response can be intense—and righteous. In Los Angeles, 34,000 members of the local union affiliate were contacted by those Koch- and DeVos-linked groups trying to get them to opt out. So far, only one member has….
We are in a race for the soul of our country. But if we really double down, if we fight not only for what’s right but for what the vast majority of Americans believe, working people—not Janus’ wealthy funders—will emerge as the real winners.
Noah Feldman wrote a smart and thoughtful article for the New York Review of Books about the likely rulings of a Supreme Court with an activist conservative majority, ansent any moderating Justice.
It’s an interesting read. Let me know if it is behind a paywall and I will post more of it.
He writes:
“If Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27, is confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have a stable majority of conservative justices for the first time since before the New Deal. Kennedy’s successor will be Trump’s second Surpreme Court pick and may not be his last. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is eighty-five, clearly wishes to stay on the Court as long as Trump is president. So does Justice Stephen Breyer, who turns eighty later this year. But neither is immortal. Especially if Trump is reelected, he could potentially replace both of these justices with staunch young conservatives.
“The current Court’s four consistent conservatives are all substantially younger than Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Breyer. The oldest, Clarence Thomas, is sixty-nine. Samuel Alito is sixty-eight, Chief Justice John Roberts is sixty-three, and Neil Gorsuch is just fifty. All are self-described constitutional originalists; all favor interpreting statutes based on text rather than their intention; and all have strongly pro-business judicial records. Should Trump appoint a fifth conservative—to say nothing of a sixth or seventh—the conservative majority could easily last a generation.
“In light of this prospect, it is not too soon to start asking what a conservative Supreme Court would mean for the country. A conservative jurisprudence, aggressively applied, would reshape American law and politics. It would reinterpret fundamental issues of individual and privacy rights, health care, employment, national security, and the environment. These changes would in turn affect electoral politics. The range of conservative legislation that could survive judicial review would expand, while the range of progressive legislation that could do so would narrow.
“In retrospect, it is remarkable that a strong conservative majority on the Court has not emerged before now. Since 1980, Republicans have held the presidency for twenty-two years and Democrats for sixteen. Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on the platform of choosing conservative judges, appointed three justices—Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Kennedy—and elevated William Rehnquist to the chief justiceship. That should have established conservative control. Yet O’Connor turned out to be a centrist, controlling the Court for a quarter-century by casting the decisive fifth vote in controversial cases. When she retired in 2006, Kennedy assumed her position as the swing justice and unexpectedly emerged as a liberal hero, voting, for example, to extend constitutional rights to detainees in Guantánamo Bay and marriage rights to same-sex couples.1
“George H.W. Bush also had the chance to consolidate a conservative majority. He appointed Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall but also replaced William Brennan with David Souter, who underwent a subtle yet significant evolution from Burkean conservative to Burkean liberal. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama each got two justices confirmed, which maintained the Court’s balance. That conservative control has been so long in coming reflects either miscalculation by Reagan and George H.W. Bush or (more likely) something less than full-throated judicial conservatism on their part.
“There is one glaring anomaly in the pattern of appointments. Obama should have been able to get Merrick Garland confirmed after Scalia died in February 2016—which would have provided some insulation against a conservative majority. The Senate’s decision to block the moderate Garland purely because Obama nominated him transformed both the composition of the Court and the norms of the confirmation process.
“A Senate controlled by Democrats would probably refuse to confirm any Trump Supreme Court nominee, no matter how much time remains in his presidency. If justices can only be confirmed when the president and the Senate majority come from the same party, we will witness a shrinking Supreme Court forced to operate with eight, seven, or even six justices. In this scenario, a president whose party controls the Senate would have the chance to fill all those vacancies with justices who share his or her ideology. The Court’s politics would no longer drift gradually but veer suddenly to the left or the right.
“One of the first things likely to happen if the Court’s majority turns conservative is that state legislatures in heavily Republican states will pass legislation restricting abortion rights. Already, Mississippi has passed a law barring abortions after fifteen weeks—long before viability. A federal court blocked the law, but its passage signals clearly that the Court will come under pressure to revisit Roe v. Wade.
“In the past, Chief Justice Roberts has shown a decided preference for changing constitutional law indirectly. Rather than overturning landmark liberal precedents outright, he prefers to minimize their importance by narrowing them and limiting their holdings to factual situations that no longer exist. He would surely prefer that Roe suffer death by a thousand cuts rather than see the Court accused of overturning it in a stroke and casting the country back to the days of coat-hanger and back-alley abortions.”
Thanks to Fred Smith for sending a sharper, clearer video of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s magnificent speech, “I Have a Dream.” In addition to its clarity, it also has captions.
In these troubled times, beware the reactionaries who claim that Dr. King wanted only a color-blind society, where children needed nothing more than to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The March on Washington was a march for jobs, a march for basic freedoms, like the right to vote, and a march for justice and equality of opportunity. Dr. King reminded us that 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, black Americans were still not free. Given our nation’s embrace of mass incarceration, millions of black Americans are literally not free, and millions more worry about excessive use of force by police.
Today, as the Trump administration plans to abandon affirmative action and desegregation, the movement for equality has been dealt a grievous blow. As it is poised to appoint another justice to the Supreme Court, all the gains of the civil rights movement of the past six decades are in jeopardy.
The March was funded by a coalition of civil rights groups and labor unions.
Please note that Bayard Rustin, the great intellect and strategist of the civil rights movement, can be seen at King’s side. Rustin was a pacifist and a brilliant writer. He was gay, and he was frequently pushed aside or hidden for fear he would hurt the movement. He went to propison during World War 2 as a conscientious objector. He was no coward. He risked his life repeatedly in demonstrations and protests. He was a beloved friend, who performed a capella in my home in a fundraiser for the Young People’s Socialist League. I am proud to have known this great man.
