In Cleveland, Texas, about 40 miles from Houston, five family members were killed. Their neighbor liked to fire his gun outside, and he was shooting at 11 p.m. A family member asked if he could stop shooting because the baby was sleeping.
The suspect was the victims’ neighbor and went to their home Friday night after they asked him to stop shooting an AR-15-style weapon in his front yard because of the noise, Capers [the sheriff] said.
Oropeza frequently shot the gun in his yard, Capers said, and allegedly became angry when the neighbors said their baby was trying to sleep around or after 11 p.m. Authorities saw video footage of Oropeza walking up to the victims’ front door before going inside…
Vianey Balderas, who lives across the street from the family, said she first heard some gunshots when a few people were outside. About 20 minutes later, Balderas heard about five more gunshots, then another 10, she told The Washington Post.
“When I heard those gunshots, I didn’t think anything of it because in this neighborhood everyone has guns. Every weekend you hear gunshots,” she said in an interview in Spanish. “People shoot in their backyards, after they drink alcohol, men take out guns at house parties and shoot the ground.”
All five victims were shot in the head, he said. Two of the women who were killed were found lying on top of the surviving young children in a bedroom, “trying to protect them,” Capers told The Post by phone from the scene.
Just another day in a land where everyone has the right to own a gun, in a state where no one is required to get a permit.
Stephen Ruis asks the question that is the title of this post. I appreciated this post because I often get tweets that claim the Bible as the source of the right to bear arms. Lots of people think that God wrote the Constitution or at least the Second Amendment. I think of Jesus as an exponent of peace, love, forgiveness, redemption, and non-violence. I can’t imagine him blessing an AR-15. Or blessing someone who uses an assault rifle to slaughter innocents.
Ruis answers on his blog:
If there was ever a reason to oppose Christian nationalism, it is the confounding of Constitutional rights with what are supposed to be god-given rights.
Arm yourself. Exercise your God-given rights. Carry everywhere you go. (anonymous gun rights supporter)
Where in the Bible does it say that we have a god-given right to bear arms? In the Old Testament, the Hebrews were bearing arms all of the time but that was at the order of their leaders, so that was military service, not walking around the neighborhood rights.
New Testament fanboys go to incredible lengths to disavow Jesus telling his supporters to sell what they have to buy a sword (Luke 22). Since this doesn’t appear in the other three canonical gospels, it gets only one vote out of four for being an honest quotation. In any case, there are many other citations disavowing violence by Jesus.
Jennifer Rubin is a columnist for the Washington Post. Originally, she was hired to express conservative views. Her column was called “Right Turn.” But when Trump was elected, she flipped. She realized that the Republican Party had lost its principles and stood for nothing other than slavishly obeying Trump’s whims and passing tax cuts for the 1%.
In this column, she calls out Senator Dick Durbin for acquiescing to the obsolete tradition of allowing one home-state Senator to block the President’s nomination to a federal judgeship. Democrats play by the unwritten rules, but Republicans ignore them. Democrats allowed Trump to nominate totally unqualified federal judges and joined in confirming them (e.g., the zealous anti-abortion extremist in Amarillo, Texas, who recently slapped a national ban on the main abortion pill because he disapproved of the Federal Drug Administration’s rigorous approval process).
But Republicans withhold their approval of well-qualified judicial nominees. And now, with Senator Dianne Feinstein home on sick leave, the Judiciary Committee is not approving any of President Biden’s nominees and will not give their approval to Senator Feinstein’s request to be removed temporarily from the committee.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) seems spectacularly ill-suited for an era when democracy is at risk, when Republicans observe no rules of decorum and when the federal judiciary’s credibility is crumbling.
Far too restrained and deferential, Durbin has refused to alter practices such as the “blue slip,” which allows home-state senators to nix the president’s judicial nominees, although he has beseeched Republicans not to abuse the practice. Durbin also hasn’t yet conducted hearings on the disastrous effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and related abortion bans, nor has he held hearings on a mandatory ethics code for judges — although he has promised hearings on revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas’s failure to disclose luxurious travel gifts and real estate sales. Then again, Senate Democrats as a whole haven’t pushed Durbin, so one cannot blame him alone for his timidity.
Caroline Fredrickson and Alan Neff recently wrote about blue slips for Just Security:
“The blue slip is an opaque — and inherently obstructionist — Senate tradition that allows a single Senator in any State to block a presidential nominee to the District Courts in their electoral patch merely by withholding their consent to consideration of the nominee in Committee. Like the filibuster, the blue slip allows Senators to halt Senate action without ever having to explain themselves to their Senate colleagues, their constituents, or the public, even if it means more criminal and civil cases languish unresolved on federal trial-court dockets for longer periods.”
Durbin could end this practice at any time, removing another abuse of minority-party power in the Senate. It’s one that has been spectacularly abused by Republicans, who have pushed through grossly unqualified, unfit nominees nominated by Republican presidents and yet nixed perfectly acceptable judges nominated by Democratic presidents…
Last week, Carl Hulse wrote for the New York Times:
“Then last week, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Republican of Mississippi, served notice to the Judiciary Committee that she would not allow the nomination of Scott Colom, a candidate for a court vacancy in the state, to move forward, citing his past political support from the left, among other reasons. Her stance endangered the confirmation of Mr. Colom, a popular Black Democratic state prosecutor who had the backing of Roger Wicker, the other Republican senator from the state, as well as leading Mississippi Republicans including two former governors, Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant.”
Durbin had previously promised he would respect blue slips unless the decision to withhold the blue slip was based not on the nominee’s qualifications but on race, gender or sexual orientation.
Apparently, this didn’t qualify in his eyes.
Durbin’s appeals to shameless Republicans have accomplished nothing. Instead, he has allowed Republicans to run amok. Is it any surprise that when they were asked to approve the request from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to be removed from the committee, they balked? Plainly, they know they have nothing to fear from Durbin.
Committee Democrats can, if they choose, push Durbin to end the blue slip practice. They also could demand a hearing on Supreme Court ethics, on book banning, and on the effects of Dobbs and abortion bans. They might even hold hearings on corruption in the prior administration or on domestic terrorism. They could hold hearings on nationwide injunctions and single judge divisions, which allowed for Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s abysmal ruling on the abortion drug mifepristone.
All these would be appropriate uses of oversight power — unlike House Republicans’ stunts. They’ve done none of that.
Voters, court reformers, progressive advocacy groups, donors and even Vice President Harris — a former committee member who is strenuously working to keep the plight of women denied abortions in the news — could all apply pressure. Democrats cannot attend to the threats to democracy if they play by Marquess of Queensberry rules and apply to Republicans’ nonexistent good faith.
The voters elected a Democratic Senate and Democratic president; they have a right to expect swift confirmation of qualified nominees when democracy remains vulnerable. Voters have a right to expect Senate investigations into questionable actions at the Supreme Court and elsewhere.
Durbin and his fellow Democrats need to learn to play hardball.
It is well known that the idea of vouchers was launched in response to the Brown decision of 1954. Southern states wanted to avoid desegregating their schools, so they created voucher laws so that white students would not be forced to go to school with Black students. (A useful history is Steve Suitts’ Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.) Some “credit” libertarian Milton Friedman as the godfather of the voucher movement, but his 1955 essay advocating vouchers would have disappeared into the mists of time without the legislation passed across the South.
The voucher idea was stigmatized for many years because of its association with segregation. But it was revived in 1990 by a scholarly book by John Chubb and Terry Moe called Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, in which they theorized that vouchers were actually a panacea. (Their word.)
We now know they were wrong. As multiple studies have reported, student academic performance is worse in voucher schools than in public schools. we also know that most vouchers are used by students who were already enrolled in private and religious schools, so vouchers are an expensive subsidy for families that like the subsidy but don’t need it.
So, why is there continued advocacy for vouchers? why do voucher advocates say that “all families should have the same choice as the rich” when the value of vouchers don’t pay for elite schools attended by the rich? Why are they sold as salvation for children when they are not?
The purpose of vouchers is to abandon public schools. As choice prevails, the community sees no reason to tax itself for private choices. Bond issues will lose. Parents whose children are no longer in school will not pay taxes for other people’s children. People without children will think, “that’s not my responsibility.” People will not want to pay for religious schools for those of a different faith. Schooling will become a personal responsibility, not a civic responsibility.
Peter writes:
We need to find another way to talk about vouchers.
As the GOP mounts a multi-state initiative to implement vouchers or super-voucher education savings accounts in many states across the country, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ve been looking at the voucher movement through the wrong lens (which is to day, the lens that voucheristas have promoted).
Vouchers are not about freeing or empowering parents. They are about empowering private interests to chomp away at the giant mountain of education money in this country. They are about dismantling any sort of oversight and accountability; it’s striking how many of these voucher bills/laws very specifically forbid the state to interfere with the vendors in any way, shape or form.
Think of voucher programs this way.
The state announces, “We are dismantling the public education system. You are on your own. You will have to shop for your child’s education, piece by piece, in a marketplace bound by very little oversight and very few guardrails. In this new education ecosystem, you will have to pay your own way. To take some of the sting out of this, we’ll give you a small pocketful of money to help defray expenses. Good luck.”
It’s not a voucher system. It’s a pay your own way system. It’s a you’re on your own system. The voucher is not the point of the system; it’s simply a small payment to keep you from noticing that you’ve just been cut loose.
Freedom and empowerment will come, as always, in direct proportion to the amount of money you have to spend.
The voucher amount will dwindle. That amount is based on what the public school system spends to educate a child, and taxpayers will shrink that amount going forward as the schools themselves shrink to holding facilities for students who can’t find a private vendor to accept them, or whose parents can’t afford what the voucher won’t cover. And remember, we’ve seen this movie before– after Brown v. Board of Education, white families in some states moved their children into private segregation academies, and then they cut public school taxes (because why keep paying taxes on the system that your child no longer used).
Vouchers are the tail, not the dog. They are the public-facing image of privatization– and not just privatization of the “delivery” of education. Voucherization is also about privatizing the responsibility for educating children, about telling parents that education is their problem, not the community’s.
We need another term for discussing this family of policies; “voucher” doesn’t begin to capture what’s truly at stake. I can imagine a world in which charter schools are a viable, even useful part of a robust pubic education system; it’s not at all the world we currently live in, but I can imagine it. But the system that voucher proponents want is absolutely incompatible with a functioning public education system. And it has nothing to do with freedom.
Chalkbeat NY reports that Mayor Eric Adams (whose campaign was heavily funded by charter-loving billionaires) intends to cut $960 million from the budget for the city’s public schools.
The city’s education department budget would drop by nearly $960 million next school year under a more detailed budget proposal released by Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday, though city officials did not offer specifics about the impact on individual campuses.
Two-thirds of that cut, or $652 million, is the result of Adams’ decision to reduce the city’s contribution to the education department. Another $297 million is from a drop in federal funding, which is drying up as pandemic relief programs end.
Part of the city’s cut is tied to a mandate from the mayor earlier this month calling on city agencies to cut spending, including at the education department. That raised questions about whether schools would take a hit, but on Wednesday, Adams vowed that this specific cost-saving measure “will not take a dime from classrooms.”
Instead, that reduction — totaling $325 million — will largely come from recalculations on how much the city spends in fringe benefits, such as health insurance for teachers. (Officials emphasized this would not result in a loss of benefits or other services.)
“We had to make tough choices in this budget,” Adams said Wednesday. “We had to negotiate competing needs. We realize that not everyone will be happy but that is okay because that is how you get stuff done.”
The education department’s operating budget would total about $30.5 billion next year under the mayor’s plan, down by about 3%.
Note that a large part of the savings will be funded by changes (cuts) in teachers’ health insurance.
Since the city will soon have to comply with a state law requiring class size reduction, it’s not clear how the city will pay for the additional costs of smaller classes. It is a very valuable reform, but it’s costly.
The city will also bear the cost of 14 new charters. Currently the 275 charters in the city are a heavy expense, since the city must pay their rent, even if they locate in private space. In some cases, such as Success Academy, the charter owns the space and still charges the city exorbitant rent.
The charter lobby in New York is well funded by billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Paul Tudor Jones as a long list of Wall Street hedge funders. These elites want the state and New York City to open unlimited numbers of charter schools, despite their impact on public schools, attended by nearly 90% of students. New York City has a cap of 275 charters.
But that’s not enough for the billionaires. Governor Kathy Hochul is attentive to their needs because they supply campaign cash.
The legislature rejected her proposal to lift the caps, but she succeeded in inflicting 14 “zombie charters” on NYC. A zombie charter is one that opened but failed.
At a time of budget cuts, this decision will put more stress on the city’s public schools.
“The Senate and the Assembly did the right thing by rejecting the governor’s plan to lift the New York charter cap. Unfortunately, the governor listened to the demands of a handful of billionaires and revived 14 zombie charters for New York City — even though New York City has nearly 40,000 unused charter seats. Now it’s time for the governor to listen to New York parents who want accountability and transparency from the charter sector and an end to loopholes that benefit corporate charters at the expense of our public schools.”
Southern politicians like to boast that their states are safer that big cities like New York City. But as Politico shows, the reverse is true. In an article by Colin Woodard, he attributes the differences to the founding cultures of different regions.
Listen to the southern right talk about violence in America and you’d think New York City was as dangerous as Bakhmut on Ukraine’s eastern front.
In October, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed crime in New York City was “out of control” and blamed it on George Soros. Another Sunshine State politico, former president Donald Trump, offered his native city up as a Democrat-run dystopia, one of those places “where the middle class used to flock to live the American dream are now war zones, literal war zones.” In May 2022, hours after 19 children were murdered at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott swatted back suggestions that the state could save lives by implementing tougher gun laws by proclaiming “Chicago and L.A. and New York disprove that thesis.
In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/j50EM/4/
If you grew up in the coal mining region of eastern Pennsylvania your chance of dying of a gunshot is about half that if you grew up in the coalfields of West Virginia, three hundred miles to the southwest. Someone living in the most rural counties of South Carolina is more than three times as likely to be killed by gunshot than someone living in the equally rural counties of New York’s Adirondacks or the impoverished rural counties facing Mexico across the lower reaches of the Rio Grande.
The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed.
Misty Griffin has an important story to tell, based on her dreadful personal experience. Her story is important especially at this moment when so many politicians are repeating the mantra of “parent rights.” Misty reminds us that children too have rights, and not all parents are trustworthy. Misty wrote her story in a book titled Tears of the Silenced: An Amish True Crime Memoir of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Brutal Betrayal, and Ultimate Survival.
I asked her to write her story for you.
She wrote:
In the United States, freedom of religion has the ability to cancel out every single child safety law/regulation on the books. Children across the nation are cloistered into strict religious communities that either have their own private religious schools or homeschool their children. Most of these groups do not believe in reporting child abuse and stress the importance of severe corporal punishment and view sexual abuse as a moral failing rather than a serious crime. Children in such religions/churches/cults are left with no one in their orbit who will help them out of abusive situations. Many of these children suffer greatly on a daily basis and seem forgotten by regular society.
A bit of my story.
My stepdad was a wanted pedophile who fled the Seattle area in the late 70s after a warrant was put out for his arrest for molesting the neighbor’s 2 small daughters. My mom met him in 1986 when I was 4. My sister and I became isolated and cut off from society. We were sexually abused and severely beaten multiple times a day.
When I was 7 years old, we started dressing in long dresses and scarves. When I was 10 years old we were dressing like the Amish. My mom told everyone we were being homeschooled (in reality we just did sporadic math and reading lessons here and there in case anyone from the state wanted to see schoolwork.) When I was 11 we moved to a remote mountain ranch in northern WA. At 18 yrs old, I tried to escape and was taken to a real Amish community. Three and half years later I fled the Amish community after 6 months of sexual abuse by the bishop.
My entire church knew that the bishop was a sexual predator. They had shunned him for six weeks for molesting his daughter a few years before I landed in the community. I reported the bishop to the police because I was suspicious he was molesting the children. The police drug their feet and told me point blank that they had to be careful not to trample on the religious rights of the Amish community. The bishop ended up escaping to Canada with his whole family and went on to molest almost all of the 11 children. Eleven years later he was finally sent to prison after one of his daughters asked a neighbor for help. They had come back to the United States by that time.
Child Rights Act
I had approximately a third-grade education when I came out into the “world.” It’s so sad that stories like mine are allowed to happen, but my story is not the only one, In recent years I have received thousands of emails from people who grew up in strict religions/cults. We must call out this religious aspect of child abuse because no matter how many laws and regulations we put on the books if this issue is not addressed and children are not given rights, children in strict religions and cults will never be reached.
I am not anti-religion; I am a non-denominational Christian, but religion should not allow anyone to bypass child safety measures. If you agree please sign my Child Rights Act Petition and share it on social media. Religious Rights should not outweigh children’s Human Rights.
Helen Gym is a brilliant, eloquent progressive candidate for Mayor of Philadelphia. She is an activist and a member of the City Council. I enthusiastically endorse her candidacy. I have known her for a dozen years and am repeatedly impressed by her values, her energy, and her passion for justice. Philadelphia schools have suffered grievously due to budget cuts imposed by the state. A decade ago, two young children died because their schools had no nurse. Helen thinks that every school should have a nurse and counselors. In the suburbs, such services are taken for granted. But not in Philadelphia, where public schools and their students have been shortchanged for years.
Will Bunch is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who has followed the mayoral race closely. He sums up the reasons why she is the right person at the right time. Her election would bring hope to Philadelphia. This election could be a turning point for this great but neglected city.
He writes:
Philly needs a bullhorn mayor to slice through decades of status quo baloney
In a crowded Philly mayoral race, Helen Gym is fighting for the city’s poor and neglected. No wonder status quo elites are so desperate to stop her.
Philadelphia City Councilmembers Helen Gym, Jamie Gauthier, and Kendra Brooks walk with protesters following the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Steven M. Falk / MCT
It was one of those raw late April afternoons in Philadelphia where the weather in the far corner of Love Park — unrelentingly grey, windy, occasional drizzle — seemed to match the grim civic mood looming over the City Hall tower in the background. At the supposed 12:45 p.m. start time for this Helen-Gym-for-mayor campaign rally, just a few folks milled around and chatted with the candidate in her bright red coat, carrying a reusable Target shopping bag, and you briefly wonder if you got the time or place wrong.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a blue-clad army of about 50 supporters — young and old, Black, brown and white, including members of the teachers’ union that has endorsed Gym, carrying signs that read “The Wealth To Fix Our City Exists!” — crossed JFK Boulevard all at once, and it was showtime. Over the next half-hour, speakers from the various Jenga blocks of Philly’s shaky civil society reimagined the city as it could be. A librarian from South Philly spoke about the dream of reopening on the weekends as a community refuge. An instructor and union leader from the Community College of Philadelphia imagined the benefits of free tuition.
“When I say, “Moral!,” chanted emcee Elisa King, a minister and counselor at CCP, “you say, “Budget!’” — driving home the rally’s theme that City Hall needs to focus on restoring vital services, not more incremental tax cuts.
When the 55-year-old former city council member finally got the microphone, the spring sun had seared through the layer of clouds. Gym declared her idea of a moral budget “is not defined by the corporate-backed interests, the developers and the status-quo electeds, bureaucrats and wealthy individuals who have long tried to buy this campaign with their tired ideas and their technocratic solutions.” The crowd whooped. “Those candidates have played it safe all their lives.”
The only remaining progressive in a May 16 primary field whittled down to five or six major candidates defined her rivals’ ideas as “just too small for this moment. They’re talking about safety that’s only defined by policing. They’re talking about development only in terms defined by the tax cuts and those people who get to benefit. They manage crisis — we’re here to end them!” Almost on cue, a passing dump truck on the boulevard tooted its horn loudly in support.
It’s fitting that the race to pick the 100th mayor of America’s founding city is also arguably its most consequential in decades, perhaps since the divisive Frank Rizzo era. That’s because the coronavirus also attacked the civic immune system that had allowed the city’s leaders to ignore the warning symptoms of the nation’s highest rate of deep poverty and unacceptable schools housed in unsafe buildings while touting the surface glitz of Philadelphia’s comeback … for tourists, and handful of gentrifying neighborhoods. Now, a spike in gun violence and related dysfunction has put the nation’s sixth-biggest city at a crossroads.
I might be The Inquirer’s national columnist but I’ve watched this local election closely — not just because I work and pay taxes and ride the troubled subways here (or because my two adult offspring live here) but also because what Philadelphia voters decide in little more than two weeks will say a lot about how America is going to solve its urban problems, especially persistent poverty. In this (sort of) post-pandemic era, comparable cities such as Boston, Chicago, and L.A. have rejected old-school police-union fearmongering for young, progressive mayors who see how issues like attacking climate change or youth unemployment can bring real change.
It’s not at all clear yet whether Philadelphia has the courage or boldness to follow its sister cities down that fresh pathway. I’ve watched both televised debates and have been somewhat taken aback with how most of the major candidates have crafted a message around not new ideas but “leadership.” What they are really offering, in essence, is a pledge to restore some presence and personality to City Hall that’s been missing during the shockingly absent Jim Kenney administration, but with little evidence they’d change the status quo policies of minor tax cuts or FOP-endorsed policing that coincided with decline.
In the debates and on the campaign trail, Gym has set herself apart as the only candidate who fully grasps the root problems in the most desperate neighborhoods — and who wants to go big to actually address them. How many times can we hire more cops or return to “stop-and-frisk” policing with the same tired results? That’s why Gym is the leader in pushing for trained responders to replace cops on mental-health calls — hugely successful where it’s been tried — and is the only candidate who agrees with the majority of Philadelphians who twice elected Larry Krasner as DA, that some criminal-justice reforms were long overdue.
Elite critics of some of Gym’s bigger and bolder ideas — going all-out in fixing unsafe school buildings, or guaranteed employment for adults under 30 — call them unrealistic pie in the sky. Most everyday voters know what matters most about a political leaders is less about the budgetary small print and more about who and what they are willing to fight for. And in her seven years as an at-large city council member, Gym has fought for what cynics had written off as lost causes, and won a strikingly high percentage of the time.
A ”fair workweek” ordinance that mandates essential workers have predictable schedules. Long-overdue eviction protections for the city’s beleaguered tenants. A return to local control of the Philadelphia School District while fighting to restore school nurses and counselors. A push to get lead out of school drinking water. No wonder that after her first term on council, The Inquirer Editorial Board hailed her as “a savvy, passionate and progressive leader.”
Things are a lot different now that Gym is running for mayor. While she’s been endorsed by the influential Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and a panoply of other unions and progressive groups, many of the city’s elites — even some who’ve been somewhat supportive of her council work — seem dead-set on preventing her from running Philly. Some of that is with a budgetary magnifying glass, but much of it centers on attacking her personality and blocking her ideas. Yes, she changed her mind on charter schools after founding one — but who wouldn’t after watching them become a negative drain on public education? Of course it was a mistake to protest the Union League and go there just days later, but is that a big-enough reason to punish Gym — and the city — by voting for someone who doesn’t share your values?
“I think it’s about making things about individuals and reducing it to isolated incidences rather than looking at a track record that holds steady over time,” Gym told me Wednesday after her rally. “The way to marginalize real movements for change is to hyper-individualize faults within imperfect people. I mean, I’m not perfect — I make mistakes and all of that — but I think the difference with me is I have a 20-year-plus track record of standing alongside communities.”
One truism about politics is that a lot of times you can gauge a candidate by the enemies they make. The Chamber of Commerce crowd and their handmaidens aren’t fighting Gym because of her mistakes but because of the things that she gets right. There’s a reason that many of Philadelphia’s most essential yet underheard folks — the teachers and librarians and social workers — don’t just think that Gym is the best among a large field of candidates, but truly believe that her election in 2023 is a matter of civic life-or-death.
“She is rising to the moment, which is a moment of crisis for our city,” Stan Shapiro, vice-chair of Philly Neighborhood Networksand a former City Council staffer, told me before the rally. “It’s not a time for the status quo, for business as usual, for just keeping the lights on. There aren’t enough lights. There aren’t enough rec centers. There aren’t enough health centers.”
One of the other straw-man arguments from Gym’s critics centers on how she’s carried a bullhorn to protest in the streets on behalf of Philly’s kids, or its underserved people, or the moment when — the horror! — she was willing to get detained in Harrisburg to dramatize how state Republicans won’t invest in education. We’ve had decades of “conveners” and glad-handers on the second floor of City Hall with too little to show for it. It’s time to try a bullhorn mayor, a real fighter. In a race with many candidates, there is only one that truly matters.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times is an extraordinary opinion writer. I subscribe to the LA Times, and I always look forward to his cogent insights. In this one, he describes the tactics of rightwing lawyers, who shop for rightwing judges. When they wanted to invalidate a key plank in Obamacare, they knew exactly where to go to find a zealot to take away free preventive care from all Americans. If not reversed, this decision will cost hundreds of thousands of lives–by denying access to early screenings for cancer and other deadly diseases.
Hiltzik writes:
You might have thought that, more than a dozen years after its enactment, the Affordable Care Act was finally safe from interference by right-wing judges carrying water for religious fanatics and anti-government activists.
Unfortunately, a ruling from a one-horse federal courtroom in Texas reminds us that there’s almost an endless supply of those litigants and the judges who run with them. Less than two weeks ago, U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor invalidated an ACA provision mandating that a long list of preventive care services be provided to patients without co-pays or deductibles.
If O’Connor’s March 30 ruling stands (the government is certain to appeal), it would block no-fee preventive services such as breast- and cervical-cancer screenings for millions of women, smoking cessation programs, hepatitis tests, screening for diabetes, osteoporosis, depression, HIV and many other conditions and health risks.
A court oversteps its authority when an injunction does more than benefit the plaintiffs who have sued.
— Law professors Nicholas Bagley and Samuel Bray
The anti-HIV provision, as it happens, was the principal target of the plaintiffs in this case. Among them are Steven Hotze, a self-described Christian owner of a “wellness” center who complained that the Affordable Care Act mandate to provide anti-HIV drugs would “facilitate behaviors such as homosexual sodomy, prostitution, and intravenous drug use — all of which are contrary to Dr. Hotze’s sincere religious beliefs.”
Hotze also objects to other preventive-care mandates that require his business’ health plans to cover screening for and counseling about sexually transmitted diseases “for those engaged in non-marital sexual behavior.”
O’Connor’s ruling undermines one of the bedrock public-health features of the Affordable Care Act, its encouragement of services aimed at keeping Americans healthy by catching signs of developing medical issues before they require costly interventions.
Sadly, the ruling didn’t come as much of a surprise: Not only did O’Connor telegraph his decision during hearings on the lawsuit months ago, but he’s the same judge who in 2018 tried to throw a monkey wrench into Obamacare by declaring the entire law unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court slapped him down with a 7-2 ruling upholding the act’s constitutionality in 2021, but that didn’t seem to invest O’Connor with any measure of humility.
O’Connor’s latest ruling underscores a major problem with America’s federal judicial system. That’s the ability of hack judges in backwater courthouses to interfere with policy by issuing nationwide injunctions based on specious or at least shallow legal arguments.
In time, we will see whether the Trump Supreme Court agrees that Americans don’t need preventive health care.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 