As I prepared to celebrate the Martin Luther King holiday, I listened to a sermon King delivered in a little Baptist church in Chicago in 1967.
The sermon, taken from the Gospel of Luke, was based on the story of a foolish man who valued wealth over everything, including his immortal soul. But King in his genius understood that this was not just the story of a single man. It was the tale of America—a country that had lost its very soul to the twin ills of materialism and racism. The story of the foolish man was, in many ways, the story of all of us.
WASHINGTON—For Chief Justice John Roberts, required by the Constitution to preside when the Senate tries a president, the impeachment of Donald Trump offers a chance to distinguish the judiciary from the partisanship engulfing the Capitol.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts will be a central figure in the ongoing drama of the Donald Trump presidency in coming months. He is due to preside over a Senate impeachment trial, while the Supreme Court he leads will rule on a titanic clash over the president’s attempts to keep his financial records secret.
For three decades, Georgia and Florida have been battling over how to share a precious resource : water. Georgia has it, and Florida, which is downstream, says it’s not getting its fair share. The dispute is once again headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Florida wants the justices to cap Georgia’s water use. But a court-appointed special master recently rejected that idea.
“I got five words out before Justice Scalia interrupted me.”
That’s how Erwin Chemerinsky, now the dean of Berkeley Law School, recalls his first U.S. Supreme Court argument back in 2002. He was referring, of course, to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the larger-than-life jurist known for putting advocates through the wringer at oral arguments over his three-decade high court tenure.
Scalia’s aggressive approach, aided by increasingly inquisitive colleagues, gave rise to a notoriously “hot bench” that asked so many questions, it sometimes left lawyers little room to get words in edgewise.
"The 86-year-old four-time cancer survivor has resumed an active role in oral arguments and is often the first of the nine justices to pose a question. She regularly asks whether the Supreme Court should even decide the legal issue before it. By framing the debate in this way, Ginsburg could limit the five conservative justices from setting new precedent over the dissent of the court’s four liberals."
It’s been three weeks since the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump, and yet the outlines of the process that will decide whether he remains in office are still stuck in political limbo. Republican leaders are calling for a swift, minimalist trial while Democrats demand new witnesses and evidence. And on Monday, it seemed as if Democrats might actually be able to nab a high-profile witness. Former national security advisor John Bolton announced that he would finally testify before Congress if subpoenaed by the Senate, introducing the possibility that new and potentially damaging evidence against Trump could still appear, perhaps shifting the narrative and public opinion on impeachment.
But Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell looks unlikely to cooperate, or at least, unlikely to make a decision on whether to call new witnesses immediately. On Tuesday, he said he had the votes to open the trial now in spite of Democrats objections, arguing that he’s just following the precedents set by the Clinton impeachment trial.
"As Trump reshapes the federal judiciary with staunch conservative and controversial picks, some Harvard Law School students appear to be thinking twice about applying for clerk jobs with them, and passing up what are generally considered plum positions."
When the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump opens, the man in the center chair will be Chief Justice John Roberts. His role is spelled out in the Constitution.
It says that the chief justice "shall preside" over the Senate trial of a president. Those who envision a powerful role for Roberts point to Senate rules that would allow him to make decisions on "all questions of evidence." In theory, at least, that might enable Roberts to rule on motions from the House managers seeking to compel testimony from White House aides, like former national security adviser John Bolton, and others who had been blocked by Trump from testifying.
When the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump opens, the man in the center chair will be Chief Justice John Roberts. His role is spelled out in the Constitution.
It says that the chief justice "shall preside" over the Senate trial of a president. Those who envision a powerful role for Roberts point to Senate rules that would allow him to make decisions on "all questions of evidence." In theory, at least, that might enable Roberts to rule on motions from the House managers seeking to compel testimony from White House aides, like former national security adviser John Bolton, and others who had been blocked by Trump from testifying.
"Now Roberts will be in the national spotlight as never before, presiding over the Senate trial of President Donald Trump before an audience of millions. Roberts, who turns 65 later this month, has played multiple roles in Washington but kept the same face : reserved, practiced, steady."
Roberts is often viewed as an incrementalist in his judicial philosophy, conscious of the fact that the Supreme Court risks its legitimacy if its 5-4 conservative majority appears too aggressive in moving the law to the right.
The publicity-shy, traditional conservative jurist not only will preside over the Republican president’s Senate impeachment trial that formally began on Thursday but in the coming months will cast potentially decisive votes in major cases before the Supreme Court including one in which Trump is fighting to keep his financial records secret.
In the Senate trial over whether to remove Trump from office over two charges passed by the House of Representatives arising from his request that Ukraine investigate political rival Joe Biden, the role Roberts will play is expected to be primarily ceremonial. The Republican-led chamber sets the rules and the 100 senators serve as jurors, with Roberts presiding over the proceedings on the Senate floor.
When the proceedings begin in earnest on Tuesday, Roberts will have to juggle his trial commitments with his “day job” at the Supreme Court across the street from the U.S. Capitol.
The court hears arguments in cases on Tuesday and Wednesday, including a closely watched dispute over religious rights involving public funding for students to attend private religious schools. The arguments are expected to end at around noon, giving Roberts time to take his place in the Senate for the planned 1 p.m. trial session.
After next week, the Supreme Court is scheduled to take its usual mid-winter break, with the next arguments scheduled on Feb. 24. By then, the impeachment trial could very well be done.
The director of a forthcoming documentary on the life of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says the film will give the American people the chance “to hear his very remarkable life story directly.”
Michael Pack, the director of "Created Equal : Clarence Thomas in His Own Words," told “Fox & Friends” Monday that he had "conducted over 30 interviews with him [Thomas] and his wife over a six month period and they are the only people interviewed in the film."
In the documentary, which premieres nationwide Jan. 31, Thomas reflects on his contentious 1991 confirmation hearing and shares his thoughts about Joe Biden, who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts pulled double duty on Tuesday as he juggled dual responsibilities at the Supreme Court and President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.
His long day began in the familiar confines of the ornate marble-fronted Supreme Court building before he headed across the street to the U.S. Capitol to preside over the full opening session of the impeachment trial.
On home turf, Roberts, 64, oversaw back-to-back Supreme Court arguments in the morning. Roberts walked up to the mahogany bench, looking calm, and scanned the audience before taking his seat and donning his reading glasses. He appeared relaxed and engaged as the lawyers in front of him argued their cases before the nine justices.
Roberts welcomed each new attorney sworn in by the court clerk with a smile. And when the arguments began he listened closely, shifting his gaze periodically from papers before him to the lawyer who was speaking.
On two occasions, Roberts made quips that prompted laughter in the courtroom. The first case involved whether a convicted felon’s sentence for illegal gun possession should be increased under a federal law based on his previous convictions for drug trafficking. The second was a fight between companies over whether their legal dispute should be heard by an Alabama court or an international arbitrator in Germany.
Washington (CNN). As Chief Justice John Roberts presides over the Senate trial of President Donald Trump, he has a highly public perch but little control. He is directing the proceedings but almost certainly will not cast any votes. He is fulfilling his constitutional duty but leave Trump’s fate to the Senate, which has "sole power to try all impeachments."
In many respects, it represents the polar opposite of his life at the Supreme Court.
These days, Roberts not only holds the center chair of the nine-member court but, since the 2018 retirement of centrist conservative Anthony Kennedy, resides at the middle of the ideological spectrum of the bench. That often puts Roberts in a position as the decider, in a venue where cameras are not allowed and most of the justices’ work occurs behind closed doors.
"He is widely considered one of the most influential legal thinkers of his time by lawyers, academics, and historians, whether they agree with him or not. And I say, ’If you ever had a chance to meet and talk with the justice, you would love and admire him as a human being as much as I do,’" the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner and former Thomas clerk writes.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has returned to his day job, and he must be relieved.
His grim demeanor during President Trump’s impeachment trial made plain that he did not enjoy his role in it. As the trial ended, the chief justice said he had “attempted to carry out ill-defined responsibilities in an unfamiliar setting” during “my period of required residency.”
He approached the task of presiding over the trial with stoic restraint, no doubt having concluded that doing as little as possible was the best way to try to protect the authority and legitimacy of the Supreme Court in an era of poisonous partisan warfare.
WASHINGTON – A legal and political earthquake hit the nation’s capital precisely four years ago when Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died on a hunting trip in Texas. President Barack Obama was poised to nominate Scalia’s successor and give the court its first liberal majority in decades.
It didn’t happen, of course.
Within hours of Scalia’s death on Feb. 13, 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., vowed to keep the seat open until the presidential election in November. He made good on that pledge, and the vacancy remained for 14 months, until President Donald Trump filled it with Scalia acolyte Neil Gorsuch.
Fast-forward to 2020.
If a vacancy were to occur this presidential election year – with the staying power of 86-year-old Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a four-time cancer survivor, a perpetual subject of speculation – Democrats and liberals will say it should remain open through the November election.
"It’s going to be very hard for Republicans to argue that it’s appropriate to consider a Trump nominee in 2020 with a straight face," says Brian Fallon, executive director of the liberal advocacy group Demand Justice. "We’ll be ever closer to the election."
But with the White House and Senate in Republican hands, McConnell has said the 2016 precedent does not apply. He has vowed to confirm as many federal judges as possible.
Harvard Law School Library Opens Antonin Scalia Collection to the Public. "While most of the collection consists of papers from his time on the Supreme Court and the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals, the library will not release any case materials during the lifetime of other justices and judges involved in the cases for which Scalia worked."
A group that opposes affirmative action filed an appeal Tuesday of a federal ruling that Harvard had not intentionally discriminated against Asian-American applicants, ratcheting up a challenge to decades of Supreme Court decisions upholding race-conscious selection in college admissions.
For the past 18 months, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and other conservatives have plied the White House with memos and suggestions about which people to fire—and who should replace them. President Trump has generally treated Ms. Thomas’s suggestions coolly, passing them off to advisers, according to people familiar with Ms. Thomas’s efforts. But since the end of the Senate impeachment trial, the president has become more distrustful of the people filling the ranks of government and has been giving those recommendations a closer look.
On abortion, gun rights and more, the future could be determined by how fully the court’s new conservative majority embraces a rigid understanding of the Constitution.
The line between law and politics has always been blurry, and judges have often professed to sharpen it. Claims of unblinking fidelity to the text have increasingly become the crowning orthodoxy on the right in recent decades. Now [Justice Neil] Gorsuch and his conservative colleagues have a chance to harness that energy to transform the law.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the appeal of a police officer who shot a suspect multiple times, letting stand what the officer argued is an unprecedented and dangerous appeals court ruling.
The justices passed on North Carolina officer Zachery Pittman’s petition despite his claim that he was trying to save his own life, leaving undisturbed a ruling he said “will eviscerate qualified immunity for law enforcement officers in use of deadly force situations.”
Justice Samuel Alito would have granted the officer’s petition, the high court said in its orders list containing the denial.
Both gun-rights advocates and educational equity activists use similar legal strategies. Why does the Supreme Court treat them so differently ?
This is an essay about two words no one wants to see in the same story : guns and schools. But this isn’t about school shootings. This is instead about two starkly different social-activist groups : gun-rights proponents and educational-equity advocates. It’s about their steadfast pursuit of wildly divergent civil rights. It’s about a surprising similarity in their legal strategies. And more than anything, it’s a story about law and ideology, and the difficulty of deciding the former without the influence of the latter.
1. La charge de la juge fédérale Lynn Adelman ("The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy", Harvard Law & Policy Review, 2020).
This article argues that economic and political developments in the last fifty years have in many respects undermined America’s democratic institutions and that, instead of working to strengthen democracy, the Supreme Court over which Chief Justice Roberts presides, is substantially contributing to its erosion. The Court has done this in two ways, first by carrying on a sustained assault on the right of poor people and minorities to vote. The Court has virtually eviscerated the landmark Voting Rights Act, it has upheld strict voter identification laws that serve no purpose other than to make voting more difficult, and it has authorized states to purge thousands of people from the voting rolls. In addition, the Court has abdicated its responsibility to end the anti-democratic process of partisan gerrymandering. The second way in which the Court is weakening democracy is by reinforcing the enormous imbalance in wealth and political power that has developed in recent decades and that has contributed to undermining democracy. The Court has done this by consistently strengthening the economic and political power of corporations and wealthy individuals, as, for example, through its campaign finance decisions, and by reducing that of ordinary Americans as, for example, through its decisions involving labor unions, forced arbitration and the expansion of Medicaid.
2. Une critique étonnamment idéologique. La réplique du professeur Josh Blackman dans Reason le 10 mars 2020.
I had never heard of U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman. He was appointed to the Eastern District of Wisconsin in 1997. According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, Judge Adelman found that Wisconsin’s Voter ID law violated the 14th Amendment, and was considered for a Seventh Circuit vacancy.
Alas, now I am aware of Judge Adelman. He posted to SSRN a forthcoming article, titled "The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy." It will be published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review, the official law review of the American Constitution Society.
(...)
It has become en vogue for federal judges to criticize President Trump in such terms. But I don’t recall seeing a lower-court judge charge the Chief Justice with being "disingenuous" or "misleading." Indeed, Judge Adelman has come close to accusing Roberts of committing perjury–a crime, and an impeachable offense.
3. Il a raison sur le fond. Mais peut-être le moment n’était-il pas bien choisi, font valoir Dahlia Lithwick et Mark Joseph Stern dans Slate le 10 mars 2020.
Washington (CNN)In October 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign appeared to be lagging, his strategists suggested he appeal to female voters by promising to put a woman on the Supreme Court.
In its two-century history, no woman had ever been nominated, and Reagan’s announcement at a Los Angeles news conference made front-page headlines.
But when presidential candidate Joe Biden first declared in South Carolina he wanted to name a black woman to the Supreme Court, and when Rev. Jesse Jackson recently said in Michigan he was endorsing Bernie Sanders because he personally promised to name an African-American woman justice, the statements drew little notice.
The same was true Sunday night at the CNN debate, when Biden repeated his commitment to a black woman on the court. Audiences understandably seized on his additional, fresher vow to choose a woman as his vice president.
CNN, 16 mars 2020.
[Les spéculations de presse désignent : Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, juge fédérale à Washington, DC, 49 ans - Leondra Kruger, juge à la Cour suprême de Californie, 43 ans - Sherrilyn Ifill, juriste de la NAACP, 57 ans - Melissa Murray, professeur de droit à la NYU, 44 ans."]
La Cour suprême des États-Unis a statué lundi que la clause de Due Process n’oblige pas les États à offrir une défense d’aliénation mentale traditionnelle fondée sur l’incapacité d’un accusé à distinguer le bien du mal.
La Cour suprême a rendu une décision par 6 voix contre 3 dans le cas d’un condamné à mort du Kansas, James Kraig Kahler, qui a été reconnu coupable du meurtre de quatre membres de sa famille en 2009. La juge Elena Kagan a rédigé l’opinion de la majorité, rejointe par le président John G. Roberts Jr. et les juges Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch et Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Au Kansas, un accusé peut invoquer une maladie mentale pour montrer qu’il ne possédait pas l’état mental requis pour être déclaré pénalement responsable. Un accusé peut également soulever tout type de maladie mentale après sa condamnation pour demander une peine d’emprisonnement inférieure ou un placement dans un établissement de santé mentale.
Le Kansas fait partie d’une poignée d’États qui ne reconnaissent pas la défense d’aliénation mentale traditionnelle qui prévoit l’acquittement lorsqu’un défendeur atteint de maladie mentale est incapable de distinguer le bien du mal.
At a time when government officials are justifiably limiting in-person gatherings to slow the spread of COVID-19, the public should have access to essential government activities. The Supreme Court is no exception, which is why it must finally allow cameras in its courtroom.
Washington (CNN)The coronavirus pandemic is forcing all courts to alter their procedures, but the US Supreme Court, imbued with an archaic, insular air and a majority of justices over age 65, will face a distinct challenge to keep operating and provide public access to proceedings.
The justices for years have refused to televise hearings, livestream the audio from sessions or even provide recordings of oral arguments the same day they are held. The Supreme Court of Canada, meanwhile, has been webcasting its proceedings for more than a decade, some lower US courts livestream audio of arguments, and many US state courts allow live TV coverage.
The virus is bound to force Supreme Court justices into new territory. They may open their operations in more modern ways. Or, if they move in the opposite direction and shun any high-tech alternative, they might postpone all previously scheduled March and April oral argument sessions, a total 20 disputes, until next summer or fall.
If Roberts is serious about protecting his fellow jurists from future political attacks, then he must do more than issue stern statements of disapproval. Instead, he should reconsider the way the court conveys its decisions to the public. Specifically, he should make per curiam opinions—anonymous opinions, issued without disclosing the identity of the authoring judge or the voting blocs’ membership—the new standard. Per curiam opinions circumvent the political cues associated with a given justice’s identity and instead allow the court to present its holdings as an institution. Not only would this shield the justices from being targeted as individuals, but research also shows that it would strengthen public support for the court’s decisions.
She helped Ruth Bader Ginsburg win a federal judgeship. “I would not hold the good job I have today were it not for Barbara,” Justice Ginsburg said.
Barbara Babcock in 2010. She helped Jimmy Carter appoint more women and minorities to the federal bench than all previous presidents combined.
Barbara Babcock in 2010. She helped Jimmy Carter appoint more women and minorities to the federal bench than all previous presidents combined.
When President Jimmy Carter appointed Barbara Allen Babcock to head the Justice Department’s civil division in the late 1970s, he tasked her with increasing the number of women and members of minorities on the federal bench.
Among those she lobbied for was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a law professor, to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. But Griffin Bell, the attorney general, was not keen on Ms. Ginsburg.
“He was tired of hearing Ruth’s name,” Professor Babcock said in a 2018 speech at the New York City Bar Association. Besides, he had said, with so many more women becoming lawyers, it would be easy to find one to fill the vacancy.
_“Women are not fungible,” Professor Babcock wrote to him in a blunt memo, adding : “For a very visible appointment that could lead to the Supreme Court, it has to be Ruth.” Not naming someone so well qualified who had also paid her dues, she said, would be “a slap in the face.”
President Madison did not have children with his wife, Dolley. Leading scholars believe he was impotent, infertile, or both. But the stories I have heard since my childhood say that James Madison, a Founding Father of our nation, was also a founding father of my African American family.
In my childhood, whenever I whined or squirmed or got into trouble, my mother repeated the refrain : “Always remember — you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.” This is my family’s credo, the statement that has guided us for 200 years.
Wendy Roth has been arguing for years that the U.S. Census Bureau should ask about race in a different way. The race box that people check for themselves on the census doesn’t always match the box someone else might have checked for them. And that, Roth says, is a problem.
Roth, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, began researching that mismatch in racial identification in the early 2000s. She recruited 60 New Yorkers who had been born in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, showed them the census race question and asked them how they would answer. The responses surprised her.
The black individual passing for white in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction by white writers is usually a woman, and usually when the truth emerges, the purity of the white race is saved. However, in An Imperative Duty (1891) by William Dean Howells, a Boston girl is ashamed to find out that legally she is colored, but her white suitor marries her anyway and takes her off to a life in Italy. In the beginning of Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), a “high-bred” black man in North Carolina returns to his hometown to ask his sister to take his dead white wife’s place and bring up his son. A young aristocrat she meets in her new white life proposes marriage, but soon learns the truth of her origins. Literary convention, in the form of a fever, kills her. The white suitor realizes too late that love conquers all. He promises to keep the brother’s secret.
I stand in the aisle of the school bus while the other seventh graders snicker and block me from sitting next to them, as they have for the entire school year. Taking my seat next to the bus driver, I look out to the road with resignation. My great-aunt, adorned in a colorful sari, waves goodbye to me while the entire school bus looks on. I want to disappear into the dingy brown vinyl bus seats. With the newfound cruelty of adolescence, I scoff and loudly tell my classmates, “That crazy lady is just my maid.”
I am still ashamed of how I treated my great-aunt. I also know it was a form of preteen self-preservation. I desperately wanted what so many other children that age do : to be as bland and vanilla as possible, just so that I could get through the day without being ostracized.
ALEXANDRIA, La. (City of Alexandria) - Alexandria Mayor Jeffrey W. Hall joined local historic preservation supporters Tuesday afternoon in the Alexander Fulton Mini Park downtown to unveil a historical marker in honor of P.B.S. Pinchback, Louisiana’s first African-American governor.
Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback was born in 1837 in Georgia to a white father, who was a planter, and a black mother who was a former slave. While he could have tried to pass for white, Pinchback embraced his African-American roots. During the Civil War and after the fall of New Orleans, Pinchback recruited the first set of African-American volunteer soldiers for the Union Army in Louisiana known as the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, and he served as its first Captain.
Self-Portrait is Williams’s attempt to liberate his mind from the shackles of conventional racial designations once he realizes that his children will never be seen by anyone—not even, most likely, by themselves—as black. Williams, the son of a white mother and a black father, whom he calls “Pappy” and who serves as an intellectual and ethical anchor in Self-Portrait and a previous memoir, marries a white French woman, and their firstborn child, a daughter named Marlow, emerges in the delivery room with blond hair and blue eyes. Because Marlow will not share his racial identity, Williams decides that that identity no longer suits him. Instead of black, by the end of the book, he calls himself “ex-black”—which may be a bit like threatening to run away from home but never making it past the front porch.
Like many immigrant children, Daniel Dae Kim didn’t learn of the hard-won American Dream that brought his parents to the United States until later in life. He was a teenager when they finally told him their story, one that resembled those chronicled in PBS’ five-part docuseries “Asian Americans,” a landmark program spanning 150 years that couldn’t arrive at a more timely moment.
They described how, when he was 1 year old, they’d come to the U.S. from South Korea with just $200. Eventually, the family put down roots in Pennsylvania. “From that they built a whole life for themselves and raised three happy, healthy children, one of whom who is fortunate enough to speak to you right now,” said Kim, known for his roles on “Lost” and “Hawaii 5-0.”
If there’s one case that epitomizes the synonymity of courtroom drama with American television, it’s commonly accepted to be that of OJ Simpson, the celebrated black ex-football player whose acquittal in the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown-Simpson, and her acquaintance Ron Goldman in 1995 became a months-long national obsession. It spawned its own universe of catch-phrases (“If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit !”) and reality stars (the Kardashians) but though grand in celebrity, it was hardly the first case in which court television built frenetic national interest. As the Netflix docuseries Trial by Media reveals, the history of American media’s embedment in the criminal justice system has a much deeper and dizzying history than one sensational, oft-cited case.
Trial by Media, whose executive producers include George Clooney, Court TV creator Steven Brill and longtime CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin (whose book on the Simpson trial inspired Ryan Murphy’s 2016 Emmy-winning drama The People v OJ Simpson) is a deeply researched, bitingly edited sprawl of a series that favors identifying America’s tentacled media and criminal justice system over one pointed argument. It revisits six cases – some famous, others less so – in which the media played an outsized role. “We wanted a mix of cases that were famous and recognizable, and cases that were … just bizarre and fascinating on their own terms,” Toobin, a New Yorker staff writer, told the Guardian.
The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses, and how to exploit them. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods. Even as to disinformation, the best-known and perhaps most overrated of their tactics, they have innovated, finding new ways to manipulate Americans and to poison the nation’s politics. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.
Last month, the United States Supreme Court, in Ramos v. Louisiana, held that the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous jury verdict to convict a defendant of committing a serious offense in state court. The decision rectified a lingering injustice in two outlier states—Louisiana and Oregon still allowed non-unanimous juries’ verdicts to convict defendants. It also provided a window into how the current Court’s composition might decide questions of constitutional interpretation.
The majority decision was held together by a vote of six to three, with four justices writing separately. It is the kind of fractured decision that gets lawyers, academics, and court watchers frisky, ready to opine on the rigors of Justice Gorsuch’s history or whether Justice Kavanaugh should have required grievous and egregious error as a necessary condition to overturning precedent. I leave it to others to do that. I write to address the brief lesson in civic virtue that Justice Alito delivered in his dissenting opinion.
Americans accept “judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes,” George F. Will wrote some ten years ago, “because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.”
Indeed, judicial review—the concept that the courts must ensure that even duly enacted acts of legislation comport with the Constitution—is encoded in the DNA of the United States, having been established during the very birth of the nation. But its import, its application, and its limitations have been fiercely debated for just as long by legal scholars, elected officials, and judges alike.
The centuries-long discussion of judicial review has also acquired an ideological hue, as both left and right have alternately embraced it as a wise counter-majoritarian restraint and disdained it as unbridled judicial activism, depending on who wields the levers of power. The Supreme Court is variously hailed as a beacon of democracy, valiantly defending constitutional norms, or lambasted as an undemocratic assemblage of unelected mandarins, thwarting the authentic, legitimate will of the American people. And to hear these ideological warriors tell it, the trend has only worsened over time, with the courts either vindicating important liberties or impeding national priorities at an alarming rate.
If you’ve watched any of “Mrs. America,” the star-studded miniseries about the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment, you may be wondering how accurately it captures this divisive chapter in American political history.
The nine-part drama pits conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett) and her followers against a band of feminist all-stars led by Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale) and Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), who are prone to spirited internal debates. Creator Dahvi Waller and her team of writers conducted extensive research into Second Wave feminism and the rise of the new right in the 1970s.
Like nearly all works of historical fiction, “Mrs. America” takes some liberties, particularly when it comes to private conversations behind closed doors, and offers a necessarily subjective take on highly polarizing figures such as Schlafly, whose family has been critical of the series. But when it comes to events in the public record, “Mrs. America” hews very close to the facts, often quoting feminist leaders and their critics verbatim.
The president’s extremist approach to immigra¬tion enforcement has created a ‘tinderbox,’ putting thousands of detainees at risk
A year ago, around the time an ICE agent showed up at his mother’s home in Queens looking for him, Edwin had a union job working with sheet metal, and a wife and two kids. “My brother calls me, and he’s crying,” Edwin, who has a thick New York accent, recalls. “He’s like, ‘Damn, bro, this is for you.’ ” The officer left his business card at the house, and Edwin, who says he wanted to do the right thing for his family, made arrangements to turn himself in. Thirteen months later he was still in custody at the Hudson County Correctional Center in New Jersey, waiting for a chance to plead his deportation case, when the pandemic began.
“I remember watching Fox 5. It started off with two people in ¬Jersey City, and in a matter of two weeks, it went to 158 people,” he says. “We knew this was getting serious. And when they canceled every contact visit, we knew it was getting out of hand.”
At the time, Edwin was sleeping in an open dorm he shared with 56 other ICE detainees. “There’s barely soap, there’s barely toilet tissue, there’s barely any type of cleaning materials. If there’s hand sanitizer, the hand sanitizer is for the correction officers,” Edwin told Rolling Stone in March. (Hudson County jail did not respond to requests for comment.)
According to Sean Wilentz’s opinion piece in the September 16 New York Times, the Constitution of 1787 did not make slavery a national institution. The noted American historian cites the anxiety of some of the founding fathers over slavery to counter “one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history,” the claim that our national government was established on “racist principles.”
Wilentz is wrong. The Constitution incorporated slavery into our national system of governance. If slavery was not legal in every state, it was nonetheless “national law,” protected and upheld by the Constitution.
Wilentz badly misinterprets the antislavery sentiment evident at the constitutional convention of 1787. In his version of history, if most of the Framers did not explicitly defend slavery, they must have stood against it. And if the slaveholders did not get everything they wished, they must have lost. In other words, if the glass was not empty, it must have been full. But for the first eight decades of our country’s life, the devil’s bargain struck in 1787 warped almost every aspect of national politics and national life.
What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Mrs. America’s Episode About Bella Abzug
In the most recent installment of FX and Hulu’s nine-part series Mrs. America, Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale) steps into the limelight as the national face of the pro–Equal Rights Amendment movement when she is chosen by President Jimmy Carter to preside over the first-ever National Women’s Conference. Working with Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), and gay rights activists to unify factions within the women’s liberation movement, Abzug makes arrangements for the conference while Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative opposition struggle to coordinate a response.
The episode also contains a number of more surprising details. Did Schlafly really collaborate with the Ku Klux Klan ? Did Jimmy Carter really have a closeted lesbian as an adviser ? Below, just as we did for the first six episodes, we break it all down.
A new miniseries dramatises a key battle in the culture wars—and shows why feminists lost.
IN OCTOBER 1971 a proposed amendment to the United States constitution, promising that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged...on account of sex”, was approved by the House of Representatives. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) enjoyed bipartisan support and the endorsement of President Richard Nixon ; it looked certain to pass the Senate, and did in March 1972. It was handed to state legislatures for ratification, and needed the assent of 38 to be enshrined in the constitution. Yet after some initial enthusiasm—35 states had signed by 1977—the ERA failed to get the necessary confirmation before the deadline in 1979. After a number of extensions, and some states seeking to rescind their ratifications, the amendment remains in legal limbo to this day.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn ?” President Donald Trump asked in early 2017, after Jeff Sessions, his first attorney-general, recused himself from the probe into Russian election-meddling. Mr Sessions explained that, since he was involved with the campaign, he should not be involved in any campaign investigation.
Mr Trump had no patience for such qualms. He wanted a man who would serve his interests as the legendarily fierce Cohn, a private lawyer in New York, had done—and as he believed Robert Kennedy had done for his brother John, and Eric Holder had done for Barack Obama. In William Barr (pictured behind the president), Mr Sessions’s replacement, Mr Trump seems to have found what he sought.
PORTLAND, Ore.— Victor Pierce has worked on the assembly line of a Daimler Trucks North America plant here since 1994. But he says that in recent years he’s experienced things that seem straight out of another time. White co-workers have challenged him to fights, mounted “hangman’s nooses” around the factory, referred to him as “boy” on a daily basis, sabotaged his work station by hiding his tools, carved swastikas in the bathroom, and written the word “nigger” on walls in the factory, according to allegations filed in a complaint to the Multnomah County Circuit Court in February of 2015.
Pierce is one of six African Americans working in the Portland plant whom the lawyer Mark Morrell is representing in a series of lawsuits against Daimler Trucks North America. The cases have been combined and a trial is scheduled for January of 2017.
“They have all complained about being treated poorly because of their race,” Morrell told me. “It’s a sad story—it’s pretty ugly on the floor there.” (Daimler said it could not comment on pending litigation, but spokesman David Giroux said that the company prohibits discrimination and investigates any allegations of harassment.)
The allegations may seem at odds with the reputation of this city known for its progressivism. But many African Americans in Portland say they’re not surprised when they hear about racial incidents in this city and state. That’s because racism has been entrenched in Oregon, maybe more than any state in the north, for nearly two centuries. When the state entered the union in 1859, for example, Oregon explicitly forbade black people from living in its borders, the only state to do so. In more recent times, the city repeatedly undertook “urban renewal” projects (such as the construction of Legacy Emanuel Hospital) that decimated the small black community that existed here. And racism persists today. A 2011 audit found that landlords and leasing agents here discriminated against black and Latino renters 64 percent of the time, citing them higher rents or deposits and adding on additional fees. In area schools, African American students are suspended and expelled at a rate four to five times higher than that of their white peers.
All in all, historians and residents say, Oregon has never been particularly welcoming to minorities. Perhaps that’s why there have never been very many. Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent African American.
“I think that Portland has, in many ways, perfected neoliberal racism,” Walidah Imarisha, an African American educator and expert on black history in Oregon, told me. Yes, the city is politically progressive, she said, but its government has facilitated the dominance of whites in business, housing, and culture. And white-supremacist sentiment is not uncommon in the state. Imarisha travels around Oregon teaching about black history, and she says neo-Nazis and others spewing sexually explicit comments or death threats frequently protest her events.
Evidence continues to mount that the Republican Party is planning to hold on to its power in Washington this November despite a lack of popular support. Some of its assets will include structural factors like the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the anti-democratic character of the United States Senate. But as the New York Times reported today, the GOP and its ideological and interest-group allies will augment those assets with a vast and expensive campaign of voter suppression, deploying lawsuits, “voter fraud” misinformation, voter registration purges, direct intimidation of voters at the polls, and anything else they can find to hold down participation by those people. In this campaign, Republicans will not hesitate to use COVID-19 as a silent partner that discourages some forms of voting even GOP legislators can’t prevent, or curtail others.
Lorsque Norma McCorvey, la plaignante anonyme dans l’affaire Roe vs. Wade, s’est prononcée contre l’avortement en 1995, elle a stupéfait le monde et a représenté une énorme victoire symbolique pour les opposants à l’avortement : « Jane Roe » avait changé de camp. Le reste de sa vie, McCorvey a travaillé à renverser la jurisprudence qui portait son nom.
Mais ce n’était qu’un mensonge, dit McCorvey dans un documentaire tourné dans les mois qui ont précédé sa mort en 2017, affirmant qu’elle ne l’avait fait que parce qu’elle était payée par des groupes anti-avortement, dont Operation Rescue.
(CNN) As the novel coronavirus has spread across the globe, President Trump has repeated one phrase like a mantra : It will go away.
Since February Trump has said the virus will "go away" at least 15 times, most recently on May 15.
"It’s going to disappear one day," he said on February 27. "It’s like a miracle."
Invoking a miracle is an understandable response during a pandemic, but to some, the President’s insistence that the coronavirus will simply vanish sounds dangerously like magical thinking — the popular but baffling idea that we can mold the world to our liking, reality be damned.
The coronavirus, despite Trump’s predictions, has not disappeared. It has spread rapidly, killing more than 90,000 Americans.
In that light, Trump’s response to the pandemic, his fulsome self-praise and downplaying of mass death seems contrary to reality. But long ago, his biographers say, Trump learned how to craft his own version of reality, a lesson he learned in an unlikely place : a church.
On a pleasant day in August 2008, Senator Joe Biden put on a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses and drove a pickup truck to his sister’s Delaware home. He was there for a secret meeting with David Axelrod and David Plouffe, top aides to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. The three men sat by the backyard pool for about two hours. It was one of three clandestine meetings the aides had with top candidates as Obama’s running-mate selection process wound down.
Now Biden is the one doing the vetting as the presumptive nominee. But the process, while still early, is unfolding a bit differently.
The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a lower court order requiring the Trump Justice Department to turn over to the House Judiciary Committee secret evidence compiled by the grand jury during the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller last year.
The withheld evidence was first requested more than a year ago, prior to the beginning of formal impeachment proceedings against President Trump and his acquittal by the Senate this past February.
Two lower courts ordered the evidence turned over to the House Judiciary Committee. The lower courts said that grand jury records are court records, not just Justice Department records, and that similar records in the past have been turned over to Congress as part of impeachment investigations.
In a decision with potentially far-reaching implications for November’s election, a federal judge in Florida has determined a state law that would have required felons to pay any outstanding court fees and fines before they can register to vote is unconstitutional.
The ruling on Sunday by U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle moves hundreds of thousands of felons who have completed "all terms of their sentence including probation and parole" one step closer to winning back their right to vote.
The case at the center of the decision stems from a constitutional amendment overwhelmingly approved by Florida voters in 2018 overturning a 150-year-old law that permanently disenfranchised people with felony convictions.
Let me first lay my bias and experience cards on the table. I’ve been a member of the Christian conservative wing of the Republican Party from the moment I could vote until 2016, when the Republican Party left me behind by crossing multiple red lines in its embrace of Donald Trump. Before I became a full-time writer and journalist, I wasn’t just a Christian conservative voter, I was a pro-life activist and constitutional litigator for pro-life and religious liberty legal organizations.
If there was any American subculture that I knew well, it was American Evangelicalism—especially the most politically engaged branch of the movement—and while I knew it had its flaws (every human movement does), I did not believe that racism was one of them. In fact, I knew it wasn’t. One of the core arguments of the modern pro-life movement is that abortion rights were rooted in part in eugenic racism, in a desire to weed out “undesirable” populations. Pro-life activists are continually pointing and condemning the disproportionate number of abortions in the African American community.
So imagine my surprise when I began to see an increasing amount of argument that, actually, racism taints the rise of the religious right.
"The U.S. Supreme Court this month heard telephonic arguments as the coronavirus pandemic prevented in-person sessions. It represented a historic chapter for the court and a potential template for attorneys who might need to master remote sessions if courtrooms remain virtual.
Lisa Blatt, a partner at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, D.C., argued the first case under the new format in early May. She represented Booking Holdings Inc. in a case that weighed the company’s ability to trademark the name Booking.com.
The most difficult part was deciding where to perform her oral argument : at home, or in an empty office ? She decided to stay home. A headset was ordered, extension for her landline phone cord was obtained, and that search for a suitable lectern began. Ms. [Lisa] Blatt also confronted possible land mines : the dog and the doorbell. Neither could derail her actual arguments taking place May 4."
Female and liberal justices are getting less speaking time in the court’s telephonic arguments.
Equal justice under law is engraved on the front of the United States Supreme Court building. The court and our country have never quite lived up to that ideal, and the Supreme Court’s unprecedented telephonic arguments were no exception.
Typically, Supreme Court arguments are a free-for-all where the justices speak as they please, with the chief justice moderating when multiple justices try to speak at the same time. But for its first-ever telephonic arguments, the court adopted a format where each justice was allowed to question each of the advocates in order of seniority.
That system forced Chief Justice John Roberts to do more than play traffic cop when multiple justices tried to talk. In the new system, the chief justice had to ensure each justice’s compliance with the allotted time for questioning each of the advocates. The court did not release any more guidelines about the telephonic arguments, but the chief may have set an amount of time for each justice to question a given advocate and planned to intervene when a justice got close to or exceeded that time. (Each side gets 30 minutes to argue, but the amount of time each advocate has depends on whether the argument is divided between more than two advocates.)
On the warm afternoon of June 8, 1844, an armed patrol of 15 Texas Rangers was traveling through the Hill Country of south central Texas when it came under attack by 75 Comanche warriors. Until this day, encounters between the Rangers and Comanche—fierce and able fighters who’d been raiding Texan settlements for years, as the Spanish and then Anglo presence intruded on their homeland—had generally gone badly for the Rangers. Not only were they often outnumbered, they were also effectively out-weaponized. The Rangers had better guns, but even the best guns at the time needed to be reloaded after every shot. At a minimum, reloading took 30 seconds. Meanwhile, the Comanche, mounted on fleet mustangs, galloped toward them, firing arrows at a rate of 20 or 30 per minute. Before a Ranger reloaded, he was likely to be dead.
But the Rangers had a surprise in store for the Comanche that day. They’d acquired a cache of a new kind of pistol, called a repeater, or a revolver, patented eight years earlier by a young man from Connecticut named Samuel Colt. The first practical mass-produced, rapid-fire gun in history, Colt’s pistols had a rotating cylinder that could be loaded with five bullets (later six) and turned after each shot to bring the next chamber into alignment with the barrel.
ON MAY 25th police officers in Minneapolis responded to a shop assistant’s complaint about someone passing a counterfeit bill. They arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, but instead of putting him in the back of a squad car, an officer pressed his knee to Mr Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes—almost three of which came after police failed to find Mr Floyd’s pulse. Mr Floyd complained that he could not breathe, called out for his late mother and eventually stopped moving.
Mobile-phone footage of Mr Floyd’s death emerged one day later, and for the ensuing four days, violent protests have wracked Minneapolis. Derek Chauvin, the officer who held Mr Floyd on the ground, was arrested on the afternoon of May 29th and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter, and may face further charges for what certainly looks like excessive and unjustified force.
Some observers look aghast at the people rioting in Baltimore in protest of the police brutality that led to Freddie Gray’s horrific death in police custody. Pundits have bemoaned the actions of “thugs” who looted stores and burned cars, and politicians have pled for non-violence. Plenty of bewildered observers have wondered what good it does anyone to burn their own neighborhoods. But looking at the rioters in Baltimore, or any other place, in isolation misses the point. If Americans have one grand political tradition, it is rioting.
There was a little matter of some tea in Boston in 1773, when men dressed up as American Indians boarded three ships moored at Griffin’s Wharf, broke open their valuable cargoes of tea, and dumped the chests overboard. They destroyed about 90,000 pounds of tea, worth about $1.7 million today.
New York City exploded dramatically at least twice in the mid-nineteenth century. In May 1849 more than 25 people were killed and more than 120 injured in a struggle over which Shakespearean actor was better : American Edwin Forrest or Englishman William Charles Macready. The Astor Place Riot, as it was known, was so violent the authorities started to worry they had lost control of the city. They called out troops, who fired indiscriminately into the crowd.
President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday designed to limit the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content users post on their platforms.
What they’re saying : "Currently, social media giants like Twitter receive an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, which they are not," Trump said in the Oval Office. "We are fed up with it. It is unfair, and it’s been very unfair."
The state of play : The order comes after the president escalated his attacks against Big Tech in recent days — specifically Twitter, which fact-checked him for the first time this week over an unsubstantiated claim that mail-in voting drives voter fraud.
Where do you go to get the news ? For most people in the United States, a primary source is social media, which really means that you’re getting your news from everywhere.
Thanks to your baby boomer uncle, you see some Breitbart headlines, your hippie neighbor puts Mother Jones in your feed, and your wine-mom aunt across the pond makes sure you see Daily Mail’s latest scandal du jour. Your favorite political commentators are no longer Ivy League-educated trust fund babies whose parents bribed legacy media outlets for jobs. On the Left and on the Right, they’re increasingly sharp up-and-comers who earned their followers with incisive reporting and relentless intellectual honesty. And when an article is patently bogus, the masses call them out, either in the comment sections or across Twitter.
But President Trump wants to take us back to the previous century, when we relied on an oligopoly of privileged media denizens, with no platform for the rest of the public to call out fake news. That’s because his crusade against Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a move to get revenge against Twitter (a private company) for fact-checking what technically constituted an official government statement, would make social media companies and online comments sections liable for the words of individual users.
Authoritarian rulers inevitably try to silence their critics, and President Trump did just that in his clearly illegal executive order that seeks to limit the protections social media companies have from being held liable for the content published on their platforms. I hope that we have not become so desensitized by Trump’s constant misconduct as president that we have lost the ability to be outraged and frightened by something that strikes at the very heart of freedom of speech.
The executive order signed Thursday was meant to retaliate against Twitter for calling attention to two “potentially misleading” Trump tweets. On Tuesday, Twitter had applied fact-checking to the tweets in question, in which Trump claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to widespread voter fraud. The company then appended a message to the tweets in a format it uses to combat misinformation or unverified claims : “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” Those messages linked to a fact-check page that Twitter had created that was filled with further links and summaries of news articles debunking the assertion.
The struggle for inclusion and diversity in politics has ensued for decades, but for the first time in U.S. history, the rising political power of black women took center stage in the 2018 election. Last November, Harris County [Texas] made history by electing 17 black female judges to the bench — a group of candidates widely known as “Black Girl Magic.”
Their victory was extraordinary and unprecedented. Black female judges were the exception, not the norm, in the judiciary. In 1966, Judge Constance Baker Motley, appointed to the Southern District of New York by President Lyndon Johnson, became the first black woman to serve as a federal district judge. In 1979, Judge Amalya Kearse, appointed to the Second Circuit by President Carter, was the first black woman to be appointed to a federal Court of Appeals.
Three decades before these “first” appointments, Judge Jane Bolin (1908-2007) held the honor of being the first African-American female judge in the United States.
Attorney General William Barr is sending specialized teams of federal agents to help control protests in Washington, D.C., and Miami, and the FBI is setting up command posts in cities across the country as demonstrations against George Floyd’s death move into a second week.
Barr has directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to dispatch riot teams to the nation’s capital and to Miami to assist local authorities in responding to protests there, according to a senior Justice Department official.
The attorney general also sent an FBI hostage rescue team to help authorities Sunday in Washington with demonstrations, the official said, adding that the federal law enforcement presence will be "maximized" in the city on Monday evening.
President Trump and the White House have not decided whether he will deliver a formal speech addressing the protests and turmoil that have erupted after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, White House adviser Brooke Rollins told Politico on Monday.
Mass demonstrations have taken place across the country to call for justice for Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as Floyd pleaded for help.
Tensions have escalated as police officers have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters, and some demonstrators have set buildings and cars on fire.
Attorney General Steps Up Federal Law Enforcement Response To Protests
"Everything’s on the table," Rollins told Politico in a remote interview. "I think ultimately he believes, and rightfully so, that he is in a constant narrative and conversation with his citizens."
President Trump threatened Monday to take military action in American cities if the violent demonstrations that have been taking place in recent days aren’t stamped out.
"If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them," Trump said in a short statement in the Rose Garden at the White House.
To do that, the president would need to invoke what’s known as the Insurrection Act of 1807. The original text of the act, which has been amended several times since it was first passed, reads as follows :
An Act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.
APPROVED, March 3, 1807.
The act was last invoked in 1992 to quell the Los Angeles riots after the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black man, and before that in 1989 during widespread looting in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, after Hurricane Hugo.
Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, confronted the American public with urgent political challenges that would shape the trajectory of the post-Civil War United States. But a religious controversy that erupted during the subsequent weeks of national mourning would raise enduring social and moral questions about what it means to be both deeply patriotic and religiously observant in America.
Shortly after Lincoln’s murder, President Andrew Johnson declared a “day of humiliation and mourning,” upon which he recommended that his fellow citizens across the country gather in their respective places of worship to lament the late president’s tragic demise. But in doing so, Johnson had unwittingly created a significant dilemma for American Jews. His chosen date—June 1, 1865—happened to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates God’s revelation of the Law at Mount Sinai.
Today, the holiday is popularly observed among Orthodox and various traditionalist Jews but largely ignored by others. In an article for the American Israelite newspaper, leading 19th-century Reform Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise described a similar state of affairs in mid-19th-century America. (Later in the century, American Reform communities increasingly began to celebrate Shavuot as a confirmation day.) But traditionalist Jewish congregations, including some of the most prominent synagogues in the nation, had long observed Shavuot by reading customary mystical and liturgical Jewish texts, many still recited today, that reinforced fealty to the Torah’s commandments—and these congregations often saw large crowds on Shavuot, even inviting non-Jewish dignitaries to attend. So while not all American Jews observed Shavuot at the time of Lincoln’s assassination, those who did considered it one of Judaism’s happiest occasions, upon which Jewish law prohibits any expressions of mourning.
Many American Jews in 1865, therefore, faced what seemed like a stark choice between duty to country and duty to God—between patriotism and piety. As Shavuot drew near, Jewish writers, political activists, and spiritual leaders throughout the United States began in earnest to weigh in on the matter. Out of their respective solutions emerged two different models for how faith communities should serve the public square : compliance and conviction.
A Stanford Law School (SLS) professor is facing criticism from numerous student groups and instructors after saying the N-word in a class while quoting from historical source material.
Michael McConnell — a former judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit — used the word in his “Creation of the Constitution” class on Wednesday in a quote allegedly from Patrick Henry, who was arguing against the ratification of the Constitution at the Virginia Ratifying Convention.
The incident occurred just weeks after McConnell, who is white, was named a co-chair of Facebook’s Oversight Board, an independent oversight body with final say over complicated content moderation decisions — including decisions regarding hate speech and misinformation — on Facebook and Instagram. It also comes amid fallout after an assistant art history professor used the N-word during lecture in late April and in a class discussion post in early May.
In this American dark age we must all take a moment to travel through time. Dark ages are marked with violence, disease, economic and cultural erosion, scientific perversions as well as, surprisingly, technological advancements. Technology for violence and the science of war thrives in these periods while libraries shrink. Arts investments dwindle and our knowledge of history, both distant and immediate, fades. Some believe we are just now on the brink of a dark age, and yet those not invited to benefit from certain privileges of whiteness have been in one for centuries. The black American and the white American live in two bodies during the same hour with eyes that see vastly different shadows. Racism is an integral part of the American experiment. There is no more time or energy left to waste arguing that truth. Genocide of the indigenous peoples, enslavement of the African, abduction and incarceration of the Japanese American, exploitation of the modern undocumented immigrant and the current carceral state that grinds black and brown bodies into profit for private corporations is racial in design, an obvious and grotesque reality. That is the strategy of institutionalized national racism. Oppressed citizens of that nation possess no country. The land below them is controlled by the state, so they become nomadic and vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by delusional agents of the state. Black Americans have been citizens of a nation without a country for a very long time.
President Donald Trump’s warning that he would deploy the United States military to any state that refuses to take aggressive action against rioting rests on a longstanding presidential power that gives wide latitude to the White House, legal experts said Monday.
But a decision to do so would be met with likely legal opposition, and strong opposition from governors seeing it as an overreaction.
“If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said during a Rose Garden address as cities across the country grappled with property destruction, looting and violent police clashes in the week since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Legal experts say the president does indeed have the authority under the Insurrection Act of 1807 to dispatch the military in states that are unable to put down an insurrection or are defying federal law.
In the last half-century, presidents have sent the military to Southern states to ensure desegregation of schools there in the 1950s and 1960s, and to Los Angeles after the California governor sought federal help during the 1992 riots.
The most traumatic year in modern American history was 1968. But what is now the second-most traumatic year, 2020, still has seven months to run. The comparison provides little comfort, and several reasons for concern.
How could any year be worse than the current one, in which more Americans are out of work than in the Great Depression, and more people are needlessly dying than in several of America’s wars combined ?
....
All of this is bad, and getting worse. How does it compare with the distant past of 1968 ? Naturally, there is no objective comparison of suffering or confusion. Fear, loss, dislocation, despair are real enough to people who encounter them, no matter what happened to someone else at some other time.
But here is what anyone around at that time will remember about 1968 : The assassinations. The foreign warfare. The domestic carnage and bloodshed. The political chaos and division. The way that parts of the United States have seemed in the past week, in reaction to injustices, is the way much of the U.S. seemed day after day. I think I can remember every week of that eventful year.
The assassinations : I fear even to mention this, but America is fortunate that high-profile political murders have not been turning points in its recent political history, as they were through too much of the past century.
In April of 1968, one of the greatest leaders of America’s greatest moral struggle, Martin Luther King Jr., was shot dead in Memphis—at age 39. He was a more controversial figure at the time than is convenient to remember : Controversial among many white people as an “uppity” black man. (I remember, from very conservative elders in my conservative hometown, sarcastic references to “Dr. Martin Luther Nobel” after his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.) Controversial even among Democrats in the year before his death, as he expanded what had been a racial-justice movement into a larger campaign against the war in Vietnam and for economic justice at home. His killing was a central event in American history—but only one of many traumas of that tumultuous year.
Lundi ⁅1er juin⁆, la Cour suprême a validé à l’unanimité un aspect clé de la réponse fédérale à la pire crise de la dette de l’histoire portoricaine, qui menaçait les services de base comme les écoles et les hôpitaux, quelque 50 milliards de dollars en obligations de retraite publiques et plus de 70 milliards de dollars en dettes envers les détenteurs d’obligations.
Pour la première fois en près d’un siècle, Porto Rico a révisé une série de lois qui régissent les droits sur le territoire américain, notamment le mariage, l’avortement et la propriété sans avoir tenu d’audiences publiques.
Le gouverneur Wanda Vázquez a signé lundi soir un nouveau code civil qui remplace celui créé en 1930 et contient plus de 130 amendements, ce qui fait craindre que certains ne créent des vides juridiques dans ce qui est considéré comme le deuxième document juridique le plus important de Porto Rico après sa Constitution.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is expected to announce plans Thursday to remove one of the country’s most iconic monuments to the Confederacy, a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee along Richmond’s prominent Monument Avenue, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.
The move would be an extraordinary victory for civil rights activists, whose calls for the removal of that monument and others in this former capital of the Confederacy have been resisted for years.
“That is a symbol for so many people, black and otherwise, of a time gone by of hate and oppression and being made to feel less than,” said Del. Jay Jones, a black lawmaker from Norfolk. He said he was “overcome” by emotion when he learned the statue was to come down.
President Trump put a nauseating new spin on Bible-bangin’ when he ordered flash grenades and tear gas to be lobbed at peaceful protesters outside of the White House so he could take a picture holding a Bible in front of a church. He has proven himself a Tartuffe of the highest order.
Amid the stampede, still ringing in my ears is the voice that cried out, to nobody in particular, that “There are kids here !” It was 6:30 p.m. on a gorgeous Monday. Surely, Trump’s base was thrilled to the marrow at the sight of him pawing the Good Book while, one block away, teenagers scrambled, even as the president’s own teenager presumably sat inside mere yards away — even as the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., said she was “outraged” by the gambit. (In an extraordinary press conference from the Pentagon on Wednesday morning, Defense Secretary Mark Esper affirmed that he was left in the dark about Trump’s intent to turn the show of force into a photo op, a plan that, according to The New York Times, was hatched in part by Ivanka and Hope Hicks. Esper also broke with the president by saying he didn’t support invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would allow Trump to deploy active-duty troops.)
Citing a robust collection of federal and state case law, a New York State Bar Association task-force group on Thursday said it should be mandatory for all Americans to have a COVID-19 vaccination, when one is available, including those who won’t want it for “religious, philosophical or personal reasons.”
It’s the time of the year when Supreme Court justices can get testy. They might have to find a new way to show it.
The court’s most fought-over decisions in its most consequential cases often come in June, with dueling majority and dissenting opinions. But when a justice is truly steamed to be on a decision’s losing side, the strongest form of protest is reading a summary of the dissent aloud in court. Dissenting justices exercise what a pair of scholars call the “nuclear option” just a handful of times a year, but when they do, they signal that behind the scenes, there’s frustration and even anger.
A judge in Richmond, Va., has issued a temporary injunction blocking removal of a massive statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee until a lawsuit seeking to halt the removal can be heard.
Amid nationwide protests calling for an end to police brutality against African Americans following the killing of George Floyd, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam last week ordered the statue removed "as soon as possible" and placed in storage.
But on Monday, Judge Bradley B. Cavedo of Richmond Circuit Court issued the 10-day injunction, citing a lawsuit filed by William C. Gregory, who claims Virginia promised to "faithfully guard" and "affectionately protect" the statue when the land it is located on was annexed by the state in 1890.
“In the name of Jesus, this flag has to come down.” So begins one of the most consequential sermons of the twenty-first century. Bree Newsome, a thirty-year-old artist from North Carolina, was a few dozen feet above the ground, scaling a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House. Police officers were hollering up at her, demanding that she come down, but she kept climbing, and kept preaching : “You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.”
Newsome had been thinking about that Confederate flag for some time. Her ancestors had been enslaved in South Carolina, and she had heard stories from her grandmother about the violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan in Greenville. Then, on June 17, 2015, a white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners during a Bible study at a church in Charleston, and Newsome decided it was time for the flag to come down. Ten days later, after meeting with other activists—including one who had scaled trees for Greenpeace—and practicing on a few lampposts, she climbed the thirty-foot pole outside the State House, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-seventh Psalm as she rose higher and higher, removed the flag, and returned it to the ground, where a crowd applauded and the police arrested her. Newsome spent about seven hours in jail ; the Confederate flag was restored before she had even been released. But, by the second week of July, after millions of Americans had seen photographs or footage of her climb, the state legislature voted to permanently remove the flag from the capitol, and, in the years that followed, many other Confederate memorials and statues have come down around the country.
A bipartisan group of Mississippi lawmakers, with the blessing of Speaker of the House Philip Gunn, began whipping votes and drafting a resolution on Monday to change the state flag, which was adopted in 1894 and is the last in the nation containing the Confederate battle emblem.
The conversation behind closed doors this week marks one of the first earnest legislative discussions about changing the state flag since the 2001 referendum in which Mississippians voted nearly 2-to-1 to keep the current flag. It also comes as tens of thousands of black Mississippians and their multi-racial allies march the streets to protest racial inequalities in government.
For more than 70 years, the Confederate flag was a common and complicated sight at NASCAR races. Through the civil rights era right on through the season opener at Daytona in February, the flag dotted infield campsites and was waved in grandstands by fans young and old.
As the nation — and at last, NASCAR — comes to grips with race relations in the wake of the death of George Floyd, it was time : The flag is no longer welcome in the stock car series.
NASCAR banned the flag at its races and all its venues Wednesday, a dramatic step by a series steeped in Southern tradition and proud of its good ol’ boy roots. It must now convince some of its most ardent fans that it is truly time to keep the flag at home, leave those T-shirts in the drawer, scrape off the bumper stickers and hit the track without a trace of the longtime symbol to many of racism and slavery. Policing the policy may prove challenging and NASCAR did not offer details.
The issue was pushed to the forefront this week by Bubba Wallace, NASCAR’s lone black driver and an Alabama native who called for the banishment of the Confederate flag and said there was “no place” for it in the sport.
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — An 80-foot tall Confederate monument in the Virginia city of Norfolk could be removed as early as Aug. 7.
The Virginian-Pilot reports that city officials laid out details of a plan on Tuesday to take down the monument. The monument’s removal will be allowed once a new state law takes effect in July.
Norfolk’s plan is taking shape as Virginia’s governor says he plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from state-owned property in Richmond. Richmond’s mayor is also planning to remove Confederate monuments along Monument Avenue that are on city owned land.
As more calls grow across the country to remove Confederate statues, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee remained steadfast Tuesday in their resistance to removing a bust of a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader on prominent display in the state capitol.
However, legislation that would stop designating July 13 as Nathan Bedford Forrest day advanced in the House — even though a conflicting version is also making its way in the Senate.
One hundred years ago, the 19th Amendment enfranchised millions of women across the United States following a seven-decade campaign. The struggle to expand voting rights to women resonates today as the country continues to debate who should vote and how.
As scholars of civic engagement and women’s suffrage, we have compiled “19 Things to Know” about this landmark amendment. Together they reveal the strength and determination of the suffrage movement as it battled for this fundamental right of citizenship.
1. Many early suffragists were also abolitionists. They include Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.
Mayor Bill de Blasio joined two congressional lawmakers in urging the military to rename General Lee Avenue, a main street on an Army base in Brooklyn.
Mayor Bill de Blasio waded into a resurgent national debate over the legacy of the Civil War on Thursday morning, when he called on military officials to rename a street at an Army base in Brooklyn named after Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general and its military leader.
“His name should be taken off everything in America, period,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news briefing.
The mayor’s comments came as the city has faced weeks of protests demanding a reckoning over institutional racism and systemic bias, part of a national movement touched off by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The City Council of New Orleans is continuing their efforts to cast down controversial historical figures in the wake of national unrest over racism and police brutality.
Councilmembers have announced their plans to form a committee that will be dedicated to renaming streets, parks and any places in New Orleans that "honors white supremacists," specifically those with ties to the Confederacy.
On Thursday, June 18, the city council will introduce a motion to establish the "City Street Renaming Commission."
The group will consist of nine members appointed by each councilmember, Mayor Latoya Cantrell and the City Planning Commission. All members will have knowledge of the history and geography of New Orleans.
The group will be tasked with identifying places to be renamed and create a plan to educate the public on the changes made.
"Gone with the Wind" remains the highest-grossing movie of all time when adjusted for inflation and won 10 Oscars, including the first ever for an African-American performer, supporting actress Hattie McDaniel.
The 1939 movie — adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel set during the Civil War — also contains numerous problematic elements that haven’t aged well, from stereotyped depictions of African Americans to the debate over whether the staircase scene between Rhett and Scarlett, which concludes off screen, was a case of marital rape.
"Gone with the Wind" is the latest movie to face renewed concerns about its exposure in the 21st century, as studios mine their libraries to stock the shelves of new streaming services. The controversy over that erupted again this week, as HBO Max, the new service from CNN parent WarnerMedia, announced that it was temporarily pulling the movie from its rotation.
The film will return, a spokesperson said, with "a discussion of its historical context" and denunciation of its racially charged aspects. The movie itself won’t be altered.
In the more than two hundred and thirty years since the Constitution was ratified, no lawsuit had attempted to enforce its anti-corruption provisions—until the Presidency of Donald Trump. Two previously obscure provisions of the Constitution, known as the emoluments clauses, aim to prevent public officials from being improperly beholden to foreign and domestic governments. One, the foreign-emoluments clause, requires a person holding a federal “office of profit or trust” to get Congress’s consent before accepting any “emolument”—an advantage, gain, or profit—from a “foreign state.” The other, the domestic-emoluments clause, prohibits the President in particular from receiving any “emolument” from the federal government or from a state, other than the preset standard salary for the job of President. Previous Presidents did not present the need for courts to interpret these clauses’ meaning. And, for the same reason that Trump is so different from other Presidents—his brazen disregard of legal norms—several lawsuits claiming that he is violating the emoluments clauses may end up forcing the unfortunate recognition that the Constitution’s anti-corruption measures are ineffectual when most needed.
Scattered across the American South, 10 Army bases bear the names of Confederate officers, including several who resigned their commissions in the United States military and fought against the Union Army in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.
Some of the military installations acknowledge their namesakes on their websites. Others, like Fort Hood in Texas, make no mention on their websites of the Confederate officers whose legacies they honor.
Now, as protests over the death of George Floyd have led to a broader reckoning over the many monuments and memorials that honor men who fought to preserve slavery and uphold white supremacy, a fresh debate is occurring over whether to rename these installations.
On Monday, a Pentagon official said that Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy were “open to a bipartisan discussion on the topic” of removing Confederate names from the bases.
As unrest has continued day after day and in town after town in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, a secondary skirmish has emerged : deciding how to describe what’s happening.
In speeches and newsrooms and social media posts, people have had to make choices about how to characterize widespread, evolving unrest. Are cities in the midst of uprisings ? Rebellions ? Riots ?
“There’s kind of a war of words as to how we should understand what they’re doing,” says Heather Ann Thompson, a professor of history and Afro-American studies at the University of Michigan. Each term sends a vastly different message about precisely what is going on in America’s streets and why.
During his short speech in the Rose Garden on June 1, President Trump used some form of the word riot five times. And he’s not alone. At TIME’s request, the Oxford English Dictionary analyzed its corpus – including roughly 2,800 articles published between May 26 and June 2 – related to events that were spurred by the killing of George Floyd, to see how those events were being described in the media.
The activists who have flooded city streets since the death of George Floyd all broadly agree on the systemic injustice that has caused the nationwide uprising. They all want to end mass incarceration, dismantle structural racism and end the police killings of black men and women across the country.
But tactical differences have emerged between different camps of activists in the seven years since Black Lives Matter first became a national rallying cry. Some activists have adopted a reformist approach, pushing successfully to equip cops with body cameras, require implicit-bias training and encourage community policing. Others, seeing those measures fail to reduce the number of black deaths at the hands of police, are pushing for more aggressive strategies that weaken or eliminate police altogether. All these activists are committed to the same ends, but they don’t all agree on the means.
Plusieurs jours après les émeutes de Détroit, le président Johnson parle à la nation des émeutes et propose des solutions préventives pour l’avenir. Johnson parle d’abord de sa création d’une commission consultative spéciale pour enquêter sur les causes des émeutes...
My fellow Americans :
We have endured a week such as no nation should live through : a time of violence and tragedy.
For a few minutes tonight, I want to talk about that tragedy—and I want to talk about the deeper questions it raises for us all.
I am tonight appointing a special Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.
Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois has agreed to serve as Chairman. Mayor John Lindsay of New York will serve as Vice Chairman. Its other members will include Fred R. Harris, Senator from Oklahoma ; Edward W. Brooke, United States Senator from Massachusetts ; James C. Corman, U.S. Representative from California, 22d District, Los Angeles ; William M. McCulloch, the U.S. Representative from the State of Ohio, the 4th District ; I. W. Abel, the president of the United Steel Workers ; Charles B. Thornton, the president, director, and chairman of the board of Litton Industries, Inc. ; Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the NAACP ; Katherine Graham Peden, the Commissioner of Commerce of the State of Kentucky ; Herbert Jenkins, the chief of police, Atlanta, Georgia.
The Commission will investigate the origins of the recent disorders in our cities. It will make recommendations—to me, to the Congress, to the State Governors, and to the mayors—for measures to prevent or contain such disasters in the future.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that employers cannot fire employees based on their sexual orientation or gender identity under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Why it matters : The 6-3 opinion marks a huge win for LGBT rights in a court with a clear conservative tilt. It was authored by conservative justice Neil Gorsuch, who was joined by the court’s more liberal and swing members.
Title VII explicitly prohibits discrimination based on "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin," but it did not specifically name sexual orientation or gender identity as protected classes.
What they’re saying : "An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex," Gorsuch wrote.
"Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids."
"Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. ... But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands."
_"When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit."
More than two decades after affirmative action was outlawed at public campuses, University of California regents on Monday unanimously supported the repeal of Proposition 209, the 1996 state initiative that banned preferential treatment by government bodies based on race, ethnicity or sex — and has been blamed for a decline in diversity at UC’s most selective campuses.
With passionate remarks about the pernicious effects of racism, the regents endorsed Assembly Constitutional Amendment 5, which would repeal Proposition 209, clearing the way for affirmative action to once more be used in UC admissions and hiring.
The measure passed the state Assembly last week and, if ratified by the Senate by June 25, will be on the Nov. 3 statewide ballot.
The Clemson University Board of Trustees has voted to remove John C. Calhoun’s name from the Honors College and has requested the state Legislature to empower the school to rename Tillman Hall to its original name, Old Main.
In a Friday morning vote, the board unanimously voted to remove Calhoun from the Honors College as recommended by Provost Bob Jones. The college was immediately rebranded The Clemson University Honors College.
All 13 trustees voted in favor and five emeritus trustees who are former board members supported the changes, board Chairman Smythe McKissick said.
"Clemson must also recognize that there are central figures in Clemson’s history whose beliefs and actions do not represent the university’s core values ... and as our values guide us, we are listening," McKissick said.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch was President Trump’s first choice for the Supreme Court and a conservative’s dream — until he wrote this week’s landmark opinion extending civil rights protections to LGBTQ employees nationwide.
The ruling sent a shudder through the ranks of conservative activists and columnists, some of whom saw signs of another betrayal by a Republican-appointed justice who ended up siding at times with liberals on key issues.
“This was not judging. This was legislating — a brute force attack on our constitutional system,” said Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which funded ads supporting Gorsuch’s confirmation in 2017.
Gorsuch spoke for a 6-3 majority in declaring that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on employment discrimination based on “sex” also covers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer workers. “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” he wrote in Bostock vs. Clayton County. Previously, Title VII of the act was seen as protecting women from gender discrimination.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, called it a “radical Supreme Court decision [which] shows that the threat to the rule of law doesn’t only come from leftist rioters in the streets.”
A Senate amendment to remove the names of Confederate leaders on military property "picks on the South unfairly," a GOP senator said Tuesday, the latest sign that President Donald Trump’s opposition to the plan has opened up an uncomfortable election-year debate within the party.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican whose state has military installations named after leaders of the Confederacy, sharply criticized the amendment, offered by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and said he planned to offer his own measure "to rename every military installation in the country after a medal of honor winner."
"I think history will show that in the 18th century, in the 19th century, and well into the 20th century, there were many non-Confederate generals, soldiers and others, in both the South and the North who practiced racial discrimination, anti-Semitism and misogyny," Kennedy told reporters. "I don’t think we ought to just pick on the South."
Kennedy added : "Sen. Warren’s amendment, in my opinion, picks on the South unfairly."
Kennedy’s comments come amid an election-year debate that has forced Republicans to stake out their positions as protests over racial injustice are taking place across the country. A number of Republicans have little appetite to be seen as defending the Confederacy, despite Trump’s call for GOP senators to fall in line and kill the Warren amendment, which was added to a bipartisan defense policy bill with the support of senators from both parties.
Sen. Josh Hawley had a stunning view of the Supreme Court’s decision extending new protections to LGTBQ workers : It “represents the end of the conservative legal movement.”
Though careful not to criticize any sitting justices by name or even the policy they were responding to, the Missouri Republican teed off on the system that he claims created the decision, which he repeatedly called a “piece of legislation.” Declaring that “Congress has pointedly declined” to address employment discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, Hawley said foot-dragging in the Senate and House has led to too much power for the courts.
So even as he lit into the courts, he criticized his colleagues, as well.
In the long and mostly disappointing history of women in American politics, 1992 is widely considered a pivotal year. Fueled in part by outrage over Anita Hill’s treatment by an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination hearings the previous fall, voters elected a record number of women to the House and Senate.
Headline writers would soon dub 1992 “The Year of the Woman.” In the popular imagination, that phrase has come to evoke the beginning of a decisive upward trajectory for women in elective office. But it was always a bit of a misnomer. Of the 24 women elected to the House in 1992, 20 were Democrats—as were all four of the newly elected senators. A more accurate description would have been “The Year of the Democratic Woman.”
That label would also have foreshadowed the path of progress for women in the years since.
It is no secret that COVID-19 has made election administrators’ task in 2020 exponentially more difficult. States like Wisconsin and Georgia, where elections took place after COVID took hold in the United States, have struggled to distribute absentee ballots and keep polling places open. The result is a dilemma that recalls some of the most sordid episodes in our nation’s history : Americans—particularly Black and brown citizens, who have both borne the brunt of the COVID epidemic and face disproportionate and discriminatory barriers to voting—were forced to choose between their personal safety and exercising their right to vote. But as a voting rights lawsuit our organization recently filed on behalf of a coalition of organizations and voters in Wisconsin demonstrates, lawyers and judges can find a good solution to the whole mess in Bogalusa, Louisiana.
1960s-era Bogalusa, to be precise.
Bogalusa may seem like an odd place to look for guidance here. Louisiana, after all, was not known at the time for having free and fair elections. And Bogalusa may have been the very worst place in the state on that front : The city had the highest rate of per capita membership in the Ku Klux Klan in the entire United States, and the local Klan was engaged in a widespread campaign of “terror and intimidation.” Klan members attacked civil rights activists and brandished guns at civil rights marches. They defamed and boycotted white moderates who supported desegregation. And they threatened any governmental officials—from the governor to the mayor—who dared to try to get in their way.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s top lawyer thinks the state law protecting historic monuments from being torn down or altered without a legislative vote is constitutional.
But the attorney general opinion released Thursday said an additional requirement that the General Assembly must give a two-thirds vote to alter monuments or change building or street names probably would be struck down by judges.
The opinion from state Attorney General Alan Wilson’s office is not binding and remains an educated guess on what a judge might do if someone sued over the law.
After years of activist demands and administrative resistance, Princeton University announced on Saturday that its governing board had voted to strip Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public-policy school, now to be known as the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. The decision — which cites Wilson’s racist views and legacy — comes amid national protests over police violence toward Black Americans.
Four years ago, the university made the high-profile decision to leave Wilson’s name on the school. But in his announcement of the name change, Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, noted that times had changed. "When a university names a school of public policy for a political leader," Eisgruber wrote, "it inevitably suggests that the honoree is a model for students who study at the school. This searing moment in American history has made clear that Wilson’s racism disqualifies him from that role."
In removing Wilson’s name from the school, Princeton joins a host of campuses nationwide that are swiftly renaming buildings and removing Confederate statues in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In his message, Eisgruber noted the positive influence of Wilson, Princeton’s 13th president, on the university — and took pains to distinguish him from figures like Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun, whose names and likenesses are being rapidly removed from colleges across the country. Wilson, Eisgruber wrote, was honored by Princeton "not because of, but without regard to or perhaps even in ignorance of, his racism."
He continued : "That, however, is ultimately the problem. Princeton is part of an America that has too often disregarded, ignored, or excused racism, allowing the persistence of systems that discriminate against Black people."
_ The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 juin 2020.
There has been much debate recently about reparations for slavery. According to its proponents, the federal government should award Americans of African descent financial damages solely because slavery, as an institution, existed in the United States from the founding until almost a century later.
Three principal arguments are offered : (1) The legacy of slavery has hindered the economic progress of blacks in America ; (2) reparations would serve as a damage award that would rectify a historical wrong committed by the United States ; and (3) reparations would give poor blacks more disposable income, which would increase their living standards and lift entire black communities.
On the surface, these arguments seem to have a modicum of legitimacy. However, because of the potential divisiveness that the issue is sure to have, it is important to closely examine the premise on which these arguments are based. To do that effectively, we must first look at the institution of slavery itself from a historical perspective.
Clyde ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.
Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied ; mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”
The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.
Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”
As a young student, Hind Makki recalls, she would call out others at the Islamic school she attended when some casually used an Arabic word meaning “slaves” to refer to Black people.
“Maybe 85% of the time, the response that I would get from people ... is, ‘Oh, we don’t mean you, we mean the Americans,’” Makki said during a virtual panel discussion on race, one of many organized in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
“That’s a whole other situation about anti-Blackness, particularly against African Americans,” said Makki, who identifies as a Black Arab Muslim.
In recent weeks, many Muslims in the U.S. have joined racial justice rallies across the country and denounced racism in sermons, statements and webinars. American Muslims, Black and non-Black, are also having raw conversations like Makki’s as they grapple with questions of racial equity, tensions and representation in their own faith communities.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Friday signed legislation allowing additional penalties to be imposed for crimes motivated by a victim’s race, religion, sexual orientation or other factors, removing Georgia from the dwindling list of U.S. states without a hate crimes law.
State lawmakers acted with haste to pass the legislation, which had previously been stalled, following the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, as well as recent nationwide protests against racial injustice and police brutality. Arbery was a 25-year-old Black man pursued and fatally shot while running near Brunswick, Georgia, in February. Three white men, including a father and son, were charged with murder after video of the killing was made public.
Kemp said Friday before signing the bill that “we witnessed a horrific, hate-filled act of violence. We saw injustice with our own eyes. Georgians protested to demand action, and state lawmakers, many who are gathered here today, rose to the occasion.”
The Republican governor said the legislation won’t “fix every problem or right every wrong. But ... is a powerful step forward.”
Robert Mueller submitted his final report as the special counsel more than a year ago. But even now—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the Administration’s tragically bungled response to it, and the mass demonstrations following the killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others—President Trump remains obsessed with what he recently called, on Twitter, the “Greatest Political Crime in the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt.” In the past several months, the President has mobilized his Administration and its supporters to prove that, from its inception, the F.B.I.’s investigation into possible ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government was flawed, or worse. Attorney General William Barr has directed John Durham, the United States Attorney in Connecticut, to conduct a criminal investigation into whether F.B.I. officials, or anyone else, engaged in misconduct at the outset. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also convened hearings on the investigation’s origins.
The biggest cases of the Supreme Court term so far have a surprising common thread.
On a court with five Republican appointees, the liberal justices have been in the majority in rulings that make workplace discrimination against gay and transgender people illegal, protect young immigrants from deportation and, as of Monday, struck down a Louisiana law that restricted abortion providers.
As surprising, Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative nominated by President George W. Bush who has led the court for nearly 15 years, has joined his liberal colleagues in all three.
Since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, Roberts has played a pivotal role in determining how far the court will go in cases where the court’s four liberals and four conservatives are closely divided.
Here’s a look at where Roberts stood in the abortion, immigration and LGBT cases, his history on the court and what’s at stake in coming decisions in which Roberts could play a key role.
After more than 120 years of flying over the state of Mississippi, the Confederate battle flag is no longer a part of the state’s official flag. On Tuesday, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law a bill fast-tracked by the Mississippi legislature over the weekend that calls for a new design. In a somber ceremony Reeves said he was signing the law to turn a page in Mississippi. "A flag is a symbol of our present, of our people, and of our future," Reeves said. "For those reasons, we need a new symbol." First adopted in 1894 by white supremacists reclaiming power after Reconstruction, the old flag incorporated the Confederate battle emblem – a red background with a blue X lined with 13 white stars. Since the civil rights movement, activists have been calling for its removal, arguing it’s an outdated banner in a state that has a 38% African American population. But state elected officials had not been willing to go against the nearly 65% of voters who approved keeping the flag in a 2001 referendum. It finally fell this week amid the outcry for racial justice happening across the U.S. much like Confederate monuments that have come down elsewhere around the South.
Across the United States, statues of Confederate figures and former slave owners are coming down as Black Americans demand justice after the police killing of George Floyd. The hundreds that still remain seem to be waiting in line for removal, but many Americans are still defending their existence in the name of heritage.
President Trump echoed those arguments during an interview on Fox News on Sunday when he was asked about efforts to remove these statues and monuments.
"You don’t want to take away our heritage and history and the beauty, in many cases, the beauty, the artistic beauty. Some of the sculptures and some of this work is some of the great — you can go to France, you can go anywhere in the world and you will never see more magnificent work. And that’s a factor. It’s not the biggest factor but it’s a factor," said the president.
Across the United States, statues of Confederate figures and former slave owners are coming down as Black Americans demand justice after the police killing of George Floyd. The hundreds that still remain seem to be waiting in line for removal, but many Americans are still defending their existence in the name of heritage.
President Trump echoed those arguments during an interview on Fox News on Sunday when he was asked about efforts to remove these statues and monuments.
"You don’t want to take away our heritage and history and the beauty, in many cases, the beauty, the artistic beauty. Some of the sculptures and some of this work is some of the great — you can go to France, you can go anywhere in the world and you will never see more magnificent work. And that’s a factor. It’s not the biggest factor but it’s a factor," said the president.
Le gouverneur républicain du Mississippi, Tate Reeves, a promulgué le 1er juillet 2020 une loi qui interdit l’avortement en fonction de la race, du sexe ou des anomalies génétiques d’un fœtus, ajoutant ainsi de nouvelles limites dans un État qui possède déjà certaines des lois d’avortement les plus strictes du pays.
Pour aller plus loin sur la controverse sur les avortements raciaux.
Des responsables du Mississippi ont organisé une cérémonie le 1er juillet 2020 afin de retirer l’ancien drapeau de l’État et de l’envoyer à un musée d’histoire, un jour après que le gouverneur républicain Tate Reeves a promulgué une loi supprimant le statut officiel de la dernière bannière d’État aux États-Unis qui comprenait l’emblème de la bataille confédérée.
Here’s a thought experiment. You’re John Roberts, not only the chief justice of the United States but the head of the entire federal judicial branch. After 15 years on the job, you find yourself in an exquisitely tough spot.
On the one hand, you’re confronted with a rogue court — the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, one of the 13 appeals courts that, like all “lower” federal courts, are bound to follow the law as the Supreme Court hands it to them. Four years earlier, your court reversed the Fifth Circuit and ruled that a Texas law imposed an unconstitutional “undue burden” on women’s access to abortion.
And what did the Fifth Circuit turn around and do ? It upheld an identical law in Louisiana on the ground that, well, Texas was Texas and Louisiana wasn’t. Clearly, you can’t ignore such blatant defiance.
Last week marked one of the most important legal moments in LGBTQ+ history, surpassing even that of marriage equality : A conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ+ people are protected in the workplace and public spaces by federal anti-discrimination laws. The court’s ruling was on two separate cases—one concerning sexual orientation brought by two gay men, and one brought by a transgender woman named Aimee Stephens. Stephens passed away in May, but became a hero for bringing a case to the Supreme Court that would eventually enshrine civil rights protections for transgender people throughout all 50 states.
One of her lawyers was the ACLU’s deputy director for trans justice, Chase Strangio, a trans man who called this case his “baby.” Strangio has long been at the forefront of fighting for legal justice for trans people, and now he has one of the most significant moments in the LGBTQ+ movement under his belt. GQ caught up with Strangio just days after the decision was handed down to talk about the victory, what’s coming next, and why Pride forever needs to change.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court took an adventurous leap into the twentieth century. The coronavirus pandemic had made it impossible for the justices to safely hold their planned oral arguments in person in March and April. Instead, the court heard those arguments by conference call and made the live audio available to the public. For the first time in the nation’s history, Americans could listen in on the action as the justices and the opposing sides deliberated over cases in real time without having to travel to Washington, D.C., and be there in person.
The ad hoc experiment wasn’t without some minor hiccups. Some of the justices had trouble with the mute button when it was their turn to speak—a relatable experience for those who’ve worked from home for the last three months. The round-robin format also drew criticism from longtime court-watchers like Lyle Dennison, who argued that it diminished the utility of oral arguments and undermined the justices’ equal standing. Fortunately, those flaws are distinct from real-time broadcasting itself and would not affect its use during in-person arguments when they eventually resume.
Last week the United States Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – the statute that bars discrimination in the workplace based on sex – protects gay and transgender workers. The ruling was a major victory for the LGBTQ community, as well as some Stanford law students graduating this year.
“We are absolutely thrilled with the outcome,” said Connie Wang, JD ’20.
Wang is one of the Stanford law students who participated in the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic last year. Under the direction of Stanford Law School faculty members, students in the clinic work on Supreme Court cases, representing parties and serving as advisers.
The case they worked on was Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which combined three cases, including one involving Donald Zarda, a New York skydiving instructor who was fired after telling a customer he was gay. Zarda’s legal team included students in the clinic, and the clinic’s co-director, law Professor Pamela Karlan, who argued the case before the Supreme Court last October.
“There are only so many cases that go up to the Supreme Court each year,” Wang said. “So we’re lucky that the court chose to hear this one.”
Chief Justice John Roberts has shattered societal and political expectations of the conservative Supreme Court and thrust it — and his stewardship — to the center of the national scene.
In a series of striking rulings over the last two weeks on immigration, LGBTQ rights and now abortion, Roberts has sided with the court’s four liberal justices and established himself as one of the most influential figures in America today.
His decision Monday to invalidate a Louisiana regulation on physicians who perform abortions affirms a 2016 ruling — that he protested at the time — and continues to preserve a woman’s decades-old constitutional right to end a pregnancy.
Although he did not join the four liberals’ legal reasoning, likely stirring more anti-abortion litigation in the states, Roberts’ move marked the first time he had ever voted to strike down an abortion regulation.
On Monday morning, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberals yet again to strike down a restrictive Louisiana abortion law that could have left the state with a single clinic.
This case was one of the most-watched items on the docket this term for a reason. It was the first ruling on abortion since President Trump appointed two new justices to the court, which meant abortion-rights opponents were optimistic that a new conservative majority might be willing to undo past decisions on abortion rights — even though the Louisiana law was basically identical to a Texas restriction that was struck down by the court in 2016. The laws banned doctors from providing abortions unless they had admitting privileges at a local hospital.
It turned out this was a bad bet. Roberts ultimately wasn’t willing to backtrack on what the court had so recently decided. “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons,” he wrote in a separate opinion from the majority. “Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”
Le New York Times, comme d’autres quotidiens américains avant lui ces dernières semaines, a décidé de mettre une capitale au mot « Black » pour décrire les personnes et les cultures d’origine africaine. Le sujet fait débat aux Etats-Unis, moins en France.
(...)
Cette décision a été prise dans un contexte particulier après la mort de George Floyd, tué par un policier blanc, Derek Chauvin, fin mai aux Etats-Unis. Elle répond également à un mouvement de fond dans la presse américaine depuis quelques semaines. Avant le New York Times, l’agence de presse Associated Press avait pris la même décision. « Le noir en minuscule est une couleur, pas une personne », expliquait dans une note John Daniszewski, vice-président pour les normes au sein d’AP. Ajoutant : « Ces changements s’alignent sur la capitalisation de longue date d’autres identifiants raciaux et ethniques tels que Latino-Américain, Asiatique-Américain et Amérindien. Nos discussions sur le style et la langue tiennent compte de nombreux points, notamment la nécessité d’être inclusif et respectueux dans notre narration et l’évolution de la langue. »
Le Los Angeles Times, USA Today (et ses 260 rédactions à travers le pays) et NBC News ont également fait le même choix, tandis que l’Association nationale des journalistes noirs (NABJ) a demandé aux autres rédactions d’adopter les mêmes standards.
Comme le rappelle l’Associated Press, il y a près d’un siècle, le sociologue américain William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, dans une lettre envoyée aux médias, leur avait demandé de capitaliser le terme « Negro », alors utilisé de façon commune, estimant que la minuscule était « un signe d’irrespect et de racisme ». En 1930, le New York Times avait adopté cette forme, estimant que c’était un « acte de reconnaissance et de respect pour ceux qui ont passé des générations en minuscule ».
Feux d’artifice, drapeaux et hot-dogs : aux États-Unis, le 4 juillet baigne dans le patriotisme et la tradition, en rappel de ce jour où des colons américains mécontents se sont affranchis du joug britannique pour déclarer leur intention de fonder une nation démocratique indépendante.
Mais l’histoire de cette journée festive est plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît. L’anniversaire de l’indépendance des États-Unis est le 2 juillet, et non le 4. Qui plus est, les révolutionnaires à l’origine de cette nouvelle nation ne garantissaient pas le droit à « la vie, la liberté et la recherche du bonheur » à l’ensemble de ses citoyens.
En 1774, après des années de taxation abusive et de contrôle impérial, la clameur à l’encontre de la couronne britannique avait atteint son paroxysme à travers les 13 colonies américaines. La guerre semblait inévitable et, face à ce constat, les délégués des colonies décidèrent de se réunir au mois de septembre pour exprimer leurs doléances dans le cadre d’un Congrès continental.
Il faudra ensuite attendre le 7 juin 1776 pour que s’amorce le processus de déclaration de l’indépendance avec l’introduction d’une résolution par le délégué de Virginie, Richard Henry Lee, lors du Second Congrès continental. D’une longueur de 80 mots, la Lee Resolution proposait la dissolution de toute connexion politique entre la Grande-Bretagne et les colonies. Même si la plupart des délégués étaient favorables à l’indépendance, la proposition n’était pas assurée de recueillir l’unanimité et les membres du Second Congrès avaient donc préféré différer le vote.
After weeks that have seen mass protests about police brutality, the toppling of monuments, and calls for racial justice, some figures are now pointing to the US’s national anthem. As calls for change continue as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, the troubling history and slavery links of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ are being brought up for discussion and debate.
One American student recently refused to sing it at her virtual graduation ceremony, instead performing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, often referred to as the ‘Black national anthem’. Four years ago, San Francisco 49’ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick famously refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem. President Obama supported Kaepernick’s right to protest, saying it was his ‘constitutional right’ to stay seated.
An article by Yahoo Music’s Editor in Chief, Lyndsey Parker, asks if it’s time to adopt an anthem with a “more inclusive message”. Speaking to Parker, historian and scholar Daniel E. Walker agrees. He says : “The 53-year-old in me says, we can’t change things that have existed forever. But then there are these young people who say that America needs to live up to its real creed.
“And so, I do side with the people who say that we should rethink this as the national anthem, because this is about the deep-seated legacy of slavery and white supremacy in America, where we do things over and over and over again that are a slap in the face of people of colour and women. We do it first because we knew what we were doing, and we wanted to be sexist and racist. And now we do it under the guise of ’legacy.’”
This Independence Day weekend is going to feel very different from any Fourth of July in our lifetimes. Normally, there would be parades, barbecues and beer, topped off by fireworks. This year : No parades. Socially distanced barbecues. And illegal fireworks have been snap, crackle, fizzling for weeks.
But can we talk beer ? Those suds are as much a part of our heritage, I’d argue, as apple pie and the red, white and blue. Our founders spent their evenings writing and arguing over the Declaration of Independence, tankard in hand, in the taverns of Philadelphia during the very hot summer of 1776. John Adams and his colleagues spent time at The City Tavern, a then-new popular watering hole just a few blocks from Independence Hall. It burned down in 1834, but was rebuilt in time for the bicentennial in 1976. (The tavern has been shuttered by the pandemic, but plans to reopen when Philadelphia gets the green light.)
How do Native Americans observe the 4th of July ? This year, many people’s plans reflect their concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. But the answer has always been as complicated as America’s history.
Perhaps the most quoted language in the Declaration of Independence is the statement that all men are created equal. Many Native Americans, however, also remember the signers’ final grievance against the king :
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
With the emergence of a nation interested in expanding its territory came the issue of what to do with American Indians, who were already living all across the land. As the American non-Indian population increased, the Indigenous population greatly decreased, along with tribal homelands and cultural freedoms. From the beginning, U.S. government policy contributed to the loss of culture and land.
Protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and systemic racism have been boisterous, righteous assertions of the constitutional liberties of free assembly, expression and speech — even as police have too often breached those rights. Yet as a wider precept, free speech is losing ground. As activists take to the streets demanding systemic change, they should consider that a robust defense of free speech is crucial to their goals.
In recent years, the right has tried to claim the upper hand on free speech, decrying political correctness run amok. President Trump has invoked the 1st Amendment in defending gun-toting marauders in Charlottesville, Va., raging against Twitter for flagging his incendiary tweets and threatening to withhold funds from colleges that undercut speech protections.
But the president’s defense of free speech is selective at best, and the White House and its allies frequently wage war on speech with which they disagree. The president pushed the NFL to punish players for kneeling in demonstration. He has persistently discredited legitimate media outlets and retaliated against them for unfavorable coverage. And he even went so far as to call for military suppression of protests under the Insurrection Act.
Apart from being cynical and opportunistic, this one-sided conservative approach to free speech has had the unfortunate effect of fueling doubts about the value of free speech on the left. When people in high government positions invoke free speech to protect bigotry, it’s no wonder some people begin to question whether the 1st Amendment is just a smokescreen for noxious ideas.
Moreover, when free speech defenders deny the dehumanizing effect that speech can have, and dismiss justifiable outrage as oversensitivity, they feed a sense that free speech as a principle is impervious to the harms that expression can wreak for minority groups in particular.
Throughout U.S. history, people have claimed the 1st Amendment to protect speech they favor, but resisted similar safeguards for expression they find offensive. In 1978, when the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Ill., memberships from its largely liberal supporters tanked, partially recovering only when the organization explained that the city ordinances they challenged had also been used to stop Jewish war veterans from parading.
Princeton University has decided to remove former President Woodrow Wilson’s name from its school of Public and International Affairs, citing his “racist thinking and policies.” Looking solely through the lens of race relations, the case against Wilson is clear. In his 1912 run for the White House, Wilson would warm up the crowds with racial jokes that today would be unprintable.
And while lately expressions like “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” have been thrown around quite liberally, the Wilson administration provides literal examples of these concepts enacted as government policy. Gazing back across the long century since Wilson was in office shows the progress we have made as a country.
Wilson is not alone in being erased. Monuments to the once sacrosanct George Washington have been vandalized. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson statues are also under siege, and the venerable Democratic tradition of the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner has been abandoned because neither party founder meets contemporary muster. The first two Republican presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, are also facing censure and calls from radicals to have their monuments taken down. The fact that between them Lincoln and Grant defeated the Confederacy, ended slavery, and enforced the anti-slavery amendments to the Constitution seems inconsequential to the woke mob.
It is ironic that statues are the most visible targets of radical ire since they are idealized visions of flawed people. Looking at past presidents, how far do we go in demanding they live up to a statuesque level of perfection ?
Franklin D. Roosevelt has been conspicuously unscathed in the recent round of iconoclasm, but his record on race is hardly commendable. The same people who castigated President Donald Trump for allegedly putting immigrant children in cages ought to be incensed over FDR’s internment of 120,000 Japanese during World War II, most of whom were American citizens. He also blocked Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, kept the armed forces segregated, and praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee as “one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.”
Donald Trump ne s’était jamais caché de sa volonté d’épargner la prison à son ami de longue date Roger Stone. Le président américain a commué, vendredi, la peine de prison de son ex-conseiller reconnu coupable de mensonges au Congrès et de subordination de témoin dans le cadre de l’enquête sur l’ingérence russe.
Le président américain Donald Trump a décidé de commuer la peine de prison de son ami Roger Stone, condamné en février à 40 mois de prison dans le cadre de l’enquête sur l’ingérence russe pendant la campagne présidentielle américaine de 2016, a indiqué, vendredi 10 juillet, la Maison Blanche.
La peine de prison de Roger Stone, qui avait été reconnu coupable en novembre de mensonges au Congrès et de subordination de témoin, devait commencer la semaine prochaine.
"Aujourd’hui, le président Donald J. Trump a ordonné une mesure de clémence exécutive pour commuer la peine injuste de Roger Stone", est-il écrit dans le communiqué publié par la présidence américaine, ajoutant que cet ami de longue date du président, une "victime du canular russe", était dorénavant "un homme libre".
Dès l’annonce de la condamnation, Donald Trump avait expliqué qu’il voulait gracier son ex-collaborateur de 67 ans, un conseilleur politique sulfureux connu pour son style haut en couleur et son tatouage de Richard Nixon dans le dos.
The Supreme Court opened its term in October facing major cases on gay rights, guns, abortion and religious schools as well as President Trump’s effort to repeal the Obama-era policy that has protected young immigrants known as Dreamers.
The stage seemed set for a sharp move to the right. Conservatives had celebrated in 2018 when Senate Republicans narrowly confirmed Brett M. Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who had occupied the court’s center. Before, there had been four reliable conservatives ; this year, for a full term, there would be five.
But the term that ended this week took on a dramatically different tone than conservatives — or many others — expected, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts firmly in control and steering the court on a middle course.
Led by Roberts, the justices dealt a defeat to Trump by rejecting his repeal of the program that shields Dreamers from deportation. They ended the term Thursday by ruling the president can be required to turn over his tax returns and financial records to a New York grand jury.
Roberts cast the fifth vote to strike down a Louisiana abortion law that could have shut down most of the state’s clinics, saying he did so out of respect for precedent. Remarkably, the precedent came from a Texas case in which he had dissented.
For now, the chief justice looks to be standing in the way of a conservative drive to repeal the right to abortion. He appears to be playing a similar role in gun cases. And he signed onto a landmark decision by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch that vastly expanded job protections for gay, lesbian and transgender Americans.
On Nov. 13, 1862, the Confederate government advertised in the Charleston Daily Courier for 20 or 30 “able bodied Negro men” to work in the new nitre beds at Ashley Ferry, S.C. “The highest wages will be paid monthly,” the ad stated.
It was odious work. The nitre beds were large rectangles of rotted manure and straw, moistened weekly with urine, “dung water,” and liquid from privies, cesspools and drains, and turned over regularly, according to accounts at the time.
The process was designed to yield saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder, which the Confederate army desperately needed during the Civil War.
The wages for this repulsive task went, of course, not to those toiling in the beds, but to their owners.
The National Archives has made available online a trove of almost 6,000 Confederate government payroll records that account for money issued to hundreds of owners and others for the work of the enslaved.
The records provide a glimpse into the system in which a vast workforce — more than 29,000 people just in Virginia, according to historian Jaime Amanda Martinez — was compelled to labor on behalf of a war waged to preserve slavery.
Men, women and children were forced to work in places like a Petersburg, Va., lead factory that made bullets for the Confederate army.
A thousand “hands,” including laborers, brick layers and carpenters, rebuilt the old colonial installation, Fort Boykin, on the James River, for the Confederates.
Writer, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. Associated with the Concord-based literary movement called New England Transcendentalism, he embraced the Transcendentalist belief in the universality of creation and the primacy of personal insight and experience. Thoreau’s advocacy of simple, principled living remains compelling, while his writings on the relationship between people and the environment helped define the nature essay.
After graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau held a series of odd jobs.
Encouraged by Concord neighbor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, he started publishing essays, poems, and reviews in the transcendentalist magazine The Dial. His essay “Natural History of Massachusetts” (1842) revealed his talent for writing about nature.
From 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived in a cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, a small glacial lake near Concord. Guided by the maxim “Simplify, simplify,” he strictly limited his expenditures, his possessions, and his contact with others. His goal : “To live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
During his time at Walden, Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax. He withheld the tax to protest the existence of slavery and what he saw as an imperialistic war with Mexico. Released after a relative paid the tax, he wrote “Civil Disobedience External” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”) to explain why private conscience can constitute a higher law than civil authority. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” he argued, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.” Thoreau continued to be a vocal and active opponent of slavery. In addition to aiding runaway slaves, in 1859 he staunchly and publicly defended abolitionist John Brown.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says that her cancer has returned and that chemotherapy is yielding positive results. In a statement, she said that her most recent scan, on July 7, "indicated significant reduction of the liver lesions and no new disease."
In the statement, Ginsburg said she began a course of chemotherapy on May 19 after a periodic scan in February, followed by a biopsy, revealed lesions on her liver. She said her recent hospitalizations to remove gallstones and to treat an infection were unrelated to the recurrence of the cancer.
"Immunotherapy first essayed proved unsuccessful. The chemotherapy course, however, is yielding positive results," the statement said.
The statement added : "I am tolerating chemotherapy well and am encouraged by the success of my current treatment. I will continue bi-weekly chemotherapy to keep my cancer at bay, and am able to maintain an active daily routine. Throughout, I have kept up with opinion writing and all other Court work. I have often said I would remain a member of the Court as long as I can do the job full steam. I remain fully able to do that."
Those who have seen Ginsburg in recent months say that she is cheerful and fully engaged and that while she seemed to lose some weight during the initial phase of the lockdown, she has been gaining back those pounds of late.
The Justice Department has put to death Daniel Lee, 47, marking the first federal execution since 2003, after a chaotic overnight series of court rulings.
Lee had been convicted of killing three people, including a child, as part of a broader racketeering scheme to fund a white supremacist cause. He had waited more than 20 years on federal death row in Terre Haute, Ind.
Lee, strapped to a gurney and connected to an IV in his left arm, said : "I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer," according to a pool report from the prison.
Lee blamed a judge in Arkansas for ignoring DNA evidence in his case and said he was on the other side of the country when the killings happened. He said at one point, "I bear no responsibility" for the murders in his case, according to the pool report.
Lee’s last words were, "You’re killing an innocent man."
The United States has executed Wesley Purkey in its second federal execution this week after a 17-year hiatus. Purkey, 68, was executed via lethal injection on Thursday morning in Terre Haute, Ind.
The Supreme Court early Thursday denied appeals to stay Purkey’s execution, clearing the way for it to proceed.
Purkey, who was on death row at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, was convicted of the 1998 kidnapping and killing of 16-year-old Jennifer Long.
"I deeply regret the pain and suffering I caused to Jennifer’s family," Purkey said before he was put to death, according to a pool report from The Associated Press. "I am deeply sorry. I deeply regret the pain I caused to my daughter, who I love so very much. This sanitized murder really does not serve no purpose whatsoever."
Jennifer’s father, William Long, said that Purkey’s death had been "a long time coming."
The Justice Department has executed Dustin Lee Honken in Terre Haute, Ind., the third federal inmate put to death by the government this week.
Honken, 52, was sentenced to die in October 2005 after being convicted of numerous offenses, including five counts of murder — among them two small children — during the course of a continuing criminal enterprise.
A coroner pronounced him dead by lethal injection at 4:36 p.m. ET Friday.
At the time of his death, Honken had served more than 22 years in an Indiana prison.
For his last words, he turned to the writings of a Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, reciting lines from the poem Heaven-Haven.
Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec said ending Honken’s life was the culmination of "just punishment" being carried out.
"Nearly three decades after Honken coldly ended the lives of five people, including two young girls, all in an effort to protect himself and his criminal enterprise, he has finally faced justice," Kupec said in a statement.
President Donald Trump refused to give a clear answer on whether he would accept this year’s presidential election results in an exclusive wide-ranging interview with Fox News, which aired Sunday.
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace pressed Trump to “give a direct answer” on whether he would accept the Nov. 3 election results or not.
“I have to see. Look, you — I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say no and I didn’t last time either,” Trump said.
When asked if he can give a direct answer about whether he will accept the election, Trump replied, "I have to see." pic.twitter.com/QgRWyCM3D4
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) July 19, 2020
The exchange came shortly after Wallace asked whether Trump was “a good loser” or gracious. Trump said that he wasn’t a good loser and that he thinks “mail-in voting is going to rig the election.” This led Wallace to ask whether Trump may not accept the results of the election.
Wallace referenced that he had asked Trump a similar question during a 2016 presidential debate in which Trump had faced off against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Wallace had asked then whether Trump was prepared to concede to the winner, if he didn’t win. “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense,” Trump had said in 2016.
Election experts say Trump’s critiques of mail-in voting as a pathway to voter fraud are largely unsubstantiated. Instead, they say mail-in voting is expected to improve voter turnout on the whole and there is little evidence that it will have a partisan effect by benefitting one party over the other. Democrats are rallying behind increased access to voting, including mail-in voting, as the coronavirus pandemic has led some citizens to risk their health in order to vote in-person. Some Republicans have voiced support for mail-in voting as well.
Le secrétaire à la Défense américain, Mark Esper, a diffusé, ce vendredi, un memo qui était attendu depuis quelques jours.
Ce texte clarifie l’utilisation de certains drapeaux aux États-Unis. Dont le drapeau confédéré, cette bannière adoptée pendant la guerre civile (1861-1865). Ce drapeau rouge est barré d’une croix bleu marine sur laquelle se retrouvent 13 étoiles ; il est devenu un symbole de ralliement aux idées racistes. L’État du Mississippi avait pris la décision de retirer de son drapeau le symbole confédéré, début juillet.
Cette décision va à l’encontre des souhaits de Donald Trump pour qui le drapeau confédéré fait partie du patrimoine américain. Trump avait aussi déclaré que la décision de faire flotter le drapeau confédéré relevait de la « liberté d’expression ».
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, the degree to which fundamental concepts like “liberty,” “rights,” “free speech,” “defiance,” and “self-defense” have been historically racialized is arguably nowhere more visible than in the Black military experience. Traditional attitudes toward African Americans in uniform have implications for our understanding of the ongoing policing of Black bodies across the nation. The fear and animus stoking law-enforcement violence against Black Americans can also be discerned at the root of earlier longstanding policies prohibiting outright, or radically restricting, African-American military service dating back to the Revolution, when the British cannily offered enslaved men their freedom in exchange for defending the rights of the king.
Several thousand Black men, enslaved and free, ended up serving in the Continental Army, for the most part in integrated units, but once the crisis was over, Congress passed the 1792 Militia Act limiting enrollment to “white male” citizens. It would not be amended for another 70 years, when emergency again compelled the enlistment of “persons of African descent” for “military or naval service” in 1862. By the end of the Civil War, approximately 180,000 Black soldiers had served in the Union Army, about 10 percent of the total force.
The connection between full political participation and the bearing of arms to defend the republic dates to antiquity. In the United States, especially during the early national and antebellum eras, the citizen-soldier’s obedience—a thinking, willing obedience—was routinely defined against both the blind obedience of the European conscript and the cringing, compelled obedience associated with the slave. That is why the Confederate congress refused until the desperate end of the Civil War to consider arming the enslaved : that action would have affirmed chattel to be human beings.
As the white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who commanded a regiment of newly freed slaves in South Carolina, wrote, “Till the blacks were armed, there was no guarantee of their freedom. It was their demeanor under arms that shamed the nation into recognizing them as men.” Confederate policy regarded Black Union soldiers as not enemy combatants but fugitives to be re-enslaved or otherwise “dealt with” by state authorities, while their captured white officers, “deemed as inciting servile insurrection,” were to “be put to death or be otherwise punished.”
In practice, Black soldiers were often given no quarter ; at best, their fate was wildly uncertain. The April 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, which reminded one Confederate of a slaughterhouse awash in brains and blood, is only the most notorious example of the treatment received at enemy hands. Soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the war’s most celebrated Black regiment, participated in the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863, knowing full well that, in the words of Captain Luis F. Emilio, their enemy regarded them as “outlaws.”
No one is more important to the history of environmental conservation than John Muir — the “wilderness prophet,” “patron saint of the American wilderness” and “father of the national parks” who founded the nation’s oldest conservation organization, the Sierra Club. But on Wednesday, citing the current racial reckoning, the group announced it will end its blind reverence to a figure who was also racist.
As Confederate statues fall across the country, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in an early morning post on the group’s website, “it’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.” Muir, who fought to preserve Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Forest, once referred to African Americans as lazy “Sambos,” a racist pejorative that many black people consider to be as offensive as the n-word.
While recounting a legendary walk from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, Muir described Native Americans he encountered as “dirty.”
Muir’s friendships in the early 1900s were equally troubling, the Sierra Club said. Henry Fairfield Osborn, a close associate, led the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History and, following Muir’s death, helped establish the American Eugenics Society, which labeled nonwhite people, including Jews at the time, as inferior.
The Sierra Club isn’t the only organization that is shaking its foundations. Leaders of predominantly white, liberal and progressive groups throughout the field of conservation say they are taking a hard look within their organizations and don’t like what they see.
African American and other minority employees are pointing out the lack of diversity in green groups and the racial bias that persists in top and mid-level management.
Throughout the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of the past weeks, his name was evoked by activists and news anchors. His message of nonviolence has been conveyed repeatedly—in a powerful new documentary and several recent children’s books. Indeed, over this past weekend, politicians called for his name to be affixed to the Voting Rights Act and even to the Edmund Pettus Bridge itself—the historic span, across the Alabama River, where Lewis was clubbed and bloodied 55 years ago.
John Lewis, in life and in death, has been everywhere lately. Even as I write this, an authorized biography of the widely revered civil rights activist and U.S. congressman from Georgia is being rushed to print. The book, His Truth is Marching On : John Lewis and the Power of Hope, by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham, contains an incident that perfectly encapsulates the modest, exemplary character of Lewis, who died Friday after a battle with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
The date was August 28, 1963. The setting was the White House, where Martin Luther King Jr. and a group of civil rights leaders—a 23-year-old John Lewis among them—were meeting with President John F. Kennedy. At one point when photographs were being taken, Lewis was hidden in the back. James Forman—a colleague of Lewis’s on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—often urged Lewis, a protégé of Dr. King’s and a rising voice in the movement for racial justice, to push his way to the front in situations like this. Lewis quietly refused. He later explained why. “I’ve never been the kind of person who naturally attracts the limelight,” he said. “I’m not a handsome guy. I’m not flamboyant. I’m not what you would call elegant. I’m short and stocky. My skin is dark, not fair…For some or all of these reasons, I simply have never been the kind of guy who draws attention.”
The breadth and richness of his 80-year life journey belie the absurdity of such a statement. For, if nothing else, John Lewis over the decades would become famous for drawing attention, for placing his imprint on the narrative of this country, an imprint that is deeply entrenched and has been continually discovered and rediscovered by each generation.
Federal agents operating in Kansas City, Mo., as part of a new push against violent crime will be identifiable and won’t be roving the streets to make arrests, the local U.S. attorney said, responding to questions sparked by the controversial use of federal agents in U.S. cities.
"These agents won’t be patrolling the streets," U.S. Attorney Timothy Garrison said in a statement to NPR. "When they are making arrests or executing warrants, these federal agents will be clearly identified by their agency’s visible badges or insignia."
The presence of federal law enforcement agents has become a new flashpoint in national protests over racial injustice and police brutality. The dynamic is most prevalent in Portland, Ore., where local and state officials said federal forces are essentially occupying the city – and worsening, rather than de-escalating, clashes with protesters.
In Kansas City, Garrison said, "The only people federal agents will be removing from the street are those they arrest in the course of their investigations of violent crimes."
The federal prosecutor’s remarks echo what he said last week when he said the enhanced federal presence "is not about suppressing protests."
As the U.S. attorney answered questions about the federal operation in Missouri, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas on Monday joined the mayors of 14 other U.S. cities, including Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, D.C., in calling on Attorney General William Barr to withdraw federal forces immediately and "agree to no further unilateral deployments in our cities."
President Trump on Wednesday said his administration would "surge" federal law enforcement officials to help fight crime in Chicago and Albuquerque, N.M., as part of the Justice Department’s controversial Operation Legend.
Trump accused local politicians in the cities of not doing enough to address what he says are waves of crime as the public and some politicians call for the reduction of police department budgets.
"In recent weeks there’s been a radical movement to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments," Trump said, claiming "extreme politicians have joined this anti-police crusade and relentlessly vilified our law enforcement heroes."
"To look at it from any standpoint their efforts to shut down policing in their own communities has led to a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence. This bloodshed must end. This bloodshed will end," the president added.
Citing a long series of crime statistics – including for New York City, Philadelphia and Minneapolis – Trump urged other cities to ask for federal help.
John Muir is a towering figure in the environmental movement. He saved Yosemite Valley, helped form the National Park Service and influenced generations with his passionate calls to protect and revere nature.
But on Wednesday, the Sierra Club — which Muir co-founded — acknowledged a darker part of Muir’s history.
“He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life,” the environmental group said in an article posted on its website. “As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.”
The club said it was addressing Muir’s racism in the spirit of reckoning with the past following protests over the death in police custody of George Floyd. In the wake of Floyd’s death, numerous Confederate monuments have been taken down, as well as some statues of Christopher Columbus and Father Juniper Serra, another founding father of California.
Conservatives are always looking for converts, the old saying goes, while liberals are always looking for heretics. This would explain why so many of each are so angry right now. Joe Biden’s campaign has attracted the support of a small clique of Republican converts : the Lincoln Project, a boutique collection of anti-Trump Republicans, as well as former Ohio governor John Kasich, who confirmed yesterday he will endorse Biden at the Democratic convention.
It’s no surprise conservatives are furious. Anti-anti-Trump conservative Dan McLaughlin argues in National Review that the defectors have abandoned “any pretense at being a Republican or conservative project,” having expanded the grounds of their disenchantment from narrow critique of Trump’s personal failings (which McLaughlin shares) to a broader rejection of the party whose pathologies Trump reflects. “Just say they’re a bunch of Democrats who are campaigning for a Democrat,” sneered Ben Shapiro on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show. Both Ingraham and Shapiro (who has a side hustle hawking unregulated brain pills) agreed the Lincoln Project is composed of “grifters.”
Perhaps more surprisingly, many progressives are also furious. The Lincoln Project has been criticized by leftists like former Bernie Sanders spokesperson David Sirota, Esquire columnist Charles Pierce, The New Republic’s Alex Shephard, and the Nation’s Jeet Heer, who goes so far as to accuse the anti-Trump Republicans of “pushing a sinister agenda.”
Many activists will not tolerate a Democratic-controlled Senate that allows Republicans to block civil-rights legislation next year.
Through the mid-20th century, southern segregationists relied on the Senate filibuster as their ultimate legislative weapon to block equal rights for Black Americans. Now the renewed struggle over those rights may doom the filibuster itself, perhaps as soon as next year.
With Donald Trump struggling in the polls, Democrats now are eagerly contemplating the possibility that the November presidential election could deliver the party unified control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time since 2009. But that excitement is tempered by the recognition that under any scenario, Republicans will almost certainly still control enough Senate seats to block most of the Democrats’ ambitious agenda through sustained filibusters.
That prospect raises alarms among advocates for a broad range of causes, including climate change and immigration reform. But after this spring’s nationwide outpouring of protest following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many Democrats believe that if the party wins unified control, issues of racial inequity and civil rights may create the greatest pressure yet to eliminate the filibuster. That pressure will only grow if, as many voices are already urging, Democrats brand some or all of their voting-rights agenda as a tribute to the civil-rights pioneer and longtime Representative John Lewis, who died on Friday. Already, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said he would reintroduce one such bill to name it for Lewis, who he described as “my hero.”
It is a rare thing to have so many people be so attentive to the health and well-being of an 87-year-old they don’t know and have probably never met.
But Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no ordinary octogenarian. As the oldest member of the U.S. Supreme Court, and a stalwart of its liberal wing, the vitality of the jurist is of exceeding importance to those eager to fashion the nation’s highest court after their own views and ideology.
Every medical bulletin, like Ginsburg’s recent announcement she was undergoing chemotherapy for a recurrence of cancer, brings a fresh round of ghoulish speculation about a possible court vacancy, who might fill the seat, when and how.
While the Supreme Court is supremely important — and its makeup of utmost interest to a segment of the electorate — it has typically not been a top-of-the-mind issue for the vast majority of those casting presidential ballots.
Voters pay attention to major court decisions and political fights such as the 2018 battle over Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination, said Carroll Doherty, who directs political research for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. But in general, he said, “Americans don’t know a lot about the court,” and their interest quickly wanes with the faded news headlines.
“They can see members of Congress. They can see the presidential candidates,” Doherty went on. “But you don’t see [Chief Justice] John Roberts on CNN. You don’t see the court’s deliberations in real time.”
This Supreme Court term belonged to John Roberts. The chief justice was in the majority in nearly every case. And he quite literally had the last word, as he wrote the opinion for the last two cases released this term, which dealt with President Trump’s much sought-after financial records. The rulings were largely interpreted as a rebuke to Trump, and considering Roberts unexpectedly joined the liberals in several other cases this term, some have speculated that the conservative chief might be moving to the center.
But is Roberts actually becoming more liberal ?
New data from Supreme Court researchers indicates that Roberts is firmly at the center of the court. According to this year’s Martin-Quinn scores, a prominent measure of the justices’ ideology, there is an 82 percent chance that Roberts was the median justice in the term that just wrapped. However, as the chart below shows, there is some uncertainty about where he actually falls — or how much daylight exists between Roberts’s ideological position this term and the positions of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.
One Tuesday this past May, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg announced she was spending the night at the hospital.
The announcement sent the usual shivers down the spines of liberals across America, who, given Ginsburg’s advanced age and serial bouts with cancer, are stricken with fear each time word comes that she is facing yet another health scare while Republicans are in a position to name or control the Senate‘s approval of her successor.
The details accompanying the May announcement, however, offered considerable reassurance that no shift in the makeup of the often-polarized court was imminent. While any trip to the hospital by an 87-year-old is cause for concern, according to the court’s news release, the problem was a minor one : The court’s much-celebrated liberal trailblazer had a gallstone.
Only months earlier, Ginsburg had declared herself "cancer free," and the court’s statement emphasized that Ginsburg’s gallbladder condition was “benign” and the treatment she faced was “non-surgical.”
On Friday, however, Ginsburg confirmed that the May statement did more to obscure the truth about her health than to illuminate it.
It turns out that in February, the justice got word that a regular “scan” found lesions on her liver. A biopsy appears to have confirmed that the growths were malignant cancer, as Ginsburg says she embarked on immunotherapy and then chemotherapy when the first treatment “proved unsuccessful.”
Front-runner. Black woman. Afro-Asian ? A favorite to become Joe Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris is in the homestretch of the most consequential veepstakes of our lifetime. With cries for racial justice and police reform gripping the nation, we know Harris’ Blackness matters to a Democratic ticket led by a white male septuagenarian—but so does her Asian identity.
As the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, Harris’ Afro-Asian heritage puts her at the crux of the coronavirus crisis. Just as the pandemic has cast a stark light on the lethality of systemic anti-Black racism in the United States, it has also exposed discrimination and xenophobia against Asian communities and other immigrants. Still, a Black cop and an Asian cop are among the officers charged with aiding and abetting George Floyd’s murder. Speaking to Black and Asian constituencies now would be a powerful acknowledgment that could further galvanize political coalition building while tending to the wounds of division.
Of course, the senator’s Afro-Asian heritage is muted in part because of the American one-drop rule—“a drop of Black blood” makes an individual Black. In her book The Truths We Hold, Harris recounts that her mother understood that America would view her daughters as Black, so she raised them as such…
The U.S. Supreme Court term that ended last week was a blockbuster, with landmark decisions on abortion, LGBTQ rights, presidential power, immigration, religious liberty and American Indian law. No term in almost two decades comes close to having issued so many crucial decisions —with long-term consequences for millions of Americans.
The drama of the term was enhanced by what you might think of as coming-out events for two justices : chosen transformations that change the way each presents to the world.
Chief Justice John Roberts revealed himself to be (or to have become) a genuine, judicial restraint Burkean conservative who is prepared to uphold liberal precedents and to keep the Trump administration subordinate to the rule of law. He surprised liberals and horrified movement conservatives who had hoped he would lead or at least participate in sweeping away liberal precedents they hate.
And Justice Neil Gorsuch revealed himself as so highly principled in his commitment to textualist statutory interpretation that he will carry its logic to conclusions that liberals love and conservatives hate. His bid to become the intellectual leader of the conservative wing of the court is going to have a different character than court watchers like me had anticipated.
Together, these coming-out events should remind us that the justices aren’t robots, driven by partisan or ideological agendas. They are complex human beings, whose decisions are shaped by jurisprudence, values, beliefs, ideas, emotions and strategies. That’s why they have the capacity to surprise us.
Roberts is now the most influential chief justice since the great John Marshall, who held the job from 1801 to 1835. His power stems from the fact that he is the swing vote on the court. The way he votes will ordinarily win. Roberts was in the majority on every single one of the major cases this term except the Indian law case, the one that almost certainly will have the least real-world impact.
The past decade has witnessed a dangerous trend : a judicial branch that expresses deep suspicion of the legislative branch’s competence and motives.
The Constitution makes Congress the first branch among equals. But the past decade has witnessed a dangerous trend : a Supreme Court that expresses deep suspicion of Congress’s competence and motives. This distrust should be worrying for anyone who cares about the most democratic branch’s ability to serve as a check on presidential power and confront an ever-growing list of policy challenges.
Let’s begin with this past Supreme Court term. In Trump v. Mazars the Court evaluated subpoenas that three House committees issued to private corporations, asking for President Trump’s personal financial documents. The Court’s decision remanded the case to a lower court, with instructions that forged a middle path between the polar-opposite arguments advanced by Congress and Trump. But on its own terms, the Court’s opinion sets out a new rule calling for Congress’s motives to be closely scrutinized, asking lower courts to “carefully assess whether the asserted legislative purpose warrants the significant step of involving the President” and be “attentive to the nature of the evidence offered by Congress to establish that a subpoena advances a valid legislative purpose.” In other words, the Court invites close scrutiny of congressional subpoenas. After Mazars, courts need not defer to Congress’s assertions of what documents it needs and why.
In 1972, the future Florida congresswoman was a young Black girl struggling to make friends at a predominantly white Jacksonville high school. She and her best friend, Vera Hartley, created the Charisma Club. Hartley was president and Demings was her second-in-command.
“We created an environment of inclusion,” Hartley said, recalling how she and Demings invited white students to join. Then “we were able to get into other clubs.”
Nearly four decades later, Demings is again being considered for vice president — this time by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. As a Black woman with a background in policing who hails from America’s premier battleground state, Demings has honed the charisma she learned in high school to build a rapid national profile.
But she’s also facing scrutiny, particularly over her four years as Orlando’s police chief. While those credentials could blunt President Donald Trump’s argument that a Biden administration would lead to lawlessness, they could also spur unease among progressives who are leery of law enforcement, especially at a time of reckoning over systemic racism and policing.
When Roberts joined liberals on the Supreme Court to preserve an Obama-era program shielding young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children, he surprised some of his colleagues by voting against the Trump administration from the beginning, according to multiple sources familiar with the inner workings of the court.
New details obtained by CNN reveal how Roberts maneuvered on controversial cases in the justices’ private sessions, at times defying expectations as he sided with liberal justices. Roberts exerted unprecedented control over cases and the court’s internal operations, especially after the nine were forced to work in isolation because of Covid-19.
The chief justice, for the first time in his tenure on the court, voted to strike down a state law that would diminish access to abortion and, in a decision for the ages, rejected President Donald Trump’s extensive claims of "temporary presidential immunity."
Roberts also sent enough signals during internal deliberations on firearms restrictions, sources said, to convince fellow conservatives he would not provide a critical fifth vote anytime soon to overturn gun control regulations. As a result, the justices in June denied several petitions regarding Second Amendment rights.
In an exclusive four-part series, CNN offers a rare glimpse behind the scenes at how justices on the Roberts court asserted their interests, forged coalitions and navigated political pressure and the coronavirus pandemic. The justices’ opinions are public, but their deliberations are private and usually remain secret.
Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) was a prominent historian of American political culture. He taught for many years at Columbia University, was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and is remembered for works such as Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and the essay collection The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). Beginning his academic career as a man of the left, by the 1950s Hofstadter had become associated with the postwar “consensus” school of historiography—a label he was never entirely comfortable with. In his many books and essays, Hofstadter paired his appreciation for historical irony and complexity with iconoclastic criticisms of both leftist shibboleths and liberal complacencies. It was, however, above all to the American conservative tradition—which he lived to see take new and virulent forms in the later 1960s, before his death of leukemia at fifty-four—that he devoted his attention and analysis.
Then as now, Hofstadter’s focus on the cultural and psychological dimensions of right-wing politics have attracted both praise and controversy—particularly as, since 2016, commentators have once again debated the political valence of populism, the purported psychological roots of partisanship, and the nature of both consensus and polarization in American politics. This has prompted the Library of America to publish a three-volume new edition of Hofstadter’s major works, reportage, and unpublished essays on American politics and culture, edited by Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz. The first volume appeared in April 2020 as Richard Hofstadter : Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965. Daniel Wortel-London interviewed Wilentz about Hofstadter and this new edition.
The Justice Department celebrates its 150th anniversary this month, but thousands of agency veterans aren’t really feeling the love these days.
Instead, they worry President Trump has demolished the norms that were supposed to insulate prosecutions from politics.
At the center of the debate is Attorney General Bill Barr, who’s scheduled to testify Tuesday on Capitol Hill.
Barr has become a lightning rod for critics who argue he’s not an independent officer in the way the boss of the Justice Department should be, but acting too much like a sympathetic counselor for the president.
In recent weeks, lawyers in Washington have pushed the bar association to investigate the attorney general. A bipartisan group of 65 professors and faculty at his alma mater, the George Washington University Law School, said he had “failed to fulfill his oath of office to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States.’”
Barr’s fans said the Justice Department is lucky to have him at the helm during a difficult time in history. And the attorney general has defended himself, including in an interview with NPR.
Echoes of Watergate
Longtime watchers in government and law said the environment today echoes the most chaotic period in the modern history of the Justice Department.
In May 1973, President Richard Nixon was staring down the Watergate investigation that would eventually lead to his downfall. Nixon was using the powers of the presidency to try to persecute his political enemies and then cover up the discovery of those actions.
As part of that effort, the president delivered a speech that evening that came to be known as his “no whitewash” address.
Justice Ginsburg underwent a minimally invasive non-surgical procedure today at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City to revise a bile duct stent that was originally placed at Sloan Kettering in August 2019. According to her doctors, stent revisions are common occurrences and the procedure, performed using endoscopy and medical imaging guidance, was done to minimize the risk of future infection. The Justice is resting comfortably and expects to be released from the hospital by the end of the week.
On July 1, Richmond, Va.’s, monument to Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson — which had towered above the city’s Monuments Avenue since 1919 — was taken down from its pedestal. The announcement was a victory for advocates who had called for the statue’s removal for years, and similar milestones were occurring across America. Between George Floyd’s death on May 25 and July 14, at least 36 Confederate monuments were removed or relocated in the U.S., according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Monuments to Christopher Columbus have also been torn down in numerous cities, as have other monument perceived to celebrate a racist history, such as a statue of Philadelphia’s former Mayor Frank Rizzo.
As a result, monument bases in dozens of cities now stand vacant. What, if anything, should fill those empty spaces ? TIME reached out to a collection of historians, art historians, artists and activists to get their opinions.
Many responded with a similar answer : Communities must democratize the process by which they select their new monuments. Erecting monuments, says Kirk Savage, a professor of the history of art and architecture at University of Pittsburgh, has always been driven by “people with access to power, who then disproportionately become the voices that are heard in the commemorative landscape.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a darling of the US left and an increasingly frail octogenarian, is taking center stage ahead of this year’s presidential election, with the Supreme Court’s balance hanging on her seemingly faltering health.
Ginsburg’s liver cancer — and recent repeat trips to the hospital due to bile duct infection — has Washington’s political class on tenterhooks, with her every medical procedure causing major hand-wringing, not to mention a variety of contingency plans.
Ginsburg was hospitalized yet again on Wednesday to "revise a bile duct stent," as her doctors assured the public that such things were "common occurrences."
Should the 87-year-old, who is currently undergoing chemotherapy, leave the bench, President Donald Trump would move quickly to name a successor, with the Republican-led Senate likely to confirm the nomination in equally record speed as the November 3 election draws near.
This would cement a conservative majority on the court, which has final say on a number of the touchiest subjects dividing America — from abortion to fire arms, civil rights to the death penalty.
Although five of the court’s nine justices are conservative, it is not uncommon for at least one of them to vote with the progressive bloc, resulting in several recent decisions favorable to liberals.
In his latest assault on the American electoral system, President Donald Trump today proposed postponing the November election.
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump tweeted, offering no evidence for a debunked assertion. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote ???”
As Trump may or may not know, the date of the election is set by law, and would require an act of Congress to be overturned. Trump probably cannot postpone the election, the bedrock of American democracy, but the greater danger is that he can destroy its legitimacy.
The idea of a delay has been floated previously, though usually vaguely and in response to questions. Jared Kushner refused to rule it out, and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, has warned that Trump would try to postpone the election, though the president has previously affirmed November 3 as Election Day. This time is different, because Trump is raising the idea of his own volition.
David A. Graham : The damage of Trump’s voter-fraud allegations can’t be undone
While Trump has shown little regard for the rule of law, and his aides have often broken the law with the confidence that they wouldn’t be punished, this proposal is still likely a dead letter. The major dates of the election and presidential term of office are set by law and by the Constitution. According to the law, Election Day is held the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Changing that would require Congress to change the law, and it is unlikely, to put things mildly, that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic House would agree to any such delay.
The Supreme Court is more popular than it has been in more than a decade, with almost 6 in 10 Americans approving of the job the nine justices are doing in new Gallup polling.
It’s the highest mark since 2009, when 61% said they approved of the way the court was going about its business.
In the intervening decade, the approval numbers for the nation’s highest court slipped significantly — bottoming out following the 2016 election, when just 42% approved.
The comeback in SCOTUS numbers of late has been fueled by rising approval among Democrats and independents, even as the numbers among Republicans have dipped.
In 2019, 73% of Republicans, 54% of independents and just 38% of Democrats approved of the Court.
President Trump’s reactions to Supreme Court decisions threaten the legitimacy of the nation’s judicial system.
Abortion. Religious liberty. Gender identity. Immigration. Presidential power. These are but some of the consequential issues the U.S. Supreme Court decided this past year.
But the Court’s decisions are not the only noteworthy aspect of the Supreme Court’s 2019-2020 term. Another remarkable, albeit troubling, aspect of the Supreme Court’s recent term had nothing to do with the Court itself. It had to do with President Donald J. Trump’s reactions to some of the Court’s decisions that did not turn out the way the President would have liked.
Rather than responding in a measured and respectful manner to adverse decisions, as previous Presidents have done, President Trump resorted to making what could fairly be described as snide digs directed at the Court. Consider a sampling of comments from his Twitter account :
U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves often weaves the nation’s history of discrimination into his analysis. Reeves, a Black man who writes with trenchant candor about racism in America, was appointed to the Southern District of Mississippi by President Barack Obama in 2010. His Tuesday decision in Jamison v. McClendon, however, is much more than a legal history lesson. It is a fiery protest against the injustices of racist law enforcement wrapped in a scholarly critique of the appalling doctrine that lets lawless cops off the hook. He denounced a legal system that favors unconstitutional policing over Black lives. And then he let the officer off the hook.
The doctrine of qualified immunity, which protects police officers from lawsuits over their behavior on the job, has suddenly received massive scrutiny in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. Judges have begun to grapple with the courts’ role in expanding the doctrine and its dehumanizing consequences. Some judges are now even listening to the protests in the streets. A federal appeals court cited Floyd’s killing in a June opinion denying qualified immunity, explaining that the doctrine risks letting cops disrespect “the dignity and worth of black lives.” Reeves has now joined the chorus of judges urging the Supreme Court to acknowledge the “worth of black lives” and its complicity in using “legal jargon” to cover up systemic racism in law enforcement.
Justice Ginsburg has had quite a few health scares over the past little over a decade. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2009 and subsequently resisted pressure to retire from the Court under Obama’s administration. With multiple hospital stays this year and a recurrence of her pancreatic cancer, many question how long she will be able to stay on the Court and if she will outlast President Trump’s incumbency, while some liberals express frustration that Ginsburg did not retire under President Obama.
Retirements and replacements from the Court occur in different patterns. The current situation harkens back to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s retirement from the Court in 1991. Like Ginsburg, Marshall was a liberal leader on the Court. While Ginsburg spent her early years as a practitioner working for the ACLU, Marshall established the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund prior to his nomination to the Court. Marshall’s health was in decline during the Reagan years and once George H.W. Bush was elected president, he might have guessed he would need to step down before the end of Bush’s minimally four years as president. Still, he was known to somewhat sarcastically confide to his clerks, “If I die, prop me up and keep on voting,” not wanting a conservative justice to be placed in his stead. Marshall retired from the Court with Bush still president in October 1991 citing health and age. He was replaced by Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the more conservative justices on the Court, leading to one of the biggest ideological shifts from retiring to replacing justice.
On a September morning in 2001, Native American leaders from across the country convened in a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC, to talk strategy. The Supreme Court was escalating a destructive war on tribal sovereignty, weakening the power of Indigenous nations to protect their people and lands. As the meeting opened, Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii took the podium and stunned everyone with the news that two planes had just hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The meeting’s 300 attendees flocked to the lobby to watch live coverage of the attacks.
Less than one hour later, some esteemed tribal leaders called for the meeting to continue as planned. “What’s happened is awful,” lawyer Riyaz Kanji recalls them saying. “But we came here from all around the country to address some big issues. So let’s get to work.”
Their willingness to proceed testified to the urgency of their task. Though federal policies were slowly becoming more supportive of Native peoples, the Supreme Court had delivered two decades’ worth of judgments limiting their progress. In 2002, legal scholar David Getches “found that convicted criminals won 34 percent of the time while Indian tribes have won only 23 percent of the time.” He added, “Nobody does worse in this Supreme Court than Indian tribes.” After 2000 brought particularly brutal rulings over taxation and jurisdiction issues, tribal leaders and lawyers decided they needed a new approach. Thus, on September 11, 2001, they formed the Tribal Supreme Court Project—and their luck began to change.
The work of four justices captures the nature of the extraordinary and historic October 2019 term of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Much already has been written about the role of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. With Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement in 2018, court scholars and others predicted Roberts would be the median or center justice between the court’s four liberal justices and the four justices more conservative than he. Those predictions came to full fruition last term.
Roberts strategically guided the court through high-stake political cases, such as subpoenas for President Donald Trump’s financial records and elimination of the so-called Dreamers delayed deportation program, with cross-ideological majorities that created the image of a nonpartisan, independent institution.
I am pleased to be at this Hillsdale College celebration of Constitution Day. Sadly, many colleges these days don’t even teach the Constitution, much less celebrate it. But at Hillsdale, you recognize that the principles of the Founding are as relevant today as ever—and vital to the success of our free society. I appreciate your observance of this important day and all you do for civic education in the United States.
When many people think about the virtues of our Constitution, they first mention the Bill of Rights. That makes sense. The great guarantees of the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms, just to name the first few—are critical safeguards of liberty. But as President Reagan used to remind people, the Soviet Union had a constitution too, and it even included some lofty-sounding rights. Ultimately, however, those promises were just empty words, because there was no rule of law to enforce them.
The rule of law is the lynchpin of American freedom. And the critical guarantee of the rule of law comes from the Constitution’s structure of separated powers. The Framers recognized that by dividing the legislative, executive, and judicial powers— each significant, but each limited—they would minimize the risk of any form of tyranny. That is the real genius of the Constitution, and it is ultimately more important to securing liberty than the Bill of Rights. After all, the Bill of Rights is a set of amendments to the original Constitution, which the Framers did not think needed an express enumeration of rights.
Le procureur général Bill Barr a qualifié ses propres procureurs du ministère de la Justice de "bureaucratie permanente" qui abusent trop souvent de leur pouvoir pour s’attaquer à des cibles de premier plan dans un processus qu’il a assimilé à une "chasse aux têtes".
Dans un discours mercredi devant un public largement conservateur célébrant la Journée de la Constitution au Hillsdale College, le chef du ministère de la Justice a affirmé qu’il était celui qui devrait porter les grands pourvois dans les cas d’intérêt national.
"L’idée que les procureurs de rang doivent prendre les décisions finales au ministère de la Justice est complètement folle", a déclaré Barr.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, championne de la lutte pour l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes et doyenne de la Cour suprême des États-Unis, est décédée vendredi à l’âge de 87 ans. Son remplacement promet une bagarre épique entre républicains et démocrates, à moins de deux mois de l’élection présidentielle.
Avec Ruth Bader Ginsburg, emportée vendredi par un cancer du pancréas, “disparaît une authentique légende de la justice américaine”, observe El País. “Une icône du féminisme, représentante de l’aile progressiste de la cour, dont le vote fut décisif” dans la lutte pour “l’égalité des sexes” et certains sujets divisant profondément les États-Unis, comme “l’avortement, le mariage homosexuel ou les droits des immigrés”.
Nommée en 1993 par Bill Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg était déjà une figure vénérée du féminisme avant son entrée à la Cour suprême. Mais ses années passées au sein de la plus haute juridiction américaine, avec son lot de votes historiques, avaient fait entrer cette juriste de haut vol, major de sa promotion à Columbia, dans la culture populaire, souligne Variety.
La juge Amy Coney Barrett, candidate du président Donald Trump à la Cour suprême, siège à la Cour fédérale d’appel du 7e circuit (Chicago) depuis 2017.
Sa courte activité en tant que juge a donné lieu à peu d’opinions dignes de mention ou controversées. Elle a cependant compté parmi les juges majoritaires dans plusieurs décisions qui seront sûrement remises en question lors du débat au Sénat sur sa confirmation.
Avec le soutien du leader de la majorité sénatoriale Mitch McConnell et de la Federalist Society, M. Trump a nommé plus de trois cents nouveaux juges fédéraux. Il a nommé 30 p. 100 des juges de cours d’appel fédérales et trois juges de la Cour suprême : Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh et Amy Coney Barrett. Ils servent tous pour la vie. Et à moins que les démocrates ne remportent les deux élections à second tour du Sénat en Géorgie, Biden aura besoin de l’assentiment d’un Sénat contrôlé par les républicains pour nommer de nouveaux juges ou juges. Qu’est-ce que ce paysage signifie pour l’avenir des tribunaux fédéraux, et de la Cour suprême en particulier ?
Les résultats des élections de 2020 sont là. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. est le président élu des États-Unis d’Amérique. Quelque temps avant le 20 janvier 2021, Donald Trump reconnaîtra l’inévitable (même s’il ne l’admettra peut-être jamais publiquement) et se préparera à quitter la Maison-Blanche. Étant donné que son mandat a été en proie à de nombreuses allégations d’inconduite privée et officielle, les observateurs s’attendent à ce qu’il puisse essayer de se protéger, lui-même, sa famille et ses associés contre les poursuites fédérales par l’utilisation libérale du pouvoir de grâce, y compris peut-être la délivrance d’une grâce à lui-même. En prévision de l’arrivée de ce moment, j’ai passé les derniers mois à procéder à un examen historique, juridique et politique complet du pouvoir de grâce du président. Dans le prochain article savant qui présente mes conclusions, je conclus (entre autres choses) que, bien que la question n’ait jamais été testée, un président ne peut pas se gracier constitutionnellement. Voici pourquoi.
"Il me semble que la réponse à cette question dépend de la théorie précise selon laquelle les ex-présidents peuvent être mis en accusation, et les deux théories ont été mentionnées lors du procès Belknap".
La Cour suprême veut raviver une doctrine qui paralyserait l’administration de Joe Biden. "Au moins cinq juges conservateurs ont signalé qu’ils étaient désireux de faire revivre la "doctrine de la non-délégation", le principe constitutionnel selon lequel le Congrès ne peut pas donner ("déléguer") trop de pouvoir législatif à l’exécutif."
Election présidentielle. L’Attorney General du Texas demande à la Cour suprême un coup d’État. "Son pourvoi est une pièce de théâtre, pas une stratégie juridique crédible."
Le Chief Justice John Roberts devrait-il être considéré comme un patriote américain ? "Dans tous les cas, le vote de Roberts est louable. Son bilan établit un modèle de jugement indépendant et non dogmatique avec une révérence à la cour en tant qu’institution. Pour cela, il devrait être considéré comme un patriote américain."
Les sectes sont de nouveau à la mode. Ou du moins, il est à la mode d’appeler sectes toutes sortes de choses, de QAnon à SoulCycle. Il est assez facile de jeter le mot vaguement, car nous ne sommes jamais parvenus à un consensus sur ce qu’est exactement une secte.
La ligne entre « secte » et « religion » est réputée flou, et la plus grande distinction pratique entre les deux est de savoir si une foi est là depuis assez longtemps pour que vous vous sentiez à l’aise de l’avoir. Si vous êtes particulièrement inquiet à propos des sectes rivales, même la longévité peut ne pas suffire à faire sortir un groupe du crochet. « La différence entre une religion et une secte », expliqua le Globe and Mail en 1979, « c’est que vous appartenez à une religion et que tout le monde appartient à une secte ».
Le 22 mai 1872, le président Ulysses S. Grant a signé la loi d’amnistie générale, permettant à tous les électeurs du Sud, sauf environ 500 d’entre eux, de se voir refuser le droit de vote en guise de punition pour la rébellion en vertu du XIVe amendement, de regagner leur droit de vote et d’occuper un emploi public. L’amnistie générale est finalement rendue universelle le 6 juin 1898.
Nous, soussignés, sommes des spécialistes de la démocratie qui avons observé la récente détérioration des élections américaines et de la démocratie libérale avec une inquiétude croissante. Plus précisément, nous avons vu avec une profonde inquiétude les législatures d’État dirigées par les républicains à travers le pays, ces derniers mois, proposer ou mettre en œuvre ce que nous considérons comme des changements radicaux aux procédures électorales fondamentales en réponse à des allégations non prouvées et intentionnellement destructrices d’élections volées. Collectivement, ces initiatives transforment plusieurs États en systèmes politiques qui ne remplissent plus les conditions minimales pour des élections libres et équitables. Par conséquent, toute notre démocratie est maintenant en danger.
The national debate over Confederate monuments and their place in public spaces hinges on a fundamental disagreement. What do the memorials actually symbolize ? Many of those who want the monuments taken down argue that they represent racism, while people who prefer to maintain the memorials often say that they stand solely for southern heritage or pride — not hatred. A new analysis of existing data sheds light on the discussion.
The study, led by University of Virginia social psychology researcher Kyshia Henderson, has uncovered a quantifiable connection between Confederate monuments and the prevalence of lynching. A team of other UVA researchers — including Batten School professors Sophie Trawalter, Michele Claibourn, and Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi as well as data scientist Samuel Powers — contributed to the new and rigorously peer-reviewed work, which was published today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The contentious debates over Confederate monuments are often framed as battles between differing opinions, but "at the center of these debates are testable questions," Henderson explained. "We can go beyond opinions and add some empirical evidence to this discussion. Specifically, we can test whether Confederate memorials are associated with hate."
Lynching, a recognizably racist and extreme form of extrajudicial violence, became prevalent in the South during Reconstruction. Lynchings were a common tactic to suppress civil rights efforts and terrorize Black communities. The researchers reasoned that if Confederate memorials served a similar purpose, the monuments and lynching might be connected.
Some scholars have already performed research that supports the link between Confederate memorials and racism. In their paper, Henderson and her co-authors note that many monuments were dedicated during the Jim Crow era, often on the grounds of prominent government buildings. The researchers also cite a review of 30 dedication speeches for Confederate memorials, which found that nearly half invoked “explicit racist language,” including phrases such as “love of race” and “your own race and blood.”
In addition to scholars, “this is something that activists have also been saying for a very long time,” Henderson noted.
Ce que la plupart des gens savent de Passing de Nella Larsen, c’est qu’il explore un type particulier de tromperie - naître dans une catégorie raciale marginalisée et se glisser dans une autre, pour obtenir des privilèges, la sécurité ou le pouvoir. Mais l’importance de Passing ne réside pas dans les faits superficiels, mais dans le brio de son exécution : la beauté de l’écriture, l’étude approfondie des personnages et l’intense suspense psychologique.
Comme un précurseur d’un roman de Patricia Highsmith datant de plusieurs décennies, un sentiment de glamour sensuel, de frustration et de pressentiment imprègne la célèbre nouvelle de Larsen. Dans le Chicago de 1927, deux femmes noires à la peau claire, amies d’enfance dont les vies ont pris des chemins différents, se rencontrent à nouveau dans un espace théoriquement blanc, et une étrange amitié se renoue malgré le danger que cette connexion pourrait entraîner. Pour Irene Redfield, épouse d’un médecin noir et doyenne de la société de Harlem, le passing est une indulgence mesquine, quelque chose qu’elle pratique à l’occasion, pour "des raisons de commodité". Sa dextérité raciale lui permet de gagner "des restaurants, des billets de théâtre, et des choses comme ça". Mais pour la belle orpheline Clare Kendry, passer est un moyen de survie. Clare avait un foyer avec ses parents blancs qui méprisaient sa race ; elle voulait quelque chose de plus, et elle l’a saisi, faisant une rupture permanente...
Carole V. Bell, Book Reviews, National Public Radio, 2021-11-10
Elle était sûre et confiante dans tout ce qu’elle faisait. Elle était grande, intelligente et intimidante, une femme d’affaires avisée qui n’avait pas peur de dire ce qu’elle pensait. Pendant des années, j’ai reconnu Effa Manley pour de nombreuses choses : son action en faveur des droits civiques, sa copropriété et sa gestion d’une équipe de baseball de la Negro League, son passage en tant que trésorière de la Negro National League, son rôle dans l’intégration de la Ligue américaine de la Major League de baseball par Larry Doby, et le fait qu’elle ait été la première femme afro-américaine à être intronisée au National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Mais pour tout ce que Manley était, il y a une chose qu’elle n’était pas vraiment : noire.
"Tout dans ma vie a été noir", a déclaré Manley au journaliste sportif Henry Hecht du New York Post en 1975. Pendant de nombreuses années, cela a semblé être le dernier mot sur la question. Tout en sachant que Manley n’était pas la première femme à posséder une équipe - une distinction détenue en fait par Olivia Taylor, qui est devenue propriétaire des Indianapolis ABC Clowns après la mort de son mari C.I. Taylor en 1922 - j’avais toujours supposé qu’elle était afro-américaine. Sa race, cependant, a été une source de controverse discrète pendant des années, une controverse dont je n’étais pas conscient. Ce n’est que lorsque j’ai commencé à faire des recherches sur sa vie que j’ai découvert que Manley n’était peut-être pas exactement qui elle semblait être...
Fin août 1963, juste après l’assassinat de Medgar Evers et la Marche sur Washington, la photographe, organisatrice et enseignante Doris Derby se rend dans le Mississippi. Au cours des neuf années suivantes, Derby a voyagé entre Jackson et les zones rurales de l’État avec son appareil photo, documentant et participant au mouvement sudiste des droits civiques.
Le premier film de Rebecca Hall, "Passing", basé sur le roman éponyme de Nella Larsen paru en 1929, est l’une des rares adaptations de livres qui porte à l’écran un style littéraire. Le sens du style du film est plus qu’un simple ornement ; il incarne la confrontation avec les circonstances - pratiques, émotionnelles, historiques - au cœur de l’histoire. "Passing" (disponible sur Netflix mercredi) est un film d’époque, qui se déroule à Harlem pendant la Prohibition, juste avant la Dépression. Le film réussit une reconstitution ample et résonnante de cette époque, mais il ne comporte pas de décors colossaux et ne donne pas l’impression que des quartiers entiers ont été transformés pour les besoins du tournage. Au lieu de cela, Hall utilise des lieux bien définis de manière imaginative et évoque l’époque grâce à sa façon originale d’utiliser la lumière, la texture et les gestes, qui évoquent tous un passé riche en histoires mais troublé. Le résultat est une émotion immédiate, d’autant plus vive qu’elle est subtile, d’autant plus intense qu’elle est raffinée et contemplative, et qui, par-dessus tout, exprime avec justesse le sujet puissant et angoissé du film.
Hollywood a une longue histoire de "films de passing" - des films dans lesquels des personnages noirs passent pour des blancs - généralement interprétés par des acteurs blancs. Même si ces films ont tenté de dépeindre les effets dévastateurs du racisme en Amérique, ils ont utilisé des tropes éculés sur la négrité. Mais un nouveau film de l’actrice-écrivain-réalisatrice Rebecca Hall reprend les conventions problématiques de ce genre typiquement américain et les renverse. Rebecca Hall raconte comment son film a vu le jour et comment sa réalisation l’a aidée à se débattre avec les secrets de sa propre famille sur la race et l’identité.
En 1739, l’Académie royale des sciences de Bordeaux a annoncé un concours pour le meilleur essai sur les sources de la "noirceur". Quelle est la cause physique de la noirceur et des cheveux africains, et quelle est la cause de la dégénérescence des Noirs, demandait l’annonce du concours. Seize essais, rédigés en français et en latin, ont finalement été envoyés de toute l’Europe. Les auteurs étaient des naturalistes, des médecins, des théologiens et des savants amateurs. Chaque page contient les idées européennes sur qui est noir et pourquoi.
Derrière ces essais se cache le fait que quelque quatre millions d’Africains avaient été enlevés et expédiés de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique au moment où le concours a été annoncé. Les essais eux-mêmes représentent un large éventail d’opinions. Certains affirment que les Africains ont perdu la grâce de Dieu, d’autres que la noirceur est le résultat d’un climat brutal, d’autres encore soulignent la spécificité anatomique des Africains. Toutes les contributions tournent néanmoins autour d’un thème commun : la recherche d’une compréhension scientifique du nouveau concept de race. Plus important encore, elles constituent un témoignage indispensable de la pensée de l’époque des Lumières qui a normalisé la vente et l’asservissement des êtres humains noirs.
L’une des choses que j’entends souvent en tant que personne qui écrit fréquemment sur la race, l’ethnicité et l’égalité, c’est que le brunissement de l’Amérique - le passage prochain du pays d’une majorité de blancs à une majorité de non-blancs - est l’un des plus grands espoirs dans la lutte contre la suprématie et l’oppression blanches.
Mais cet argument vole toujours trop haut pour prêter attention aux détails sur le terrain. Pour moi, la suprématie blanche n’est qu’un pied de la bête. L’autre est l’anti-noirisme. Il faut combattre les deux.
La triste réalité est que l’anti-noirisme - ou l’anti-noirceur, pour supprimer la définition stricte d’une seule race dans le cadre de cette discussion - existe dans toutes les sociétés du monde, y compris les sociétés non blanches.
Dans de trop nombreuses sociétés à travers le monde, lorsqu’il existe une différence de couleur de peau, les personnes les plus sombres se voient souvent attribuer une caste inférieure.
Le chef d’orchestre Yannick Nézet-Séguin et le Philadelphia Orchestra ont enregistré chez Deutsche Grammophon les symphonies Florence Price : Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 a été nominé pour le prix de la meilleure performance orchestrale aux Grammy Awards 2022. Les Grammy, qui célèbrent à la fois les réalisations artistiques et techniques, sont la récompense la plus prestigieuse de l’industrie du disque.
"Nous sommes honorés que la Recording Academy continue de reconnaître notre travail", a déclaré le Dr Clemens Trautmann, président de Deutsche Grammophon. "Au cours de l’année écoulée, nos artistes ont sorti des enregistrements extraordinaires, qu’il s’agisse de monuments du répertoire comme la ’Symphonie des mille’ de Mahler ou des symphonies récemment redécouvertes de Florence Price. Ils ont rencontré de nouveaux publics dans le monde entier et ont démontré l’esprit de la musique classique sous toutes ses formes, qui favorise la vie. Je suis ravi que leurs réalisations soient reflétées dans les nominations pour les GRAMMY Awards 2022."
Les raisons de la négligence choquante de l’héritage de Price ne sont pas difficiles à trouver. Dans une lettre adressée en 1943 au chef d’orchestre Serge Koussevitzky, elle se présente ainsi : "Mon cher Dr. Koussevitzky, Pour commencer, j’ai deux handicaps - ceux du sexe et de la race. Je suis une femme et j’ai du sang noir dans les veines". Elle voyait manifestement ces facteurs comme des obstacles à sa carrière, car elle a ensuite dit que Koussevitzky "savait le pire." En effet, elle avait du mal à progresser dans une culture qui définissait les compositeurs comme étant blancs, masculins et morts. Un chef d’orchestre éminent a défendu sa cause - Frederick Stock, le directeur musical d’origine allemande de l’Orchestre symphonique de Chicago - mais la plupart des autres l’ont ignorée, y compris Koussevitzky. Ce n’est qu’au cours des deux dernières décennies que les œuvres majeures de Price ont commencé à faire l’objet d’enregistrements et de représentations, et ceux-ci sont encore peu fréquents.
Pendant des années, je me suis fait passer pour un Blanc. Ce n’est que plus tard que j’ai compris que les avantages dont je bénéficiais me rendaient complice d’un système qui opprimait les autres.
J’ai jeté un coup d’œil dans la salle de cinéma dès que nous nous sommes assis. Lentement, j’ai commencé à repérer des individus qui nous ressemblaient, ma fille et moi - des Noirs et des métis au teint clair. Je me suis dit qu’eux aussi étaient venus voir un film qui reflétait notre réalité commune.
(...)
Pendant la majeure partie de ma vie, j’ai passé pour une Blanche. Ma peau "high yella", comme l’appelait ma grand-mère, ainsi que mes yeux gris-vert et mes cheveux raides, cachaient le fait que je suis métisse. Ma famille aussi.
Racial ‘passing’ is still a reality. Here’s why I embraced my complex identity
Steve Majors, The Boston Globe Magazine, 30 novembre 2021.
Choisir ce que l’on va lire est à la fois une petite décision et une décision de la plus haute importance. Pour les élèves, ce choix est crucial pour les inciter à lire. Certains livres sont magiques, ils créent un monde et sont inoubliables. D’autres sont dangereux et bouleversants. Beaucoup inspirent les deux sentiments, surtout chez les jeunes. La lecture est censée être un défi, et la littérature doit servir de moyen d’explorer des idées qui semblent impensables, inconnues, voire illicites. Il est donc extrêmement préoccupant de voir des représentants du gouvernement interférer de manière flagrante avec le libre échange d’idées dans les bibliothèques scolaires.
Vendredi, le gouverneur du Nevada, Steve Sisolak, a écouté les récits des anciens de la tribu sur l’histoire de l’école. Le gouverneur, les chefs tribaux, les responsables des agences de l’État et les fonctionnaires de l’Intérieur ont discuté de la manière dont l’État - qui a financé la construction de l’école et a aidé à rassembler les enfants à y envoyer - peut contribuer aux efforts fédéraux visant à lutter contre les injustices historiques et les traumatismes intergénérationnels et à honorer les enfants qui sont morts dans les pensionnats.
Les descendants des Paiute, Washoe et Shoshone qui ont fréquenté l’école Stewart pendant les 90 années de son fonctionnement ont raconté que des primes étaient offertes pour amener des enfants autochtones à l’école, que des élèves tentaient de s’enfuir pour cause de famine et que les dortoirs étaient extrêmement surpeuplés.
Dans cette biographie perspicace, Burton I. Kaufman explore comment la carrière politique de Barack Obama a été marquée par des tendances conservatrices qui ont frustré ses partisans progressistes et fait mentir les discours alarmistes de droite sur son socialisme. La présidence d’Obama a fait date, mais paradoxalement, comme le montre Kaufman, elle n’a donné lieu qu’à peu, voire à aucun, changement politique radical.
Après son élection, les partisans et les détracteurs du président Obama s’attendaient à des réformes radicales. En tant que premier Afro-Américain à occuper le poste de président, il a accédé à la Maison Blanche en promettant un changement pendant sa campagne. Mais Kaufman trouve chez Obama des modèles clairs de conservatisme classique d’ordre idéologique et de pragmatisme politique de base. Sa volonté d’instaurer une société multiraciale, multiethnique et multiculturelle était fondamentalement liée à l’ouverture, mais pas à la modification radicale, du système de libre entreprise existant.
La loi sur l’assurance maladie (Affordable Care Act), sans doute la plus grande réalisation politique du président Obama, est une distillation de ses motivations complexes en matière de politique. Plus conservateur que radical, l’ACA a intégré l’expansion de l’assurance maladie dans le système existant. De même, en politique étrangère, Obama a évité de recourir à la force pour changer de régime. Pourtant, il a maintenu des troupes sur le terrain au Moyen-Orient et a soutenu des révoltes électorales visant à instaurer dans les pays étrangers les mêmes principes de libéralisme, de libre entreprise et de concurrence que ceux qui existaient aux États-Unis.
En évaluant le parcours et l’impact de la vie politique d’Obama, Kaufman montre clairement que le désir et la peur du changement dans la politique américaine ont affecté la perception populaire mais pas la ligne de conduite du quarante-quatrième président des États-Unis.
Née et élevée à Poughkeepsie, mais ayant fait carrière dans les cinq arrondissements de New York, Jane Matilda Bolin (1908-2007) est surtout connue pour une "première" d’une ampleur révolutionnaire. Elle a l’honneur d’avoir été le premier juge afro-américain de tous les États-Unis, en rejoignant le tribunal des relations familiales de la ville de New York en 1939. Sa nomination par le maire Fiorello La Guardia, qui a quelque peu surpris Mme Bolin elle-même - convoquée avec son mari à une audience avec le maire lors de l’exposition universelle de 1939, elle n’avait pas été informée à l’avance des intentions du maire - a fait la "une dans le monde entier ".
Brittany Murphree est née et a grandi dans le comté de Rankin, dans le Mississippi, l’un des comtés les plus républicains de l’un des États les plus républicains.
(...) À la faculté de droit de l’Université du Mississippi, où Murphree est maintenant en deuxième année, ses amis sont pour la plupart des Blancs conservateurs.
Début janvier, Murphree les a tous choqués lorsqu’elle a annoncé que l’un des cours qu’elle suivrait ce semestre était "Law 743 : Critical Race Theory".
"Pourquoi prendrais-tu ce cours ?, lui a objecté son père au téléphone. C’est le concept le plus ridicule."
"Brittany, ce cours va te faire culpabiliser d’être blanche", ont prévenu certains de ses camarades de classe.
(...)
Pourtant, Murphree voulait savoir en quoi consistait vraiment le "sujet si vivement débattu".
Pour le rédacteur en chef des sports du New York Daily News, il était logique que ces types dominent le basket. Après tout, "le jeu fait appel à un esprit alerte et intrigant, à la ruse, à l’art de l’esquive et à l’intelligence en général", sans parler de "l’équilibre et de la vitesse supérieurs donnés par Dieu".
Il faisait référence, bien sûr, aux Juifs.
Dans les années 1930, Paul Gallico tente d’expliquer la domination juive sur le basket-ball. Il émet l’idée que la structure du jeu faisait simplement appel aux traits immuables des Hébreux rusés et de leurs esprits intrigants. Cette idée semble étrange à l’oreille aujourd’hui, mais uniquement parce que nos stéréotypes sur les personnes naturellement douées dans certains sports ont changé. Sa théorie n’est ni plus ni moins perspicace aujourd’hui qu’elle ne l’était à l’époque ; sa confiance devrait nous rappeler de faire preuve de scepticisme à l’égard des arguments similaires, prétendument explicatifs, qui abondent aujourd’hui.
L’examen des vieux stéréotypes est un exercice utile ; il peut aider à illustrer la nature arbitraire du concept de "race" et la façon dont ces identités changent alors même que les gens insistent sur leur permanence et leur infaillibilité. Parce que la race n’existe pas, elle est suffisamment malléable pour servir les besoins de ceux qui ont le pouvoir de la définir, les certitudes d’une génération cédant la place aux dogmes contradictoires d’une autre.
Lundi, l’actrice Whoopi Goldberg, co-animatrice de l’émission The View, s’est lancée dans un cauchemar de relations publiques pour ABC en insistant sur le fait que "l’Holocauste ne concernait pas la race". Après la diffusion d’un épisode du Late Show With Stephen Colbert dans lequel elle affirmait que "les nazis étaient des Blancs, et la plupart des personnes qu’ils attaquaient étaient des Blancs", elle a été temporairement suspendue de The View. Elle s’est excusée pour ses remarques...
Latinx est un mot à la mode pour les individus d’origine latino-américaine aux États-Unis, pourtant l’utilisation de "Latinx" comme substantif pour identifier les personnes d’héritage latino et hispanique n’est pas universellement accueillie.
"Ooooo, vous êtes entré dans le territoire dangereux de la ’politique identitaire’", a déclaré Luis Duno-Gottberg, professeur à l’université de Rice, sur un post de médias sociaux où un journaliste demandait des opinions sur l’utilisation de Latinx.
Le mot "Latinx" et son pluriel "Latinxs" suscitent des discussions passionnées, ses partisans affirmant qu’il est plus inclusif que les prédominants "Latinos" ou "Hispaniques" pour regrouper les identités multiformes des personnes dont les origines remontent à l’Amérique latine et aux pays hispanophones.
Certains analystes font remonter l’utilisation initiale de Latinx au milieu des années 2000, lorsqu’il a commencé à apparaître dans les recherches sur Internet. Le mot a entamé une lente tendance à la hausse en juin 2016, selon les données de Google Trends. Certains observateurs l’ont associé à la fusillade de masse survenue ce mois-là dans la boîte de nuit Pulse à Orlando, où 49 personnes ont été tuées et 53 blessées...
Olivia P. Tallet, The Houston Chronicle, 24 janvier 2021.
Oliver Cromwell est né dans la ferme du tavernier John Hutchin le 24 mai 1753, dans l’actuel comté de Burlington, une région dont les tavernes, décrites par l’auteur de "Burlington Biographies" Richard L. Thompson, ont été un foyer du sentiment révolutionnaire américain.
L’origine de Cromwell n’est pas connue avec certitude, mais de nombreux documents indiquent qu’il était métis, probablement de sang mêlé noir et blanc. Vers la fin de sa vie, il se disait "de la famille de John Hutchin".
Cromwell a rejoint la milice du New Jersey en 1775, où il était répertorié comme "Indien", ce qui laisse penser qu’il pouvait avoir un héritage amérindien. C’est loin d’être définitif, a déclaré l’historien du comté de Burlington Jeff Macechak, qui a noté que d’autres soldats qu’il pensait être d’origine africaine étaient également répertoriés de la même manière...
"L’originalisme exige essentiellement que les juges et leurs assistants juridiques obtiennent un doctorat en histoire américaine (et probablement, aussi, en anglais moderne précoce). Une théorie juridique construite sur des fondements historiques ne fonctionne pas si les juristes ne sont pas rompus à l’histoire."
Le vote latino a déconcerté les démocrates qui s’attendaient non seulement à ce qu’il progresse mais aussi à ce qu’il devienne le rempart d’une nouvelle majorité progressiste. Alors qu’une majorité de Latinos a voté démocrate lors des deux dernières élections présidentielles, la part votant pour Donald Trump a augmenté de huit points de pourcentage, selon les estimations, entre 2016 et 2020. Ce changement, ainsi que des données de sondage plus récentes, a incité les universitaires et les journalistes à se demander pourquoi les Latinos soutiendraient un parti dont le candidat à la présidence était ouvertement raciste et anti-immigrant.
Dans Racial Innocence, Tanya Katerí Hernández indique que le préjugé anti-noir des Latinos est une réponse à cette énigme. Professeur de droit des droits civils à l’université Fordham, Hernández s’appuie sur des affaires judiciaires datant de 1964 à 2021, sur des histoires personnelles, sur des entretiens avec des dirigeants, des éducateurs et des avocats, ainsi que sur des recherches universitaires, pour plaider en faveur d’un débat ouvert et d’une confrontation avec le racisme anti-Noir au sein de la communauté latino.
Le ministère américain de la Justice (DOJ) a inculpé le 31 octobre 2022 le Californien David Wayne DePape pour des infractions fédérales (agression et enlèvement) pour avoir supposément attaqué Paul Pelosi, le mari de la présidente de la Chambre des représentants des États-Unis, Nancy Pelosi.
Le 7 novembre 2022, la juge Ketanji Brown Jackson a produit sa première opinion à la Cour suprême depuis son entrée en fonctions. Et il s’agit d’une opinion dissidente au refus d’admission du pourvoi d’un condamné à mort dans l’Ohio, Davel Chinn, qui demandait la cassation de son pourvoi au motif que ses droits constitutionnels avaient été violés par le fait pour l’accusation d’avoir supprimé des preuves qui auraient pu modifier l’issue de son procès. En l’occurrence, il s’agissait de preuves établissant qu’un témoin clé contre Chinn avait une déficience intellectuelle qui aurait pu affecter sa mémoire et sa capacité à témoigner avec précision. Les juridictions inférieures en avaient décidé autrement. La juge Jackson, suivie par la juge Sotomayor, a fait valoir qu’elle aurait admis le pourvoi "parce que [la] vie [de Davel Chinn] est en jeu et compte tenu de la forte probabilité que les dossiers supprimés aient changé l’issue du procès".
Le 29 novembre 2022, un jury a reconnu hier le fondateur d’Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, coupable de conspiration séditieuse pour son rôle dans la mise en place d’un complot visant à subvertir les résultats de l’élection de 2020. Le jury a également condamné Kelly Meggs, leader des Oath Keepers de Floride, pour le même motif. En revanche, les trois autres coaccusés - Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson et Thomas Caldwell - ont été acquittés du chef de complot séditieux. Tous les cinq ont cependant été condamnés pour d’autres chefs d’accusation, dont l’obstruction au Congrès.
Selon une étude, le taux de décès par arme à feu aux États-Unis a atteint l’an dernier son niveau le plus élevé depuis trois décennies. Le taux de femmes - en particulier de femmes noires - tuées par des armes à feu a augmenté plus rapidement que celui des hommes.
Le New York Times a publié le 19 novembre 2022 un article rapportant qu’un groupe de pression conservateur (Faith and Action) avait cherché à influencer le juge Samuel Alito et cherché à connaître à l’avance le sens de l’arrêt de la Cour suprême dans Burwell v. Hobby Lobby en 2014.
Deux élus démocrates au Congrès, le sénateur Sheldon Whitehouse et le représentant Henry Johnson, avaient alors écrit à la Cour suprême afin de s’enquérir de ces pressions et actions alléguées de Faith and Action qu’ils estimaient corroborer leur propre engagement en faveur de l’édiction de règles éthiques à la Cour suprême qui soient obligatoires et supposément moins permissives. Entre-temps, l’article du New York Times avait été développé, voire nuancé, par le journal en ligne Politico.
Le 28 novembre 2022, Ethan Torrey, le conseiller juridique de la Cour suprême, a répondu aux deux élus démocrates dans une lettre consistant, d’une part, à exposer les réponses et réfutations du juge Alito aux mises en cause dont il a fait l’objet, d’autre part, à souligner le degré d’exigence des règles éthiques appliquées par les juges de la Cour suprême.
Après que le propriétaire du réseau social Twitter a laissé penser que cette entreprise avait favorisé le parti démocrate et censuré des discours favorables aux Républicains, Donald Trump avait fait un commentaire assertant que les déclarations d’Elon Musk constituaient « la révélation d’une fraude et d’une tromperie massives et généralisées » dont on devrait conclure que, lui Donald Trump, était le vainqueur de l’élection présidentielle de 2020. « Une fraude massive de ce type et de cette ampleur, ajoutait-il, permet de mettre fin à toutes les règles, à tous les règlements, et à tous les articles, même ceux qui se trouvent dans la Constitution ».
Ces déclarations ont été dénoncées par différents acteurs politiques. Andrew Bates, le porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, a ainsi appelé les Républicains à s’en désolidariser et à réaffirmer leur attachement à la Constitution. La sénatrice républicaine Liz Cheney, membre de la commission spéciale d’enquête sur les événements du Capitole du 6 janvier 2021 a pour sa part affirmé qu’avec ces déclarations, « aucune honnête personne ne pouvait désormais nier que (Donald) Trump est un ennemi de la Constitution ».
« Moi, Joseph R. Biden Jr, président des États-Unis d’Amérique, en vertu de l’autorité qui m’est conférée par la Constitution et les lois des États-Unis, je proclame le 15 décembre 2022 Journée de la Déclaration des droits. J’appelle le peuple des États-Unis à observer cette journée par des cérémonies et des activités appropriées. » (extrait de la Proclamation présidentielle du 14 décembre 2022).
Le président Joe Biden a promulgué le 5 janvier 2023 la loi « Martha Wright-Reed » (Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act).
Martha Wright-Reed était une avocate du District fédéral de Columbia qui s’est battue pendant plus de dix en faveur de tarifs d’appel raisonnables pour les personnes incarcérées. Elle avait directement été concernée par la question à travers son petit-fils incarcéré. Elle est décédée le 18 janvier 2015.
La loi Martha Wright-Reed se rapporte au problème du coût exorbitant des correspondances téléphoniques des détenus. Dans la plupart des cas, si ce n’est tous, une entreprise a un monopole dans les établissements qu’elle dessert. Entre autres problèmes, les consommateurs ne peuvent donc pas choisir parmi les fournisseurs concurrents, ce qui produit des monopoles locaux et des profits monopolistiques. « Il peut parfois coûter jusqu’à 1 $ la minute pour passer un appel depuis ou vers une prison, une maison d’arrêt, ou tout autre établissement de détention. Cela peut rendre pratiquement impossible pour certaines familles de maintenir le contact avec un fils ou une fille, une mère ou un père, ou une sœur ou un frère, surtout si et quand les visites en personne sont limitées, comme cela a été le cas pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 ».
La nouvelle loi habilite la FCC, l’agence fédérale des communications, à réglementer les tarifs de l’ensemble des appels passés par ou vers des personnes privées de liberté, que ces communications soient à destination d’un correspondant résidant dans l’État de détention ou en dehors de cet État. En effet, jusqu’ici, la FCC avait l’autorité légale pour réglementer ces communications lorsqu’elles étaient passées d’un État à un autre, mais pas à l’intérieur de l’État de détention : une décision qu’elle avait prise en ce sens en 2015 fut invalidée en 2017 par une cour fédérale au motif que l’agence fédérale n’en avait pas reçu le pouvoir. La loi « Martha Wright-Reed » le lui accorde.
Les prisons fédérales voudraient que les détenus indemnisent d’abord les victimes, avant de pouvoir dépenser de l’argent à passer des appels téléphoniques ou à acheter des objets vestimentaires.
