Category: Civil Rights

Corrupt Partisan Pig-Felching Bastards

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In what is a continuation of Chief Justice John Roberts’ life long quest to prevent Black people from voting, the Supreme Court has upheld Arizona’s voter suppression laws and further gutted the voting rights act.

This is a nakedly partisan and nakedly corrupt decision:

Conservatives have effectively accomplished their long-term goal of blotting the 15th Amendment out of the Constitution with a bottle of Wite-Out®. This has been the conservative project (whether those conservatives have called themselves “Democrats” or “Republicans” depends on the era) since the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870.

The 15th Amendment, of course, prohibits both state and federal governments from denying the right to vote on the basis of race. Conservatives were shockingly effective at reading this amendment out of the Constitution for the first hundred years after its ratification. The amendment was so bad at stopping conservative racism that we needed a whole different rule, the 24th Amendment, which was ratified in 1964, to outlaw the poll tax, which had become a favorite way for white people to deny minority voting rights.

………

Yesterday, in a Supreme Court case called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Justice Samuel Alito told conservatives how to defeat the Voting Rights Act, once and for all. White supremacists don’t have to storm the Capitol to hoard political power anymore. They just have to follow Alito’s instructions.

The issue in the case was pretty straightforward, as these things go. Arizona had enacted two voter restrictions. One outlawed “ballot harvesting”—which is the scary Republican label for, say, an older person giving their mail-in ballot to somebody else to walk it to the drop-off location. The other allowed the state to discard votes accidentally submitted at the wrong polling place.

Both of these laws had the effect of suppressing minority voter participation. That’s not a conjecture I’m making based on my apparent Black superpower of understanding what white people are trying to do. That’s an empirical fact, one we know from the data we have from Arizona elections, and that was acknowledged by the Arizona defenders of the laws and the Supreme Court itself. These laws disproportionately affected voters of color, period.

But the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court said that the racial bigotry inherent in these laws is fine, because they concluded it’s not that much bigotry. In the situation where ballots are cast in the wrong precinct, Alito noted that 1 percent of Hispanic, African American, and Native American voters cast votes in the wrong precinct (votes that can now be completely discarded in Arizona), while .5 percent of white voters did. Alito says that this disparity is too small to matter for the Voting Rights Act.

………

Elena Kagan, joined by Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, blasted Alito’s framing in a dissent that is already more well-known than Alito’s majority opinion. It’s worth reading in full, but this part is stellar:

And what is a “mere inconvenience” or “usual burden” anyway?… Consider a law banning the handing out of water to voters. No more than—or not even—an inconvenience when lines are short; but what of when they are, as in some neighborhoods, hours-long? The point here is that judges lack an objective way to decide which voting obstacles are “mere” and which are not, for all voters at all times.

Kagan’s mention of water was a clear reference to the current eruption of voter suppression laws, enacted by Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere. She was absolutely right to go there, because Alito’s awful logic will not stay in Arizona. Instead, it will give voter-suppression efforts (those already happening and those yet to come) a clear safe harbor to smuggle in all their bigotry.

Alito applies his new conception of the Voting Rights Act to laws restricting the “time, place, and manner” of voting. Alito then makes up a five-factor test to apply to these voter restrictions (spoiler alert: racists win), but the upshot is that, going forward, states that argue that their voter suppression efforts only restrict when people can vote, where they can vote, and what they have to do in order to vote can functionally ignore the Voting Rights Act. It won’t matter if those time, place, and manner restrictions have a disparate racial impact. It won’t even matter if those restrictions are done with the express intent of racial bias. The presumption that voter restriction is illegal if it is designed to exclude or suppress minority voters has been replaced by Alito’s new ruling that the state can impose restrictions that merely inconvenience voters of color on purpose.

………

This is what conservative justices have always been here to do. People think that the issue that unites conservative justices is hostility toward abortion or antipathy toward the LGBTQ community or a shared passion for corporate malfeasance. And sure, conservatives broadly share horrible views about all that stuff. But the thing that truly binds a Trump judge with a Bush judge with a Ronald Reagan judge, the thing that reaches out across time and space to put Roger Taney in bed with William Rehnquist and John Roberts is their rejection of Black voting rights and the laws and the precedents meant to protect them. The idea that the 15th Amendment prohibits laws that say “No N***** Votes” but nothing else is the consistent theme of conservative voting-rights decisions. Unless the law explicitly uses the n-word, conservatives are going to tell you that it’s a “race neutral” restriction on voting and turn to stone.

………

Conservatives will never stop trying to take away the right of nonwhite citizens to vote. That has been their unyielding position since the end of the Civil War. You can have a free and fair democracy, or you can have conservatives in control of the judiciary, but the history of this country says that you can’t have both.

The history of conservative jurisprudence on voting is to the ideals of the constitution what Ebola is to the concept of French kissing.

The packing of the Supreme Court over the past 4 years has been a disaster for the nation, and a clear and present danger for our freedoms.

From the Department of About F%$#ing Time

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The Department of Justice has sued Georgia over over its new racist voting laws. 

Personally, if evidence of a conspiracy to deprive citizens of their civil rights is found, and this is clearly fits the legal definition of a conspiracy, I’d like to see a criminal investigation with some of the principals subject to the risk of jail time:

Justice Department officials announced a federal lawsuit Friday against Georgia over new statewide voting restrictions that federal authorities allege purposefully discriminate against Black Americans, the first major action by the Biden administration to confront what it describes as efforts by Republican-led jurisdictions to limit election turnout.

The legal challenge takes aim at Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, which was passed in March by the state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R). The law imposes new limits on the use of absentee ballots, makes it a crime for outside groups to provide food and water to voters waiting at polling stations, and hands greater control over election administration to the legislature.

The 46-page federal court filing came as numerous GOP-majority state governments have been seeking to impose new voting restrictions in the wake of President Biden’s victory over Donald Trump last November. Trump has spent months waging a baseless effort to discredit the result, making false and unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud.

In Georgia, Black voters helped drive record turnout for the presidential election and handed the state to Biden, who became the first Democrat to win its electoral votes in 28 years. High levels of Black voter turnout also helped Democrats Raphael G. Warnock and Jon Ossoff sweep the U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia in January, ensuring full Democratic control of Congress.

Among other things, this lawsuit moves to bring Georgia under the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act again, and this is a good thing.

Politicians should not be allowed to prevent people from voting because they vote against those politicians. 

As an aside, if you live in Georgia, register as a Republican, and vote for the Trump-nuts in their primary so as to make a chance of Democratic victory in the general election more likely.

An UNBELIEVABLY Appropriate Use of the KKK Act

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Various Biden campaigners have sued Texas terrorists who attempted to force their campaign bus off of the road in October of last year under the Klu Klux Klan act of 1871.

This seems about right:

Timothy Holloway clutched the wheel of a Biden-Harris campaign bus last October, swerving and dodging as one hostile car bearing a Trump flag after another tried to run him off a Texas highway.

“We were terrified,” Holloway said in a news release. “They were clearly trying to scare us and prevent us from arriving at our destination in peace.”

The tactic worked — the Biden campaign canceled the rest of the day’s events, saying it feared for the safety of campaign staffers, supporters and local political candidates. Some prominent Republicans cheered the effort by the self-proclaimed “Trump Train,” while President Donald Trump himself lauded their efforts, calling the drivers “patriots” who “did nothing wrong.”

Now, Holloway — along with a White House staffer, a former Texas lawmaker and a campaign volunteer — are suing several members of the caravan, accusing them of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which bars violent election intimidation, as well as local Texas laws. The group is also suing local law enforcement, claiming they failed to provide protection.

“Those on the bus feared injury or for their lives. All suffered lingering trauma in the days and months thereafter,” says one of a pair of federal lawsuits filed to the Western District of Texas court on Thursday. “The events of October 30 arose from a campaign of politically motivated intimidation.”

………

The case isn’t the only recent attempt to invoke the Ku Klux Klan Act against Trump supporters. In February, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, invoked the Klan Act in a lawsuit against Trump, Rudolph W. Giuliani and two extremist groups whose members are accused of participating in the insurrection. Thompson alleged that Trump and Giuliani violated the act by inciting the riots with false claims of a rigged election. The lawsuit is ongoing.

This was terrorism, pure and simple, and they should be treated at LEAST as severely as the Muslim losers that the FBI entraps in their sting operations.

Take their guns while the trials are going on, and seize their trucks, as they are the instruments of the crimes.

C%$# Suckers

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Mitch Mcconnell and Evil Minions™ just filibustered the”For the People” act, because if there is anything that Republicans agree on, it’s that N*****s should never vote:

Senate Republicans banded together Tuesday to block a sweeping Democratic bill that would revamp the architecture of American democracy, dealing a grave blow to efforts to federally override dozens of GOP-passed state voting laws.

The test vote, which would have cleared the way to start debate on voting legislation, failed 50-50 on straight party lines — 10 votes short of the supermajority needed to advance legislation in the Senate.

Republicans, particularly Senate Republicans, are not the opposition, they are the enemy, and must be treated as such.

Welcome to the Handmaiden’s Tale

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A woman had a miscarriage in Spokane, Washington and Spokane police treated it as a crime, and swore out a search warrant against her.

This sort of sh%$ needs to be slapped down hard by the Feds.  The local US Attorney should make their lives hell:

In March, a woman miscarried in a Spokane hotel. Police investigated. They searched her room, told her they’d meet her at the hospital and found it suspicious when she did not show up. They filed a search warrant in hopes of finding her.

Considering the fetus her dependent, officers suspected that the woman could be guilty of criminal mistreatment of a child if she did not call 911 soon enough to potentially save her pregnancy, according to a warrant filed at the time.

Police later closed the investigation without pursuing criminal charges, but to Paul Dillon, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, the move to investigate was “a huge violation of privacy and very stigmatizing.”

………

“Under Washington law, everything about this is discriminatory and potentially violating of constitutional rights,” Ainsworth said.

………

The case arises as reproductive freedoms have been restricted in Republican-led Legislatures from Texas to Idaho, and with the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly poised to curtail or even overturn the abortion rights enshrined in the landmark Roe v. Wade case. While abortion remains legal in all 50 states, Ainsworth said under Washington’s Equal Rights Amendment, investigating pregnancy losses could be discriminatory as such investigations are necessarily biased against women, Ainsworth said.

“Here this person is suffering, an ambulance is called to make sure they’re OK, then the police show up and the police are surprised they didn’t check themselves into a hospital,” Ainsworth said. “This person needed their autonomy and grief to be respected and instead there’s a search warrant.”

The goal here is to eventually make a miscarriage a matter for law enforcement, and it must be aggressively fought at every level, because any step back will be occupied by people who want to keep women in chains.

A Little Late, Aaron Schwartz is Dead

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The Supreme Court has finally shot down the overbroad interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that was used to prosecute Aaron Schwartz to death.

I’d say, “About f%$#ing time,” but it’s at least 7 years too late: 

The Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday in Van Buren v. United States provides the court’s first serious look at one of the most important criminal statutes involving computer-related crime, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion for a majority 0f six firmly rejected the broad reading of that statute that the Department of Justice has pressed in recent years.

Among other things, the CFAA criminalizes conduct that “exceeds authorized access” of a computer. Crucially, the statute defines that term as meaning “to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain … information … that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain.” The question in Van Buren was whether users violate that statute by accessing information for improper purposes or instead whether users violate the statute only if they access information they were not entitled to obtain. In this case, for example, a Georgia police officer named Nathan Van Buren took a bribe to run a license-plate check. He was entitled to run license-plate checks, but not for illicit purposes. The lower courts upheld a conviction under the CFAA (because he was not entitled to check license-plate records for private purposes). The Supreme Court disagreed, adopting the narrower reading of the CFAA, under which it is a crime only if users access information they were not entitled to obtain.

To be clear: Van Buren should be in jail for a very long time, but his crime is violation of people’s civil rights, abuse of power, and taking bribes, not computer hacking.

And Amy Coney Barret gets to the heart of the matter, that the government’s position would literally make tens of millions of people unwitting felons:

Finally, Barrett turns to a topic that dominated the amicus filings and much of the time at oral argument: the “breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity” that the Government’s reading would criminalize. For Barrett, that reality “underscores the implausibility of the Government’s interpretation,” which provides (in words Justice Elena Kagan coined in an earlier case) “extra icing on a cake already frosted.” Barrett notes that extending the statute to “every violation of a computer-use policy” would make criminals of “millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens,” offering examples of such trivial conduct as “embellishing on online-dating profile” and “using a pseudonym on Facebook” – activities that violate website use restrictions and thus would fall within the government’s understanding of the CFAA.

If there is a lesson from all of this, it is that prosecutors will take the most outrageous and extreme view of any criminal statue that they come across.

There needs to be some serious reform here.

Support Your Local Police

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West Hazleton, Pennsylvania (why does ALL this crap seem to happen in the Keystone State?) police chief Brian Buglio threatened an online critic with arrest on trumped up charges.

The FBI got involved, and he’s now pled guilty to federal civil rights charges.

Am I a cynic for thinking that the only thing special about this story is that THIS time, the dirty cop got caught:

A police chief in Pennsylvania who threatened a critic with false arrest unless the person deleted Facebook posts attacking him has agreed to plead guilty to a federal civil rights violation.

The chief, Brian Buglio of the West Hazleton, Pa., Police Department, made the threats in March 2020 to a private citizen, telling the person that he would pursue felony charges in retaliation for several social media posts that were directed at him and the police, the authorities said.

The person agreed at the time to remove the posts from Facebook and to refrain from making future comments about Chief Buglio and the police, according to a criminal complaint that was filed on Thursday in federal court in Scranton, Pa.

“During the meeting, Brian Buglio acknowledged that the threatened felony charges lacked merit,” federal prosecutors said in the criminal complaint, adding that Chief Buglio and the person had shaken hands over the “deal.”

………

Chief Buglio could face up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, according to the plea agreement, which still must be finalized in court.

Here is hoping that the judge will throw the book at him.

Speaking of Delicate Snowflakes

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It should surprise no one that the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society attempted to get a law student expelled for making fun of them.

I guess that in the Federalist Society, they only believe in the 1st Amendment if it applies to union busting businesses and themselves.

I’m pretty sure that the OED has “The Federalist Society” as an alternate definition of hypocrisy:

Facing forceful criticism and many questions, Stanford University moved Wednesday to allow a law-school student full graduation privileges after the student’s “satirical” letter, sent months ago, provoked the ire of a conservative student organization and a strong defense from a student-rights group.

Law student Nicholas Wallace was poised to graduate June 12, but his degree was held up while the school probed the missive, which took the form of a flyer advertising a made-up event titled “The Originalist Case for Insurrection,” supposedly sponsored by the campus chapter of the right-wing Federalist Society. According to the flyer, the “event” would include appearances by U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton “to discuss violent insurrection.” It added that “riot information” would be emailed the morning of the event.

“Violent insurrection, also known as doing a coup, is a classical system of installing a government,” the flyer said. “Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”

………

Despite Wallace’s flyer being sent January 25 and advertising an event to be held three weeks earlier, on January 6, Stanford put his upcoming degree on hold two weeks before he was to graduate, after Stanford Law’s student Federalist Society chapter complained about the flyer.

After a Slate report Wednesday on the school’s action went viral on social media, and this news organization asked the university to explain its actions, Stanford announced Wednesday that its investigation was done, the flyer was

………

The school’s Federalist Society chapter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Of course the, “school’s Federalist Society chapter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”  Bullies hate it when you fight back.

Also: Shame on Stanford University not laughing this out of the in-box.

More of This

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In Texas, Democrats in the Statehouse walked out, denying quorum for a vote, to stop the Republican voter suppression bill.

The Texas Governor is threatening to veto the budget for the legislature in response, because black and brown people voting is to their twisted minds is an affront to God, or at least THEIR god, because it’s clear that they are seriously into Mammon:

Democrats in the Texas Legislature staged a dramatic, late-night walkout on Sunday night to force the failure of a sweeping Republican overhaul of state election laws. The move, which deprived the session of the minimum number of lawmakers required for a vote before a midnight deadline, was a stunning setback for state Republicans who had made a new voting law one of their top priorities.

The effort is not entirely dead, however. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, indicated that he would call a special session of the Legislature, which could start as early as June 1, or Tuesday, to restart the process. The governor has said that he strongly supported an election bill, and in a statement he called the failure to reach one on Sunday “deeply disappointing.” He was widely expected to sign whatever measure Republicans passed.

“Election Integrity & Bail Reform were emergency items for this legislative session,” Mr. Abbott said on Twitter on Sunday night. “They will be added to the special session agenda.” He did not specify when the session would start.

While Republicans would still be favored to pass a bill in a special session, the unexpected turn of events on Sunday presents a new hurdle in their push to enact a far-reaching election law that would install some of the most rigid voting restrictions in the country, and cement the state as one of the hardest in which to cast a ballot.

………

After a lengthy debate in the State House of Representatives in which Democrats raised numerous objections, staged lengthy question-and-answer sessions and leveraged procedural maneuvers, Democrats departed en masse, leaving the chamber roughly 14 members short of the required 100-member quorum to continue business. Without the requisite number of legislators, Dade Phelan, the speaker of the State House, adjourned the session around 11 p.m. local time, effectively killing the bill for this legislative session.

Maybe if Democrats in the US Senate get their heads out of their asses, this will mean something in the end. 

I’m not holding my breath.

Consider the Source

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The New York Times editorial board is a font of conventional thinking. (Note that I did not say, “Wisdom.”)

You won’t find bold new or visionary ideas, but it is a good marker of where the conventional, “Wisdom,” is going, so their OP/ED calling for the end of qualified immunity for police officers might be an indication of a sea change in the elite consensus:

When a Minneapolis jury last month convicted the former police officer Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd on May 25, 2020, many Americans celebrated. At last, a moment of accountability, if not quite justice, in the face of persistent police brutality.

But for all the justified relief at the verdict, a troubling reality lurks: Had Mr. Chauvin not been criminally prosecuted — as the vast majority of police who kill in the line of duty are not — he may well have faced no consequences at all.

………

Qualified immunity arose out of an 1871 civil rights law that made government officials, including police officers, financially liable for violating a person’s constitutional rights. In a series of rulings starting in the late 1960s, the Supreme Court decided that an officer is immune from liability unless it can be shown that he or she broke “clearly established” law in the process. The burden is on the plaintiff to make this showing, and the bar is absurdly high: If no other court has previously ruled in a case involving an essentially identical set of facts, the law is determined to be not “clearly established.”

Examples of courts splitting hairs to give a pass to even egregious misconduct abound: the prison guard who pepper-sprayed an inmate in the face “for no reason at all”; the officer who fired at a nonthreatening dog and missed, accidentally hitting a 10-year-old child lying nearby on the ground; the officers who stole $225,000 in cash and rare coins while executing a search warrant; the officer who shot a 14-year-old boy after he had dropped a BB gun and raised his hands.

“I don’t think there’s any serious argument but that the qualified immunity doctrine as it currently exists is completely off the rails,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University and a founder of the Policing Project, which aims to give the general public a role in shaping law enforcement policy. “It makes no sense whatsoever and gives police officers far more leeway than they ought to have.”

In short, it’s hard to see what is qualified about qualified immunity.

………

In practice, qualified immunity has become what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called an “absolute shield” that “tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”

The court has also expressed the concern that individual cops will be bankrupted by judgments. This simply doesn’t happen. To the contrary, governments virtually always foot the bill for police wrongdoing. One study found that officers personally paid only .02 percent of the dollars that plaintiffs were awarded.

………

Ending or curtailing qualified immunity would not be a cure-all for police brutality. By the time it becomes an issue, the harm has already been done. While holding people and departments accountable is important, it’s even more important to ensure that the harm doesn’t occur in the first place. “Police misconduct is often a systemic problem. These are not just bad apples but bad barrels,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who studies police misconduct. “We should be thinking about how to reduce the harm, not just pay people.”

………

The more immediate solution is legislative. Congress is currently considering the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a far-reaching bill addressing racial discrimination and excessive force by law enforcement officers. One provision would eliminate the “clearly established” defense and prevent cops from relying on their own belief that their conduct was lawful. Unfortunately, that has become the bill’s main sticking point, as most Republicans have sided with police unions in opposing any liability for individual officers.

………

If the rule of law means anything, it means that those sworn to enforce it should not be above it.

The current state of policing int he United States is needlessly corrupt and brutal. 

It must be reformed, and many, if not most, of its current members need to removed.

The DoJ Weighs in About the Arizona Freak Show

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The Department of Justice wants to have a word with Cyber Ninjas’ and their audit of Maricopa County Presidential ballots.

Given the lax security, and the fact that this audit included what appeared to an attempt to intimidate voters, it comes as no surprise that the Feds were profoundly unamused:

The Arizona Senate will hold off on a plan to contact voters as part of a Republican-commissioned election recount that raised concerns from the Justice Department about voter intimidation, state Senate President Karen Fann said Friday.

The head of the department’s civil rights division, Pamela S. Karlan, wrote to Fann (R) on Wednesday suggesting that the recount of nearly 2.1 million ballots in the state’s largest county by a private contractor may not comply with federal law, leaving ballots at “risk of damage or loss.” She also raised questions about the contractor’s stated plans to “identify voter registrations that did not make sense” and interview voters via phone and “physical canvassing.”

The ongoing audit run by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas has been widely criticized as fueling wild theories that fraud and other electoral problems led President Donald Trump to lose the presidential race. Officials in Maricopa County, which went for Joe Biden in November, say the results have been validated repeatedly.

But Republicans have pressed ahead with a new, highly unusual inquiry that has ranged from scrutinizing ballots under UV lights to seeking traces of bamboo. With Cyber Ninjas, they hired a company whose chief has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims of problems with the 2020 election.

Looking for traces of what? 

Are they worried that some snacking Panda was messing with the ballots?

The senator laid out conditions for anyone contacting voters: Canvassers would convey that participation is voluntary; would not select people for characteristics such as race or party affiliation; would not carry a weapon; and would not wear or say something implying an affiliation with police, immigration, tax enforcement or the military, among other requirements.

Karlan, in her letter, raised particular worries about targeting by race. “Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” Karlan said.

Voter intimidation is the goal here.

Responding to the Justice Department’s security concerns, Fann said that “not a single ballot or other official election document has been destroyed, defaced, lost, or adulterated.” Ballots must be securely maintained for 22 months following a federal election.

Shining bright UV lights on ballots in an attempt to find signs of Panda infiltration cause the ballots to fade.

Their Panda hunt will deface the ballots.  It’s basic physics.

………

Former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett, the audit’s spokesman, previously told The Washington Post that Cyber Ninjas had not begun interviewing voters and said the company has pledged to do nothing that would constitute intimidation.

The owner of Cyber Ninjas, an enterprise with no prior experience with vote tabulation or canvassing, has already prejudged the outcome.  Expecting them to follow the law is a fiction.

This is a clearly an attempt to intimidate voters and to manufacture uncertainty on an already twice audited vote tabulation process.

Why do Republicans hate America?

Every Single Damn Obituary Relegates His Greatest Accomplishment to the 3rd Paragraph

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Former Senator and Vice President Walter Mondale died last night, and every single obituary downplays his role in passing the fair housing act. 

He sponsored the bill, and got it through the senate after years of effort.

The above link does not even mention the Fair Housing Act, relegating it to the throw away line describing him as a, “Champion of such liberal causes as open housing and anti-poverty programs.”

And his whole life is reduced to, “The guy wot got destroyed in the 1984 Presidential election.”

This is a disgrace.

Yeah, That’s Gonna Help

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In response to the brutal and negligent killing of Breonna Taylor by out of control police, the Kentucky State Senate has passed a bill making it illegal to insult police, because apparently police officers are beautiful cinnamon rolls too perfect for this world.

OK,the bit about cinnamon rolls came from The Onion, but God help us, the rest of this is true:

Kentucky’s Republican-majority Senate on Thursday moved forward a bill that would make it easier to arrest protesters for insulting a police officer, a measure that critics say would stifle free speech.

The bill, passed two days before the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, would make it a misdemeanor to taunt or challenge an officer with words or gestures “that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.” Conviction would be punishable by up to 90 days in jail and fines of up to $250.

State Sen. Danny Carroll (R), who sponsored the bill, said it would enable officers to arrest someone inflaming them before the encounter turns violent. The provision is meant to apply to comments that are “obviously designed to elicit a response from the officer — something to push them to making a mistake, pushing them to violence,” he said, although courts would have the final say in interpreting the rule.

“You don’t have a right to accost a police officer,” Carroll said.

In addition to criminalizing taunting police, the bill would expand the category of protest behavior considered illegal, heighten sentences for offenses related to “riots” and prevent early release for those violations. It comes as Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, prepares for hundreds of people to gather downtown Saturday to recognize the first anniversary of Taylor being fatally shot during an early-morning raid.

………

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky called the measure “an extreme bill to stifle dissent” with broad and ambiguous language.

“It’s criminalizing speech in a way that’s directed at protesters and people who are speaking out against police action,” said Corey Shapiro, ACLU of Kentucky’s legal director. “It is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment that people should be able to criticize police action, even if it’s using offensive speech.”

The provision of the bill that would ban insulting police was modeled on laws in other states prohibiting comments that could reasonably push a person to violence, said Carroll, himself a former police officer. Those statutes, which are not specific to anti-police comments, rely on an exception to the First Amendment known as the “fighting words doctrine,” which holds that words inciting immediate violence are not constitutionally protected.

I am going to go out on a limb here, but I think that dealing with violent and verbally abusive people is a central part of a police officer’s job.

Also, the, “Fighting Words Doctrine,” has largely been vitiated over the past 4 or 5 decades, and

If you cannot deal with someone calling you a pig-felching racist douche bag without resorting to violence, you probably are:

  • A pig felching racist douche bag.
  • Completely unsuited to the job of peace officer. 

As an aside, if you do not know the definition of the word, “Felch,” DON’T look it up.

Trust me on this one.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

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In Arizona, State Representative John Kavanagh kist said. “We don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”

We’ve always known it to be the case that Republicans don’t just object to the Democratic Party, they object to Democracy:

A Republican lawmaker in Arizona has defended GOP-sponsored legislation to restrict ballot access as a means to protect “the quality of votes” and arguing that “everybody shouldn’t be voting” as Republicans in at least 43 states introduce dozens of bills to curb voting rights, compelled by spurious fraud claims and election conspiracy theories in the wake of 2020 elections and disproportionately impacting Black voters.

Arizona state Rep John Kavanagh, who chairs the state legislature’s Government and Elections Committee, told CNN that Democrats are “willing to risk fraud” by expanding voter access, and that “Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”

Mr Kavanagh was referencing a measure that could purge thousands of people from a list of voters who automatically receive popular mail-in ballots during elections. Arizona lawmakers are considering roughly two dozen other bills.

………

Mr Kavanagh also suggested that Democrats’ voter registration and ballot collection drives can “greatly influence the outcome of the election” by targeting “uninformed” voters.

When Dick Tuck said, after losing a campaign for Congress, said, “The people have spoken, the bastards,” he was making a joke to liven up what was a somber moment.

The Republicans really mean it.

Of Course They Are

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In response to surprise Senate and Presidential campaign defeats, Georgia Republicans are trying to make voting as difficult as possible.

When your policies are bad, the response of the GOP is not to change those policies, or even to try to sell their policies better.  Their response is to pick and choose their voters, because they are a bunch of racist fascists:

Georgia Republicans have unveiled sweeping new legislation that would make it dramatically harder to vote in the state, following an election with record turnout and surging participation among Black voters.

The measure is one of the most brazen efforts to make it harder to vote in America in recent years. The bill would block officials from offering early voting on Sundays, a day traditionally used by Black churches to mobilize voters as part of a “souls to the polls” effort. It would place new limits on the use of mail-in ballot dropboxes, restrict who can handle an absentee ballot, and require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a copy of other identification with their application for a mail-in ballot. It would also require voters to provide the same driver’s license information on the mail-in ballot itself or the last four digits of their social security number if they do not have an acceptable ID.

The bill gives voters less time to request and return mail-in ballots, not only moving up the deadline to return an application but also limiting requests to start 78 days ahead of an election instead of the current 180. It requires election officials to reject ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct and bans organizers from offering food or water to voters standing in line to cast a ballot.

“With exacting precision, the bill targets voters of color,” said Nse Ufot, chief of the New Georgia Project, one of the groups that mobilized voters of color in Georgia. “Georgia Republicans saw what happens when Black voters are empowered and show up at the polls, and now they’re launching a concerted effort to suppress the votes and voices of Black Georgians.”

Working to find common ground with these people is a fools errand.

They only care about power (theirs) and hatred (of those who do not look or pray like them).

Yeah, This Might Work Better Than a Congressional Commission

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The N.A.A.C.P. and Representative Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) are suing Donald Trump and Rudolph Giuliani under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

This might get some action, and it will definitely have the defendants compelled to testify under oath about what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did:

The N.A.A.C.P. on Tuesday morning filed a federal lawsuit against former President Donald J. Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, claiming that they violated a 19th century statute when they tried to prevent the certification of the election on Jan. 6.

The civil rights organization brought the suit on behalf of Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi. Other Democrats in Congress — including Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey — are expected to join as plaintiffs in the coming weeks, according to the N.A.A.C.P.

The lawsuit contends that Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 statute that includes protections against violent conspiracies that interfered with Congress’s constitutional duties; the suit also names the Proud Boys, the far-right nationalist group, and the Oath Keepers militia group. The legal action accuses Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and the two groups of conspiring to incite a violent riot at the Capitol, with the goal of preventing Congress from certifying the election.

………

Mr. Thompson is seeking compensatory and punitive damages in the lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington. The suit does not include a specific financial amount.

Mr. Thompson, 72, claims he was put at an increased health risk by later being required to shelter in place in a cramped area that did not allow for social distancing. The lawsuit notes that Mr. Thompson shared confined space with two members of Congress who tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after the attack at the Capitol.

………

Derrick Johnson, president of the N.A.A.C.P., said the decision to seek compensatory and punitive damages was rooted in a history of tools that have worked to fight back against white supremacy.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the Ku Klux Klan that bankrupted a chapter,” he said, referring to a 2008 judgment against a Kentucky-based Klan outfit that ordered the group to pay $2.5 million in damages. “This is very similar. If we do nothing, we can be ensured these groups will continue to spread and grow in their boldness. We must curb the spread of white supremacy.”

The short version of the 1871 Klu Klux Klan act is that an individual can be held liable both criminally and civilly for depriving a citizen of their Constitutional rights.

Preventing a member of Congress from approving the Electoral Vote count seems to be messing with the Constitution.

Once Again, Scalia Makes the World a Better Place by His Absence

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The Supreme Court will not allow North Carolina’s voter suppression law to be in force for election day. It was a 4-4 tie:

A deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive parts of a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The court was divided 4 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members voting to revive parts of the law. The court’s brief order included no reasoning.

North Carolina’s law, which imposed an array of voting restrictions, including new voter identification requirements, was enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2013. It was part of a wave of voting restrictions enacted after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively struck down a central part of the federal Voting Rights Act, weakening federal oversight of voting rights.

Challenges to the laws have met with considerable success in recent months, and Wednesday’s development suggested that the current eight-member Supreme Court is not likely to undo those victories.

If Scalia were still on the court, it would be gleefully reinventing Jim Crow.

This is Angela Merkel Desperately Trying to Salvage Her Electoral Chances

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Frau Merkel* has signed onto a proposal to ban face veils from public places in Germany:

Europe’s battle over public attire for Muslim women moved on Friday from the outcry over banning “burkinis” in France to a strong call from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing conservative bloc for a ban in Germany on face veils in schools and universities and while driving.

The German proposal, announced by the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, was clearly driven by an intensifying political season and a surge in support for the far right since Germany accepted more than a million refugees last year. There has been mounting public anxiety over integrating the refugees, who are mostly from Muslim countries, particularly after a series of terrorist assaults and a gun rampage last month.

………

Yet the proposals now being floated in Germany around restricting the burqa make it clear that France is not the only European country grappling with whether some Islamic coverings amount to a barrier to the full participation of women in Western society.

Ms. Merkel had sent a signal about the partial ban on face veils on Thursday, when she told a group of provincial newspapers that “from my standpoint, a fully veiled woman scarcely has a chance at full integration in Germany.”

Mr. de Maizière said the same day that “the burqa doesn’t fit with our country and does not correspond to our understanding of the role of women.”
Continue reading the main story

Mr. de Maizière and Ms. Merkel stopped short of calling for an outright ban on the burqa, but the proposal put forward on Friday tiptoes along a path that the French traveled down with a 2010 law that barred any covering that hides the face.

………

The German plan would not ban shawls or abayas that cover the body and are often worn with a hijab, a head scarf that does not cover the face, which German officials acknowledge would not win approval from the country’s constitutional court.

It would ban full face veils in schools and colleges, and while driving, appearing before courts or at public registry offices, or when going through passport control. Women who want to wear a face veil in public should not teach or become civil servants, Mr. de Maizière said in announcing the plan on morning television.

“We want to make it a legal requirement to show your face in places where that is necessary for the cohesion of our society,” he said.

He was flanked by the conservative leaders of two states with elections next month — Lorenz Caffier of the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Frank Henkel of the city-state of Berlin. Both men are running on strong law-and-order platforms and had called for a ban on veils.

This is all about the elections.

Merkel has managed to burn through a lot of good will from the German electorate with her handling of the Syrian refugee crisis, and this is an attempt at damage control.

*Horses whinnying.

This is Some Well Done, and Well Deserved, Trolling

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Following repeated cuts to the Missouri Public Defender’s office by the Missouri Governor, which has led the state to have the 49th most underfunded office in the nation, the head of the Public Defender’s office has invoked a section of state law to assign the Governor as a defense attorney for an indigent defendant.

It’s a “No Saving Throw” kind of thing under state law:

Fed up with what he says is the governor’s failure to properly fund his overwhelmed office, the state’s lead public defender ordered Gov. Jay Nixon this week to represent a poor person in Cole County this month.

Michael Barrett said he was using a provision of state law that allows him in extraordinary circumstances to delegate legal representation “to any member of the state bar of Missouri.” He’s starting with the state’s highest-profile lawyer: Nixon.

Barrett says the governor has repeatedly declined to give the public defender system the money it requests and is withholding promised funding increases this year.

“Providing counsel to poor people who face incarceration is the obligation of the state. It’s not fair to go after private attorneys who are trying to pay the rent when they had nothing to do with contributing to this,” Barrett said in an interview Wednesday.

Barrett never exercised this power before because he thought it was wrong to place the burden of public cases on private attorneys “who have in no way contributed to the current crisis,” he wrote in a letter to the governor dated Tuesday.

“However, given the extraordinary circumstances that compel me to entertain any and all avenues for relief, it strikes me that I should begin with the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it,” Barrett wrote, referring to Nixon, a Democrat who was a four-term attorney general before becoming governor.

………

The Missouri constitution allows the director of the public defender system to assign cases to any lawyer in the state, regardless of whether the lawyer is a public defender, Barrett said.

Just this June, the legislature granted the public defender system a $4.5 million increase, which would’ve helped in hiring 10 more employees and some private attorneys on a contractual basis. The office currently employs more than 370 attorneys. Officials with the public defender’s office had asked for a $23.1 million boost, while Nixon recommended a $1 million increase.

Last month, Barrett and the Missouri State Public Defender Commission filed a lawsuit claiming that Nixon withheld $3.5 million of that $4.5 million increase. Barrett claims Nixon is targeting the public defender system for budget cuts while leaving more money for other programs he likes.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Governor is claiming that this assignment isn’t legal, but the law is pretty explicit here: the head of the Public Defender’s office can involuntarily appoint a bar member as counsel for an indigent defendant.

It’s gotten to the point where the US Department of Justice has expressed concerns that the state is violating defendants’ civil rights, and the governor keeps trying to gut the office.

Nixon deserves what’s happened to him.

A PDF of the letter is after the break:

Nope. No Racism Here

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When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites.

But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote.

The majority-white Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black Sparta citizens — a fifth of the city’s registered voters — by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights. “When I read that letter, I was kind of nervous,” Mr. Flournoy said in an interview. “I didn’t know what to do.”

The board’s aim, a lawsuit later claimed, was to give an edge to white candidates in Sparta’s municipal elections — and that November, a white mayoral candidate won a narrow victory.

“A lot of those people that was challenged probably didn’t vote, even though they weren’t proven to be wrong,” said Marion Warren, a Sparta elections official who documented the purges and raised an alarm with voting-rights advocates. “People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena, especially if they haven’t committed any crime.”

The county attorney, Barry A. Fleming, a Republican state representative, said in an interview that the elections board was only trying to restore order to an electoral process tainted earlier by corruption and incompetence. The lawsuit is overblown, he suggested, because only a fraction of the targeted voters were ultimately scratched from the rolls.

………

But the purge of Sparta voters is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. In Georgia and all or part of 14 other states, the 1965 Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to receive so-called preclearance before changing the way voter registration and elections were conducted.

Clearly the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act was premature, but it was a corrupt and blatantly political ruling, so this is no surprise.