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katyshannon

Justice Department Sues Ferguson After City Amends Police Reform Deal : The Two-Way : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...city-amends-police-reform-deal

justice department ferguson city MO amends police reform DOJ npr sue deal lynch US crisis politics

shared by katyshannon on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Department of Justice is suing the city of Ferguson, Mo., for unjust policing that violates the civil and constitutional rights of citizens, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Wednesday.
  • The lawsuit came one day after the Ferguson City Council voted to change a proposed consent decree to reform the police and courts. The council said the package, which had been negotiated between the DOJ and city officials, cost too much.
  • In a news conference, Lynch said the DOJ was sensitive to the city's cost concerns throughout the months-long negotiation. She also said, "There is no price for constitutional policing."
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  • "A few weeks ago, the Department of Justice and Ferguson's own negotiators came to an agreement that was both fair and cost-effective — and that would provide all the residents of Ferguson the constitutional and effective policing and court practices guaranteed to all Americans. As agreed, it was presented to the Ferguson City Council for approval or rejection. And last night, the city council rejected the consent decree approved by their own negotiators. Their decision leaves us no further choice."
  • She also said she was disappointed that Ferguson had not approved the deal, as the goal of the negotiation was to avoid litigation.
  • A year after the DOJ announced the findings of its investigation into the Ferguson Police Department, Lynch said the people of Ferguson should not have to wait any longer for "their city to adopt an agreement that would protect their rights and keep them safe." She said the violations by the police and courts in Ferguson "were not only egregious — they were routine."
  • The lawsuit alleges a "pattern or practice of law enforcement conduct that violates the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments of the Constitution and federal civil rights laws," Lynch said. "We intend to aggressively prosecute this case and I have no doubt that we will prevail."
carolinehayter

House Democrats are still pursuing Trump's tax returns but Biden administration may not... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics us Trump Economics policy

shared by carolinehayter on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • After notching recent wins in their long hunt for material to help bring legal accountability to former President Donald Trump, congressional Democrats fear the Biden administration won't be helpful when it comes to obtaining the documents they covet the most: Trump's tax returns.
  • But four months into President Joe Biden's term, liberal advocates and some lawmakers are growing impatient that the Justice Department hasn't done more to expose the Trump administration's alleged misdeeds -- and in some cases has even tried to help shield them.
  • Last week, Garland's Justice Department partly sided with Barr. The department partially appealed a judge's order to release a 2019 memo written for Barr about how to handle Mueller's findings on Trump and obstruction of justice. The Justice Department tried to offer some transparency: A federal judge had slammed the department for considering the optics of the Mueller report's rollout, and the department made that section public.
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  • It's "a return to business as usual for DOJ -- and not DOJ swinging as frantically to an anti-Trump agenda as it did to the pro-Trump one that I and many other observers abhorred,"
  • "I appreciate the independence. I don't always agree with the positions," said Eisen, who would like to see more released by the Justice Department. "They're going to act with that same independence in defense of what they perceive to be in the long-term interests of the executive branch."
  • The Biden administration now has control over three high-profile documents that are still central to Democrats' court fights related to Trump: Trump's tax returns, held by the IRS; grand jury material underpinning the Russia investigation; and the key internal memo to former Attorney General William Barr justifying the decision not to charge Trump with obstruction in former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
  • Trump's taxes have been the white whale of Democratic investigators for years,
  • Trump's tax returns are no longer completely under lock and key, either. The Manhattan district attorney obtained them earlier this year through a lawsuit of his own.
  • In late April, federal agents executed search warrants on Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Democrats have also received some documents related to Trump's Washington hotel lease that the Trump administration had kept hidden. And on Friday, House Democrats will finally get the chance to interview former White House counsel Don McGahn about Trump's efforts to obstruct justice.
  • But the department is now fighting to keep redacted six-and-a-half pages of legal analysis on whether a criminal case against the then-President was merited, even if he could not be charged under Justice Department policy.
  • Congressional Democrats urged Garland not to appeal the judge's decision.
  • "There is this institutional rivalry between executive and legislative branches that overlays or perhaps underlays the misbehavior that the judge found within the department,"
  • The Justice Department's stance shouldn't be a surprise, given that Biden came into office with a team that was vowing to move on from the Trump-era controversies.
  • The House committees that investigated Trump, however, have vowed to keep pursuing their cases that are tied up in court.
  • The Supreme Court was set to hear an appeal from the administration as it sought to keep grand jury documents cited in the Mueller report under seal, after the House won access in court. That hearing has been postponed.
  • The House's push for financial documents and Trump's tax returns has another obstacle beyond the Biden administration: Trump himself. The former President's involvement in the cases, now as a private citizen who has several teams of lawyers protecting his interests, may be one reason for the stalemates.
Javier E

Conservatives Start to Take the DOJ Report on Ferguson Seriously - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...387835

justice system DOJ partisan bias epistemic politics report

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • I criticized the conservative movement for its reaction to the DOJ report on Ferguson, Missouri, arguing that for various ideological and political reasons, its organs were failing to recognize civil rights violations in urgent need of a remedy. Where was the outrage? Since then, there's been a small but notable improvement.
clairemann

SB 8, Texas's anti-abortion law, is back at the Supreme Court. Here's what's different ... - 0 views

www.vox.com/...doj-texas-sb8-abortion-jackson

us politics SCOTUS abortion

shared by clairemann on 19 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • On October 14, the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit formally blocked a trial court’s decision halting SB 8, a Texas law banning most abortions in that state.
  • But there are some important legal distinctions between the current challenge to SB 8, known as United States v. Texas, and the Court’s previous order in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson allowing SB 8 to take effect. Specifically, the Justice Department argues in its request for relief that the United States is allowed to sue Texas directly, even if private parties may not.
  • The new challenge from the DOJ argues that, at least in an unusual case such as this one, the United States should be allowed to sue the state of Texas — and that it should be able to do so specifically because no one else can. As Judge Robert Pitman, who briefly blocked SB 8 before his decision was stayed by the Fifth Circuit, summarized the DOJ’s argument, the United States should be allowed to step in when “(1) a state law violates the constitution, (2) that state action has a widespread effect, and (3) the state law is designed to preclude review by the very people whose rights are violated.”
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  • But SB 8, written to sidestep that kind of legal challenge, explicitly forbids any “officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” in Texas from enforcing it. The idea is that, if no state official can enforce the law, abortion rights plaintiffs have no one to sue.
  • This scheme, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his dissenting opinion in Whole Woman’s Health, “is not only unusual, but unprecedented.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the law is “engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.”
  • The Texas law was specifically drafted to evade judicial review.
  • The second and more difficult question is why the federal government should be the plaintiff of last resort. DOJ rests the lion’s share of its argument on In re Debs (1895), a Gilded Age decision giving federal courts extraordinary authority to halt union activities that disrupt interstate commerce (Debs arose out of a massive railroad strike that threw shipping in the Midwest into disarray).
  • Ordinarily, if a state law permitted private parties to sue abortion providers in state court, those providers could wait to be sued, and then argue that the law permitting them to be sued is unconstitutional during that state court proceeding. But SB 8 is designed to frustrate this normal process as well. For one thing, it contains a simply extraordinary provision stating that SB 8 defendants may not assert their “belief that the requirements of this subchapter are unconstitutional or were unconstitutional” as a defense in state court.
  • Although this Court is unlikely to protect abortion rights, there are still potent reasons why even anti-abortion justices should oppose SB 8. For one thing, if Texas can offer bounties to anti-abortion plaintiffs — and evade judicial review in the process — other, bluer states could pass copycat laws. Do the justices really want New York to pass a law permitting “any person” to collect a bounty from gun owners?
  • I don’t have any illusions that this Supreme Court will hold that doctors who perform abortions cannot be punished. But I’d hope that we could all agree that doctors who are falsely accused of violating a state law should not be punished. If due process means anything, it should mean that Dr. Smith should get her day in court before she is forced into bankruptcy.
davisem

DOJ watchdog launches probe into handling of Clinton email investigation - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...of-clinton-email-investigation

shared by davisem on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • davisem on 13 Jan 17
     
    The announcement, which was expected, comes after criticism of the Justice Department's handling of the investigation, particularly on how the public was notified. The email probe was a major issue on the 2016 campaign trail. Developing story - more to come
Javier E

D'Souza, the Pardon Power and the Question of Norms - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ower-and-the-question-of-norms

pardon faction favoritism trump

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The pardon power is archaic and in some ways hard to reconcile with our modern concepts of justice and judicial process. But mercy is an important element of justice. Indeed, without a role for mercy there can be no justice. There are many people rotting in prison who shouldn’t be there, even if they were guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted.
  • Relatedly, I’ve written about the way the modern pardon power has been circumscribed almost beyond recognition. There’s a Pardon Attorney at the DOJ who handles the process. The guidelines make demands which all but erase the meaning of the pardon power itself. You not only have to express remorse, you have to have served your sentence and then wait a period of time after you’ve served your sentence. In other words, the whole idea of have executive clemency which springs you out of prison ahead of time isn’t even supposed to be part of the process
  • The pardon power is there to find people who simply should be forgiven by the state in advance of completing their sentence. We should use it for classes of prisoners who we see now shouldn’t be in jail
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  • Once marijuana is legal, should people really be serving long terms for use or minor dealing? As a legal matter, legalization makes no difference. But the pardon power can provide a measure of justice and rectification.
  • Yet clearly part of what running the pardon process through the DOJ is for is to insulate the President from that power
  • Joe Arpaio, Scooter Libby, Dinesh D’Souza – the pattern is pretty clear
  • What clearly isn’t okay is what we’re seeing today
  • the real pattern is giving political allies an out from the execution of the law, political allies and people who have an iconic significance for Trump’s most loyal supporters.
  • This isn’t just bad governance. It’s the essence of factional rule. The faction leader – the political warlord – gets control of the state and uses it in the interest of his supporters, protecting them from the law and giving them the state’s largesse
  • These are in a sense norms. The President doesn’t just wake up one day and decide to pardon someone or hear from a friend who puts in a good word for someone in jail. It’s too arbitrary, too ripe for abuse, even though the constitution is 100% clear that the President does have the power to do this.
  • This is why you have norms. They keep you within the rails in the face of obvious temptations and questions about propriety
davisem

Comey Testimony Shows It's Not The Crime That Could Hurt Trump. It's The Cover-Up. | Hu... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...up_us_593963cce4b0061054804867

shared by davisem on 08 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON ― When it comes to President Donald Trump and Russian interference in the election, the issue is the cover-up, not the crime. That’s the takeaway from former FBI Director James Comey’s dramatic testimony before Congress on Thursday
  • By firing Comey, Trump created a powerful enemy no longer entirely constrained by the traditions of the FBI or the desire to keep his job. Compounding their error, the Trump administration and the president himself angered Comey with what Comey called their “shifting explanations” for his firing that left him “confused” and “concerned.”
  • The American people should have full confidence in Mueller, who preceded Comey as head of the FBI, Comey said Thursday. Mueller, he said, is a straight shooter who will “turn over all the rocks” in the course of the investigation. Comey added that Mueller would never have agreed to become special counsel last month “if he wasn’t going to get full independence.”
hannahcarter11

Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...over-covid-19-vaccine-strategy

democrats vaccine Black community minorities

shared by hannahcarter11 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Publicly, House Democrats are largely united behind a simple message surrounding COVID-19 vaccines: Get one as soon as you can and take whichever one is offered.   
  • Speaker Nancy PelosiNancy PelosiGOP senator applauds restaurant stimulus money after voting against relief bill McCarthy calls on Pelosi to return Capitol to pre-pandemic operations Jayapal asks for ethics investigation into Boebert, Gosar, Brooks MORE (D-Calif.) has sided with those Black Caucus leaders, arguing on a recent conference call that underserved communities, including Black and brown populations, should get to pick which vaccine they receive, according to sources on the call.  
  • Rep. Kim SchrierKimberly (Kim) Merle SchrierThe Hill's Morning Report - Presented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation - At 50 days in charge, Democrats hail American Rescue Plan as major win Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Democrats point fingers on whether Capitol rioters had inside help MORE (D-Wash.), a pediatrician, issued a stern warning to her colleagues that demanding choice would not only buck the advice of public health experts and muddle the Democrats’ vaccine message, it would also heighten the the doubts of many Americans already skeptical about taking vaccines — doubts that threaten the arrival of herd immunity and a return to social normalcy.
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  • The Democrats’ message, Schrier said, should be clear and simple: All vaccines are good. And the best thing American can do to protect themselves and their loved ones is to get a shot.
  • Pelosi spokesman Henry Connelly said the Speaker was simply reflecting concerns in her diverse caucus about whether minority communities were being treated equitably in the aggressive push to vaccinate all Americans.
  • That disparity has been attributed, in part, to the fact that the earlier Moderna and Pfizer vaccines each require two shots and colder refrigeration, complicating storage and distribution. That’s created additional barriers for getting the vaccine to poorer, historically underserved populations and rural communities.
  • Black people are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white people and nearly two times more likely to die from the disease; Hispanics are more than three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than whites and 2.3 times more likely to die. 
  • White people have been vaccinated for COVID-19 at two times the rate of Black people, according to a New York Times analysis. The figures are worse for Hispanics. 
  • The disagreement among Democrats comes during a pivotal moment in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic as states like Texas and Mississippi end their mask mandates and lift restrictions on businesses, and health experts worry about a surge in cases driven by COVID-19 variants.
  • Because the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one shot and regular refrigeration levels, some officials like New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) have ordered that shipments of that vaccine be prioritized for harder-to-reach Black and brown communities. 
  • But while Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an overall efficacy of about 95 percent in preventing moderate to severe disease, that number for the Johnson & Johnson version is just 66 percent — though experts point out the J&J vaccine was being tested after more contagious variants had begun spreading in the U.S., unlike the Pfizer and Moderna versions. 
  • That's led to some in those minority communities voicing concerns in recent days that they are being given a less-effective vaccine than more affluent, white communities.
  • Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), another CBC member, noted that those suspicions have historic roots, pointing to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study — a deadly federal research project that targeted poor Black people in rural Alabama in 1930s — as evidence of the "painful history" of biomedical mistreatment of African Americans in the United States. 
  • Despite such reservations, the broad consensus in the caucus appears to favor efforts to maximize vaccinations in the shortest possible time, regardless which shot is available in a given community.
  • On Wednesday, Kelly is set to join Rep. Joyce BeattyJoyce Birdson BeattyDemocrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Black Caucus backs Biden's pick to head DOJ Civil Rights Division Sole GOP vote on House police reform bill says he 'accidentally pressed the wrong voting button' MORE (D-Ohio), head of the Black Caucus, in an online forum with medical experts designed to educate minority communities on best vaccine practices. 
  • Rep. Anthony BrownAnthony Gregory BrownOvernight Defense: Pentagon chief to press for Manchin's support on Colin Kahl | House Dems seek to limit transfer of military-grade gear to police Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy 140 lawmakers call for Biden administration to take 'comprehensive' approach to Iran MORE (D-Md.) said officials should monitor the distribution of vaccines to identify “patterns” that might indicate prejudices in the dispensation. But he’s also encouraging all of his constituents to get whatever vaccine is available first, and he highlighted the advantages of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, particularly in hard-to-reach populations like the homeless. 
yehbru

Whistleblowers Allege Improper Hiring At Justice Department During Trump's Last Days : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...epartment-during-trumps-last-d

US Politics Republicans Trump Justice Department

shared by yehbru on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Two whistleblowers assert that a Justice Department official improperly injected politics into the hiring process during his waning days in the Trump administration, according to a new filing obtained by NPR.
  • The whistleblowers accuse Jeffrey Bossert Clark of conducting a "sham" process and elevating a person who volunteered to defend a controversial Trump policy on abortion access, even though the person had far less experience than other finalists for the job in the Civil Division, they said in a Wednesday letter to House and Senate lawmakers and the Justice Department's inspector general
  • The whistleblowers said that Clark's participation in the hiring process for an assistant director of the Civil Division was unusual and that he engaged in "perfunctory" 15-minute interviews with two more highly qualified finalists for the post.
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  • "What set the successful appointee apart from the other candidates was that the appointee — unlike the others — had volunteered and was part of the DOJ litigation team defending a controversial Trump administration policy," according to their letter.
  • "Mr. Clark's last-minute politicization of the DOJ hiring process and issuance of policy memoranda — capped by his willingness to participate in what was close to an attempted coup d'état — demands immediate, close and transparent oversight and investigations."
hannahcarter11

Pride Month organizers to draw attention to anti-transgender laws | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ttention-anti-transgender-laws

pride anti-transgender laws discrimination Biden

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • Tuesday marks the beginning of Pride Month, and LGBTQ groups say they plan on drawing attention this year to the anti-transgender bills making their way through state legislatures across the country.
  • GOP-backed measures targeting transgender people have picked up steam in recent months, ranging from bills banning transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports to legislation prohibiting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.
  • By HRC's tally, 250 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year, including at least 35 blocking transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care.
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  • “We have members of the trans and non-binary community that are living in a state of fear.”
  • Pride Month organizers and LGBTQ groups said Pride Month this year will also reflect the new administration in the White House.
  • David touted President BidenJoe BidenTexas Democrats stage walkout to block passage of sweeping election overhaul package DOJ adds four defendants to Oath Keepers conspiracy case Biden remembers late son Beau in Memorial Day remarks MORE’s support for the Equality Act, House-passed legislation that would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, education and other areas.
  • More immediately, many Pride Month organizers are focused on holding either in-person or hybrid events during June after last year's gatherings were largely online due to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • “Because we’ll be having events throughout the month of June and throughout the year, folks should anticipate in-person events, some like we’ve been traditionally known for, but also many innovative, broader reaching, and more diverse experiences,” Gerald Garth, board treasurer for LA Pride, told The Hill.
anonymous

Merrick Garland rapidly erasing Trump effect at Justice Department - Axios - 0 views

www.axios.com/fd-43e3-9d9d-1331873c9058.html

trump garland justicedepartment

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Attorney General Merrick Garland is quickly negating the Trump administration’s law enforcement legacy, dismaying conservatives with a burst of aggressive reversals and new policies.
  • Liberal fears that the soft-spoken Garland might resist prosecuting Trump and his allies for the sake of unity were partially eased on Wednesday, when news broke that federal agents had raided the Manhattan home of Rudy Giuliani.
  • "Pattern or practice" investigations into the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, following the deaths last year of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
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  • The revocation of a Trump-era policy that restricted federal funding for "sanctuary cities."
  • under Attorney General Bill Barr, the department repeatedly blocked SDNY prosecutors from executing a search warrant for Giuliani's electronic records in the final months of 2020,
martinelligi

William Barr To Step Down As Attorney General Before Christmas : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...steps-down-as-attorney-general

attorney general politics trump

shared by martinelligi on 14 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Attorney General William Barr, an outspoken proponent of conservative values and an expansive view of presidential power, will leave office before Christmas, President Trump announced in a tweet Monday afternoon.
  • Earlier this month, Barr said the DOJ found no evidence of widespread election fraud, directly contradicting President Trump's baseless claims that the election was stolen by Democrats. Ahead of the election, Barr had stood by the president, repeating his unsubstantiated claims that mail-in voting was ripe for fraud.
  • In less than two years on the job, Barr emerged as perhaps the most divisive attorney general in recent memory for a series of controversial actions, including his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on the Russia investigation and his repeated false claims about the integrity of mail-in voting.
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  • But his legacy will forever be stamped by his role leading the forceful removal of peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park in the summer of 2020 to clear the way for a presidential photo op in front of a nearby church.
  • Republicans and Democrats alike had hopes that Barr could bring leadership and a steady hand to the department, which had found itself in the middle of Washington's brutal partisan battles since the 2016 election.
  • Graham and other supporters said criticism over Barr's actions was unmerited and politically driven. Backers say he has not done anything outside the realm of what any other attorney general would do.
  • But behind the scenes, Barr grew frustrated by the president's tweets and public statements about the department's ongoing cases, people close to Barr say. The attorney general was sensitive about the perception that he wasn't an independent officer but a political factotum of the president.
  • In an interview with ABC News a few days later, Barr said the president's tweets were making it "impossible" for him to his job. He urged the president to stop publicly discussing the department's work.
Javier E

What Comes After the Search Warrant? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671093

politics history crisis violence rule of law trump

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.
  • Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.
  • This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.
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  • What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.
  • “If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”
  • It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall
  • We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.
  • If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.
  • It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries.
  • Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”
  • Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee.
  • Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.
Javier E

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...477939

concept creep psychology liberalism harmful trauma torture prejudice

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
  • concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
  • “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
  • critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
  • How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
  • The concept of abuse expanded too far.
  • Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
  • Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
  • Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
  • Haslam endorses two theories
  • Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
  • The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
  • there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
  • While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
  • It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
  • “Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
  • police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
  • After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
  • Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
  • One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
  • Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
sarahbalick

Justice Department threatens legal action against Ferguson - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...80084794

justice department action ferguson

shared by sarahbalick on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Justice Department threatens legal action against Ferguson
  • The Justice Department said Wednesday it is exploring "legal actions" against the city of Ferguson, hours after the city council in the St. Louis suburb called for several revisions to a tentative agreement to revamp its police department and municipal court operations.
  • The Justice Department rebuked the move and could file a civil rights suit against the city to enforce the agreement. Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department civil rights division, said in statement that the department will take "necessary legal actions to ensure that Ferguson’s policing and court practices comply with the Constitution and relevant federal laws.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "In order to make sure this is a successful decree, we got to make sure that this something we can implement, something we can afford," Knowles said.
  • "Their vote to do so creates an unnecessary delay in the essential work to bring constitutional policing to the city and marks an unfortunate outcome for concerned community members and Ferguson police officers."
  • The Ferguson City Council has attempted to unilaterally amend the negotiated agreement,"
  • "This is not going away. We have to pay," Patricia Cowan, 54, told council members. "We need to think about where we’re at, and we need to move forward."
  • "My fear is that with your vote that Ferguson will cease to exist," said Susan Ankenbrand, 73, who has lived in the city for 41 years. "I would rather lose our city by fighting in court than losing it to DOJ’s crushing demands."
  • The tentative agreement reached last month calls for Ferguson to pay the cost of a Justice Department monitor for at least three years and purchase software and hire staff to maintain data on arrests, traffic stops and use-of-force incidents. It calls for a revision in the police department's training with an emphasis "toward de-escalation and avoiding force — particularly deadly force — except where necessary."
  • "since time immemorial"
  • “We reject this argument out of hand as an affront to democracy," said Sherilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "All public institutions, including police departments, must operate in accordance with the U.S. Constitution."
Javier E

Stolen Elections, Voting Dogs And Other Fantastic Fables From The GOP Voter Fraud Mytho... - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-the-gop-voter-fraud-mythology

voting elections gop voter fraud history Politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Numerous studies have found that voter fraud is far from a major issue in the U.S., and in-person fraud of the sort Trump and Kobach like to talk about — things like non-citizens showing up to vote or people returning to vote multiple times under different names — is vanishingly rare. A 2007 study by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice memorably found that an individual American is more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud.
  • as of last summer, 68 percent of Republicans thought millions of illegal immigrants had voted in 2016, and almost three quarters said voter fraud happens “somewhat” or “very often.” The same survey found that nearly half of Republicans believed Trump had won the popular vote.
  • The idea that Nixon gracefully and expeditiously chose not to fight the outcome is a myth, the historian David Greenberg demonstrated back in 2000. Nixon did, however, eventually give in — but in the process, he turned the notion that the Democrats had stolen the election into an article of faith among Republicans, especially conservative ones.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.
  • the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.
  • Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution
  • Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.
  • One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”
  • Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.
  • The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.
  • As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.
  • At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote
  • Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.
  • “I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”
  • The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.
  • The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.
  • Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.
  • So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”
  • Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”
  • Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”
  • In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.
  • Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”
  • Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.
  • voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.
  • Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”
  • As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.
  • But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes
  • Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.
  • for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.
  • Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”
  • In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.
  • Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.
  • One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee
  • Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.
  • Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.
  • This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.
malonema1

Democratic intelligence memo released with redactions - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US policy

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • CNN)The House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released a Democratic memo in redacted form that seeks to undercut Republican claims of FBI surveillance abuses.The committee made the Democratic memo public after the White House signed off following negotiations between the FBI and the committee's top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, over what in the document should be redacted.
  • "The Democratic response memo released today should put to rest any concerns that the American people might have as to the conduct of the FBI, the Justice Department and the FISC," Schiff said in a statement. "Our extensive review of the initial FISA application and three subsequent renewals failed to uncover any evidence of illegal, unethical, or unprofessional behavior by law enforcement and instead revealed that both the FBI and DOJ made extensive showings to justify all four requests."
  • Speaking Saturday afternoon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Nunes said that he wanted the Democratic memo released "because we think it is clear evidence that the Democrats are not only trying to cover this up, but they're also colluding with parts of the government to help cover this up.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • n the three subsequent FISA renewals, the Justice Department provided information "obtained through multiple independent sources" that corroborated parts of what Steele reported about Page, the memo states, though many details of that section are redacted.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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zareefkhan

FBI's Andrew McCabe leaving deputy director job, will retire in March - The Washington ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html

fbi politics US trump director

shared by zareefkhan on 29 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe — a frequent target of President Trump’s ire dating to the 2016 presidential election — is stepping down as he nears the date in March when he can retire with full pension benefits
  • Trump responded to the revelation with a tweet, writing at the time, “90 days to go?!!!”
  • Technically, he will remain an FBI employee for the next several weeks, but he has left the deputy director position and is not expected back to work
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • McCabe, 49, rose quickly through the FBI’s ranks as a counterterrorism supervisor, playing a key role in reorganizing how the U.S. government interrogates international terrorism suspects
  • David Bowdich, a senior FBI official who led the agency’s response to the San Bernardino terrorist attack, is expected to serve as the next deputy director
  • McCabe ran the FBI for three turbulent months last year, until Christopher A. Wray took over as director.
  • Trump’s dislike of McCabe dates back to October 2016, when news stories revealed that McCabe’s wife had run as a Democrat for the Virginia legislature
  • In recent months, McCabe has been harshly criticized by congressional Republicans who challenge the FBI’s rationale for opening the Russia probe in July 2016.
  • Former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. called McCabe “a dedicated public servant who has served this country well.” Holder, a Democrat, denounced “bogus attacks on the FBI and DOJ to distract attention from a legitimate criminal inquiry.”
  • The political scrutiny surrounding McCabe intensified in December, when The Post reported that his senior adviser, Lisa Page, had been engaged in a romantic relationship with Peter Strzok, a senior FBI agent, and the two exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Clinton text messages while they we
  • re immersed in ongoing investigations about the two presidential candidates.
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