12 June 20
The beauty of the RSN system, the reason we can do it without corporate advertising or major funders is because it’s a very lean and efficient process.
The problem is that we are getting less than the bare bones minimum. That’s unjust.
You can be sure that “someone else” will not do it.
Reasonable support easily can.
Easily.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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12 June 20
Jeffrey Toobin | Georgia's Primary and the State of Voting Rights
Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
Toobin writes: "A favorite parlor game in some circles is to name the worst Supreme Court decision of all time."
Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
Toobin writes: "A favorite parlor game in some circles is to name the worst Supreme Court decision of all time."
From the nineteenth century, Dred Scott v. Sandford, from 1857, is hard to beat, because it decreed that African-Americans could not be full citizens, and helped precipitate the Civil War. From the twentieth century, Korematsu v. United States, which, in 1944, upheld the forced removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast, often figures as a strong runner-up. But it’s increasingly apparent that there is a modern contestant for this baleful roll call: Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, from 2013.
In Shelby County, the Court’s five Republican appointees declared unconstitutional the core of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most consequential civil-rights law in modern American history. (The four Democratic appointees dissented.) The act, and its subsequent reauthorizations, designated certain areas, mostly the states of the old Confederacy, for special scrutiny of their voting-rights practices. If these states wanted to make any changes with regard to elections—from redrawing the boundary lines for legislative districts to determining the location of polling places—they had to obtain “pre-clearance” from the Department of Justice. (The states could also go to court for pre-clearance.)
For decades, the pre-clearance process operated as an effective check on discrimination in voting rights. But Roberts’s opinion asserted that times had changed since 1965: as he put it, “the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” As a result, the Court effectively ended pre-clearance, giving the states previously under scrutiny free rein to change their voting practices without first obtaining approval from the federal government. In practice, the Shelby County decision has been a disaster for voting rights, especially for the voting rights of African-Americans.
This was once again made clear in the shambolic primary election that Georgia held on Tuesday. It was always going to be difficult to conduct elections in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, but Georgia’s effort was an emphatic failure—with long lines, faulty voting machines—especially in poorer, minority areas. (My colleague Charles Bethea has some of the grim details here.) Georgia was a covered jurisdiction under the Voting Rights Act at the time of the Court’s opinion, and if the Justices had not neutered the law the state would have been required to clear its plans for the primary.
The Shelby County decision has done more than just allow occasional misfires. It has hastened perhaps the most sinister aspect of the contemporary political agenda of the Republican Party. In every state and locality under its control, the G.O.P. is trying to limit the ability of Democrats, especially people of color and lower-income people, to vote. This has often taken the form of demanding photo identification to vote (to address the largely imaginary problem of voter fraud), limiting early and absentee voting, and closing polling places in certain neighborhoods. These trends predated the Shelby County decision, but the Justices’ green light spurred vote-suppression efforts literally overnight. According to the Brennan Center, within twenty-four hours of the Shelby County ruling, in 2013, Texas announced that it would implement a strict photo-I.D. law. Two other states, Mississippi and Alabama, also began to enforce photo-I.D. laws that had previously been barred under federal pre-clearance. As the Brennan Center further noted, these Republican efforts to disenfranchise African-Americans have intensified in recent years.
The majority in Shelby County made sure that those with the worst of intentions—that this, officials who want to manipulate the electoral system to achieve their desired outcomes—have almost unlimited power to do so. The demands of conducting elections in the wake of a pandemic seem certain to make a bad situation worse. The only hope for a fair election in November will rest with people at the local level, who will have to do their best to fight for what the Voting Rights Act once delivered.
Gen. Mark A. Milley. (photo: Spc. Avery Howard/Army)
The Generals Are Turning on Trump
Fred Kaplan, Slate
Excerpt: "Mark Milley's apology for the church photo-op is a major escalation."
Fred Kaplan, Slate
Excerpt: "Mark Milley's apology for the church photo-op is a major escalation."
resident Donald Trump’s fraught relations with senior military officers ratcheted up another notch on Thursday as Gen. Mark Milley, the top U.S. general, formally apologized for appearing in Trump’s June 1 photo-op at St. John’s Episcopal Church after police and National Guard officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas to clear protesters from nearby Lafayette Square, across from the White House.
“I should not have been there,” Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a prerecorded commencement address to National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
Last week, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who also appeared in the photo-op, told reporters that he too shouldn’t have been there, further claiming that he didn’t know where he was going when Trump led him to the church. Esper also said that he opposed invoking the Insurrection Act to bring active-duty soldiers to quell disorder in D.C., as Trump had threatened to do. Esper’s remarks earned him a chewing-out in the Oval Office. Whether the same will happen to Milley—who has reportedly been agonizing over his role in Trump’s politicization of the military—is a matter of some suspense.
In between the June 1 incident and now, several senior officers, retired and still serving, have spoken out against the idea of using active-duty troops against the American citizens who have been demonstrating since the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. Retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, who had resigned in protest as secretary of defense in December 2018, used the occasion to criticize Trump himself, lambasting his presidency as “three years without mature leadership.”
Trump is scheduled to give a commencement address this Saturday to the graduating cadets at West Point. Rather than delivering it remotely, as various leaders have done for other military academies, Trump—against the wishes of West Point’s leaders—demanded that the Army cadets return to campus, isolate themselves for two weeks, and then, during the ceremony itself, sit in tight formation, ignoring CDC guidelines on social distancing. Of the 1,100 graduating cadets, 17 have tested positive for the coronavirus. The whole business, which seems designed to provide footage of Trump speaking before the newest flock of military officers for his reelection campaign, has sparked quiet resentment from many in the Army.
Meanwhile, in another brewing conflict between Trump and a military culture that’s suddenly, swiftly modernizing, the Republican-chaired Senate Armed Services Committee late Wednesday approved a motion giving the Defense Department three years to change the names of all military bases, installations, and street signs named after Confederate officers. Sen. Elizabeth Warren offered the amendment to the defense authorization bill; the motion was approved in a voice vote, signaling that it will almost certainly be adopted by the full Senate.
Then, on Thursday, Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from New York, introduced a bill giving the Defense Department just one year to change the names. She sponsored a similar bill in 2017 that garnered so little support it didn’t even come up for a vote on the House floor.
The world has since changed. Just in recent days, several prominent Army officers—notably retired Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan—have said it’s time to remove the names of the treasonous secessionists who fought against the United States in the Civil War from U.S. military facilities, including 10 large Army bases in former Confederate Southern states. In response, acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said that he would be open to a “bipartisan conversation” on the matter.
But Trump reacted with fury to the whole idea, tweeting on Wednesday that he “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.” He finished off his tweet, laden with more capitalized letters than usual: “Respect our Military!”—although he clearly has no notion of what real military officers, who have deployed for real combat from these bases, really think.
All of this is taking place as Trump’s ratings have slid by as much as 10 percentage points just in the past week, owing in part to his hostile and aggressive response to the protests and to his political exploitation of church property, a move that has damaged his standing with many evangelicals. Now, he’s picking a high-profile fight with the military as well.
The awkward thing about Milley is that Trump appointed him Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman in 2019. The post has a term of four years, so he is nowhere near retiring—though, in accordance with his powers as commander in chief, Trump could fire him. In a recent article in the Atlantic, Eliot Cohen, dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies, wrote about the Trump era’s growing crisis in civil-military relations, concluding, “The real demonstration of military courage by a general in such a position is … the willingness to be fired.” Milley may soon face that test.
U.S. Border Patrol agents on ATVs monitor the fence at the Imperial Sand Dunes near Felicity, California. The 15-foot fence, also known as the 'floating fence,' sits atop the dunes and moves with the shifting sands. (photo: John Moore/Getty)
Customs and Border Protection Used Money Meant for Food and Medicine on Dirt Bikes and ATVs
Adiel Kaplan, NBC News
Kaplan writes: "Customs and Border Protection spent parts of a $112 million emergency fund meant to buy food, medicine and other items for migrants on all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes and boats, according to a Government Accountability Office report published Thursday."
Adiel Kaplan, NBC News
Kaplan writes: "Customs and Border Protection spent parts of a $112 million emergency fund meant to buy food, medicine and other items for migrants on all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes and boats, according to a Government Accountability Office report published Thursday."
EXCERPT:
"Congress provided this additional funding for the primary purpose of improving conditions for migrants at the border and ensuring migrants were receiving adequate healthcare after the deaths of multiple children in custody," Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement. "Instead of helping migrants and improving conditions on the ground, CBP then broke the law by spending this taxpayer money on things that were not authorized — such as ATVs, dirt bikes, and computer systems."
At the request of Congress, the GAO had examined CBP's books for how the agency spent its emergency allocations for "consumables and medical care" in 2019 and issued a legal opinion finding that CBP had used the funds for items that were not food, hygiene products or medicine. The GAO recommended that CBP fix its books to put expenses in the proper categories and pay for the items out of the right parts of its budget, or else it would be required to report its failure to do so.
"If CBP lacks sufficient budget authority to make the adjustments, then it should report a violation of the Antideficiency Act as required by law," the GAO report said.
The funds in question were a part of the 2019 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Humanitarian Assistance and Security at the Southern Border Act. The act was passed when there was a surge in asylum-seekers at the border and migrants were staying in overcrowded CBP processing centers, some so densely populated that there was nowhere for the migrants to lie down to sleep. The act included $112 million specifically for "consumables and medical care."
Some of the purchases in question made with "consumables and medical care" funds included expenses for CBP's canine program, items in support of its employee vaccine program, computer network upgrades, printers, speakers and a selection of vehicles, including ATVs, motorcycles, dirt bikes, boats, passenger vans and small utility vehicles.
CBP also used some of the money for facility services, including heating and air conditioning upgrades, sewer system upgrades and janitorial services. The GAO found little to no connection between the expenses and the category of funds used to pay for them. While CBP disputed some of those decisions, according to the report, the agency agreed in correspondence with the GAO to reallocate some of the expenses to other budget categories.
The aftermath of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa. (photo: Tulsa Historical Society)
'Almost Blasphemous,' Says Historian: Trump Plans Political Rally in Tulsa, Site of a Race Massacre, on Juneteenth
DeNeen L. Brown, The Washington Post
Brown writes: "President Trump announced Wednesday that he plans to resume holding his political rallies - in Tulsa on June 19, the celebratory day of Juneteenth. Yet Tulsa is the site of one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history: the 1921 race massacre."
READ MORE
DeNeen L. Brown, The Washington Post
Brown writes: "President Trump announced Wednesday that he plans to resume holding his political rallies - in Tulsa on June 19, the celebratory day of Juneteenth. Yet Tulsa is the site of one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history: the 1921 race massacre."
READ MORE
A protester holds a sign during a June 1 protest over the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. (photo: Darron Cummings/AP)
No-Knock Warrants Banned in Louisville in Law Named for Breonna Taylor
Barbara Campbell and Suzanne Nuyen, NPR
Excerpt: "The Louisville, Ky., Metro Council has voted unanimously to ban no-knock warrants. The legislation was titled Breonna's Law, in honor of a woman who was killed during a raid on her home earlier this year."
READ MORE
Barbara Campbell and Suzanne Nuyen, NPR
Excerpt: "The Louisville, Ky., Metro Council has voted unanimously to ban no-knock warrants. The legislation was titled Breonna's Law, in honor of a woman who was killed during a raid on her home earlier this year."
READ MORE
Mike Pompeo and William Barr at a press conference on Thursday. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
Trump Admin Targets ICC Employees With Sanctions After Court Opens War Crimes Investigation
Julian Borger, Guardian UK
Borger writes: "The Trump administration has launched an economic and legal offensive on the international criminal court in response to the court's decision to open an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan carried out by all sides, including the US."
Julian Borger, Guardian UK
Borger writes: "The Trump administration has launched an economic and legal offensive on the international criminal court in response to the court's decision to open an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan carried out by all sides, including the US."
EXCERPTS:
The US will not just sanction ICC officials involved in the investigation of alleged war crimes by the US and its allies, it will also impose visa restrictions on the families of those officials. Additionally, the administration declared on Thursday that it was launching a counter-investigation into the ICC, for alleged corruption.
The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, defence secretary, Mark Esper and attorney general, William Barr, gave a presentation on the decision at the state department, but then left without taking any questions.
Barr made clear that this was the beginning of a sustained campaign against the ICC, and that Thursday’s measures were just an “important first step in holding the ICC accountable for exceeding its mandate and violating the sovereignty of the United States”.
“The US government has reason to doubt the honesty of the ICC. The Department of Justice has received substantial credible information that raises serious concerns about a long history of financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor,” Barr said.
He referred to the ICC as “little more than a political tool employed by unaccountable international elites”.
The ICC responded on Thursday night with a statement expressing “profound regret at the announcement of further threats and coercive actions.”
“These attacks constitute an escalation and an unacceptable attempt to interfere with the rule of law and the Court’s judicial proceedings,” the statement said. “They are announced with the declared aim of influencing the actions of ICC officials in the context of the court’s independent and objective investigations and impartial judicial proceedings.”
An attack on the ICC also represents an attack against the interests of victims of atrocity crimes, for many of whom the Court represents the last hope for justice.
Judges at the ICC gave the green light in March to an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, and began an investigation into crimes by Israeli and Palestinian forces in December. In his remarks, Pompeo made clear the US sanctions were also aimed at defending Israel.
“Given Israel’s robust civilian and military legal system and strong track record of investigating and prosecuting wrongdoing by military personnel, it’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in his crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” Pompeo said.
Human rights activists say that the Israel Defence Forces have operated with virtual impunity in the West Bank and Gaza.
The secretary of state urged other ICC members to join its campaign against the court.
“We cannot, we will not, stand by as our people are threatened by a kangaroo court,” Pompeo said, warning US allies: “Your people could be next, especially those from Nato countries who fought terrorism in Afghanistan right alongside of us.”
David Bosco, who wrote a book on the ICC, Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics, said: “I think this is as much directed at the looming Palestine situation as it is at the Afghanistan investigation. The executive order clearly allows for sanctions against ICC personnel who investigate US allies who have not consented to the court’s jurisdiction.”
Bosco, an associate professor at Indiana University, added: “The actual effect on the court’s Afghanistan investigation will probably not be significant. That investigation faces many logistical and evidentiary obstacles already and will take years to complete.”
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, welcomed the move, describing the Hague-based court as “politicised and obsessed with carrying out a witch-hunt against Israel and the United States.”
But the Dutch foreign minister Stef Blok said he was “very disturbed” by the news.
The American Civil Liberties Union condemned the decision, arguing that Trump was “playing directly into the hands of authoritarian regimes by intimidating judges and prosecutors committed to holding countries accountable for war crimes.
“Trump’s sanctions order against ICC personnel and their families – some of whom could be American citizens – is a dangerous display of his contempt for human rights and those working to uphold them. We are exploring all options in response,” the ACLU said.
The ICC was set up in 2002, as an attempt to extend the effort to impose international humanitarian law for war crimes and crimes against humanity begun by the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Over 120 countries, including Washington’s closest allies in Europe, are party to the Rome statute, the founding document of the ICC. Bill Clinton signed for the US in 2000, but said the statute would not be sent to the Senate for ratification until the US had assessed the court’s operations.
George W Bush informed the UN in 2002 that the US would not join the court.
Donald Trump's decision to step back from international climate action pushes any prospect of hitting global emissions targets to 'near zero.' (photo: iStock)
Four More Years of Donald Trump Could 'Delay Global Emissions Cuts by 10 Years'
Josh Gabbatiss, Carbon Brief
Excerpt: "Donald Trump's decision to step back from international climate action pushes any prospect of hitting global emissions targets to 'near zero,' according to new analysis."
READ MORE
Josh Gabbatiss, Carbon Brief
Excerpt: "Donald Trump's decision to step back from international climate action pushes any prospect of hitting global emissions targets to 'near zero,' according to new analysis."
READ MORE
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