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26 January 21
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Bernie Sanders in New Push for $15 Minimum Wage Under Biden: 'For Me, It's Morally Imperative'
ALSO SEE: Democrats Reintroduce $15 Minimum Wage Bill
Steven Greenhouse, Guardian UK
Greenhouse writes: "Senator Bernie Sanders says the widespread suffering caused by the pandemic-induced economic crisis has made it 'morally imperative' to increase the US's minimum wage to $15 an hour."
Leftwing senator tells Guardian the chances of raising the federal minimum are better than ever with new president in White House
And in an interview with the Guardian, Sanders and other lawmakers pushing for a higher minimum wage say the chances of enacting a $15 minimum are better than ever before now that President Joe Biden has called for a $15 federal minimum as part of his emergency Covid legislative package.
Raising the minimum to $15 would more than double the current $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, but many Republicans oppose the move, saying it would hurt business.
In an interview, Sanders, who championed a $15 minimum wage as a presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, voiced excitement about the prospects of raising the minimum wage, which hasn’t increased since 2009, the longest stretch without an increase since Congress first enacted a minimum wage in 1938.
“This country faces an enormous economic crisis that is aggravated by the pandemic,” Sanders said. “We’re looking at terrible levels of unemployment. We’re looking at growing income and wealth inequality. What concerns me as much as anything is that half our people are living paycheck to paycheck. Millions of people are trying to survive on starvation wages. For me, it’s morally imperative that we raise the minimum wage to a living wage that’s at least $15 an hour.”
The House voted last July to raise the minimum wage to $15 in steps through 2025, but then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote on it. With the White House, Senate and House under Democratic control, Sanders said the chances are good to enact a $15 minimum, although he said it would be hard to attract 10 Republican Senators to support it, making it hard to overcome a filibuster.
Sanders, the incoming chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, sees another route to passage, saying it could be done under the “budget reconciliation” – a process where measures deemed to have budgetary impact can be approved by simple majority vote.
“It clearly has to be done by reconciliation. That’s something I’m working very hard on,” said Sanders.
Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which played a pivotal role in backing the Fight for $15, sees considerable momentum behind a $15 minimum.
That push has come a long way since the Fight for $15 began in 2012, when 200 fast-food workers in New York went on a one-day strike. “We are incredibly proud that the momentum around $15 solidified as part of the presidential campaign, and that the Biden-Harris administration is so committed to get it done that they’ve put it in the first action of Congress for Covid emergency relief,” Henry said. “There is wind at our backs.”
Henry noted that Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff campaigned for a $15 minimum in their successful Senate races in Georgia. Moreover, Florida voters, while backing Donald Trump, voted overwhelmingly – 61% to 39% – to raise that state’s minimum to $15 by 2026.
“A $15 minimum is the single most concrete way to reduce racial inequality, put money in people’s pockets and make material change in people’s lives,” Henry said. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, found that raising the minimum to $15 would help 25% of Black workers, 19.1% of Hispanic workers, 13.1% of White workers and 10.8% of Asian workers.
A Pew poll found that Americans favor increasing the minimum to $15, by 67% to 33%. Henry warned that “any elected official in Congress who dares to stand against us on this is going to pay a big political price”.
Rita Blalock, a McDonald’s cook in Raleigh, North Carolina, prays for a $15 minimum. Blalock, who earns $10 an hour after nearly 10 years at McDonald’s, said she often relies on food pantries and can’t afford her $200 rent every two weeks at a rooming house. “Fortunately, I can eat free at work,” said Blalock, whose work schedule has been cut to 20 hours many weeks.
Asked what a $15 minimum would mean, Blalock, 54, said: “Oh my God, I could afford rent. I could eat a little better. I could finally buy me some clothes.”
Blalock has participated in many of the Fight for $15’s one-day strikes. “I feel if it doesn’t pass in [Biden’s] first 100 days, it’s going to be swept under the rug,” she said.
A $15 minimum faces strong Republican opposition from senators including Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, who has said that “if the federal government mandates a universal $15 minimum wage, many low-income Americans will lose their current jobs and find fewer job opportunities in the future.”
Michael Saltsman, managing director of the Employment Policies Institute, a corporate-backed research group, also said it would be a bad time to enact a $15 minimum.
“You’ve got a lot of businesses hanging from a thread,” he said. “A $15 minimum is an irresponsible proposal at any time, and it’s particularly so right now.”
Saltsman said the Senate should not vote on a $15 minimum via reconciliation, arguing that its budgetary effect would be minimal. With the Senate divided 50-50, he questioned whether Democrats could muster 50 votes for a $15 minimum, suggesting that centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia might balk at it.
Bill Dauster, a top aide to former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, wrote in a recent editorial that raising the minimum would have clear budgetary effects and could be voted on through reconciliation.
Many Republicans say the federal minimum should remain at $7.25, leaving any increases to individual states. Walmart chief Doug McMillon says that if there is a minimum wage increase, it should take “geographic differences” into account, considering the differing costs of living in, say, California and Mississippi.
The Congressional Budget Office forecast that 1.3 million workers would become jobless due to an increase to $15. That study also forecast that 27 million workers would receive pay increases thanks to a $15 minimum, and the number of people in poverty would decline by 1.3 million.
Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said a review of economic studies shows that “more ambitious minimum wage policies have yet to produce any clear impact on jobs, even though it has certainly raised wages and reduced inequality”.
“Overall, the body of literature shows it has very little effect on low-wage jobs,” Dube said. “My work shows it leads to a reduction in poverty and increased family earnings, and maybe 35¢ on the dollar goes back to the government through reduced public assistance.”
Differing with Dube, economists David Neumark and Peter Shirley, in a newly released review of minimum wage research, conclude that “most of the evidence indicates the opposite – that minimum wages reduce low-skilled employment,” with the strongest effects on teens, young adults and the less-educated.
Senator Sanders said it’s outrageous that the purchasing power of the minimum wage has declined 30% since the late 1960s. “The fact that President Biden moved aggressively on this is important to the workers who will benefit,” Sanders said.
“It signals to the entire country that workers cannot continue to live on starvation wages, and I hope that message gets out to employers all across the country.”
Members of the Proud Boys group gesture as the presidential motorcade passes through West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., December 31, 2020. (photo: Tom Brenner/Reuters)
Canada Parliament Labels US Far-Right Proud Boys Group 'a Terrorist Entity'
France 24
Excerpt: "Canada's parliament on Monday unanimously passed a motion calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government to designate the right-wing Proud Boys as a banned terrorist group."
he motion is purely symbolic, but the government has said authorities are monitoring the group and collecting evidence that could support the move.
Put forward by the fourth-ranked New Democrats, the motion states that the government should "use all available tools to address the proliferation of white supremacists and hate groups, starting with the immediate designating of Proud Boys as a terrorist entity."
Members of the Proud Boys, which was started by a Canadian who has since distanced himself from the group, were among Donald Trump supporters charged over the violent assault on the US Capitol earlier this month.
Its chairman, Enrique Tarrio, was also arrested in Washington over the torching of a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a church during violent protests in December.
In Canada, they first made headlines in 2017 when five navy members of the Proud Boys were disciplined for disrupting an indigenous ceremony in Halifax.
Canada lists dozens of banned terrorist organizations including Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Taliban and the Islamic State group.
Ten progressive members of Congress say in letter: 'Trump mob's success in breaching the Capitol was not due to a lack of resources at the disposal of federal law enforcement.' (photo: Reuters)
Fears Grow That Efforts to Combat US Domestic Terrorism Can Hurt Minorities
Noa Yachot, Guardian UK
Yachot writes: "Civil rights advocates worry that moves to fight far-right extremism will be used against communities of color and leftwing activists."
n expanded no fly list. New crimes put on the books. Increased use of the death penalty.
These are some of the ways that politicians, pundits and law enforcement want to head off a repeat of the 6 January attack on the Capitol. But a renewed national security push aimed at addressing domestic terrorism has civil liberties groups steeling themselves, concerned that moves to combat far-right extremism will instead redound against communities of color and leftwing activists.
Last summer’s racial justice protests jump-started a national conversation over the endurance of racism within America’s law enforcement and security apparatus. But despite campaigning on the need to reform those institutions, some mainstream Democrats are now taking the lead on calls to expand them.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has called for the Capitol rioters to be placed on the no fly list. President Joe Biden, whose campaign website pledges his administration will “work for a domestic terrorism law”, has ordered a comprehensive assessment of domestic violent extremism. House speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a new “9/11-type commission”. And the first domestic terrorism legislation to follow the Capitol attack was introduced in the House last week by Illinois Democrat Brad Schneider.
The Democratic party, however, isn’t entirely united on the issue.
Ten progressive members of Congress, led by Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib have sent a letter to congressional leadership expressing opposition to an expansion of national security powers.
“The Trump mob’s success in breaching the Capitol was not due to a lack of resources at the disposal of federal law enforcement,” the letter reads. “We firmly believe that the national security and surveillance powers of the US government are already too broad, undefined, and unaccountable to the people.”
“Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people,” the letter continues.
It cites as examples the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee, the surveillance of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the invention of a category in 2017 called “Black Identity Extremism” the FBI claimed posed a risk of domestic terrorism.
More than 100 civil and human rights organizations have also joined in a statement of opposition to any new domestic terror legislation.
Since 6 January, security officials have resurrected the same well-honed argument trotted out when the debate around domestic terrorism resurfaces: that the law hamstrings police from effectively fighting white nationalist violence. “There are so many limitations on law enforcement,” Bill Bratton, former commissioner of the NYPD, recently told CNBC. “We don’t have many of the tools to battle domestic terrorism that we have to battle international terrorism.”
Civil rights and civil liberties experts say that argument is disingenuous, a ploy to seize power in a time of national crisis, and point to the many laws at the disposal of law enforcement in fighting domestic extremism. What they lack, they say, is the will to go after white supremacists the way they do communities of color, despite white supremacists accounting for the vast majority of criminal acts that are classifiable by law as domestic terrorism.
“In the last four years, white supremacists and far-right militias have engaged in public violence, and have made public statements about their intent to do so,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the Brennan Center for Justice. “So it’s a little hard for me to understand how the FBI and local law enforcement had no idea that the attack on the Capitol was being planned.”
The government does have more expansive powers – powers that ballooned in the decades since 9/11 – to target Americans it claims are associated with groups designated by the State Department as “Foreign Terrorism Organizations”. While the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 authorities did expand the government’s ability to investigate and prosecute domestic terrorism, it has so far avoided extending all of those authorities to domestic groups. That’s in part due to First Amendment-related concerns, as the US Constitution permits nonviolent association with hateful groups.
Advocates also point out how damaging those anti-terrorism powers have been to Muslim-American communities and the rule of law. The “terrorism” label has been used to justify the surveillance of entire communities, mass arrests and deportations, entrapment, harassment, an inflated watchlist system and, of course, the Muslim ban, one of the original sins of the Trump presidency.
“An expansion of domestic terrorism won’t mean more focus on white terrorism,” said Diala Shamas, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “When you consider the biases that law enforcement has – with its focus on black political dissent, Muslim political dissent, Palestinian organizing – it’s not far-fetched to imagine that those are the groups that will be disproportionately represented in any so-called domestic terrorism framing.”
Shamas says the concept of terrorism can’t be divorced from its legacy of politicization and abuse. “The caution I urge in using that terminology is because of this acute awareness that it ends up triggering such expansive state action.”
Asad Dandia, a Brooklyn-based community organizer, has firsthand experience with the upheaval the terrorism label can wreak.
When Dandia was a teenager, his charity was infiltrated by an informant working for the NYPD who spent months spying on Dandia, his family and friends, as part of the police department’s notorious, years-long surveillance program of the city’s Muslim communities. Dandia joined a lawsuit against the NYPD in 2013 that settled in 2017 after the NYPD agreed to a series of reforms.
He recently reread the confession the informant posted on Facebook. “I was an informant for the NYPD, for a little while, to investigate terrorism,” it read.
“I had totally forgotten that keyword was there,” Dandia says of the word terrorism. “We, my community and my friends, were given that designation. To argue for that designation for another community would implicitly mean to accept it for myself. And I refuse to accept it for myself.”
Policymakers are currently considering a number of options. The bill introduced last week calls for the creation of domestic terrorism offices within the FBI and the departments of homeland security and justice, and for increased monitoring and reporting on threats and investigations.
The proposal that has civil liberties most concerned is a bill first introduced in 2019 by House intelligence chair Adam Schiff, which would give the attorney general the authority to identify certain crimes as acts as terrorism. Given the aggressive policing and prosecutions of last summer’s racial justice protesters – in just one example, an Indigenous man now faces 10 years in prison for his Facebook posts – they say it’s easy to imagine charges against protesters inflated even more with a terrorism designation green-lit by an unsympathetic attorney general like William Barr.
“In addition to further harming already marginalized communities, these charges could be used to brand as terrorists people who protest against government injustices by engaging in civil disobedience or actions that result in property damage,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a letter opposing that bill.
German, the former FBI agent, recently published a report tying biased policing to the extensive infiltration of police departments by white supremacists.
German charges the FBI with playing a “semantic game” in claiming the US lacks a domestic terrorism law, pointing to the dozens of statutes relating to what the law defines as domestic terrorism. The best way for police to target white supremacist violence, he says, is by rooting out racists within their ranks and enforcing laws that already exist.
Shamas and German both point to the need for a broader reckoning with the reasons the government has historically turned a blind eye to far right extremism. “In my view, the real problem with white supremacy is the proximity to the state,” says Shamas. “It’s the fact that we have representatives in Congress who are white supremacists, it’s the fact that police departments are being infiltrated by these groups.
“None of that is captured when you say, ‘these are terrorists.’ The relationship with the state gets blurred.”
Harriet Tubman was a spy and a nurse for the Union during the U.S. Civil War. (photo: Getty Images)
Harriet Tubman: Biden Moves to Put Anti-Slavery Activist on $20 Bill
BBC
Excerpt: "The Biden administration has said it will seek to push forward a plan to make anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman the face of a new $20 bill."
note featuring Ms Tubman, who was born a slave in about 1822, was originally due to be unveiled in 2020.
The US Treasury said she would replace former President Andrew Jackson, a slave owner.
But the effort was delayed under former President Donald Trump, who branded it "pure political correctness".
Now President Joe Biden has revived the project, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters the Treasury was "exploring ways to speed up" the process.
The move would make Ms Tubman the first African American to appear on a US banknote, and the first woman for more than 100 years.
"It's important that our notes, our money - if people don't know what a note is - reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that," Ms Psaki said on Monday.
The women last depicted on US notes were former First Lady Martha Washington, on the $1 silver certificate from 1891 to 1896, and Native American Pocahontas, in a group image on the $20 bill from 1865 to 1869.
However, given the complexities of redesigning and producing US banknotes, the bill is not expected to be released any time soon.
In 2019, Mr Trump's Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said the redesign would be delayed until at least 2026. At the time, he said he was focused on redesigning bills to address counterfeiting issues, not making changes to their imagery.
Mr Trump, an admirer of his populist predecessor Andrew Jackson - whose portrait hung in his office - expressed opposition to the redesign.
While campaigning in 2016, Mr Trump suggested that Ms Tubman be put on the $2 bill instead.
Who was Harriet Tubman?
Born into slavery in about 1822, Ms Tubman grew up working in the cotton fields in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was the fourth of nine children born to two enslaved parents, Benjamin Ross and Harriet Rit.
As a teenager, she was hit in the head by an iron weight thrown by an overseer, leaving her severely injured.
She escaped from a slave plantation in 1849, fleeing north to the neighbouring state of Pennsylvania.
In the years that followed, Ms Tubman returned multiple times to Maryland to rescue others, conducting them along the so-called "underground railroad", a network of safe houses used to spirit slaves from the south to the free states in the north.
She is estimated to have made some 13 missions to rescue more than 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network.
Later, she became a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, a prominent supporter of the women's suffrage movement, and a famous veteran of the struggle for the abolition of slavery.
After the war, Ms Tubman toured eastern cities giving speeches in support of women's suffrage, drawing on her experiences in the fight against slavery.
She died in 1913, aged 91, surrounded by her family.
Marva Sadler, director of clinical services, prepares the operating room at the Whole Woman's Health clinic in Fort Worth, Texas, on Sept. 4, 2019. (photo: Tony Gutierrez/AP)
Texas Encourages Court to Endorse Risky, Medically Unnecessary Abortion Procedure
Jordan Smith, The Intercept
Smith writes: "The morning after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals convened to consider whether Texas should be allowed to ban the safest and most common method of abortion used later in pregnancy."
In fighting to ban the safest and most common method of later-term abortion, Texas advocates for experimenting on women.
If the court agrees with Texas, it would be endorsing a previability abortion ban in direct conflict with decades of precedent.
At issue is the dilation and evacuation method of abortion, known as D&E, which is considered the safest and most effective method of termination during the second trimester of pregnancy. The procedure involves dilation of the cervix, then the removal of the fetus and products of conception, typically with medical instruments, followed by vacuum suction. D&E is used in nearly all later-term procedures in the U.S., which account for a small percentage of all abortions: In 2016, roughly 5.4 percent of abortions occurred after 16 weeks.
Nonetheless, D&E has come under fire from anti-abortion activists and lawmakers who have dubbed it “dismemberment abortion” (a term that has no basis in medicine) because the process causes disarticulation when the fetus hits the cervix. In order to provide more “humane” treatment to a previable fetus, Texas decided to ban D&E and make it a criminal offense to provide the procedure unless a doctor can first cause fetal demise.
The problem is that there is no meaningful way to ensure fetal death before an abortion is performed, and the methods to do so can be risky. In other words, advocates for reproductive rights say, Texas is seeking to ban a universally medically accepted procedure in favor of a law that would force doctors to experiment on women.
“What this law really does is make it a crime for physicians to use their best medical judgment and provide their patients with the highest standard of care,” Molly Duane, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Texas’s abortion providers, told The Intercept. “That’s something that’s unheard of in the context of medicine, broadly. You just don’t see politicians meddling with medicine in that way except that, of course, abortion is always treated differently.”
In the summer of 2017, as the law was set to take effect, abortion providers sued to block it. They were ultimately successful, both in the district court, which permanently enjoined the law, and then again last fall, when a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit concluded that the law was unconstitutional. “An undue burden, we reiterate, exists when a ‘state regulation has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus,’” the majority wrote. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly determined that a statute that would effectively ban the safest, most common method of second trimester abortion imposes an undue burden.”
Eight states have passed D&E bans, and every federal court that has taken up the issue to date has blocked those laws from taking effect. When Alabama lost its case before the 11th Circuit, it appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to take the case. There, even Justice Clarence Thomas reluctantly concluded that Alabama’s law would not pass legal muster.
But that hasn’t stopped the 5th Circuit from pressing the issue. On October 30, the court made the rare move to rehear the case en banc on its own motion — meaning that without Texas asking them to do so, the judges determined the full court would reconsider whether the previous panel, which split 2-1 to block the law, had made the right decision. “We take this as a concerning signal,” Duane said. “But what we know is that the law and the facts … support us.”
A De Facto Ban
In a hearing held remotely on January 21, Texas’s Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins came out swinging with loaded language and junk science. The state had enacted the D&E ban to “prohibit live fetal dismemberment abortions,” he said. “It’s illegal to kill an animal in Texas by ripping it limb from limb,” and the state’s ban would extend “that same protection … to pain-capable unborn children on the cusp of viability.”
The law wasn’t actually a ban, he argued. “It simply requires those who commit abortions to kill the unborn child in a more humane way before tearing her arms and legs off.” He told the court that there were plenty of ways of doing this, including using drugs like digoxin or potassium chloride to kill the fetus before extracting it from the uterus.
The alternatives Hawkins was trying to normalize are anything but typical. Potassium chloride injections require specialized training and can prove fatal to a woman if administered incorrectly. Digoxin, which is administered via a 4-inch needle inserted into the uterus through the vagina or abdomen, has a failure rate as high as 13 percent, meaning it could take multiple shots to induce demise — and there’s no research to confirm that’s safe. Another method of demise, umbilical cord transection, can cause perforations of the uterus and damage to the cervix.
While some providers do use digoxin, it is administered on a case-by-case basis and, importantly, is not used before 18 weeks. Texas would require doctors to ensure fetal demise starting at 15 weeks — a medically unnecessary and risky proposition, Duane told the court.
“No method of demise works in every case, and a physician cannot know if demise will be successful until after starting a procedure, at which point it is simply too late to turn back,” she said. “Rather than risk going to jail for violating [the ban] or violate their own ethical obligations … some physicians will stop providing abortion altogether.”
If a doctor couldn’t be sure that demise had taken place until the abortion procedure had already begun — patient on the table, feet in stirrups, cervix dilated — then what? Would they be required to continue trying to cause demise? Would they be able to go forward with the abortion without facing potential criminal prosecution? “Tellingly, Texas provides no answer for what a physician should do when a demise attempt fails,” Duane said.
According to Hawkins, even in that scenario, the doctor would have to keep trying to cause demise. Under the law, if a doctor is mid-procedure when they determine demise hasn’t happened, that would not qualify as a “medical emergency” and thus would not protect the doctor against prosecution. “In your run-of-the-mill case, that is not a medical emergency,” Hawkins said. Still, he argued, that didn’t make the law unconstitutional. “In that situation, there are still numerous alternatives available,” he said, like administering additional digoxin, a dose of potassium chloride, or severing the umbilical cord.
“You’re already in the middle of the procedure,” Chief Judge Priscilla Owen said. “But in no circumstances can you finish the abortion procedure with a not-dead fetus.”
Absent an emergency, Hawkins said, that was correct. But since the law hadn’t been allowed to take effect, he argued, there was no way to know if any of this was going to be a problem in practice. And if there were to be any individual patient for whom the law “erected a substantial obstacle” to obtaining an abortion because demise didn’t work or “because of some contraindication or some idiosyncratic medical issue, that patient of course could pursue an as-applied challenge to this law,” he said.
“She’s on the table!” Owen replied.
Invoking Junk Science
While Texas’s position came across as stunningly extreme, Hawkins’s arguments were well-received by a number of the judges who took part in the oral argument, including those who seemed to fancy themselves medical experts or invoked junk science to bolster their apparent approval of the law. One argued that there was an alternate procedure employing suction aspiration after 15 weeks; no, that’s not the standard of care, Duane said. Still others — including Judge Edith Jones and her Trump-appointed colleague Judge James Ho, both of whom are vocally anti-abortion — peppered Duane with questions about “fetal pain.”
“It seems to me that even in high school, if you’re going to dissect a frog, you kill him before you start taking him apart,” Jones said. “And so I’m not quite sure why the state has no interest in giving a growing fetus in the womb the same kind of humanity that we would give a frog.”
Duane pointed out that there is no credible medical evidence that a fetus can feel pain until much later in pregnancy because the necessary neural connections simply don’t exist. (The junk science of fetal pain has been used to pass 20-week abortion bans across the country.)
“But we don’t know about frog pain, do we?” Jones replied.
Ho followed up: “I realize that you dispute that there’s fetal pain in these particular fact patterns, but let’s put that dispute aside,” he said. “Does the state have an interest in preventing and reducing and mitigating fetal pain?”
The question was hard to answer, Duane replied, since fetal pain was not an issue in this case. “The state just does not have that interest here.” Well, Ho said, she could take the question as a hypothetical. “And if you don’t want to answer, that’s fine too,” he said. “I just want to make sure you’re making a decision not to answer the question.”
Duane said that she wasn’t trying to be evasive, but it was “a difficult hypothetical to imagine” since it had no bearing on the case at hand.
Going Rogue
In the end, Hawkins argued that not only was the ban constitutional, but the appeals court should also substitute its judgment for that of the district court, which has enjoined the law.
But that’s not what the appellate courts are supposed to do. The district court in this case presided over a five-day trial with 19 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits before concluding that the law could not stand. The 5th Circuit’s job is to review the lower court’s decision for clear error — meaning that if the trial court’s factual determinations based on the evidence presented are plausible in light of the entire record, the appellate court may not reverse the lower court’s opinion, even if it would have decided the case differently.
Still, the 5th Circuit has developed something of a penchant for ignoring the rules and substituting its own judgment for that of the lower court by wholly reimagining the importance of witnesses and evidence at a trial it had no part in. Just last summer, the Supreme Court rebuked the 5th Circuit when it struck down as unconstitutional a Louisiana abortion law that the appellate court had overruled a lower court in order to uphold.
Given the tenor of the arguments in the current case — and the fact that in deciding to rehear it at all, the judges are challenging not only the lower court but also members of their own bench — it does not appear that the 5th Circuit has absorbed the Supreme Court’s reprimand and decided to stay in its own lane.
If the court overturns its previous decision and lets the D&E law stand, it would be affirming a de facto ban in Texas on all abortion after 15 weeks, Duane and others argue, since complying with the law would require doctors to reject safe medical practice and instead perform a procedure of unknown efficacy and safety. To date, the federal courts have not only blocked D&E bans from taking effect but also blocked outright bans on abortion before 15 weeks, which is long before a fetus is viable outside the womb.
Still, if the Texas case makes it to the Supreme Court, what the justices might decide to do is unknown. The Supreme Court is a very different place than it was just months ago; with the elevation of Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat vacated by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, the court now has a solid 6-3 majority that disfavors abortion rights. Indeed, last June, the state of Mississippi appealed to the Supreme Court to uphold its 15-week ban; to date, the court has not decided whether it will take the case.
Demonstrators carry signs during an anti-government protest in Tunis, Tunisia, January 23, 2021. The sign reads: 'the fall of the regime.' (photo: Jihed Abidellaoui/Reuters)
Tunisia: Protests Continue Against Police Brutality, Corruption
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Hundreds of people marched in the Tunisian capital on Saturday to protest police repression, corruption and poverty, following several nights of unrest marked by clashes and arrests."
Tunisians march against police brutality, inequality, as government bans gatherings amid surge in COVID-19 cases.
Protesters in Tunis chanted “No more fear, the streets belong to the people” and “the people want the fall of the regime” – a slogan popularised during the Arab Spring a decade ago. They also held up banners calling for the release of hundreds of protesters detained since January 14.
The police say more than 700 people have been arrested following last week’s clashes, in which young people hurled rocks and petrol bombs at security forces, who responded with tear gas and water cannon.
Human rights groups say at least 1,000 people had been detained.
“We can’t accept a police state in Tunisia 10 years after the revolution … it is shameful,” said Mahmoud, a young cafe worker who did not give his family name.
Much of the unrest has been in disenfranchised and marginalised areas, where anger is boiling over soaring unemployment and a political class accused of having failed to deliver good governance, a decade after the 2011 revolution that toppled long-time President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Although the youths clashing with riot police after dark in poor districts of Tunisian cities have voiced few clear political aims, daytime protests have focused on the lack of jobs and on the police response to demonstrations.
“The situation is catastrophic,” said Omar Jawadi, 33, a hotel sales manager, who has been paid only half his salary for months amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“The politicians are corrupt, we want to change the government and the system.”
Saturday’s protests came as Tunisia struggled to stem the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has crippled the economy and threatened to overwhelm hospitals. More than 6,000 people have died from COVID-19 in Tunisia, with a record 103 deaths reported on Thursday.
The government on Saturday extended a night-time curfew from 8pm to 5am (19:00 to 04:00 GMT) and banned gatherings until February 14.
Starting Monday, the government is also forbidding travel between regions and ordering all people over 65 to stay at home as part of stricter virus measures announced Saturday by the Tunisian Health Ministry spokesperson, Nissaf Ben Alaya Ben Alaya.
Restaurants and bars will remain closed except for takeout food. Schools and universities can resume studies Monday but many classes will be transferred online. Ben Alaya threatened “drastic measures” against violators, saying the country is “at a critical juncture” in its battle against COVID-19.
In the capital, police placed barricades along Habib Bourguiba Avenue, the stately tree-lined thoroughfare running from the sea up to the old city of Tunis, in a bid to stop the protesters gathering.
Demonstrators instead rallied outside the central bank building and marched through the city, with plain-clothes police moving on each side with two-way radios.
Though protesters later managed to reach Habib Bourguiba, a symbolic focal point of the 2011 uprising, the attempt to close off the avenue underscored government unease at the momentum of the protests. The demonstration had been authorised for two hours, and police fired tear gas to disperse the crowds when the two hours were up.
Tunisia last week marked one decade since Ben Ali fled the country amid mass protests, ending 23 years in power.
Tunisia’s political leadership is divided, with Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi waiting for parliament to confirm a major cabinet reshuffle announced last Saturday.
A protest about the Flint water crisis. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Unfinished Business of Flint's Water Crisis
Anna Clark, ProPublica
Clark writes: "When I first heard E. Yvonne Lewis tell the story, it was a hot July day in downtown Flint, Michigan."
hen I first heard E. Yvonne Lewis tell the story, it was a hot July day in downtown Flint, Michigan. We and about 70 others had gathered in the high-ceilinged ballroom of the Northbank Center, just west of the river, where the Michigan Civil Rights Commission was conducting its 2016 hearings on how this Great Lakes city learned that its own water was a threat.
Lewis, a community health worker and mother of three, testified that she kept a Crock-Pot in her bathroom. To take a bath, she filled the cauldron with bottled water, waited for it to heat, poured it into her bathtub, then repeated this process until she had enough to wash.
The image of the slow cooker in her bathroom haunts me, one of many such stories I heard while writing a book about the crisis in Flint, where toxic water was delivered to a city of nearly 100,000 people for 18 months before the state acknowledged the problem. As I sat for hour after hour, trying to put words to these experiences, I struggled with the fact that there was no ending. My book couldn’t conclude with a rousing sense of wrongs righted and justice served. Not only had no one been held accountable, but the true toll of the crisis for both the city and its inhabitants would not be known for years, maybe decades.
“People are dead,” Lewis said when I spoke with her last weekend. “Children are ill. We still don’t know the long-term implications of the exposure.”
This ambiguity stands in contrast to recent news that suggests Flint’s story is headed for resolution. On Thursday, a federal judge granted preliminary approval of a $641 million class-action settlement in the case, believed to be the largest in state history. It will provide for “every person exposed while a minor child; every adult exposed with a resultant injury; every residential property owner, renter, or person responsible for paying Flint water bills; and certain business owners,” according to the decision. That ruling comes exactly a week after nine public officials, including former Gov. Rick Snyder, were indicted on 42 counts of wrongdoing involving their alleged roles in the water crisis. All nine have pleaded not guilty.
Criminal charges and a class-action settlement may seem like the last chapter in Flint’s story, which has already begun to fade in public memory. But much of Flint’s unfinished business lingers, including policies that lie at the root of the crisis.
The problem with Flint’s water began when a state-appointed emergency manager decided to leave Detroit’s water system. In 2014, while awaiting the construction of a new regional system, officials rebooted the city’s old treatment plant and used the Flint River as a water source. But the plant did not get the resources to properly treat the water. Most seriously, the water did not receive corrosion control, as required by federal law, causing pipes to break down. Brown water coming out of taps: that was corroded iron, or rust.
Despite escalating concerns from residents, boil-water advisories and other red flags (the water so badly corroded machinery at a General Motors plant, the company switched to another city’s water system), it took large-scale organizing for a year and a half before the city returned to Detroit’s water system. By then, people had been exposed not only to high amounts of lead, a neurotoxin that is especially damaging to children, but a series of bacterial outbreaks. A Legionnaires’ disease outbreak officially sickened 90 and killed 12. As Frontline documented, the number of those harmed by the outbreak is likely more.
To address the heart of the crisis, though, you have to look beyond a courtroom. Nearly five years after Snyder’s own investigative commission cited Michigan’s emergency manager, or EM, law — which hands total political authority over a city or school district to state-appointed officials — as a contributing factor in the water crisis, the law remains on the books, unchanged. That is despite some unsuccessful legislative efforts to turn the position into a three-person board and to add some limits to its authority. Two of the four people who formerly held that post are among those charged in last week’s indictments. While the state has not had an active emergency manager since 2018, ending an 18-year streak, the law’s defenders argue that it is a necessary tool, pointing to the one who steered Detroit through America’s largest municipal bankruptcy. But Peter Hammer, director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University Law School, disagrees.
“It is tragic and reprehensible that the EM law has not been repealed in Michigan,” he said in an email, arguing that its provisions have disproportionately affected the democratic rights of Black communities. “It is not enough that the measure has not been used in the past few years, it must be removed. The dangers are even greater with looming crises in municipal finance in the wake of the Covid pandemic.”
Michigan is also one of only two states that exempts both the governor and Legislature from open records requests, a fact that delayed or denied access to critical information on the decisions made about Flint’s water. After years of effort, the most recent push for bipartisan legislation that would make Michigan’s government more transparent died after the Senate Oversight Committee failed to send it to the full Senate, even though its chair, Senator Ed McBroom, a Vulcan Republican, was one of the bill’s co-sponsors. Both he and Senator Jeremy Moss, a Southfield Democrat, the other co-sponsor, said the bill was scheduled for hearings in March, but it was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and then later ran out of time as other issues took the Senate’s attention: McBroom pointed to criminal justice reform; Moss to allegations of perceived election fraud. Both also say they expect transparency legislation to be reintroduced in 2021. “I think the need is as clear as it’s ever been,” McBroom said.
Nationally, in the first update of the Lead and Copper Rule since it was adopted in 1991, the Environmental Protection Agency developed testing requirements for water at schools and child care centers, and requires public inventories of millions of lead service lines that remain in America’s drinking water systems. But the new guidelines slow down the replacement of those lines, with the new standard calling for a 3 percent annual replacement rate for water systems that show especially high levels of lead, rather than the previous 7 percent rate. In a fact sheet, the EPA said the new rule is more effective because it closes loopholes that left the previous standard unmet. But many advocates are disappointed. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy law firm, has sued the EPA, with a top official in the organization asking, “Have we learned nothing from Flint?”
More broadly, the chronic disinvestment in communities like Flint has deepened their precariousness. It even worsened the water crisis. People and businesses fled Flint, leaving the city with fewer than half the taxpayers it had in 1960, but the water system remained as massive as ever. This led to unaffordable rates and water sitting stagnant in corroding pipes, making it more vulnerable to contaminants.
Even the steps taken to address the wrongs done to the people of Flint aren’t as clear-cut as they appear. The charges filed last week are the second attempt at prosecutions; the first effort was scrapped by new lead prosecutors who promised to build stronger cases. Several of the defense lawyers not only claim prosecutors have failed to make those cases, but they strongly decry the secretive one-judge grand jury process that led to the charges, a system unique to Michigan and rarely used in the state.
The pending $641 million class-action settlement may be the largest in the state’s history, surpassing the $500 million allotted two years ago to gymnasts abused by Dr. Larry Nassar. But, given the huge size of the class (to say nothing of attorney fees), it may not result in much for any individual. For all that the city has lost, 95,538 people still called Flint home as of 2019; in comparison, the Nassar settlement involved 332 survivors. Some residents have protested the terms of the settlement, saying that compared with what they endured, it isn’t enough. A number of other lawsuits, including a negligence suit against the EPA, are still pending.
Despite all that remains undone, Flint’s legacy has inspired some promising change, with implications that go far beyond the city borders. Michigan has strengthened its water testing, setting a higher standard than the federal minimum. It also mandates that every community in the state replace its lead service lines. Because of a 2017 legal settlement with the state, Flint had a head start. Nearly 10,000 of the city’s lead lines have been replaced as of late December (but not yet all of them). The state also created the new Office of the Environmental Justice Public Advocate to better respond to concerns about inequitable treatment.
Many residents have drawn on lessons from the water crisis to build new models for democracy and public health. Their work includes an innovative program where community members help develop, vet and carry out research proposals from academics, bringing transparency along the way; a water lab in a refurbished school where residents, including young people, work with scientists to test their own drinking water; and an environmental justice movement, with teachings on using data and community organizing to rebuild crumbling infrastructure.
“One of the things I think we’ve learned in our work is that component is absolutely essential to doing things the right way — not just engagement but collaboration,” said Benjamin Pauli, author of Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis. His family, including two young children, were exposed to the water.
The story of Flint goes on, and on. There are days I wish I could sneak into bookstores, find copies of my book, The Poisoned City, and staple addendums to the back cover. But when I was writing the book and still today, it comes down to the same thing: learning to accept the reality of all that’s uncertain and incomplete, without losing clarity on the truth, or the worth of Flint’s people.
It’s not just theory; it’s personal. Lewis is talking with her adult daughter about how the water crisis might affect her ability to have a healthy pregnancy — and child. She is thinking about what her own life will be like as she ages. Every single physical or mental ailment in the decades to come, she said, will have her asking: What if …?
“In the back of my mind,” she said, “there’s always one question — the impact of that exposure.”
In the most intimate of ways — in the bodies of those who experienced it — the water crisis goes ever on.
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