30 March 22
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The January 6 committee investigating the deadly attack on the Capitol is reportedly deciding whether to interview Ginni Thomas — the Republican activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — about her efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss. The move comes after a series of Thomas’s texts were made public in which she urges Donald Trump’s then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks following the election to take action to prevent a Biden victory. Justice Thomas is the only justice who dissented in the Supreme Court’s decision a few months ago that led to the release of White House documents around January 6. We speak with Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent at Vox, who calls Ginni Thomas “a cheerleader at the highest level” for the attempt to overturn the election. “When you’re a judge, you can’t sit on a case where your wife has an interest,” says Millhiser. “If Clarence Thomas knew that his wife was potentially implicated in this scandal, I think he should have recused himself from this case.” Millhiser’s latest piece is headlined “Clarence Thomas’s long fight against fair and democratic elections.”
On November 10th, after news outlets declared Joe Biden the winner, Ginni Thomas wrote to Meadows, “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” she texted.
Just months ago, in January, the Supreme Court denied a request by Trump to block the release of White House documents around January 6th. In the 8-to-1 ruling, only one justice dissented: Clarence Thomas, Gina’s husband. Calls are growing for Justice Thomas to be impeached, after the release of the text messages. This comes as Justice Thomas participated remotely Monday in arguments at the Supreme Court after he was hospitalized for nearly a week with an unspecified infection.
For more, we’re joined by Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent at Vox, who has long followed Justice Thomas. His new piece, out today, is headlined “Clarence Thomas’s long fight against fair and democratic elections: Like wife, like husband.” He is the author of two books on the high court: The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America and Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted.
Ian, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can talk about the significance of what has been discovered about Ginni Thomas’s texts, and the connection to her husband and the rules in the Supreme Court around partners ruling in cases that involve — that may possibly involve their spouses?
IAN MILLHISER: So, what we know at this point is we know that Ginni Thomas was very much a cheerleader, and a cheerleader at the highest levels. I mean, she was texting the White House chief of staff about, you know, cheering on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. We don’t know yet if she was a co-conspirator. You know, was she in the room with people like John Eastman trying to plot the strategy to actually overturn the election? And the extent of her role could be revealed by various documents and various interviews that the January 6 committee is conducting.
You know, you mentioned in the intro that the committee sought records from the White House. Thomas — Justice Thomas — tried to block their access to these records. And, you know, we don’t yet know what’s in those records. We don’t know if they incriminate Ginni Thomas. We don’t know if they reveal her to be a co-conspirator. We don’t know if her name isn’t mentioned at all. So, if Clarence Thomas knew that his wife was potentially implicated in this scandal, I think he should have recused himself from that case, and he should recuse himself from any future cases related to this — related to this investigation, because, you know, when you’re a judge, you can’t sit on a case where your wife has an interest.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What are the conflict of interest requirements for justices of the Supreme Court? And there has been an attempt in Congress to tighten that, but Chief Justice Roberts has warned against Congress attempting to control an equal branch of government, in effect?
IAN MILLHISER: Yeah. So, there’s really two questions there. I mean, there is a statute that lays out certain obligations. You know, a judge shouldn’t sit on a case where their impartiality can reasonably be questioned, and so on and so forth. The issue is that there’s no enforceable ethics rules against Supreme Court of the United States. So, there’s a statute which tells them what they’re supposed to do, and the justices have said for a really long time, “Oh, yeah, we are very, very careful about complying with ethics,” and so on and so forth, but, ultimately, it’s up to each individual justice. And, I mean, this is the overarching problem we’re having with the Supreme Court right now, is when this body gets out of line, when it gets overly partisan, when it starts ignoring the law, there really isn’t a good method to rein in a rogue Supreme Court. I mean, there’s impeachment, but impeachment takes 67 votes. We couldn’t even impeach — successfully impeach Donald Trump after Donald Trump cheered on an attack on the Capitol.
So I am pessimistic that anything is going to happen to Justice Thomas. But again, like, if his wife has an interest in a case, that is the classic case of where you need to recuse. You can’t sit on a case that you have an interest in, and you can’t sit on a case where your immediate family members have a direct interest.
AMY GOODMAN: And Justice Ian Millhiser — I mean, and, Ian, isn’t it —
IAN MILLHISER: I’ve been promoted! Great!
AMY GOODMAN: Isn’t it true that in this case where Clarence Thomas was the only dissenter — he did not want to obligate Donald Trump to send over these documents — that’s where the emails were discovered of his wife? So, I mean, there is a suggestion that he wanted to cover that up.
IAN MILLHISER: So, my understanding is that the text messages that we know about between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows came from a different tranche. I believe that actually Mark Meadows voluntarily turned them over to the committee. The documents that the committee sought from the Trump White House, they were in the National Archives. Trump sued to try to block them. And I don’t believe we know what’s in those documents yet. Now, I’m sure the January 6 committee will get around to telling us very soon.
But the question here is really: What did Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it? When did Clarence Thomas know that his wife was potentially implicated in the January 6 attack? And if he knew that, then he obviously can’t sit on a case involving an investigation into the January 6th attack.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk in general about Justice Thomas’s record? His dissent in this case is not necessarily out of the ordinary for how he has dealt with cases in the past.
IAN MILLHISER: Yeah, no, that’s right. I mean, if I didn’t know about Ginni Thomas’s involvement, I still would’t be surprised by the vote that Clarence Thomas cast in that one case, because he’s consistently been a strong opponent of voting rights laws. He has — you know, the Roberts Court has been awful to the Voting Rights Act. He’s wanted to go much further. He is a supporter of a doctrine that would essentially allow state legislatures to ignore their state constitutions when passing election laws. He is a huge opponent of freedom of the press. He wants to overturn a case called New York Times v. Sullivan that protects reporters from malicious libel suits that seek to bankrupt their outlets. And he just doesn’t believe that the legislatures should have the authority to make laws. You know, he thinks that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional. He thinks that the ban on whites-only lunch counters is unconstitutional. He thinks that the minimum wage is unconstitutional. You know, this is simply a man who does not believe in democracy. And so I’m not at all surprised to learn that he is married to a woman who apparently also does not have a very strong attachment to democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Ian Millhiser, the report that Ginni Thomas was at the January 6th protest, the significance of that, and also, in these texts, calling for the hiring of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy theorist lawyer, who even herself in court defended herself by saying, “No one should have believed what I said”?
IAN MILLHISER: Right, yeah. I mean, the fact that she was recommending potential legal counsel certainly suggests that she may have played a larger role. You know, again, we need to see more information. I want to know what’s in the new documents. I think that the committee should try to interview Ginni Thomas. You know, there are many people who attended the rally on the Capitol grass, which is lawful — you’re allowed to rally on the Capitol grass — and did not invade the Capitol. So we don’t yet know that she committed that particular crime. But again, what we need here is we need more information. We don’t know yet if Ginni Thomas has done anything criminal. We don’t even know whether she was involved in any of the planning. What we do know so far is that this wife of a Supreme Court justice was a cheerleader of this coup attempt.
AMY GOODMAN: Ian Millhiser, we want to thank you for being with us, senior correspondent at Vox. We will link to your coverage at democracynow.org.
Babies from surrogate mothers inside a shelter belonging to one of Ukraine's largest surrogacy clinics. (photo: Gleb garnish/Reuters)
A newborn, wrapped in a patterned blanket, yawns from the website of BioTexCom, the Ukrainian surrogate parenting clinic, before then crying for a bit. "Shhh," says a nurse as she bends over the baby, rocking it back and forth in its crib.
Next to the video is a note: "Dear BioTexCom patients! Unfortunately, the level of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine exceeded all possible expectations. At the same time, we urge you to keep calm, do not panic and follow the rules of conduct. We remind you that your life and the life of your child depend on it."
The tired newborn is one of 18 babies who are currently being sheltered in a bunker of Ukraine’s largest surrogacy clinic, located in a suburb of Kyiv, as they wait for their families. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, it has grown increasingly difficult for the future parents to pick up their children. And every day, new children from surrogate mothers in Ukraine are being born, with hundreds more still pregnant.
Since 2015, Ukraine has developed into the global capital of surrogacy, with numerous other countries, including Nepal, India and Thailand, having banned the practice. According to estimates, between 2,000 and 3,000 babies are born to surrogate mothers in the Eastern European country, most of them for parents abroad. Prior to the war, the surrogacy system in Ukraine had widely been considered professional and uncomplicated. At BioTexCom, surrogacy packages cost between 40,000 and 65,000 euros, far less than in the United States, for example, where the practice is also allowed.
Maria Holumbovska is in charge of the surrogacy clinic’s business relations in Germany. She remains in Kyiv and spoke to us about the new challenges presented by the Russian invasion.
DER SPIEGEL: Ms. Holumbovska, your clinic is one of the largest surrogacy service providers in Ukraine and is responsible for about a quarter of the entire global market. How many babies are currently in your care?
Holumbovska: There are currently 18 babies in our air raid shelter in a Kyiv suburb. But new ones are arriving every day. We have an additional location in central Ukraine, and there are also more newborns in the maternity clinics of Kyiv. As soon as they can be released, our chief physician picks them up in person, accompanied by representatives of a volunteer battalion. In total, we currently have 35 babies in the country.
Maria Holumbovska, born in 1987, is the representative of the Ukrainian surrogacy clinic BioTexCom for Germany. Holumbovska studied the German language and German literature at Zhtomyr University and has worked for the agency since 2014.
DER SPIEGEL: What are conditions like in the shelter.
Holumbovska: The suburb is still relatively quiet and you can only hear a few explosions in the distance. There are eight nurses taking care of the babies, most of them women who have families of their own, generally in other parts of the country. Since the beginning of the war, it has no longer been possible for them to travel home. We are still well supplied when it comes to baby food and diapers. We are receiving generous donations from a lot of countries. Parents who in the past have had children with our help are also getting involved and sending aid supplies.
DER SPIEGEL: Since the beginning of the war, some parents have managed to pick up their babies in Ukraine, such as the publicized case of a Swiss couple who flew in with a private jet. Does the possibility currently exist for parents to pick up their babies?
Holumbovska: Most parents want to try, despite the dangers. Five German babies were picked up from us in the last three weeks. We currently have three others. The oldest German baby who is still with us was born one day before the war started. His parents now want to pick him up. They want to drive with their own car and then travel the last portion by train. The trip is risky, of course, and takes several days. Once the parents arrive, they aren’t able to immediately turn around and head back home.
DER SPIEGEL: Why not?
Holumbovska: Prior to the beginning of the war, the bureaucratic processes lasted about a month. We have now worked out an accelerated process with the agencies so that parents can leave with their babies after just two days or so. Fewer documents are now necessary. But the children need a passport from the German Embassy. And that is rather difficult at the moment. We would like to see the German Embassy react a bit more quickly to our applications.
DER SPIEGEL: From what countries do the children’s parents come from?
Holumbovska: We have children here from all over the world: France, the United Kingdom, Austria, Switzerland, Israel, Argentina, Brazil and China. Our oldest children are Chinese. Their parents are unable to leave the country and pick up their children because of the strict coronavirus measures.
DER SPIEGEL: How are the surrogate mothers doing?
Holumbovska: We have around 600 pregnant women in the country. Around 80 of them are carrying children for German parents. They come from all over the country. We were able to evacuate all of our pregnant women from Mariupol in time. Some women here in Kyiv are still living in their homes, while others, particularly those further along in their pregnancies, are living in our shared living quarters. Generally, we only go out when it is absolutely necessary. We are still able to do our shopping in the supermarkets. When an air raid warning sounds, we head to the shelter. It was quite shocking in the beginning, but now we have almost grown used to it.
DER SPIEGEL: Why aren’t you evacuating the pregnant women from the country?
Holumbovska: We considered doing so at the beginning of the Russian invasion. But we didn’t think that the war would last this long. And it seemed too dangerous to travel through Ukraine with heavily pregnant women. What would happen if one of them went into labor in an area of fighting? They would then have to have the baby in whatever space is available, potentially not even in a clinic. So we came to the conclusion that it was better to stay here and wait to see what happens.
DER SPIEGEL: Did some surrogate mothers leave the country on their own?
Holumbovska: Yes, some of our surrogate mothers fled to Poland, but they were all women in the early stages of their pregnancy. And they promised us that they would return to give birth. The problem is that surrogacy is legal in Ukraine, but not in surrounding countries. If these women give birth in Poland, then they are suddenly mothers, and the babies legally belong to them. The bureaucratic process to change that situation would likely be extremely lengthy.
DER SPIEGEL: What do you plan to do now?
Holumbovska: We hope that the situation in Kyiv doesn’t escalate and that we don’t end up in the same situation as other cities. We hope that the Germans finally provide us with real help. We will continue to take care of the babies until their parents can pick them up. And we want to help many other couples to have children, many of whom have already signed a contract. The situation is also a sad one for all of these people.
In the two years since George Floyd's murder, the US has made little progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement. (photo: Gillian Flaccus/AP)
As Joe Biden pushes to ‘fund the police’, data from Mapping Police Violence shows high rates of deaths at the hands of law enforcement persist
Law enforcement in the US have killed 249 people this year as of 24 March, averaging about three deaths a day and mirroring the deadly force trends of recent years, according to Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group. The data, experts say, suggests in the nearly two years since George Floyd’s murder, the US has made little progress in preventing deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and that the 2020 promises of systemic reforms have fallen short.
Police have killed roughly 1,100 people each year since 2013. In 2021, officers killed 1,136 people – one of the deadliest years on record, Mapping Police Violence reported. The organization tracks deaths recorded by police, governments and the media, including cases where people were fatally shot, beaten, restrained, and Tasered. The Washington Post has reported similar trends, and found that 2021 broke the record for fatal shootings by officers since the newspaper started its database tracking in 2015.
“The shocking regularity of killings suggests that nothing substantive has really changed to disrupt the nationwide dynamic of police violence,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard, which evaluates departments. “It demonstrates that we’re not doing enough, and if anything, it appears to be getting slightly worse year over year.”
Advocates argue that the persistent rate of killings was a critical reason the US should not be expanding its police forces.
Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said to “fund the police”, released a budget proposal earlier this week for $30bn in law enforcement and crime prevention efforts, including funding to put “more police officers on the beat”. The proposal, which called for the expansion of “accountable, community policing”, sparked immediate criticisms from racial justice groups. The Movement for Black Lives noted that the White House was proposing only $367m to support police reform and said Biden’s budget “shows a blatant disregard for his promises to Black people, masked as an effort to decrease crime”.
Michael Gwin, a White House spokesperson, said in an email that Biden had been “consistent in his opposition to defunding the police and in his support for additional funding for community policing”, and “remains committed to advancing long-overdue police reforms”.
“The president, along with the overwhelming majority of Americans, knows that we can and must have a criminal justice system that both protects public safety and upholds our founding ideals of equal treatment under the law. In fact, those two goals go hand-in-hand. That approach is at the core of the president’s comprehensive plan to combat crime by getting guns off the streets, and by investing in community-oriented policing and proven community anti-violence programs,” he added.
During the national uprisings after Floyd’s murder, “defund the police” became a central rallying cry, with advocates arguing reform efforts had failed to prevent killings and misconduct. Cities could save lives by reducing police budgets, limiting potentially deadly encounters with civilians, and reinvesting funds into community programs that address root causes of crime, activists have said.
Some cities initially responded with modest cuts to police budgets, in some cases removing officers from schools, traffic enforcement and other divisions, and investing in alternatives. But over the last year, an uptick in gun violence and homicides has prompted a backlash to the idea of defunding (even as the current crime rate remains significantly lower than decades prior). With intense media coverage of crime, officials have been pressured to abandon reforms, prioritize harsh punishments and invest more in police. Cities that made small cuts have largely restored and expanded law enforcement budgets.
“To invest more into a system that we all know is broken is really a slap in the face to everyone who marched in summer 2020,” said Chris Harris, director of policy at the Austin Justice Coalition in Texas. “It reflects just a real lack of solutions to the problems that we face. It’s just more of the same – even if it’s exactly the thing that we know continues to hurt and kill people.”
Harris said it was disappointing to see calls for police expansion at the federal level, given the George Floyd Act, the national reform measure proposed after the protests, did not succeed. He said he was not surprised that the killings by police continue apace: “We fail to deal with the underlying issues that often drive police interactions in our communities, partly because we’re funding this law enforcement response rather than the upfront supports and services that could help people.”
Gwin noted that the White House was exploring possible executive action to pass reforms after Republicans blocked negotiations over legislation.
Sinyangwe pointed to a data analysis in Los Angeles, which showed that in recent years, one-third of incidents in which Los Angeles police department (LAPD) officers used force involved an unhoused person: “Instead of using force against homeless people, we should be investing in services and creating unarmed civilian responses to these issues.”
But in LA, where housing and outreach efforts have fallen short, there has been an escalating law enforcement crackdown on street encampments. And LAPD is on track to get a large budget boost, despite a sharp increase in killings by officers in 2021.
Proponents of police budget increases argue that law enforcement is the solution to violence, but Sinyangwe noted that fewer than 5% of arrests nationally are for serious violent crimes. And research has shown that when police forces expand, there are more arrests for low-level offenses, he said. And many high-profile killings by police have involved stops for alleged low-level crimes.
Kaitlyn Dey, an organizer in Portland, Oregon, said it was frustrating to see officials push a narrative that cities need to “re-fund the police” when municipalities have largely failed to defund law enforcement in the first place.
“We have to start chipping away at how many officers there are, what kind of equipment they have – that is going to reduce [police] violence, because they’re not going to be able to enact it if you take away their resources,” she said.
There are documented solutions that could reduce killings, said Alex S Vitale, sociology professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on policing. He noted estimates suggesting that 25% to 50% of people killed by police were having a mental health crisis.
“If we would develop non-police mental health crisis teams, and improve community-based mental health services, we could save hundreds of lives a year,” he said.
Vitale, author of The End of Policing, pointed to a program in Denver that sends mental health clinicians and paramedics to respond to certain 911 calls, which is now dramatically expanding after a successful pilot. Health experts have responded to thousands of emergency calls since 2020, and have never had to call police for backup, the Denver Post reported.
“While the media has mobilized crime panics to try and shut down talk of reducing our reliance on policing, organizations across the country are doing grassroots work in communities to demand these alternatives,” he said.
Sen. Susan Collins, (R-Maine) talks to media as she meets with Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, March 8, 2022. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Susan Collins said on Wednesday that she plans to vote to confirm President Biden’s nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer
It took a second meeting with Jackson on Tuesday afternoon for Collins to feel comfortable that the federal judge and former public defender would not be “bending the law to meet a personal preference,” as Collins told The New York Times in an interview.
“In recent years, senators on both sides of the aisle have gotten away from what I perceive to be the appropriate process for evaluating judicial nominees,” the centrist senator said. “In my view, the role under the Constitution assigned to the Senate is to look at the credentials, experience and qualifications of the nominee. It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the individual ideology of a senator or would vote exactly as an individual senator would want.”
Collins added that Jackson assured her that, on the topic of expanding the court, she “would forever stay out of that issue.”
Collins has backed Supreme Court nominees from Democratic administrations before, having voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan the following year. Collins also opposed the confirmation of conservative Amy Coney Barrett, whom former President Trump nominated just before the 2020 election.
Collins may not be the only Republicans to vote to confirm Jackson. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) meet with her on Tuesday, according to the Times, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) may also join Collins.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House after President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act, making lynching a hate crime under federal law, on March 29. (photo: Nicholas Kamm/AP)
President Biden just made lynching a federal hate crime after more than 100 years of legislative failure.
The Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act, named after the 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped, brutally beaten, and shot by a mob of white men in Mississippi in 1955 before they threw him into a river, allows an act to be prosecuted as a lynching when a person conspires to commit a hate crime that results in death, serious bodily injury, and other serious harms.
The bill’s passage is long overdue, but its arrival still has an important symbolic power and will give federal prosecutors another tool to prosecute some of the country’s most brutal hate crimes. In other words, the act builds on the severity of the federal hate crimes laws that already exist.
“Lynching is a clear example of one’s inhumanity toward another. It’s a uniquely American act of terrorism that is motivated by hatred, and, before today, was never punished by our legal system,” Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL), the longtime sponsor of the legislation, told Vox. “Emmett Till would’ve been 80 years old. I’m 75, and I just imagine the kinds of contributions he would have made to our society. Biden’s signing of the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act sends a message that America will no longer continue to ignore this shameful chapter of our history and that the government engaged in legislative failure for far too long.”
The new act amends the existing federal criminal code, created by the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2009. The language of the new provision suggests that there is a difference between lynching and murder.
The difference is in the historic and present-day effect of lynchings; the idea that the person who was killed is not the only victim. And lynchings are typically motivated by the victim’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or other identifier. “Lynching has typically sent a message to an entire community that ‘you’re not safe here’ or ‘you could be next.’ Lynching has typically been motivated by racial animus and harms an entire community,” said Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University.
The three men convicted in 2021 of murdering Ahmaud Arbery — Travis and Gregory McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan — could have been charged with lynching if the law were in effect, Rush told Vox. On top of the state-level charges that they were convicted of — among them malice murder, felony murder, and false imprisonment — their crime could have been tried as a “lynching” at the federal level. A federal grand jury did indict the three men on hate crimes, attempted kidnapping, and separate counts of using firearms in the process. According to Rep. Rush, the man who murdered Heather Heyer with his vehicle in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 could have also been charged under the new law.
A Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Vox that the new provision would, in fact, allow for greater penalties for “a subset of completed hate crimes committed by multiple people acting together.” The Justice Department pointed out that the victim does not have to be killed for a perpetrator to be charged with lynching; “serious bodily injury” would suffice.
Since at least 1900, legislators have tried to criminalize lynching. That year, North Carolina Rep. George H. White, then the only Black person in Congress, introduced an anti-lynching measure that eventually failed. Similar legislation was introduced in nearly every subsequent decade but was thwarted by the Senate filibuster or opponents who claimed the issue should be left to states.
In 2018, then-Sen. Kamala Harris, along with Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Tim Scott (R-SC), introduced similar legislation — the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act — but it was never taken up by the House. As recently as 2020, the House passed a previous version of Rush’s bill, but Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) objected to its unanimous passage in the Senate on the grounds that the bill was too broad.
“While we passed anti-lynching legislation twice before in the Senate, politics always seemed to get in the way of it getting across the finish line,” Scott told Vox. “This issue of justice should never be politicized because it’s not a Republican or Democrat issue — it’s an American issue.”
Following a revision to include the phrase “death or serious bodily injury” and an extension of the maximum sentence from 10 years to 30, the bill now represents the first time the country has codified an anti-lynching measure, signaling national recognition that lynchings have destroyed lives and families in some of the ugliest and most tragic ways — and that the federal government never intervened.
“Between 1936 and 1938, the national headquarters of the NAACP hung a flag with the words ‘A man was lynched yesterday,’ solemn reminders of the dark eddies of our nation’s past,” Booker told Vox. “Although no legislation will reverse the pain and fear felt by those victims, their loved ones, and Black communities, this legislation is a necessary step America must take to heal from the racialized violence that has permeated its history.”
Two years after a stunted racial reckoning in America, terror against minority groups remains ever-present — the FBI found that hate crimes were at their highest levels in 12 years in 2020. But even so, does the word “lynching” resonate with people in 2022? Does the new law have the power to deter racist violence? Will the federal government be inclined to prosecute perpetrators under the new legislation? And will locking up perpetrators bring justice and healing to victims, their loved ones, and the broader communities impacted?
“The most transformative civil rights legislation that we have has been paid for by the blood of Black people,” Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told Vox. “Most victims of these crimes are dead. So this is definitely symbolic for surviving family members since a prison sentence won’t bring someone back.”
But there’s more to the legislation, Hewitt said. “One interesting thing about the Black experience, when it comes to the justice system, is it’s not just about being the target of harassment and state violence. There’s a desire to be protected and to be recognized as a full American, a full citizen, a full human. When people talk about Black Lives Matter, that’s what it means,” Hewitt said. “This legislation sends a signal that, yes, the lives of Ahmaud Arbery and others lynched do matter, that the people who commit violence against them will be prosecuted under the full extent of the law.”
Lynching back then — and now
We now know that more lynchings took place than were previously known, evidence that investigating and recording lynchings is a difficult process. A recent report from the Equal Justice Initiative found that nearly 6,500 “racial terror lynchings” took place in America between 1865 and 1950. The report documents nearly 2,000 Black people were lynched by white mobs between 1865 and 1877, during Reconstruction after the Civil War, alone. The organization defines a racial terror lynching, which they say peaked between 1880 and 1940, as “violent and public acts of torture that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.”
Research from the NAACP, which defines “lynching” as “the public killing of an individual who hasn’t received due process,” found that 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States between 1882 and 1968, with the majority of them — 3,446 — being lynchings of Black Americans. Other minority groups and some white people were lynched, too, like the Texas lynching of 15 Latin Americans one night in 1918 and the mass lynching of Chinese people in 1871.
These reports reveal that lynching wasn’t just about a Black person being hanged by the neck but also about “the slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive forms of torture and mutilation,” as historian Leon Litwack wrote in Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. For this reason, some modern-day murders, Hewitt said, can still be considered lynchings.
“Lynching, for some people, might feel like a word that is starting to lose its power because it doesn’t feel real and present,” Hewitt said. “But it is kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap. It is torture. It is the sexual abuse that sometimes happens when someone is kidnapped. It is murder.”
Under this definition, examples of modern-day lynchings abound: There’s Abner Louima whom white police officers brutally beat and sodomized with a wooden stick in New York City in 1997; In 1998, James Byrd Jr. was kidnapped, beaten, chained to a car, and dragged for three miles before he died. Many referred to the more recent killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery as lynchings. Both men were held against their will, publicly brutalized, and killed at the hands of white men.
How the law fits the present
The new law would cement a meaning of lynching into the federal code. “Whoever conspires to commit a hate crime offense that results in death or serious bodily injury or that includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill shall, if death or serious bodily injury results from the offense, be imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both,” the law reads.
The provision also counters modern interpretations of lynchings. Think Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s use of the phrase “high-tech lynching” when his then-colleague Anita Hill called him out for inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace during his Supreme Court nomination hearings, or Trump’s more recent use of the term to describe his impeachment. “People have certainly misused the term and over the years it has started to lose its force,” Hewitt said. But there are still a number of crimes and killings that we would still consider lynchings, he said.
Additionally, the law gives the federal government power to bring more charges against perpetrators, especially those who act together. People who work together to commit a crime will be charged the same regardless of their role in an attack. A Justice Department official told Vox that prosecutors will be able to charge a defendant under both the new anti-lynching act and under the provisions that already existed.
The law might also bring greater attention to the various cold cases that involve the mysterious deaths of Black people. “In these cases there often isn’t enough information to find the perpetrator and charge someone so they are often classified as suicides. But a lot of these cases could very well be classic lynchings,” Hewitt said.
In 2020, two Black men, Robert Fuller and Malcolm Harsch, were both found dead from hanging in Southern California just days apart from one another. Authorities claimed there was no foul play in either death, though both families were skeptical. There were no further investigations in either death. Federal prosecutors likely wouldn’t bring charges forward without more information, but since the law now defines lynching, lawmakers hope that prosecutors will be inclined to give these cases another look.
It’s unclear how the new legislation would handle deaths at the hands of law enforcement. “When it’s the police, we usually think about excessive force under Section 1983, which allows someone to sue the government if they’ve been a victim of police brutality,” Hansford, the Howard law professor, said. “These hate crimes laws are usually reserved for people who are not on duty as police officers when they commit a crime.”
For example, scholars have suggested that the death of Sandra Bland, who reportedly died by suicide by hanging herself in a jail cell after being pulled over by a police officer for a traffic violation in Texas in 2015, could be considered a lynching, should investigators find evidence that law enforcement officials were involved. But even if that evidence emerged, an officer on duty would argue that they were defending themselves, Hansford said, and the DOJ might be less likely to bring lynching charges against a police officer.
Though commentators viewed George Floyd’s murder as a lynching, Minnesota’s attorney general declined to charge former police officer Derek Chauvin with a hate crime, claiming there was no evidence to prove that Floyd’s race motivated Chauvin to pin Floyd down with his knee. The DOJ did eventually bring charges against Chauvin that he pleaded guilty to, but they were not hate crime charges.
“This bill isn’t just saying, ‘Don’t lynch people anymore because we don’t do that anymore.’ It builds upon the body of a statutory framework that the Department of Justice has at its disposal,” Hewitt said.
Still, the extent of the new legislation’s power will come down to whether the Department of Justice plans to even use it. As Vox’s Jamil Smith reported, hate crimes prosecutions themselves are uncommon and can be rarer depending on who is in office.
Between 2005 and 2009, the DOJ investigated 647 hate crimes. They investigated fewer under President Donald Trump — 597 between 2015 and 2019, an 8 percent decrease. “In total, however, of nearly 1,900 suspects investigated between 2005 and 2019, 82 percent were not prosecuted. The overwhelming majority of those cases were not pursued for lack of evidence,” Smith wrote.
An official at the Department of Justice told Vox that “eliminating hate crimes and bias-motivated violence” is one of the department’s top priorities.
“I know that the activists and people who are freedom-seeking won’t just sit around and let the Justice Department ignore this power granted to them under this act,” Rep. Rush told Vox. “Local law enforcement tried to ignore what happened to George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, but the people didn’t let that happen.”
Hansford added that there’s more room for healing and thinking more broadly about how lynching affects entire communities. “These laws make sure that perpetrators get more time behind bars but they don’t consider how the family moves forward financially and psychologically,” Hansford said. “America still needs to recognize that our whole community deserves healing.”
Minneapolis schoolteachers picket in front of Justice Page Middle School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 8, 2022. (photo: Kerem Yucel/Getty)
The Minneapolis teachers’ union just won a nearly three-week-long strike. We talked to two strike leaders about what they saw on the picket line and how militant unionism that fights for the whole working class can spread across the country.
The strike won significant gains on many fronts. Educational support professionals, or ESPs, an especially underpaid and disproportionately non-white workforce, will see major increases in their salaries and hours, bringing most close to the $35,000 salary initially demanded by the union. In line with the strategy of growing number of unions to bargain for the common good, using their power as organized workers to fight not only for themselves but for the multiracial working class, strikers won caps on class sizes and contract language exempting educators of color from excesses and layoffs, as well as the hiring of two district mentors for non-white educators.
Mental health support for students — another major strike demand — will receive a major boost through a nurse, school counselor, psychologist, or social worker at every secondary site; a doubling of the number of elementary schools with counselors; a social worker in every school building; a minimum of one school nurse for every two schools; and a decrease in school psychologist to student ratios from 1 to 1,000 to 1 to 850. Far less progress was made on teacher pay, though the gains of 5 percent pay raises plus a one-time $4,000 bonus is still the highest pay bump for licensed educators in Minneapolis in twenty years.
Perhaps the most important win of the strike, however, was that educators dramatically increased their sense of power and solidarity, as Greta Callahan and Shaun Laden — the presidents, respectively, of the union’s teacher and ESP chapters — explain in this interview with Jacobin’s Eric Blanc. After two exhausting years in which the pandemic has thrown school workers into survival mode and onto the political defensive, educators across the country would do well to follow the inspiring lead given by the Minneapolis strike.
EB: One of the things that I’ve heard both of you speak a lot about is the importance of collective joy in the struggle. Can you share any anecdotes about what that looked like during your strike?
SL: Being out on the picket line with your entire group of coworkers and having time to talk to them, to get to know them, to understand them — that can be a transformative experience for educators and for the union as a whole. We won a lot of important gains in the contract, but our most priceless win from the strike is that we were all out together for three weeks. We came together. We never knew how powerful we were before now.
Students are returning to school today in Minneapolis after one of the longest educators’ strikes in decades. After nearly three weeks on the picket line, the teachers and educational support professionals chapters of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) Local 59 have overwhelmingly voted — with yes votes of 76 and 79 percent of the two chapters — to approve the proposed tentative agreements.
The strike won significant gains on many fronts. Educational support professionals, or ESPs, an especially underpaid and disproportionately non-white workforce, will see major increases in their salaries and hours, bringing most close to the $35,000 salary initially demanded by the union. In line with the strategy of growing number of unions to bargain for the common good, using their power as organized workers to fight not only for themselves but for the multiracial working class, strikers won caps on class sizes and contract language exempting educators of color from excesses and layoffs, as well as the hiring of two district mentors for non-white educators.
Mental health support for students — another major strike demand — will receive a major boost through a nurse, school counselor, psychologist, or social worker at every secondary site; a doubling of the number of elementary schools with counselors; a social worker in every school building; a minimum of one school nurse for every two schools; and a decrease in school psychologist to student ratios from 1 to 1,000 to 1 to 850. Far less progress was made on teacher pay, though the gains of 5 percent pay raises plus a one-time $4,000 bonus is still the highest pay bump for licensed educators in Minneapolis in twenty years.
Perhaps the most important win of the strike, however, was that educators dramatically increased their sense of power and solidarity, as Greta Callahan and Shaun Laden — the presidents, respectively, of the union’s teacher and ESP chapters — explain in this interview with Jacobin’s Eric Blanc. After two exhausting years in which the pandemic has thrown school workers into survival mode and onto the political defensive, educators across the country would do well to follow the inspiring lead given by the Minneapolis strike.
EB: One of the things that I’ve heard both of you speak a lot about is the importance of collective joy in the struggle. Can you share any anecdotes about what that looked like during your strike?
SL: Being out on the picket line with your entire group of coworkers and having time to talk to them, to get to know them, to understand them — that can be a transformative experience for educators and for the union as a whole. We won a lot of important gains in the contract, but our most priceless win from the strike is that we were all out together for three weeks. We came together. We never knew how powerful we were before now.
One of the moments where that became especially clear was when we were rallying at the state capitol and all of our members sang “Purple Rain” together — with Tenille Evans from the Chicago Teachers Union on the mic, closing it out. It was amazing, a really powerful and joyful moment, where we felt what we’re capable of.
GC: On one of the last days of the strike, we were able for a few minutes to escape the dungeon [district headquarters’ negotiation rooms], and when we came outside, we saw that children were completely running the big strike rally. There were zero grown-ups around them, and one of them — she was probably like six or seven — was on the mic leading the chants. I heard her explain to the crowd: “When I say, ‘Who are we?’ you say, ‘MFT!’ And when I say, ‘What do we have?’ you say, ‘Good kids!’” So you had this amazing tiny person leading a thousand strikers to chant “Good Kids!”
Another big highlight was seeing so many students occupy the Davis Center [district headquarters]. There was so much joy in that space. When we left bargaining on the last day, we were literally stepping over students in sleeping bags who had taken over the entire building. So the kids are all right.
EB: Based on your recent experience, could you speak about what you think it will take to turn things around for educators and the labor movement generally?
GC: Strikes are necessary — and they work. Look at what was on the table after over a year of negotiating compared to what we got after the strike, an action voted on by over 97 percent of our members. It’s night and day.
Withholding our labor is not just a way to flex our power, it’s a way to build power at all our worksites. But it’s unfortunate that we had to strike for almost three weeks in order to help get basic things that humans — in this case children — need and deserve. I’m still outraged.
SL: And in the public sector, we have this unique situation where our bosses are elected. So I think there’s a balance between building a labor movement that’s strike ready while also building our power in the electoral realm.
Elected officials help set the context for what’s possible through strike action, so we’ve got to have better folks in there making decisions about funding. That requires thinking strategically about how we build political power to create conditions for strikes to be as effective as possible.
EB: You’ve celebrated your wins, but you also noted that you didn’t win everything, that huge problems still exist in the school system, and that the fight continues. What’s next?
SL: I think we need to be building toward a statewide education strike. We have a $9 billion surplus in Minnesota, but we are not going to see a dime of that if things continue the way they’re going.
For that to change, I think we’ve ultimately got to have a statewide educators’ strike. That’s what [the 2018 walkouts in] West Virginia and Arizona showed: to get systemic change, you need to take it to the state level, because two-thirds of our funding comes from the state of Minnesota. We need to move in that direction.
GC: That’s right, and we need to make sure that those who are elected understand the power of workers. We have a governor — a former teacher! — who has been silent for the last three weeks. We have a mayor who was endorsed by labor who’s been silent for the last three weeks. It is totally unacceptable that these people in power are not publicly supporting workers when they withhold their labor to fight for the common good.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to kick all of these people out from office, but it means, at a minimum, that they need to not be afraid to stand up for labor and for everything that we’ve been fighting for.
EB: What lessons would you like to pass on to educators across the country who are struggling in similarly difficult conditions and who have been inspired by your struggle?
GC: It doesn’t have to be this way — do something about it. Get your joy back. You should feel joy at work, you should be proud to be an educator, you should not feel demonized. You do have full control if you fight back together — and when you do, you’ll see everything change.
There’s just so much potential for the momentum we’ve built to continue to shift Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the whole country.
SL: And to do all this, we also need to transform our unions. Six years ago, we were losing — that’s when I ran for president of the ESP chapter of the union and beat an incumbent of eight years. It took a lot of work to overcome a very stale union culture in which most members were not given a strong reason to get engaged.
“You should feel joy at work, you should be proud to be an educator, you should not feel demonized. You do have full control if you fight back together.”
Since then, we’ve done our best to raise expectations for what is possible and we’ve sent a bunch of our new member leaders through Jane McAlevey’s online organizing trainings [“Organizing for Power”]. When it comes to building power, there’s a way to do it right, and it’s not magic. It means implementing the strategies and tactics that the labor movement used before, back when we were winning.
There are a lot of workers, and a lot of union members, who want to do things better — the role of leaders should be to help facilitate membership takeovers of our unions. And by taking over and democratizing our unions, by helping empower members to fight back, we are going to do things better. That’s how we can finally turn things around in our schools and for working people everywhere.
This photo taken on April 1, 2021 shows a worker adjusting cryptocurrency mining rigs at a cryptocurrency farm in Dujiangyan in China's southwestern Sichuan province. (photo: Getty)
The code makes Bitcoin more polluting than other cryptocurrencies
The cryptocurrency uses more electricity annually than global gold mining operations or the entire country of Norway, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. Burning through so much energy generates some serious greenhouse gas emissions, but campaign organizers argue that it doesn’t have to be that way. Other cryptocurrencies use just a fraction of the energy Bitcoin requires because they use a different system to verify transactions.
““Change the code, not the climate””
In order to validate transactions, Bitcoin miners rely on specialized hardware to solve complex puzzles. Their computers gobble up a lot of energy in the process, and the miners get new tokens in return. It’s a process called “proof of work,” in which the energy used is sort of the price paid to verify transactions. The process is deliberately energy-intensive as a safety measure. The baked-in inefficiency is meant to discourage bad actors from manipulating the data because it would cost a lot of energy to do so.
The new campaign aims to move Bitcoin away from that energy-hungry proof of work process. The most popular alternative is called proof of stake. Cryptocurrencies that use proof of stake use vastly less energy because there are no puzzles to solve. Instead of essentially paying with electricity to participate in the process, you have to offer up some of your own tokens. This is supposed to prove that you have a “stake” in keeping the ledger accurate. If you mess anything up, you lose tokens as a penalty.
While proof of stake might make solve a lot of Bitcoin’s pollution problems, experts have been skeptical that miners would be willing to make the change. Miners invest a lot in their hardware and would be hard-pressed to abandon it. And some fans of proof of work maintain that it’s the most secure way to maintain the ledger.
“We know Bitcoin stakeholders are incentivized not to change,” the campaign acknowledges on its website. “Changing Bitcoin would render a whole lot of expensive infrastructure worthless, meaning Bitcoin stakeholders will need to walk away from sunk costs — or find other creative solutions.”
Regardless, the campaign’s organizers are trying to enlist some big names in tech to help turn up the heat on Bitcoin miners to make the change. “Leaders like Elon Musk of Tesla, Jack Dorsey of Block, and Abby Johnson of Fidelity have vested interests in Bitcoin — and the power to affect change,” the campaign website says.
“Bitcoin has gotten even dirtier”
The website implores visitors to tweet at the Musk, Dorsey, and Johnson to support the campaign. The campaign also includes new ads in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, MarketWatch, Politico, and on Facebook.
“No matter how you feel about Bitcoin, pushing those with the power to ensure a code change will make our planet and communities safer from the destructive impacts of climate change,” Greenpeace USA chief program officer Tefere Gebre said in a press release.
Bitcoin has gotten even dirtier since China banned it in 2021. The biggest mining hub in the world is now the US, where miners have breathed new life into retired and aging coal and gas power plants.
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