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The filmmakers began developing their project in 2017, just after President Donald Trump, who had vowed to appoint justices who would overturn Roe, took office. So they knew the story of the Janes would be timely, but they had no idea just how until a draft opinion from the court leaked just last month.
"I think we're all sort of surprised by the exact timeliness of this, you know, that we're premiering on HBO the same month that Roe is gonna evaporate," producer and co-director Emma Pildes tells Yahoo Entertainment. "But I think everybody involved… everybody sort of saw that things weren't looking great, so we're just happy we have something to contribute in this moment."
Their contribution features candid interviews with some of the mostly white and middle-class women who were directly involved in the effort. Pildes's partner in the film, co-director Tia Lessin, said some of the interviewees had to make phone calls to their loved ones before the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the grand jury prize, in order to prepare them for what they would learn about their pasts.
"Some of them are telling their stories for the first time," says Lessin, who was nominated for an Oscar for the 2008 post-Hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water, which she produced and co-directed. "You know, they had moved on with their lives, and this was something they'd put well behind them. They understood the importance and the value of their story at this moment, so we had that going for us."
And after every screening, more women felt compelled to share their own stories from the era — a time when unmarried women couldn't get birth control pills until 1972.
"Whether it was… a woman whose grandmother had a back-alley abortion when her mother was 5 years old and died. Or another woman who put on a football helmet and threw herself down a flight of stairs to terminate an unwanted pregnancy," Lessin says. "This was… part of women's lives in that era, and it wasn't talked about because it was so stigmatized. But it needs to be talked about now."
Pildes, the producer of Emmy-nominated doc Jane Fonda in Five Acts, recalls an especially affecting story she heard from a woman who was required to check into a psychiatric ward, even though she wasn't mentally ill, as proof that her pregnancy was causing her mental suffering before an abortion was allowed. She then had to go before a board of all male doctors who talked around her as they decided what she would do.
"I can only imagine how scary and surreal it was," Pildes says.
The doc is also full of details on how the Janes operated, regularly changing locations with the aid of volunteer drivers and through code words; Someone would call "Jane" and be taken to "the front," or the waiting room, and eventually to "the place," where they underwent the medical procedure. The group relied on sympathetic doctors, and some of the women eventually learned to perform abortions themselves.
"They were very cloak-and-dagger, you know. They were sneaky," says Lessin, noting that the women were coming from an era of civil rights protests and the anti-war and student movements. "These are women in their 20s and early 30s who had a whole bag of tricks, from obtaining medical supplies without a license to shielding and protecting the women they served. I think what's surprising is that they all, at that young age, were willing to take the risk. I mean... this goes beyond civil disobedience, you know?"
In 1970, New York state legalized abortion, and the demographics of the women seeking help from the Janes suddenly began to change. Now more affluent, often white women could afford to travel to the Empire State, so it was predominantly poorer women and women of color who needed the group's services.
"It would've been irresponsible for us to make this film and not include that," Pildes says, "because race and class in this country is always an issue with healthcare. It was an issue then with abortion care. It was an issue while we were making the film in the middle of a pandemic. It was playing out in those ways. And it's gonna be a huge issue going forward when Roe is taken away. I mean, it's already an issue now with abortion care, but it's gonna get a lot more extreme."
As viewers will see in the movie, on May 3, 1972, the operation was raided. The Janes began eating index cards on which they kept information on their clientele. Even so, seven of them were arrested and charged.
Facing sentences of 110 years each, the women found a lawyer, Jo-Anne Wolfson, who knew the Supreme Court was mulling Roe. Her strategy then was to stall. And it paid off. After that opinion came down the following year, the charges against the Janes were dropped. The group disbanded.
As noted in the documentary, the women went on to be healthcare workers, civil servants, educators, artists and community organizers. So a lot of them are still working for the cause, albeit in a different way.
Today, it's again the younger generation that has taken up the fight for abortion rights.
And that makes Lessin hopeful.
"You know, they are not gonna let us down. While they may have taken abortion rights for granted up until now... the battle is on, and they seem to be up for it," she says. "The Janes are passing the baton to the younger generation, and I think the younger generation is taking that on. You know, I see that. I see my nieces and my goddaughters and the young people in my life who are ready to sacrifice a lot to make sure that these rights are protected."
Law enforcement officers have identified nine Russian occupiers who drove more than 300 people into the basement of a school in the village of Yahidne, Ukraine. (photo: Facebook)
Source: Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova on Facebook
Quote from Venediktova: "The Office of the Prosecutor General and the Chernihiv Regional Prosecutor's Office together with the Security Service of Ukraine [SBU], the National Police and the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) have already identified 9 servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces involved in the atrocities in Yahidne.
They were all informed that they were suspected of violation of the laws or customs of war, combined with premeditated murder."
Details: Evidence of involvement in crimes has been gathered against the following military personnel:
- Siin-ool Suvan - branch commander of the 1 Mortar Platoon of the Mortar Battery of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation,
- Aigarim Mongush - soldier of the 3rd Mortar Platoon of the 2nd Mortar Battery of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation,
- Naziti Mongush - sergeant of the 2nd Mortar Platoon of the 2nd Mortar Battery of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation,
- Ehresu Oorzhak - corporal of the 3rd Mortar Platoon of the 2nd Mortar Battery of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation,
- Arian Khertek - soldier of the 2nd Mortar Platoon of the 2nd Mortar Battery of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation,
- Saian Khomushko - soldier of the 2nd Mortar Platoon of the 2nd Mortar Battery of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation,
- Ivan Oorzhak - serviceman of the 3rd Portar platoon of the Mortar Battery of the 2nd Mechanised Brigade of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation,
- Chaian Chinan - serviceman of the 2rd Mortar Platoon of the Mortar Battery of the 2nd Mechanised Brigade of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation,
- Kehzhik-ool Shaktar-ool - serviceman of the 1st Mortar Platoon of the Mortar Battery of the 2nd Mechanised Brigade of the 55115 Military Base of the Russian Federation.
Venediktova reminded readers that in March the invaders drove the residents out of their shelters. People were forced to undress outside in the cold - [Russian soldiers] were looking for patriotic tattoos and military underwear. And the Russian military stole washing machines, TVs, microwave ovens and electric kettles from the residents’ houses during so-called "searches."
In addition, [the Russian invaders] took mobile phones from local people, threatening that if they were found to be hiding them, every 5th man would be executed.
Then, the occupiers took more than 300 people into the cramped basement of the village school. At the school, the invaders set up their headquarters, so the civilians became their "living shield."
The youngest person the Russians took prisoner was 1.5 months old, and the oldest was 93. A total of 77 children were kept in the basement.
Conditions were unbearable: [the basement] was overcrowded and airless and completely dark. [Prisoners suffered from] hunger and thirst and completely unsanitary conditions, resulting in the deaths of 10 civilians in the basement between 9 to 28 March.
Also at this time the Russian military killed 17 more people in Yahidne. The captives kept a register of deaths on the basement wall.
Chesa Boudin, the self-styled "progressive prosecutor" in charge of the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, lost handily in a recall election. (photo: Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle)
In the wake of Tuesday’s results, it seems inevitable that some will falsely claim this race was a referendum on the entire movement to reform the criminal legal system, rather than one high-profile defeat that is unfairly overshadowing scores of smaller victories in other parts of the country. But the reasons Boudin found himself in this predicament at all are important nonetheless.
Elected in 2019 on a promise to radically transform the city’s legal system, Boudin quickly became the target of a years-long smear campaign and bitter recall fight, driven by a burgeoning alliance between the local press, police unions, major conservative outlets like Fox News, and the city’s allegedly “progressive” class of wealthy tech investors.
For the wealthy backers of Boudin’s recall, “progressive” prosecutors are the perfect scapegoat for what they see as emergent threats. While Boudin and his counterparts in other jurisdictions have in some ways promised to transform society, it has become clear that they have limited power to do this alone.
Whatever policies progressive prosecutors may implement to make the legal system less unjust, the people who are most over-criminalized and policed still suffer disproportionately from a lack of housing, health care, clean air, transportation, and good jobs. And in the end, we cannot provide these things in earnest without substantially raising taxes on the wealthy or otherwise fundamentally changing the way society works. Although decarcerating America is certainly a worthy objective, simply not arresting the largely low-income and Black and brown people who populate America’s prisons is not enough.
But the status quo has created a pretty solid quality of life for, say, realtors who dumped money into the Boudin recall campaign. Many of the people who donated to the recall effort rely on heavy-handed cops to make their businesses work. Police are often agents of gentrification, and many of the city’s realtors seem fine with empowering law enforcement to displace and disappear homeless people if it means they can sell a few more warehouse lofts. Having to see poverty on your way to a Hawaiian barbeque beer hall kind of dampens the mood, after all.
Other major funders of Boudin’s recall included big players in Silicon Valley, like David O. Sacks, the founding COO of PayPal, who also invested in Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Airbnb, and other major tech companies. Whether they realize it or not, these donors benefit financially when the poor are warehoused in prisons and jails, stigmatized as felons, or shot dead in the street, because those options are all far cheaper for the wealthy than actually funding social services.
Few people underscore this point better than William Oberndorf, the single largest donor to the “Neighbors for a Better San Francisco” political action committee, the biggest group pushing the Boudin recall. Obendorf is a “Never Trump” Republican who’s donated millions to GOP politicians, including Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush. The fact that Oberndorf does not, for example, pay a massive marginal tax rate to fund housing for the homeless allows him to instead spend huge amounts of his income influencing politics and gambling on tech investments, all in an effort to preserve and amass more wealth.
It’s telling that wealthy San Franciscans have had a prolonged meltdown over Boudin’s tenure, even though his most ambitious policies have not been particularly transformational. Despite his rhetoric, Boudin’s office mostly fiddled with policies at the margins. And while his office might argue that he was forced to take a more constrained approach, Boudin ultimately shrunk drug-related convictions by a decidedly-not-transformational amount and even angered public defenders by requesting $2.3 million to ramp up fentanyl prosecutions. (Ironically, law enforcement and business groups later criticized the program for not prosecuting more fentanyl cases).
Likewise, a recent San Francisco Chronicle piece outlined how Boudin’s office actually failed to pump resources into preexisting restorative justice programs that could have reduced recidivism among arrested children. By underdelivering, it seems Boudin may have failed to mobilize his own base enough to combat a very predictable right-wing backlash.
But even with those failures in mind, Boudin’s stated ideology hinted at a world in which the indigent actually deserve some rights. His office, for example, stopped assigning cash bail for certain charges and the city did not burn down. What would stop Boudin or his successor from chipping away at the system even further?
The wealthiest San Franciscans simply could not allow this. So with a gigantic war chest, Boudin’s opponents mounted a transparently bad faith campaign to pretend the city was on fire, even though it was not. Conservative outlets like Fox News and Breitbart turned Boudin into a household name, reportedly mentioning his name more than 1,400 times in the last year.
Right-wing media, desperate to portray California as a failed state run by woke hippies, dubiously claimed that Boudin had done everything from releasing “an army of drug dealers” from prison to causing a spike in fentanyl overdoses in Humboldt County, more than 300 miles north of San Francisco. Other, less bombastic writers at the Wall Street Journal and Atlantic Monthly took plenty of bad faith pot-shots as well. So did the Chronicle—the local paper of record—with one particular columnist writing dozens of negative stories, including some that misleadingly bolstered the “progressive” credentials of Boudin’s opponents.
Local cops also went on something of their own wildcat strike, prompting reports that they had let crimes occur and discouraged victims from reporting incidents in order to create more bad headlines for the DA’s office. Last month, Boudin’s office told the San Francisco news site Mission Local that prosecutors had to rent their own U-Haul for an operation to break up an alleged theft ring after the SFPD claimed it was “too busy” to participate.
Local TV news was also complicit in smearing Boudin. Outlets allowed major retail chains like Walgreens or Safeway to wantonly lie so they could blame Boudin for a citywide spike in shoplifting that did not exist. Even random purse snatchings turned into headline news that could be used to point the finger at the DA’s office. In a particularly high-profile incident, KGO-TV, the Bay Area’s local ABC affiliate, ran a dead-wrong story blaming Boudin for dropping charges against a 16-year-old girl accused of carjacking a 75-year-old woman. The piece was completely inaccurate, but that did not stop right-wing pundits from picking up the story online.
Even self-professed “moderate liberals” and “progressives” joined in on the dog-pile. At the height of the crime panic last Fall, luxury stores in San Francisco’s downtown boarded up their windows—leading to screeds from centrist Democrats lamenting that their city was on the brink of anarchy because they could not see inside a Burberry store. Of course, this was little more than status anxiety: The city’s rich liberals benefit from the police just as much as its rich conservatives do.
In the lead-up to Boudin’s recall, some journalists sought to point out that the data overwhelmingly did not support claims of a crime spike in San Francisco. Despite these facts, in polls, many of the city’s residents said they no longer “felt” safe. Some on the left have frustratedly explained this as yet another case of mass delusion. But perhaps people could be excused for feeling some lack of safety right now—albeit for reasons that go far beyond the actions of any individual prosecutor.
Since March 2020, amid a failed national response to the pandemic, more than 1 million people have died, the economy has crashed, and Americans have learned—whether they’re willing to accept it or not—that we’re all one, particularly nasty germ away from potential societal collapse. Meanwhile, we’ve gotten no relief from a staggering list of other problems—poverty, inequality, a complete lack of affordable housing, unattainable health care, endless student loan debt, and mass shootings, to name a few. Americans are desperate for real, meaningful action on those issues, but the federal government has offered little more than a thumbs-up in response. No sane person would feel safe in such a country. But that’s hardly Chesa Boudin’s fault.
We could, of course, begin addressing these issues by breaking the stranglehold the uber-wealthy have over our public sphere. But, rather than allow those thoughts to enter the public consciousness, the media has helped make a progressive DA the scapegoat for America’s slow decline. And so, Boudin lost. Behind his defeat we see a new playbook for protecting an inequitable status quo that makes us all less safe. As long as the rest of us feel unsafe, the wealthy get to rest easy at night.
In the wake of Tuesday’s results, it seems inevitable that some will falsely claim this race was a referendum on the entire movement to reform the criminal legal system, rather than one high-profile defeat that is unfairly overshadowing scores of smaller victories in other parts of the country. But the reasons Boudin found himself in this predicament at all are important nonetheless.
Elected in 2019 on a promise to radically transform the city’s legal system, Boudin quickly became the target of a years-long smear campaign and bitter recall fight, driven by a burgeoning alliance between the local press, police unions, major conservative outlets like Fox News, and the city’s allegedly “progressive” class of wealthy tech investors.
For the wealthy backers of Boudin’s recall, “progressive” prosecutors are the perfect scapegoat for what they see as emergent threats. While Boudin and his counterparts in other jurisdictions have in some ways promised to transform society, it has become clear that they have limited power to do this alone.
Whatever policies progressive prosecutors may implement to make the legal system less unjust, the people who are most over-criminalized and policed still suffer disproportionately from a lack of housing, health care, clean air, transportation, and good jobs. And in the end, we cannot provide these things in earnest without substantially raising taxes on the wealthy or otherwise fundamentally changing the way society works. Although decarcerating America is certainly a worthy objective, simply not arresting the largely low-income and Black and brown people who populate America’s prisons is not enough.
But the status quo has created a pretty solid quality of life for, say, realtors who dumped money into the Boudin recall campaign. Many of the people who donated to the recall effort rely on heavy-handed cops to make their businesses work. Police are often agents of gentrification, and many of the city’s realtors seem fine with empowering law enforcement to displace and disappear homeless people if it means they can sell a few more warehouse lofts. Having to see poverty on your way to a Hawaiian barbeque beer hall kind of dampens the mood, after all.
Other major funders of Boudin’s recall included big players in Silicon Valley, like David O. Sacks, the founding COO of PayPal, who also invested in Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Airbnb, and other major tech companies. Whether they realize it or not, these donors benefit financially when the poor are warehoused in prisons and jails, stigmatized as felons, or shot dead in the street, because those options are all far cheaper for the wealthy than actually funding social services.
Few people underscore this point better than William Oberndorf, the single largest donor to the “Neighbors for a Better San Francisco” political action committee, the biggest group pushing the Boudin recall. Obendorf is a “Never Trump” Republican who’s donated millions to GOP politicians, including Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush. The fact that Oberndorf does not, for example, pay a massive marginal tax rate to fund housing for the homeless allows him to instead spend huge amounts of his income influencing politics and gambling on tech investments, all in an effort to preserve and amass more wealth.
It’s telling that wealthy San Franciscans have had a prolonged meltdown over Boudin’s tenure, even though his most ambitious policies have not been particularly transformational. Despite his rhetoric, Boudin’s office mostly fiddled with policies at the margins. And while his office might argue that he was forced to take a more constrained approach, Boudin ultimately shrunk drug-related convictions by a decidedly-not-transformational amount and even angered public defenders by requesting $2.3 million to ramp up fentanyl prosecutions. (Ironically, law enforcement and business groups later criticized the program for not prosecuting more fentanyl cases).
Likewise, a recent San Francisco Chronicle piece outlined how Boudin’s office actually failed to pump resources into preexisting restorative justice programs that could have reduced recidivism among arrested children. By underdelivering, it seems Boudin may have failed to mobilize his own base enough to combat a very predictable right-wing backlash.
But even with those failures in mind, Boudin’s stated ideology hinted at a world in which the indigent actually deserve some rights. His office, for example, stopped assigning cash bail for certain charges and the city did not burn down. What would stop Boudin or his successor from chipping away at the system even further?
The wealthiest San Franciscans simply could not allow this. So with a gigantic war chest, Boudin’s opponents mounted a transparently bad faith campaign to pretend the city was on fire, even though it was not. Conservative outlets like Fox News and Breitbart turned Boudin into a household name, reportedly mentioning his name more than 1,400 times in the last year.
Right-wing media, desperate to portray California as a failed state run by woke hippies, dubiously claimed that Boudin had done everything from releasing “an army of drug dealers” from prison to causing a spike in fentanyl overdoses in Humboldt County, more than 300 miles north of San Francisco. Other, less bombastic writers at the Wall Street Journal and Atlantic Monthly took plenty of bad faith pot-shots as well. So did the Chronicle—the local paper of record—with one particular columnist writing dozens of negative stories, including some that misleadingly bolstered the “progressive” credentials of Boudin’s opponents.
Local cops also went on something of their own wildcat strike, prompting reports that they had let crimes occur and discouraged victims from reporting incidents in order to create more bad headlines for the DA’s office. Last month, Boudin’s office told the San Francisco news site Mission Local that prosecutors had to rent their own U-Haul for an operation to break up an alleged theft ring after the SFPD claimed it was “too busy” to participate.
Local TV news was also complicit in smearing Boudin. Outlets allowed major retail chains like Walgreens or Safeway to wantonly lie so they could blame Boudin for a citywide spike in shoplifting that did not exist. Even random purse snatchings turned into headline news that could be used to point the finger at the DA’s office. In a particularly high-profile incident, KGO-TV, the Bay Area’s local ABC affiliate, ran a dead-wrong story blaming Boudin for dropping charges against a 16-year-old girl accused of carjacking a 75-year-old woman. The piece was completely inaccurate, but that did not stop right-wing pundits from picking up the story online.
Even self-professed “moderate liberals” and “progressives” joined in on the dog-pile. At the height of the crime panic last Fall, luxury stores in San Francisco’s downtown boarded up their windows—leading to screeds from centrist Democrats lamenting that their city was on the brink of anarchy because they could not see inside a Burberry store. Of course, this was little more than status anxiety: The city’s rich liberals benefit from the police just as much as its rich conservatives do.
In the lead-up to Boudin’s recall, some journalists sought to point out that the data overwhelmingly did not support claims of a crime spike in San Francisco. Despite these facts, in polls, many of the city’s residents said they no longer “felt” safe. Some on the left have frustratedly explained this as yet another case of mass delusion. But perhaps people could be excused for feeling some lack of safety right now—albeit for reasons that go far beyond the actions of any individual prosecutor.
Since March 2020, amid a failed national response to the pandemic, more than 1 million people have died, the economy has crashed, and Americans have learned—whether they’re willing to accept it or not—that we’re all one, particularly nasty germ away from potential societal collapse. Meanwhile, we’ve gotten no relief from a staggering list of other problems—poverty, inequality, a complete lack of affordable housing, unattainable health care, endless student loan debt, and mass shootings, to name a few. Americans are desperate for real, meaningful action on those issues, but the federal government has offered little more than a thumbs-up in response. No sane person would feel safe in such a country. But that’s hardly Chesa Boudin’s fault.
We could, of course, begin addressing these issues by breaking the stranglehold the uber-wealthy have over our public sphere. But, rather than allow those thoughts to enter the public consciousness, the media has helped make a progressive DA the scapegoat for America’s slow decline. And so, Boudin lost. Behind his defeat we see a new playbook for protecting an inequitable status quo that makes us all less safe. As long as the rest of us feel unsafe, the wealthy get to rest easy at night.
The Supreme Court will determine how much authority the E.P.A. has to address the climate crisis by regulating emissions from power plants. (photo: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg)
Before breaking for the summer at the end of this month, the court is likely not only to strike down or severely curtail the constitutional right to an abortion and expand gun rights but also to undermine important environmental protections.
From my perspective as an environmental lawyer and a former clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a case that looms large is West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, which should be decided within weeks. The justices will determine how much authority the E.P.A. has to address the climate crisis by regulating emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide from power plants.
The Obama-era regulation at issue never went into effect because the Supreme Court’s conservatives suspended the rule. And it never will go into effect because the Biden administration is in the process of proposing a new rule. So there is no dispute to resolve yet, and thus no “case or controversy” that would support the court’s jurisdiction.
Why is the court going beyond calling balls and strikes, as Chief Justice John Roberts memorably described his role, to take a case it arguably doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear? Some of the court’s conservatives seem eager to assist polluting industries by undercutting the power of agencies to regulate in the public interest. More specifically, certain justices have signaled their interest in sharply limiting the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in the West Virginia case by invoking and expanding a “major questions” doctrine. That doctrine invites unelected judges to second-guess Congress when lawmakers give an agency the authority to regulate on matters that have “major” political or economic significance.
Agencies need latitude to regulate in a world of novel problems and scientific complexity. Congress routinely gives them expansive authority through broadly-worded statutes. And Congress puts its own limits on agency discretion. Laws like the Administrative Procedure Act require that agency actions be consistent with science and informed by public input. Further, Congress has ample tools to get a wayward agency back on track: confirmation and oversight hearings, budget instructions, or even statutory amendments if necessary.
Expanding the major questions doctrine would destabilize this legislative balance and shift power to the courts. The doctrine would leave agencies with little power to tackle new and pressing environmental problems like climate change without a steady stream of statutory instructions at a degree of detail that an inexpert and political entity like Congress is unequipped to provide. Worse, the doctrine is uncertain and manipulable. Even conservative justices struggle to define what triggers a “major question” review. Virtually any environmental regulation worth issuing has “major” impacts on some industry, so the doctrine invites polluters to challenge regulations and gives sympathetic judges a potent tool for striking them down.
Even more concerning, West Virginia v. E.P.A. may be only the beginning. In its next term, the Supreme Court will likely take up another important environmental case: Sackett v. E.P.A., which concerns the geographic reach of the Clean Water Act.
Once again, the court agreed to take up a case it would normally have declined: Appeals courts have consistently agreed on the scope of the statute relevant to the Sackett case, and the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers will likely soon finalize a new proposed rule to provide further clarity on how the law should work. So again, the court appears to be reaching out aggressively to hear a case that could advance a deregulatory policy agenda: restricting the scope of one of the country’s most important environmental laws, administered by an agency mandated to protect the public health and environment.
The Clean Water Act prevents polluters from dumping waste into the nation’s waters without a permit. Conservative groups and extractive industries want the court to hold that the law does not protect certain wetlands, which would benefit polluting industries to the detriment of downstream waters and people.
Americans are increasingly concerned about the environment, and two-thirds of us think our government should do more to protect it. Why then do the Supreme Court’s conservatives seem to be going so far out of their way to hamstring federal efforts to regulate polluters and slow climate change?
The reason is that the court’s five most conservative justices were seemingly selected primarily for their fidelity to an agenda that is so far outside the legal mainstream that even Charles Fried, President Ronald Reagan’s conservative solicitor general, called it “reactionary.” Moreover (and not coincidentally), they were confirmed by senators who together were elected with fewer votes than senators who opposed their confirmations. Three of them — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote.
This profound disconnect between the will of the people and the court’s deregulatory agenda on the environment could not come at a more dangerous time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that our window to avert irreversible climate harm is closing fast. If the Supreme Court chooses this moment to pursue an agenda of limiting federal regulatory power, it will serve the interests of corporations — particularly fossil fuel companies — while pushing people and the planet closer and closer to the point of no return.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California speaks during a protest near Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, June 8, 2022. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
The legislation passed by a mostly party-line vote of 223-204. It has almost no chance of becoming law as the Senate pursues negotiations focused on improving mental health programs, bolstering school security and enhancing background checks. But the House bill does allow Democratic lawmakers a chance to frame for voters in November where they stand on policies that polls show are widely supported.
"We can't save every life, but my God, shouldn't we try? America we hear you and today in the House we are taking the action you are demanding," said Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas. "Take note of who is with you and who is not."
The push comes after a House committee heard wrenching testimony from recent shooting victims and family members, including from 11-year-old girl Miah Cerrillo, who covered herself with a dead classmate's blood to avoid being shot at the Uvalde elementary school.
The seemingly never-ending cycle of mass shootings in the United States has rarely stirred Congress to act. But the shooting of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde has revived efforts in a way that has lawmakers from both parties talking about the need to respond.
"It's sickening, it's sickening that our children are forced to live in this constant fear," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Pelosi said the House vote would "make history by making progress." But it's unclear where the House measure will go after Wednesday's vote, given that Republicans were adamant in their opposition.
"The answer is not to destroy the Second Amendment, but that is exactly where the Democrats want to go," said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
The work to find common ground is mostly taking place in the Senate, where support from 10 Republicans will be needed to get a bill signed into law. Nearly a dozen Democratic and Republican senators met privately for an hour Wednesday in hopes of reaching a framework for compromise legislation by week's end. Participants said more conversations were needed about a plan that is expected to propose modest steps.
In a measure of the political peril that efforts to curb guns pose for Republicans, five of the six lead Senate GOP negotiators do not face reelection until 2026. They are Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, John Cornyn of Texas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. The sixth, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, is retiring in January. It's also notable that none of the six is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
While Cornyn has said the talks are serious, he has not joined the chorus of Democrats saying the outlines of a deal could be reached by the end of this week. He told reporters Wednesday that he considers having an agreement before Congress begins a recess in late June to be "an aspirational goal."
The House bill stitches together a variety of proposal Democrats had introduced before the recent shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. The suspects in the shootings at the Uvalde, elementary school and Buffalo supermarket were both just 18, authorities say, when they bought the semi-automatic weapons used in the attacks. The bill would increase the minimum age to buy such weapons to 21.
"A person under 21 cannot buy a Budweiser. We should not let a person under 21 buy an AR-15 weapon of war," said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif.
Republicans have noted that a U.S. appeals court ruling last month found California's ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under 21 was unconstitutional.
"This is unconstitutional and it's immoral. Why is it immoral? Because we're telling 18, 19 and 20-year-olds to register for the draft. You can go die for your country. We expect you to defend us, but we're not going to give you the tools to defend yourself and your family," said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky.
The House bill also includes incentives designed to increase the use of safe gun storage devises and creates penalties for violating safe storage requirements, providing for a fine and imprisonment of up to five years if a gun is not properly stored and is subsequently used by a minor to injure or kill themselves or another individual.
It also builds on the Biden administration's executive action banning fast-action "bump-stock" devices and "ghost guns" that are assembled without serial numbers.
The House is also expected to approve a bill Thursday that would allow families, police and others to ask federal courts to order the removal of firearms from people who are believed to be at extreme risk of harming themselves or others.
Nineteen states and the District of Columbia currently have such "red flag laws." Under the House bill, a judge could issue an order to temporarily remove and store the firearms until a hearing can be held no longer than two weeks later to determine whether the firearms should be returned or kept for a specific period.
Pedestrians walk through Harvard Yard on the closed Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 20, 2020. (photo: Adam Glanzman/Getty)
The university’s museum collections possess the remains of nearly 7,000 Native Americans and at least 19 enslaved people, according to a document leaked to the school newspaper.
The draft report, which has not yet been finalized and was dated in April, is the work of a steering committee tasked with making plans for Harvard's collection of human remains. It urges the university to return the remains to descendants’ families — or, if ancestry is unclear, to consult with the descendants’ communities about how to address returning the remains.
According to the Crimson, the draft report acknowledges that the remains “were obtained under the violent and inhumane regimes of slavery and colonialism” and that they “represent the University’s engagement and complicity in these categorically immoral systems.”
“Moreover, we know that skeletal remains were utilized to promote spurious and racist ideas of difference to confirm existing social hierarchies and structures,” the draft report says.
The remains primarily reside in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology, the Crimson reports. The director of the museum and University President Lawrence S. Bacow apologized last year for the practices that led to Harvard’s possession of the remains.
The formation of the Steering Committee on Human Remains in Harvard Museum Collections was just one development related to a 134-page report released April 26 by a separate group, the Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. That report aimed to “remedy the persistent educational and social harms that human bondage caused.”
The report documented the remains of “thousands of individuals” sitting in Harvard’s museum collections and stated many of the remains were thought to belong to Indigenous people, and at least 15 were from potentially enslaved people of African descent. The university pledged $100 million to implement the recommendations in the report.
“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Bacow wrote in a statement released with the initial report. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”
A court upheld Jessica Reznicek's excessive sentence for vandalism aimed at stopping the Dakota Access pipeline. (photo: Joshua Smith)
A court upheld Jessica Reznicek’s excessive sentence for vandalism aimed at stopping the Dakota Access pipeline.
The terror enhancement, which dramatically increased Reznicek’s sentence from its original recommended range, set a troubling precedent. Decided by a lower court in 2021, it contends that Reznicek’s acts against private property were “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government.” The appellate justices’ decision to uphold her sentence, callously dismissing the challenge to her terrorism enhancement, doubles down on a chilling message: Those who take direct action against rapacious energy corporations can be treated as enemies of the state.
Reznicek, an Iowa-based member of the Catholic Worker Movement and a participant in the Indigenous-led climate struggle, engaged in acts of property damage in an attempt to stop the completion of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Along with fellow activist Ruby Montoya, Reznicek took credit for various acts of sabotage, which harmed no humans or animals but burnt a bulldozer and damaged valves of the pipeline. The damaged equipment was property not of the U.S. government, but of private pipeline and energy companies.
Following Reznicek’s guilty plea to a single charge of conspiracy to damage an energy facility — which brought a recommended sentencing range of 37 to 46 months — Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger, in allegiance with prosecutors, added the terrorism enhancement. This increased her sentencing range to 210 to 240 months, making the eight-year sentence Reznicek ultimately received fit comfortably below the accepted range, though it’s more than double the previous recommendation. (Montoya, who also pleaded guilty, has filed a motion to withdraw her plea, claiming that it was coerced.)
Both courts’ decisions on Reznicek’s sentence reflect unsurprising but deeply troubling priorities in our criminal legal system. It would be unempirical to the point of foolishness to expect the courts, stacked as they are with right-wing justices, to side with individuals taking risks to stop environmental devastation rather than those corporations making millions on the back of it. Yet Reznicek’s appeal was on a point of law: Terrorism enhancements are only supposed to be applicable to crimes that target governmental conduct; Reznicek’s targets were private corporations.
The collapsing of government and corporate interests signified by Reznicek’s terrorism enhancement is worthy of profound challenge, but the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges did not even address the substance of the activist’s appeal. In a short, unsigned opinion, the court wrote that even if there had been an “error” in applying a terrorism enhancement, it was “harmless,” because Ebinger had stated on the record that she would have imposed an eight-year sentence with or without the terrorism enhancement.
It is a cynical move indeed to sidestep the chilling effect of labeling such acts as “terrorism,” as if it carries no material consequences for the future of water and Indigenous land protection and other social movements. As Reznicek’s support team wrote in a statement Monday, “Federal prosecutors only pursued terrorism enhancements against Reznicek after 84 Congressional representatives wrote a letter in 2017 to Attorney General Jeff Sessions requesting that Reznicek and other protesters who tamper with pipelines be prosecuted as domestic terrorists.” These members of Congress, note Reznicek’s supporters, have together received a combined $36 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.
Determinations over which actions are labeled “terrorism” are always political, and in this case nakedly so given the clear pressure applied on prosecutors by politicians and their industry backers. Ebinger’s claim — that she would have imposed the excessive eight-year sentence with or without the terror enhancement triggered — cannot be considered the final word here. Reporting on Reznicek’s case, ABC News — an outlet hardly aligned with the environmental left — noted that neither white supremacist murderer Dylann Roof nor avowed neo-Nazi James Fields, who plowed his car into anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, received a terrorism enhancement when sentenced.
Reznicek’s legal team will continue to challenge her sentence in court, especially since the question of the misapplication of a terrorism enhancement remains open, despite the judges’ decision this week. A full court hearing by the 8th Circuit, an appeal to the far-right Supreme Court, or a request for clemency from President Joe Biden are all technical options, but hardly are any of these sites of optimism.
As her legal battles continue, Reznicek, whose acts of sabotage place her firmly on the right side of history, if not the law, deserves full-throated public support. As she noted in her 2017 statement claiming responsibility for the actions against the Dakota Access pipeline: “We acted from our hearts and never threatened human life nor personal property. What we did do was fight a private corporation that has run rampant across our country seizing land and polluting our nation’s water supply.”
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