04 June 22
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Pictures from Ukraine by combat photographers, including contract photographer James Nachtwey and Associated Press photojournalists Felipe Dana, Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka, have brought to light the horrific consequences of Russia’s invasion and the unconscionable treatment of innocent civilians.
Fifty years ago, I was in the same position as those photographers, working for the Associated Press in Vietnam.
I was inspired to become a photojournalist by my brother, who worked at the AP before I did, and whose mentor was the great Horst Faas. My brother taught me how to use cameras. Before he died covering a battle, he told me: “I hope one day you have a picture that stops the war.”
Horst strongly objected when I decided to follow in my brother’s footsteps. He said he did not want to have to call my mother to say that a second son had died. I told him that I understood the risk and that it was my choice.
I was inspired by my brother’s belief that photography can serve the cause of social justice, but I didn’t know if one photo could have the power he suggested. Today, many credit my photo “Napalm Girl” for hastening an end to the Vietnam War. What I know for sure is that it depicts the absolute horrors of war — defined by a young girl running naked amid destruction and death.
On June 7, 1972, I learned about fighting taking place in Trang Bang, a small village roughly 30 miles northwest of Saigon. I still have vivid memories of my drive the next morning to Trang Bang, seeing rows of bodies by the side of the road and hundreds of refugees fleeing the area. I eventually arrived at a village destroyed by days of airstrikes. The residents were so tired of the constant battles, they fled their village to seek refuge on the streets, under bridges or wherever they could find a moment of calm.
By midday, I had the photos I thought I needed. I was preparing to leave when I saw a South Vietnamese soldier drop a yellow smoke bomb, which served as a target signal, near a group of buildings. I picked up my camera, and a few seconds later captured the image of a plane dropping four napalm bombs on the village.
When the bombs exploded, we didn’t know whether anyone had been injured. All morning, the village had seemed empty. But many people were hiding inside the village temple.
As we came closer, we saw people fleeing the napalm. I was horrified when I saw a woman with her left leg badly burned. I can still see so vividly the old woman carrying a baby who died in front of my camera and another woman carrying a small child with his skin coming off.
Then I heard a child screaming, “Nong qua! Nong qua!” Too hot! Too hot! I looked through my Leica viewfinder to see a young girl who had pulled off her burning clothes and was running toward me. I started taking pictures of her.
Then she yelled to her brother that she thought she was dying and wanted some water. I instantly put my cameras down so I could help her. I knew that was more important than taking more photos. I took my canteen for her to drink and poured water on her body to cool her off, but it created more pain for her. I didn’t know that when people get burned so badly, you’re not supposed to put water on them.
Still in shock, and amid the confusion of everyone screaming, I put all the kids into the AP van.
I drove them to Cu Chi hospital, since it was the closest to Trang Bang. The girl kept crying and screaming, “I’m dying! I’m dying?” I was sure she was going to die in my van.
At the hospital, I learned that her name was Phan Thi Kim Phuc. She had suffered third-degree burns on 30 percent of her body. The doctors were overwhelmed by the huge numbers of wounded soldiers and civilians already there. They initially refused to admit her and told me to take her to the larger Saigon hospital. But I knew she would die if she did not get immediate help. I showed them my press badge and said, “If one of them dies I will make sure the whole world knows.” Then they brought Kim Phuc inside. I never regretted my decision.
Once stable, she was transferred from Cu Chi to the children’s hospital in Saigon and eventually to a burn unit there. But her injuries weren’t the only hurt Kim Phuc suffered in the attack. She lost two nephews, and one of her brothers was severely wounded, too.
Kim Phuc was allowed to return home for just one day after a year in the burn unit. I went to visit her that day, bringing toys and books from the Red Cross and fruits and cakes from the AP office. Her family home was destroyed, but Kim Phuc was smiling. It was nice to see her be with her entire family and play with kids again in the village.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, I didn’t see Kim Phuc until I met her again in Cuba in 1989. I was on assignment and she was a visiting student studying Spanish and pharmacology. She introduced me to her fiance, named Toan. Before she met him, because of her burns, she thought that she could never be loved and that nobody would want to marry her.
They both wanted to defect. After her wedding, a friend gave the couple money for a honeymoon to Moscow, and they found their opportunity. When the plane stopped to refuel on the way back to Cuba in Gander, Newfoundland, Kim Phuc and Toan left their things behind and went to customs, saying, “We defect.” The Canadians initially refused to accept her. But upon learning that she was the girl in the famous photo, she and Toan were granted amnesty.
Today, they live in Toronto with their two children. Kim Phuc is a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO. She has books about the war throughout her house but doesn’t want to see any war pictures, nothing to remind her of the nightmare there. She became a Christian and goes to church every week. Even though she is always smiling, I see her pain and what we saw and endured 50 years ago.
Though Kim Phuc hated the photo in the beginning, she now believes that it has given her a purpose. She uses her voice to work for peace and help others suffering a similar fate in war-torn countries.
Kim Phuc and I are two people intertwined in history. To this day, I view her as family. She calls me “uncle,” and I talk with her often. But I will always hate the circumstances in which we met.
Viewing the horrors of war in person provides a perspective that few can ever experience. At the same time, amid the death and destruction of war, the resiliency of humanity shines through — and I am reminded of that each time I see a picture of Ukrainians supporting their fellow citizens through this challenging time.
It is with this optimism in my heart that I hope that when Russian soldiers come upon an innocent Ukrainian girl in need of help, they feel the same impulse I once did, put their guns away and take care of a fellow human.
I am proud of my photo and the emotions and conversations it created around the world. Truth continues to be necessary. If a single photo can make a difference, maybe even help end a war, then the work that we do is as vital now as it has ever been.
A Ukrainian soldier guards his position. (photo: Mstyslav Chernov/AP)
"Whereas before the situation was difficult, the percentage (held by Russia) was somewhere around 70%, now we have already pushed them back by approximately 20%," Serhiy Gaidai told national television.
Russia has poured forces into the battle for the city which Moscow must capture to achieve its stated aim of holding all of Luhansk province. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Thursday said his country's forces had had some recent success there.
Gaidai said the Russians were shelling Ukrainian positions for hours and then advancing, only to be driven back by defenders who had not been hurt, before repeating the pattern.
"This is how they are moving forward, step-by-step, because with artillery, aircraft, mortars, they are simply destroying everything," he said.
"But as soon as we have enough Western long-range weapons, we will push their artillery away from our positions. And then, believe me, the Russian infantry, they will just run."
Steven C. McCraw, Director and Colonel of the Texas Department of Public Safety (2nd L), speaks with DPS State Troopers near Robb Elementary School on May 30, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Where was their courage? Why were there no heroes?
On Tuesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety announced that Pete Arredondo, the chief of the Uvalde school district’s police, had ceased cooperating with the agency’s investigation into Arredondo and his officers’ response to last week’s mass murder at Robb Elementary School. Though DPS officials didn’t venture a guess as to why Arredondo had withdrawn his cooperation, the performance of the Uvalde police at the shooting—a portrait of which has emerged in grim detail after grim detail over the past several days—certainly supplies enough suggestion of lethal negligence and catastrophic failure to encourage the employ of a good lawyer.
Another man might own up to what he had done directly, but that same man likely wouldn’t have done what Arredondo evidently did in the first place—namely, barely anything at all. Unlike other school shootings, the urgent mystery at the heart of the Robb Elementary School slaughter is as much about the behavior of law enforcement as the behavior of the killer. Per the latest reports, though two senior police officers entered the school only two minutes after the killer and exchanged fire with him through a locked classroom door, Arredondo ordered his men to stand back for more than an hour, while children were dead and dying.
Though DPS and the Department of Justice have yet to release any findings from their investigations into the police response at Uvalde, we can rule out one explanation for so much incomprehensible delay: It wasn’t that they couldn’t breach the door. Police beat down locked doors regularly. It rather seems that Arredondo believed that all the children in the shooter’s reach were already dead—they weren’t; Arredondo had no reason to presume such, and possibly reasons to believe otherwise—and therefore that the most important thing was to wait for a Border Patrol team with better protective equipment to breach the door.
Yesterday, The New York Times reported that after a 10-year-old student called 911 and told the operator one of her teachers lay dying in the classroom, a group of law-enforcement officers in the corridor finally decided to act, ignoring an explicit order not to breach. Once they had chosen, after precious time had passed, to act, they simply entered the classroom and killed the shooter. No law-enforcement officers were killed, although one was grazed by a bullet fragment.
If the police had just broken down the door early on, they may have found the odds of a veritable throng of adult men against a teenage boy fairly favorable. Other men caught in the sights of school shooters have done as much. Liviu Librescu, a 78-year-old engineering professor at Virginia Tech, barricaded his classroom door with his body and directed his students to escape through windows during the 2007 rampage there. He eventually died of his injuries after the gunman gained entry. Riley Howell, a student, gave his life at 21 as he tackled a shooter firing into a crowded classroom at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2019, taking bullets to the head and torso as he slammed his body into the shooter’s, ending the killing. That same year, Kendrick Castillo, an 18-year-old student at STEM School Highlands Ranch, in Colorado, lunged at a shooter who opened fire on his literature class, allowing a group of other students to disarm the killer. Castillo, too, died for his bravery. There are so many others.
On occasion, and typically in contexts having more to do with what is done but ought not to be than what isn’t done but should be, we consider the malignant variant of male character called toxic masculinity. More familiar instances of toxic masculinity concern the wanton infliction of violence, especially the sexual kind, especially upon women and girls. In his threats of rape and domestic battery, the Uvalde killer himself exhibited this strain: emasculated, resentful, explosively violent but mainly toward women and children, for he was afraid of adult men.
Yet on the other side of the wall was, it seems, another sort of toxic masculinity—a platoon of armed and trained men who had evidently come to rely so heavily on guns and armor in lieu of courage and strength that they found themselves bereft of the latter when outdone in the former. Instead they were beset by cowardice, evidently as convinced as the shooter was that the gun really does make the man, and that outgunned is thus as good as outmanned.
In its own imagination, Texas is the land of men who would never admit defeat at all, much less surrender instantly with decent odds and innocent lives at stake: Surely its police ought to feel the highest and noblest sort of calling to valor, the type of vocation that surpasses profession and speaks to a person’s mission in life. Or perhaps those things, too, all the militarism and bravado, the heady authority and free respect, the unearned certainty in one’s own capacities provoked by so many Punisher bumper stickers and decals, had the same corrupting effect as the guns and body armor. Eventually, one either develops their own virtues or finds they’ve developed vices instead.
Chelsea Becker spent 16 months in jail after she was charged with murder for having a stillbirth. (image: Anastasia Ivashchenko/Guardian UK)
Chelsea Becker, prosecuted for murder after her stillbirth, spent 16 months in jail: ‘Why did the hospital call police?’
The next day, Becker was asleep at the home she was staying in when officers with the Hanford police department arrived.
“The officer had a large automatic weapon pointed at me and a K-9 [dog],” Becker, now 28, recalled in a recent interview. “I walked out and surrendered.”
Two months before, Becker had had a stillbirth at a California hospital, losing a baby boy at eight months pregnant. The King’s county prosecutor in the central valley charged her with “murder of a human fetus”, alleging she had acted with “malice” because she had been struggling with drug addiction and the hospital reported meth in her system.
Becker’s attorneys argued there was no evidence that substance use caused the stillbirth and California law did not allow for this type of prosecution in the first place. Still, she spent 16 months in jail awaiting trial before a judge dismissed the charges.
Becker’s nightmare offers a preview of the kinds of criminal cases that could become commonplace in the US if the supreme court, as expected after the leak of a draft opinion last month, officially overturns Roe v Wade. In the states that outlaw abortion, advocates warn, pregnancy losses more broadly will be treated as potential crimes, including in cases of wanted pregnancies. Even with Roe in effect, women have repeatedly faced arrest and charges for their pregnancy outcomes.
“These prosecutions will escalate at an extremely rapid clip if Roe is reversed,” said Emma Roth, staff attorney with the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), a non-profit group that supported Becker in her legal battle. “A lot of people don’t realize that pregnant people are already facing criminalization all across the country, including in blue states like California. All it takes is a rogue district attorney.”
‘Why did the hospital call police?’
Becker grew up in an agricultural region 200 miles north-west of Los Angeles. The area has an unemployment rate twice the California average, and more than 15% of its residents live in poverty. Authorities say it has long been a hub for meth distribution, and access to drug rehabilitation, reproductive healthcare and other services is limited.
Becker had struggled with addiction and at the time of her stillbirth was also battling homelessness, occasionally forced to sleep on a motel stairwell.
On 9 September 2019, she had been preparing for the birth of her fourth child, a baby boy whom she had already named, when her family had to call an ambulance to rush her to the hospital.
She was uncontrollably bleeding when she arrived at the Adventist Health Hanford hospital, a faith-based organization, and roughly two hours later lost the child.
Staff treated her with suspicion, Becker said. Her mother learned before her that the baby had not survived, Becker recalled in an email interview. “I was in shock, physically from the blood loss and mentally from the news,” she said.
She briefly held her baby, she said, and wondered whether he could have survived if the hospital had done an emergency C-section. She also wondered why she received blood transfusions only hours after she had arrived in distress.
The next morning, she said, she discovered that the hospital had left her baby on a table at the other end of the room for hours on end. She also learned that hospital staff had called the police.
“Why the hospital staff called the police to take my baby away is still so troubling. That image of me lying in the hospital bed with my deceased son left on a table, seemingly abandoned, is an image I will never forget,” she said.
‘I suffered alone’
Police records show that hospital staff reported the stillbirth as “suspicious” to police and found Becker tested positive for meth, though her attorneys say she never consented to a drug test.
Later, Becker agreed to meet police at her mother’s house where an officer interrogated her about her drug use. The police recommended she be prosecuted for murder, and weeks later, took her to jail.
Becker was prosecuted by the Kings county district attorney, Keith Fagundes, the only prosecutor in California who has filed charges for a stillbirth in the last three decades. The year before, Fagundes had also filed a murder case against Adora Perez, after she delivered a stillborn baby at the same hospital in Hanford and police also alleged that meth use had caused the loss.
Becker awaited trial in jail while struggling to process her grief. Behind bars, she was unable to receive proper counseling, she said in a recent statement to lawmakers: “I was afraid anything I might have said to any of them would be used against me in court, so I suffered alone.”
While in jail, she lost custody of her son, who was adopted. Her two other children were already in the custody of a relative.
Becker was prosecuted under Section 187 of the California penal code, which defines murder as “the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought”. Lawmakers added “fetus” to the statute in 1970 in response to the case of a man who had attacked a pregnant woman, causing a stillbirth. The law does not apply to an act “consented to by the mother of the fetus”, and the primary author of the legislation, a Republican lawmaker, later testified that the mention of fetus was solely intended for prosecuting “a third party’s willful assault on a pregnant woman”.
But Fagundes, and the police officials who investigated Perez and Becker, have used it to argue that women, in some cases, should be jailed.
Becker’s lawyers argued that she could not legally be prosecuted under Section 187. They also noted that at the time of the stillbirth, Becker had three separate reproductive infections, all of which can cause stillbirth. The pathologist who concluded Becker’s stillbirth was due to “acute methamphetamine toxicity” admitted in court that he was not aware of the infections when he conducted the autopsy and had not reviewed her medical records before his determination.
A judge dismissed the case in May 2021.
Adora Perez, the other woman prosecuted by Fagundes, spent four years behind bars before her case was dismissed earlier this year.
“The DA’s extraordinarily broad and very dangerous interpretation of the statute means that if a woman does any kind of activity that could be considered reckless while she’s pregnant, and she loses her fetus, she’s up for murder,” said Mary McNamara, Perez’s lawyer. “If she works at a dangerous factory while she’s pregnant and loses her child, that’s murder. If she is ill and needs cancer treatment that could harm her fetus, that’s murder.”
‘Women are afraid to seek help’
Although Becker’s case was unusual in California, it is not unique in the US.
The 1973 Roe decision established the constitutional right to abortion. But NAPW has tracked more than 1,700 cases between 1973 and 2020 in which pregnant people have been criminalized often based on the notion of “fetal personhood” – that a fetus is, in effect, a person with rights. That estimate, probably an undercount, includes a wide range of cases in which pregnant people faced arrest, prosecution or other criminal or civil consequences based on some action or behavior that law enforcement claimed caused harm to the fetus.
Pregnant women have been criminalized for falling down stairs; giving birth at home; exposing a fetus to dangerous “fumes”; having HIV; not resting enough during the pregnancy; not getting to a hospital fast enough while in labor; being the victim of a shooting; and self-inducing an abortion.
“Once prosecutors decide they want to punish somebody for ending a pregnancy, they will figure out a way to do so,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director of If/When/How, a reproductive justice group.
Substance use is one of the most common allegations, with mothers facing charges even when there’s no evidence of harm to the fetus and in some instances, even after they have given birth to a healthy baby.
Two physician experts testified that Becker’s arrest was rooted in “medical misinformation” and that the claims that meth use causes stillbirths were unfounded. At least 20% of all pregnancies in the US end in miscarriages and stillbirths, often with unknown causes, the doctors wrote, and if the courts treat stillbirths as potential crimes, it will require a dramatic expansion of the role of law enforcement in pregnancy.
A coalition of major medical associations, public health and reproductive rights groups also filed a brief supporting Becker, noting the research consensus that the threat of prosecutions does not protect pregnancies, but rather endangers them by leading people to avoid care. “It is in no way pro-life or in the interest of the health of a fetus that we criminalize the negative outcomes of pregnancy,” added Jacqueline Goodman, one of Becker’s attorneys.
Becker said women who are addicted and pregnant are afraid to seek help, whether in the form of drug treatment or prenatal care. “Women wonder, ‘How can I fix this on my own without anyone else finding out, and in time before the baby comes?’” Becker said. “And many times, as we have seen, it’s much too difficult a battle to fight alone, and many women are unable to kick their addiction by themselves without professional help.”
The fight to protect others
When Becker’s case was dismissed last year, she was in the middle of completing a drug treatment program. “There was a small part of me that said, ‘I don’t have to be here any more. I can leave and go home, and nothing will happen to me.’ But I knew better than to abandon that commitment,” Becker recalled.
After completing treatment, she enrolled in college and is now working toward a community health worker certificate and public health degree.
She also recently advocated for state legislation meant to explicitly block these kinds of prosecutions.
“I hope that in the future, no woman will ever be prosecuted for losing a pregnancy,” she told legislators. “I was punished for something that could have happened to anybody.”
Brian Johnson, an Adventist Health spokesperson, declined to comment on Becker’s case, but said it was hospital policy to notify the coroner’s office in a stillbirth after 20 weeks, and that it follows reporting requirements of child protective services.
The Hanford police department did not respond to inquiries.
Fagundes, the prosecutor, dismissed the medical associations’ arguments as a “political position”.. He said he could not cite research to support his claims that prosecution was the right approach to addiction, but noted that the women did not use drugs behind bars.
Asked why he was the only DA in the state prosecuting women for stillbirths, he said, “Others are fearful of the liberal media machine, the attorney general and the governor and our legislature.”
He added he could in the future refile cases against Becker and Perez, but said he had no immediate plans to do so. “It really depends on how these two women proceed in life. If they’re successful and sober and don’t harm more children, then they probably deserve some credit for that,” he said.
Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
A silly case about a minor paperwork error could snowball into a serious threat to the right to vote.
It involves a fight over whether 257 ballots cast in a low-level state judicial race should be tossed out because of a very minor paperwork error. It also involves a fairly obvious violation of a federal law providing that voters should not be disenfranchised due to such errors.
And yet, this nothingburger of a case features legal arguments that target much of what remains of federal voting rights laws, after the Supreme Court spent the last decade taking a hatchet to those laws.
David Ritter is a Republican candidate for a judgeship on the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas in Pennsylvania. Official tallies show him leading Democrat Zachary Cohen by 71 votes. Meanwhile, 257 ballots remain uncounted — enough to potentially flip the race from Ritter to Cohen.
Ritter wants the Supreme Court to prevent these ballots from being counted, thus locking in his victory. And, while the election took place last November and two other judges who prevailed in that election have already been sworn in, the outcome of the Ritter/Cohen race remains uncertain as the fight over these uncounted ballots drags on.
A state law provides that voters who cast their ballots by mail shall “date and sign” the envelope accompanying their ballot. Significantly, however, the state does not care which date the voter writes on this envelope — only that a date is written upon it. Envelopes that are dated “July 4, 1776” or “April 5th, 2063” will be opened and the ballot within shall be counted. But Ritter argues that voters who fail to write any date should be disenfranchised.
Ritter’s argument conflicts with a federal voting rights law, which provides that voters should not be disenfranchised due to paperwork errors “if such error or omission is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote in such election.”
This law, which was enacted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was intended to prevent states from hunting through paperwork filed by voters of color to find small errors that could then be used to disenfranchise those voters. But the law is written broadly to apply to any state action that would strip someone of the right to vote because of a paperwork requirement that is irrelevant to whether the voter is legally qualified to vote.
Ritter in other words, should be an extremely easy case. Even if there might be a legitimate reason why Pennsylvania could require voters to accurately state the date when they cast their ballot, a requirement that voters must write any random date on their ballot envelope is “not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote.”
As Judge Paul Matey, a Trump appointee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, wrote about this case “no party contests that voter declarations with inaccurate dates were counted in this election.” There’s no way to defend a state policy that discards undated ballots, but which counts ballots that purport to have been cast on “December 25, 0 CE”
Nevertheless, Ritter raises three legal arguments that could do considerable violence to federal voting rights law. His arguments would have gained no traction in another era. But this Court is notoriously hostile to federal voting rights statutes. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a 2021 dissenting opinion, her Republican-appointed colleagues have “treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act.
There is a non-zero risk, in other words, that the Court could transform this low-stakes case, about an entirely clearcut dispute, into a vehicle for gutting much of what remains of American voting rights law.
The case makes aggressive attacks on the law protecting voters with minor paperwork errors
Although Ritter attempts to argue that the voting rights law at issue in this case does not apply to the facts of this case, those arguments are exceedingly unpersuasive. The law excuses all paperwork errors by voters that are “not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote.” A requirement that voters write any random date that they choose on an envelope is not relevant to determining whether a voter can lawfully cast a ballot.
His strongest arguments — strong, not because they are consistent with current law but because they could persuade many of the justices on this highly politicized Court — involve three structural attacks on the federal government’s power to enact and enforce voting rights laws.
Ritter suggests that the voting rights law is unconstitutional
Ritter’s most aggressive legal argument is that the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at issue in this case may be unconstitutional.
The Constitution gives Congress nearly limitless power to set the rules governing congressional elections, but its power to regulate state and local elections like the judicial race at issue in Ritter is narrower. As Ritter’s lawyers write in their brief, “though Congress can modify state regulations of federal congressional elections ... its power to modify state regulations of state elections can be justified only under its power to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.”
That statement is true as far as it goes, but it also does not undercut the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act. The 15th Amendment prohibits states from denying the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and it also gives Congress broad power to enforce this prohibition.
Indeed, the Court has repeatedly said that Congress may enact broad voting rights laws that ban techniques that states have used in the past to disenfranchise racial minorities, even if those federal laws also prevent states from using those techniques in racially neutral ways. In City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), for example, the Court endorsed “a suspension of literacy tests and similar voting requirements under Congress’ ... power to enforce the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment.”
That is, to prevent states from using literacy tests to target voters of color, Congress may enact a blanket ban on all literacy tests as a voter qualification. It follows that Congress may also enact a blanket ban on election rules that disenfranchise voters for minor paperwork errors, in order to prevent states from using these errors to target voters because of their race.
If the Supreme Court were to back away from the rule it announced in Flores and similar cases, that could be a catastrophe for voting rights. It could reopen the door to literacy tests and other tactics that were historically used to disenfranchise voters, unless a voting rights plaintiff could prove that these tactics were being deployed specifically to target voters because of their race.
Ritter claims that the relevant provision of the Civil Rights Act can only be enforced by the attorney general
Ritter also points to a provision of the voting rights law at issue in this case, which allows the US attorney general to file suit against states that target voters who make minor paperwork errors, and claims that only the attorney general may bring such suits.
This argument is wrong for many reasons. Among other things, federal law also provides that federal courts hearing voting rights suits brought under the Civil Rights Act shall hear those suits “without regard to whether the party aggrieved” has exhausted other possible legal remedies. It makes no sense to include this broadly worded provision if the only party that is allowed to file such a lawsuit is the attorney general.
It is worth noting that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the single most important safeguard against race discrimination in elections — also contains similar language permitting the attorney general to file lawsuits. And it also contains similar language indicating that private parties should be able to bring voting rights lawsuits even if they haven’t exhausted other legal remedies.
Indeed, in a 2021 concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch made a very similar argument to the one Ritter makes to undercut the Civil Rights Act, though Gorsuch targeted the Voting Rights Act. And, last February, a Trump judge in Arkansas embraced this narrow reading of federal voting rights law — holding that only the attorney general may file suits enforcing the Voting Rights Act. So far only one other justice, Clarence Thomas, has publicly shown support for this approach.
But it’s a sign that the question of whether to cut off voting rights suits by private plaintiffs, and give sole authority to enforce such suits to a single political appointee, is an open one — at least among the rightward fringe of the federal judiciary. Existing law rejects this limited reading of voting rights statutes, but at least some members of the Supreme Court appear eager to toss out existing law.
Ritter wants to shut down voting rights suits brought after an election
Finally, Ritter relies on something called the “Purcell principle” to argue that federal courts may not enforce the voting rights provision of the Civil Rights Act after an election has already taken place.
In Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), the Court warned federal judges to be cautious about altering a state’s election law as the election draws close. “Court orders affecting elections ... can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,” the Court warned in Purcell, and this risk increases “as an election draws closer.”
Though Purcell simply urged judges to exercise caution when handing down decisions close to an election, key members of the Court’s Republican-appointed majority have relied on Purcell to shut down voting rights lawsuits months before Election Day. Concurring in Merrill v. Milligan (2022), for example, Justice Brett Kavanaugh invoked Purcell to justify reinstating a racially gerrymandered congressional map in Alabama — despite the fact that Merrill was decided nine months before the next general election and three months before the next primary.
Ritter claims that this Purcell principle operates “with much more force on the back end of elections,” suggesting that voting rights lawsuits brought after an election may be impermissible.
If the Supreme Court were to embrace this argument, the implications would be breathtaking. The impact of state laws that illegally disenfranchise voters often are not apparent until after an election has taken place, when voters who expected their votes to be counted are surprised to learn that they were not.
It is far from clear that the provision of the Civil Rights Act relevant in the Ritter case could be enforced at all if it can’t be enforced in post-election proceedings. Federal courts are not allowed to hear a lawsuit challenging a state or federal law unless the plaintiff in that lawsuit can show that they were injured in some way by that law.
But the crucial point in the Ritter case is that about 250 voters inadvertently made a paperwork error that caused their ballots to be set aside. These voters couldn’t possibly have known that they were injured by the state law calling for them to write a date on the ballot envelope until after the election took place. And, if they had known that the state law required them to write a date on the envelope, they would have simply written a date on the envelope rather than challenging the state law in federal court.
Similarly, Zachary Cohen — Ritter’s opponent who is now pushing to get the disputed ballots counted — couldn’t have known that the outcome of the election could turn upon whether undated ballots are counted until after the election took place. Cohen’s injury, in other words, was entirely speculative until after the election had already happened.
Thus, if post-election lawsuits are forbidden, it is likely that no one would have been legally permitted to challenge Pennsylvania’s requirement that voters must write a date on their ballot envelopes.
Any time this Court hears a voting rights case is a cause for alarm
The bottom line is that Ritter involves a straightforward violation of a federal statute, which clearly requires the 257 disputed ballots to be counted. In his attempt to prevent those ballots from being counted, Ritter asks the Court to do considerable violence to the federal government’s power to protect voting rights.
And yet, given this Court’s history, it is entirely possible that at least five justices will take Ritter up on his invitation to gut this part of federal voting rights law. The arguments raised by Ritter are extreme, but they aren’t less extreme than the kinds of arguments that have already earned favor with the justices.
Four justices, for example, have signed onto a theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which would potentially give gerrymandered state legislatures limitless power to write highly partisan election laws — even if those laws violate the state’s constitution. The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, has not yet weighed in on this theory. But it is entirely possible that she will provide the fifth vote for it because she typically votes with the Court’s right flank in voting rights cases.
The Court’s Voting Rights Act decisions, meanwhile, have taken such liberties with the text of that law — and with the text of the Constitution — that their outcomes seem unconstrained by very basic rule that words are supposed to have meaning. In Brnovich v. DNC (2021), for example, the Court invented several new limits on the Voting Rights Act — such as a presumption that voter restrictions that were common in 1982 are lawful — which appear nowhere in the law’s text. As Justice Kagan wrote of Brnovich, the majority opinion “mostly inhabits a law-free zone.”
All of which is a long way of saying that, this Court frequently goes out on a limb to strike down or weaken voting rights laws. And the kind of judges who brought us Brnovich could also embrace the fairly extreme arguments presented in Ritter.
This is probably not the most likely outcome in Ritter. But, in this Court, it is dangerous to predict that any case will end well for voting rights.
A demonstrator dressed as Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (C) with blood on his hands protests outside the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., demanding justice for missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
US president can still leverage his visit and call for reforms in the kingdom, activists and rights groups say
Several reports have indicated that the US president will be travelling to Saudi Arabia later this month where he will meet with bin Salman, who is also known by his initials MBS. In speaking with reporters on Friday, he confirmed that he would be travelling to the region at some point.
"Saudi Arabia would be included in that if I did go, but I have no direct plans at the moment," Biden said, adding that he was still committed to human rights.
Abdullah Alaoudh, a Saudi academic who is also the son of jailed Islamic scholar Salman al-Awda, said he and other Saudi activists felt "betrayed by Biden".
"President Biden came into office promising accountability for the crown prince's reign of terror. But with one fell swoop, Biden is gambling all hope of justice for MBS's countless victims like my father," Alaoudh told Middle East Eye.
"It was salt in the wound when Trump bragged about 'saving [MBS’s] @$$.’ But how is Biden any better if he kisses the ring of this murderer, this torturer, this war criminal and autocrat?
"If Biden gives him the US meeting MBS so desperately wants, the bloody handshake will send a clear message to tyrants everywhere: you can always count on America to betray its values and reward bad behaviour."
The planned visit comes as the US president is seeking to secure lower fuel prices and shore up support for isolating Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
The meeting with MBS will mark a stark contrast to when Biden said he was looking to "recalibrate" the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, and said that he would only speak directly with MBS's father, the ailing King Salman.
Prior to taking office in January 2021, he vowed to make Saudi Arabia "the pariah that they are" over the killing of MEE columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
The Biden administration also said that it would prioritise human rights and promote democracy in its foreign policy, in contrast to the previous Donald Trump administration.
The Project on Middle East Democracy said on Twitter that the planned visit "is a slap in the face to activists, dissidents, women human rights defenders, journalists, & everyday citizens - in Saudi and abroad - who have been imprisoned, disappeared, and murdered".
US still has plenty of leverage
While many have described Biden's visit as a diplomatic victory for the Saudi crown prince and a huge concession to Riyadh, several Saudi activists have said that the US leader still has plenty of leverage to utilise to push MBS on a number of reforms in the country.
Prior to the visit, Opec+, which is led by Saudi Arabia, agreed to boost fuel production by hundreds of thousands of barrels per day after refusing to heed US calls to do so in the past several months.
For Lina al-Hathloul, sister of the previously jailed women's rights activist, Loujian al-Hathloul, the move reminds her of the concessions made by Saudi Arabia prior to Biden's inauguration into office.
"The Saudi regime was very stressed about Biden coming to power and they knew they would be pressured into releasing at least the most prominent activists," Hathloul said during a Twitter Spaces panel on Friday.
"He applauded [Loujain's] release saying that it was the right thing to do, before even naming the king or before even naming the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman."
Hathloul said that with the leverage the US holds, Washington "has a duty to have preconditions in such visits".
"It's very dangerous not only for the Saudi people or for the repression inside the country to have such a high-level visit that will embolden and empower and legitimise MBS."
Alaoudh called on Biden to use his visit in part to speak to Saudi civil society, not just officials "who are not elected, who are not represented as a republic. Who are not reflecting what the Saudi public wants and feels".
"To uphold human rights principles, to uphold democratic principles means, at least, to hear and listen to people from all Saudi groups," he said at the Twitter Spaces panel.
"This is not just a human rights demand and democratic demand. This is also, talking from the realpolitik kind of perspective, good for Biden, because this is leverage that he can use against MBS."
Caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (photo: Johnny Johnson/The Image Bank/Getty Images)
Drilling in the refuge has long been a controversial issue, as the 19.5-million-acre wilderness area is home to 45 species of mammals including polar bears, bowhead whales and caribou and considered sacred by the Indigenous Gwich’in people, according to the Gwich’in Steering Committee.
“These exits clearly demonstrate that international companies recognize what we have known all along: drilling in the Arctic Refuge is not worth the economic risk and liability that results from development on sacred lands without the consent of Indigenous Peoples,” the Gwich’in Steering Committee said in a statement.
The Anchorage Daily News first reported Thursday that the oil company Regenerate Alaska, a subsidiary of 88 Energy, had canceled its lease on the refuge’s coastal plain, as confirmed by the Bureau of Land Management.
“The Bureau of Land Management has a well-established procedure to do this, and last month rescinded and canceled the lease, as requested,” the Interior Department said in a statement reported by the Anchorage Daily News. “The Office of Natural Resources Revenue refunded (the) full bonus bid and first year rentals.”
At the same time, the paper also reported that Hilcorp and Chevron had spent $10 million to exit older leases to land owned by an Alaskan Native coorporation within the refuge.
“Chevron’s decision to formally relinquish its legacy lease position was driven by the goal of prioritizing and focusing our exploration capital in a disciplined manner in the context of our entire portfolio of opportunities,” company spokesperson Deena McMullen told The Hill.
The move follows a game of political football over oil and gas exploration along the refuge’s 1.5 million acre coastal plain. In 2017, Congress passed a law mandating two lease sales in the refuge by 2024, according to The Washington Post. However, when the Trump administration held its first lease sale in the coastal plain in January 2021, Regenerate Alaska was the only oil company to buy a lease, according to the Anchoridge Daily News.
The company’s decision to pull out follows political uncertaintly over the lease, as the Biden administration put a halt to exploration in the refuge and suspended the leases for more study. Indigenous and enviornmental groups also led a campaign against drilling in the refuge, and 29 banks and 14 international insurers have now said they won’t fund drilling in the refuge, according to the Gwich’in Steering Committee.
Some have criticized the Biden administration for delaying the leases, blaming its actions for the companies’ departure.
“The Biden administration continues to tell the American people that they are doing all they can to bring down energy prices,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said, as The Washington Post reported. “Then they take actions that do the exact opposite, especially in Alaska.”
However, environmental groups responded favorably to the news, arguing that drilling in the refuge would be dangerous both to the local ecosystem and the global fight against the climate crisis.
“This is positive news for the climate and the human rights of Indigenous people whose survival depends on a healthy, thriving calving ground for the Porcupine Caribou Herd, and further proves that the oil industry recognizes drilling on sacred lands is bad business,” Wilderness Society Alaska state director Karlin Itchoak said in a statement reported by The Washington Post.
There are two entities that retain leases following the 2021 sale – the state-owned Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and an Anchorage real estate investor (AIDEA). However, experts say that it’s unlikely they will be able to develop the land independently, making fossil fuel exploration in the refuge now unlikely. Still, Indigenous activists said they would keep pressure on the remaining lease holders.
“AIDEA must show respect to the Indigenous communities they have been overlooking in Alaska projects,” executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee Bernadette Demientieff said in a statement. “We are spiritually and culturally connected to the land, water and animals. The Gwich’in people and our allies will never stop fighting to protect Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit.”
It's long overdue that the US reduce its consumption which is excessive.
There are programs available to weatherize homes and low cost solutions.
Reducing home energy consumption puts $$$ permanently in your pocket.
This offers PER CAPITA energy consumption by nation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita
This offers imports/exports by nation:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-and-exports.php
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