21 July 22
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They're about stopping Trump's ongoing attempted coup
The committee is clearly building a criminal case against Trump and his closest enablers of seditious conspiracy, a crime defined as “conspiring to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the government of the United States or to oppose by force the authority thereof.” I expect the committee will make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, handing over all its evidence. Ideally, Trump, along with Giuliani, Powell, Stone, Flynn, Navarro, Bannon, Meadows, and other co-conspirators, will be convicted and end up in jail.
But the Committee has a second purpose — one that has received too little attention: to stop Trump’s continuing attack on American democracy.
Even as the committee reveals Trump’s attempted coup in the months leading up to and during the January 6 attack, the attempted coup continues. Trump hasn’t stopped giving speeches to stir up angry mobs with his Big Lie — he’ll be giving another tomorrow in Arizona. Trump hasn’t stopped pushing states to alter the outcomes of the 2020 election — last week he urged Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to support a resolution that would retract Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes cast for Biden. Trump is actively backing candidates who propound the Lie. Several prominent Republican candidates for the Senate and for governor — such as JD Vance in Ohio, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — are running on it. Republican candidates across America are using increasingly violent language. Republicans lawmakers in several states are enacting legislation to take over election machinery and ignore the popular vote. Meanwhile, the lives of committee members and their families have been threatened. Witnesses are receiving gangster-style warnings not to cooperate.
The committee’s message to all of America, including Republicans: Stop supporting this treachery.
In other words, the committee’s work is not just backward-looking — revealing Trump’s attempted coup. It is also forward-looking, appealing to Americans to reject his continuing attempted coup.
In order to accomplish this, the committee is doing six important things:
First, it’s making crystal clear that the continuing attempted coup is based on a lie — which is why the committee has repeatedly shown Trump’s Attorney General William Barr, saying:
I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations [of voter fraud], but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn't count and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense. And it was being laid out there, and I told them that it was — that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that. And it was doing a grave disservice to the country.
Second, the committee is showing that the battle between democracy and authoritarian is non-partisan. Not only are the committee’s vice-chairman Liz Cheney and committee member Adam Kinzinger, Republican representatives, but most of the committee’s witnesses are Republicans who worked in the Trump White House or as Republican-elected state officials, or they staffed Republican legislators or served as judges appointed by Republican presidents.
All appear before the committee as American citizens who are disgusted by and worried about Trump’s attempted coup. When Cheney displayed a message Trump tweeted after the assault on the Capitol began, in which he claimed Vice President Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done," Cheney asked former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for her reaction. Hutchinson responded:
As a staffer that works to always represent the administration to the best of my ability, and to showcase the good things that he had done for the country, I remember feeling frustrated, disappointed, it felt personal, I was really sad. As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.
Third, the committee is appealing to Republican lawmakers to stop supporting Trump’s continuing attempted coup. During the first televised hearing, Liz Cheney issued an explicit warning:
We take our oath to defend the United States constitution. And that oath must mean something. Tonight. I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.
Fourth, the committee wants the public to see that average Americans have fallen for Trump’s treachery, with disastrous results. Witness Stephen Ayres, who described himself as “nothing but a family man and a working man” participated in the January 6 attack because Trump “basically put out, you know, come to the Stop the Steal rally, you know, and I felt like I needed to be down here. … I was, you know, I was very upset, as were most of his supporters.” When Liz Cheney asked Ayers, “Would it have made a difference to you to know that President Trump himself had no evidence of widespread fraud?” he replied, “Oh, definitely … I may not have come down here then.”
Fifth, the committee is reminding Americans of their duties to democracy. Committee chair Bennie Thompson, last week:
When I think about the most basic way to explain the importance of elections in the United States, there's a phrase that always comes to mind. It may sound straightforward, but it's meaningful. We settle our differences at the ballot box. Sometimes my choice prevails, sometimes yours does, but it's that simple. We cast our votes. We count the votes. If something seems off with the results, we can challenge them in court, and then we accept the results. When you're on the losing side, that doesn't mean you have to be happy about it. And in the United States, there's plenty you can do and say so. You can protest. You can organize. You can get ready for the next election to try to make sure your side has a better chance the next time the people settle their differences at the ballot box. But you can't turn violent. You can't try to achieve your desired outcome through force or harassment or intimidation. Any real leader who sees their supporters going down that path, approaching that line has a responsibility to say stop, we gave it our best, we came up short, we try again next time, because we settle our differences at the ballot box.
Others on the committee have spoken about the danger to democracy of mobs and demagogues. Here’s committee member Jamie Raskin:
In 1837, a racist mob in Alton, Illinois broke into the offices of an abolitionist newspaper and killed its editor, Elijah Lovejoy. Lincoln wrote a speech in which he said that no transatlantic military giant could ever crush us as a nation, even with all of the fortunes in the world. But if downfall ever comes to America, he said, we ourselves would be its author and finisher. If racist mobs are encouraged by politicians to rampage and terrorize, Lincoln said, they will violate the rights of other citizens and quickly destroy the bonds of social trust necessary for democracy to work. Mobs and demagogues will put us on a path to political tyranny, Lincoln said. This very old problem has returned with new ferocity today, as a president who lost an election deployed a mob, which included dangerous extremists, to attack the constitutional system of election and the peaceful transfer of power.
Finally, the committee is showing that Trump’s attempted coup is ongoing. Near the end of last week’s hearing, Cheney revealed that:
After our last hearing, President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation. A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings. That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump's call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us and this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice. Let me say one more time, we will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously.
I have no idea whether the hearings will lead to criminal indictments and convictions of Trump and his enablers, but I do believe the hearings are finding their way into the public’s consciousness. This may prove to be as — if not more — valuable than a criminal proceeding. Not even a criminal conviction will change the minds of those who believe Trump’s Big Lie; to the contrary, it may make them even more suspicious or paranoid, possibly leading to further violence. But the hearings may begin to convince Trump supporters that he’s a dangerous charlatan.
The hearings already appear to be having an effect. The percentage of Republicans who say Trump misled people about the 2020 election has ticked up since last month, while a majority of Americans say Trump committed a crime. At the same time, Trump’s enormous fundraising operation has slowed. A New York Times/Siena College poll last week that showed nearly half of Republican primary voters would rather vote for a Republican other than Trump in 2024. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who may run in 2024, has been gaining on Trump in some polls, including in New Hampshire, the first primary state, where one recent survey had DeSantis statistically tied with Trump among Republican primary voters.
In 1954, I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings from our living room sofa — my father and I squinting into a tiny television screen (my father yelling “son-of-a-bitch!” every time McCarthy or his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, spoke). McCarthy had picked a fight with the U.S. Army, charging lax security at a top-secret army facility. The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's young staff attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As the television audience looked on, Welch responded with the lines that ultimately ended McCarthy's career: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"
Almost overnight, McCarthy's immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.
Is there a lesson here?
There will be pockets such as the Otero County area that will hold steadfast to their delusions. News and information doesn't reach all Americans it seems.
Otero County, New Mexico voted 61% for tRump in 2020.
In a recent election, they refused to certify the results initially until threatened with prison.
It is unclear if any action has been taken to address potential voter fraud or other issues.
excerpt:
Otero County certifies 2022 election after threats of prosecution from State of New Mexico
They expressed concerns with “ghost” votes where multiple ballots appeared to be filed from a home where all residents were allegedly dead and mistrust of Dominion voting machines.
County Commission Chairwoman and District 3 Commissioner Vickie Marquardt said County Clerk Robyn Holmes allayed the concerns about deceased voters.
She said the commission and people of Otero County must continue to hold the State accountable for what she called government overreach that compelled the board to certify the results, despite lingering suspicion of the voting machines.
Those doubts first arose when volunteer group New Mexico Audit Force attempted to prove voter fraud in Otero County but displayed no credible evidence, records show, and when Echo Mail began a similar audit that was halted as the county was investigated for misuse of public funds in its contract with the company.
Ballotpedia for additional detail:
https://ballotpedia.org/Otero_County,_New_Mexico,_elections,_2022
Live-streamed footage shows people carrying a banner in the colours of the Ukrainian flag as they protest amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, March 2022. (photo: Reuters)
A statue of Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin, erected in April, stands in the city centre, where the Russian and Soviet flags have been hoisted. On the side of police cars patrolling the streets, the Ukrainian word "politsiya" has been repainted in Russian.
Some shops accept the Russian currency, the rouble, as well as Ukraine's hryvnia. Internet traffic is now routed via Russia. And, with the Ukrainian mobile phone network down, hawkers sell Russian SIM cards on the streets.
Reuters spoke to two current residents and three ex-residents of Nova Kakhovka who said they see clear signs that Russian-installed authorities are seeking to bind the city, and the surrounding Kherson region, to Moscow.
A senior official in the Russian-installed regional government told Reuters it was pressing ahead with plans to hold a "referendum" for Kherson to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. He praised the era before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Ukraine was one of 15 national republics ruled by the Communist Party from Moscow.
"We've decided - the people of Kherson region have decided - that we need to hold a referendum and vote to join the Russian Federation," Kirill Stremousov, the deputy head of Kherson's Russian-appointed regional authority, said in an interview.
Stremousov did not give a date for the planned plebiscite. He said that, within weeks, the Russian telecommunications network would fully cover Kherson and he hoped to have the Russian rouble in full circulation by early next year.
The efforts at integration with Russia come amid vocal Ukrainian pledges to retake the strategic Black Sea region soon in a major counteroffensive.
Control of Kherson, home to 1 million people before the war, gives Russia a land corridor from its border to Crimea, an arid peninsula that it annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Kherson also includes a canal from the Dnieper river needed to keep Crimea supplied with fresh water.
The White House said on Tuesday that Russia was laying the groundwork for the annexation of Ukrainian territory - including via the introduction of the rouble and the forced use of Russian passports - in a repeat of the tactics used in Crimea. The Russian embassy in the United States dismissed Washington's comments as "fundamentally false".
The Kremlin has said the future of occupied regions of Ukraine will be decided by residents. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow's war aims now went beyond the separatist-controlled Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and included Kherson and neighbouring Zaporizhzhia in the south.
The Ukrainian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Kyiv has said the planned referendum is a pointless initiative staged by collaborators who will be prosecuted once Russia's troops are expelled.
SOVIET-STYLE EDUCATION
Russia's invasion has already prompted many inhabitants to flee the city, which had a population of 60,000 before the war.
Some of those who remain in Nova Kakhovka are angry at the disruption to their way of life and feel their hometown is returning to the era of economic hardship and distant authoritarian rule by Russia under the Soviet Union.
A teacher, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, said her school's administration summoned its 20 remaining staff in late May and asked who would be prepared to teach the Russian curriculum when classes return in September. The meeting was held in Russian, she said.
Just two of them raised their hands, said the teacher, who was present. She told Reuters she would resign if she had to abandon the Ukrainian curriculum.
"I love Ukraine. Why should I teach the kids differently … Can I tell them that the ones killing our people and our kids are doing a great job? My conscience won't let me do it," she said by telephone.
She said only a small fraction of the city's teachers readily accepted the change and it was not clear if it would be implemented. Nova Kakhovka's mayor's office and school board could not be reached for comment.
"My soul hurts. They haven't returned us to Russia like they like to say. They've sent us back to the USSR of 40 years ago," she said.
Stremousov, the Russian-installed official, told Reuters on July 6 that the Kherson regional authority planned to gradually change the curriculum and Russian would now be used in schools as well as Ukrainian.
The 45-year-old lauded the Soviet curriculum and said that, if teachers chose to quit, that was their choice.
Russia's Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov, who travelled to occupied southern Ukraine last month, said that education there had formerly promoted anti-Russian sentiment and the priority would be to teach pupils about "our joint achievements".
His ministry said on Thursday that he had travelled to Kherson and personally presented Russian diplomas to eight school children. New textbooks for use in the region were also presented at the event, the ministry said.
Ukraine has instructed teachers in occupied areas to report to the security services if they are forced to adopt the Russian curriculum.
POOR QUALITY GOODS
Margo, an 18-year-old artist who declined to give her full name, said that Ukrainian goods have largely disappeared from shelves in Nova Kakhovka and the quality of the Russian food and goods brought in from Crimea was poor.
Prices have surged, though the panic buying of the invasion's early days has subsided. Many shops remain closed and unemployment is rife, she said.
Stremousov denied food quality had worsened, though he acknowledged that prices were higher.
The official, who often addresses Kherson's residents in online videos under a portrait of Vladimir Putin, said he believed the region had thrived economically under the Soviet Union.
Margo said that occupation authorities had organised a concert, which she attended, in the city's House of Culture on the eve of a May 9 parade to commemorate the Soviet victory in World War Two.
She recognised no-one in the crowd and found people with Soviet flags and elderly women wearing the St George ribbon, a Russian military symbol often used to express pro-Russian sentiment, she said.
"Before the concert began, the self-proclaimed mayor came out and gave a speech saying 'I think most people in the audience now feel what I do: as if they've recovered from a long illness. Today we'll hear songs that used to be banned. The first one will be Katyusha'," she said, referring to the Soviet-era war song that promptly began to play.
The self-proclaimed mayor could not be reached for comment.
INTERNET BLACKOUT
Ukrainian mobile signal and Internet have veered from patchy to non-existent, the current and former residents said. Some people have bought Russian SIM cards to stay in touch with relatives and friends, though they sometimes don't work, Margo said.
The SIM cards have no markings or branding on them and those who buy them have their passports and registration papers photographed by the street vendors.
Reuters was not able to confirm this independently.
Ukraine has urged residents of Kherson region to evacuate because of its looming counteroffensive. In the last fortnight, at least four Ukrainian long-range strikes have hit targets in Nova Kakhovka which, until now, has been spared heavy fighting.
Margo said many Ukrainian residents, especially younger ones, have fled the city. Her friends went abroad or to Ukrainian-held cities and she was planning to leave, too.
Stremousov estimated 60-70% of the region's residents remained. He said that Russian passports were being handed out in the region and there were long queues.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on May 25 simplifying the process for residents of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to acquire Russian citizenship and passports. read more
Reuters was unable to determine how many people had fled the city but spoke to the members of four families that had left.
The teacher said she had no plans to depart.
"We're waiting for the Ukrainian army," she said. "I don't know how it's going to happen and where we'll hide and what we'll lose, but we want to be in Ukraine."
Republicans keep gerrymandered maps - after they were struck down by court. (photo: Janice Chung/The New York Times)
Ohio Republicans have maneuvered to keep districts in place for this fall’s election despite the state supreme court striking them down seven times this year
When I called up Catherine Turcer on Tuesday, she mentioned that her daughter had just sent her a text message saying it must feel like she’s living the same day over and over again.
Turcer is the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, and one of the most knowledgeable people about redistricting in her state. Earlier that morning, the Ohio supreme court struck down the map for the state’s 15 congressional districts, saying they were so distorted in favor of Republicans that they violated the state constitution. It was the seventh time this year the court has struck down either a congressional or state legislative map this year (it has struck down the congressional map twice and state legislative districts five times).
Despite those rulings, Republicans have maneuvered to keep both the congressional and state legislative maps in place for this fall’s election. It has set up an extraordinary circumstance in Ohio: voters will cast ballots for federal and state representation this fall in districts that are unconstitutional.
Turcer and I have spoken several times over the last few months as the saga in Ohio has unfolded, and she is not someone who sugar coats things. I’ve been interested in her perspective as someone who was initially optimistic about the reforms – she fought to pass them – but has seen the reality of how Republicans have brazenly ignored them this year.
“It’s incredibly painful to participate in elections that you know are rigged,” she told me. “I’ve been encouraging folks to look at the upcoming elections as important to participate because if we do just opt out, we would have even worse representation.”
This wasn’t the way things were supposed to happen.
After egregiously aggressive GOP gerrymandering in 2011, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2015 that set new guardrails on the practice when it came to drawing state legislative lines. It left a bipartisan commission of lawmakers in control of the process, but said it had to follow certain rules, including a requirement that said districts can’t “primarily” favor a political party. In 2018, voters approved a measure that set set similar constraints on congressional redistricting.
It was a huge win for reformers. Before 2015, there had been several statewide referendum to limit partisan gerrymandering and all of them failed. And even though lawmakers still had control over the redistricting process, she believed that it could weed out the most severe gerrymandering. I covered the 2018 amendment, and I remember there was some criticism at the time about whether it went far enough to limit lawmakers.
Now, Ohio Republicans have validated that criticism. In both their congressional and state legislative maps, they’ve sought maps that would give them a huge advantage, and have passed their plans on partisan lines. Each time the supreme court has rejected their efforts, they’ve only made marginal tweaks and submitted the plan again. Eventually, they ran out the clock, forcing courts to allow their maps to go into effect this year.
“This could have worked if the elected officials had approached this in good will,” she told me, making it clear lawmakers were to blame for the failure. “I am no longer assuming good will on anyone’s part… I no longer have faith that elected leaders will do the right thing when it comes time to draw voting districts.”
Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, tweeted on Wednesday what I thought was an insightful analysis of why the maps failed.
Most significantly, there was no meaningful “stick” to force Ohio Republicans to draw constitutional maps. Under the constitutional amendment, the Ohio supreme court can only send lawmakers back to the drawing board, not draw a map for it. And the only “punishment” lawmakers face to passing a map along partisan lines is that it won’t be in effect for an entire decade, a consequence Republican lawmakers were clearly unfazed by.
“We should have fought harder over leaving the Ohio redistricting in charge of mapmaking,” Turcer told me. “It seems really clear that giving the Ohio supreme court the stick, shall we say, not just the carrot, could have made an enormous difference.”
After seeing the reforms fail, Turcer said she expects a push to create an independent redistricting commission in Ohio, something that the chief justice of the Ohio supreme court, the critical swing vote in all of the redistricting cases, has encouraged.
“It certainly hasn’t worked the way it should. The mapmakers are just drunk on power. And you take away the keys from drunks,” she said. Clearly, the next step is an independent, insulated commission.”
A scene shows the aftermath of a shooting of a 13-year-old by Chicago police on May 18, 2022. (photo: CPD)
The teen's lawyers, and witnesses, contend his hands were up when police opened fire. He is now paralyzed from being shot in the back, the attorneys said.
The officer, identified by his attorney as Noah Ball, believed the suspect was pointing a weapon -- that turned out to be a cell phone -- and made a split-second decision to shoot, his lawyer told CNN.
As an independent police oversight office investigates the incident, new body camera video obtained exclusively by CNN shows the frantic final moments that led up to the shooting and what immediately followed.
In the footage, taken the night of May 18, an officer jumps out of his car to chase a 13-year-old who had bailed out of a suspected stolen vehicle and ran past him. Other officers are also in pursuit, including Ball, who according to his attorney had seen the vehicle hours earlier driving straight at his car.
Officers chase the teen to a nearby west side Chicago Marathon gas station, and one officer fires three shots, audio from the police body cameras shows.
One body camera video shows the 13-year-old at the end of the chase, slowing down, turning and appearing to raise his hands as he is shot.
He was unarmed. The teenager's attorneys told CNN he was trying to surrender. The officer's attorney said Ball mistook a large cell phone -- which he said the 13-year-old was holding -- for a gun and made a split-second decision.
Scenes from various officers' body cameras show officers reacting to the shooting. One goes to the ground and says, "Jesus f**king Christ, dude." He later approaches the teen and asks, "Was anyone hit?" then notices the injured teen and says, "He's hit? Dammit, get an ambulance."
Ball's body camera wasn't turned on at the time of the shooting, and it didn't activate until roughly 40 seconds after the shooting is over.
Shortly after his camera came on, Ball is heard asking another officer, "Is your camera on?" and when that officer replies yes, he says, "Okay good."
Ball's attorney, Timothy Grace, told CNN his client's body camera was off inadvertently, but attorneys for the teen said it was inexcusable.
"The suggestion that 'Hey, maybe this was just a temporary absentmindedness because he was involved in a pursuit,' first of all, they're trained," Steven Hart, one of the attorneys representing the teen's family, told CNN. "They have forethought. They know they're supposed to engage their cameras and it's up to them to do it. No one else can do it."
Only a cell phone and puddle of blood were left on the ground shortly after the incident, when two officers lifted the 13-year-old by his sweatshirt and legs and carried him away from the gas pump where he fell wounded.
The teen's attorneys said it was a clear example of how the teen was viewed by police. "They drag him with no regard for this young man, pull him like a rag doll away from the pump to another area after he had already sustained a major injury to his back," Andrew M. Stroth, one of the teen's attorneys, told CNN.
Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown told reporters the day after the shooting, "They moved the young man away from what might have been combustible gas pumps based on the firing being in that direction of the gas pumps."
'His hands are up'
According to the Chicago Police Department, the 13-year-old was a passenger in a suspected stolen car. When officers tried to stop the car, he jumped out and started running, police said.
Brown told reporters the car's license was identified by a plate reader and then a police helicopter began following the car and broadcasting the location.
Not long after, police descended on the location and the foot chase began. It was over in seconds.
"His hands are up, there was no justification for the officer to shoot," Stroth told CNN.
Some people on the scene that night appeared to agree.
"He had his f**king hands up!" one bystander is heard yelling on an officer's body camera.
Another witness, who only chose to go by "Anthony," told CNN-affiliate WLS, "His hands was up and I seen the cop run up to that boy and just start shooting that boy did not have no gun or nothing."
But Ball's attorney is looking less at where the hands were and more at what his client thought was in them.
"Drop the gun!" is heard on an officer's body camera. "Show us your f**king hands!" and, "He has a f**king gun!" are heard yelled after the gunshots.
Ball's attorney wrote to CNN in part, "You can hear Officer Ball yell that he has a gun." Ball believed "the object being pointed at him was a firearm. That dark object in his hand being pointed at officers was not a firearm but in actuality a large cell phone," Grace wrote.
He added, "Officer Ball had to make a split-second decision as he had no cover and no concealment. He discharged his service weapon to stop the threat."
The 13-year-old's attorneys disputed there was anything in his hands at all and argued there's no definitive video to prove it.
They also said he was trying to surrender and that the pursuit shouldn't have happened in the first place.
"If all you need is to have someone flee from the police to justify a shooting, we've got real problems in this city and in this country," Hart told CNN.
Stroth added, "There's been no charges against him, he was in a stolen vehicle and he ran away. He ran away. And does that warrant being shot in the back and paralyzed from the waist down?"
Ball, was stripped of his police powers two days after the shooting, pending the outcome of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability investigation.
Would new foot pursuit policy have avoided shooting?
In June, the Chicago Police Department released its long-awaited new policy on foot pursuits, almost a month after the shooting of this 13-year-old, and more than a year after the shootings and killings of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez and 13-year-old Adam Toledo during foot pursuits.
It does not go into effect until late August.
The new policy states that officers can only engage in a foot pursuit if there "is a valid law enforcement need to detain the person" that outweighs the dangers of the pursuit.
Other factors in determining whether to initiate a chase include: containment of the area, saturation of law enforcement in the area, helicopter unit support, and more.
"When determining the most appropriate tactical option, the safety of Department members, members of the public, and any person being pursued is the primary consideration," the new policy reads.
The policy also states, "Deciding to initiate or continue a Foot Pursuit is a decision that a Department member must make quickly and under unpredictable and dynamic circumstances. It is recognized that Foot Pursuits may place Department members and the public at significant risk."
Alexandra Block, an attorney with the ACLU of Illinois, says language in the new policy does not go far enough.
"There's so much weaselly language about how officers should you know, consider the totality of the circumstances or consider alternatives to chasing people, but there aren't enough black and white rules that officers must follow," Block told CNN.
"And so you get officers in the split-second decision-making circumstances where if they haven't been trained on either yes chase somebody, or don't chase somebody under a circumstance, they are likely to make a wrong decision."
The teen's family has filed a federal lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department.
"He can't walk, he can't get up, he can't go to the bathroom, he can't get his own food, I mean his life is changed forever," Stroth told CNN.
Hart added, "It's just not our 13-year-old client. He's at the end of a long list of largely minorities who have been shot, either maimed seriously, or killed by the Chicago Police Department."
"They're supposed to value the sanctity of human life. There was no value here. They didn't value this 13-year-old's life," he said.
A same-sex marriage supporter waves a flag while celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding same-sex marriage in 2015. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)
The Respect for Marriage Act’s greatest strength is its narrowness. If more bills were written this way, there’d be more opportunities for aisle-crossing votes.
The act “says with regards to a marriage between two individuals—regardless of sex, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of race, regardless of national origin—if it is legally performed in one state, it has to be recognized for the purposes of state-based actions such as taxation in another state,” Meijer continued in his clip. “That’s it. There’s no compulsion. There’s no threats to religious freedom,” he said, touting the bill as “the right choice” in terms of liberty, limited government, and avoiding the “chaos” that would come if Supreme Court decisions protecting interracial and/or gay marriage were revoked.
Legislators in both parties should take a lesson from Meijer’s explanation of his vote: This bill is small. It’s simple. It accomplishes its goal with a light touch, neither grabbing for a sweeping victory nor cramming together a panoply of unrelated partisan priorities.
Consequently, it nabbed the support of one in four House Republicans despite being sponsored by 179 Democrats. And though it’s not yet clear how the bill will fare in the Senate, its passage there isn’t wholly inconceivable because of this narrow scope.
More legislation should be built on this small-scale model. With a highly polarized but closely divided Congress (and country), including a few Senate moderates who wield disproportionate power, keeping bills small could be a way around some of our legislative stagnation. Unlike the oligarchic omnibus bills and gazillion-dollar, whole-platform legislative packages that have come into vogue in recent decades, narrowly tailored bills would make space for frequently shifting, issue-by-issue coalitions. Lawmakers could dart back and forth across the aisle as conscience and district realities permit. It could replicate, at least to a small degree, the pragmatic flexibility of a multi-party democracy.
The Respect for Marriage Act is an instructive case because the 47 yes-vote Republicans are far from a uniform block. A few, like Meijer and South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, have something of a libertarian edge. Others decidedly do not, like Never-Trumper Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming or New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the latter of whom has run toward former President Donald Trump at least as fast as Cheney ran away from him.
Notably, the entire all-GOP delegation from conservative Utah backed the bill, though they’d likely never vote for more expansive legislation like the Equality Act.
Although these other Republican lawmakers haven’t explained themselves as thoroughly as Meijer did, many of them undoubtedly voted on the same rationale. The Respect for Marriage Act lets them endorse keeping gay and interracial marriage legal—both of which most Republican voters want—without supporting a broader political agenda that would raise those same voters’ fears about religious liberty.
Make a small bill with no poison pills and, it turns out, fewer people will find it hard to swallow.
That’s even true in election years, like this one, though obviously representatives’ campaign calculations will vary considerably by district and timing, especially in the run-up to a competitive primary race. Still, a small bill could have advantages here, too, allowing politicians to defend only the votes they want to defend instead of getting dragged for omnibus compromises. And anyway, very few votes will outweigh incumbents’ advantage among the base. With this bill, for instance, even the minority of Republican voters who oppose legal same-sex marriage are unlikely to find such a closely tailored bill objectionable enough to jilt their own party’s nominee.
That’s the case for small bills for the minority party in Congress. What about the majority, particularly one with rivalrous power centers who can’t quit each other in our two-party system? For them, it’s in the contrast between the swift, bipartisan House passage of the Respect for Marriage Act (once marriage again became a live issue) and Democrats’ year of internal squabbles around President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.
Large, multi-subject bills tend to become either too big to fail (if they mostly concern established programs and agencies, as in omnibus spending bills) or too big to succeed (if they show any hint of policy ambition, as with Build Back Better). The former is undemocratic, the latter unproductive, and both contribute to our political dysfunction, frustration, and animosity.
Sticking to smaller bills wouldn’t be possible in every circumstance, nor could it be a panacea. But if we really want our government to be more responsive and our partisanship less negative, we could give smaller bills a shot.
After all, 47 votes from one party in favor of any bill pushed by the opposing party that’s more substantive than renaming a post office feels like a rare achievement these days. Lawmakers should decide if they want to keep disguising their party platforms as sprawling legislation—or if they’d like to make passing important and popular little bills a lot less rare.
ADDED:
DOMA was unenforceable.
excerpt:
Section 2 of the act allows states to deny recognition of same-sex marriages conducted by other states. Section 3 codifies non-recognition of same-sex marriages for all federal purposes, including insurance benefits for government employees, social security survivors' benefits, immigration, bankruptcy, and the filing of joint tax returns. It also excludes same-sex spouses from the scope of laws protecting families of federal officers, laws evaluating financial aid eligibility, and federal ethics laws applicable to opposite-sex spouses.[1]:?23–24?
After its passage, DOMA was subject to numerous lawsuits and repeal efforts. In United States v. Windsor (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court declared Section 3 of DOMA unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause, thereby requiring the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages conducted by the states. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court held that same-sex marriage was a fundamental right protected by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause. The ruling requires all states to perform and recognize the marriages of same-sex couples, leaving Section 2 of DOMA as superseded and unenforceable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act
Just remember DOMA was at a time when the Supreme Court was SANE!
There is no predicting what the Federalist Follies will do since it wasn't included in the Constitution. You know those "Originalists "
In the US, we know that teaching Abstinence Only increases teen pregnancies and STDs, some of which are antibiotic resistant. (It has been said that in Europe, FREE birth control and easy access has reduced their abortion rate.)
CONTRACEPTIVES appear to be next on their extremist agenda:
“They’re coming for contraception”: 195 Republicans vote against right to birth control, condoms
Just 8 Republicans supported the bill as Democrats call out the GOP's "assault on women's rights"
All but eight House Republicans voted against a bill to codify the right to contraception federally amid concerns that the Supreme Court could overturn a decades-old ruling prohibiting states from banning contraceptives.
The House voted 228 to 195 to pass the Right to Contraception Act, which would make it a federal right for Americans to obtain and use birth control pills, condoms, IUDs and other contraceptives. The legislation would also codify health care providers' rights to provide contraceptives and allow the Justice Department to take those that infringe the right to court.
Only eight Republicans voted in favor of the bill: Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.; Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.; Nancy Mace, R-S.C.; Fred Upton, R-Mich.; Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa.; Anthony Gonzalez, R-Ohio; John Katko, R-N.Y.; and Maria Salazar, R-Fla. Reps. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, and Mike Kelly, R-Pa., both voted "present."
Republicans spread misinformation about the bill and contraceptives in general, accusing Democrats of seeking "more abortions" with the bill even though contraceptives prevent unwanted pregnancies. Republicans also denied that the right to contraceptives is at risk even though Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in an opinion backing the court's reversal of abortion rights urged the court to "correct" other earlier decisions, including the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling that barred states from banning contraceptives.
https://www.salon.com/2022/07/21/theyre-coming-for-contraception-195-vote-against-right-to-birth-control-condoms/
This lunacy harkens back to a time when it was illegal to sell contraceptives to unmarried people. Bill Baird challenged the laws.
excerpts (worth reading in its entirety):
Bill Baird (born June 20, 1932) is a reproductive rights pioneer, called by some media the "father" of the birth control and abortion-rights movement.[1][2][3] He was jailed eight times in five states in the 1960s for lecturing on abortion and birth control.[4] Baird is believed to be the first and only non-lawyer in American history with three Supreme Court victories.[4]
In 1967, hundreds of students at Boston University petitioned Baird to challenge a Massachusetts law that prohibited providing contraception to unmarried persons. On April 6, 1967, he gave a lecture at Boston University, during which he gave a condom and a package of over-the-counter contraceptive foam to a female college student. He was immediately arrested and eventually jailed. His appeal of his conviction culminated in the 1972 Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. Baird, which established the right of unmarried persons to possess contraception on the same basis as married couples.[5] U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. wrote in that decision: "If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as to whether to bear or beget a child."[6] Eisenstadt v. Baird has been described as "among the most influential in the United States during the entire century by any manner or means of measurement".[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Baird(activist)
Taking the issue of CONTRACEPTIVES a step further, includes our global failures to address population and provide tools for women in other nations to reduce their pregnancies. In some nations, women have 12 or 14 children or until they die, similar to Colonial US (Mass Bay Colony) when men had several wives and lots of offspring because few survived. Empowering women with economic opportunities has reduced childbirth.
From Counter Currents:
8 Billion Humans? Population Is a Difficult Conversation, but We Need to Start Getting Real
https://countercurrents.org/2022/07/8-billion-humans-population-is-a-difficult-conversation-but-we-need-to-start-getting-real/
President of the Metis community, Cassidy Caron, speaks to the media in St. Peter's Square after their meeting with Pope Francis at The Vatican, Monday, March 28, 2022. (photo: Gregorio Borgia/AP)
The Vatican’s Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum, located near the food court and right before the main exit, houses tens of thousands of artifacts and art made by Indigenous peoples from around the world, much of it sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens.
The Vatican says the feathered headdresses, carved walrus tusks, masks and embroidered animal skins were gifts to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the Church’s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.
But Indigenous groups from Canada, who were shown a few items in the collection when they traveled to the Vatican last spring to meet with Francis, question how some of the works were actually acquired and wonder what else may be in storage after decades of not being on public display.
Some say they want them back.
“These pieces that belong to us should come home,” said Cassidy Caron, president of the Metis National Council, who headed the Metis delegation that asked Francis to return the items.
Restitution of Indigenous and colonial-era artifacts, a pressing debate for museums and national collections across Europe, is one of the many agenda items awaiting Francis on his trip to Canada, which begins Sunday.
The trip is aimed primarily at allowing the pope to apologize in person, on Canadian soil, for abuses Indigenous people and their ancestors suffered at the hands of Catholic missionaries in notorious residential schools.
Caron said returning the missionary collection items would help heal the intergenerational trauma and enable Indigenous peoples to tell their own story.
“For so long we had to hide who we were. We had to hide our culture and hide our traditions to keep our people safe,” she said. “Right now, in this time when we can publicly be proud to be Metis, we are reclaiming who we are. And these pieces, these historic pieces, they tell stories of who we were.”
___
More than 150,000 Native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior.
Official Canadian policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also aimed to suppress Indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions at home, including the 1885 Potlatch Ban that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony.
Government agents confiscated items used in the ceremony and other rituals, and some of them ended up in museums in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, as well as private collections. The Vatican’s catalogue of its Americas collection, for example, features a wooden painted mask from the Haida Gwaii islands of British Columbia that “is related to the Potlatch ceremony.”
During the spring visit, Natan Obed, who headed the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami delegation, raised the issue of an Inuit kayak in the collection that was featured in a 2021 report in The Globe and Mail newspaper. Obed was quoted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. as saying the museum head, the Rev. Nicola Mapelli, was open to discussing its return.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni didn’t rule out that Francis might repatriate some items during the coming trip, telling reporters: “We’ll see what happens in the coming days.”
There are international standards guiding the issue of returning Indigenous cultural property, as well as individual museum policies. The 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for example, asserts that nations should provide redress, including through restitution, of cultural, religious and spiritual property taken “without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.”
It is possible Indigenous peoples gave their handiworks to Catholic missionaries for the 1925 expo or that the missionaries bought them. But historians question whether the items could have been offered freely given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions and the government’s policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”
“By the power structure of what was going on at that time, it would be very hard for me to accept that there wasn’t some coercion going on in those communities to get these objects,” said Michael Galban, a Washoe and Mono Lake Paiute who is director and curator of the Seneca Art … Culture Center in upstate New York.
Gloria Bell, a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and assistant professor in McGill University’s department of art history and communication studies, agreed.
“Using the term ‘gift’ just covers up the whole history,” said Bell, who is of Metis ancestry and is completing a book about the 1925 expo. “We really need to question the context of how these cultural belongings got to the Vatican, and then also their relation to Indigenous communities today.”
The Holy See’s Indigenous collection began centuries ago, with some pre-Columbian items sent to Pope Innocent XII in 1692, and has been amplified over the years by gifts to popes, especially on foreign trips. Of the 100,000 items originally sent for the 1925 exhibit, the Vatican says it has kept 40,000.
It has repatriated some items. In 2021, Vatican News reported that the Anima Mundi had recently returned to Ecuador a shrunken head used in rituals by the Jivaroan peoples of the Amazon.
Katsitsionni Fox, a Mohawk filmmaker who served as spiritual adviser to the spring First Nations delegation, said she saw items that belong to her people and need to be “rematriated,” or brought back home to the motherland.
“You can sense that that’s not where they belong and that’s not where they want to be,” she said of the wampum belts, war clubs and other items she documented with her phone camera.
The Vatican Museums declined repeated requests for an interview or comment.
But in its 2015 catalogue of its Americas holdings, the museum said they demonstrated the church’s great esteem for world cultures and its commitment to preserving their arts and artifacts, as evidenced by the excellent condition of the pieces.
The catalogue also said the museum welcomes dialogue with Indigenous peoples, and the museum has held up its collaboration with Aboriginal communities in Australia before a 2010 exhibit. The collection’s director, Mapelli, a missionary priest and an associate visited those communities, took video testimonies and traveled the world seeking more information about the museum’s holdings.
Opening the revamped Anima Mundi gallery space in 2019 with artifacts from Oceania as well as a temporary Amazon exhibit, Francis said the items were cared for “with the same passion reserved for the masterpieces of the Renaissance or the immortal Greek and Roman statues.”
He noted that some items had recently been loaned to China and said the collection “invites us to live human fraternity, contrasting the culture of rancor, racism and nationalism.”
Francis also praised the museum’s stated commitment to transparency, noting the glass partitions showing the storage facilities upstairs and the restorers’ workstations on the main floor: “Transparency is an important value, above all in an ecclesiastic institution.”
___
You might miss the Anima Mundi if you were to spend the day in the Vatican Museums. Official tours don’t include it and the audio guide, which features descriptions of two dozen museums and galleries, ignores it entirely. Private guides say they rarely take visitors there, because there is no explanatory signage on display cases or wall text panels.
Margo Neale, who helped curate the Vatican’s 2010 Aboriginal exhibition as head of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledges at the Australian National Museum, said it is unacceptable for Indigenous collections today to lack informational labels.
“They are not being given the respect they deserve by being named in any way,” said Neale, a member of the Kulin and Gumbaingirr nations. “They are beautifully displayed but are culturally diminished by the lack of acknowledgement of anything other than their ‘exotic otherness.’”
It wasn’t clear if the current exhibition was a work in progress with labels eventually to be added; at the gallery entrance, a text panel asks for donations to fund the collection.
Museums and governments around Europe — in places like Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium — are grappling with the question of their colonial and postcolonial collections, and leading the discussion of legally transferring property back, experts say. With some exceptions, the trend is increasingly toward repatriation — recently agreements were announced in Germany and France to return pieces of the famed Benin Bronzes to Nigeria.
“There is a certain willingness growing in a number of European countries to return objects and archives and ancestral remains,” said Jos van Beurden, who runs a group email list and a Facebook group, Restitution Matters, that tracks developments in the field.
In Canada, the Royal British Columbia Museum has gone so far as to create a handbook empowering Indigenous communities to reclaim their cultural heritage.
In Victoria, the city where the museum is located, Gregory Scofield has amassed a community collection of about 100 items of Metis beadwork, embroidery and other workmanship dating from 1840 to 1910, tracked down and acquired via online auctions and through travel and made available to Metis scholars and artists.
Scofield, a Metis poet and author of the forthcoming book “Our Grandmother’s Hands: Repatriating Metis Material Art,” said any discussion with the Vatican Museums should focus on granting Indigenous scholars full access to the collection and, ultimately, bringing items home.
“These pieces hold our stories,” he said. “These pieces hold our history. These pieces hold the energy of those ancestral grandmothers.”
The migratory monarch butterfly endemic to North America has been categorized as an endangered species. (photo: David Crane)
The International Union for Conservation of Nature placed the migratory insect on its endangered species list Thursday
Thursday’s decision by the International Union for Conservation of Nature to declare the species endangered comes as years of habitat destruction and rising temperatures have decimated the fluttering orange itinerants’ population.
The species’ numbers have dropped between 22 and 72 percent over the past decade, according to the new assessment. Monarchs in the Western United States are in particular danger: The population declined by an estimated 99.9 percent, from as many as 10 million butterflies in the 1980s to fewer than 2,000 in 2021.
“It is difficult to watch monarch butterflies and their extraordinary migration teeter on the edge of collapse, but there are signs of hope,” said Anna Walker, an entomologist at the New Mexico BioPark Society who led the butterfly assessment.
The monarch is not alone. Butterflies across the region are vanishing as the West gets hotter and drier. According to one recent study, a majority of 450 species across a swath of 11 Western states are dropping in numbers.
But it is the decline of the well-known monarch that has grabbed headlines and caused dismay among many wildlife watchers.
The butterfly is famous for its epic migrations from wintering grounds in Mexico and California across the rest of the continent, signaling the start of summer as it fans out into the northern reaches of the United States and Canada.
Despite surviving thousands of miles of migration, threats from humans now abound.
Forest clearing to harvest timber and to make space for farms and homes is creeping into its wintering grounds. Pesticides and herbicides threaten not only the insect itself but also milkweed, which monarch larvae need to live. And climate change is exacerbating droughts and fires that can kill the butterflies and the plants they depend on.
Despite the dangers, wildlife officials in the United States have yet to protect the monarch under the Endangered Species Act.
In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the butterfly’s decline is sharp enough to warrant placement on the endangered species list. But the agency declined to do so, saying other species should take priority.
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