Federal vs. State Rights

In our federal republic, established by our Constitution, government power, unless explicitly granted to federal authorities, is presumed to be under the exclusive control of the state governments. The Tenth Amendment, the last provision of the Bill of Rights, reads: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Under our federal system every state has its own marriage laws, criminal codes, family law, business laws, voting laws, gun laws, abortion laws, drug laws, capital punishment laws, etc.

The legal wrangling over States’ Rights vs. Federal enforcement of citizens’ rights has a long and sordid history in the US, during which federal enforcement of civil rights (guaranteed in the post-Civil War Constitution) have often been denied to selected groups of citizens (usually “non-white” groups). This continuous effort by states to restrict the rights of certain citizens is rearing its hideous, often irrational head as I write these words. 60% of American state legislatures are currently ruled by Republicans, after a fifty year effort to gain control of state governments and the federal courts by conservative groups funded by billions in largely “dark money”.

Those who argue for inviolable States’ Rights can rest their argument firmly on the Tenth Amendment, although they had a much stronger argument for it before the Civil War. and the resulting constitutional amendments that were added to the U.S. Constitution. These changes to the constitution were intended to increase liberty and justice for all and create a federal guarantee of these new rights.

Four score and seven years after the founding of the United Sates an American civil war raged, following the secession of one third of the then-existing states, over the issue of States’ Rights, specifically, a state’s right to decide if a sizable percentage of its population would have only the same rights as cows, pigs, donkeys, chickens, hunting dogs and other chattels.

After that long, bloody war, slavery was definitively abolished throughout every state in the Union (except as punishment for those duly convicted of any of the new, targeted crimes, like the enhanced “anti-vagrancy” laws that affected mostly former slaves and returned them to unpaid bondage). Following the Civil War, Congress passed three amendments to establish in law what had been contested by the Confederacy in a hard fought war — that race is not grounds for enslavement or inferior treatment under law.

The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments outlawed slavery [1], guaranteed federal enforcement of due process of law and equal treatment under the law, and extended voting rights to men formerly enslaved. The devastated states of the former Confederacy were required to sign on to these amendments as a condition for re-entering the Union (and receiving federal funds to rebuild their shattered infrastructure.)

The federal government made sure to reserve its right to enforce the 14th Amendment, a right that explicitly superseded the power of any state on matters covered by the newly amended constitution — as required by the 10th Amendment. The last section of the 14th amendment explicitly states that Congress may make any laws necessary to enforce the guarantee of due process of law and equal rights to all Americans, regardless of what state they lived in.

One equality-enhancing innovation that flowed from the 14th Amendment was Congress’s creation of the Department of Justice in 1870, to enforce newly universal civil rights for all citizens, now constitutionally defined as anyone born in the USA. The 14th Amendment was ratified after president Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, on the grounds of white supremacy.

The first post-war civil rights act was enforced only haltingly and was soon written out of law by the Supreme Court’s absurdly narrow interpretation of the 14th Amendment [2] and later rulings upholding segregation. The idea of civil rights for Blacks was a dead letter in many states for generations, until The Civil Rights Act of 1964 again made it possible for individuals to enforce those rights in federal court. The Civil Rights Act only became law after decades of organizing, activism and struggle against often violent racism at law, efforts that culminated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Democratic president Lyndon Johnson knew that signing the Civil Rights Act would turn the white south solidly Republican, which it remains to this day. He hoped that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would level the playing field in those states, by allowing Blacks to register and vote in large numbers.

There are many devilish details in how the Supreme Court, Congress and the States spun the 14th Amendment, and more than one civil rights act, into oblivion. One of the most infernal examples is how quickly and efficiently several judges on the Supreme Court wrote the protections of the 14th Amendment out of law, for individuals (corporate persons continued to make good use of it during the first Gilded Age and beyond) during its almost century long judicially-induced coma. In the years from 1873 to 1963 no citizen, outside of corporations, was able to vindicate their civil rights under the 14th Amendment. The amendment that was supposed to provide access to the federal courts for citizens denied basic civil rights by their state government took a century long nap and the doors of the federal courts were closed to any persons not corporate in nature.

These maneuvers by federal judges and federal and state legislators allowed many of the worst evils of slavery to persist virtually unchanged for a century of winked at white supremacist violence after the Peculiar Institution was legally abolished. The Ku Klux Klan Act, which after vigorous enforcement by the new DOJ actually shut down the Klan for a short time, was quickly abandoned in a political compromise over the close presidential election of 1876, Reconstruction officially ended and law enforcement was left solely to state and local officials in the former Confederacy. Then, a century of Klan rule in many places.

None of the Congressional shenanigans over the course of that unjust, murderous, openly racist century would have been possible without the Senate filibuster and the steady, impartial hand of the Supreme Court, deciding case after landmark case that enforced segregation and other forms of unequal treatment under the law as matters of States’ Rights.

The filibuster was regularly used by a racist minority to block any law that would allow federal oversight of a state’s discriminatory racial practices. The 14th Amendment, which is now recognized as applying the protections of the Bill of Rights to the citizens of every state against infringement by their state, gave the federal government jurisdiction over the enforcement of civil rights. Enforcement of civil rights for millions of our newest citizens was the primary mission of the Department of Justice, at least for its first few years of existence. (Compare, for example, the recent policies and actions of the DOJ under the racist Jeff Sessions and unapologetic, pugnacious right-wing provocateur Bill Barr — read that ten month old article on Barr’s treachery in light of the Chauvin conviction for murder and the Big Lie about the rigged, stolen 2020 election, yikes)

The facially non-racist mantra of the filibusterers is always bipartisanship and “States’ Rights,” an impartial, hallowed, constitutionally endorsed doctrine expressing an understandable preference for local sovereignty and freedom from a central government “bureaucracy”. States’ Rights, its inconstant advocates always insist (on certain issues — abortion, marijuana, gay marriage — the same people insist federal bans should prevail), has nothing whatsoever to do with race, however disgruntled angry Black, brown and anti-racist white citizens might otherwise feel about it.

At the troubled heart of the States’ Rights argument is the unspoken, eternal question of who, in each state, actually gets the right to have a say about those rights and who in the state will enjoy them. The phrase is one of those glittering generalities, used to justify all sorts of devilment, like “Freedom is on the March” (shock and awe, Iraq), “Manifest Destiny” (ethnic cleansing of indigenous people and free land to pioneers) and “Liberty and Justice for all” (play ball!)

States’ Rights is really an argument for keeping the power relations and status quo firmly in place. “Local Rule” is an argument against change of any kind, unless it is to criminalize political protest, further suppress voting, harshly punish the users of certain drugs, and their families, ensure that partisan officials can overrule election results they don’t like, as many GOP state legislatures are now doing.

States’ Rights, the right of a free people to local sovereignty, has also long been advanced by historical revisionists as the sole reason why the states of the former Confederacy seceded from the Union. The Civil War had NOTHING to do with slavery, y’all, in spite of what the Articles of Secession of each state may have said about the constitutional right to own and breed slaves free from federal government tyranny.

Senator Strom Thurman (racist, segregationist father of a black daughter) heroically filibustered for almost twenty-four hours to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957. More than twenty bills to make lynching a federal crime were killed by filibusters over the years, most recently less than a year ago by fucking Rand Paul. Racist obstructionists constantly blocked any bill that would have made racist practices — like unpunished racist terrorism or openly restrictive race-based voting laws finally eliminated by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — federal crimes that could be enforced by the Department of Justice rather than by the otherwise sovereign and impartial states of Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, South Dakota.

Americans do not know this history. Many barely recall the horrific videos of the bloody insurrectionist riot at the Capitol that took place only three months ago. Imagine if Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi had actually been captured and executed, as the crowd that breached the Capitol announced its intention to do.

Wait…wasn’t that a peaceful and legal demonstration by patriots rightfully outraged at massive Democrat [sic] voter fraud that stole the election from Mr. Trump? Weren’t those loyal, peacefully assembling patriots set up to look violent, and make Trump look bad, by Black Lives Matter and anti-fa? If we allow a commission to investigate the so-called Trump riot, claim proponents of the stolen election, don’t we have to investigate Black Lives Matter and antifa and their raging riots last summer, claiming George Floyd and a handful of others had been “murdered” by police? Why do Blacks and anti-fascists always get off the hook for their terrorism? (One possibility, there is no evidence that either group engage in the kind of organized, deadly, terroristic violence we saw at the Capitol where police were attacked and 140 officers were seriously injured, along with $30,000,000 of damage to federal property. The vast majority of those arrested in connection to Barr/Trump’s militarized federal crackdown on both groups last summer had all charges against them dismissed, almost a year later).

I am interested in history, read history books and articles about history and law, as well as historian Heather Cox Richardson’s nightly newsletter, and I had little grasp of the legal underpinnings for a century of open racism at law until I went to law school and learned about the Constitution and Supreme Court precedents in detail.

Did you know, as I learned in first year “Con Law”, that virtually all of the early federal civil rights cases were brought under the “commerce clause” a few words in the Constitution that gives the federal government jurisdiction over interstate commerce? A segregated restaurant in Georgia that served potatoes shipped from Idaho? Interstate commerce, yo, here come the federales. As a public accommodation, post Brown v. Board, you’ve got to serve everybody, or you’re in violation of the commerce clause… chump.

All Americans know that slavery was abolished after the Civil War, the constitution was amended — but how did this ongoing shit — racist voting laws, unaccountable Klan lynching for a century of “Separate but Equal”, the huge wealth gap between whites and Blacks, disparate treatment under the law for whites and people of color, disproportionate, unpunished police violence — actually happen?

States’ Rights, my friends, and a federal government obstructed at every occasionally well-meaning turn by committed zealots, halted in its tracks from enforcing the plain intent of the framers of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

The only Framers talked about today, by conservative purists like the Federalist Society, following in Antonin Scalia’s “originalist” footsteps, are the original group, from 1789. You know, the founding fathers who wisely compromised on things like slavery and apportioning representation in the House on the white population plus 3/5 of the slave population and carved in stone that a well-regulated militia being necessary for the protection of a free state — no regulation of guns allowed! It’s like the Civil War never happened for them, or, if it did, the kerfuffle was a reasonable response by states to having their constitutional right to own other human beings as chattels ripped away from them, their genteel, Christian society torn apart.

You can find these same manipulative weasels making the same speeches today (yes, I heard you the other day on the steps of the Supreme Court, Lyin’ Ted, you “fat wolverine”), defending the rights of certain people (coincidentally always white) to be free from the tyranny of other people (oddly, always “non-white”), mindless, manipulated people who want to “replace” them, as the theory goes. Republicans like Cruz call for bipartisanship, and the sanctity of the filibuster, whenever they are in the minority, even as their colleagues make state laws to suppress the vote, reserve the party’s right to tally all votes, and criminalize protected peaceful assembly, while immunizing those who kill protesters with their cars, as the great state of Florida did just the other day.

The massive multi-racial largely peaceful protests after the murder of George Floyd, protests Bill Barr’s DOJ sent federal troops to violently put down (pursuant to Trump’s hastily promulgated executive order on defense of federal property), are held up as an example of “anarchy” and unreasonable and violent expressions of irrational rage.

Now that the murderer of George Floyd is convicted, as a result of the massive public demonstrations that led to his prosecution, states are getting busy curtailing the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly in their states as they remain uncompromising on the Second Amendment, which they claim does not allow any regulation of gun ownership whatsoever.

Cynical, power hungry politicians playing to their “base” will do whatever it takes to remain in power, no matter what the majority of their constituents might actually want them to do. They will spin everything in terms of liberty from tyranny, in the manner of Groucho Marx flummoxing his unpaid workers:

But there is also history, the record of things that actually took place, who said and did what, what event precipitated another, what the law was and how the Supreme Court ruled on it, which can explain a lot about why the modern day counterparts of the slaveholding class are basically the same impious, largely racist ilk who used Christ’s teachings to justify holding other Christians as farm animals.

[1]

With a very important, and profitable, loophole written into it, no doubt the result of a political compromise by the centrists of their day, insisted on by those who could benefit from it:

“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”

13th Amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

see also, Thirteenth (excellent and highly recommended)–

[2]

The infamous Slaughterhouse cases put the 14th Amendment into a century long, judicially-induced coma. The only rights of federal citizenship the amendment protected, according to the unappealable majority on the Supreme Court in 1873, were the right to freely move from state to state, the right to use navigable interstate waterways and one equally crucial liberty I don’t recall at the moment. Everything else was left to the states, whatever the “intent of the framers” (most of whom were alive and outraged after the ruling was announced) might have been. Wikipedia blurb:

The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36, was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution only protects the legal rights that are associated with federal U.S. citizenship, not those that pertain to state citizenship.

This ruling was effectively reversed ninety years later when a federal court in the South allowed a lawsuit brought on 14th Amendment grounds, under the never-repealed Ku Klux Klan Act, to proceed. This allowed the federal government to prosecute the Klan murderers of civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman. Wikipedia:

The murder of the activists sparked national outrage and an extensive federal investigation, filed as Mississippi Burning (MIBURN), which later became the title of a 1988 film loosely based on the events. In 1967, after the state government refused to prosecute, the United States federal government charged eighteen individuals with civil rights violations. Seven were convicted and received relatively minor sentences for their actions. Outrage over the activists’ disappearances helped gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[5]

Since 1967, tens of thousands of 14th Amendment cases, violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have been litigated as many of us work to bend the moral arc of history toward justice.

Mr. Manchin — save babies! Protect the Filibuster!

“On Tuesday evening, President Biden urged Congress to get moving on federal police reform. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House in March, but Republicans have filibustered it in the Senate—primarily over a provision to change qualified immunity, the doctrine that protects law enforcement officers who brutalize people from civil liability. The bill would also ban deadly chokeholds and no-knock warrants, restrict the flow of military-grade equipment to state and local agencies, and create a national police-misconduct registry, among other measures.” 

source

The purpose of the filibuster rule, as we all know, is to promote bipartisanship among obstructionists. And, of course, to SAVE BABIES!

Students for Life of West Virginia Appeals to Sen. Manchin to Continue Defending the Filibuster on Billboards Up Now — SFLA Action

The precedent set by the Chauvin murder conviction

The verdict yesterday, while welcome, and historic — police supervisors testified that an officer was out of control when he killed (we can now say murdered) a handcuffed prisoner — sets a limited precedent.

The writer of an op-ed in the Times today makes this horrific point:

Yet [in spite of an “avalanche” of damning evidence] right up until the reading of the verdict, much of the nation was on tenterhooks about the outcome of what ought to have been an open-and-shut case. This suspense over whether the reams of evidence would matter is itself a scandal. Only by wading through the facts as the jury saw them can you appreciate this.

source

The Chauvin precedent seems to be:

In a case where there is overwhelming multi-perspective video, witness and forensic evidence of the officer’s guilt, and his supervisors testify against him, and the defense has nothing but ridiculous, irrational, counterfactual stories aimed at producing reasonable doubt in at least one racist juror, and there is a massive movement on the streets in a country ready to explode from centuries of ongoing, unaddressed racism and police brutality with no accountability — sure, in that case, a jury of twelve will vote to convict that kind of murderous, very bad apple. 

It’s a rare and encouraging moment of accountability, yes, but the uniquely overwhelming, unambiguous, incontrovertible evidence in this particular police killing of a handcuffed “suspect” is something to keep in perspective (as I figure out how we point the Jewish space laser at certain rabid Qanon members of Congress, and at Tucker “Jews will not replace us” Carlson, who needs to be replaced, if not simply vaporized.)

Bear in mind that the original police report blandly reported that a suspect, after resisting arrest, appeared to have been suffering from a medical condition and was rushed to the hospital where he died. Darnella Frazier’s real-time videotape of the murder directly contradicted the official report — and went viral worldwide. But for the 17 year-old’s courageous action documenting the killing, the lying police report would have been the last word on Mr. Floyd’s death.

In another great moment for justice, the Department of Justice is investigating whether Chauvin violated George Floyd’s civil rights by slowly choking him to death [1]. It’s the kind of thing you read and think “what the fuck? the fucking law… grrrr…”

It reminds me of the infamous, little known, constitutionally pernicious Cruikshank case, which was brought by the brand new Department of Justice in 1873 after a white mob massacred more than a hundred Blacks in Colfax, Louisiana. The case was the first decisive death knell for the “equal protection under law” promised in the new Fourteenth Amendment. It was a long nail into the coffin of Reconstruction after the Civil War and a case that could be cited in support of any “states’ rights” argument.

The case was brought on violation of civil rights grounds against the mob that massed for a day of burning, shooting and slaughter, after an election that was going to put candidates voted for by Blacks into office, an election the mob claimed had been stolen. The mass killing, the indictment read, denied at least two named victims (one was named Tillman, as I recall) of their civil rights.

Cruikshank made its way up to the Supreme Court where the indictments against Cruikshank and his fellow pogromists were dismissed due what the majority found to be to the inartful [2] drafting of the original indictment by the Department of Justice. The case held that the US could not prosecute a federal criminal case against a conspiracy of private citizens to violate the civil rights of the dozens of people they butchered on Easter Sunday, 1873. That kind of prosecution was left exclusively up to the discretion of the individual states, in spite of whatever might be implied from the language of the Fourteenth Amendment or the laws passed to enforce it.

The case made abundantly clear that the 1870s Supreme Court had a very, very narrow view of the 14th Amendment, which had been ratified to provide rights the states denied on “states’ rights” grounds. States would be able to openly deny these civil rights for close to a century, largely due to the holding in Cruikshank, and its more famous sibling, the aptly named Slaughterhouse cases.

Here’s the plaque some fucking racists erected in Colfax, long after the events of that hellish Easter Sunday in 1873:

[1] Democracy Now reports:

The U.S. Justice Department has opened a civil investigation into whether the Minneapolis Police Department has engaged in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the probe Wednesday, one day after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd.

Attorney General Merrick Garland: “Yesterday’s verdict in the state criminal trial does not address potentially systemic policing issues in Minneapolis. … The investigation I am announcing today will assess whether the Minneapolis Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force, including during protests.”

The probe is separate from a federal criminal investigation into whether Chauvin violated George Floyd’s civil rights.

source

[2]

This piece on the recent origins of the word “inartful” by the late William Safire is artfully done. He attributes it to Barack Obama, to whom he ironically tips his cap for another remark, which Safire gives us the ancient on-the-nose Latin analogue for.

The Harvard-trained senator’s best subtle play on Latin so far was his comment about problems with those checking out his potential vice-presidential choices: “I would have to hire a vetter to vet the vetters.” As lawyers know, this catchy noun-verb construction is bottomed on a phrase in the poet Juvenal’s sixth satire in the second century A.D. advising his friend Ursidius to remain a bachelor because eligible young women were no longer as chaste as in the old days and, as wives, tended to dally with those assigned to protect them: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” is translated as “Who shall guard the guardians?”

Solving the registration issue for kids making GIFs on phones

A friend has been home-schooling her talented eight year-old granddaughter during the pandemic and asked me to help her with an art project. We met briefly, in a park, during the height of the pandemic, where I showed them how to do it, explaining the general principle of stop-motion animation, but it was a quick and uninspiring demonstration.

There was also the difficult to solve problem of how to line up the frames properly so that they’d make an effective phone gif. If the frame is not completely steady from frame to frame, the moves will be out of registration and not produce a watchable gif. I had to basically invent a rig to keep the frames steady when I launched a non-profit kids’ animation workshop almost a decade ago, but even with that rig there are technical hurdles to getting perfectly registered frames.

Now that we are all vaccinated I can go in person and work directly with the young artist, help her go wild with her eight year-old creativity. In the meantime, I promised my friend I’d send her a little kit to let the girl start making gifs herself.

The challenge remained, how to give them a foolproof way to properly register the frames so the gifs would work. Particularly for someone using a cellphone camera and without the steady little rig I’d put together over the course of months of trial and error.

I solved it late last night. Check out the gif below and see if you can see my fix.

Why the adversarial system is not a reasonable solution for many painful problems

Minneapolis was poised for riots, 3,000 National Guard troops standing by, in the event that a jury did not hold former police officer Derek Chauvin legally responsible, in some form, for the slow killing of George Floyd that was videotaped in its entirety by a high school girl, Darnella Frazier. The agonizing to watch video inspired nationwide, even worldwide, demonstrations against the continual unaddressed killings of civilians, particularly Black and brown ones, by American police.

Dozens more civilians have been killed by police during the three weeks of the Chauvin trial (50% of them white!), so there’s no question that this horrific, ongoing problem of deadly, often racist, police violence persists. The trial, even the conviction, of a single guilty officer is a drop in the rapidly rising, acidified ocean that goes a very short way to addressing any part of the larger problem. The adversarial system is a supremely stupid way to try to address institutional police violence, though, in our system, convicting Chauvin for callously killing a handcuffed suspect is, of course, the right thing to do. Many people are very relieved at the verdict which proves, if you have indisputable evidence, a police hierarchy ready to testify against a killer cop and a perfectly presented prosecution case, a just outcome can be obtained.

Sekhnet, who cannot turn off an ongoing national news story, listened to the defense’s closing argument in the Derek Chauvin trial the day before yesterday. The defense, hired to raise reasonable doubt, had a very poor hand to play. They were reduced to claiming that it was reasonable for Chauvin to continue kneeling on a dead man’s neck, that the nine and a half minute slow suffocation of George Floyd was justified and that any reasonable officer would have done the same, because of what had happened twenty minutes earlier — the part the prosecution won’t let you see because nobody videotaped it. The defense’s argument echoed the original elliptical police report on the death of George Floyd [1].

The defense also argued that the officers kneeling on the face down, handcuffed George Floyd for almost ten minutes had nothing to do with his death. Nothing. The experts the prosecution produced, who testified about the prolonged denial of oxygen to Floyd’s brain caused by the weight of men on his neck and back, were merely speculating. Floyd’s death, the defense insisted, was caused by his ingestion of several illegal drugs — indisputably found during his autopsy — his heart condition, adrenaline pumping through his struggling system, carbon monoxide. The defense’s position is that George Floyd’s death was his own damned fault, actually, that his own poor choices killed him, not Derek Chauvin and his colleagues kneeling on the face down Floyd’s neck and back while the restrained man’s hands were securely cuffed behind his back and he struggled to breathe.

The Chauvin defense team was in a bad position, in light of the incriminating video that showed Chauvin’s depraved indifference to the pleading man he was kneeling on, hands nonchalantly in pockets, and the credible testimony of a strong roster of prosecution witnesses in a clearly presented case. On the bright side for Chauvin, his lawyers only had to convince one angry white man on the jury, or an angry white woman, that the giant Black ex-convict somehow deserved what happened to him when he carelessly lost his life. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

Leaving “justice” up to the subjectively reasonable doubt of one stubborn bigot on the jury is not the way to ensure fairness, solve a gigantic problem or promote healing. The adversarial system is not the way to create real systemic change. It’s certainly not the mechanism to enforce common decency. In fact, the adversarial system often requires indecent, sometimes maddeningly absurd, arguments from lawyers and prosecutors. Desperate arguments that can make your head explode and make you want to take a baseball bat to a store window. If someone in your own life made arguments like these, you’d be within your rights to slap them out of their mouth.

The thirteen year-old recently shot dead by a policeman in Chicago while surrendering with his hands up? Obviously, claimed police, the boy “surrendered” right after he threw away his gun and turned, menacingly, in that split second afterwards, during which the officer had less than the blink of an eye to decide whether to kill the kid or risk being killed himself. The story is hotly contested, and told completely differently, by adamant adversaries insisting on their version of events– he said, we said. Something happened, there are actual facts, an actual videotape. A jury trial with each side sticking to whatever theory they can concoct, no matter how unlikely, to convince twelve people on a jury, is not the way to the truth.

It is the American way, as encompassed in the American Rule for lawsuits of all kinds — each side pays its own way, fair is fair. If you face a year or more in jail, the constitution requires that some lawyer will be provided for you. In criminal trials you get the Dream Team you can afford to pay for, or an overworked public defender with fifty other open files in her briefcase. The American Rule: a giant corporation pays its lawyers to defend a case, why shouldn’t an individual suing the corporation be held to the same standard? It’s the American way, except in rare cases where an aggrieved party, vindicated in court, can be reimbursed for legal fees, as in most other countries when you are forced to go to court by a person or entity that knows it did wrong and uses the adversarial system to fight, even bankrupt, you.

What is the proper way to address a plague like police violence against mostly poor and “nonwhite” people? It will take a massive overhaul of how things are done. It will be a very heavy lift, but it needs to be done.

My best idea, once the filibuster is lynched (and don’t think McConnell won’t do it, the second he gets a majority back) and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 becomes law, is an independent commission, composed of experienced police officials who have demonstrated their ability to be objective (I’m thinking of someone like Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo who, whatever his faults, drew the line at what Chauvin did and testified against it) about the need for systemic changes to ensure better police-civilian relations, and civilians who have shown the same impulse to be fair and find sustainable solutions. The commission would also be free of police union influence.

This commission would review the evidence and make a finding about every instance of police use of violence against civilians. No jury would have to be convinced of anything, no intelligence-insulting counterfactual arguments would be heard, no jury to convince, no blue wall of silence to be breached. An investigation would yield actual facts and the committee would have the final say as to discipline, dismissal and/or prosecution of officers. Early on this commission would be very busy, but as time went on, and the certainty of consequences for bad apple cops became a reality, instances would dramatically decline. The findings of the commission would help legislators pass laws to to find the best way forward.

There are cases when the police are justified in fearing for their lives and resorting to deadly violence (many involve the War on Drugs, which is a whole other subject). There are cases where the police have no demonstrable fear for their own safety when people are nonetheless roughed up or even killed. You can watch the videotape, like those two bad apple cops who pulled over an active duty military man, in uniform, who’d broken no laws. They threatened him, shouted contradictory orders (show your hands! Reach down and take off your seat belt!) pepper sprayed him in the face, forced him to lie on the ground, handcuffed him. Peace officers who responded to this brown-skinned man’s entirely reasonable fear by telling him he ought to be afraid, one telling him he was going to “ride the lightning.” That particular case will go in front of a jury, or be quietly settled, but the deadly problem is institutional.

Aside, while we’re talking about the adversarial system that assholes are constantly exploiting to hide and distort the truth, Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky colleague Rand Paul singlehandedly blocked a vote on a federal anti-lynching bill, part of a new hate crimes law, approved 410-4 by the House, shortly after the killing of George Floyd [2]. Paul objected to, among other things, calling it the Emmett Till Act, after a Chicago boy lynched in the former Confederacy in 1955. Rand Paul also voted, more recently (and with fellow Big Lie supporting senators Cruz, Hawley and Lee), against enhancements of federal hate crime law to better protect American Asians during a rash of violence against Asians by angry Americans galvanized by Trump’s racist rhetoric about Covid-19.

Politics is now a completely adversarial system. A small handful of diehard pieces of shit suffice to block laws that virtually all Americans are in favor of.

There are things too important to leave in the hands of a few lifelong partisans, or juries.

Like the political party that controls presidency and the Senate, even by a single vote, choosing members of an unappealable court that has the final say on the constitutionality of many life and death human rights issues every day. The adversarial process is no way to choose these powerful justices. An independent commission is needed, a bipartisan committee, a non-partisan group preferably (career partisans like Boof Kavanaugh, lifelong right-wing activist, would be disqualified, based on their history of partisanship), to ensure that fairness in the selection process prevails and that only the most qualified, least ideologically pure, judicial candidates are appointed to their limitless posts.

I’m writing, of course, as though we live in a world where Reason prevails over ignorance, superstition and conspiracism. If you live in a world where powerful Jews and our Satanist pedophile cannibal coconspirators are plotting your replacement by Colored people, stupid pliable robots who will vote for whatever these Jews tell them to, you might have a good shot at representing constituents in a gerrymandered 70% Red district in Georgia, but you are unlikely to be able to prove this replacement theory based on evidence or even common sense. To replace you, I have to put someone there in your place and get rid of you. Nothing short constitutes actual “replacement”, but that’s not really crucial to the “theory” of the case now, is it, darling?

Save babies. Protect the filibuster!

[1]

When they released information about Floyd’s death on May 26, the Minneapolis police department described it like this: “Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. [He was, in fact, dead.] Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.”

source

[2]

Amid the visceral national outcry for racial justice in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a lone US senator is standing in the way of a bill that would make lynching a federal hate crime.

Rand Paul, a Republican with a reputation as a one-man awkward squad in the US Senate, has put the historic legislation into limbo, frustrating black colleagues and civil rights leaders, including the Rev Jesse Jackson.

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Workers vs. giant corporations

Argue, if you like, but the man makes a good four minute case about the inequality of power between giant corporations and increasingly un-unionized employees, which I watched on the day the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post prints an Associated Press article about the legal case the union has made against Amazon’s successful efforts to crush the union effort by intimidating, threatening and monitoring workers prior to and during the vote [1]. The NY Times, we note, did not cover this development. It has published not a mumbling word about Amazon or the union since it’s April 16 piece claiming Amazon workers pretty much love their company.

Robert Reich makes a very strong case, unless, of course, you agree with Mr. Bezos, Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. DeVos, that it is perfectly fair that 0.01% of the population has about as much wealth as the bottom 90%. You can make a case for that, but 90% of Americans probably wouldn’t buy it.

[1] From Union accuses Amazon of illegally interfering with vote

…Many of the other allegations by the union revolve around a mailbox that Amazon installed in the parking lot of the Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse. It said the mailbox created the false appearance that Amazon was conducting the election, intimidating workers into voting against the union. Security cameras in the parking lot could have recorded workers going to the mailbox, giving the impression that workers were being watched by the company and that their votes weren’t private, according to the retail union…

...Alex Colvin, the dean of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said these types of cases can take a year or more to resolve. Even if a union wins, the penalties for the employer are weak, like it could be forced to post a notice saying employees have a right to form a union. He said the labor board could hold another election, but at workplaces where turnover is high like at Amazon, the employees might no longer be around. Overturning the results are rare, Colvin said.

The union push in Bessemer was the biggest in Amazon’s 26-year history and only the second time one reached a vote. Workers reached out to the union last summer, tired of working 10-hour days on their feet, packing boxes or storing products, without getting enough time to take a break. Mail-in voting started in early February and went on from about 50 days. Organizers promised a union would lead to better working conditions, better pay and more respect.

Amazon, meanwhile, argued that it already offered more than twice the minimum wage in Alabama and provided workers with health care, vision benefits and dental insurance, without paying union dues.

Always generous, the avaricious Mr. Bezos had the last words of the article

Last week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos acknowledged in a shareholder letter that the company could do better for its workers and said he didn’t take comfort in the outcome of the union election in Bessemer. He vowed to make Amazon a safer place to work by reducing sprains, strains and other injuries at warehouses.

“I think we need to do a better job for our employees,” Bezos said.

Anarchist Jurisdiction Propaganda

Can you believe what we are subjected to in New York City, walking down the street, minding our own business?

What next from these antifa/BLM liar sons of bitches? Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t cure Covid-19? The plague was not deliberately made in a Chinese lab by Satanic Democrat pedophile cannibals in league with Hunter Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky to rig the US election?

Seriously, what next? Sleepy Joe Biden honestly won the election in Georgia, along with that slick Black preacher and the smart-ass Jew journalist who “won” the run-off that had zero electoral integrity (before Georgia fixed its corrupt election laws)? Give me a break, 11,780 votes, come on fellas! You expect me to believe Biden won the Electoral College without massive illegal help from Ukraine?

Polls show that over 60% of Republicans know the real deal (Biden is as illegitimate as Obama was), which is why 43% of Republicans polled are dead set on freedom from tyranny, rather than obsequious obedience to the evil, coercive nanny State that is using “science” to take all freedom away by forcing “vaccinations” on them as it forcibly takes their guns away, craps on Christmas and God — and the Bible– no more Bibles! — and plots to kill their unborn babies.

Actual billboard in West Virginia:

Students for Life of West Virginia Appeals to Sen. Manchin to Continue Defending the Filibuster on Billboards Up Now — SFLA Action

By the way, ever wonder what might have happened differently if that peaceful crowd that swarmed into the Capitol on January 6th actually did hang Mike Pence?

Letter to the editor, NY Times

To the Editor:

I have to question why an article that concludes “(t)urnout for the vote was low, at only about half of all eligible workers, suggesting that neither Amazon nor the union had overwhelming support” was headlined  Why Amazon Workers Sided With the Company Over a Union.  If the article was PR written by Jeff Bezos himself, it could not have been more faithful to his point of view or desired outcome.  Fittingly, it ends with Mr. Bezos promising shareholders he’ll do even better to make his lowest paid employees even happier.

The authors observe that if the estimated 25% of the workforce that “turned over” during the three month organizing/voting period had stayed, unionization likely would have prevailed.

Among crucial issues unaddressed by the article, if Amazon workers side with Amazon, why does Amazon have such massive worker turnover, even during a pandemic and economic hard times in one of the poorest states in the US?

The reader is left to piece together, from the “wish” expressed by Amazon supporters that they could have more than a 30 minute break during their ten hour shifts, that working conditions might be less than ideal at the Bessemer, Alabama Amazon fulfillment center.

The reader is left completely uninformed about the “aggressive” (and multi-million dollar) measures Amazon took to defeat the union and dissuade half of its workforce from voting at all.

We get only the gentlest hint of the famously oppressive conditions at the Amazon warehouses that cause so many to quit their jobs, even during an international health emergency. As though the right to urinate when it’s urgent is irrelevant compared to a generous minimum wage and company provided health insurance.

Draft of a letter to the Grey Lady

I find myself so churned up these days, as truth and outrageous fiction have become interchangeable in politics, and even reasonable medical advice is weaponized for “political” ends in our 40% John Birch Society America. 

The news is an ongoing nightmare to me, as things that should not be in controversy at all are continually fought to the death — you say reality, I say Q!

Since the Chauvin trial for killing the handcuffed George Floyd began on March 29th, only 64 civilians, a mere three a day, have lost their lives during encounters with police, (50% of them have been white) [1]. The question everyone on the right is asking — why are Blacks and liberals claiming there’s a problem with police violence, or the disproportionately racist application of police violence?

Now we have new headlines informing us that Republicans are starting to unite in their opposition to a commission to study if prominent Republicans organized, funded and fomented the January 6 riot at the Capitol (and let it rage for hours, unchecked).  Of course they are united in opposing it. You would be too!

So, in the absence of something more concrete to do about anything today, I’m taking Sekhnet’s advice and drafting a letter to the NY Times about their recent “puff piece” for Jeff Bezos.

 

To the Editor:

I have to question why an article that concludes “Turnout for the vote was low, at only about half of all eligible workers, suggesting that neither Amazon nor the union had overwhelming support” was headlined Why Amazon Workers​ ​Sided With the Company Over a Union​. If the article had been PR written by Jeff Bezos himself, it could not have been more faithful to his point of view or desired outcome.​ Fittingly, it ends with Mr. Bezos promising shareholders he’ll do even better to make his lowest paid employees even happier.  

The authors observe that if the estimated 25% of the workforce that “turned over” during the three month organizing/voting period had stayed, the union likely would have prevailed.

Among crucial issues unaddressed by the article, if Amazon workers in fact sided with their employer over the union, and love their well-paying $15/hr. jobs and health insurance from day one, why does Amazon have such massive worker turnover, even during a pandemic and economic hard times in one of the poorest states in the US?

The reader is left to piece together, from the “wish” expressed by Amazon supporters that they could have more than a 30 minute break during their ten hour shifts, that working conditions might be less than ideal at the Bessemer, Alabama Amazon fulfillment center.

The reader is left completely uninformed about the “aggressive” (and multi-million dollar) measures Amazon took to defeat the union and dissuade half of its workforce from voting at all.

We get only the gentlest hint of the famously oppressive conditions at the Amazon warehouses that cause so many to quit their jobs, even in one of the poorest states in America, during an international health emergency. As though the right to urinate when it’s urgent is irrelevant compared to a generous minimum wage and company provided health insurance.

Eliot Widaen, New York, NY

Mr. Widaen is a wild-eyed hothead who is often angered by the status quo-defending distortions regularly published by the Journal of Record.

[1]

Grrr… grrrrr!!!

The NY Times has got me by the throat lately, I just read this beautifully crafted, non-judgmental paragraph, in the article cited above, about the 64 civilians who died in encounters with police since the Chauvin trial began three weeks ago, that is making me foam at the mouth slightly:

And their [police killings] fallout has been wrenchingly familiar, from the graphic videos that so often emerge to the protests that so often descend into scuffles between law enforcement and demonstrators on streets filled with tear gas. Just as one community confronts one killing, another happens.

source

Reasonable, constitutionally protected protests that are typically met by police clad in anti-riot gear, deploying crowd dispersal methods designed for use against violent insurgents “so often descend into scuffles” on streets “filled with tear gas” (probably terrorist tear gas, no?, beautiful thing, that passive voice — who released the tear gas that filled the streets “filled with tear gas”?) 


Makes me wanna holler.