Last Call For A Better Day In Gunmerica, Con't

So, turns out I was wrong.

Republicans did not sink the Senate gun safety bill, and for once, Democrats got the win.

President Joe Biden signed into law the most sweeping legislation aimed at preventing gun violence in 30 years at the White House on Saturday shortly before departing for Europe for a series of meetings with world leaders.

Biden called the signing of the legislation a "monumental day" and said it was proof that Democrats and Republicans could find common ground on important issues.

“God willing, it's going to save a lot of lives," he said.

The bill provides grants to states for “red flag” laws, enhances background checks to include juvenile records, and closes the “boyfriend loophole” by keeping guns away from unmarried dating partners convicted of abuse. It will also require enhanced background checks for people ages 18 to 21 and funding for youth mental health services.

The bipartisan gun legislation sped through Congress in the month after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. Democrats unanimously voted in favor of the bill along with more than two dozen Republicans in the House and the Senate, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

"When it seems impossible to get anything done in Washington, we are doing something consequential," Biden said. "If we can reach a compromise on guns, we ought to be able to reach a compromise on other critical issues, from veterans health care to cutting-edge American innovation to so much more."

He had pleaded with lawmakers to pass legislation tightening gun laws following the shootings in Buffalo, New York, and in Uvalde. But the bill stopped short of his call for Congress to ban assault weapons and to require background checks for all gun purchases, both of which are widely opposed by Republicans in Congress.

“I know there’s much more work to do, and I’m never going to give up, but this is a monumental day,” Biden said. “God bless us with the strength to get the work left done.”

 

President Biden, God love 'em, got the job done.

 

Of course, the bigger problem is that the Supreme Court has essentially killed any gun safety measures remotely related to this, and I'm sure Mitch McConnell knew Justice Thomas's decision earlier this week to end New York's century-old carry license law was coming. 

Remember, the "compromise" was to give states like Texas and Florida billions in red flag law grant money where the states don't actually have to spend a dime on administering red flag laws.

Between the two, gun safety laws are effectively dead at the state level, and I imagine that if Republicans really wanted to, they could challenge today's law in the courts and win at SCOTUS.

New York and California are going to implement new gun safety measures in the weeks ahead, but I would expect that they will never take effect in the wake of SCOTUS.

Just another day in Gunmerica.  Not the worst one, but this is still a country where firearms will outnumber people for a very long time.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

As I said earlier this month, Putin is profiting tremendously off of Russian sanctions. Oil, food, and commodity prices are up sharply because of the war, and as long as Putin can keep fighting it, American energy companies and OPEC will go along with him with oil at $120 barrel. Oil has dropped to $105 or so in the last week, but there's no reason to think it won't be at this price for a long time.

I also said that from a military standpoint that if nothing changed, Russia would take the Donbass this summer. Having said that, the key things here that have changed is that the US and EU have gotten more and better equipment into the theater, and that the concept of  "as long as Putin can continue the war" means there's evidence now that this will not be "forever".

The Russian military will soon exhaust its combat capabilities and be forced to bring its offensive in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region to a grinding halt, according to Western intelligence predictions and military experts.

“There will come a time when the tiny advances Russia is making become unsustainable in light of the costs and they will need a significant pause to regenerate capability,” said a senior Western official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

The assessments come despite continued Russian advances against outgunned Ukrainian forces, including the capture on Friday of the town of Severodonetsk, the biggest urban center taken by Russia in the east since launching the latest Donbas offensive nearly three months ago.

The Russians are now closing in on the adjacent city of Lysychansk, on the opposite bank of the Donetsk river. The town’s capture would give Russia almost complete control of the Luhansk oblast, one of two oblasts, or provinces, comprising the Donbas region. Control of Donbas is the publicly declared goal of Russia’s “special military operation,” although the multi-front invasion launched in February made it clear that Moscow’s original ambitions were far broader.

Capturing Lysychansk presents a challenge because it stands on higher ground and the Donetsk river impedes Russian advances from the east. So instead, Russian troops appear intent on encircling the city from the west, pressing southeast from Izyum and northeast from Popasna on the western bank of the river.

According to chatter on Russian Telegram channels and Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Anna Malyar, the Russian military is under pressure to bring all of Luhansk under Russian control by Sunday, perhaps explaining the heightened momentum of the past week.

But the “creeping” advances are dependent almost entirely on the expenditure of vast quantities of ammunition, notably artillery shells, which are being fired at a rate almost no military in the world would be able to sustain for long, said the senior Western official.

Russia, meanwhile, is continuing to suffer heavy losses of equipment and men, calling into question how much longer it can remain on the attack, the official said.

Officials refuse to offer a time frame, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, citing intelligence assessments, indicated this week that Russia would be able to continue to fight on only for the “next few months.” After that, “Russia could come to a point when there is no longer any forward momentum because it has exhausted its resources,” he told the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in an interview.

 

So the good news is Russia's attacks have been scaled down dramatically from "taking multiple former Soviet countries back" to "Taking Ukraine" to "Taking Kyiv' to "taking the Donbass" to now, "still trying to take the Donbass while using everything we have left".

 

Putin is definitely scoring damage on the US and EU economically, but militarily he has accomplished zero of his "special operation goals" so far. Ukraine is holding the line.

Things are looking much less dicey than just two weeks ago.

The Road To Gilead: The Path Ahead

Vox's Ian Millihiser tells us what's on the block next for the Roberts Court in a post-Roe, Dobbs world.

 

Alito’s Dobbs opinion acknowledges that the Constitution protects some rights that are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, but only rights that are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”

He’s made this argument before. Specifically, Alito made this “history and tradition” argument in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the landmark opinion holding that people with same-sex partners have the same right to marry that partner as anyone else. “It is beyond dispute that the right to same-sex marriage” is not sufficiently rooted in history and tradition, Alito claimed in his Obergefell dissent.

Justice Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, wrote a concurring opinion in Dobbs where he denounced the concept of “substantive due process,” the legal theory that drives many of the Court’s decisions involving a right to sexual and romantic autonomy. Alito also rejects the idea that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment implies the right to an abortion. But Thomas goes further.

According to Thomas’s opinion, which is joined by no other justice, the Court’s pro-contraception decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), its decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that consenting adults have a right to choose whom they have sex with and how they have sex, and its decision in Obergefell should all be reconsidered.

That said, the final version of Alito’s opinion seems to go out of its way to explain that abortion is different from these other rights — again, because abortion involves the termination of a fetal life and these other rights do not. Much of this language was added after Alito wrote the leaked early draft of the Dobbs opinion.

Indeed, Alito accuses the dissenting opinion — which is co-authored by all three of the Court’s Democratic appointees — of stoking “unfounded fear that our decision will imperil those other rights” because the dissent worries that Dobbs could endanger things like same-sex marriage or contraception.

In any event, the future of rights other than abortion will likely need to be litigated. There is no doubt that Thomas would happily light many existing rights on fire. And there is little doubt that Alito, based on his Obergefell dissent, would also happily tear down same-sex marriage.

But it takes five votes to strip away an existing constitutional right, and it remains to be seen whether Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — conservatives who sometimes break with Alito’s most aggressive attempts to drive the law to the right — will support mass rollbacks of existing rights.

Kavanaugh and Barrett had no problems ending Roe. They will end everything else, as will Alito. 

It gets worse.

Although there may not be five votes on the current Supreme Court to permit an outright ban on all forms of contraception, the Court may permit states to ban certain forms of contraception that many religious conservatives believe to be akin to abortion.

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), a 5-4 Supreme Court held that employers who object to certain forms of birth control on religious grounds may refuse to cover these contraceptive methods in their employees’ health plans. At least some of the plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby claimed that “two forms of emergency contraception commonly called ‘morning after’ pills and two types of intrauterine devices” can cause an abortion because they “may operate after the fertilization of an egg.”

It is far from clear that these forms of birth control actually do operate on fertilized eggs. As Dr. Mary Jacobson, an OB-GYN and chief medical officer at Alpha Medical, told me, “No existing scientific studies validate the fallacy that hormonal contraceptives or the copper intrauterine device act partly as abortifacients.”

But the question of whether IUDs or morning-after pills qualify as contraception (which is still protected by existing Supreme Court precedents) or abortion-inducing drugs (which are not protected after Dobbs) will not be decided by medical doctors. It will be decided by a federal judiciary dominated by conservative Republicans.

In Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), moreover, the Supreme Court held that state and federal lawmakers have “wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty.” This line is likely to play a starring role in conservative judicial decisions permitting bans on certain forms of contraception.

Under Gonzales, to justify a contraception ban, a state does not need to prove that a particular form of contraception definitively acts as an abortion-inducing drug. They just have to convince a court that may be dominated by right-wing Republicans that there is “uncertainty” about how a pill or contraceptive device operates.

Litigation over contraception bans, in other words, is inevitable if a state decides to ban common forms of birth control such as the morning-after pill or IUDs.

 

It's just the beginning, as I said.  Jia Talentino at the New Yorker:

In the states where abortion has been or will soon be banned, any pregnancy loss past an early cutoff can now potentially be investigated as a crime. Search histories, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment data, information from period-tracking apps—prosecutors can examine all of it if they believe that the loss of a pregnancy may have been deliberate. Even if prosecutors fail to prove that an abortion took place, those who are investigated will be punished by the process, liable for whatever might be found.

Five years ago, Latice Fisher, a Black mother of three from Mississippi, who made eleven dollars an hour as a police-radio operator, experienced a stillbirth, at roughly thirty-six weeks, at home. When questioned, she acknowledged that she didn’t want more kids and couldn’t afford to take care of more kids. She surrendered her phone to investigators, who scraped it for search data and found search terms regarding mifepristone and misoprostol, i.e., abortion pills.

These pills are among the reasons that we are not going back to the era of coat hangers. They can be prescribed via telemedicine and delivered via mail; allowing for the prescription of an extra dose, they are ninety-five to ninety-eight per cent effective in cases of pregnancy up to eleven weeks, which account for almost ninety per cent of all abortions in the U.S. Already, more than half of all abortions in the country are medication abortions. In nineteen states, doctors are prohibited from providing abortions via telemedicine, but women can seek help from clinicians in other states and abroad, such as Rebecca Gomperts, who leads Aid Access, an organization based in Austria that is openly providing abortion pills to women in prohibition states, and has been safely mailing abortion pills to pregnant people all over the world since 2005, with the organization Women on Web. In advance of the U.S. bans, Gomperts has been promoting advance prescription: sympathetic doctors might prescribe abortion pills for any menstruating person, removing some of the fears—and, possibly, the traceability—that would come with attempting to get the pills after pregnancy. Misoprostol can be prescribed for other issues, such as stomach ulcers, and Gomperts argues that there is no reasonable medical argument against advance prescription. “If you buy bleach in the supermarket, that’s more dangerous,” she has said.

There was no evidence that Latice Fisher took an abortion pill. She maintained that she had experienced a stillbirth—an occurrence in one out of every hundred and sixty pregnancies in the U.S. Nonetheless, she was charged with second-degree murder and held on a hundred-thousand-dollar bond. The district attorney, Scott Colom, had campaigned as a progressive reformer; advocates pushed him to drop the murder charge, and to provide a grand jury with more information about an antiquated, unreliable “float test” that prosecutors had used as a basis for their allegation that Fisher’s baby was born alive. Fisher was eventually cleared of all charges; the ordeal took more than three years.

Even if it remains possible in prohibition states to order abortion pills, doing so will be unlawful. (Missouri recently proposed classifying the delivery or shipment of these pills as drug trafficking. Louisiana just passed a law that makes mailing abortion pills to a resident of the state a criminal offense, punishable by six months’ imprisonment.) In many states, to avoid breaking the law, a woman would have to drive to a state where abortion is legal, have a telemedicine consultation there, and then receive the pills in that state. Many women in Texas have opted for a riskier but easier option: to drive across the border, to Mexico, and get abortion pills from unregulated pharmacies, where pharmacists may issue incorrect advice for usage. Some women who lack the freedom and money to travel out of state, and who might fear the consequences of seeking a clinical confirmation of their gestational stage, will order abortion pills without a clear understanding of how far along they are in pregnancy. Abortion pills are safe and effective, but patients need access to clinical guidance and follow-up care. Women in prohibition states who want to seek medical attention after a self-managed abortion will, as a rule, have to choose between risking their freedom and risking their health.

Both abortion and miscarriage currently occur more than a million times each year in America, and the two events are often clinically indistinguishable. As such, prohibition states will have a profoundly invasive interest in differentiating between them. Some have already laid the groundwork for establishing government databases of pregnant women likely to seek abortions. Last year, Arkansas passed a law called the Every Mom Matters Act, which requires women considering abortion to call a state hotline and requires abortion providers to register all patients in a database with a unique I.D. Since then, six other states have implemented or proposed similar laws. The hotlines are provided by crisis pregnancy centers: typically Christian organizations, many of which masquerade as abortion clinics, provide no health care, and passionately counsel women against abortion. Crisis pregnancy centers are already three times as numerous as abortion clinics in the U.S., and, unlike hospitals, they are not required to protect the privacy of those who come to them. For years, conservative states have been redirecting money, often from funds earmarked for poor women and children, toward these organizations. The data that crisis pregnancy centers are capable of collecting—names, locations, family details, sexual and medical histories, non-diagnostic ultrasound images—can now be deployed against those who seek their help.

If you become pregnant, your phone generally knows before many of your friends do. The entire Internet economy is built on meticulous user tracking—of purchases, search terms—and, as laws modelled on Texas’s S.B. 8 proliferate, encouraging private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who facilitates an abortion, self-appointed vigilantes will have no shortage of tools to track and identify suspects. (The National Right to Life Committee recently published policy recommendations for anti-abortion states that included criminal penalties for anyone who provides information about self-managed abortion “over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication.”) A reporter for Vice recently spent a mere hundred and sixty dollars to purchase a data set on visits to more than six hundred Planned Parenthood clinics. Brokers sell data that make it possible to track journeys to and from any location—say, an abortion clinic in another state. In Missouri, this year, a lawmaker proposed a measure that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of the state get an abortion elsewhere; as with S.B. 8, the law would reward successful plaintiffs with ten thousand dollars. The closest analogue to this kind of legislation is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

 

The good news is that moving the battle over abortion rights to the states is that Blue states like New York, Illinois, and California are fighting back with new pro-choice legislation and executive orders now.

 

California Governor Gavin Newsom and other top officials vowed that the most-populous state will be an abortion sanctuary and will lead other liberal areas seeking to protect reproductive rights in the wake of the US Supreme Court ruling dismantling Roe v. Wade.

State lawmakers are quickly advancing bills to expand abortion access, including a measure to let voters to decide in November whether to enshrine the right to the procedure in California’s constitution. Newsom, a Democrat up for re-election in the liberal bastion in November, signed a bill on Friday that would protect out-of-state abortion seekers from civil actions in their home states, as well as local providers.

“I want folks to know all around the rest of the country and many parts of the globe, that I hope we’re an antidote to your fear, to your anxiety, perhaps to the cynicism that many of you are feeling about the fate and future of not only our state but the world we’re living in,” Newsom said.

The governor appeared in a Friday briefing with his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta, Senate President pro tempore Toni Atkins, reproductive rights advocates and state legislators to express outrage, sorrow and resolve after the highest court struck down the 1973 decision that established abortion rights.

Newsom has proposed a $125 million package to bolster abortion access in his state. The money would go to providing care for uninsured people, improving infrastructure for reproductive health facilities and giving grants for outreach and education. He also has proposed that companies that move to California from areas with restrictive laws on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights would have a stronger chance of winning tax credits aimed at increasing employment and capital investment.

 

But the bad news is your rights to your body as a woman are now soley determined by where you live, and that is an unsustainable situation. By the end of the year I expect multiple red states will have Texas style bounty laws, not to get around Roe anymore, but to draft citizens into ratting out their pregnant sisters, mothers, co-workers, churchgoers.  

 

The fight over whether anti-abortion states can imprison pregnant people who go to other states to get an abortion is the next big legal battle, and all indications are that this court will say yes they can based on Alito's ruling in Dobbs, that the state has a duty to protect the unborn by punishing women who seek abortion elsewhere.

This is the new regime coming in Texas, Missouri and other states very soon. The goal on Dobbs now shifts to a national ban on abortion, because this was never about babies, or state's rights. It's about control and punishment. And even if we fight back and keep Congress and the WHite House, this court has shown that it will go as far as it takes to yank rights away from people. A ruling on "fetal personhood' classifying all abortion as murder is on the horizon.

 

And let's remember that a Roberts Court that trashed Roe can and will take numerous other Civil Rights Era decisions and toss them into the sun. It's all on the table now, segregation and discrimination protections, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights,  contraception, the whole damn enchilada.

The battle's over for Roe. The war over Dobbs is just beginning.

The Road To Gilead: Reaching The Gates

 The end of safe, legal abortion in half of the Unites States is now upon us.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, holding that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion.  

The opinion is the most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades and will transform the landscape of women's reproductive health in America.   

Going forward, abortion rights will be determined by states, unless Congress acts.  Already, nearly half of the states have or will pass laws that ban abortion while others have enacted strict measures regulating the procedure.   

"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion. "Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division." 

The vote was 5-3-1. In a joint dissenting opinion, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan heavily criticized the majority, closing: "With sorrow -- for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection -- we dissent." 

The opinion represents the culmination of a decades-long effort on the part of critics of abortion seeking to return more power to the states.  It was made possible by a solid six-member conservative majority -- including three of Donald Trump's nominees.  

 

Now the country begins down the road to a federal abortion ban, and worse, overturning Griswold v Connecticut. Along this road will be thousands, tens of thousands, of women dying yearly.

If you personally don't care about access to safe abortions, you already know and care about somebody whose life will be affected by this, right now, today. Texas is already dancing on graves over this.

They won't stop with this, unless we stop them in the future. It's not the end of the battle. It's the start of the war.

Vote like your country depends on it.

Enter your email to sign up for CNN's The Point with Chris Cillizza.

close dialog

Sign up for CNN's

CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know.

By subscribing, you agree to our

privacy policy.

Pardon The Insurrection, Con't

The big legal issue for Trump's inner circle continues to be the slates of fraudulent electors. But the additional problem for Republican in Congress who went all in on Trump's coup is that several of them asked Trump for blanket pardons of their imminent criminal actions, those requests themselves being illegal as all hell.

In the days after Jan. 6, several of Mr. Trump’s political allies on Capitol Hill, who had helped stoke the false election claims and efforts to overturn the results, sought pardons from Mr. Trump, who considered granting them, according to testimony on Thursday.

Among those looking for a pardon was Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida. Mr. Gaetz was seeking a blanket pardon that would have essentially covered any crime he had committed in his entire life. Although it was not known publicly at the time, Mr. Gaetz was under Justice Department investigation for paying a 17-year-old girl for sex.

“The general tone was, ‘We may get prosecuted because we were defensive of, you know, the president’s positions on these things,’” Mr. Herschmann, the White House lawyer, said in a video clip of his testimony. “The pardon that he was requesting was as broad as you could describe. I remember he said ‘from the beginning of time up until today. For any and all things.’”

“Nixon’s pardon was never nearly that broad,” Mr. Herschmann recalled saying at the time in response to the request.

A slew of other allies asked for them. Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, sent an email to the White House seeking so called pre-emptive pardons for all House and Senate members who had voted to reject the Electoral College vote certifications of Mr. Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

A former aide to Mr. Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified that several other Republican House members expressed interest in pardons, including Mr. Perry and Representatives Louie Gohmert of Texas and Andy Biggs of Arizona.

Ms. Hutchinson said she had also heard that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia had reached out to the White House Counsel’s Office about a pardon.

Mr. Trump “had hinted at a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 thing for anybody,” Mr. Trump’s former head of presidential personnel, John McEntee, testified.

Mr. Kinzinger suggested that the pardon requests were evidence that Mr. Trump’s allies had consciousness of guilt.

“The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you’ve committed a crime,” he said.

One of the other Republican crooks to request a pardon was Sen. Mo Brooks, who lost his primary on Tuesday  

Brooks, who this week lost a primary runoff for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, defended his pardon request. Brooks told CNN there was "a concern Democrats would abuse the judicial system by prosecuting and jailing Republicans."

I mean, he's right. Brooks deserves to be prosecuted and jailed. And he'll be out of the Senate very soon... 

You'll have to pardon him, you see.

Last Call For Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

 You live in the Wild West now.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Constitution provides a right to carry a gun outside the home, issuing a major decision on the meaning of the Second Amendment.

The 6-3 ruling was the court’s second important decision on the right to “keep and bear arms.” In a landmark 2008 decision, the court had said for the first time that the amendment safeguards a person’s right to possess firearms, although the decision was limited to keeping guns at home for self-defense.

The court has now taken that ruling to the next step after years of ducking the issue and applied the Second Amendment beyond the limits of homeowners’ property in a decision that could affect the ability of state and local governments to impose a wide variety of firearms regulations.

The decision, which came as Congress advanced the most significant gun violence prevention legislation in almost 30 years, involved a New York law that required showing a special need to get a permit to carry a concealed handgun in public. The state bans carrying handguns openly, but it allows residents to apply for licenses to carry them concealed.

The law at issue said, however, that permits could be granted only to applicants who demonstrated some special need — a requirement that went beyond a general desire for self-protection.

Gun owners in the state sued, contending that the requirement made it virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to get the necessary license. They argued that the law turned the Second Amendment into a limited privilege, not a constitutional right.

The court agreed with the challengers and struck down the heightened requirement, but it left the door open to allowing states to impose limits on the carrying of guns.

"The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not 'a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,'” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion. "We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need."

 

This is the end of any attempt at gun control, as laws will be sued under this precedent for years to come.

 

Get used to your neighbors carrying heat.

 

Act accordingly, I guess. 

Just Another Day In Gunmerica.

The Supreme Death Watch

As of today's SCOTUS decisions, your Miranda rights are now meaningless as you have no Constitutional remedy in the courts to force accountability for violations of your Miranda rights.

 

The Supreme Court limited the ability to enforce Miranda rights in a ruling Thursday that said that suspects who are not warned about their right to remain silent cannot sue a police officer for damages under federal civil rights law even if the evidence was ultimately used against them in their criminal trial. 

The court's ruling will cut back on an individual's protections against self-incrimination by barring the potential to obtain damages. It also means that the failure to administer the warning will not expose a law enforcement officer to potential damages in a civil lawsuit. It will not impact, however, the exclusion of such evidence at a criminal trial. 

The court clarified that while the Miranda warning protects a constitutional right, the warning itself is not a right that would trigger the ability to bring a civil lawsuit. 

"Today's ruling doesn't get rid of the Miranda right," said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. "But it does make it far harder to enforce. Under this ruling, the only remedy for a violation of Miranda is to suppress statements obtained from a suspect who's not properly advised of his right to remain silent. But if the case never goes to trial, or if the government never seeks to use the statement, or if the statement is admitted notwithstanding the Miranda violation, there's no remedy at all for the government's misconduct."

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by the five other Republican-appointed justices, said that a violation of the Miranda right "is not itself a violation of the Fifth Amendment," and that "we see no justification for expanding Miranda to confer a right to sue," under the relevant statute.

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by the other liberal justices, said that the court's ruling was stripping "individuals of the ability to seek a remedy for violations of the right recognized in Miranda."

 

So yes, in cases that never go to trial, where suspects are coerced into a plea bargain (and that makes up the vast majority of criminal cases) there's no penalty for violating your Miranda rights. None.

Every cop in America is going to take advantage of that.

Watch.

Election Insurrection, Con't

The evidence revealed by the January 6th Committee hearings, continuing today, has now coincided with the Justice Department issuing multiple subpoenas in multiple states for election officials involved in Trump's fraudulent elector slate scam.

 

Federal agents investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday dropped subpoenas on people in multiple locations, widening the probe of how political activists supporting President Donald Trump tried to use invalid electors to thwart Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.

Agents conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity Wednesday morning at different locations, FBI officials confirmed to The Washington Post. One was the home of Brad Carver, a Georgia lawyer who allegedly signed a document claiming to be a Trump elector. The other was the Virginia home of Thomas Lane, who worked on the Trump campaign’s efforts in Arizona and New Mexico. The FBI officials did not identify the people associated with those addresses, but public records list each of the locations as the home addresses of the men.

Among those who received a subpoena Wednesday was David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, who served as a Trump elector in that state, people familiar with the investigation said. Shafer’s lawyer declined to comment.

Separately, at least some of the would-be Trump electors in Michigan received subpoenas, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. But it was not immediately clear whether that activity was related to a federal probe or a state-level criminal inquiry.

The precise nature of the information being sought by the Justice Department at the homes of Carver and Lane was not immediately clear.

Officials have previously said that the Justice Department and the FBI were examining the issue of false electors, whom Trump and others hoped might be approved by state legislators in a last-ditch bid to keep Trump in the White House. Until now, however, those investigative efforts seemed to primarily involve talking to people in Republican circles who knew of the scheme and objected; the subpoenas issued Wednesday suggest the Justice Department is now moving to question at least some of those who allegedly agreed to pursue the effort.

FBI agents delivered a subpoena to Lane on Wednesday morning at his home in Virginia, according to the person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. After leaving the Trump campaign, Lane has worked for the Republican National Committee’s election efforts in Virginia, this person said.

A video posted online in 2020 appears to show Lane handing out paperwork for electors at the Arizona Republican Party’s Dec. 14 alternate elector signing ceremony in Phoenix.

Phone messages left for Lane were not immediately returned. Carver, the Georgia lawyer, also did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. Public records list an address for Lane in south Arlington, and an FBI spokeswoman confirmed agents conducted “court-authorized law enforcement activity” at that address on Wednesday morning.

The new investigative moves by the Justice Department come amid a series of high-profile congressional hearings examining not just the riot at the Capitol, but also Trump’s efforts to undo Biden’s electoral victory through fake electors, lobbying the Justice Department and false claims of massive voter fraud.

 

Repeat after me: Conspiracy to defraud the United States of America.

 

Merrick Garland and the DoJ are moving deliberately now towards prosecution and have been for months. We've known about the fake elector scam for 18 months almost. The only question is if they will go all the way up the ladder and charge Trump. The DoJ has been on this investigation since January of this year.

 

Granted, that's the biggest decision of them all, but I guarantee you federal charges are coming for a hell of a lot of Trump's inner circle on this.

 

 

Last Call For Gillium Gets Gotten

As if somehow things couldn't possibly get worse for the semi-torpid corpse of the Florida Democratic Party, the last guy they tried to run against Ron DeSantis is now facing 21 counts of federal fraud charges.

Andrew Gillum, the once-rising Florida Democratic star who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race to Ron DeSantis, was hit with a 21-count federal indictment Wednesday for wire fraud, related conspiracy charges and making false statements.

Gillum, the former Tallahassee mayor, was charged along with his mentor, Sharon Lettman-Hicks, for fraudulently fundraising from "various entities" between 2016 to 2019, according to a Department of Justice press release. The Justice Department said the two allegedly diverted some of the money to a company controlled by Lettman-Hicks, who fraudulently disguised the funds as payroll payments to Gillum.

In a written statement, Gillum and his lawyers proclaimed his innocence. Lettman-Hicks — a candidate for a state House seat — has not returned texts or calls from NBC News requesting comment.

“I have spent the last 20 years of my life in public service and continue to fight for the people,” Gillum said. “Every campaign I’ve run has been done with integrity. Make no mistake that this case is not legal, it is political. Throughout my career I have always stood up for the people of Florida and have spoken truth to power. There’s been a target on my back ever since I was the mayor of Tallahassee. They found nothing then, and I have full confidence that my legal team will prove my innocence now.”

Marc Elias, a leading Democratic lawyer, and top criminal defense attorney David Oscar Markus also issued a joint statement said they’ll fight to clear his name.

“The government got it wrong today. The evidence in this case is clear and will show that Mr. Gillum is innocent of all charges. We look forward to putting this case to rest and giving Andrew and his family peace of mind once and for all,” the lawyers said.

The indictment marks a new low for Gillum, a married father of three who withdrew from public life as a political leader and a paid CNN commentator after a March 2020 sex scandal involving a suspected male overdose victim in a South Beach hotel.

At the time, Gillum said he was abusing alcohol as he coped with his loss to DeSantis, but campaign finance records and a leaked criminal subpoena in 2019 showed that Gillum also faced the pressure of an FBI investigation.

 

Now that investigation has resulted in a boatload of indictments, which if Gillum was governor, would be grounds for impeachment, removal, and, well, someone like DeSantis being elected governor, so. 

Yaaaaaay Florida Dems.

 

We Don't Need No Education, Con't

The Roberts Court issued a ruling on funding religious schools with taxpayer dollars that could most generaously be described as creating a path for forcing states and the federal government to fully fund private relgious schools with taxpayer money, and more accurately as Slate's Mark Joseph Stern writes, a path to ending public education in America period. 

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority effectively declared on Tuesday that the separation of church and state—a principle enshrined in the Constitution—is, itself, unconstitutional. Its 6–3 decision in Carson v. Makin requires Maine to give public money to private religious schools, steamrolling decades of precedent in a race to compel state funding of religion. Carson is radical enough on its own, but the implications of the ruling are even more frightening: As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent, it has the potential to dismantle secular public education in the United States.

Carson challenges Maine’s effort to provide quality civic education to every child in the state. The government created a tuition assistance program to help families who live in remote, sparsely populated regions without any public schools. Under the program, parents can send their kids to certain private schools, and the state covers the cost of tuition. To qualify, these schools must give students a secular education. They may be affiliated with, or even run by, a religious organization. But their actual curricula must align with secular state standards.

Two families challenged this limitation, arguing that it violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Just two decades ago, this claim would’ve been laughed out of court: SCOTUS only permitted states to subsidize religious schools in 2002; at the time, it would’ve been absurd to say that states have a constitutional obligation to subsidize them. Beginning in 2017, the court began to assert that states may not exclude religious schools from public benefits that are available to their secular counterparts. And in 2020, the conservative justices forced states to subsidize religious schools once they began subsidizing secular private education.

Tuesday’s decision in Carson takes this radical theory to a new extreme, ordering Maine to extend public education funds to religious indoctrination.

The upshot of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court is that states have no compelling interest in providing public, secular education to children. Indeed, Roberts suggests that the very concept of secular schooling is a smokescreen for “discrimination against religion”—a pretext for unconstitutional animus toward pious Americans. His opinion reaches far beyond Maine. About 37 states have amendments to their constitutions that bar government funding of religious institutions, including schools. Carson essentially invalidates those laws while undermining the broader constitutional basis for the nation’s public school system.

Roberts reached this astonishing result by overruling broad swaths of precedent respecting states’ authority to separate church and state more strictly than the U.S. Constitution requires. The court previously upheld states’ interest in avoiding the “establishment” of religion by refusing to underwrite the indoctrination of students into a particular faith. No longer. Roberts condemned Maine’s efforts to guard against religious establishment as nothing more than “discrimination against religion”—an effort to “exclude some members of the community” from public benefits “because of their religious exercise.” He also overruled a line of cases that let the government withhold funding on the basis of religious use (like indoctrination) but not religious status (like affiliation with a church). That distinction, he wrote, “lacks a meaningful application not only in theory, but in practice as well,” tossing it in the precedential dumpster.

The chief justice maintained that Carson’s rule only kicks in once a state starts sending taxpayer dollars to private schools through vouchers, tax credits, or scholarships. So, in theory, a state can send all its money to public schools and avoid constitutional concerns. Even if that’s true, the consequences are sweeping: Most states offer at least one of these programs, so Carson gives millions of families an opportunity to bail out of the public school system and demand public money for parochial education.

But can this distinction hold? Roberts’ bright line dims under scrutiny: Maine, after all, wanted private schools to replace public education for some students, not supplement it. And yet the court found no good reason for the state to insist that these substitute schools adhere to secular standards. Indeed, the chief justice’s rhetoric depicts education not as a state-sponsored benefit for all, but rather as a personal matter best left up to parents. There is, he claimed, no “historic and substantial state interest” in preserving secular education. If that’s true, how can any state refuse to fund religious schooling?

Breyer raised these questions in dissent. Does Carson, he asked, “mean that a school district that pays for public schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to send their children to religious schools?” In other words, must every state begin cutting checks to parents who want to give their kids a Christian education? Does Carson mean “school districts that give vouchers for use at charter schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to give their children a religious education?” Can states even mandate secular curricula at charter schools any more? Who knows? In the end, the only limit on Carson is whatever five justices want it to be.

 

The issues Justice Breyer raises are the ones that will be determined in future cases, because I guarantee you those lawsuits are being readied in light of Chief Justice Roberts's bonkers interpretation of Carson. The next step is almost certainly demanding that anything less than equal funding for religious schools as public secular ones is religious discrimination, and that the standards that secular schools are held to when getting that state and federal money will be changed to meet religious school dogma.

In other words, the end of secular schooling, period.

This is as dangerous a ruling as it gets to the future of America.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

The Senate "Bipartisan Deal" on gun safety in the wake of lethal mass shootings in Buffalo NY and Uvalde, Texas has resulted in a toothless federal bill that shifts the burdens of adopting red flag and background check laws to states, and rewards state that refuse to implement either with more federal money for "crisis prevention". 

 

A bipartisan group of senators overcame some last-minute hurdles and released legislative text Tuesday on a narrow set of provisions to combat gun violence, including state funding to implement “red flag” laws and enhanced background checks.

“Today, we finalized bipartisan, commonsense legislation to protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country," Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a joint statement along with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C.

"Our legislation will save lives and will not infringe on any law-abiding American’s Second Amendment rights. We look forward to earning broad, bipartisan support and passing our commonsense legislation into law,” they added.

Cornyn said earlier Tuesday that the senators agreed to address the so-called boyfriend loophole by limiting gun rights for non-spouse dating partners who are convicted of domestic abuse.

“Unless someone is convicted of domestic abuse under their state laws, their gun rights will not be impacted," he said on the Senate floor. "Those who are convicted of non-spousal misdemeanor domestic abuse—not felony, but misdemeanor domestic violence—will have an opportunity after five years to have their Second Amendment rights restored. But they have to have a clean record."

The legislation will offer red flag grants to every state, including those that do not adopt red flag laws, which can be used on other crisis prevention programs designed to prevent individuals in crisis from resorting to violence, said Cornyn, the chief GOP negotiator.

The boyfriend loophole and red flag provisions were the last two major sticking points between the core senators: Murphy, Cornyn, Sinema and Tillis.

"We are closing the boyfriend loophole," Murphy said. "This provision alone is going to save the lives of so many women who unfortunately die at the hands of a boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend who hunts them down with a firearm."

Murphy said the bill enhances background checks for people between the ages of 18 and 21, allowing up to three days to conduct checks, and an extra 10 days if there are signs of concern. He said it will contain tougher penalties for gun trafficking and "clarify" which sellers must register as a federal firearm licensee, which would force them to conduct background checks. And he said the bill expands money for mental health and school-based health.

The National Rifle Association quickly announced its opposition to the bill, arguing in a statement that the legislation “does little to truly address violent crime while opening the door to unnecessary burdens on the exercise of Second Amendment freedom by law-abiding gun owners.”

The evenly split Senate is expected to hold a procedural vote on the legislation as early as Tuesday night, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., saying he hopes to pass the bill this week. The initial vote would only require a simple majority to begin processing the legislation.

It remains to be seen whether there will be 60 votes to ultimately break a filibuster and end debate on the bill later in the voting process.

 

We'll see if the bill survives or not, but even if it does, in the era of the Roberts Court, states have to opt in individually and still get the money if they don't. 

Quite literally this is the best we're going to get on federal firearms legislation, and even then, it's an entirely optional law.

If it even becomes law, which is still very much in doubt.

 

Last Call For The Ravnsborg And The Tower

After his impeachment in April by South Dakota's state House, SD Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg faced a state Senate trial and possible removal from office on Tuesday over his conduct in a fatal hit and run crash that left a man dead in 2020, and when Ravnsborg faced the music he had no chair to sit in when it stopped playing.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was removed from office on Tuesday after an historic impeachment trial in the state Senate, nearly two years after he fatally struck a man with his vehicle.

Ravnsborg was facing two articles of impeachment stemming from his role in the 2020 car crash: one for crimes that resulted in death, and the other for malfeasance related to his conduct after the collision.

The senators voted 24-9 in favor of the first article — the exact number of votes to meet the two-thirds threshold necessary for conviction and removal — and 31-3 for the second. Those outcomes triggered a third vote on whether Ravnsborg should be barred from holding future office, with all 33 senators present voting in favor of that.

Ravnsborg, a Republican who was elected state attorney general in 2018, now becomes the first South Dakota official to be removed from office –– more than two months after he became the first to ever be impeached following a vote in the state House of Representatives.

For almost two years, the ordeal surrounding Ravnsborg has gripped South Dakota locals and brought national attention to the sparsely populated state.

It also became a dominant focus for the state’s governor, Kristi Noem, who repeatedly called on Ravnsborg to resign. After Ravnsborg pleaded no contest to a pair of misdemeanors over the crash, Noem immediately called on the legislature to move forward with impeachment.

Following the vote in the state Senate on Tuesday, Noem celebrated the outcome.

“After nearly 2 years the dark cloud over the Attorney General’s office has been lifted,” the governor said on Twitter. “It is now time to move on and begin to restore confidence in the office.”

Ravnsborg was driving back to the capital city of Pierre on September 12, 2020 when he veered off the road and struck a man named Joseph Boever. The subsequent chain of events is what elevated the crash to a scandal. Ravnsborg claims he did not realize he hit a man that night, and after calling 911, the responding county sheriff loaned the attorney general his personal vehicle to complete his trip back to the capital city of Pierre that night.

When he drove back to return the sheriff’s vehicle the following morning, Ravnsborg and his chief of staff stopped by the scene and found Boever’s lifeless body. Ravnsborg claims that was the first moment he knew he had hit a man.

There has been pervasive skepticism surrounding that account, which was a central topic at Tuesday’s trial.

“He absolutely saw the man,” said Alexis Tracy, one of two attorneys leading the prosecution.

Tracy said Ravnsborg had “countless” opportunities “to do the right thing.”

In his closing arguments, Mark Vargo, the other prosecutor, probed some of Ravnsborg’s comments made to investigators, at one point playing a clip of the attorney general clumsily saying he never saw the man.

“You’ve heard better lies from five-year-olds,” Vargo said.

 

Ravnsborg really believed he would never be removed in this way and that he would simply be able to run in November for a second term. That will not happen now. Justice was not served here, but accountability was to be had for once in the GOP.

It's the exception that proves the rule of a party of corruption.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Democratic party strategists are gearing up for the death of Roe v Wade in the next week or two, in an attempt to massively rally voters to show up at the polls once abortion becomes de facto illegal in half the US.

In every poll running in every targeted House district around the country, House Democrats’ campaign arm is testing how voters feel about the Supreme Court likely overturning Roe v. Wade.

The group’s strategists have drafted fundraising emails that will blast out to millions of supporters in the hours after the decision comes out. They’ve cut video clips of what GOP candidates say about abortion. They’re developing analytics models to find and target voters who back abortion rights.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s preparations, previewed by a committee official, are a window into the Democratic Party’s broader efforts to capitalize — in the middle of a brutal-looking midterm election climate — on the Supreme Court’s likely reversal of Roe v. Wade, which would change a half-century of precedent and let states decide the legality of abortion.

Support for Roe is at an all-time high with voters, and the Democrats’ strategy is aimed at firing up a flagging Democratic base, while also trying to compete for some of the college-educated, female, suburban swing voters who backed them during the Trump era. The question, though, is how to make abortion a top issue for voters in November while facing a range of challenges, especially gas prices averaging $5 a gallon and inflation ticking up.

“We’re not going to be able to keep it in the national news, but we’re going to put a lot of money on paid advertising — on TV, on digital ads, on mail, on radio — and in key places across the country, and that’s how this issue will matter,” said Stephanie Schriock, former president of EMILY’s List, a Democratic pro-abortion-rights group. “And in some states, it will be in the news every day, because state legislatures are going to push this issue further and further to the right with outright bans.”

The DCCC is one of many entities on the left meticulously planning how to jump on the post-Roe moment, starting in the minutes after it happens.

The Democratic National Committee put together briefings and message trainings with state parties, surrogates and campaign staff on Roe, while the Democratic Governors’ Association will be launching the “Protect Reproductive Rights Fund,” which will direct cash and volunteers through the fund to states where abortion is poised to be banned altogether.

The DGA — charged with electing Democratic governors, who will be on the front lines on this issue — is already drafting language for fundraising emails, social media posts and texts and direct mail to voters.

American Bridge, a Democratic super PAC, had its full roster of paid influencers pivot all their conversations to Roe after POLITICO published a draft majority opinion overturning the precedent in May. And in the Senate, Democrats are drilling into candidates’ statements on abortion, particularly those who support banning it even in cases of rape and incest, a stance that former President Donald Trump hasn’t gone so far as to agree to.

As for spending, EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood and NARAL, a trio of abortion rights groups, announced $150 million in spending on the 2022 midterms.

“We will be using every tool in the toolbox to tell this story,” said Heather Williams, executive director at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “We know that Roe is not the only issue [in the midterms], but Roe is a motivator … and we definitely see that voters who may be only presidential-year voters — that Roe falling certainly gives them additional motivation and urgency.”

Democrats’ efforts come as support for abortion rights hits an all-time high. Gallup, which has tracked views on abortion for decades, found that voters self-identifying as “pro-choice” jumped to 55 percent in recent weeks. The Pew Research Center found that six in 10 Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. After the draft opinion reversing Roe was published, the Kaiser Foundation found that two-thirds of Americans said they do not want the 1973 decision to be overturned.

But even though a majority of Americans don’t want Roe overturned, that doesn’t mean they will automatically vote along those lines in November.

“I don’t think it wins us the persuasion fight, given everything else the public is facing, from inflation to rising costs to supply chain problems,” said Josh Ulibarri, a Democratic pollster.

“The decision will help motivate our base,” Ulibarri continued. “I see no data, no focus group, no survey where Republicans win on the abortion fight. We win it handily. But is that more powerful than when a voter looks at their receipt when they check out at Target?”

 

The problem is the DCCC and the DGA are still clown shows. Current DCCC leader Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney might very well get redistricted out of the House altogether by Democrats in his own state of New York because he's such an asshole, and Gov. Roy Cooper in NC has his hands full with the NC GOP overriding nearly all of his vetoes, including anti- abortion laws.

The cold hard reality though is that the economy is the number one issue with voters. We'll see what voters think, but this was a battle we lost in 2016 and now millions of women will pay the price.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Tang The Conqueror has apparently realized just how bad the January 6th hearings have been and will continue to be, so much so that Trump is going to play the Roger Stone game with former White House legal adviser John Eastman, offering Eastman up to the Committee (and AG Merrick Garland) in order to try to save his own ass.

With the Justice Department and Jan. 6 committee taking a close look at Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he and his cronies could certainly use a fall guy, and it looks like they’ve found their patsy: right-wing lawyer John Eastman.

Eastman worked for Trump as the attorney devised legal strategies to overturn the election to keep the outgoing president in power. But, in recent weeks, Trump has confided to those close to him that he sees no reason to publicly defend Eastman, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president is also deeply annoyed with Eastman and all the negative “attention” and media coverage that the lawyer’s work has brought Trump and his inner sanctum, including during the ongoing Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill.

Furthermore, to those who’ve spoken Trump about Eastman in recent months, the ex-president has repeated an excuse he often uses when backed into a corner, as investigators confront him with an associates’ misdeeds: He has privately insisted he “hardly” or “barely” knows Eastman, despite the fact that he counseled Trump on taking a string of extra-legal measures in a bid to stay in power and wrote the so-called “coup memo,” which laid out the facsimile of a legal argument for reversing Trump’s election defeat.

Behind closed doors, Trump will occasionally ask questions about Eastman’s fortunes, including bluntly inquiring: “Is [John] going to jail?” according to a source who has heard the former president say this. But publicly, Trump has stayed silent. Over the past several months, Trump has been strongly advised by lawyers and several associates not to openly discuss Eastman or his work — and to personally avoid the man altogether, according to three sources familiar with the matter. At this time, Trump, his legal advisers, and various political counselors would prefer to cut ties with Eastman and keep their distance, in a perhaps vain attempt to build a firewall between the lawyer who enthusiastically pitched strategies for delegitimizing the 2020 election outcome and the ex-president who repeatedly sought his help.

“It has been repeatedly communicated to the [former] president that he should not even bring up Johnny Eastman’s name because he is maybe the most radioactive person [involved in this] when it comes to…any so-called criminal exposure,” a source with direct knowledge of the matter says. “Johnny does not have many friends in [the upper crust of] Trumpworld left, and most people loyal to the [former] president are fine with him being left out on his own, to deal with whatever consequences he may or may not face.”

Indeed, the infamously garrulous Trump has publicly kept his mouth shut about Eastman, a lawyer whose work became integral to the scandalous efforts to nullify President Biden’s 2020 victory. (Trump even considered Eastman as counsel for his post-insurrection impeachment.)

Nowadays, in the top ranks of MAGAland, there’s a clear attitude towards Eastman (“Johnny,” as some Trump advisers derisively call him): He might be going down. So be it, as long as he doesn’t take anyone else down with him.

Eastman and a Trump spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment from Rolling Stone.

 

Now, the long game as with Stone, is that Trump expects to be back in power, and he'll pardon everyone involved on his Team Stupid Conpiracy checklist.

 

But anyone even slightly self-aware on this knows Eastman was a key player, and giving him up could have him turn on Trump to save himself.

 

The bigger issue is that Trump now knows he's in real trouble over this coup thing. The walls are getting a bit closer this week.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

VP Kamala Harris visited the African American History Museum in Washington DC today, surprising a class of students as America observed our first federal holiday for Juneteenth.

Children and their families greeted Harris, the first Black woman to serve as the nation's second-highest executive, with cheers as she entered the room.

"Happy Juneteenth, young leaders," a smiling Harris told the children.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were the last to learn President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier, freeing them from slavery. The date achieved federal holiday status last June, when President Joe Biden signed into law the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act.

"Today is a day to celebrate the principle of freedom," Harris told the children ages 4 to 10, "and think about it in terms of the context of history, knowing that Black people in America were not free for 400 years of slavery, but then at the end of slavery -- right? ... when the Emancipation Proclamation happened, that America had to really think about defining freedom ..."

"I would argue, it is our God-given right to have freedom," she added. "It is your birthright to have freedom, and then during slavery freedom was taken. And so we're not going to celebrate being given back what God gave us anyway" as the group voiced agreement, one person saying, "Amen."

She continued, "let this be a day that is a day to celebrate the principle of freedom, but to speak about it honestly and accurately, both in the context of history, and current application. That's what I'm thinking about today."

 

Republicans in several states of course have made laws where students and teachers actually did "speak about it honestly and accurately" about Juneteenth and its accompanying history "both in the context of history, and current application" the teacher would immediately be fired or worse.

 

It's no coincidence that she said this.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.