Racism is alive and well, Thanks Trump and his supporters!

[Athos_131]

Sikh school bus driver reported years of harassment over his turban and beard

Some who noticed his turban and unshorn beard called him a terrorist. Others taunted that he was Osama bin Laden. From nearly his first day as a school bus driver in suburban Maryland, Sawinder Singh, an observant Sikh, said he was targeted for the way he looked.

The harassment came from co-workers, supervisors and students, he said. One day while driving the roads of Montgomery County, he missed a turn, only to have a large group of middle-schoolers aboard shout that he was kidnapping them.

“The driver is going to blow up the bus!” he recalls them yelling.

But 13 years into his career with the county school system, Singh, 45, is turning a page on those experiences, as his lawyers and school officials settle issues raised in a complaint filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016.

The agreement, expected to be announced Tuesday, includes efforts to improve cultural education and training on recognizing bias, which Singh said he hopes will lead to a greater understanding among employees and students of Sikhs and other religious minorities in the diverse school system.

His attorneys assert the case could have a broad reach nationally, given Montgomery’s stature as one of the country’s largest and most well-regarded school systems.

“If a school district of its caliber is doing this, then other districts will take notice,” said Amrith Kaur, legal director for the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights organization representing Singh. “I hope that it’s a wake-up call for other districts and for other employers.”

Kaur’s organization, which has represented hundreds of hate-crime clients over the past 18 years, says that Sikhs in America are hundreds of times more likely than the average American to experience bias. Many are targeted because of their skin color, turbans, uncut hair and religious faith; some, including Singh, also are immigrants.

“This is an issue that continues to grow, and it’s not going away,” Kaur said.

School system officials said in a statement they investigated each allegation Singh made and took “swift corrective action” with staff members and students who engaged in offensive behavior.

They said they are committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment, citing training efforts on cultural proficiency and implicit bias, along with broader efforts to address hate-based incidents in schools.

In response to incidents cited by Singh, school officials said they conducted face-to-face training on workplace bullying among transportation department workers in 2016, published a staff newsletter story in 2016 about Singh to highlight his background and experiences, and listed him as a resource for teachers on Sikh or South Asian cultural programs.

“We do not and will not tolerate behavior that is hateful, bigoted, racist or discriminatory,” the statement said.

Singh, a father of three who lives in Clarksburg and has two children in the school system, started his job in 2006. He was a musician and music teacher in India — and a devotional singer at Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion, he said.

He moved to the United States in 1999, following several trips to the country to perform music, and later landed a job with the school system’s transportation operations.

“Working with the school system, to me, it was a kind of honor, and especially working with students and children,” he said. “I felt that I am going to start their day and end their day. I was very happy about it.”

But harassment soon followed, he said. As an observant Sikh, he said, his unshorn hair and beard are integral to his religion and considered among his “articles of faith” — showing thankfulness and humility and that “whatever you are given by God, you keep it, you do not touch it.”

In the beginning, Singh did not want to make waves and did not report incidents, his lawyers say.

“He didn’t do it the first time or the second time or even the fifth time something unfair happened to him,” said Karla Gilbride, a senior attorney with Public Justice, a public interest legal organization that joined the Sikh Coalition on the case in January 2018.

According to the EEOC complaint, co-workers in the transportation department called Singh “Osama bin Laden,” “al-Qaeda” and “Taliban.” When bin Laden was killed in 2011, it said, fellow employees expressed condolences to him as if they were related.

One supervisor threatened to put duct tape on Singh’s beard and pull it off, the document said, and when he said he did not appreciate the joke — and that his hair was an expression of his religion — he was told he lacked a sense of humor.

Many offensive comments came from students, too: The complaint lists 21 incidents he said he reported to school officials from 2011 to 2016, each listed with a date.

One student reached out to shake his hand in August 2013, then asked if he had a bomb. A group of students at first refused to board his bus in November 2015, saying he was a terrorist.

In February 2016, a student began to board, then stepped back, saying, “Look at the driver! We are all going to die today!”

Singh said he struggled with how he was treated. His attorneys said that while the school system responded to many incidents reported by Singh, the response was inadequate.

“These things were troubling me all the time when I came home, affecting my sleep,” he said. “My background is in serving, not harming anybody.”

Starting in 2011, Singh tried to report major incidents of harassment by students in writing, according to the EEOC complaint. A copy of the EEOC complaint shared with The Washington Post was redacted, with names of employees and schools removed.

In 2012, it said, a supervisor told him that his efforts to inform students’ schools of their behavior “would ruin students’ education.” The supervisor tried to dissuade him from completing paperwork and said he was too easily offended, according to the document.

In response to the EEOC complaint, school officials said they deny being liable for discrimination but believe “we can and must work together with the community to ensure all students and staff are treated with respect.”

In other allegations, Singh’s EEOC complaint said he was denied opportunities for training and advancement and “required to do less complex work when compared to my non-Sikh, non-South Asian, non-Indian origin colleagues.”

Singh was promoted to bus route supervisor but asserts he was assigned menial tasks. And after the Sikh Coalition advocated on his behalf, the complaint alleged he was retaliated against — written up harshly for dropping two students off at home, rather than at a caregiver’s, after believing their account that a parent’s note had been lost.

He was suspended without pay for 10 days and cited for a “critical offense” that bars promotion for at least three years, the complaint said.

As part of the settlement, the school system will establish a project team to consider changes to training initiatives that would make them more interactive and based in real-life scenarios, and include awareness of the Sikh religion. The two organizations involved in Singh’s case will propose changes that school officials will consider; the first formal proposal should be offered within 60 days.

The goal is a more systemic approach that includes assessing the climate for students and staff of all ethnicities and religions, and going beyond individual discipline, Singh’s lawyers said.

The agreement also includes expanded career opportunities for Singh, including the chance to work under a mentor and transfer to another bus depot. Singh’s attorneys declined to discuss any potential financial compensation in the settlement.

Singh said he is happy the school system was willing to work on the agreement — and hopes that processes and procedures improve for others facing harassment.

“I’m hoping there will be more enforcement,” he said, adding that he does not want to see anyone else have to bear up to similar disparagement. “If any employees are being discriminated against, there should be proper investigations.”

“I want everyone to feel a sense of belonging,” he said.

#Resist

[_priapism]

I remember the time my kid pointed at a Sikh man at a sandwich shop and asked loudly, “IS THAT MAN A TERRORIST?”  I informed him no, and took him over to the man to apologize.  The gentleman was very gracious, invited us to join him, and we all learned something about Sikhism.

[Athos_131]

Laura Ingraham promoted a white supremacist on her show. At least one advertiser is pulling out.

A photo-printing company has pulled its advertisements from Laura Ingraham’s show after the Fox News program aired a graphic featuring white supremacist and anti-Semite Paul Nehlen.

The controversy stems from a Thursday night episode of "The Ingraham Angle,” in which the host lamented recent comments made by Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), criticizing Facebook’s refusal to take down an altered video of Pelosi.

Speaking with conservative activist Candace Owens, Ingraham likened the altered video to a work of satire. Clinton’s and Pelosi’s complaints, she said, were simply a coordinated effort from the left to “silence conservative voices” ahead of next year’s election, a common accusation by conservatives, including President Trump.

“Facebook now, what do they monitor, hate?” Ingraham asked. “That sounds good until you realize hate — and these are some of the people that they’ve shunned.”

Fox then displayed a graphic featuring Owens and seven other “prominent voices censored on social media.” Among those silenced, Ingraham said, were “people who believe in border enforcement, people who believe in national sovereignty.”

But for many, the inclusion of Nehlen — who was banned from Twitter in February 2018 for a racist tweet about Meghan Markle, actress and wife of Britain’s Prince Harry, and is known for espousing anti-Semitic rhetoric — was indefensible. Once a fringe candidate in the Republican congressional primaries in Wisconsin, Nehlen has described himself as “pro-White” and has a documented affiliation with the alt-right movement. He once tweeted a list of his critics on Twitter, writing that of those 81 people, “74 are Jews while only 7 are non-Jews.”

Nehlen was denounced by Breitbart, and soon afterward, his own party.

CNN news anchor Jake Tapper also criticized Ingraham on Friday, tweeting: “Just a reminder that Paul Nehlen is a racist and if you’re defending him that’s what you’re defending.”

Included in the backlash were numerous calls to Ingraham’s advertisers to boycott her show. By Friday evening, at least one had taken notice: photo-printing company Fracture.

“Last night one of our ads aired during an episode of The Ingraham Angle during which Laura Ingraham expressed alarming views that run entirely counter to the values that we hold as a company,” Fracture wrote in a statement. “Effective immediately, we are no longer advertising on The Ingraham Angle.”

In a statement, Fox News vehemently denied assertions that Ingraham was defending Nehlen.

“It is obscene to suggest that Laura Ingraham was defending Paul Nehlen’s despicable actions, especially when some of the names in our graphic were pulled from an Associated Press report on best known political extremists banned from Facebook,” the statement read. “Anyone who watches Laura’s show knows that she is a fierce protector of freedom of speech and the intent of the segment was to highlight the growing trend of unilateral censorship in America.”

Ingraham appeared to respond to those who had condemned her show in a Friday morning tweet, writing, “Retweeting screenshots of despicable old tweets by racists and/or anti-Semites must make those racist & anti-Semites very happy.”

Fracture, which promised to update its media-buying criteria following Thursday’s episode, is one of several companies that have pulled out of "The Ingraham Angle” in recent years. In March 2018, she lost more than a dozen advertisers after accusing Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg of whining when he was rejected from four California colleges.

Among those to pull out: Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Hulu, Jenny Craig, Ruby Tuesday and Miracle-Ear. Ingraham later apologized. However, Hogg — who was eventually accepted into Harvard — alleged the mea culpa was a front to “save your advertisers.”

The Washington Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi wrote in December these advertiser decisions tend not to affect Fox’s bottom line. That month, at least 18 companies had pulled their ads from Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show after he claimed immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”

But these upset advertisers can be moved to other programs throughout the day, Farhi noted, leaving Fox with no loss of revenue.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Jared Kushner Is A Coward

#Resist

[Athos_131]

YouTube: No, We Won't Remove These Videos of Racist, Anti-Gay Harassment Because It's Just 'Debating'

YouTube has chosen not to take action against right-wing video personality Steven Crowder after Vox host Carlos Maza posted clips of Crowder repeatedly harassing him with derogatory, anti-gay, and racist statements, which Maza says resulted in hordes of Crowder’s fans doxxing him and subjecting him to abuse on social media.

Last week, Maza posted a cut of Crowder’s show to Twitter, including sections where Crowder called him a “lispy queer,” a “token Vox gay atheist sprite,” and a “gay Mexican.” Other attacks included an offensive pantomime of Maza’s voice in which Crowder pretended to eat chips and exclaimed “just can’t eat one, like dicks.” (According to Maza, Crowder has also referred to him by the derogatory slur “anchor baby”). Maza said in followup tweets that Crowder’s videos, many of which had received millions of views, continually led to him experiencing a “wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter,” as well as waves of taunting texts to his cell phone number and on one occasion, a phone call.

“This has been going on for years,” Maza tweeted.

YouTube’s hate speech policy page specifically bars “content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups” based on a number of attributes including ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation. In a subsection, YouTube specifically writes creators cannot:

Use racial, ethnic, religious, or other slurs where the primary purpose is to promote hatred.

Use stereotypes that incite or promote hatred based on any of the attributes noted above. This can take the form of speech, text, or imagery promoting these stereotypes or treating them as factual.

Invoking hurtful stereotypes of gay men as effeminate to target a specific gay person, as well as disparaging references to that person’s ethnic background, seems about as straightforward a violation of this policy as can be. YouTube writes on that page that content in violation of these rules will be removed and can result in a creator having strikes applied to their account.

Perhaps that’s why in an obviously insincere apology video uploaded this weekend, Crowder tried his best to come off as indifferent but nonetheless felt the need to insist off the bat he was “not in violation of policy guidelines.”

Turns out YouTube agrees! The platform responded on Tuesday by saying it would not take any action on the videos involved. After claiming YouTube takes “allegations of harassment very seriously” and that they had spent days “conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us,” the Team YouTube Twitter wrote that while Crowder’s language was “clearly hurtful,” “the videos as posted don’t violate our policies” and will “remain on our site.”

Gizmodo asked YouTube and its parent company, Google, via email why the specific language used by Crowder and highlighted in Maza’s videos did not constitute a violation of the previously aforementioned rules. In response, the Google Press Team directed Gizmodo to the prior thread on Twitter, but included “Further info on Background (okay to paraphrase, according to YouTube)”.

Gizmodo did not agree to any kind of “on background” stipulation with YouTube beforehand, so here it is.

Amid relaying some boilerplate data points on its anti-harassment policies and insisting that Crowder did not personally spread Maza’s personal information online—which neither Gizmodo nor Maza have alleged—the Google Press Team said that it takes into account whether “criticism is focused primarily on debating the opinions expressed or is solely malicious.” It also argued that “the main point of these videos was not to harass or threaten, but rather respond to the opinion” expressed by Maza in prior videos:

We have strict policies that prohibit harassment on YouTube.

In the first quarter of 2019 we removed 47,443 videos and 10,623 accounts for violation of our policies on cyberbullying and harassment.

We take into consideration whether criticism is focused primarily on debating the opinions expressed or is solely malicious. We apply these policies consistently, regardless of how many views a video has.

In videos flagged to YouTube, Crowder has not instructed his viewers to harass Maza on YouTube or any other platform and the main point of these videos was not to harass or threaten, but rather to respond to the opinion.

There is certain behavior that is never ok: that includes encouraging viewers to harass others online and offline, or revealing nonpublic personal information (doxxing).

None of Maza’s personal information was ever revealed in content uploaded by Crowder and flagged to our teams for review.

(The press team did not respond to multiple follow-up requests for comment from Gizmodo on the specifics of how it determined Crowder’s language was not in violation of its hate speech policy.)

So in other words, YouTube’s stance is apparently that it is okay for a host with millions of subscribers (3,846,360 as of early Wednesday a.m.) to repeatedly engage in racist, homophobic bullying so long as it’s couched as part of some kind of ambiguously defined ‘debate.’ This is not only a fundamental misunderstanding of the intent of hate speech, which is not to “debate” or “respond” but to dehumanize, but is almost indistinguishable from bad-faith rhetorical arguments offered up by people spreading hate speech. In fact, Maza said that in 2018 he received hundreds of anonymous texts saying “debate steven crowder.”

YouTube is refusing to take action on this not so long after it denied allegations its proprietary algorithms for juicing audience numbers are contributing to the spread and normalization of hate speech online—what’s been colloquially referred to as the “extremist rabbit hole.” (Coincidentally, one data-driven report by Data & Society last year listed Crowder as one of a network of 65 YouTube personalities, ranging from more mainstream conservative figures like psychologist Jordan Peterson to white supremacists like Richard Spencer, that promote reactionary positions through “an interlocking series of videos, references, and guest appearances.”)

“It’s bullshit and they know it. Literally every form of hate speech qualifies as a ‘hurtful opinion,’” Maza told Gizmodo via Twitter DM. “YouTube is trying to make excuses to avoid enforcing its own policies, because it knows that enforcing them would require them to punish some of their most ‘engaging’ creators. YouTube doesn’t give a shit about actually stopping harassment, it’s doing damage control so it can keep tricking advertisers into believing that it has the courage to regulate its own platform.”

“... Audiences don’t need to be explicitly asked to harass a target to become abusive,” Maza added. “If they see a major YouTuber doing it, they get the message that that kind of abuse is acceptable. Give me a break... My issue isn’t that Crowder is asking his followers to harass me. It’s that he’s harassing me, with homophobic and racist language, in front of millions of loyal listeners, thanks to an audience that YouTube helped him find and build.”

Maza posed a question to LGBTQ+ employees at YouTube: “YouTube has decided to side with the people who made our lives miserable in high school. It’s decided to use the platform you’ve helped create in order to arm bigots and bullies with massive megaphones. Why do you stick around? What are you going to do about it?”

By the way, YouTube’s account on the site is currently decorated to celebrate LGBT Pride Month.

n a separate statement posted to its subsidiary the Verge, Vox Media wrote that YouTube “now appears to be broken in some ways that we can’t tolerate. By refusing to take a stand on hate speech, they allow the worst of their communities to hide behind cries of “free speech” and “fake news” all while increasingly targeting people with the most offensive and odious harassment... YouTube is not enforcing the policies and are not removing known and identified users who employ hate speech tactics. By tacitly looking the other way, it encourages this behavior and contributes to a society more divided and more radicalized.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Listen to Rashida Tlaib

Rep. Rashida Tlaib choked up during a congressional hearing on Tuesday while reading one of the torrent of death threats she said she has received for the crime of being one of the first Muslim women ever to serve in Congress.

Tlaib, who has been the consistent target of racist and Islamophobic attacks since taking office, was asking FBI officials about the “tools” they have to fight domestic extremism when she read from a letter she and fellow Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar had been sent. She had to pause to compose herself while reading the letter and was visibly emotional as she finished it.

The letter writer referred to Tlaib and Omar as “ragheads,” said they were pleased to hear about the Christchurch massacre, and added, “This is a great start. Let’s hope and pray that it continues here in the good old USA. The only good Muslim is a dead one.”

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1136013078510874624

“We get so many of them,” she added, “and I keep asking, what happens? What happens to these individuals...I’m a mother. I want to go home to my two boys.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The FBI Admits Black Lives Matter Was Never a Threat. It’s White People You Should Be Worried About

Last week, as Donald Trump curtsied before the Queen; as Congressional Democrats continued to cower from their constitutional obligations; while we took our horses down to Old Town Road, mounted Megan Thee Stallion’s bandwagon and watched what happens When They See Us, the Federal Bureau of Investigation admitted that prejudiced assumptions against the Black Lives Matter movement, Muslim Americans and black identity extremists was all a lie. Intelligence officials sat in front of lawmakers and openly admitted that white supremacists and right-wing violence are the biggest domestic terror threat but also admitted that federal agencies aren’t really doing anything about it.

On Tuesday, June 4, the House Oversight subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties held the second session in a series of hearings titled: “Confronting White Supremacy.” Among those testifying before the subcommittee was Michael C. McGarrity, the director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. McGarrity explained that right-wing extremists like the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh were charged with hate crimes instead of domestic terrorism simply because “there’s no domestic terrorism charge.”

To be clear, there is a law that defines domestic terrorism but not one that charges people who commit acts of terrorism in America. People who conspire with international terrorists—even if they aren’t materially involved in an act of violence—are charged with “acts of terrorism transcending international boundaries.” But someone who sends pipe bombs to Democrats; plows through a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, Va.; or shoots up a church in Charleston, S.C., will not face domestic terrorism charges.

The subcommittee noted that there was a 17 percent increase in reported hate crimes in 2017 from the previous year and a 31 percent increase since 2014. And in spite of the ADL’s report that white supremacists were responsible for 78 percent of extremist murders in 2018, the FBI still dedicates most of its time, money and manpower to investigating and stopping international terrorism. According to the Daily Beast, the Trump administration even disbanded a unit in the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to domestic terrorism and right-wing extremists, upsetting many intelligence and law enforcement officials.

“The FBI has testified the bureau allocates its resources almost exactly backwards than the problem would suggest,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said. “Devoting 80 percent of field agents to stopping international terrorism including Islamic extremism and only 20 percent to stopping domestic terrorism including far right and white supremacist extremism.”

Not only did McGarrity concede that people labeled as “black identity extremists” had nothing in common except their skin color, but Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s (D-Mass.) question about the FBI’s “black Identity extremist” designation prompted a startling revelation from McGarrity.

When Pressley pressed McGarrity on the secret “race paper” and the black identity extremist designation first uncovered in the 12-page FBI document called “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers,” the counterterrorism director revealed that the FBI no longer uses the term.

“The designation no longer exists?” Pressley asked.

“It hasn’t existed since I’ve been here for 17 months,” McGarrity replied. “We are not using ‘black identity extremists’ as a term or for a group.”

And despite the insistence of the president, Steve King and every guest on Fox News that there are bad people on “both sides,” including Black Lives Matter terrorists, McGarrity disclosed the astonishing number of people who have been killed by Black Lives Matter terrorists:

Pressley: How many extremist murders has the FBI linked to Black Lives Matter or similar black activist groups?

McGarrity: We don’t work Black Lives Matter it’s a movement. It’s an ideology. We don’t work that.

Pressley: So the answer is none. Can you just say that for the record? There has been no killing that the FBI can link to black Lives Matter or similar black activist groups, to your knowledge.

McGarrity: To my knowledge—I’d have to go back—but to my knowledge, right now, no.

When it comes to any form of resistance or fight for equality, America will always paint black people as terrorists. Law enforcement officers always knew this was bullshit. The FBI was fully aware that Black Lives Matter posed no threat, but COINTELPRO is constantly updated to monitor every movement for freedom and equality, including “defiant” anti-lynching advocates, the “Un-American, communist-inspired” civil rights protests and the Black Power movement that FBI officials called “the greatest threat to internal security of the country.”

“To recap: The FBI created a new category of threat,” NPR’s Hannah Allam noted. “And two years later quietly abandoned it without explanation.”

But when it comes to white people’s stance on black protest, as the great poet and philosopher Montero Lamar Hill once said: “Can’t nobody tell me nothing.”

They can’t tell me nothing.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Son of sheriff's deputy faces federal hate crime charges in Louisiana church fires

ederal hate crime charges have been filed against the son of a sheriff's deputy who was arrested in connection with a string of fires at three historically black churches in Louisiana, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday.

Holden Matthews, 21, faces three counts of intentional damage to religious property, which constitute hate crimes under the Church Arson Prevention Act. He was also charged with three counts of using fire to commit a felony, the Justice Department said in a news release after the federal indictment was unsealed.

The indictment says the fires were set "because of the religious character" of the properties.

The fires at the three churches, which were all started by gasoline and set from late March to early April, unnerved churchgoers in the St. Landry Parish region — conjuring up images of attacks on black churches in the South during the civil rights movement, and more recently, during the 1990s.

"Churches are vital places of worship and fellowship for our citizens and bind us together as a community," David Joseph, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, said in a statement. "Our freedom to safely congregate in these churches and exercise our religious beliefs must be jealously guarded. Today we are one step closer to justice for the parishioners of these churches and the St. Landry Parish communities affected by these acts."

Matthews already faced state charges in the church fires, including violating Louisiana's hate crime law. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.

During a news conference in April after Matthews' arrest, St. Landry Parish Sheriff Bobby Guidroz revealed that he is the son of one of his deputies. He added that Matthews' father, Roy Matthews, was unaware of his son's alleged involvement.

Investigators at the time also described Matthews' possible connection with "black metal" music, and said they were determining whether he was influenced by a subgenre that has been linked to white nationalist ideology and church arsons in Norway.

Matthews, who has no previous criminal record, was denied bail in his state case and his trial is scheduled to begin in September.

If convicted in the federal case, he faces up to 20 years per count of intentional damage to religious property, as well as a $250,000 fine and restitution for each of the counts, among other potential punishments.

The churches were empty at the time of the fires, officials have said, although each suffered considerable damage and forced worshippers to hold services at other locations.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

See a Design of the Harriet Tubman $20 Bill That Mnuchin Delayed

Extensive work was well underway on a new $20 bill bearing the image of Harriet Tubman when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced last month that the design of the note would be delayed for technical reasons by six years and might not include the former slave and abolitionist.

Many Americans were deeply disappointed with the delay of the bill, which was to be the first to bear the face of an African-American. The change would push completion of the imagery past President Trump’s time in office, even if he wins a second term, stirring speculation that Mr. Trump had intervened to keep his favorite president, Andrew Jackson, a fellow populist, on the front of the note.

But Mr. Mnuchin, testifying before Congress, said new security features under development made the 2020 design deadline set by the Obama administration impossible to meet, so he punted Tubman’s fate to a future Treasury secretary.

In fact, work on the new $20 note began before Mr. Trump took office, and the basic design already on paper most likely could have satisfied the goal of unveiling a note bearing Tubman’s likeness on next year’s centennial of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. An image of a new $20 bill, produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and obtained by The New York Times from a former Treasury Department official, depicts Tubman in a dark coat with a wide collar and a white scarf.

That preliminary design was completed in late 2016.

A spokeswoman for the bureau, Lydia Washington, confirmed that preliminary designs of the new note were created as part of research that was done after Jacob J. Lew, President Barack Obama’s final Treasury secretary, proposed the idea of a Tubman bill.

The development of the note did not stop there. A current employee of the bureau, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, personally viewed a metal engraving plate and a digital image of a Tubman $20 bill while it was being reviewed by engravers and Secret Service officials as recently as May 2018. This person said that the design appeared to be far along in the process.

Within the bureau, this person said, there was a sense of excitement and pride about the new $20 note.

But the Treasury Department, which oversees the engraving bureau, decided that a new $20 bill would not be made public next year. Current and former department officials say Mr. Mnuchin chose the delay to avoid the possibility that Mr. Trump would cancel the plan outright and create even more controversy.

In an interview last week, Mr. Mnuchin denied that the reasons for the delay were anything but technical.

“Let me assure you, this speculation that we’ve slowed down the process is just not the case,” Mr. Mnuchin said, speaking on the sidelines of the G-20 finance ministers meeting in Japan.

The Treasury secretary reiterated that security features drive the change of the currency and rejected the notion that political interference was at play. He declined to say if he believed his predecessor had tried to politicize the currency.

“There is a group of experts that’s interagency, including the Secret Service and others and B.E.P., that are all career officials that are focused on this,” he said, referring to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. “They’re working as fast as they can.”

Monica Crowley, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mnuchin, added that the release into circulation of the new $20 note remained on schedule with the bureau’s original timeline of 2030. She did not, however, say that the bill would feature Tubman.

“The scheduled release (printing) of the $20 bill is on a timetable consistent with the previous administration,” she said in a statement.

In a separate statement released on Friday afternoon, Len Olijar, the director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, said the bureau “was never going to unveil a note design in 2020,” adding that doing so this far in advance of going into circulation would aid counterfeiters. He described the image obtained by The Times as a “facsimile” that contained no security features, and he echoed Mr. Mnuchin’s argument that it was too early to develop an integrated concept or design until security features are finalized.

Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer
A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.

SIGN UP
“No bureau or department official has ‘scrapped anything,’” said Mr. Olijar, in what appeared to be a reference to Tubman. “Everything remains on the table.”

But building the security features of a new note before designing its images struck some as curious. Larry E. Rolufs, a former director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, said that because the security features of a new note are embedded in the imagery, they normally would be created simultaneously.

“It can be done at the same time,” said Mr. Rolufs, who led the bureau from 1995 to 1997. “You want to work them together.”

The process of developing American currency is painstaking, done by engravers who spend a decade training as apprentices. People familiar with the process say that engravers spend months working literally upside down and backward carving the portraits of historical figures into the steel plates that eventually help create cash. Often, multiple engravers will attempt different versions of the portraits, usually based on paintings or photographs, and ultimately, the Treasury secretary chooses which one will appear on a note.

Mr. Rolufs said that because of the complexity of creating new currency, circulating a new note design by next year was ambitious. He also acknowledged that making major changes to the money is an invitation for backlash.

“For the secretary to change the design of the notes takes political courage,” he said. “The American people don’t like their currency messed with.”

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump called the decision to replace Jackson, who was a slave owner, with Tubman “pure political correctness.” An overhaul of the Treasury Department’s website after Mr. Trump took office removed any trace of the Obama administration’s plans to change the currency, signaling that the plan might be halted.

Within Mr. Trump’s Treasury Department, some officials complained that Mr. Lew had politicized the currency with the plan and that the process of selecting Tubman, which included an online poll among other forms of feedback, was not rigorous or reflective of the country’s desires.

The uncertainty has renewed interest in the matter. This week, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, where Tubman was born, wrote a letter to Mr. Mnuchin urging him to find a way to speed up the process.

“I hope that you’ll reconsider your decision and instead join our efforts to promptly memorialize Tubman’s life and many achievements,” wrote Mr. Hogan, a Republican.

On Friday, Democrats called on Mr. Mnuchin to provide more answers about plans for the $20 note and suggested that the Treasury secretary had misled Congress.

“The Trump administration’s indefinite postponement of this redesign is offensive to women and girls, and communities of color, who have been excitedly waiting to see this woman and civil rights icon honored in this special way,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire.

Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, who raised the issue with Mr. Mnuchin at a hearing in May, accused him of doing Mr. Trump’s bidding.

“Secretary Mnuchin has allowed Trump’s racism and misogyny to prevent him from carrying out the will of the people,” she said.

At the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which offers tours and an exhibit on the history of the currency, some visitors said they preferred tradition, while others were seeking change.

“For me, it’s not important enough to spend the money to change it,” said Jeff Dunyon, who was visiting Washington from Utah this week. “There are other ways to honor her.”

Others believed that adding Tubman to the front of the $20 bill and moving Jackson to the back was an important symbolic move, and, for them, the possibility that it might never happen has been painful.

Charnay Gima, a tourist from Hawaii, had just finished a tour when she pulled aside a guide to ask what became of the plan to make Tubman the face of the $20 bill. The plan was scrapped, she was told, for political reasons.

“It’s kind of sad,” said Ms. Gima, who is black. “I was really looking forward to it because it was finally someone of color on the bill who paved the way for other people.”

#Resist

[joan1984]

  President Pence, at the end of his second term, will have appointed a suitable Treasury Secretary, who it seems, in 2030, will make final decisions for changes to the $20 Dollar Bill.

  Right on the same schedule, as noted in the Times article showing a facsimile of a potential new look for the Twenty, the same schedule President Trump has inherited from his predecessor. Right on schedule.

  Maybe a different person should be selected, from among the many eligible, to mark the anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had nothing to do with the design of Treasury Bills in the first place.

  Several designs of U.S. Currency exist today, and have for many years, which honor and celebrate noted women by their design. Perhaps one of those can be the focus, for those who insist upon using U.S. Currency to recall the 19th.

  Glad we could clear all that up for everyone.

[Athos_131]

  President Pence

O rly?

Trump declines to give Pence his endorsement for a 2024 presidential run

President Donald Trump on Friday declined to give Vice President Mike Pence an early endorsement for president in 2024.

When asked in an interview with “Fox & Friends” whether Pence would have his “automatic endorsement,” Trump tried to sidestep the question.

“Well, it's — I love Mike, we are running again, you're talking about a long time, so you can't put me in that position,” Trump said. “But I certainly would give it very strong consideration. He's a very, very outstanding person.”

Pence, the former governor of Indiana, has long played a deferential role in regard to Trump, serving as loyal booster while not expressing further political ambitions of his own.

Pence regularly travels around the country to sell the administration’s agenda and has served as a primary fundraiser for the Trump team.

Try to stay current, being upset 8chan had a search warrant issued on them today is not an excuse.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump called for the execution of the Central Park Five. He still won’t apologize.

Trump refused Tuesday to apologize for the full-page ad he ran in 1989 calling for the execution of the Central Park Five and suggested the men might still be guilty, even though they were exonerated years ago.

Ten days after the brutal rape and beating of a female jogger in Central Park, Trump, then a real estate developer in Manhattan, took out a full-page ad in four New York City newspapers demanding the death penalty be reinstated for the five teenage boys of color arrested for the crime.

“The ad’s basically very strong and vocal, they are saying bring back law and order. And I’m not just referring to New York, I’m referring to everything,” Trump told Larry King at the time, using the kind of rhetoric he still employs.

Years later, the men were exonerated by DNA evidence and another man’s confession. The story is back in the news with a new Netflix miniseries, “When They See Us,” focused on the boys who were wrongfully convicted and served between six and 16 years of their young adulthood in jail.

April Ryan, a White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, tweeted at the president early Tuesday asking if he’d apologize to the five men. Then, as the president left the White House for his reelection kickoff rally in Orlando, Ryan asked him in person.

“Why do you bring that up now? It’s an interesting time to bring that up,” Trump responded. “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt . . . some of the prosecutors think the city should never have settled that case and we’ll leave it at that.”

Trump has never apologized for his role in exacerbating the heightened emotions of the case. Several weeks before the 2016 election, Trump gave a similar answer to CNN, noting that the boys, who at the time of their convictions were 14 through 16 years old, had admitted guilt.

The boys have said they were coerced by police to do so.

Yusef Salaam, one of the five, wrote a Washington Post essay in 2016 shortly after Trump doubled down on his contention that they were guilty of the crime.

“Trump has never apologized for calling for our deaths,” Salaam wrote. “It’s further proof of Trump’s bias, racism and inability to admit that he’s wrong.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Harvard did the right thing by revoking Kyle Kashuv’s admission

Kyle Kashuv deserves some sympathy. But that’s about all.

Some context: Harvard University has rescinded its offer of admission to Kashuv, an 18-year-old Parkland, Fla., school shooting survivor and conservative activist, after screenshots of slurs and racist language from 2017 or early 2018 made their way online.

In one message, a then-16-year-old Kashuv complained about how a female classmate at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School preferred “N-----jocks” (sexually, the limited context suggests), and in another wrote “Kill all the f---ing Jews.” In a shared Google document being used as a class study guide, he repeated the N-word 11 times, writing that “practice uhhhhhh makes perfect.”

Perhaps this is just a kind of youthful folly that Kashuv has now outgrown. But it is certainly a kind that stands out.

When his comments surfaced in May, Kashuv wrote a statement acknowledging that he had used “callous and inflammatory language,” and, while not actually apologizing, suggested that he had matured and grown. Later, when the Harvard admissions committee wrote to say that it had been made aware of his offensive statements, Kashuv responded in a much more robust manner, with a full apology and even an additional email to the school’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

It wasn’t enough. The school rescinded his admission.

So on Monday, Kashuv made the saga public via a Twitter thread that included screenshots of Harvard’s communications, his own replies and his reflections on it all. The thread ended with the eyebrow-raising statement that, “In the end, this isn’t about me, it’s about whether we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistakes brand you as irredeemable, as Harvard has decided for me.”

Has it, though?

I feel bad for Kyle Kashuv. He is still young, after all, and having his college admission rescinded is surely disappointing, embarrassing and stressful. But do I think that it justifies so much Internet hue and cry, or that Harvard should reinstate his place in the class of 2023? Not at all.

The decision to rescind was not a plot to “crush [Kashuv’s] public reputation,” as David French wrote in National Review. After all, Harvard did not publicly advertise its deliberations; Kashuv shared the story all on his own. Nor does the decision illustrate forgiveness “withheld,” as Ben Shapiro huffed in the Daily Wire. Forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending nothing happened. We don’t get to choose what accountability looks like.

“Wisdom comes through a renovation of the heart,” David Brooks mused in the New York Times, chastising Harvard for not taking a “truth-and-reconciliation approach.” But sometimes, feeling the consequences for your actions — even if you didn’t think said actions would be so consequential — is part of that internal renovation.

This is not a question of whether our society has outlawed forgiveness, whether educational institutions misunderstand childish mistakes or whether the academic establishment has it out for conservatives. The issue is that Harvard has standards for admission that include not making wildly offensive comments, and Kyle Kashuv’s behavior in high school failed to meet them.

We’ve all been teenagers; most of us managed to pass through high school without being known for our egregious racial slurs. And there are, frankly, many deserving students who would like to go to Harvard — other Parkland survivors, other reformed makers of racist jokes, a wide range of other outstanding scholars who are neither. Perhaps the university simply thought that its limited resources would be better spent educating someone else.

When it comes down to it, it’s not a death sentence to be turned away from the elite university of your choice; it happens to tens of thousands of teenagers every year. Even having one’s admission revoked is nothing new; in 2017, Harvard rescinded the admission of 10 students over similarly obscene Facebook messages. A college education is not closed off to Kyle Kashuv, neither is future success. The only person who has deemed him irredeemable is … him.

If anything, Kashuv’s setback may be the latest illustration of the hazards of growing up in a digital age: Things you have said or written in the past might have bearing on your future, and these complications may arise without warning. Certainly, I’m sympathetic to the fact that Harvard’s decision might have come as a surprise and as a disappointment. But I’m not so sympathetic as to suggest that the consequences don’t make sense.

Maybe next time, don't do racist shit.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

White Supremacist Who Plowed His Car Into Charlottesville, Va., Counter-Protestors Begs for Mercy Ahead of Sentencing

After being convicted of the murder of activist Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others when he plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters during the infamous Charlottesville rally, James Alex Fields Jr. is begging the judge responsible for his sentencing to show him mercy.

WJLA reports that Fields’ legal team believes that the 22-year-old should not spend the rest of his life in prison due to his age, his traumatic childhood and his history of mental illness.

“No amount of punishment imposed on James can repair the damage he caused to dozens of innocent people. But this Court should find that retribution has limits,” his attorneys wrote in a sentencing memo submitted on Friday.

Additionally, his attorney’s pointed out that “no individual is wholly defined by their worst moments” and leniency in his sentencing would be appreciated as an “expression of mercy.”

Prosecutors countered that the Adolf Hitler admirer and devout anti-Semite has yet to demonstrate any remorse for his actions and should be punished accordingly. They also pointed to years of documented racist behavior exhibited by Field prior to taking Heyer’s life and that he was recorded on a jail phone call last month making inflammatory remarks about Heyer’s mother.

Prosecutors also refused to accept Fields’ history of mental illness as an excuse for his behavior.

“Any mental health concerns raised by the defendant do not overcome the defendant’s demonstrated lack of remorse and his prior history of substantial racial animus,” prosecutors wrote.

Fields struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors to take the death penalty off of the table, but under federal sentencing guidelines, he’s expected to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Fields sentencing is scheduled for June 28.

Justice For Heather Heyer

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Treasury’s Inspector General to Review Harriet Tubman $20 Bill Delay

The Treasury Department’s internal watchdog has agreed to look into why designs of a new $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman will not be unveiled next year.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, last week asked the Treasury Department’s inspector general to open an investigation following Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s announcement at a May Congressional hearing that designs of the new $20 would be unveiled in 2026 instead of 2020 — the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.

Mr. Mnuchin, at the hearing, would not commit to Tubman being featured on the note, diverging from the plan and timeline set by the Obama administration and leaving the decision to a future Treasury secretary.

Treasury’s inspector general, in a letter to Mr. Schumer dated June 21, said that the review of the $20 would be included in an already-planned audit of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s process for designing new notes and security features. That audit will include interviews with senior officials from Treasury, the B.E.P., the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and the Secret Service. A formal investigation will be opened if any indication of misconduct surrounding the delay emerge during the inquiry.

“I believe this approach will efficiently address the concerns expressed in your request,” Rich Delmar, the acting inspector general at Treasury, wrote in a letter to Mr. Schumer.

Mr. Delmar said that the review would specifically include the process with respect to the $20 bill.

“If, in the course of our audit work, we discover indications of employee misconduct or other matters that warrant a referral to our Office of Investigations, we will do so expeditiously,” Mr. Delmar added.

The audit is expected to take 10 months. Mr. Delmar said that work would begin before the end of June.

Mr. Mnuchin has said that it was his responsibility to focus on anti-counterfeiting measures with the note and that the $20 bill would still come into circulation by 2030. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that extensive work on a note featuring Tubman began before President Trump took office and continued until at least 2018.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump said that replacing the $20 bill’s current occupant, Andrew Jackson, with Tubman, a former slave and abolitionist, was “pure political correctness.”

A Treasury spokesman said that the timeline for issuing the new $20 note is not a political process and that security and preventing counterfeiting is the department’s priority.

Mr. Schumer said in a statement that he was happy that the matter is being reviewed.

“I’m pleased the inspector general will review this matter and hope it is conducted in an expeditious fashion,” Mr. Schumer said. “There are no women, there are no people of color on our paper currency today, even though they make up a significant majority of our population, and the previous administration’s plan to put New Yorker Harriet Tubman on the $20 note was a long overdue way to recognize that disparity, and rectify it.”

He added, “The motivation for the Trump administration’s decision to delay the release of the new note has not been credibly explained, and the inspector general’s review must get to the bottom of this.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Former top Commerce aide says he was directed by Ross to add census citizenship question

A House panel is releasing information that it says “points to a partisan and discriminatory effort” behind the Trump administration’s move to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census, just days before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the matter.

In a memo to members of the House Oversight Committee, the panel’s Democratic staff said that James Uthmeier, a former senior adviser and counsel to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, had refused to answer “dozens of questions” but that he had nonetheless “confirmed key information” about the effort to add the citizenship question.

“Mr. Uthmeier disclosed that Secretary Ross directed him to begin examining the citizenship question within weeks of being sworn in as Secretary and that they had multiple conversations about it well before any request came from DOJ — erasing any doubt about the inaccuracy of Secretary Ross’ claim that he added the citizenship question ‘solely’ at DOJ’s request,” the memo reads.

Ross originally told Congress that his decision to add the question came solely in response to a December 2017 Justice Department request, but lawsuits later produced emails showing that Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, had been pushing for the question for months before that.

The Justice Department earlier this month dismissed the allegations that it hid the government’s true motives, calling them “frivolous.”

The Oversight Committee voted earlier this month to hold two Cabinet officials — Ross and Attorney General William P. Barr — in contempt of Congress in connection with the administration’s efforts to shield documents related to its decision to add the citizenship question.

The panel is recommending a full House vote on contempt, although the timing of such a vote remains unclear.

In a statement issued Tuesday morning, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), said the Trump administration “claimed that the only reason it wanted to add the citizenship question was to help the Department of Justice enforce the Voting Rights Act, but that claim has now been exposed as a pretext.”

“Official after official appearing before the Committee have refused to answer questions about the real reasons behind their effort, but the mounting evidence points to a partisan and discriminatory effort to harm the interests of Democrats and non-Whites,” he said.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in April and is scheduled to issue a ruling by the end of June. The issue was rushed to the Supreme Court because the Commerce Department said it needs an answer this summer to print census forms.

Last week, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to deny a request to send the census question case back to a lower court. Lawyers for civil rights organizations, meanwhile, had asked the high court to put off a ruling on the issue in the wake of new allegations that the question was added with the input of a Republican strategist, Thomas Hofeller.

Hofeller wrote a 2015 study showing that adding the question would give an electoral advantage to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites. Documents suggest that Hofeller was communicating with the Trump administration about the question in 2017 and earlier with a census official.

The oversight panel released transcripts Tuesday of interviews with four people on the matter. They include Uthmeier; John Gore, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division; Gene Hamilton, a former DOJ and Department of Homeland Security official; and Kris Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state who once headed Trump’s voter integrity commission.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Republican Party's Future Is White and Racist

When things seem darkest in our political world, it is useful to think about the longer-term future of America’s political parties: one an increasingly diverse demographic coalition, and the other an ever-greater concentration of fearful white racists.

That is just the demographic reality. Absent any drastic, 70s-style realignment of the U.S. political party landscape, the fact is that the Republican party will continue sinking farther into the cloistered white reactionary end of the pool, as the Democrats take everyone else. Consider the findings of a new CAP report on the demographic futures of the parties: first, that in the 2016 election, the “parties’ coalitions were more dissimilar in terms of their racial, educational, and age composition” than at any time since 1980, the beginning of the Reagan era and the modern Republican party. And second, the fact that diversity is coming into the electorate whether anyone likes it or not:

Nonwhites will continue to grow as a share of both parties’ coalitions, especially Hispanics. We find that, by 2032, Hispanic voters will surpass black voters as the largest overall nonwhite voting group. And, by 2036, black voters will make up a larger share of the Democratic coalition than white noncollege voters.

On the other hand, we find that white voters will continue to decline through 2036 as a share of both the Republican and Democratic party coalitions, though this decline with be considerably quicker in fast-growing states such as Arizona and Texas that are already less white. White noncollege voters, in particular, are projected to decline rapidly as a share of both parties’ coalitions across all states through 2036, although the sharpest declines will, again, be in fast-growing states.

The broad trends going forward: The Democratic party coalition will be college-educated whites plus black and Latino voters, and the Republican coalition will be white, non-college-educated voters plus rich people. But, concurrent with these trends is the fact that white, non-college-educated voters are sharply declining as an overall percentage of the electorate. The share of white, college-educated voters and black voters will hold more or less steady, and the share of Latino voters will increase. This means that the Republicans will have to make up the votes of their declining core demographic from within those groups. Picking up substantial numbers of black voters seems unlikely; there may perhaps be more votes to be found for Republicans among Latinos, but even there, they will have trouble, because of all the, you know, xenophobia-bordering-on-genocidal-ideation. So they will seek to attract more educated white voters.

The Republican party’s only real path in the future is to more tightly cling to its identity as The White People Party. That means more racism, more anti-immigrant sentiment, more Trumpian pseudo-populism, though probably in a more refined package. The future is more divisive, not less. We can expect the Republican party to move farther to the right—even though it is today, by one measure, already farther to the right than European parties that are considered racist and far right. Though moderating itself in search of centrist votes may seem “rational,” it will not be so easy for the Republican party to make inroads with all of the groups that Trump is currently oppressing as hard as he possibly can. The familiar fantasy of a “big tent” Republican party with a friendly face and an open door for all fiscal moderates will remain a fantasy. The pendulum has swung too far into extremism to be snatched back. The only real options for the Republicans to maintain power in coming decades will be:

More white voters. And, in a nation that is growing less white,

Voter suppression.

The demographic realities actually give me hope, because they are moving inexorably away from the Republican party. But the party of corporate dominance and racists will not give up power without a fight. White identity politics will, if you can believe it, grow even more intense. And we will see how much racism the business community is willing to support in order to maintain its low tax rate.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Pregnant Woman Indicted For Baby's Death After Being Shot

An Alabama woman who was shot in the stomach, resulting in the death of her five-month-old fetus, was indicted on a manslaughter charge by a grand jury. The reason? She started the dispute that led to her getting shot.

Initially, police charged 23-year-old Ebony Jamison for shooting 27-year-old Marshae Jones in December of 2018 outside a Dollar General in Birmingham. But according to AL.com, a police investigation determined that it wasn’t Jamison who was to blame for the shooting—it was Jones, for starting it:

“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”

Reid added that the fight began over the unborn baby’s father, and that the investigation found that Jamison was defending herself.

Reid’s latest statement reiterates what he said at the time of the shooting, which was:

“When a 5-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,’’ Reid said. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”

Alabama recently passed a near-total ban on abortion, and it’s not unheard of for a woman to face jail time for miscarrying. While shocking, this case clearly delineates in the most gruesome terms what we already know: That women’s lives are not valued.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Supreme Court puts census citizenship question on hold

The Supreme Court on Thursday froze the Trump administration’s plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form sent to every U.S. household, saying the government had provided a “contrived” reason for wanting the information.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the splintered opinion, and it seemingly will be up to him — if the Commerce Department offers new justification — whether it passes muster and the question appears on the census form.

Agencies must offer “genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” Roberts wrote in a section of his opinion joined only by the court’s four liberals.

“Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”

Roberts was the only member of the Supreme Court on the term’s closing day to be on the prevailing side in both the census case and the court’s ruling on partisan gerrymandering. It was emblematic of the chief justice’s new role at the center of the court, now that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has retired.

But the ruling caused considerable confusion. It was unclear whether there would be time for the administration to come up with an acceptable justification for the question and obtain judicial approval.

The administration had said a decision was needed by the end of June to add such a question; other officials have said there is a fall deadline.

Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco called the decision a disappointment but said in a statement after the ruling that the government “will continue to defend this administration’s lawful exercises of executive power.”

After Thursday’s ruling was announced, President Trump seemed annoyed by the court’s demand for more explanation and frustrated by the time limitation.

He tweeted that he has inquired with “the lawyers” whether the census may be delayed until the Supreme Court receives the necessary information to make a “final and decisive decision” on the matter.

“Can anyone really believe that as a great Country, we are not able the ask whether or not someone is a Citizen,” Trump’s tweet says. “Only in America!”

Those who challenged the citizenship question were pleased by the ruling but said they were cautious given the uncertainty about whether the administration might still prevail. Opponents have said the citizenship question would result in an undercount of millions of people who fear acknowledging that a noncitizen is part of their household.

While the Supreme Court’s deliberations centered on whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had authority to add the question and had followed legal procedures, challengers also want to reopen in lower courts whether he had discriminatory intent.

The court’s decision in Department of Commerce v. New York came in the most debated Trump administration initiative to reach the high court since last year’s 5-to-4 decision upholding the president’s ban on certain travelers from a group of mostly Muslim countries.

There was even more at stake here, and the debate was filled with partisan politics: An undercount estimated by census officials of more than 8 million people would most affect states and urban areas with large Hispanic and immigrant populations, places that tend to vote for Democrats.

The decennial count of the nation’s population determines the size of each state’s congressional delegation, the number of votes it receives in the electoral college and how the federal government allocates hundreds of billions of dollars.

Challengers included Democratic-led states and civil rights and immigrant rights organizations.

Roberts’s bottom line — that a lower court was right to say Ross had not provided an adequate explanation for adding the citizenship question — was joined by liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

They agreed that Ross’s stated reason for adding the question — that it was requested by the Justice Department to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — fell apart upon examination.

“That evidence showed that the Secretary was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while Commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the Attorney General himself to ask if DOJ would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process,” Roberts wrote, reflecting what U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman and other judges have found.

In Furman’s view, Roberts wrote, “this evidence established that the Secretary had made up his mind to reinstate a citizenship question ‘well before’ receiving DOJ’s request, and did so for reasons unknown but unrelated to the VRA.”

Ross had also met with some of the White House’s hard-line immigration foes about the issue.

Roberts said that Ross deserved great deference in deciding how to run the census, but that “reasoned decisionmaking under the Administrative Procedure Act calls for an explanation for agency action. What was provided here was more of a distraction.”

In his January opinion, Furman said the question could not be added without resolving its “legal defects.”

He had a long list of requirements — gathering adequate information and statistics, submitting a report to relevant congressional committees, and considering relevant evidence — as well as providing Ross’s “real rationale.”

Some found the decision puzzling about what comes next.

“I don’t understand what the court decided,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) “I think it’s kind of confusing,” and “my general rule of thumb is if I’m confused about something I don’t comment.”

The court’s conservatives concurred with Roberts in the first part of his opinion, in which he said Ross had the right to ask a citizenship question and that he has wide discretion over conducting the census.

Justice Clarence Thomas said Roberts should have stopped there.

“For the first time ever, the Court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale,” Thomas wrote. “Echoing the din of suspicion and distrust that seems to typify modern discourse, the court declares the secretary’s memorandum ‘pretextual.’ ”

He criticized Furman’s opinion that said Ross and his aides “acted like people with something to hide.”

“I do not deny that a judge predisposed to distrust the secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and — with a jar of pins and a spool of string — create an eye-catching conspiracy web,” Thomas wrote.

He was joined by Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court should have stayed out of Ross’s decision-making.

“To put the point bluntly, the Federal Judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question [of] whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons,” Alito wrote.

The court’s liberals, on the other hand, thought Roberts did not go far enough. Ross’s decision should simply have been set aside, they said.

Evidence presented to Ross by his in-house experts on the census “indicated that asking the question would produce citizenship data that is less accurate, not more,” wrote Breyer.

Groups who had opposed adding the question expressed cautious optimism that decision against adding the question will stick.

“On the census, the Trump administration’s lies went so far that even this Supreme Court had to say no,” said Michael Waldman, president of the liberal Brennan Center for Justice. “If this leads to a result with no citizenship question, that would be a very welcome outcome, and it would also preserve the status quo. This should have been an easy case, and in the end, it was.”

Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s Voting Rights Project, said there is not enough time for the administration to try to come up with a new legal rationale for adding the citizenship question.

“If they try to do this over the weekend, it’s a sign of cutting corners and not reasoned decision-making,” Ho said. “There really is not time. If the administration tries to rush it, that’s clearly a red flag.”

Lower-court judges have said Ross violated administrative law and the Constitution’s enumeration clause by proposing to ask the citizenship question of each household. Those issues were at stake before the Supreme Court.

But discoveries in the case after the court heard oral arguments raised new and different issues — principally, whether the administration’s motivation was, at its core, discriminatory.

Judges in Maryland and New York have said they would consider new allegations regarding the claim that Ross’s actions violated equal-protection guarantees and was part of a conspiracy to drive down the count of minorities.

The information came from the files of a deceased Republican political operative. Thomas Hofeller, who had been in touch with some census officials at the start of the Trump administration, wrote a memo that said adding the question might help Republicans and white voters in subsequent redistricting decisions based on the census data.

#Resist