Civil Rights Liberties
419 generic rudumdent?
TARGET ON BONDI DOJ 3 HARMETT DHILLON
voter suppression gerrymandering by variety of means, help of scotus, got me thinking about this cat
===
watch xian bs co-opt
===
---
PUZZLE HOW HE GETS AWAY W FUCKING OVER VETS
AN 3 26
President Donald Trump’s new proposal for addressing widespread veteran homelessness involves forcibly institutionalizing hundreds or even thousands of them — and this is raising concerns about civil liberties.
“Our new partnership with the Justice Department reflects our ongoing commitment to ensuring that every veteran receives timely, appropriate care,” explained Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) Doug Collins in a public statement. The VA says that they will initiate legal guardianships for veterans who are either homeless or “at risk of homelessness,” thereby empowering the federal government to involuntarily commit them to care facilities.
"Critics say the policy shift raises significant civil liberties concerns, noting that in earlier generations, people with severe mental illness were routinely stripped of their legal rights and confined to state hospitals,” reported The New York Times.
Representative Mark Takano, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said that “the Trump-Vance administration is pursuing policies that would push hundreds, if not thousands, of veterans into institutions and court-ordered guardianships.”
Takano added, “Guardianship should always be a last resort, after all less restrictive options have been exhausted, to ensure veterans’ rights are respected.”
By contrast, Michael Figlioli, the director of the National Veterans Service for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said “that some of our nation’s most vulnerable veterans must be approached through a public health and social services framework” and argued that if the program is carried out thoughtfully, guardianships could offer more “structured support” for vulnerable veterans. At the same time, he said that there would need to be due diligence taken to account for “veterans’ privacy, potential implementation gaps and the need for sufficient resources.”
As the Times reported, “There are about 33,000 homeless veterans in the United States, about 14,000 of whom live on the streets. Veterans make up around 5 percent of the unsheltered homeless population.”
Prior to this policy change, Trump has often disappointed veterans. He reneged earlier in March on a promise to establish a National Center for Warrior Independence, and his sweeping cuts to the federal workforce led to 62,000 veterans losing their jobs.
“The Trump Administration has radically slashed the federal civilian workforce, sidestepping Congress and causing disruptions, slowdowns, and fragility in a range of critical public services that people and communities depend on,” wrote the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities earlier in March. “Veterans have been affected by these cuts both as members of the federal workforce and as recipients of federal health care and other benefits available to them based on their service.”
Trump has also been accused of showing disrespect toward veterans, such as earlier in March when he ignored protocol and left his hat on while greeting the remains of six soldiers killed in his Iran war.
“This fool has ABSOLUTELY no sense of dignity or appreciation for the moment,” Michael Steele, Republican National Committee chair from 2009 to 2011, wrote on X. “It is called the Dignified Transfer for a reason. Take your damn hat off!!”
Douglas Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, said that there is a partisan double standard.
“I know what Republicans would have said if Obama had done this — I would have written the statement,” Heye posted on X. “Shameful.”
A number of administration sources, including Trump’s former chief of staff and retired Marine Corps. General John F. Kelly, have said that Trump privately referred to soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” because he could not understand them fighting for things other than self-interest.
---
---
AN 12 25
About 200 former attorneys and staff from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice are warning of the “near destruction of DOJ’s once-revered crown jewel,” and what they call Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “demand” for “loyalty to the President, not the Constitution or the American people.”
“For decades, the non-partisan work of the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has protected all Americans—especially the most vulnerable—from unfair treatment and unequal opportunities,” they write in a letter dated Tuesday. They added that “after witnessing this Administration destroy much of our work, we made the heartbreaking decision to leave—along with hundreds of colleagues, including about 75 percent of attorneys.”
Bloomberg Law reported on Tuesday that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will now focus only on “intentional discrimination,” and not “policies that may appear neutral but disproportionately affect racial minorities and other protected classes.”
In their letter, the former attorneys and staff specifically state that they left the Civil Rights Division “because this Administration turned the Division’s core mission upside down, largely abandoning its duty to protect civil rights,” and that it “achieved this goal by discarding much of the Division’s most impactful work.”
The group blasted Attorney General Bondi, who, they said, “issued a series of memos that subverted the Division’s mission in favor of President Trump’s political agenda.”
“One stood out: it insinuated that DOJ attorneys were Trump’s personal lawyers, an assertion that struck at the heart of the agency’s independence. Bondi’s demand to us was obvious: loyalty to the President, not the Constitution or the American people.”
In another scathing section, they charged that Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon “focused her efforts on ‘driving [the Civil Rights Division] in the opposite direction’ of its longstanding purpose.”
They allege she issued mission statements “that included fighting diversity initiatives instead of race-based discrimination, investigating baseless allegations of voter fraud rather than protecting the right to vote, and dropping any mention of the Fair Housing Act, a landmark 1968 law that protects Americans from landlords’ racial discrimination and sexual harassment.”
And they charge that the administration “demanded that we find facts to fit the Administration’s predetermined outcomes.”
“Having no use for the expertise of career staff, the Administration launched a coordinated effort to drive us out,” they wrote. “The campaign to purge staff culminated in Dhillon encouraging everyone to resign after a period of paid leave while threatening layoffs if enough staff did not accept.”
Christine Stoneman, one of the letter’s signatories, told Bloomberg Law, “It is a sad commentary that in this anniversary of the Civil Rights Division, the Trump administration has chosen to eliminate a regulation that, for nearly 60 years has helped root out illegal race and national origin discrimination by recipients of federal funds.”
---
JUDD POP INFO YMAIL 1 25
For decades, the political right has purported to broadly support the goals of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. In recent years, Republicans sought to pare back perceived excesses benefiting minority groups and women, which they attributed not to the historic civil rights movement but modern "wokeism."
Late Tuesday, however, President Donald Trump revealed he is pursuing a far more radical agenda.
Trump issued an executive order repealing Executive Order 11246, which was put in place by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. For 60 years, Executive Order 11246 prohibited government contractors with contracts of more than $10,000 from discriminating in hiring or employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Trump's executive order described the repeal as part of "ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing."
To understand more about Executive Order 11246 and the historical significance of its repeal, Popular Information spoke with Thomas J. Sugrue, a history professor at NYU and the author of several books on the civil rights movement.
Popular Information: What is the history of Executive Order 11246, and how did it come into being?
Thomas Sugrue: Executive Order 11246 was signed by Lyndon Johnson as part of the process of enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, particularly Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade discrimination on the grounds of race, color, national origin, religion, etc. So, it was a critical part of the rollout of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
PI: Was it controversial at the time?
TS: It didn't generate a lot of controversy in the immediate aftermath of it coming out. However, it contained two words that became very controversial, and those were "affirmative action." Affirmative action had been used in a previous executive order by John F. Kennedy, but it was still undefined. And so, over the rest of the Johnson administration and into the Nixon administration, there was a lot of discussion and debate about what exactly affirmative action meant. And so that became a critical part of the legacy. It was resolved by Nixon. The Nixon administration allowed for the use of goals and timetables to measure the inclusion of minorities and other protected groups within government contractors, and that process has been more or less in place since. Essentially, 11246, with some modest amendments, since 1965 has been in place as the primary mechanism for enforcing nondiscrimination in government contracts and also by government vendors and subcontractors.
Executive Order 11246 opened up the government contracting sector, which is a huge segment of the economy, to significant numbers of non-whites and women. So, it's had a very substantial economic impact. And public contracting and public employment are among the most important sectors for non-white Americans, particularly Blacks, and have been since 11246 was put in place.
PI: What was going on with government contracting before Executive Order 11246?
TS: There were very few government contracts that went to firms with significant numbers of non-whites and women. They're still underrepresented in certain sectors. But the change was pretty significant. Essentially, it gave teeth to the government's prescription against discrimination in government contracts. In other words, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not self-enforcing. They had to come up with mechanisms to ascertain whether or not contractors were in compliance. And that was what 11246 did.
PI: Could you talk about how Executive Order 11246 worked?
TS: Among many other things, it required employers to declare that they don't discriminate against members of protected groups, women, religious minorities, etc. And then secondly, it required the gathering of data and information on whether or not there had been representation of those groups in contracts. That data-gathering mechanism is really important because it is the only way we know if nondiscrimination is working. Some critics of 11246 and affirmative action argued that it would constitute quotas. But that's a misnomer. There were never specific numerical quotas required by 11246.
Under 11246, government contractors have to demonstrate that they have a plan for reaching out to protected groups, including minorities and women. And then they have to report on the composition of their workforces, or their subcontractors.
PI: What do you think will be the impact of Executive Order 11246's repeal?
TS: The impact is going to be hindering the opportunities of minority and non-white people to get government contracts because there's been scrutiny. That matters whether or not they're in compliance. I mean, look, affirmative action in its various forms has been under siege for a long time. I'm not going to make a case that 11246 is a panacea, but it matters because of the importance of government, because of the size of the government contracting sector, and the importance of government contracting for providing opportunities for folks.
A lot of private firms are government contractors, that includes most of the major corporations in the country who are doing everything from providing office supplies to road construction materials to technology to the federal government. And so they're now released from any commitment to create or maintain a diverse workforce.
PI: So, since data will no longer be collected, we will not be able to fully ascertain the impact of the repeal?
TS: As I understand it, yes. The President's executive order doesn't go into all sorts of specifics about what this might look like, but I think it's safe to say, given that demonstration of compliance in principle and gathering of data are important parts of what the Executive Order entailed, that those will go by the wayside. I presume that the offices that are involved in the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and the Department of Labor are going to be some of the targets for elimination.
PI: How does Trump's repeal of this Executive Order fit into the broader civil rights movement?
TS: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Executive Order 11246 had bipartisan support. The Executive Order remained in place through Nixon, through Reagan, through both Bush administrations, through the first Trump administration. So there was a significant base of bipartisan support, and I think one of the most telling aspects of the decision by this current administration to expunge 11246 is the collapse of Republican support for all sorts of civil rights initiatives, including nondiscrimination in employment.
We're looking at 60 years, and 11246 survived the Reagan administration's fierce challenge to replace anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action. It lived on. It didn't get abolished because there was still substantial Democratic and Republican support for it. So that's the sea change that has happened over the last decade or so. I'm not saying a majority of Republicans supported it. I mean, the support for these programs has declined significantly since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but there was still enough bipartisan support to make it untouchable in prior Democratic and Republican administrations.
===
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-the-real-reason-bill-barr-has-re-emerged-to-give-us-a-double-dose-of-crazy/
no lnx
Here’s the real reason Bill Barr has re-emerged to give us a double dose of crazy
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon April 10, 2020
New White House chief of staff Mark Meadows announced this week that onetime Trump campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany will become the White House press secretary. The campaign is looking for a replacement and it seems that Attorney General William Barr may be auditioning for the role. Judging from his two-night interview with Laura Ingraham, he is as enthusiastic about the boss as one of the famed Mar-a-Lago Trumpettes.
We hadn’t heard much from Barr since he was scathingly chastised by a federal judge last month for his “lack of candor” in public descriptions of the Mueller report, saying that Barr had “distorted the findings” of the April 2019 report in his notorious press conference and a letter to lawmakers. The judge demanded a full copy of the Mueller report to review in order to decide whether to reveal the entire document, without redactions.
It’s not every day that the attorney general of the United States is personally castigated by a federal judge. But it was obviously too much to hope that Barr had taken his criticism to heart and had decided to play it straight. His return to the spotlight this week showed that while he may not have contracted the coronavirus, his Fox News brain rot is still raging out of control.
Ingraham has two main hobbyhorses at the moment. She believes that the response to the virus is an attack on civil liberties and that the quick cure for the disease is Dr. Trump’s magic elixir, hydroxychloroquine. She also believes that anyone who disagrees with this is part of a plot to take down her beloved president. So it was within that framework that Barr gave his interview, and he did not disappoint.
Under intense questioning about whether freedom of religion was being infringed by the shutdown, he managed to say that public health measures are acceptable for a short period and then went on to parrot Trump’s maxim that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease,” and even suggesting that more people will die of cancer because researchers are unable to continue their work during the shutdown. He made it clear that he thinks the government should be opened sooner rather than later:
I think we have to be very careful to make sure this is — you know, that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified, and there are not alternative ways of protecting people. And I think, you know, when this — when this period of time is — at the end of April expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have and not just tell people to go home and hide under the bed,
The “adaptations” he had in mind were unclear, recommending vague “protocols” for restaurants and throwing around terms like “PPE” as if he were the head epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.For all his alleged concern with civil liberties he seemed to indicate that he thinks restrictions on travel would be a positive consequence of this crisis. At least that’s what it sounded like, since he talked about stricter border laws being a good way to prevent pandemics. After all, viruses don’t recognize citizenship or nationality. If you can’t let people come in, in an attempt to protect yourself from infection, you can’t let people out either. Otherwise, they might bring it back.
It was obvious that Barr has been spending a lot of time watching Fox News. Unprompted, he let loose with a hydroxychloroquine rant worthy of Sean Hannity himself:
Acyn Torabi
@Acyn
Barr says he’s disappointed about partisanship during the pandemic because the President has acted statesmanlike and worked with all the governors while dealing with gotcha questions from the media.He goes on to accuse the media of leading a jihad against Hydroxychloroquine
Embedded video
Barr apparently missed this exchange on his favorite channel the other day in which Dr. William Haseltine, a renowned biologist and retired Harvard professor, took Fox News host Dana Perino to task for pushing this drug with little evidence to back it up.
Lis Power
@LisPower1
Fox anchor: Can you tell me your thoughts on the drug that is used normally to treat malaria.
Dr. Haseltine: It's sad to me that people are promoting that drug.
Anchor: But what about the anecdotal evidence?
Haseltine: That's complete and utter nonsense. Irresponsible.
Embedded video
The blowback over this alleged miracle cure being relentlessly touted by Trump and his friends at Fox News isn’t coming from the press or the Democrats. It’s coming from the medical community, which is appalled that the president of the United States would use his platform to push unproven drugs based on the recommendation of TV quacks and his own “feelings.”
I guess everyone’s an armchair epidemiologist these days, but the Fox News coronavirus coverage is actually dangerous. The fact that the president and the attorney general consider their blather as a basis for policymaking is kind of terrifying....
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/civil-rights-groups-sue-trump-administration-over-religious-conscience-rule
==
Daniel Ellsberg: Espionage charges against Assange are most significant attack on press in decades
As the Justice Department charges WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with…
==
AN
Trump just issued a sweeping order to give Bill Barr expanded authority to review the Russia probe’s origins
Trump just issued a sweeping order to give Bill Barr expanded authority to review the Russia probe’s origins Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
written by Cody Fenwick May 24, 2019
President Donald Trump issued a sweeping order to the intelligence community on Thursday, directing it to comply with Attorney General Bill Barr’s efforts to probe the origins of the Russia investigation that has hung over his presidency. It also expanded Barr’s declassification authority.
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders released the following statement:
Today, at the request and recommendation of the Attorney General of the United States, President Donald J. Trump directed the intelligence community to quickly and fully cooperate with the Attorney General’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 Presidential election. The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information. Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions.
News reports recently revealed that Barr had directed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the investigation, despite the fact that another U.S. attorney and the Justice Department inspector general have already been reviewing the case. Because of the president’s obvious hostility toward the investigation and Barr’s fealty to Trump, it appears to be a blatant effort to feed suspicions about the “deep state” and potentially to find reasons for targeting the president’s perceived enemies.
“Whoa,” said Matthew Miller, a former DOJ spokesman, in reacting to the announcement. “So Barr has the sole authority to declassify info related to the Trump investigation over the objections of the original classifying authority – CIA, NSA, etc. A huge accumulation of power and discretion to the AG that I believe is unprecedented.”
“National security takes a back seat to Trump demands that Barr gin up an investigation into public servants at DOJ & FBI. Also today, Trump called prosecutors killers & accused people by name of treason after a reminder the punishment is execution,” said Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor. “There’s no way this ends well.”
OMG
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/us-senate-poised-to-confirm-3-trump-judicial-nominees-who-wont-say-if-they-support-landmark-scotus-civil-rights-case/
The Republican-majority Senate this week is poised to confirm three Trump judicial nominees who refuse to say they support a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case on which critical modern-day civil rights are based.
The case: 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, which essentially codified that “separate but equal” is not equal. Brown strengthened the 14th Amendment, allowing it to become a key tool for civil rights advocates.
Brown v. Board of Education led to the end of legal segregation, or, as the NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill in The Washington Post writes, “legal apartheid in this country.”
(Meanwhile, on Friday, Vox reported: “65 years after Brown v. Board of Education, school segregation is getting worse.)
Another landmark Supreme Court ruling, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, which found that same-sex couples have the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as different-sex couples, is based in part of the 14th Amendment, strengthened by Brown v Board of Education.
==
ref wapo no lnx
Opinions
If judicial nominees don’t support ‘Brown v. Board,’ they don’t support the rule of law
Neomi Rao appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
By Sherrilyn Ifill May 12 at 4:21 PM
Sherrilyn Ifill is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Since April 2018, more than two dozen executive and judicial nominees have declined to endorse the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This week — one that marks the 65th anniversary of the landmark ruling that struck down legal apartheid in this country — the Senate is poised to confirm three of those judicial nominees to lifetime seats on the federal bench.
That is simply unacceptable.
Few of us — no matter our race, color or creed — would recognize our democracy or legal system without the changes touched off by this momentous civil rights case. For nearly 65 years, the legal consensus around Brown was unequivocal. With its transformational opinion eviscerating segregation and codifying the modern contours of equal justice, Brown remained above partisanship, ideology and everything else.
Even the most conservative judges affirmed its centrality to our nation’s democratic character. At his 2005 confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. repeatedly affirmed his agreement with Brown. That same year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. explained that Brown “vindicated what the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was supposed to mean, which was to guarantee equal rights to people of all races.” Just last year, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh described Brown as the “single greatest moment in Supreme Court history.”
But in April 2018, Trump judicial nominee Wendy Vitterbucked more than a half-century of unanimity by failing to offer support for the Brown decision. In response to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Conn.) request for her position, Vitter said, “I don’t mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions, which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with.”Judicial nominees such as Andrew Oldham, Neomi Rao and Michael Park followed Vitter’s lead.
This response simply doesn’t pass muster. The reluctance to speak about Brown cannot be explained by the rationale frequently offered by nominees who refuse to answer questions about Citizens United, for instance, namely that the case is one that might come back before the court. But no serious legal analyst thinks the issue of segregation will be relitigated ever again. In 2005, Roberts deemed Brown as unlikely to come back before the court as Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case that established the principle of Supreme Court judicial review.
More recently, and more perplexingly, President Trump’s nominee for deputy attorney general also refused to answer the question. This is unprecedented territory for a Justice Department nominee during the Trump administration, and it appears to be new ground for a Justice Department nominee in any administration since the watershed decision. Jeffrey Rosen said he could not be expected to go through “thousands of Supreme Court opinions and say which ones are right and which ones are wrong.” But the deputy attorney general oversees the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, whose mandate is to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws and precedent, including Brown. We do, in fact, have a right to know his position.
So, what’s the real reason these executive and judicial nominees are suddenly demurring on Brown? The ugly truth is that declining to offer approval of Brown signals a willingness to question the project of democracy that Brown created — one in which African Americans and other marginalized groups compelled the federal courts to honor the spirit of equal justice embodied in the words of the 14th Amendment. And this isn’t just deeply troubling; it’s also downright dangerous.
Once positioned near the center of the canon of Supreme Court jurisprudence, it’s hard not to conclude that a move is afoot to move Brown to the margins. If distancing oneself from Brown becomes an accepted marker of conservative legal bona fides, something monumental will have shifted in American legal thinking and values.
But there has been little public outrage about this clearly orchestrated response by Trump nominees. That is a colossal mistake. Perhaps we have blown past so many norms and guardrails over the past two years that we have become numb to the onslaught. But we must awaken from this paralysis. This year, when so much is at stake, we must reclaim Brown. We must demand that all nominees to the federal bench offer their support of this central feature of the rule of law in the United States.
If we are to pass down to our children a system that will protect their rights for decades to come, we must reject nominees who reduce Brown to merely one among “thousands of Supreme Court opinions” rather than as a seminal case that anchors our very conception of modern American democracy.
Support for Brown should be regarded as a low bar to clear for any judicial or Justice Department nominee. That scores of Trump nominees have been confirmed despite a refusal to even approach this simple question is a shameful reminder of how far we have moved away from principles that once enjoyed broad consensus in this “new normal.” Nominees either support Brown, the rule of law and equality under the law, or they do not. And if they do not, they put our very democracy at risk.
==
==
random? eg robt r
Supreme Court heard arguments today on theTrump administration’s decision to alter the 2020 Census to ask people if they are American citizens.
In a former life, I argued cases before the Supreme Court. From what I gathered today, it looks as if the five Republican appointees to the Court have already decided this move by Trump is constitutional.
But it’s not. The U.S. Constitution calls for “actual enumeration” of the total population for an explicit purpose: To count the residents – not just citizens, residents – of every state to properly allocate congressional representatives to the states based on population.
Asking whether someone is a citizen is likely to cause some immigrants — not just non-citizens, but also those with family members or close friends who aren’t citizens — not to respond for fear that they or their loved ones would be deported. In the current climate of fear, this isn’t an irrational response.
The result would be a systemic undercounting of immigrant communities. The Census Bureau has already calculated that it’s likely to result in a 5.1 percent undercount of noncitizen households.
This would have two grossly unfair results.
In the first place, these communities and the states they’re in would get less federal aid. Census data is used in over 132 programs nationwide to allocate over $675 billion each year.
An undercount would deprive many immigrant communities and their states of the health care, education and assistance they need and are entitled to.
Secondly, these communities and the states they’re in would have fewer representatives in Congress. The Census count determines the distribution of congressional seats among states. Under the Constitution, these seats depend on the total number of people residing in the state, not just citizens.
Which is the real reason for this move by the Trump administration.
It’s no secret that immigrants with the right to vote tend to vote for Democrats. So undercounting neighborhoods that are heavily Latino or Asian would mean fewer Democratic members of Congress.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says the citizenship question is necessary in order to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
Baloney. The Trump administration has shown zero interest in the Voting Rights Act. It has even defended voter suppression laws in court.
This is nothing but a Republican power grab orchestrated by the White House.
If Chief Justice John Roberts sides with his four Republican colleagues on this, the ruling will be the third in a series of landmark 5-to-4 Roberts Court decisions whose main purpose is to cement Republican control of federal and state governments.
The first and second were “Shelby County in 2013, which gutted the 1965 Civil Rights Act, and last year’s Janus decision, declaring that public employees don’t have to pay union dues.
Mitch McConnell’s long-term strategy of packing the Court in order to entrench the Republican Party is becoming an obscene reality.