The post civil war 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments promised equality to the freed slaves , African Americans, and others But the post-war Black Codes known as Jim Crow rendered those rights almost a nullity for a century. Only with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was national authority firmly asserted to begin the restoration of the equal justice intended by the post-war amendments.
Since then the Supreme Court has affirmed national authority - with significant exceptions. The Violence Against Women Act was declared an overreach by the court. The connection to the empowering commerce clause was too tenuous the Court held. No thought was given to the idea that the national government was empowered to protect women however it deemed necessary.
Now the Trump/Barr administration has deployed federal forces to Portland - a city that neither sought nor needed their assistance in the view of the elected mayor.
The recitation of the Founding Fathers as if they were Apostles is a reactionary ritual which retards rather than advances our understanding of law's commands.
Barack Obama declared today in
:
On the battlefield of justice, Americans like John, Americans like the Reverends Lowery and C.T. Vivian, two other patriots that we lost this year, liberated all of us that many Americans came to take for granted.
America was built by people like them. America was built by John Lewises. He as much as anyone in our history brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals. And someday, when we do finish that long journey toward freedom; when we do form a more perfect union — whether it’s years from now, or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries — John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.
And yet, as exceptional as John was, here’s the thing: John never believed that what he did was more than any citizen of this country can do. I mentioned in the statement the day John passed, the thing about John was just how gentle and humble he was. And despite this storied, remarkable career, he treated everyone with kindness and respect because it was innate to him — this idea that any of us can do what he did if we are willing to persevere.
Opinion | The Supreme Court’s Religious Wing Takes on Covid-19 Restrictions - The New York Times
by Linda Greenhouse I know I should be jaded by now by the persistence of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices in seeking to elevate religious interests over those of secular society. After all, in the closing days of the court’s term, religious employers won the right to withhold from female employees the contraception coverage to which federal law entitled them. Religious schools gained a broad exemption from the anti-discrimination laws that would otherwise protect classroom teachers and soon, no doubt, other employees as well.
But I was still startled last week to see Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas vote to turn a public health issue into a religious crusade. Fortunately for the people of rural Lyon County, Nev., where a church went to federal court for the right to have 90 people at a worship service instead of the permitted 50, the four justices failed to find a fifth vote and the 50-person cap remains.
What surprised me was not that a church would run to federal court with such a case, rather than add a second service or meet outside under a tent. Representing the church, Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley, was the Alliance Defending Freedom, which used to focus primarily on representing people seeking a religious exemption from having to do business with couples in same-sex marriages. Lately, the alliance has been bringing cases around the country to challenge Covid-19-related limits on in-person church services.
I was mildly surprised that this case got to the Supreme Court; another church case reached the court in May, with a similar outcome. In that case, as in the Nevada case, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to go along with the four dissenters.
What did astonish me was the ferocity of the main dissenting opinion, written by Justice Alito and joined by Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. They appear oblivious to the facts on the ground, particularly the well-documented role of religious services in spreading the virus. (Reflecting the nationwide pattern, a small church in New Haven, Conn., where I live, was identified this month as the likely source of an unexpected uptick in Covid-19 cases.) People who are sitting — and breathing — together for a prolonged period in an enclosed space might as well put out a welcome mat for the coronavirus. We knew that back in May. It is even more evident now. Thus the growing prevalence of official orders limiting people who can come together in that fashion to a certain number or a certain percentage of the venue’s capacity.
Supreme People’s Court’s new guidance on similar case search | Supreme People's Court Monitor by Susan Finder [PKU Shenzhen Transnational Law School] In a blogpost in June, 2019, I flagged a provision in the 5th Five Year Judicial Reform Program that would require Chinese judges to search certain prior cases. That provision has now been implemented in the form of a Supreme People’s Court policy document. On 27 July 2020, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) issued provisional guidance entitled Guiding Opinions Concerning Strengthening Search for Similar Cases to Unify the Application of Law (关于统一法律适用加强类案检索的指导意见（试行)), to be effective on 31 July. It is not a judicial interpretation. but is guidance intended to make judicial decisions more consistent. The SPC’s Case Management Office appears to have been responsible for drafting it, because “a responsible person” (presumably the head) of that office issued a press release to explain these rules.
It codifies many of the practices of the Chinese courts and imposes some new requirements. It does not mean that China has become a common law legal system. The SPC is approving the practice of using principles derived from prior cases to fill in the gaps in legislation and judicial interpretations.
It also illustrates two larger points–that discrete judicial reforms aimed at more consistent judgment continue to be implemented even as the role of Party leadership and oversight continues to be stressed. It is also an illustration of how long it can take judicial reforms to be implemented. Case Search Requirements What are similar cases?
In less than half a century, has the wheel come full circle? Nixon used the China issue to reassure his reelection in 1972. Trump is using the China issue in an effort to reassure his reelection in 2020. Unfortunately, contrary to the protests of innocence from the Chinese Government, it has played right into the hands of the Trump “warhawks” now riding high, offering them much to feed upon. What we need today is governments on both sides that will step back from the brink and seek a new modus vivendi, one that will endure for the next, even more complicated half century. Balance – not all-out nationalistic enmity – is what is called for.
Each side should practice what I call the Four C’s: Cooperation in areas critical to world progress and survival; Competition in business, science, education, the arts and sports; Criticism of each other’s many faults and failures in government, human rights and international relations; and Containment of its own military forces and goals as well as those of the other side. The next six months may be the most challenging to get through. One can only hope that next January will witness the charting of a new path. It will be a long road back.
Nadine Taub was a brilliant lawyer who with Ruth Ginsburg was among the first to litigate women's rights cases. She began that work in 1971 at Rutgers where she was recruited by Ruth Ginsburg to found the Women's Rights Litigation Clinic. I tell the story of that era in my essay People's Electric - Engaged legal Education at Rutgers Newark in the 1960s and 1970s. I was privileged to co-author a brief with her in Collins v. Union County Jail (1997). A gay prisoner had been assaulted by a guard. We wrote for amicus curiae National Organization for Women and helped to overturn the New Jersey precedents that one could not recover for sexual assault unless there had been physical injury. - gwc Nadine Taub, Early Leader in Women’s Rights Law, Dies at 77 - The New York Times by Penelope Green
In the early 1970s, Nadine Taub was one of a cadre of young female lawyers breaking new ground by fighting gender discrimination. Along with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Stearns and others, she made legal history in cases that successfully argued that equal rights for women were protected under the Constitution. She litigated cases for rape victims, for women seeking access to abortion and for employees battling workplace discrimination and sexual harassment.
“There weren’t many of us, and the field of women’s rights law was only just developing,” said Ms. Stearns, who as a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights was instrumental in the struggle to legalize abortion. “We all knew each other. We were among the young feminist progressive lawyers of our day, and it was a wonderful thing to have sisters doing what we were doing and believing what we believed.”
Ms. Taub, a professor emerita at Rutgers Law School, died on June 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 77. She had for decades struggled with Langerhans cell histiocytosis, a rare autoimmune disease, her husband, Olof Widlund, said in confirming her death.
In 1974, Ms. Taub represented a woman who had reported being raped and who was then held overnight in a Newark jail as a material witness in her own assault because the police believed that she was a prostitute. As she told the journalist Christine VanDeVelde for an article in Savvy magazine in 1988, she was rattled by the depth of her response to her client’s experience. KEEP READING
For the past several years, the study ofGerman jurist Carl Schmitt [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] has exploded in China. Floria Sapio remarks that Schmitt has enjoyed “enormous currency among mainland Chinese scholars since the 2000s.”1 Even though Schmitt has received a recent revitalization of interest of his thought among Western scholars,2 he is still known primarily for his aphoristic (and largely untranslated) texts on political theoryand his infamous association with the Nazi Party. Yet, the reason that this esoteric and controversial thinker has garnered any consideration within Chinese academia is no mystery: Carl Schmitt was a political philosopher of illiberalism. He believed that liberalism had “a tendency to undermine a community's political existence” because a state founded on such an ideology “will lack the power to protect [citizens] from external enemies.”3
What is needed, Schmidt argued, is “a strong state… with the capacity to defend… ‘the unity of the state.’”4 While his argument in totum is more elaborate, it is Schmitt’s hostility to liberalism as embodied in Western political culture, governance, and ideology that has spurred interest in his work in China, for “[the Chinese] now feel… [that] liberal thought… doesn’t help them understand the dynamics of Chinese life today or offer a model for the future.”5 In Mark Lillia’s conversations with Chinese scholars and students, there is a pervasive desire “across the political spectrum… that China needs a stronger state, not a weaker one.”6 Liberalism has not provided an answer.
The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously reversed an Appellate Division ruling that a defendant who has been released pretrial under the Criminal Justice Reform Act, and subsequently violates a condition of that release, can be charged and prosecuted for criminal contempt. But the defendant can, of course, be prosecuted for any crimes committed while released. - gwc
by Suzette Parmley
In a 7-0 decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed an appellate panel’s ruling that a defendant who has been released pretrial under the Criminal Justice Reform Act, and subsequently violates a condition of that release, can be charged and prosecuted for criminal contempt by the state.
In State v. McCray and State v. Gabourel,Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, writing for the court, said such action was at complete odds with the legislative intent of the CJRA. The act took effect on Jan. 1, 2017, under former Gov. Chris Christie and essentially eliminated money bail to make New Jersey’s pretrial justice system fairer.
“The history of the CJRA reveals the Legislature did not intend to authorize criminal contempt charges for violations of release conditions,” Rabner wrote in the July 20 opinion. “Beyond that, allowing such charges for all violations of conditions of release, no matter how minor, is at odds with the purpose and structure of the CJRA.”
Justices Jaynee LaVecchia, Barry Albin, Anne Patterson, Faustino Fernandez-Vina, Lee Solomon and Walter Timpone join in the unanimous decision.
In the two consolidated cases on appeal, both defendants were arrested and released on nonmonetary conditions, pursuant to the CJRA. After allegedly violating those conditions, each defendant was charged with contempt, a fourth-degree offense, for violating a court order.
The state—the plaintiff in both cases—argued there was nothing in the CJRA that precludes contempt prosecutions, which are consistent with the act’s purposes and supported by case law in State v. Gandhi.
Rep @AOC: "I do not need Rep. Yoho to apologize to me. Clearly he does not want to. Clearly when given the opportunity he will not & I will not stay up late at night waiting for an apology from a man who has no remorse over calling women & using abusive language towards women." pic.twitter.com/XKymFh3Oyf
Why do people go in one direction rather than the other? I don't remember much of any talk about party or politics - except that my mother voted for Ike in '56 "to give him a Congress he could work with". My parents, both Navy Veterans, deploring southern segregation, indifferent to party politics, Eisenhower voters, very Catholic, active in the school board politics, pro public school because Catholic schools had not yet been built in post-war suburban Long Island New York.
What changed for us? First Vatican II and ecumenicism, and John XXIII. Then John F. Kennedy - a Navy hero, young (their age), Irish Catholic, idealistic, aspirational. Then came the assassinations of JFK, and the inadmissible Goldwater - a hawk, and anti-civil rights. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy murdered. The night before he died RFK went to Mass with farm workers leader Cesar Chavez. The Peace movement, boycotting grapes, and eventually Fr. Daniel Berrigan and the Catholic Worker and the Catholic anti-war movement.
So I am a Vatican II Catholic, a returned Peace Corps Volunteer, etc. For William Barr growing up Catholic was a very different story. - gwc
After mounted police and tear gas cleared a path of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park for a presidential photo-op last month, President Donald Trump — who almost never attends religious services — posed with a Bible in hand, silent and brooding. As the surreal scene played out live on television in front of St. John's Episcopal Church, the most influential Catholic in the Trump administration, Attorney General William Barr, stood close by.
President Donald Trump walks from the White House June 1 for a photo-op at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Attorney General William Barr is at left. (Wikimedia Commons/The White House/Shealah Craighead)
The proximity was fitting. There have been few more stalwart loyalists to the president — who has cycled through cabinet officials and routinely publicly berates his staff — than Barr, a nearly four-decade veteran of Republican administrations, and a conservative Catholic who vigorously promotes a muscular Christianity that relishes in fighting the culture wars.
Barr helped pave the way for last week's federal executions — the first in 17 years. Yet he is often viewed as an ally of the pro-life movement because of his opposition to abortion. His enthusiastic admirers also cheer what they regard as his commitment to religious freedom at a time when many social conservatives view the rights of churches and religious institutions as under threat by secular forces.
Barr's critics counter that a Catholic at the highest level of government uses his influence to endorse a selective, ideologically driven understanding of religious liberty, and champions a nearly limitless view of executive power that is particularly dangerous, given Trump's disregard for bedrock democratic norms.
Of the myriad forces that have shaped Barr's views on politics, law and religion, a constant has been his connections to a tight-knit Catholic culture where fraternal organizations, think tanks and conservative clergy understand faith as a bulwark against perceived attacks on traditional morality, the family and church. While the attorney general doesn't name-drop theologians or directly cite the influence of Catholic doctrine, he draws both from longstanding Christian principles, and the grievance politics of the Christian right.
NCR did not receive any response to requests to the Department of Justice's media office for a statement from Barr about what his Catholic faith means to him or about Catholic leaders' criticism of his involvement in bringing back federal executions.
Religious right rhetoric
At 70, Barr has a low-key demeanor and a flat delivery style that belies his inclination to toss rhetorical grenades and frame issues in nearly apocalyptic terms.
At a widely covered speech at the University of Notre Dame last fall, Barr railed against "militant secularists," language reminiscent of Jerry Falwell's rhetoric in the 1980s at the start of the religious right movement.
Secularism, he said, could be blamed for "virtually every measure of social pathology," including "the wreckage of the family," "soaring suicide rates," "alienated young males" and a host of other social ills.
"Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery," the attorney general said at an Oct. 11 event hosted by Notre Dame's Law School and the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.
He lamented what he called the "macro-morality" of the welfare state and of "collective action to address social problems."
In contrast, he argued that Christianity "teaches a micro-morality" where "we transform the world by focusing on our own personal morality and transformation," an observation that ignores centuries of Christian teaching about pursuing the common good and social justice.
Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, declined an interview with NCR but at the time lauded Barr's talk, saying on Twitter that it was a "masterful, learned, and extremely important speech that should be widely read and pondered." Responding to critics of the speech, Deneen chided liberals' reaction as a "collective fainting spell."
Thomas Berg, a professor who specializes in law and religion at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, agrees with the attorney general on several things: federal funding for parochial schools; the right of religious institutions to terminate employees who violate their church's moral teachings or institution's ethical codes; and that real burdens on religious liberty exist.
But Berg cautions that the attorney general's articulation of religious liberty at Notre Dame was problematic.
"His description of religious liberty is selective and that threatens to make religious liberty a vehicle for polarization rather than a solution to it," said Berg. "A real problem for the cause of religious freedom in general is that the loudest voices use it or confine it to only support their political side."
The attorney general, Berg added, "says nothing about the religious freedom of Muslims, Sikhs or non-Christian religious minorities, or how the president's travel ban arose from his hostile comments about Islam. You can't claim a commitment to religious liberty and be wholly selective about it."
Politics of Christian grievance
Barr grew up in a conservative family surrounded by liberals on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His Catholic mother, Mary, sent her four sons to Corpus Christi elementary school. Barr's older brother Stephen, now a physicist, heads the Society of Catholic Scientists. A Vanity Fair article profiled Barr’s father, a controversial educator at elite New York private high schools in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Born Jewish, the elder Barr became "more Catholic than the Catholics," according to the article.
Bonjour, here is your unroll: @AndrewMCrespo: Today on TV, the Deputy Director of the federal paramilitary force in #PDX discussed the infamous van… https://t.co/d77Tg03Mzp Talk to you soon. 🤖
— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) July 22, 2020
"...the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality."
Last October, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security compiled a ranking system to assess the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. Twenty-one panel experts across the globe graded each country in 34 categories composed of 140 subindices. At the top of the rankings, peering down at 194 countries supposedly less equipped to withstand a pandemic, stood the United States of America.
It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union combined.
During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called “the sick man of Europe.” The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness — and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response.
Our former peer nations are now operating in a political context Americans would find unfathomable. Every other wealthy nation in the world has successfully beaten back the disease, at least significantly, and at least for now. New Zealand’s health minister was forced to resign after allowing two people who had tested positive for COVID-19 to attend a funeral. The Italian Parliament heckled Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte when he briefly attempted to remove his mask to deliver a speech. In May — around the time Trump cheered demonstrators into the streets to protest stay-at-home orders — Boris Johnson’s top adviser set off a massive national scandal, complete with multiple calls for his resignation, because he’d been caught driving to visit his parents during lockdown. If a Trump official had done the same, would any newspaper even have bothered to publish the story?
Yes we need to do everything we can to make mass transit safer. But there is evidence from around the world that the risk on subways is less than previously thought:https://t.co/LNLtxxysVB
LIVONIA, MICHIGAN — They were teachers. A librarian. A director of religious education. A secretary in the Vatican Secretariat of State. The author of a 586-page history of the congregation.
One was an organist. One helped her second-grade class write and perform a commercial for Campbell's Soup. One was a nurse and led nursing students' mission trips to Haiti.
All of them were members of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Felix of Cantalice, or Felician Sisters. They lived together, prayed together and worked together.
The Felician sisters lost during the COVID-19 pandemic
The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Felix of Cantalice, or Felician Sisters, in Livonia, Michigan, remembered their fallen sisters with obituaries and photos, which have been published at Global Sisters Report. Click here to read the complete 13 obituaries.
And in one awful month — from Good Friday, April 10, to May 10 — 12 sisters died of COVID-19. Eighteen other Felician Sisters at the convent in Livonia, Michigan, had the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, as well.
"We couldn't contain the grief and the sorrow and the emotional impact," said Sr. Noel Marie Gabriel, director of clinical health services for the Felician Sisters of North America. "We went through the motions of doing what we had to do, but that month was like a whole different way of life. That was our most tragic time. It was a month of tragedy and sorrow and mourning and grieving."
But as the world grapples with the economic and social fallout of the continuing pandemic, survivors are discovering that the virus can cause lasting damage and recovery may not mean a return to full health: One of the 18 sisters who initially survived the illness died from its effects June 27, making her the 13th victim in the Livonia convent.
A great-great grandson of John D. Rockefeller, he steered one of his family’s philanthropies to a feisty stance on the oil giant’s role in climate change.
David Kaiser, the president of the Rockefeller Family Fund, in 2016. His two passions were combating climate change and reforming the criminal justice system.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
As president of the Rockefeller Family Fund, and as an official of Just Detention International, a group dedicated to fighting sexual abuse in prisons, Mr. Kaiser pursued twin passions: combating climate change and reforming the criminal justice system.
His climate work took one of the family’s most prominent charitable organizations in a highly unusual direction for any philanthropy: scrappiness. It was all the more unusual for a great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, to confront Exxon Mobil, a successor company to the Rockefeller oil monopoly.
“Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And, I don't say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And, he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And, there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.”
"When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don't use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.”
"It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale."
"And, let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are, because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.
'Our most tragic time': Felician Sisters bear loss of 13 sisters to COVID-19 | Global Sisters Report NCR
