Conduct Unbecoming: The Resumption of Federal Executions | UPDATES/University of Baltimore School of Law

The federal death chamber, Terre Haute, IN

John Bessler (U of Baltimore) has written a compelling post about the gratuitous cruelty of the push by Attorney General William Barr to resume federal executions.  The cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Trump administration and the flatulence of the Supreme Court's right wing majority is exemplified in the Curt's denial 5-4, of a stay for the execution of  "Wesley Purkey, a 68-year-old federal inmate who has Alzheimer’s disease and, according to a recent in-person evaluation by a forensic psychiatrist, “lack[s] a rational understanding of the basis for his execution.”  Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent was joined by the three other moderate members of the Supreme Court.
I have one criticism - that he fails to list New Jersey's 2007 repeal of capital punishment in his catalog states that have recently moved away from the death penalty.

It never ceases to amaze me that the four practicing conservative Catholics on the court appear untroubled by these cases even though the Church itself in 2018 altered its Catechism to declare capital punishment "inadmissible". - gwc

Conduct Unbecoming: The Resumption of Federal Executions | UPDATES/University of Baltimore School of Law
by John Bessler - University of Maryland-Baltimore School of Law

Not since 2003, when an African-American man, Louis Jones, Jr., was put to death, has the federal government carried out an execution. In the coming days, though, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), led by Attorney General William Barr, plans to change that by once again putting to use the federal execution chamber at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Barr, on July 25, 2019, had previously directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule five executions, three of which were later scheduled for mid-July of this year. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. government made plans to execute three men—Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, and Dustin Honken—in quick succession, a plan reminiscent of when Arkansas, in 2017, planned to execute eight men over the course of just 11 days. “I am devastated by the prospect of exposing myself and others to the risk of COVID-19 infection because the U.S. government chooses to execute Dustin and others in the midst of this pandemic,” laments Rev. Mark O’Keefe, a moral theology professor at Indiana’s St. Meinrad Seminary and the 64-year-old spiritual advisor to Dustin Honken.

***As Justice Breyer wrote in that dissent: “Today’s administration of the death penalty involves three fundamental constitutional defects: (1) serious unreliability, (2) arbitrariness in application, and (3) unconscionably long delays that undermine the death penalty’s penological purpose. Perhaps as a result, (4) most places within the United States have abandoned its use.” The number of American death sentences and executions has dwindled dramatically in recent years, making the death penalty’s administration more arbitrary than ever.

Torts Today: NJ Supreme Court bars class action arbitration

Only Associate Justice Barry Albin stood up for workers.  A legislative fix is the only route for workers seeking to avoid barriers to access to justice.
Torts Today: NJ Supreme Court bars class action arbitration

Editorial: That Trump can still sway some Catholic voters is a real scandal | National Catholic Reporter

The headlines are about white evangelicals.  The ignored scandal is white Catholics back Trump.  Race trumps Catholic social values.  The Bishops have made abortion opposition an absolute - making it easy for white Catholics to indulge their racism.  - GWC
Editorial: That Trump can still sway some Catholic voters is a real scandal | National Catholic Reporter
***Perhaps the deeper scandal of that story is why CatholicVote wanted the information. The architects of the 2016 improbable political upset knew one thing: a solid base of likely Trump voters were carrying their cellphones into those churches. And that, we propose, is the real scandal here.

The Trump operatives' confidence that they have the support of voters in those churches is borne out by hard data.

A recent Pew survey reported on by current NCR national correspondent Christopher White indicates that President Donald Trump remains the favorite of white Catholics by a tiny plurality. But that is a wide survey number, counting all those who self-identify as Catholics. If one narrows the survey down to regular Massgoers, not simply those who identify themselves as Catholics, the numbers are indicative of a Trumpian landslide.

A RealClear survey taken early this year of U.S. Catholic registered voters found that among devout Catholics, those who attend Mass regularly, 63% approve of Trump's performance as president.

That is a sorry statistic. It tells us something about Catholics who regularly partake in the Eucharist and hear about an itinerant Palestinian preacher who talked about love for foreigners and the outsider. They remain a bedrock of support for this most peculiar president, a man who metaphorically worships at the foothold of Confederate statues and freely calls Catholic immigrants rapists and murderers. He is the most race-baiting president since Woodrow Wilson, who didn’t have Twitter to extol the virtues of the Klan and "The Birth of a Nation."

20171117T1039-12674-CNS-OBIT-EBO cc.jpg

The late Franciscan Sr. Mary Antona Ebo is pictured during the 1965 protest in Selma, Alabama. (CNS/Bettman/Corbis/PBS)

When Martin Luther King Jr. led his march on Selma, and other places throughout the South, prominent places were reserved for Catholic priests and nuns. Their presence was a sign that an immigrant church was emerging into the full light of American life, backing the long struggle for basic human rights in the United States.

In the civil rights era, debates over Communion for wayward Catholic politicians often revolved around support for segregation, as politicos who crossed New Orleans Archbishop Joseph Rummel discovered in 1962. Local officials fought against Catholic school integration. Rummel applied the penalty of excommunication. But in this new era of civil rights advocacy, it’s the politicians who play the white resentment card who think they have a friend among devout Catholics.

But maybe the times are changing.***

Former Trump Vote to Trump: Shut the F Up!

‼️ Jeffrey voted Trump in 2016, and it's safe to say he won't be doing so again.

He takes you on a ride....You gotta watch the whole thing. (Warnings: 1. NSFW 2. Wicked "Good Will Hunting" Energy) pic.twitter.com/foIo4lmaDA

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@RVAT2020) July 13, 2020

Biden: Texas - we can stop the spread

WHO leader: never too late to take decisive action

As Disney World reopens in in Orlando, and even young people's rates of covid rise in New York it is plainer than ever.  We as a country have spent too much time fretting about personal conveniences, about whether churches are being treated more harshly than shopping malls, whether people will be discouraged from working rather than protected, and about the `separation of powers'.  Tedros Ghebreyesus, the Ethiopian doctor who leads the WHO is blunt:

There will be no return to the “old normal” for the foreseeable future. But there is a roadmap to a situation where we can control #COVID19 and get on with our lives. No matter where a country is in its epidemic curve, it is never too late to take decisive action. https://t.co/qz4s8KWsYV pic.twitter.com/qxd3tsgAuf

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) July 14, 2020

Cuomo: Young people covid rates rising!

Infection rates are alarmingly rising among 20 somethings in NY.

You can get and spread COVID.

Wear a mask. Get tested. pic.twitter.com/BBG2IskoAI

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) July 14, 2020

Environment, Law, and History: The Cigarette: A Political History

The murderous policies of Philip Morris - which dominated the U.S. cigarette market by enhancing tobacco smoke's nicotine content in the Marlboro brand - nearly escaped the tort law entirely.  Their lobbying led the American Law Institute's Reporter William Prosser to list "good tobacco" with good whiskey as gentlemen's fond vices.
The Tobacco Institute used the attorney client privilege to run their fraudulent research through their favorite law firm, a history of evasion of the product liability law that the Center for Tobacco Control & Research has documented.
Environment, Law, and History: The Cigarette: A Political History

Now comes The Cigarette: A Political History (Harvard UP, 2019) by Sarah Milov, co-founder of the Environment Law & History Blog.  It was recently reviewed by Reuel Schiller for Jotwell. Schiller writes that Milov's "narrative weaves together legal, political, and economic history in a manner that calls for a revaluation of the dimensions of twentieth-century liberalism and the nature of its decline. The book is a compelling exercise in historical synecdoche: its subject is the political history of the cigarette, but its story is that of the twentieth-century American state."
***

Second, The Cigarette: A Political History furthers our understanding the demise of postwar liberalism at the end of the twentieth century.  While Milov does not suggest that American tobacco policy was progressive, she notes that the tactics deployed against it had a distinctly illiberal bent. By combining libertarian hostility towards the administrative state with an efficiency-based, cost-benefit attack on smoking, big tobacco’s opponents helped create a political culture that undermined egalitarian public policy. This market-based political culture denied the state a role in combatting systemic inequities within markets and ignored the fact that policies based on cost-benefit analysis frequently ignored important, not-easily-quantifiable values.

Don’t get me wrong. The fact that fewer Americans smoke now than at any time since the introduction of the cigarette is a triumph of postwar public policy.  But this victory did not come without a cost. Milov concludes The Cigarette: A Political History with the dismaying observation that while the “cultural cachet” of the cigarette has all but disappeared, smokers have not. Instead, concentrated within poor and minority communities, they have become increasingly stigmatized. Most Americans blame them for an addiction that is the legacy of a century of governmental action.

Triumph of the whim: the Debacle of the Pandemic

 
Emergency morgue trucks - NYC 2020

To read The Path Beneath the Seas is not only to turn back to an age of imperialism, but also to return to  an era of optimistic faith in progress, which celebrated the triumph of man over nature and American ingenuity and heroism over every obstacle, in the pursuit of a destiny that still seemed manifest.  Today we live in a postmodern age, in which an enterprise like the building of the Panama Canal seems an impossible dream.

Peter Winn

New York City

January 2002

Foreword to the Francis Parkman Prize Edition

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal: 1870 -1914

By David McCullough

David McCullough’s masterful The Path Between the Seas was published in 1977.  The product of years it happened to appear as Jimmy Carter, perhaps our best ex-President, struggled and succeeded in his greatest accomplishment: to peacefully relinquish a triumph of the colonial and industrial era.  The Panama Canal made possible what Columbus, Hudson, Vespucci, Magellan, and many others had dreamed of: sea passage to the Orient without the rigours of Cape Horn or the impossible ice of the Arctic Ocean.

Today projects of such scope can be undertaken only with acute awareness of the global climate crisis and the fragility of our environment.  But a century and a half ago the environment was seen as an obstacle to overcome, to be mastered, not protected.  The Panama Canal, like the Suez, transformed the world.  What had been a voyage of the few – around Cape Horn, the stuff of epic like Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast – became a maritime superhighway, transforming world trade.

We may lament the imperialism, the suffering of the laborers, the heedlessness of environmental consequences, but we recognize that the Canal was a world transformative labor.  It has correctly been understood as a heroic accomplishment, a point of American pride.  But today we suffer under a President who promised, without the capacity or vision to Make America Great Again.  His incompetence and egotism, aided by his deplorable allies and protectors, have led us into the greatest debacle of our history:  the bungled response to a plague of historic proportions.  Today, six months after the virus’s DNA was mapped it rages out of control.  Today new cases in Florida set a new single day record – over 15,000.  Today we live not in an “era of optimistic faith in progress, which celebrated the triumph of man over nature and American ingenuity and heroism over every obstacle”.  Rather we suffer, huddled at home, in the triumph of the will of a fool and his many acolytes. - GWC

The harder they come...the fall of Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Robert Smalls - former slave, war hero, Congressman,

Excise Revue Collector - appointed by President mcKinley,

fired by Woodrow Wilson

The harder they come...the fall of Thomas Woodrow Wilson

 Princeton University’s Trustees, spurred by the recent wave of protests over the killings of African Americans by police and others, has voted to remove the name of Woodrow Wilson from the University’s eminent School of Public and International Affairs.  It is a stunning fall from grace - but merited.  Fittingly his family home in Columbia, S.C. is now home to the Museum of Reconstruction - a movement for racial equality which he despised.

 Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia but it is New Jersey with which his name is most closely associated.  A graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), his doctoral dissertation Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics compared our Presidential system to England’s parliamentary one.  As a teacher at Princeton he rose quickly to its presidency.  In 1910 he was elected Governor of New Jersey as an unexpectedly progressive Democrat.  As President he led the United States in World War I, and played a key role in the visionary but failed League of Nations.  He nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court.  What then is not to like?  A lot, we can now recognize.

 When Wilson became President of the United States only the last embers of post Civil War Reconstruction flickered.  But Wilson doused them.  He segregated the federal civil service.  As Gordon Davis has recounted regarding the  harm done to his grandfather, He ordered the discharge of African Americans who held discretionary positions in the United States government and sharply reduced the number of African American federal employees.  Notoriously Wilson helped promote the grossly racist film portrayal of post-civil war Reconstruction - Birth of a Nation.  He hosted a screening of the movie at the White House and praised the director D.W. Griffith - a friend.  The Supreme Court also hosted a screening of the movie.  Chief Justice Edward White was impressed, noting that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan lionized in the movie - initially titled The Clansman.

 Wilson’s contempt for Constitutional rights extended to the Department of Justice.  His Attorneys General were James Clark McReynolds and A. Mitchell Palmer  who prosecuted railway union and Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs for his opposition to WWI. Palmer is best remembered for the post-war Red Scare sweeps led by J. Edgar Hoover and known as the Palmer raids.  McReynolds was elevated to the Supreme Court where in Butler v. Perry, Sheriff of Columbia County he rejected a Thirteenth Amendment defense. The Court upheld the Florida conviction of a Black man for failure to provide two days per year of statutorily mandated unpaid labor on county roads.

 It is important that the citizenry know Wilson’s history but even the facts recited above may seem remote or appropriately balanced against Wilson’s merits.  Such considerations delayed Princeton’s actions after it began review of the Wilson School’s name in 2015.  The upsurge of calls for overcoming our long history of racism, made plain to Princeton the need to drop Wilson’s name.  The question now is what to name the school.

 Wilson embraced the Jim Crow laws which flourished with the defeat of Reconstruction - a little known period for most people. But it was then that doctrines like state action stunted the implementation of the post civil war Amendments and the Enforcement civil rights Acts of 1866 and 1875.  Those laws broadly proscribed racial discrimination even by private actors.  They were crippled by the landmark cases of Cruikshank, Slaughterhouse, the Civil Rights Cases, and Plessy v. Ferguson.  Instead of Wilson who embraced them we should be lionizing Reconstruction leaders.    

 One such hero of Reconstruction, Robert Smalls discharged from a Presidential post by Woodrow Wilson, as Georgetown law professor Aderson Francois recently recounted in The New Republic.  Smalls first gained fame when as a slave pilot of the Confederate gunship The Planter he gained freedom by delivering the ship to the United States Navy which had blockaded Charleston.  After a long post-war fight he was awarded less than half the prize he was owed for delivery of the enemy ship to the Union.  The prize money enabled Smalls to purchase the plantation of his father who had owned him.  His story and the tragedy of Reconstruction is told in NYU law professor Peggy Cooper Davis's article Introducing Robert Smalls.

Smalls rose to the rank of captain in the Union Army, served five terms in the United States Congress, voted for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and achieved the rank of General in the South Carolina militia.  President William McKinley in 1889 appointed Smalls Excise Collector at the port of Beaufort, S.C.  He served until dismissed by Woodrow Wilson.  Perhaps Princeton should name its public policy school for Robert Smalls.  That would be fit teaching opportunity for today’s students and teachers.

 - GWC

July 10, 2020

How to cognitive - Sarah Cooper

How to cognitive pic.twitter.com/YM51OJ58qA

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) July 10, 2020

Yakima fisherman's 100 year old conviction voided by Washington Supreme Court

 
Citing its open letter of June 4 regarding the justice system's history of systematic racism the Washington State Supreme Court has reversed its 1916 decision which affirmed the conviction of  Yakima tribe member Alec Towessnute for fishing in waters that had been fished by the tribe since "time immemorial".  The historic methods are demonstrated in the video below.  - gwc

Open letter  of the Washington Supreme Court - June 4, 2020
Signed by every member of the Washington State Supreme Court:

Dear Members of the Judiciary and the Legal Community:

We are compelled by recent events to join other state supreme courts around the nation in addressing our legal community. The devaluation and degradation of black lives is not a recent event. It is a persistent and systemic injustice that predates this nation’s founding. But recent events have brought to the forefront of our collective consciousness a painful fact that is, for too many of our citizens, common knowledge: the injustices faced by black Americans are not relics of the past.
We continue to see racialized policing and the overrepresentation of black Americans in every stage of our criminal and juvenile justice systems. Our institutions remain affected by the vestiges of slavery: Jim Crow laws that were never dismantled and racist court decisions that were never disavowed.
The legal community must recognize that we all bear responsibility for this on-going injustice, and that we are capable of taking steps to address it, if only we have the courage and the will. The injustice still plaguing our country has its roots in the individual and collective actions of many, and it cannot be addressed without the individual and collective actions of us all.
 As judges, we must recognize the role we have played in devaluing black lives. This very court once held that a cemetery could lawfully deny grieving black parents the right to bury their infant. We cannot undo this wrong⸺but we can recognize our ability to do better in the future. We can develop a greater awareness of our own conscious and unconscious biases in order to make just decisions in individual cases, and we can administer justice and support court rules in a way that brings greater racial justice to our system as a whole.

Fauci: We're surging back up, a serious situation to be addressed immediately

TONY FAUCI effectively agrees with those charts comparing U.S. and E.U. response on covid.

FAUCI: If you look at the graphs from Europe, the European Union, it went up and then came down to baseline… We went up, and never went down to baseline, and now we’re surging back up. pic.twitter.com/fAOES7ZHAi

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) July 7, 2020

Appeals Court Strikes Down Trump Administration’s Asylum Ban - The New York Times

One of the Trump administration's harshest steps to block applicants for asylum  - a statutory and treaty obligation of the United States - has been repudiated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  The rule at stake here is the "third country bar rule".  That measure - which has no basis in statute - effectively bars asylum applications by aliens.   District Judge John S. Tigar and 9th Circuit orders blocking Trump's efforts have been stayed by the United States Supreme Court.  Sonia Sotomayor bitterly complained of such measures by the Supreme Court majority.  - gwc
Appeals Court Strikes Down Trump Administration’s Asylum Ban - The New York Times
by Miriam Jordan


LOS ANGELES — A federal appeals court on Monday struck down President Trump’s policy that barred most migrants from seeking asylum in the United States if they had passed through another country, concluding that the government did “virtually nothing” to make sure that another country is “a safe option” for those fleeing persecution.

[In East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Barr] a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco affirmed the decision of a federal judge [Jon S. Tigar] who ruled last year that the so-called third-country transit rule was unlawful, with one judge calling it “perhaps the most significant change to American asylum in a generation.”

The ruling was an interim but important step. In September, the Supreme Court had allowed the Trump administration’s rule forbidding most Central American migrants from seeking asylum in the United States to take effect while the appeals courts deliberated its legality.

That stay remains in place until the Supreme Court takes up the case or the Trump administration abandons the policy. In the meantime, nearly all asylum seekers have been temporarily blocked from entering the country under a separate administration directive, issued as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, that closed the border to all but United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.
Still, Monday’s opinion was an important legal milestone, a 66-page opinion that found serious legal deficiencies in one of the administration’s signature immigration policies.

“The Trump administration is sure to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration at Cornell Law School.

KEEP READING

Trump?s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him - The Washington Post

Trump?s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him - The Washington Post

“They coddled this guy the whole time and now it’s like some rats are jumping off of the sinking ship. It’s just a little late,” Kasich said. “It’s left this nation with a crescendo of hate not only between politicians but between citizens. … It started with Charlottesville and people remained silent then, and we find ourselves in this position now.”

Kasich added, “I’m glad to see some of these Republicans moving the other way but it reminds me of Vichy France where they said, ‘Well, I never had anything to do with that,’” a reference to the French government that continued during Nazi occupation in the 1940s. 

Hong Kong's National Security Law: how dangerous is Article 38? | The China Collection

Hong Kong's National Security Law: how dangerous is Article 38? | The China Collection

by Don Clarke (George Washington Law School)

Many people who live outside of mainland China and Hong Kong and who have been critical of the Chinese Party-state are wondering about their safety in the wake of Hong Kong’s National Security Law (the “NSL” or the “Law”), which in Article 38 purports to criminalize violations of the law committed by anyone anywhere in the world. (I discussed the details in an earlier blog post.)

My short take on this is that I don’t think anyone is in significantly greater danger than they were before the NSL came into effect provided they stay out of Hong Kong. Here’s why I think so. My analysis will look both at the law and practical realities.

I. Mainland PRC

A. Law

Let’s look first at mainland PRC law, which does not apply in Hong Kong. Criticism of the Party-state, mockery of leaders, even anti-Party-state activism, etc. by non-PRC citizens outside the PRC mainland did not generally subject non-PRC citizens to criminal liability under mainland PRC law. A non-PRC citizen committing an act outside the mainland is criminally liable under mainland PRC law only if (a) the act would get a sentence of at least three years under the PRC Criminal Law, and (b) the act is a crime in the place where committed. Thus, typical acts of speech—tweeting, blogging, teaching, writing op-eds, etc.—would not make one liable.

B. Reality

Most people know by now that relying on the words of the law in China can be risky. (Who would have thought that making a mocking reference to “Steamed Bun Xi” in a small, private WeChat group could be grounds for imprisonment for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble”?) Given that China is detaining even people who have done nothing in order to have hostages [kidnapped Canadians | kidnapped Americans], it would be foolhardy indeed to assure anyone that they could do anything offensive to the Party-state outside of mainland China that is permitted by local law and not have to worry about getting arrested if they went to China. In practice, however, it seems that detentions by China of foreign critics, even on trumped-up grounds, are few.

There are three cases I know of—there may of course be more—where non-PRC citizens have been subject to criminal liability in China for (possibly) things they did outside of the mainland PRC. ***[KEEP READING]

Video: The Federalist Society and the federal judiciary - WaPo

Review: Jim Forest’s new memoir delves into his ‘unusual conscience’ | America Magazine

Review: Jim Forest’s new memoir delves into his ‘unusual conscience’ | America Magazine

Justices fail to correct a serious mistake in latest abortion ruling - Garnett - Our Sunday Visitor

Some people just get under one's skin.  For me relentlessly conservative Notre Dame law professor Rich Garnett is one.  Like the leaders of the United States conference of Catholic Bishops (UCCB) and New York's Archbishop Dolan he is an anti-abortion absolutist.  That has landed the hierarchy in Republican and Trumpian laps.

I am instead inclined toward Michael Sean Winters at National Catholic Reporter.  He writes this week that the Pro-life clause is stymied, but not because of the recent court decision blocking a Louisiana law.  The core of Winters argument is

The heart of the matter is whether we, as a society, are going to treat pregnant women with dignity and give them the support they need so that they never view a pregnancy as a burden. Will we restructure our society so that parenting is not a career ender? Will we make sure that pregnancy costs no more than an abortion? Will we have child support services so that a single mom does not have to carry the full weight of parenting non-stop, 24/7? John Carr, who was a longtime lead staffer on public policy at the bishops' conference, has always said we need to make abortion unthinkable before we make it illegal, and I think he is right. I do not see how the pro-life movement can or should move forward right now. We need a more propitious time and more propitious leaders.

- gwc
Justices fail to correct a serious mistake in latest abortion ruling - Our Sunday Visitor
by Rick Garnett (Notre Dame Law School)

On Monday, a divided Supreme Court handed down its decision in a case called June Medical Services v. Russo, which involves a Louisiana law requiring abortionists to hold “active admitting privileges” at a nearby hospital. By a vote of 5-4, the justices ruled that this duly enacted regulation violates the Constitution of the United States.

The court’s decision, and the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts — a judicial conservative who, until now, has consistently voted to uphold reasonable abortion restrictions — voted with the court majority, have deeply disappointed not only pro-life Americans but all those who understand how badly the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision has distorted and degraded our law, our politics and our political morality.

The June Medical Services case is a sequel of sorts to another, similar one. In 2016, a few months after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, a different five-justice majority struck down a Texas admitting-privileges requirement, concluding that it unconstitutionally burdened the legal right to abortion. A question, then, in June Medical Services was whether the Louisiana statute and its effects should be regarded any differently. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by the court’s three other more liberal members, determined that it should not. And Roberts agreed. Louisiana’s health-and-safety regulation, he concluded, is “nearly identical to the Texas law struck down four years ago” and it “imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law.”***

How Palestinians Can Reunite to Oppose Israel's Annexation | Time

How Palestinians Can Reunite to Oppose Israel's Annexation | Time
by Salam Fayyad (former PM of the Palestinian Authority)

***Instead, the PLO must propose an alternative way forward that could garner broad-based Palestinian support. What the Palestinian people desperately need is a clear statement — a definition upon which we can legitimately pursue our national aspirations. I believe a broad Palestinian national consensus can be built upon a platform committing to either of two options.

The first is anchored on the model of a single state, whose constitution provides for full equality for all of its citizens, and without any discrimination on any basis whatsoever. The second is an agreed two-state solution — but only with an independent and fully sovereign Palestinian state on the entire territory occupied by Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem, and with any engagement in a peace process that is to lead to that outcome preceded by international recognition, including by Israel, of the Palestinians’ right to such state, as well as our other rights provided for under international law—namely, the right of return in accordance with UN resolution 194 and the right to self-determination.

Obviously these two options are mutually exclusive. But, they have to both be included in the new platform to ensure that the PLO—as it begins to take concrete steps to include non-PLO factions and forces opposed to the Oslo framework or the 1988 compromise—is instantaneously empowered to convey, on behalf of all Palestinians, what we are prepared to accept. At some point, Palestinians will have to choose between the two possible options outlined above. That, however, will not happen unless Israel recognizes our national rights.