SCOTUS – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Georgia on my Mind

David Posnett — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 14:40:05 +0000

a classic

OK. We can either listen to this classic… or get active… or both!

Joe Biden continues to pick up votes in Georgia after clinching the presidency.

According to WSBTV.com News Staff. Updated November 9, 2020 – 4:55 PM

Vice President-Elect Joe Biden holds a lead of 10,195 votes over President Donald Trump in Georgia as ballots continue to trickle in.

There are insufficient outstanding votes to overturn these results and a recount is unlikely to do so either.

All eyes are now on Georgia as the state prepares for two crucial Senate races that could determine the balance of power in Washington.

Kelly Loeffler is slated for a runoff with Raphael Warnock and David Perdue will face Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff on January 5.

Below is information included in today’s Hubbell newsletter about ways to work for the democratic candidates in the senate runoff elections in Georgia in January.

The Georgia Senate Races. Per an interview with Stacy Abrams, you can contribute to Fair Fight, where you can split your contribution with Jon Ossoff, Rev. Raphael Warnock, and Fair Fight (to help with voter protection efforts). You can also sign up for phonebanking opportunities at Fair Fight. If you live in Georgia, you can request an absentee ballot here: “Georgia Absentee Voters / January 5, 2021 Runoff.” If you would like to help turnout by calling voters in Georgia, see SwingLeft / Georgia. If you are a postcard writer, check out Flip the West / Postcards to Georgia Voters for U.S. Senate Runoff Race! Both Ossoff and Warnock’s campaigns have volunteer opportunities outside of phone banking, including hosting a grassroots fundraiser and attending virtual events: Jon Ossoff for U.S. Senate and Rev. Raphael Warnock for U.S. Senate.

Amy Klobuchar: the Cruz Hypocrisy regarding SCOTUS

David Posnett — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 12:58:06 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtyrrtM7iME&feature=youtu.be

People are already voting and they don’t buy in to phony Republican arguments for replacing Justice Ginsburg as soon as possible to insure enough Trump support on SCOTUS to overturn the election results if needed. Trump is not hiding his intent. This would be the death of democracy and the birth of tyranny.

We need an uprising from the majority of American voters. A revolution against tyranny. Yes, when the minority uses their ill begotten power to suppress the will of the people, that is tyranny and wide spread protests will ultimately happen.

If you are still hesitating about whether we are heading to a dictatorship, read this from Dana Milbank about the parallels between the present day Trump regime and the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933!

Now lets go do our part: Phonebank! Text! Letters! Postcards!

Something you can do for RBG

David Posnett — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 12:04:47 +0000

From Randall Parsons/Judith Hope:

If you feel the need to do something… or something more than you’ve been doing, here’s a way to honor RBG and help stop McConnell from pushing through another ultra conservative Supreme Court nominee.

Leave voicemails for the six Senators below. Murkowski and Collins have said they’ll oppose the vote, but it’s a good idea to call and support (and thereby reinforce) their decision. To make it easier for you, here’s a script for the other four (and we only need two of them):

“My name is________________. I know you know that Mitch McConnell is hypocritically ignoring the principle he set up in 2016 by trying to confirm a Supreme Court justice less than 7 weeks before the Presidential election. To preserve the legitimacy of the Court in the eyes of all Americans, I’m asking you to refuse to do that until after a new president is sworn in.”

Obviously, change the script in any way you want.

If you call today or tonight, you won’t have to talk to a live person. You can email if you prefer, but you’d have to leave your address, phone number, etc.

Mitt Romney, Utah: ‎(202) 224-5251
Martha McSally, Arizona: (202) 224-2235
Cory Gardner, Colorado: (202) 224-5941
Chuck Grassley, Iowa: (202) 224-3744
Susan Collins, Maine: (207) 784-6969

Lisa Murkowski, Alaska: (202) 224-6665

Those were the names that were sent to me, but I thought it would be worth it to contact the three Republican incumbents, who are retiring and have nothing to lose by opposing McConnell. I appealed to their sense of fairness:

Lamar Alexander, Tennessee: (202) 224-4944
Mike Enzi, Wyoming: (202) 224-3424
Pat Roberts, Kansas: (202) 224-4774

It seems that we the people are the only ones who can prevent this travesty. A lot of noise has worked before.

Complete Lee Zeldin Environmental Voting Record

David Posnett — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:00:03 +0000

Lee Zeldin’s League of Conservation Voters (LCV) score for 2019 was 28%. This seems like an improvement from his scores from prior years, which hovered around 10%, but to put things in perspective: The average Member of Congress score in 2019 was 56%, twice Zeldin’s, and true friends of the environment routinely score in the 90’s or even 100%.

Zeldin’s lifetime score, covering all 3 of his terms in Congress, remains a dismal 13%.

Since our last update, in August 2019, Zeldin voted 5 times to preserve or expand the rights of fossil fuel interests to explore and drill: Off the Gulf Coast of Florida, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, near Chaco Canyon National Park, near the Grand Canyon, and in 200,000 acres of Colorado Wilderness. He also voted to permit seismic air gun blasting (for oil and gas exploration) that harms marine mammals.

Also since our last update, Zeldin voted against closing a loophole in the Clean Water Act that allows companies to discharge unlimited amounts of toxic PFAS (also known as “forever chemicals”) into our nation’s waterways, and Zeldin voted in favor of the Trump North American trade deal that completely failed to address climate change.

On the other hand, since our last update and sometimes in seemingly contradictory fashion, Zeldin voted to ban oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, to impose a moratorium on seismic blasting off the Atlantic Coast, to ban all trade in shark fins and to increase some regulation of PFAS in drinking water and consumer products.

Full details can be found in the linked Complete Lee Zeldin Environmental Voting Record Spreadsheet. https://www.facebook.com/notes/lets-visit-lee-zeldin/complete-lee-zeldin-environmental-voting-record/1703500749943694/

By Marc Rauch and Suzi Kondic, see post on Facebook

And here is the prior post from 2017:

Complete Lee Zeldin Environmental Voting Record

Kavanaugh’s 1982 Calendar: damning!

David Posnett — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 19:48:39 +0000

“go to Timmy’s for [Brew]skis (beer) with Judge, Tom, PJ, Bernie, Squi”

(Provided by Brett Kavanaugh to the Senate Judiciary Committee)

During Thursday’s dramatic questioning of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, he was quizzed repeatedly about the calendars he provided to bolster his case that he didn’t assault Christine Blasey Ford while a high school student in 1982.

Ford alleges that she attended a party at someone’s home that summer, where, she alleges, Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge pushed her into a bedroom and locked the door and where Kavanaugh then began to try to remove her clothes. Among the others at the party, Ford alleged, was another friend of Kavanaugh’s named P.J. Smyth. Kavanaugh denies the allegation and told Fox News’ Marth MacCallum that while he might have met Ford, he didn’t know her. Judge said in a statement that he doesn’t remember any such party. Smyth made a similar statement.

It was Kavanaugh’s hope that providing those calendars would show that he attended no such gathering. He insisted, in his testimony Thursday, that any party of the sort must have been on a weekend (since he and his friends had jobs) and that the calendars showed that essentially all of the weekends were booked with other activities. (His friend Mark Judge, in a memoir about his past drinking problem, wrote that this wasn’t a concern of his: He’d regularly show up at work hung over or drunk.)

Rachel Mitchell, hired by the Republican majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee to navigate the questioning of Kavanaugh and Ford, pointed to one particular calendar entry that got some attention after the calendars came out. It read:

Tobin’s House — Workout / Go to Timmy’s for Skis w/ Judge, Tom, PJ, Bernie, Squi

The reference to “skis” is apparently to “brewskis,” or beers. The entry was July 1, a Thursday. Mitchell asked him about it.

MITCHELL: The entry says, and I quote, go to ‘Timmy’s for skis with Judge, Tom, P.J. Bernie and … Squi?’

KAVANAUGH: Squi. It’s a nickname.

MITCHELL: To what does this refer, and to whom?

KAVANAUGH: [after explaining the “Tobin’s House” part] It looks like we went over to Timmy’s. You want to know their last names, too? I’m happy to do it.

MITCHELL:If you could just identify: Is ‘Judge’ Mark Judge?

KAVANAUGH: It is. It’s Tim Gaudette, Mark Judge, Tom Kaine, P.J. Smyth, Bernie McCarthy, Chris Garrett.

Notice two things here. First, that “Squi” was in attendance at the party — someone who, we learned thanks to Mitchell’s questioning of Ford, was going out with Ford over the course of that summer. Second, notice those two other attendees, one of whom Mitchell highlighted: Mark Judge and P.J. Smyth.

Mitchell’s questioning continued.

MITCHELL:Did you in your calendar routinely document social gatherings like house parties or gatherings of friends in your calendar?

KAVANAUGH: Yes, it certainly appears that way, that’s what I was doing in the summer of 1982. You can see that reflected on several of the– several of the entries.

MITCHELL: If a gathering like Dr. Ford has described had occurred, would you have documented that?

KAVANAUGH:Yes, because I documented everything, those kinds of events, even small get-togethers. August 7 is another good example where I documented a small get-together that summer. So yes.

During her testimony, Ford made clear that the event at which she says she was assaulted was a casual get-together before the others (who were older than her and had a later curfew) went to other, bigger parties. Kavanaugh says that the gathering at Timmy’s on July 1 was essentially that.

We noted Thursday, too, that the time frame of this July 1 party fits with Ford’s testimony. She says that six to eight weeks after the alleged assault, she saw Judge working at a store in the area. Judge’s book indicates that he was working at that store for several weeks in early to mid-August.

This is a central point to Ford’s allegation. Kavanaugh denies knowing her, denies being at a party with her. Here is an event in July where he was with several long-standing friends, two of whom were named by Ford and one of whom she’d been going out with.

But Mitchell’s next question completely fumbles the point.

MITCHELL:Have you reviewed every entry that is in these calendars of May, June, July and August of 1982.

KAVANAUGH:I have.

MITCHELL:Is there anything that could even remotely fit what we’re talking about in terms of Dr. Ford’s allegations?

KAVANAUGH: No.

That was it. Mitchell changed the subject.

There were all sorts of ways that Mitchell could have pressed the issue. How, for example, might Ford have been able to identify by name two of Kavanaugh’s close friends if she didn’t know him or had barely met him? Why isn’t it possible that this July 1 get-together was precisely the sort of event at which Ford alleges she was assaulted? That more than remotely fits the allegation? But she didn’t ask.

Mitchell had been stepping in for Republican senators during the day’s questioning, a tactic that helped the majority avoid the spectacle of men grilling a woman about an attack she says she experienced. There was no break in that pattern — until the July 1 question. After that series of questions, Mitchell didn’t speak again.

Update: On Friday morning, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) outlined the points above. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the committee, responded by noting that the calendar indicates that there were at least seven boys at the party, while Ford’s allegations only mentioned four.

Ford addressed the number of attendees during her testimony on Thursday, also responding to a question from Mitchell.

“I can’t guarantee that there weren’t a few other people there,” Ford said, “but they are not in my purview of my memory.”

Comment (D. Posnett): It is interesting. to see what our congressman, Lee Zeldin, thinks of Brett Kavenaugh. Thanks to David Friedman for this:

Remembering Julie Hilden

David Posnett — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 16:39:08 +0000

A nice tribute to a First Amendment warrior

MONDAY, MARCH 19, 2018

by Michael Dorf

Julie Hilden — lawyer, author, and editor — passed away on Saturday. She was my friend for over 30 years. Julie combined a fierce intelligence with incredible kindness. Her work was brutally self-critical even as she was extraordinarily generous to others. I’ll try to paint a picture of her life and work, but this is also a personal remembrance.

I first met Julie in college on the debate team. She was good at it, but debating wasn’t really Julie’s calling. She was more interested in following ideas wherever they led than in taking a side and sticking with it. She was also the sort of person who liked to work through her ideas on the page. Don’t get me wrong. Julie was a terrific debater. It’s just that she seemed less intense about it than most of the rest of us–which, from the vantage of middle age, looks like a virtue.

Perhaps Julie’s intellectual openness and curiosity explain why, after law school, she was drawn to First Amendment work. She was in some ways a conventional free speech libertarian. She was skeptical of rationales for imposing sanctions on speakers, because she worried about line drawing by the government.

However, Julie’s free speech libertarianism was neither absolute nor automatic. Running throughout her numerous columns on free speech (archived here) one finds a focus on what my colleague Steve Shiffrin has argued ought to be the central concern of free speech doctrine: dissent. Julie was especially interested in protecting the free speech of relatively powerless dissenters, as in this column in which she argued that a high school cheerleader ought to have the right not to cheer for a player who she says assaulted her. More broadly, Julie often sided with student activists. Always still a kid at heart, I think she identified with them.

Although Julie made frequent reference to Supreme Court doctrine in her free speech writing, she did not follow it blindly. For example, she praised Justice Alito’s solo dissent in United States v. Stevens. There, the majority struck down a law that criminalized depictions of cruelty to animals. Julie thought Justice Alito had the better argument, partly because of some technical concerns about the difference between as-applied and facial challenges, but especially because she thought the existing categorical exceptions to free speech were less justifiable than the one on offer by the government. As she wrote, contrasting the recognized exceptions for obscenity, defamation, and fraud with the rejected category of depictions of animal cruelty:

obscenity’s only conceivable harm to the viewer is psychological and temporary; the viewer can quickly turn away. Defamation harms reputation, but the target always has the power to reply – either in civil court, while seeking money damages, or in the press or, increasingly, via the Internet. And the victim of fraud can generally be made whole with money, in civil court.

In contrast, the cruel murder of an animal effects damage that is permanent, ineradicable, and uncompensable. Nothing can truly remedy what has occurred, for the pain has been suffered; the death has occurred. There is no justice for the animal, except perhaps in the criminal prosecution of the perpetrator – but unlike a person who is being murdered, an animal does not even have the comfort of knowing that he may die, but at least justice will eventually be done.

And, Julie continued, the government has a sound rationale for banning the depictions of animal cruelty because the sale of such depictions drives their production–the same rationale that the Court has said justifies bans on child pornography.

Julie’s compassion for non-human animals permeated her life. She and her partner Stephen adopted an older dog from a shelter because they thought he wouldn’t otherwise find a home. Julie became a vegan and used her voice to advocate for the voiceless–as always firmly but gently. I’m going to make a donation in Julie’s memory to The Gentle Barn, a farm animal sanctuary she loved. If I weren’t already a vegan myself, I’d take the 30-day vegan challenge. I recommend it to anyone looking for a way to honor Julie’s memory. It’s hard to know what causes what, but I think that editing Sherry Colb’s columns over the years–many of them on animal rights themes–awakened Julie to the plight of non-human animals as a justice issue. I’d like to think that I played a small role in that process too, although I wrote and write less frequently on animal rights.

Julie edited all of us on FindLaw’s Writ, and then after FindLaw decided to go in a different direction, she was instrumental in moving us en masse to Verdict on Justia. I have been in close touch with my fellow columnists in the last several days. To a person, we were and are deeply affected by Julie’s life and death.

Julie was my friend before she was my editor, but that didn’t stop her from gutting my writing when it needed gutting. To this day, I somewhat ashamedly recall that I didn’t actually write what I regard as the best line I ever wrote. It was in a column about the San Remo case in the Supreme Court. A federal judge told a plaintiff to take its case to state court for the adjudication of a tricky state law claim and then come back to federal court afterwards. When the plaintiff did that, the federal court said that going to state court forfeited the claim. The Supreme Court agreed. I wrote that this was unfair. Julie improved my flat prose immeasurably. She crossed out what I had written and substituted: “If the case were a banana, it would have gone from green to rotten–with no time at which it could be deemed edible.”

Julie’s first love was literature. She always had interesting off-beat suggestions for what to read. After a few years as a practicing lawyer, she decided to take a crack at writing full-time. She was already highly credentialed as a Harvard College and Yale Law School graduate, but she felt untrained, so she applied to and then attended Cornell’s MFA program. Out of that came what was first a novel that Julie converted into a memoir by stripping out a fictional plot and leaving in the autobiographical material. The Bad Daughter is an elegant, searing book that was a revelation to those of us who thought we knew Julie.

Julie called herself a bad daughter because, when her mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, she did not drop her career to care for her. Given the nature of the relationship and behavior that preceded the diagnosis, “bad” was grossly unfair. I now think–indeed the book pretty clearly suggests–that Julie was in denial about what her mother’s disease said about her mother’s past behavior towards Julie and, more ominously, what it portended for Julie’s own future. Denial strikes me as a perfectly sensible reaction to the knowledge that a time bomb is ticking inside you–for Julie and, in a real sense, for all of us.

The Bad Daughter also chronicled Julie’s infidelities and sex life more broadly as of the time she wrote the book. She expressed a kind of guilt about the infidelities but not about the sex. Roughly contemporaneous with the run of Sex and the City, Julie’s chronicle of her own adventures as a young single female professional in NYC was both more interesting and more nuanced. She had a feminist sex-positive attitude, but not one that precluded her seeing her inability to sustain a committed relationship as undermining her own life satisfaction. She expressed the same complex feminist erotic sensibility in her novel Three. It’s dark but not a morality tale in any conventional way.

Julie also wrote a book that I confess not to have read yet, The Film Student and Me. We would be better off if we had still more books by Julie. The main reason we don’t, I think, is that after she met Stephen she was just too damned happy with their life together in Venice, California. She was emotionally and intellectually stimulated, but life gave her fewer difficult moments to turn into literature. It’s a tradeoff I don’t begrudge her. I just wish Julie had the good fortune to enjoy the life she deserved for another four or five decades.

Locking up Immigrants

David Posnett — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 14:55:23 +0000

In just a few hours, I’ll be arguing a critical case at the Supreme Court. Jennings v. Rodriguez will decide the fate of thousands of women and men who are languishing in immigration prisons across the country. It’s important – and I want to make sure you know what’s at stake.

At issue is the federal government’s practice of locking up immigrants who are challenging their deportation without the basic due process of a hearing to determine if their imprisonment is justified. Imprisoning people without a hearing is unconstitutional and un-American. We’ll prove that today in court.

We have a full docket at the Supreme Court this term, so we need all the support we can get. Can you contribute today to help fund victories for civil rights and liberties?

This case is personal for me. I come from a family of immigrants. I was born here, but my parents are Sri Lankan Tamils. When civil war broke out in Sri Lanka, our extended family fled to live with us in the U.S and I saw first-hand the pain of displacement.

I think people looking at our immigrants’ rights work often don’t take the time to put themselves in the shoes of the people we represent. Many of our clients in this case are asylum-seekers, who have come to this country fleeing persecution from abroad. Others have lived here for decades. All deserve the basic humanity we grant American citizens.

Take our lead plaintiff, Alejandro Rodriguez. Alex was brought to the United States from Mexico by his parents as a baby. He grew up here, became a lawful permanent resident, and worked as a dental assistant to support his three children. He ran into legal trouble and was convicted of a minor drug possession offense. But since he was not a citizen, instead of being sent to a drug treatment program, Alex was imprisoned by immigration authorities for more than three years without ever receiving a bond hearing.

Through this case we got him out. Alex went on to win his immigration case and keep his lawful permanent resident status. He’ll never get back those three years away from his family, but he’s taking his fight to the Supreme Court to win justice for other immigrants. I’m proud to represent him, along with thousands of green card-holders and asylum-seekers locked up without due process.

That’s what I’m fighting for today. This case began ten years ago. It’s been a long road, and we’re finally here.

Thanks for your support,

Ahilan Arulanantham
Legal Director at the ACLU of Southern California