The change would apply to people who were born Cambodian citizens, people with dual citizenship in Cambodia and another country, and people from other nations who have been granted Cambodian citizenship.

All 125 members of the National Assembly voted for the resolution, which legally amends Article 33 of the Cambodian constitution. The move comes after a rise in tensions between Cambodia and Thailand over a border dispute that resulted in a deadly shooting incident, closures at the border, and a political fight that contributed to a Thai court suspending the country’s prime minister.

(Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP)

Hun Manet, Cambodia’s prime minister, used a speech last week to frame the move’s expected impact.

“Please don’t be concerned if you are a patriot and do not oppose the interest” of Cambodia, he said. “But if you have conspired with foreign powers to destroy Cambodia then, yes, it is true you should be worried, and in such case you are not a Cambodian. No true patriot would ever plot with foreign powers to destroy their nation.”

Critics warn that new legislation targeting dissidents’ citizenship would suppress voices critical of the government.

“As the proposal moves closer to becoming reality, anyone who speaks out against or opposes the ruling party will be at risk of having their citizenship revoked,” Montse Ferrer, Regional Research Director for Amnesty International, said in a statement. “We are deeply concerned that the Cambodian government, given the power to strip people of their citizenship, will misuse it to crackdown on its critics and make them stateless.”

Before the amendment, Article 33 of the Cambodian constitution said that “no Khmer citizen shall be deprived of their nationality, exiled, or extradited to another country except through mutual agreement. Khmer citizens living abroad are protected by the state. The acquisition of Cambodian nationality is determined by law.”

Includes reporting from The Associated Press.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Khmer.

Since the beginning of its genocidal assault on Gaza twenty-one months ago, the Israeli government has deprived millions of Palestinians of food and other basic necessities for life. Now, amid the widespread starvation that it has created, the Netanyahu government has sidelined the U.N.’s neutral, internationally recognized Gaza-wide system of aid delivery in favor of GHF’s privatized and militarized model, which one U.N. expert describes as a “death trap.” Israeli soldiers were ordered to fire on Palestinians waiting for food, according to a report in Haaretz.

GHF’s system was designed to align with the Israeli’s government stated goal of forcibly displacing Palestinians from the north to the south of Gaza – a war crime under international law. While the UN’s 400 distribution sites largely sit dormant, GHF delivers aid at a handful of sites primarily located in the south. In fact, internal planning documents reveal that people involved in the development of GHF understood the risk that its distribution hubs would force the displacement of Palestinians.

In its FOIA request, the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks records that could reveal whether GHF was also created to further President Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” redevelopment – and ethnic cleansing – plan. The Center of Constitutional Rights has previously joined other human rights and legal organizations in warning that individuals and entities involved in GHF could face legal liability for complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

It is against this backdrop that the State Department approved a $30 million United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grant for GHF, which is chaired by Johnnie Moore, an evangelical preacher who worked in the first Trump administration. GHF has not disclosed information about its funding, yet in announcing the grant, the State Department exempted it from the audit required for groups receiving USAID funds for the first time.

“It is outrageous that rather than investigating GHF and the private military contractors at its distribution hubs for complicity in war crimes, the Trump administration has doubled down in furthering Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by giving GHF tens of millions of dollars,” said, Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Staff Attorney Katherine Gallagher. “The GHF operation raises many concerning questions about U.S. long-term plans for Gaza, and we will use this FOIA to get answers. The United States must stop sending arms and contractors to Gaza, and instead demand that the United Nations be permitted to resume its aid operations until Palestinians can fully return and rebuild a free Gaza.”

With its FOIA request, the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks all relevant records from the State Department and USAID from October 1st, 2024 to present, including information about GHF’s creation, the role of consulting groups like the Boston Consulting Group, its leadership, and financing. The FOIA also seeks information about the U.S. government links to the newly formed private military contractors in Gaza, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) and UG Solutions.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Let us be very clear: the Trump Administration does not want citizenship to be a right. They want it to be a reward for the loyal, the rich, or the compliant.

To this end, President Trump’s bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is a modern-day Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.

This is not about protecting America, but redefining America from the top down.

That redefinition is already underway.

The Trump Administration’s plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and consideration of a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship” are not just absurd—they’re obscene.

They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.

This governing by performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. It’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.

It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.

We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.

It’s a contradiction: while the Trump Administration decries falling birthrates and offers financial incentives for childbirth, it demonizes birthright citizenship for the very communities that are actually having children and contributing significantly to the economy without any guarantee of anything in return.

Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.

The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.

Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.

This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That precedent still stands.

Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.

Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.

After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.

If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.

That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.

Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.

You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.

If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.

As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

The same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship, based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.

This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.

And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.

In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, allegiance, and compliance.

Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.

If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.

Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.

This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals, not just the popular or the powerful.

Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic, but an empire of arbitrary rule.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Let us be very clear: the Trump Administration does not want citizenship to be a right. They want it to be a reward for the loyal, the rich, or the compliant.

To this end, President Trump’s bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is a modern-day Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.

This is not about protecting America, but redefining America from the top down.

That redefinition is already underway.

The Trump Administration’s plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and consideration of a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship” are not just absurd—they’re obscene.

They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.

This governing by performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. It’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.

It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.

We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.

It’s a contradiction: while the Trump Administration decries falling birthrates and offers financial incentives for childbirth, it demonizes birthright citizenship for the very communities that are actually having children and contributing significantly to the economy without any guarantee of anything in return.

Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.

The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.

Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.

This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That precedent still stands.

Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.

Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.

After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.

If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.

That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.

Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.

You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.

If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.

As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

The same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship, based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.

This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.

And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.

In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, allegiance, and compliance.

Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.

If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.

Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.

This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals, not just the popular or the powerful.

Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic, but an empire of arbitrary rule.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Let us be very clear: the Trump Administration does not want citizenship to be a right. They want it to be a reward for the loyal, the rich, or the compliant.

To this end, President Trump’s bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is a modern-day Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.

This is not about protecting America, but redefining America from the top down.

That redefinition is already underway.

The Trump Administration’s plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and consideration of a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship” are not just absurd—they’re obscene.

They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.

This governing by performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. It’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.

It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.

We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.

It’s a contradiction: while the Trump Administration decries falling birthrates and offers financial incentives for childbirth, it demonizes birthright citizenship for the very communities that are actually having children and contributing significantly to the economy without any guarantee of anything in return.

Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.

The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.

Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.

This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That precedent still stands.

Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.

Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.

After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.

If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.

That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.

Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.

You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.

If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.

As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

The same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship, based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.

This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.

And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.

In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, allegiance, and compliance.

Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.

If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.

Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.

This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals, not just the popular or the powerful.

Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic, but an empire of arbitrary rule.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

We speak with Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, just back from El Salvador, where he met Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father whom the Trump administration says they forcibly transferred to an El Salvador mega-prison last month by “administrative error.” “We will keep fighting for his constitutional rights, because if we deny the constitutional rights for one person, we threaten them for everybody,” says Van Hollen. Four more Democratic lawmakers, including Congressmembers Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida and Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, have since traveled to El Salvador to continue pressuring for Abrego Garcia’s release.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, joins us as President Trump’s defiance of the courts is pushing the United States toward a constitutional crisis, with multiple judges weighing whether to open contempt proceedings against his administration for ignoring court orders. On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg criticized officials for continuing to stonewall his inquiry into why planes full of Venezuelan immigrants were sent to El Salvador last month even after he ordered the flights halted or turned around midair. Boasberg noted in his order that Trump officials have since “failed to rectify or explain their actions,” giving the administration until April 23 to respond. This comes as Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador but was blocked from seeing or speaking to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who was sent to CECOT on the March flights in what the Department of Homeland Security has admitted was an “administrative error.” Both the Trump administration and the government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele have refused to release and return Abrego Garcia. This week, federal Judge Paula Xinis said the administration had made no effort to comply with the order, and said she could begin contempt proceedings. “The government is providing no information, not even the most basic factual information about what’s been happening,” says Warren.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Trump administration maintains that it can send people to overseas concentration camps with impunity  because “activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy” (BBC, 4/11/25).

As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis.

In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25).

The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”

In an X post (4/15/25) filled with unproven assertions that skirt the question of due process and extraordinary rendition, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “The entire American media and left-wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” (Are we supposed to believe that the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, are a part of the “left-wing industrial complex?”)

The complete disregard to constitutional protections of due process and to court orders should send alarm bells throughout American society. The MAGA movement condones sending unconvicted migrants to a foreign hellhole largely on grounds that they are not US citizens, and thus don’t have a right to constitutional due process. But the administration has floated the idea of doing the same thing to “homegrown” undesirables as well (Al Jazeera, 4/15/25).

‘An uncertain end’

The New York Times (4/15/25) goes out on a limb and declares that the president defying the Supreme Court is “a path with an uncertain end.”

The case is quite obviously not about the extremity or unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s policies, but a breaking point at which the executive branch has left the democratic confines of the Constitution, as many journalists and scholars have warned about. But the case is not necessarily being portrayed that way in the establishment press.

In an article about the Trump administration’s record of resisting court orders, a New York Times subhead (4/15/25) read, “Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.” In an article about “What to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador” (4/14/25), reporter Alan Feuer described the Supreme Court’s upholding the order to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García as “complicated and rather ambiguous” rather than a “clear victory for the administration.”

At the Washington Post (4/14/25), law professor Stuart Banner wrote an opinion piece saying that fears of a constitutional crisis were overblown, noting that while Trump is “famous for his contemptuous remarks about judges…tension between the president and the Supreme Court is centuries old.” Thus, he said, there are incentives in both branches to “not to let conflict ripen into public defiance.”

The Wall Street Journal (4/15/25) presents the prospect of the White House defying a Supreme Court order as a “showdown” that Trump might “win.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/15/25) said:

Mr. Trump would be wise to settle all of this by quietly asking Mr. Bukele to return Mr. Ábrego García, who has a family in the US. But the president may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss. If this case does become a judicial showdown, Mr. Trump may assert his Article II powers not to return Mr. Ábrego García, and the Supreme Court will be reluctant to disagree.

But Mr. Trump would be smarter to play the long game. He has many, much bigger issues than the fate of one man that will come before the Supreme Court. By taunting the judiciary in this manner, he is inviting a rebuke on cases that carry far greater stakes.

These articles display a naivete about the current moment. The Trump administration and its allies have flatly declared that they believe a judicial check on the executive authority wrongly places constitutional restraints on Trump’s desires (New York Times, 3/19/25; Guardian, 3/22/25).

House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to court rulings that went against MAGA desires, “warned that Congress’ authority over the federal judiciary includes the power to eliminate entire district courts,” Reuters (3/25/25) reported. The House also approved legislation, along party lines, that “limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration” (AP, 4/9/25).

In other words, Trump’s defiance of the courts is part of a broader campaign to assert that the Constitution simply should not be an impediment to his rule. That’s not a liberal versus conservative debate about national policy, but a declaration that the United States will no longer operate as a constitutional republic.

‘Constitutional crisis is here’

“Think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts,” urges Rex Huppke (USA Today, 4/15/25). “It’s time to stand up and shout ‘Hell no!’ right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.”

Pieces like the ones at the Journal, Times and Post give readers the sense that this affair is just another quirk of the American system of checks and balances, when, in fact, history could look back and declare this the moment when the Constitution became a dead letter.

Other outlets, however, appeared to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “America Is Dangerously Close to Being Run by a King Who Answers to No One” was the headline of Rex Huppke column at USA Today (4/15/25). “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here” was the headline of a recent piece by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (4/14/25).

This case will roil on, and both the judicial system (Reuters, 4/15/25) and congressmembers (NBC News, 4/16/25) are taking action. There’s still time for the papers to treat this case with the urgency that it deserves.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Apr. 14, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

“Everyone here is pretending,” said immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick as a video of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele speaking in the Oval Office circulated on Monday.

Bukele, said the senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was pretending “that he’s incapable of releasing” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident whom the Trump administration expelled to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in March, while President Donald Trump continued to pretend he’s unable to demand Abrego Garcia’s release.

When reporters asked Bukele to weigh in on Abrego Garcia’s case, the Salvadoran leader scoffed.

“Of course you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States,” he said. “How can I return him to the United States, do I smuggle him into the United States? …I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”

Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant in 2011. He was accused by a police informant of being a member of MS-13 in 2019, but he denied the allegations and was never charged with a crime. He was denied asylum in a hearing, but a judge determined that he should not be deported to his home country of El Salvador, where he had a credible fear of facing persecution and torture.

He had been working as a sheet metal worker and living in Maryland with his wife and children for several years when he was among hundreds of people accused of being criminals and rounded up to be expelled to El Salvador under a Trump administration deal with Bukele last month.

In the Oval Office on Monday, Bukele joined the Trump administration in claiming nothing can be done to return Abrego Garcia to his family in Maryland.

“The U.S. is pretending it doesn’t have the power,” said civil rights lawyer Patrick Jaicomo. “And Bukele is pretending he doesn’t have the power. So who has the power?”

The Supreme Court last week said the administration is responsible for “facilitating” Abrego Garcia’s release, and the Department of Justice claimed in a filing on Sunday that under that order, it is only liable for allowing the man to enter the U.S. once he is freed from the prison in El Salvador.

Trump’s treatment of the case represents “a full-blown constitutional crisis and possibly the watershed moment for what the near future looks like,” said one writer. “If this holds, there is no law but Trump’s law.”

In the Oval Office, said J.P. Hill, both leaders were “openly saying they’ll defy the Supreme Court and maybe even send American citizens to the prison camp in El Salvador. Nobody will be safe if we let this happen.”

As Bukele and Trump both denied responsibility for the hundreds of people they have sent to CECOT, Documented reported on Merwil Gutiérrez, a 19-year-old Venezuelan immigrant who was also sent to El Salvador.

Gutiérrez has no criminal record in the U.S. or his home country, and was not a target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation operation. An ICE agent said, “He’s not the one,” when a group of officers came to make an arrest at Gutiérrez’s apartment building, but another replied, “Take him anyway.”

Gutiérrez’s story, said Reichlin-Melnick, “comes as Bukele today pretends that he has no power to release people held in his own prison.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Julia Conley.

A Fijian academic believes Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s failed attempt to garner enough parliamentary support to change the country’s 2013 Constitution “is only the beginning”.

Last week, Rabuka fell short in his efforts to secure the support of three-quarters of the members of Parliament to amend sections 159 and 160 of the constitution.

The prime minister’s proposed amendments also sought to remove the need for a national referendum altogether. While the bill passed its first reading with support from several opposition MPs, it failed narrowly at the second reading.

• READ MORE: Fiji government fails to secure support to make changes to constitution
• Other Fiji politics reports

Video: RNZ Pacific

While the bill passed its first reading with support from several opposition MPs, it failed narrowly at the second reading.

Jope Tarai, an indigenous Fijian PhD scholar and researcher at the Australian National University, told RNZ Pacific Waves that “it is quite obvious that it is not going to be the end” of Rabuka’s plans to amend the constitution.

However, he said that it was “something that might take a while” with less than a year before the 2026 elections.

“So, the repositioning towards the people’s priorities will be more important than constitutional review,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

NBC News (2/4/25) put Trump’s unconstitutional attack on USAID in a Cold War frame.

Are the corporate media outlets reporting on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s authoritarian takeover smarter than a fifth grader? Recent coverage of the president and his henchman’s blatantly unconstitutional dismembering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) would suggest some are not.

Reports on the agency’s shuttering (Politico, 1/31/25, 2/14/25; NBC, 2/4/25) have often failed to sufficiently sound the alarm on how Trump’s efforts are upending the most basic—and vitally important—federal checks and balances one learns about in a Schoolhouse Rock episode. Instead, these reports have framed bedrock constitutional principles as if they were up for debate, and neglected to mention that the Trump administration is purposefully attempting to shirk executive restraints.

Meanwhile, much of corporate media’s justified attention on the foreign aid agency’s demise has wasted ink on a narrower, unjustifiable reason for audiences to draw objections: the loss of the “soft power” USAID gives America in its battle over global influence with its adversaries (CNN 2/7/25; New York Times 2/11/25). This sets up the precedent that Musk’s federal bludgeoning should be assessed based on the value of his target, rather than the fact that he is subverting the Constitution.

‘The least popular thing’

Michael Waldman (Brennan Center, 2/19/25): “Trump’s power grab…is the culmination of decades of pressure from conservative organizations and lawyers who have sought a way to dismantle government and curb its power to intervene in markets.”

A lawsuit by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees against the Trump administration lays out the five-alarm constitutional fire the shuttering of USAID has set off. USAID was established as an independent agency outside the State Department’s control by an act of Congress in 1998.

Longstanding judicial precedent holds that only Congress has the ability to create and dissolve federal agencies. Last year, the legislature prohibited even a reorganization of USAID without its consultation in an appropriations law. The Trump administration’s actions—justified solely by an extreme interpretation of executive authority—violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, and are indeed designed to do so.

Together Trump and Musk share interest in reconstituting US governance. The checks and balances that help to constrain executive power, along with civil service workers, are also roadblocks to the billions in federal contracts that have underwritten Musk’s empire. USAID has become the first target in their federal bludgeoning, because its relative unpopularity among voters means they might get away with rewriting the Constitution without too much public outrage. Its “the least popular thing government spends money on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to a USAID official earlier this month. (Americans tend to vastly overestimate how much the US government spends on foreign aid, and think it should be reduced to a level that is actually far more than USAID’s current budget—Program for Public Consultation, 2/8/25.)  

Trump and Musk’s withdrawal of nearly all foreign aid funded through USAID is another grave challenge to the constitutional order. Since those funds were congressionally appropriated, neither Trump nor Musk has the authority to stop them, especially not on the basis of their political preferences.

The act of a president indefinitely rejecting congressionally approved spending is known as impoundment, which has been effectively outlawed in all forms since 1974. Trump has been explicit about his intent to bring impoundment back, which threatens to render Congress—which is supposed to have the power of the purse—irrelevant.

‘Musk has been clear’

Politico (2/14/25) would have better helped readers’ understanding if it hadn’t taken “Trump’s plans to shrink the federal workforce” at face value.

Such a threat to democracy requires calling it for what it is. Simple but consequential abdications of responsibility abound, though. Politico (2/14/25), for example, saw fit to reprint at face value Trump and Musk’s claims that they just wish to drastically reduce federal spending. An explainer article on Trump and Musk’s efforts made no mention that they might have ulterior motives.

In response to the question, “What is Trump and Musk’s goal?” Politico simply answered: “With Trump’s blessing, Musk has been clear that his goal is to drastically reduce the size of the government.” That Musk, the richest person in the world, whose business empire spans the globe and dominates whole industries, has resolved to dedicate his undivided attention to the cause of reducing federal spending deserves more skepticism. The fact that Musk has prioritized going after federal agencies that have had the temerity to investigate his businesses suggests a more plausible scenario.

Though the article, which is meant to give readers a brief but comprehensive overview of Trump and Musk’s efforts, briefly mentions some of the court-ordered pauses to Trump’s orders, it doesn’t discuss the overarching implications for US democracy.

Another Politico story (1/31/25), breaking the news that Trump intended to subsume USAID into the State Department, gave the move a stamp of approval by pointing out it was the fulfillment of long-held bipartisan aspirations—corporate media’s highest praise—while ignoring the unconstitutional means that brought it about. For years, the article says, “both Democratic and Republican administrations have toyed with the idea of making USAID a part of the State Department.” That’s because, Politico claimed,

there have always been tensions between State and USAID over which agency controls what parts of the multibillion-dollar foreign aid apparatus, regardless of which party is in power.

The article qualifies that USAID “describes itself” as an independent agency, as if this were up for dispute.

‘Keep America safe’

CNN (2/3/25): “Trump’s claim that he can single-handedly shut down USAID is at odds with Congress’ distinct role in forming and closing federal agencies.”

Corporate media’s failure to foreground the authoritarian threat of Trump and Musk’s USAID takedown also includes a narrow focus on its geopolitical ramifications that smooths over the unsavory aspects of the agency’s humanitarian work.

USAID oversees billions in foreign aid that is responsible for lifesaving food, medical care, infrastructure and economic development. The massive disruption in that aid is already causing death, hunger, disease outbreak and economic hardship. But a defense of that lifesaving work, and the democratic norms threatened by its unraveling, need not require a rosy picture of its imperialist motivations.

That’s exactly what the New York Times’ Daily podcast (2/11/25) accomplished, though, in an episode titled “The Demise of USAID and American Soft Power.” As has become all too frequent, nowhere during the episode’s 35-minute run time did the host, Times reporter Michael Barbaro, or his two guests, Times journalists Michael Crowley and Stephanie Nolen, mention the constitutional principles at stake in USAID’s closure (though the following episode was dedicated to the constitutional crises Trump has provoked—Daily, 2/12/25).

Instead, the podcast focused on what Barbaro described as Trump’s overturning of a decades-long bipartisan consensus about the best way to “keep America safe.” That safety, Barbaro learned by way of his guests’ contribution, is a supposedly serendipitous return on investment America receives through its strategic generosity abroad (effective altruism, one might say?). Trump has now abandoned that generosity, leaving a more brutish impression of America’s global role, and ceding ground to geopolitical adversaries, Barbaro and company said.

What threats do they identify that Americans have needed to be kept safe from? At first, Crowley said, it was the Soviet Union’s relative popularity in the developing world. After the Cold War ended, though, USAID’s justification for existence seemed thin, he acknowledged. But that didn’t last long, because it just so happened that after 9/11, “America realized that the Soviet Communist ideology that threatened us had been replaced by a new ideology. It was a terrorist ideology,” Crowley explained.

For one, it wasn’t just USAID, but the entire military industrial complex, that was inevitably going to identify a new justification for its existence, 9/11 notwithstanding. But the podcast also completely leaves out USAID’s modern role in conditioning aid to developing countries on opening up their economies to the International Monetary Fund and multinational corporations, creating the conditions for neo-colonial dispossession and Western dependency.

Dedicating a whole episode to portraying USAID’s work as a mutually beneficial marriage between developing nations’ humanitarian needs and US national security interests, all so that audiences might selfishly conclude that preserving foreign aid is in their own interests, perpetuates imperial propaganda. Pointing out how Trump’s actions harm people, including his own supporters, is well and good. But the loss of imperial soft power is not an example of that. And pointing out the actual harms without discussing the autocratic way they were inflicted risks suggesting that unconstitutional actions are acceptable as long as their results are beneficial.

Some journalists are doing a fine job of exposing the assault on USAID (e.g., New York Times, 1/28/25, 2/5/25; CNN, 2/3/25). But amid this unprecedented blitz on democratic norms, others are showing that they might need to revisit their elementary school textbooks.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

We look at a victory for immigrant rights, after a federal judge temporarily blocked the U.S. government from deporting three Venezuelan men to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the Trump administration has started to send thousands of immigrants for detention. Our guest, Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, sought an emergency order to protect the three men, who had been held for about a year at the Otero detention center. The men say they left Venezuela to request asylum in the United States but were rejected. When they saw others from the detention center transferred to Guantánamo, they feared they could be next and asked the judge to preemptively block their transfer. This all comes as the Trump administration recently withdrew temporary protected status for Venezuelans living in the United States. “We decided we had to move and prevent their transfer, their rendition, to the lawless space in Guantánamo,” says Azmy. We also speak with Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Warren says that the United States is “facing a constitutional crisis on a range of issues, and it’s just not clear to any of us whether this administration will actually comply with the rule of law in any context.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We look at how Elon Musk’s executive branch agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, known as ”DOGE,” is wreaking havoc, with young male software engineers slashing government services and funding in what legal experts are saying could amount to a “constitutional crisis.” Most of the DOGE staffers are pulled from Musk-linked tech companies and have limited work and educational experience. “Even if these young men are very technically gifted … some of them seem to have questionable backgrounds,” says Wired reporter Vittoria Elliott, who has revealed key details about the staffers in a series of articles. One DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, resigned and was later reinstated after he was traced to racist social media posts. DOGE’s lack of oversight, training and transparency poses “an incredible risk,” adds Elliott, as its unvetted and underqualified staffers take control of the sensitive data of Americans.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

CNN (1/31/25) framed Elon Musk’s extra-constitutional power grab as part of “the war over federal spending.”

When President Donald Trump announced an unprecedented freeze on federal grants and loans last week, some of the most prominent US news outlets proved themselves largely uninterested in whether it was legal. Meanwhile, a few braver journalists called out the move as the constitutional crisis that it was (FAIR.org, 1/29/25).

When Democratic attorneys general rushed to challenge the move in court, with positive results, Trump rescinded the order. But the crisis is hardly over.

On the contrary: Elon Musk, the unelected centibillionaire who threw Nazi salutes at the inauguration, has wrested control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, after forcing out its most senior career civil servant, David Lebryk. As CNN (1/31/25) reported, the Treasury takeover happened after Trump’s team had repeatedly asked about the department’s ability to stop payments, to which Lebryk had insisted, “We don’t do that.”

These payments include everything from Social Security checks to tax refunds, federal employee salaries to contractor payments. It’s over $5 trillion a year, a fifth of the US economy. The database Musk and his tech bro allies in the non–congressionally approved “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have access to also contains enormous amounts of sensitive personal information for most Americans, including Social Security numbers. And Musk and a 25-year-old former X employee have access to the code that controls the payment systems, allowing them to make irreversible changes to it, according to Wired (2/4/25).

At the same time, Musk has infiltrated the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management—two other rather obscure and nonpolitical but hugely consequential agencies that manage federal offices, technology and employees (Wired, 1/28/25, 1/31/25).

‘An idea that crosses party lines’

The New York Times (1/31/25) put its seal of approval on Trump’s illegal attempt to freeze federal spending, calling the idea behind it “bipartisan.”

Instead of appropriately pushing the increasing lawlessness and opacity to the forefront of their reporting, the New York Times and Washington Post largely buried these stories, downplaying their earth-shattering break from democratic norms.

As Musk took over the Treasury system, the Times (1/31/25) did point out:

Control of the system could give Mr. Musk’s allies the ability to unilaterally cut off money intended for federal workers, bondholders and companies, and open a new front in the Trump administration’s efforts to halt federal payments.

And yet somehow this story struck editors as page 13 material.

Meanwhile, a piece (1/31/25) by the Times‘ Michael Shear published online the same day was deemed front-page material, causing even seasoned media critics to spit out their morning beverage at its breathtaking ability to bothsides the situation: “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines.”

Shear wrote that Trump is simply “continuing a mostly failed effort by a long series of presidents and Congress” to “somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.” He thus clearly communicated that he is not up for the task of reporting on this administration.

The Times published Musk’s Treasury takeover on page 18, under the rather nonchalant headline: “Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System.” The subhead read:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

And hey, don’t worry, the article suggests:

Mr. Musk’s initiative is intended to be part of a broader review of the payments system to allow improper payments to be scrutinized, and is not an effort to arbitrarily block individual payments, the people familiar with the matter said.

At the Post, readers got language like, “The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy” (1/31/25), and “it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access” the payment systems (2/1/25). (In fact, it appears to be unprecedented—Independent, 2/3/25.)

‘Reminiscent of Stalin’

Wired (1/31/25): Musk’s team is “attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X’s image.”

There is another way to do journalism. It’s called connecting dots, asking questions, not accepting anonymous claims of benevolent intent—and helping people understand the gravity of the situation when unprecedented end-runs around democracy are happening before our very eyes. And it’s heartening to see quite a few news outlets engaging in it.

For instance, Wired has been doing a tenacious job following Musk’s assault on the government, connecting the dots between his actions and explaining the dangers to the country. It broke the news (1/28/25) that Musk workers from his various companies had taken over management positions at the Office of Personnel Management—well before Trump’s nominee to take over the OPM has even had a confirmation hearing. Its subhead noted: “One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin.”

Wired explained that the installation of AI experts at OPM suggests a forthcoming effort to use AI on the reams of data it has access to in order to target federal employees for removal.

Regarding the GSA infiltration, Wired reported (1/31/25):

The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, among many other things, a former Biden official told Wired on Friday.

“Granting DOGE staff, many of whom aren’t government employees, unfettered access to internal government systems and sensitive data poses a huge security risk to the federal government and to the American public,” the Biden official said. “Not only will DOGE be able to review procurement-sensitive information about major government contracts, it’ll also be able to actively surveil government employees.”

Wired again put that danger (“the potential [for Musk minions] to remote into laptops, read emails, and more”) into its subhead—unlike the Times‘ muted headlines.

‘Incredibly dangerous’

Rolling Stone (2/3/25) pointed out that “the danger of operational access to the payments system is precisely that there are very little safeguards for its improper use or manipulation.”

Others are also raising alarms in their headlines, as at Rolling Stone (2/3/25): “Elon Musk’s Attempt to Control the Treasury Payment System Is Incredibly Dangerous.” The subhead explained: “Trump and Musk could use sensitive Treasury information to punish their enemies. Worse yet, they could break America’s payment system entirely.”

The piece, by Nathan Tankus, pointed out that there are glaring reasons to disbelieve administration claims about this being about “improper payments,” such as:

At 3:14 a.m. Sunday, Musk pledged to shut down supposedly “illegal payments” to Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that exists to provide “safety and support to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants from across the world.”

Tankus also points out what the Post and Times won’t, which is that the seizure of the payment system means Trump and Musk

can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign.

Even in bigger media, some critical voices could be heard. CNN‘s Zachary Wolf (2/1/25) asked some appropriate journalistic questions: “Has [Musk] taken an oath, like the federal workers he apparently has plans to fire, to uphold the Constitution?…. What are Musk’s conflicts of interests?”

Accessories to the coup

The Washington Post (2/4/25) assures readers that “the Education Department was created by Congress, and only Congress can eliminate it.”

The Washington Post put news about Musk’s takeovers on the front page today (2/4/25), as it reported on Trump preparing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, which Musk has apparently also infiltrated. But it still managed to sound rather sanguine about the threat: “The expected executive order would not shut down the agency, as there is widespread agreement in both parties that doing so would require congressional action.” Despite reporting daily on actions Trump and Musk have taken that have usurped congressional authority, the paper still seems to believe—and want readers to believe—against all evidence that our Constitution’s constraints on executive power continue to hold.

And the New York Times finally published an article (2/3/25) taking a deeper look “Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government,” as the headline stated. Still, it seemed to find it difficult to use language in its early framing paragraphs any stronger than to say that Musk’s actions “have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections,” as it explains in the third paragraph. These moves are “creating major upheaval,” the fifth paragraph allowed, and the sixth said it “represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.”

The piece was not published in the print newspaper the next day; FAIR has yet to see it rise to the top of the paper’s homepage.

As Musk and Trump continue to behave like kings, it’s incumbent upon news media to not just report on their actions, but put them in the proper context for the public to understand the threat level they represent; otherwise, we can’t respond appropriately.

That kind of reporting takes real bravery in the kind of moment we are in: Musk has already (falsely) called it a crime to reveal the names of those working for him at the agencies DOGE is targeting, which Wired and others have done. The Trump-installed DC attorney general has obsequiously promised Musk to go after those who identify his underlings—and to prosecute “anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people” (New Republic, 2/3/25).

While that might sound laughable, media outlets have already paid Trump handsome settlements to settle lawsuits that should have been seen as similarly laughable (FAIR.org, 12/16/24; PBS, 1/29/25; New York Times, 1/30/25). When prominent news outlets won’t summon the courage to vigorously oppose this descent into autocracy, they are accessories to the coup. We must demand better from them, and support the outlets and journalists doing the critical work we as citizens require to defend our democracy.

ACTION: Tell the New York Times and Washington Post to treat Musk’s actions like the existential threat to democracy that they are.

CONTACT:

New York Times
Letters: letters@nytimes.com
Bluesky: @NYTimes.com

Washington Post
Letters: letters@washpost.com,
Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

The post #18. Constitutional Loophole Propels Xenophobic Border Policies in Texas appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

On September 24, the Haitian Bridge Alliance filed a criminal complaint in municipal court against Trump and Vance for inducing panic, making false alarms, and disrupting public services based on their repeated false statements about criminal acts allegedly committed by Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community. They allege that, as a result of these false and dangerous claims, Springfield has experienced at least 33 bomb threats; evacuation and closures of schools, colleges, and public buildings; deployment of state troopers to Springfield; and threats to individuals, business owners, and elected officials.

The Clark County Municipal Court directed Discoll to investigate and determine whether or not to prosecute Trump and Vance. The letter demonstrates that the First Amendment does not protect Trump and Vance from criminal liability for knowingly repeating false and dangerous claims about the Haitian community and that the statements predictably threatened their safety and jeopardized public security.

The letter reads: “Trump and Vance’s continuous use of their national platform to spread dangerous falsehoods that foreseeably cause widespread civic disruption against already marginalized communities falls squarely within the criminal charges your office has been asked to evaluate. The Haitian Bridge Alliance asks only that this office apply the pertinent criminal statutes to Trump and Vance as they have been applied to other defendants, and that both be held to the same standards as the other individuals who have been appropriately and successfully prosecuted under the criminal charges sought here. We hope that this office agrees that the law should be applied equally to all people. Trump and Vance’s positions of authority do not immunize them from the consequences that would fall—and have fallen—upon anyone else. We strongly support the Haitian Bridge Alliance and Jozef’s petition, believe that the requested criminal charges are supported by probable cause, and are justified by Trump and Vance’s severe criminal misconduct.”

Read the full letter here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The first Monday in October commences a new United States Supreme Court term. This term, the court will hear many significant cases. However, the Supreme Court’s own reputation will also be up for judgment.

Part of that reputation is tied to the perception of the Court increasingly operating as a political body composed of nine politicians wearing robes. For years, the Supreme Court enjoyed significant legitimacy and public approval, far outstripping that of both Congress and the President. However, its approval has fallen in recent years, especially under Chief Justice Roberts. This is because the perception increasingly is that the Court is deciding cases not based on neutral legal principles but on the basis of ideology.

What best captures that is the public reaction to the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In that case, a six to three majority voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and the constitutional protection for a right to abortion. The six judges that voted to overturn Roe or limit it were all appointed by Republicans. The three opposed, appointed by Democratic presidents.

But Dobbs exemplifies a broader problem or trend in the Roberts Court. This is the proclivity of conservative justices appointed by Republicans to reject constitutional precedent.

Respect for constitutional precedent is a bedrock of American constitutional law. Following precedent promotes consistency, uniformity, and predictability in the law. It respects reliance interests, and it is meant to constrain judicial discretion. The Supreme Court is expected to follow its own constitutional precedent in the same way that it expects lower courts to follow them.

Rejecting precedent is an exception and not the rule. Former Supreme Court justices ranging from Benjamin Cardozo to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, have argued that precedent should only be rejected when it proves to be no longer workable, the conditions under which it was created have eroded, or that in some cases, when the precedent was wrong.

Over time, the Supreme Court has overturned its own constitutional precedent less than 150 times. Among notable decisions, Brown v.  Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson when the former argued that racial segregation was not constitutionally protected. In Lawrence v. Texas it overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, declaring it got it wrong when in the latter case that sexual activity among gay individuals was not protected under a right to privacy.

But the question becomes, how often has the Roberts Court overturned constitutional precedent, and with that, who is more likely to overturn precedent?

From 2005 when Justice Roberts became chief justice through the 2022 term, there have been sixteen Supreme Court cases where the Court overturned a previous constitutional precedent of their own. What we learn is that justices display various levels of support for their own Court precedent. For example, in those sixteen cases, Chief Justice Roberts voted 62% of the time to reject constitutional precedent, whereas Justice Kagan only did so 33% at the time.

If we were to look at rejection of precedent and the total number of votes that justices cast in these sixteen cases, among those justices appointed by a Republican President, they voted 75% of the time to overturn constitutional precedent. Those appointed by Democrats did so 44% of the time. Partisanship matters when it comes to constitutional precedent on the Roberts Court.

Another question to ask is whether there is any relationship between political ideology and the decision to reject constitutional precedent? Are Justices identified as liberal or conservative more likely to reject constitutional precedent? Political scientists and judicial scholars have constructed what is known as the Martin Quinn measure for judicial ideology. It is a measure that ranks how conservative or liberal justices are based on their voting behavior in relation to the rest of the Court.

Using a Martin Quinn average for all the justices during their entire term on the court, Justices O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy scored near the center. Justice Sotomayor scored the most liberal, with Clarence Thomas and Anthony Scalia among the most conservative. In using this measure of ideology and applying statistical analysis, one finds that the correlation between ideology and rejection of precedent is 0.7. This is a high correlation. The more conservative the justice on the Roberts Court, the more likely that justice is to vote to overturn constitutional precedent. Ideology matters on the Roberts Court.

Unfortunately, the court and the justices do not look politically neutral, but increasingly operate as political actors in a political institution making political decisions. Whatever fidelity the Roberts Court majority gives to originalism as a neutral tool of constitutional interpretation, the reality is their decisions clearly display an ideological bias.  That rejection of precedent also means individual rights generally lose.

Going into the 2024 Court term and the 2024 elections voters should remember partisanship and ideology matter on the Supreme Court, and both should be considered important as the public evaluates the court and their choice of presidential candidates.

The post Constitutional Precedent and Partisan Ideology in the Roberts Supreme Court appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Schultz.

Australian constitutional law expert Professor Anthony Regan believes Fiji’s Coalition government came into power “by the skin of its teeth”.

In the face of that, he believes it is not an option to leave the 2013 Constitution “as it is!”

Professor Regan spoke at the Fiji National University’s (FNU) Vice-Chancellor’s Leadership Seminar in Nasinu on Thursday, on “Constitutional Change in Fiji: Looking to the Future”.

• READ MORE: Fiji government lays groundwork to change constitution
• Regan: Not an option to keep Fiji constitution ‘as it is’

He has voiced caution about the stability of the 2013 Constitution.

“Do you leave it as it is now and say it’s too difficult to change? That’s an option,” he said.

“And you might say that’s OK because the new regime is a fair and thoughtful regime and will act only fairly.

“That may be true, but every government is subject to temptations when there are pressures.”

He spoke about what he terms a pretty bad electoral system designed to keep people in power.

The Coalition government got in by the skin of its teeth in the face of that system.

The system, he argued, designed to favour certain parties, increased the risk of a less favourable government gaining power in the future.

And this, he warned, could cause problems in the future.

“There’s no guarantee that a good outcome will come in every future election and then, if a government that had far less good intent came to power, it’s got the authority to do all the things we have talked about.”

These included overriding human rights and stacking accountability institutions.

He believes the recent Parliamentary remuneration debacle has added a new layer of complexity to the challenges we face as a nation.

He believes, with the added majority in the House, it may be possible to get the 75 percent majority needed to amend the constitution.

He has also suggested possible ways to move on reforms.

He suggested amending electoral legislation, and factored in compulsory voting to raise voter turnout and possibly inch out support for constitutional reforms.

Change though, as the good professor notes, will definitely need support and a united front.

That will mean awareness campaigns designed to raise the level of understanding of any need for reforms and encourage participation.

That will mean taking the message out to the masses, and encouraging them to buy into any bid to make changes.

That isn’t going to be a walk in the park either.

Professor Regan’s opinions will no doubt stimulate discussions on this important topic and encourage people to consider whether it is important enough for them to participate.

So we have what he considers a constitution that is vulnerable to potential abuse by future governments if it is left like this.

And in the face of that sits the need for us all to carefully consider what we must do moving forward. We have layers of complexities as we mentioned above, and major challenges that will need careful consideration and discussions!

Republished from The Sunday Times on 4 August 2024 under the original headline “By the skin of its teeth” with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai — who is also Chairman of the Melanesian Spearhead Group — has reaffirmed MSG’s support of the pro-independence umbrella group Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) stance opposing the French government’s constitutional bill “unfreezing” the New Caledonia Electoral Roll.

It is also opposed to the proposed changes to the citizens’ electorate and the changes to the distribution of seats in Congress, reports the Vanuatu Daily Post.

In a statement yesterday, he expressed “sadness” over the “unfortunate happenings that have befallen New Caledonia over the last few days”, referring to the riots sparked by protests over the French law changes.

• READ MORE: Home detention for New Caledonia’s unrest ringleaders, Tiktok banned
• Why is New Caledonia on fire? According to local women, the deadly riots are about more than voting rights
• NZ families worried as loved ones shelter from violent unrest in New Caledonia
  France declares state of emergency in New Caledonia – four die in riots
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Salwai expressed support for the FLNKS call for calm, and shared the FLNKS’s condemnation of the violence.

The MSG Chair said in the statement that the indiscriminate destruction of property would affect New Caledonia’s economy in a “very big way” and that would have a “debilitating cascading effect on the welfare and lives of all New Caledonians, including the Kanaks”.

Consistent with the support recorded during the MSG Senior Officials Meeting and the MSG Foreign Ministers Meeting in March this year, Salwai reaffirmed that the French government “must withdraw or annul the Constitutional Bill that has precipitated these regrettable events in New Caledonia”.

“These events could have been avoided if the French government had listened and not proceeded to press forward with the Constitutional Bill aimed at unfreezing the electoral roll, modifying the citizen’s electorate, and changing the distribution of seats in Congress,” the statement said.

“There is [a] need for the French government to return to the spirit of the Noumea Accord in its dealings relating to New Caledonia,” Salwai said.

The MSG Chair added that there was an urgent need now for France to agree to the proposal by the FLNKS to establish a dialogue and mediation mission to discuss a way forward so that normalcy could be restored quickly and an enduring peace could prevail in New Caledonia.

The statement was signed by Salwai and Vanuatu’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Matai Seremaiah.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Vanuatu’s former prime minister and opposition MP Ishmael Kalsakau has stepped down — just two days after he confirmed he was the rightful opposition leader.

Kalsakau, MP for Port Vila, confirmed to ABC’s Pacific Beat, and the Vanuatu Daily Post on Thursday that he had resigned along with his deputies.

RNZ Pacific has contacted him for comment.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Kalsakau speaks to Lydia Lewis

On Tuesday, while speaking to RNZ Pacific about the referendum on May 29, he opened up about regrets during his time as prime minister.

Kalsakau was elected prime minister in November 2022 after a motion of no confidence was filed against the then Prime Minister Bob Loughman.

There have been a trail of no confidence motions filed since then and two more prime ministers.

“I was so focused on how to change the country, improving Vanuatu’s image. I just didn’t look over my shoulder to see what was happening behind my back.”

‘Learnt his lessons’
He said he has “learnt his lessons” and gone as far as to say “it’s not gonna happen again.

“I will not close my eyes,” he said.

Kalsakau, confirming he was the rightful opposition leader after their were some concerns raised about his appointment recently, said Vanuatu’s upcoming referendum aims to overcome the nation’s persistent political instability.

The government is putting in front of the people two proposed constitutional amendments:

• 17A: Vacation of Seat by Party Member.

Under this amendment if a MP leaves, or is forced to resign from their political party, then their seat will be declared vacant.

• 17B: Vacation of Seat by Independent Member.

This amendment would require those MPs elected as independents to choose a political party within three months of being elected, or their seat will be declared vacant.

While it is a different position to what the former prime minister had when he was in government, he said there was a likelihood he or others, who are not satisfied with the government’s action — or inaction over the planned referendum — could go to the Supreme Court.

“They can take this matter to the Supreme Court, to get it judged there as to whether what the government is proposing at the moment is constitutional,” he said.

He said there was a precedent for such a case.

“In 1988, there has been an Appeal Court judgement, which stipulated, in bold terms, that those fundamental rights are so fundamental to the citizen, that not even a state nor any person, not even a nation, can restrict [them],” he said.

Delaying the referendum
When asked if Vanuatu is ready for the referendum, he replied: “Is any country ever ready for a referendum when it traverses the population only two months prior to the date of the vote?”

He is now asking the government to delay the referendum to give time for public consultation on the matter.

“I am hoping that that wisdom prevails at the end of the day,” Kalsakau said.

“If it doesn’t, either way, it can be an option now or it can be an option, after the amendments processed through the referendum.”

Kalsakau insists he is voting “Yes” in the upcoming referendum and his call for postponement is in the public interest.

The government has told local media a delay is not possible as the process is already underway.

However, the former opposition leader disputes that.

“It’s become a political issue now,” he said on Tuesday.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post Constitutional Loophole Propels Xenophobic Border Policies in Texas appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

The French Senate has endorsed a Constitutional review project bearing significant modifications to the local electoral rules for New Caledonia, but with amendments.

The text passed on Tuesday with 233 votes in favour and 99 against.

It aims at modifying the conditions for French citizens to access a special list of voters for the elections in New Caledonia’s three provinces and the Congress.

• READ MORE: French Parliament debates polarise tensions in New Caledonia

Since 2007 the electoral roll for those local elections was “frozen”, allowing only people residing in New Caledonia before 1998.

However, the French government and its Home Affairs and Overseas Minister Gérald Darmanin introduced earlier this year a new text for a “sliding” electoral roll allowing citizens who had been residing in New Caledonia for an uninterrupted 10 years to be on the local roll.

The move has been strongly contested by pro-independence parties in New Caledonia, who fear the new rules (which would grant the local vote to up to 25,000 extra voters) will threaten the French Pacific terrotory’s political balance.

During heated debates last week and Tuesday for the vote, Senators sometimes traded robust words, with the left-wing parties (including Socialists and Communists) rallying in support of New Caledonia’s pro-independence parties and accusing Darmanin of “forcing the text through”.

New Caledonia’s pro-independence umbrella, the FLNKS, last week officially demanded that the French government withdraw its Constitutional amendment and that instead a high-level mediatory mission be sent to New Caledonia.

Parallel to the Parliamentary moves, New Caledonia’s politicians, both pro and against independence, have been asked to meet for comprehensive talks in order to draw up a new agreement that would replace the now-defunct Nouméa Accord, signed in 1998.

Nouméa Accord
One of the Accord’s prescriptions was that three consecutive referendums on New Caledonia’s self-determination be held.

All three ballots took place in 2018 and 2021 and three times independence was defeated, albeit in narrow votes in the first two referendums.

However, even though the FLNKS contested the result of the third referendum (boycotted by the independence parties because of the covid pandemic), French President Emmanuel Macron said in July 2023 that he now considered New Caledonia wanted to remain French.

The next step in the Nouméa Accord was for political stakeholders to engage in “inclusive” talks to examine the “situation thus generated”.

The French government’s current moves are said to be a pragmatic response to those sometimes elusive guidelines.

The provincial elections, which were originally scheduled to take place in May, have now been postponed to December 15 “at the latest”.

But in the Constitutional review project, even though the sole subject is the change in access to local elections roll of voters, there are also references to the date of those elections.

This includes that even if a local, bipartisan, inclusive agreement was found and duly recognised between now and December 15, the Constitutional amendment would become irrelevant. Priority would be given to a local New Caledonian agreement to serve as the base for a new Constitutional amendment.

‘Give more time’
During debates since last week, the Senate’s Law Committee managed to introduce new amendments, sometimes rectifying the initial government text.

For instance, if the awaited accord to succeed the Nouméa pact came through, there would be a call for a new election date.

Originally, this would have been achieved by way of a government decree which, the government said, would be the fastest way.

Now the Senate has changed that to a Parliamentary process (also including New Caledonia’s Congress) which could take much more time to set in place.

The general idea, the Senate’s Law Committee said, was to “give more time” for the expected political agreement to happen “without applying excessive stress” to the whole process.

There was consensus on the need to “unfreeze” the local electoral roll (the measure was initially temporary and transitional under the Nouméa Accord) because it denied some 12,000 citizens (even if some of those, indigenous Kanaks or non-Kanaks, were born in New Caledonia) the right to vote.

It was feared that if those elections were held under the “frozen” rule, they would probably be declared invalid and unconstitutional.

Critics of the amendment, including New Caledonia’s first pro-independence Senator Robert Xowie, also said that the manner in which it was “forced” — more than its substance — was a major flaw and that the French State should keep an “impartial” posture, consistent with the spirit of the Nouméa Accord.

‘Don’t inflame’ call
“The point of no return has not been reached yet. We can still avoid lighting that spark which could inflame the whole situation”, Xowie told the Senate.

He also called on the French Prime Minister’s office, once directly in charge of New Caledonia’s matters, to return to steer these issues.

The 10-year uninterrupted residency condition was described by the government as “a reasonable compromise”, Darmanin’s delegate Minister for Overseas Marie Guévenoux told the Senate.

While apologising for Darmanin’s absence, she said the new self-imposed calendar challenges due to the change of implementation process would be hard to meet.

She said there were provisions in the initial draft that would have allowed the government to react more quickly by way of decree in suspending the provincial elections — and even postponing them as far as “November 2025”.

Waiting for a local, inclusive political agreement
After the Senate’s endorsement of the modified amendment, the text is, however, far from the end of its legislative journey: it is now due for debate before the National Assembly on May 13.

If it passes again, its legislative journey is not finished yet as it has to be endorsed sometime in June 2024 by the French Congress, which is a gathering of both the Senate and National Assembly by a required three-fifths majority.

Tensions high back in Nouméa
During debates on Tuesday, Senators often alluded to the recent radicalisation from both the pro-independence and pro-French parties.

Last week, the two antagonist groups held two opposing demonstrations and marches at the same time, both in downtown Nouméa, only a few hundred meters away from each other.

Thousands, on each side, have held banners and flags opposing the electoral changes on one side and supporting them on the other side.

There was also a clear escalation in the tone of speeches held, notably by the French  “loyalists”.

Part of their protest last Thursday was also to denounce a series of government-imposed taxes, including one on fuel (which has since been withdrawn after a series of blockades) and the other on electricity (to avoid bankruptcy for local power company Enercal)

Last month, “loyalists” members walked out of New Caledonia’s “collegial” government, saying they regarded their pro-independence party colleagues as “illegitimate”.

On the local scene, over the past few months, New Caledonia has been facing the very real effects of an economic crisis for its crucial nickel industry.

One of the three nickel mining plants has been temporarily shut down and the other two are facing a similarly bleak future, putting at risk thousands of jobs.

Paris has put on the table a rescue plan worth over 200 million euros to bail out New Caledonia’s nickel industry, provided it engages in stringent reforms to lower its production costs, but the signing, initially scheduled to take place by the end of March, has still not happened.

Later this week, New Caledonia’s congress is due to meet specifically on the matter to authorise President Louis Mapou to do so.

One strong opponent to the amendment’s vote this week, Mélanie Vogel (Greens and Solidarity caucus) warned the House she believed if the amendment was forced through “we are getting ready to break the conditions that made a return to civil peace possible”.

She and others from all sides of the House also supported the idea of some kind of a delegation to foster the conclusion of talks for the much-expected successor agreement to the Nouméa Accord.

During the first half of the 1980s, New Caledonia was the scene of a civil war between pro and anti-independence sides which only ended after the signing of the Matignon-Oudinot Accords in 1988.

The Nouméa Accord followed in 1998.

“We’re all waiting for this inclusive agreement to arrive, but for the time being, it’s not there. So this (constitutional amendment), for now, is the least bad solution,” Senator Philippe Bonnecarrère (Centrist Union) told the House.

“So this (constitutional amendment), for now, is the least bad solution.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In a filing in the US District Court for the Northern District of California last November, the CCR, representing a number of Palestinian human rights organisations including Palestinians in Gaza and the United States, sought an order “requiring that the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense adhere to their duty to prevent, and not further, the unfolding genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.”  Such a duty, arising in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, “is judicially enforceable as a peremptory norm of customary international law.”

The complaint alleged that the genocidal conditions in Gaza had “so far been made possible because of unconditional support given [to Israel] by the named official-capacity defendants in this case,” namely, President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

At the time proceedings were initiated, the Israeli campaign in Gaza, launched in response to the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, had already claimed the lives of 11,000 Palestinian civilians, “more than 4,500 of them children, as well as entire families, numerous journalists and UN workers.”  The bombardment had crippled critical infrastructure, led to the displacement of 1.6 million persons, and had been “accompanied by a total siege of Gaza, depriving Palestinians in Gaza the conditions of life necessary for human survival: food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity.”  (Currently, the displaced number exceeds 2 million; the number of dead towers at 26,000.)

In reaching his decision to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds, Jeffrey S. White admitted it was the “most difficult” of his career.  He acknowledged South Africa’s action in the International Court of Justice against Israel, which argues that Israel’s conduct against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip satisfies the elements of genocide.

The January 26 interim order of provisional measures granted by the ICJ explicitly put Israel on notice to comply with the Genocide Convention, punish those responsible for directly and publicly inciting genocide, permit basic humanitarian assistance and essential services to the Gaza Strip, preserve relevant evidence pertaining to potential genocidal acts and submit a report to the ICJ on its compliance within a month.  In international law, these interim measures are accepted as binding.

The ICJ also showed some scepticism to arguments that Israel had taken adequate measures to minimise harm to Palestinian civilians and respond to instances where an incitement to genocide could be imputed.  None of the measures taken till that point had removed the risk of irreparable harm; to merely assert compliance was not sufficient evidence of it.

In White’s words, “the undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law.”  Lawyers representing the government also chose not to cross-examine witnesses, bar one Holocaust scholar who testified that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip could be classed as genocidal.  Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the claims advanced in this case, involving disputes over foreign policy, raised “fundamentally non-justiciable political questions.”  To compel the US government to cease military and financial assistance to Israel were matters “intimately related to foreign policy and national security”.

The plaintiffs had encountered that great limitation articulated by Chief Justice Marshall in 1803: that ‘[q]uestions, in their nature political, or which are, by the constitution and laws, submitted to the executive, can never be made in this court”.  To do so would violate the separation of powers.  The judiciary was, according to White, “not equipped with the intelligence or the acumen necessary to make foreign policy decisions on behalf of the government.”

Despite being bound by weighty precedent and rulings in previous cases, White concludes with a plea.  The ICJ had found it “plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide.”  The judge implored the “Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.”  Not bad for one lacking intelligence or the acumen necessary to make foreign policy decisions.

While disappointed in White’s ruling, Brad Parker, a senior advisor to one of the organisational plaintiffs, Defense for Children International Palestine, saw the thickest of silver linings.  Along with the ICJ decision, “and the increasing recognition that what Israel is carrying out is a genocide and the US is complicit in those genocidal acts, I think the strong language from a US federal court judge increasingly works to isolate Israel’s actions and also bring pressure on the Biden administration to change course.”

To date, the slaughter in Gaza continues.  Israeli politicians and military officials persist in claiming that murderously innovative approaches to killing Palestinian civilians are not, by definition, genocidal.  But the walls of justifiable impunity, so proudly claimed by Israel in its righteous mission of self-defence, are proving increasingly porous.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

“We are pleased that Turkey’s highest court found unconstitutional the legal article that had been used to take down online news with public value under the guise of protecting individuals’ rights,” Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative, said on Thursday. “The road to legally protect the press and the free flow of information in Turkey remains long and challenging, but we applaud the court’s step in the right direction.”

The legal changes introduced in 2020, which CPJ raised concerns about at the time, amended Turkey’s 2007 internet law to allow individuals to ask local courts to remove online content that violated their “personal rights” or privacy.

The Constitutional Court said in its ruling on Wednesday that this clause interfered with freedom of expression and the press, according to news reports. The new ruling will take effect in nine months.

The law forced media outlets to remove hundreds of pieces of critical content, according to the Freedom of Expression Association, a Turkish nonprofit. Its 2021 report found that 432 out of 548 news articles that were blocked by the law covered topics that was in the public interest.

The court also cancelled another clause in the law which gave the regulatory Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK) the power to take down content without a court order.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Showing his 8^th-grade history book to Mayberry town Sheriff Andy Taylor, he says with characteristic bluster, “There’s things right there in that book I learned that I still remember to this day.” Turning the book’s pages to the Constitution, he says, “We had to memorize the Preamble, and I still remember it.” He then starts to demonstrate in a raised voice: “Constitution of the United States.” Pausing, his mind obviously gone completely blank, he pleads, “Why don’t you just give me the first word, and I’ll know the rest.”

Andy: “Okay. We. . . .”

Barney: “We. . . . We? Are you sure?” Uncomfortable pause, then in loud voice: “WE. . . .” Another clueless pause.

Andy: “The. . . .”

Barney: “The.” Clueless pause. “We, the. . . .” Uncomfortable, clueless pause.

Andy, through pursed lips: “Ppp . . . People.”

Barney: “We, the people . . . We, the people (louder) . . . We, the people (even louder). . . .” Head agonizingly buried in hands.

This goes on for interminable minutes, with Andy patiently saying each word, Barney then painfully repeating, until the end when Andy finishes the last words himself: “. . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” At which point, Barney smugly states, “I got it. You read something, you learn it.”

“Humor,” Mark Twain told us, “is the good-natured side of a truth.” To laugh at Barney Fife’s half-century-old predicament is to look into the mirror today. If you are largely ignorant of the substantive content of the Constitution, you aren’t alone. Even those who, by law, are required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution – members of the U.S. military and federal civil servants, for example – are highly unlikely to have reflected on its content since they raised their right hand many years ago. That should alarm us, not reassure us, as we face the prospect ahead of the possible return to office of Donald Trump. Constitutional literacy – and the associated will to make the provisions of this landmark guiding document a reality – could be our only salvation if that eventuality comes to pass.

The Constitution’s Preamble that Barney Fife muffed should command our primary attention above all else. That seems counterintuitive, since the preamble to any document is typically little more than cosmetic rhetorical window dressing for the substance expected to follow.

That isn’t the case here, though, for this Preamble is what we might call America’s Security Credo. Judged collectively, the precepts enumerated in the Preamble – justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, liberty for ourselves for all time – are what make us secure where they are present, insecure where they are absent.

But it is the prefatory phrase that matters most: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.” We (all of us) are, by design, a nation; a nation of laws; a nation of immigrants, E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”); a People born of many peoples, all united into one by a common identity, a common set of values; a “melting pot” (with due apologies to “tossed salad” advocates) of differences assimilated into a unified whole as Americans.

In the face of a Trump return to office, national unity will come at a premium. Unity – of purpose, of effort, of action – is a distinctly strategic concept known to, but not uniformly achieved, by practitioners of statecraft, domestic and international. When those in authority exercise power – to get their way, to get what they want, to elicit deference from others – their ability to do so is a function of not only the wherewithal at their disposal but also the consensual will of the people they presume to represent and lead. National will and national unity, undergirded by the glue of social cohesion, are thus conjoined.

Many have been the calls by figures of note over time for national unity and the Union of our federal republic. In his 1796 Farewell Address (drafted by Alexander Hamilton, delivered in written form, rather than orally), George Washington issued a clarion call that inveighed against the self-serving factions that James Madison had previously critiqued in Federalist 10:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the perceptive early 19^th-century French observer of Democracy in America, would later (1835-1840) observe: “It is clear that if each citizen [in American democracy], as he becomes individually weaker and consequently more incapable in isolation of preserving his freedom, does not learn the art of uniting with those like him to defend it, tyranny will necessarily grow with equality.”

Even before he became President (1858), Abraham Lincoln would famously claim: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Then, as President, his steadfast aim throughout the Civil War was to preserve or restore the Union, even to the extreme of stating: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Today, America is more divided than it has ever been since the Civil War, a state of affairs fed by and exploited by Trump to the utmost. His strategy is to divide and conquer, to pit us Little People and our many demographic, ideological, and cultural differences against one another, so that only he wins, while we are forever at one another’s throats.

Think of the innumerable forms of unity or disunity that characterize us as a people: race and ethnicity, gender, age, social class, religion, sexual orientation, domicile, political affiliation, ideological orientation, profession, among others. A case could be made that the degree of social affinity between and among us – from intolerance to tolerance to empathy to respect to emulation – is more or less directly proportional to the level of intellectual development we are able and willing to achieve – from ignorance to awareness to knowledge to understanding to wisdom. In this sense, our ability to achieve and maintain unity in the face of impending tyranny is, at root, an intellectual enterprise – notwithstanding the enduring embrace of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which historian Richard Hofstadter reminded us is our chosen lot 60 years ago.

Now, reconsider the many grievances (27 of them) our Founding Fathers levied against their oppressor at the time, King George III, in the Declaration of Independence; to wit:

+ “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.”

+ “He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.”

+ “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.”

This led the Founders to conclude: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Does this sound familiar?

Our Founders reacted to the tyranny they were already living under with ideas, but ideas abetted by muskets and artillery pieces. Today, we must act preventively or preemptively against tyranny that could yet be visited upon us, also with ideas, but our weapons must take the form of aggressive civic engagement – votes and demonstrations – to forestall a hostile takeover of our institutions, the attendant demise of democracy, and the dissolution of the Union. That would be an inexcusable, unforgivable self-inflicted strategic defeat that would eliminate America’s standing as a “shining city on a hill” and a so-called Great Power.

If there is a case to be made that preserving national unity, democracy, and the state of the Union in the face of impending tyranny is a fundamentally intellectual enterprise, then too must it be a totally grassroots popular effort designed to compensate for the massive failings of representative democracy in the Trump era.

The elitist temperament of America’s Founders that consigned us to a representative form of democracy was given perhaps its most powerful expression by Hamilton:

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. . . . The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.”

But wherever there was Hamilton, there also was his eternal nemesis Jefferson, who made the case for popular rule:

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

In normal times, when even the most self-serving politicians have operated within the institutional imperatives and limits of the Constitution, the Hamiltonian perspective has managed to serve us reasonably well. But the implicit premise of representative democracy, that the best of us govern the rest of us, has shown itself hugely ill-equipped to stand up to the tyranny Trump has shown us and promised us. Where courage, integrity, and selflessness on the part of our representatives are missing, we have no alternative but to turn to ourselves.

One can’t help here but be reminded of French General Ferdinand Foch’s message to his superior, General Joseph Joffre, during World War I’s First Battle of the Marne: “Hard pressed on my right; my left is in retreat. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking.”

The post Can Constitutional Literacy Save Us From the Drift to Tyranny?  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Gregory D. Foster.

This matter has cropped up in the US courts in what has become an international affair, namely, the case of WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange.  While the US Department of Justice battles to sink its fangs into the Australian national for absurd espionage charges, various offshoots of his case have begun to grow.  The issue of CIA sponsored surveillance during his stint in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been of particular interest, since it violated both general principles of privacy and more specific ones regarding attorney-client privilege.  Of particular interest to US Constitution watchers was whether such actions violated the reasonable expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Four US citizens took issue with such surveillance, which was executed by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global and its starry-eyed, impressionable director David Morales under instruction from the CIA.  Civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler and media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, took the matter to the US District Court of the Southern District of New York in August last year.  They had four targets of litigation: the CIA itself, its former director, Michael R. Pompeo, Morales and his company, UC Global SL.

All four alleged that the US Government had conducted surveillance on them and copied their information during visits to Assange in the embassy, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment.  In doing so, the plaintiffs argued they were entitled to money damages and injunctive relief.  The government moved to dismiss the complaint as amended.

On December 19, District Judge John G. Koeltl delivered a judgment of much interest, granting, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss but denying other parts of it.  Before turning to the relevant features of Koeltl’s reasons, various observations made in the case bear repeating.  The judge notes, for instance, Pompeo’s April 2017 speech, in which he “‘pledged that his office would embark upon a ‘long term’ campaign against WikiLeaks.’”  He is cognisant of the plaintiffs’ claims “Morales was recruited to conduct surveillance on Assange and his visitors on behalf of the CIA and that this recruitment occurred at a January 2017 private security industry convention at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

From that meeting, it is claimed that “Morales created an operations unit, improved UC Global’s systems, and set up live streaming from the United States so that surveillance could be accessed instantly by the CIA.”  The data gathered from UC Global “was either personally delivered to Las Vegas; Washington, D.C.; and New York City by Morales (who travelled to these locations more than sixty times in the three years following the Las Vegas convention) or placed on a server that provided external access to the CIA”.

Koeltl preferred to avoid deciding on the claims that Morales and UC Global were, in fact, “acting as agents of Pompeo and the CIA”.  Such matters were questions of fact “that cannot be decided on a motion to dismiss.”

A vital issue in the case was whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue the CIA in the first place.  Citing the case of ACLU v Clapper, which involved a challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program, Koeltl accepted that they did.  In doing so, he rejected a similar argument made by the government in Clapper – that the injuries alleged were simply “too speculative and generalized” and that the information gathered via surveillance would necessarily even be used against them.  “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.”   If the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices “were unlawful, the plaintiffs have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling.”

Less satisfactory for the plaintiffs was the finding they had no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with the publisher given that “they knew Assange was surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.”  The judge thought it significant that they did “not allege that they would not have met Assange had they known their conversations would be surveilled.”  Additionally, it “would not be recognized as reasonable by society” to have expected conversations held with Assange at the embassy in London to be protected, given such societal acceptance of, for instance, video surveillance in government buildings.

This reasoning is faulty, given that the visits by the four plaintiffs to the embassy did not take place with their knowledge of the operation being conducted by UC Global with CIA blessing.  In a general sense, anyone visiting the embassy could not help but suspect that Assange might be the object of surveillance, but to suggest something akin to a waiver of privacy rights on the part of attorneys and journalists aiding a persecuted publisher is an odd turn.

The US Government also succeeded on the point that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation to privacy regarding their passports or their devices they voluntarily left at the Embassy reception desk.  In doing so, they “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.”  Those visiting embassies must, it would seem, be perennially on guard.

That said, the plaintiffs convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation to privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.”  The government even went so far as to concede that point.

Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the biggest fish was let off the hook.  The plaintiffs had attempted to use the 1971 US Supreme Court case of Bivens to argue that the former CIA director be held accountable and liable for violating constitutional rights.  Koeltl thought the effort to extend the application of Bivens inappropriate in terms of the high standing nature of the defendant and the context.  “As a presidential appointee confirmed by Congress […] Defendant Pompeo is in a different category of defendant from a law enforcement agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”  More’s the pity.

Leaving aside some of the more questionable turns of reasoning in Koeltl’s judgment, public interest litigants and activists can take heart from the prospect that civil trials against the CIA for violations of the US Constitution are no longer unrealistic.  “We are thrilled,” declared Richard Roth, the plaintiffs’ attorney, “that the court rejected the CIA’s efforts to silence the plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIA’s attempt to carry out Pompeo’s vendetta against WikiLeaks.”  The appeals process, however, is bound to be tested.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Photo by Sean Ferigan

In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet .

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Why 14th Amendment Bars Trump From Office: a Constitutional Law Scholar Explains Principle Behind Colorado Supreme Court Ruling appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mark A. Graber.

On Sunday, December 10, 18 children, ranging from ages eight to 17, filed a new constitutional climate lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California against the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Genesis B. v. United States Environmental Protection Agencyasserts that the EPA intentionally allows life-threatening climate pollution to be emitted by the fossil fuel sources of greenhouse gases it regulates, despite knowing the harm it causes to children’s health and welfare. The young plaintiffs also claim that the EPA has discriminated against them as children by discounting the economic value of their lives and their future when it decides whether and how much climate pollution to allow. Defendants named in the case include the EPA; its administrator, Michael Regan; and the United States federal government.

This new case highlights the EPA’s conduct over the last 50 years since the Nixon administration and Congress created the agency and delegated it the authority to manage the nation’s air quality and control pollution to protect human health and welfare. The case alleges that for decades, the EPA has known that allowing climate pollution would harm children, yet it has intentionally allowed the U.S. to become one of the world's biggest contributors to climate change. The youth plaintiffs are increasingly suffering from the resulting climate harms that are growing in the Western U.S., including loss of homes from wildfire, damage from floods, and evacuations from life-threatening climate change-induced incidents. Many of the youth plaintiffs are suffering serious health harms tied to wildfire smoke and heat, have lost weeks of school, are experiencing severe depression and anxiety, and fear for their lives.

The 18 children are asking the federal court to hold a trial, weigh the evidence, and ultimately issue a declaratory judgment that the EPA has violated their fundamental constitutional rights to life and equal protection of the law. Referencing the Supreme Court’s 2022 opinion in West Virginia v. EPA, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the youth plaintiffs also seek a judgment that by systematically allowing climate pollution that harms human health and welfare, the EPA has acted outside the scope of its congressionally delegated authority. The case also asks, for the first time, for the federal courts to clarify the constitutional standard for judicial review to protect the rights of children as a unique and protected class that is different from adults.

“These children are rising up from fire, smoke, heat, and flood to share their stories of physical harm and despair, along with their clarion call to adults—'our equal rights to life matter as much as yours’,” said Julia Olson, Chief Legal Counsel for Our Children’s Trust. “There is one federal agency explicitly tasked with keeping the air clean and controlling pollution to protect the health of every child and the welfare of a nation—the EPA. The agency has done the opposite when it comes to climate pollution and it’s time the EPA is held accountable by our courts for violating the U.S. Constitution and misappropriating its congressionally delegated authority.”

"These children should not face an insurmountable barrier to ensuring their own well-being and the exercise of their constitutional rights," said Catherine Smith, Of Counsel with Our Children’s Trust. "In times like this, when the legislative and executive branches have breached their obligation to young people by intentionally allowing climate pollution and explicitly discounting children’s lives in some political or economic calculus fully aware of its consequences to youth, courts must serve as a constitutional backstop to end it."

Fourteen-year-old plaintiff Avroh said: "We are experiencing what no one should have to experience. We're facing constitutional negligence. We're challenging the EPA's failure to protect us. The air we breathe has become a casualty of their opposition."

Fifteen-year-old plaintiff Noah said: “Time is slipping away, and the impact of the climate crisis is already hitting us directly. We are running from wildfires, being displaced by floods, panicking in hot classrooms during another heat wave. We feel a constant worry about the future, and all around us no one is moving fast enough. The Constitution guarantees every American the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness including and especially children.”

Eight-year-old plaintiff Neela said: “I believe kids can make a difference and the earth needs our help. I want to help protect the people and places I love. I’m excited to be a part of this case and be a voice for all kids who deserve a healthy environment.”

“These plaintiffs, with diverse lived experiences and different climate change-induced injuries, have come together to sue the Environmental Protection Agency for discriminating against them because they are young,” Smith concluded.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit are represented by Julia Olson and Andrea Rodgers, of Our Children’s Trust; Catherine Smith, Of Counsel to Our Children’s Trust; Philip Gregory, Gregory Law Group; Paul Hoffman, Director of Civil Rights Litigation Clinic, UC Irvine School of Law; and John Washington, Schonbrun Seplow Harris Hoffman & Zeldes LLP.

In addition to Genesis B. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Our Children’s Trust represents and supports young people in active climate litigation both globally and across the United States. In June 2023, Our Children’s Trust brought the first constitutional climate trial in U.S. history in Held v. State of Montana; in August, the young Montana plaintiffs received a landmark ruling declaring the state's fossil fuel-favoring laws to be unconstitutional. Our Children’sTrust also represents the 21 youth plaintiffs in the landmark federal constitutional climatelawsuit, Juliana v. United States, currently moving forward toward trial on the question ofwhether the federal government’s fossil fuel-based energy system, and resulting climatedestabilization, is unconstitutional. In June 2024, Navahine F. v. Hawai'i Department of Transportation is set to go to trial. Other active cases include Natalie R. v. State of Utah, and Layla H. v. Commonwealth of Virginia.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

• Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves won reelection on Tuesday, while Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to an abortion and other forms of reproductive health care. In Virginia, Democrats swept legislative elections in a blow to GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
• As casualties mount in the Israel-Hamas war, calls are growing for attention to the more than 2 million civilians in the blockaded Gaza Strip. The Biden administration says it supports a narrow humanitarian pause in the fighting to allow for the movement of humanitarian supplies but opposes a wider cease-fire.
• The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the state of free speech on university campuses amid reports of a rise in antisemitism across the country.
• Ukraine claims responsibility for killing a Russia-backed official in Luhansk by a car bomb.
• Civil rights lawyers and equity advocates came together today to discuss the dangers that artificial intelligence poses to democracy and explore the steps that can be taken to protect vulnerable communities from the harmful misinformation, disinformation, and voter intimidation.

Issue 1 supporters celebrate as Rhiannon Carnes, executive director, Ohio Women’s Alliance, speaks at a watch party, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023, in Columbus Ohio. Ohio voters have approved a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care. The outcome of Tuesday’s intense, off-year election was the latest blow for abortion opponents. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

The post Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves won reelection on Tuesday, while Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to an abortion and other forms of reproductive health care – Wednesday, November 8, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

In a landmark climate case, a judge in Montana has ruled in favor of a group of young people who had sued the state for violating their constitutional rights as it pushed policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels. In her decision, Montana Judge Kathy Seeley wrote, “Plaintiffs have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate.” We speak with plaintiff Olivia Vesovich about the historic ruling, which she calls “the most life-changing news that I’ve ever heard.” “It’s a real watershed moment,” adds Julia Olson, chief legal counsel and executive director of Our Children’s Trust, a not-for-profit law firm representing the 16 youth plaintiffs between ages 5 and 22. “There’s going to be huge ripple effects as other courts start stepping up and doing their role in our democracy to be a check on the other branches of government.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Jayapura High Court has found West Papuan human rights and social justice activist Victor Yeimo guilty of treason and sentenced him to one year in prison in an appeal judgement this week.

The verdict was delivered during a public session held by the panel of judges headed by Paluko Hutagalung, with Adrianus Agung Putrantono and Sigit Pangudianto, serving as member judges.

The charges against Yeimo, the international spokesperson of the West Papua National Committee, stem from his alleged involvement in the Papuan anti-racism protest condemning racial slurs targeting Papuan students at the Kamasan III Student Dormitory in Surabaya on August 16, 2019.

• READ MORE: Other Victor Yeimo reports

Yeimo was accused of leading the demonstrations that occurred in Jayapura City on August 19 and 29, 2019.

The Jayapura High Court imposed a harsher criminal sentence than the previous verdict on May 5, 2023.

In the previous ruling, the court found Victor Yeimo guilty of violating Article 155 paragraph (1) of the Criminal Code, which pertains to the public display of writings or images containing expressions of hostility, hatred, or contempt towards the Indonesian government.

Yeimo was then sentenced to 8 months’ imprisonment.

Stirred controversy
The earlier verdict stirred controversy because the charge of Article 155 paragraph (1) of the Criminal Code was not initially brought against Victor Yeimo. Also, the legal article used to sentence him had already been invalidated by the Constitutional Court.

On May 12, 2023, both the public prosecutor and the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Human Rights for Papua, representing Yeimo as his legal counsel, appealed against the court ruling.

In the appeal decision, the Jayapura High Court overturned the previous decision, found Yeimo guilty of treason, and upheld the initial one-year prison sentence requested by the public prosecutor.

The panel of judges at the Jayapura High Court stated that the time Yeimo had already spent in arrest and detention would be fully deducted from the imposed sentence and ordered him to remain in detention.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Under preclearance, jurisdictions that had histories of barring people from voting based on their race were required to get federal approval before introducing new voting policies.

"Without this guardrail, voters lost a bulwark against discriminatory voting policies, and states previously subject to preclearance were free to implement discriminatory restrictions on voting access without advance checks," wrote Jasleen Singh and Sara Carter at the Brennan Center. "Many states did exactly that. Along with a prior decision narrowly interpreting constitutional protections for voting rights, Shelby County also sent a message to the nation that the federal courts would no longer play their historic role as a robust protector of voting rights."

"Since the 2020 election, 20 states passed 32 laws restricting mail voting access. Overall, 22 states passed 41 such laws since Shelby County. Some of these new restrictions have a clear racially discriminatory impact."

Texas wasted no time in announcing that a strict voter ID law, previously blocked by preclearance, would go into effect the same day that Shelby was handed down. Similar restrictions, which have been found to have a disproportionate effect on low-income voters and people of color, followed in at least nine states including Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina.

Since 2020—when the coronavirus pandemic upended voting and Republicans spread baseless lies about so-called "voter fraud" after former President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection—GOP state legislators have largely turned their focus to restricting measures that offer flexibility to voters, such as mail-in ballots, said the Brennan Center.

"Since the 2020 election, 20 states passed 32 laws restricting mail voting access. Overall, 22 states passed 41 such laws since Shelby County," wrote Singh and Carter. "Some of these new restrictions have a clear racially discriminatory impact."

"For example," they added, "the Brennan Center studied a 2021 Texas law requiring a voter to include their driver's license number or the last four digits of their social security number on mail ballot applications and mail ballots and requiring the number to match the individual’s voter file data. During Texas's March 2022 primary, thousands of mail ballots and mail ballot applications were rejected, disproportionately cast by Latino, Asian, and Black voters."

A number of state legislatures have also taken advantage of the Shelby ruling as they have drawn new district maps.

Sherrilyn Ifill, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation, said Sunday that she knew in 2013 that the Shelby ruling was "catastrophic," but did not predict that the Republican Party would "turn voter suppression into part of its national policy."

Before 2013, said Democracy Docket, which offers analysis and expert commentary on voting rights, the U.S. Department of Justice had blocked more than 3,000 proposed voter suppression laws under the VRA.

The Brennan Center pointed out that within its ruling in 2013, the Supreme Court stated that Congress could pass a new "coverage formula" to determine which jurisdictions would be covered by a preclearance provision.

"And it should," wrote Singh and Carter, "by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore the Voting Rights Act to its full strength, as well as the Freedom to Vote Act to set nondiscriminatory baseline national standards for voting and elections."

In an op-ed at Newsweek on Sunday, U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) wrote that another voting rights-related ruling by the Supreme Court earlier this month, Allen v. Milligan, was "energizing" as the high court affirmed that Alabama had racially gerrymandered its electoral map.

However, she said, "we cannot rely on this Supreme Court, or the courts generally, to consistently protect our freedom to vote. We must, together, act."

In addition to passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, she wrote, "we must also engage in robust voter education and outreach efforts, empowering communities with knowledge and resources to help overcome anti-voting barriers."

While Ifill said she did not predict the extent to which the GOP would go to stop marginalized communities from voting, she "also did not predict the extraordinary determination of voters, who, even at the height of a deadly global pandemic refused to be bowed," she said. "That they would stand in line and risk their very lives to vote, despite efforts of Republicans and the indifference of the Supreme Court.

"The Shelby decision was catastrophic, yes," she added. "But we didn't give in and we won't give in. We will find a way to overcome every obstacle to our right to participate as first class citizens in American political life. We will vote and organize and litigate, and legislate until we win."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The 21 youth plaintiffs, including 11 Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth, have waited almost
eight years after facing incessant and unprecedented efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice
(DOJ) to delay and dismiss their case. The Juliana case was one of the most significant targets
of the Trump administration’s “shadow docket” - a tactic wherein cases are decided without full
briefing or oral argument, and without any written opinion. Now, barring continued attempts by
the DOJ to delay the case, the youth will finally be able to move forward to trial on the question
of whether the federal government’s fossil fuel-based energy system, and resulting climate
destabilization, is unconstitutional.

Members of Congress stand in solidarity with the Juliana youth plaintiffs. Following the
ruling, members of Congress issued public statements of support for the youth plaintiffs and this
week participated in a Tweetstorm to continue to show their commitment to the youth, their
rights to a safe, livable climate, and their right to go to trial. Supporting access to justice for our
children, the members encourage the Biden administration to fulfill his promise to work with our
youth and protect them from the harms of the climate crisis.

Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Chairman of the Senate Interior, Environment, and Related
Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee and Chairman of the Chemical Safety, Waste
Management, Environmental Justice, and Regulatory Oversight Environment and Public Works
Subcommittee, shared, “BIG NEWS: The #YouthVGov case will finally proceed to trial! This
remarkable group of young people who are demanding their right to a healthy planet and future
have my full support.” Read his June 3, 2023, tweet here and June 6, 2023, tweet here.

“Twenty-one youth have waited almost eight years to get a ruling on their lawsuit demanding
their constitutional right to a safe climate be protected. And yesterday, we welcomed news that
they are finally being granted their right to go to trial,” said Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky
(IL-09), a Chief Deputy Whip and Ranking Member on the House Innovation, Data, and
Commerce Energy and Commerce Subcommittee. “These young people have taken on
incredible responsibility to protect our environment. I will continue to work with my colleagues in
Congress to support them as they continue their fight to protect the right of all to a safe and
habitable climate. Our children and grandchildren should not have to fear for the future of their
environment and our world as we know it.” Read her June 2, 2023, press statement here and
tweet here.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chairman of the Budget Committee, Chairman of the
Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, & Federal Rights Judiciary Subcommittee, and
member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, stated, “All of us have a responsibility
to leave the next generation a healthy and hospitable planet. The window of opportunity to
address climate change is still open, but we must follow the lead of our children and
grandchildren to take action today. I’m proud to stand alongside Our Children’s Trust and young
people across this country as we fight for a safer climate future.” He also tweeted his support on
June 6, 2023, here.

“Today, I'm proudly standing with @youthvgov + Juliana plaintiffs as they fight to protect their
constitutional right to a safe climate. Let's get climate justice out of the shadows & off the
shadow docket,” stated Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (TX-16), member of the Judiciary
Committee and Deputy Whip of Congressional Progressive Caucus. Read her June 6, 2023,
tweet here.

For additional statements of support, including from Senator Wyden and Congressmembers
Jayapal and Tlaib, visit the Juliana statements of support page.

“I spent most of my life living on a barrier island impacted by the climate crisis and nearly half of
my life fighting for climate justice as a plaintiff in this lawsuit,” said the youngest plaintiff in the
Juliana case, 15-year-old Floridian Levi Draheim. “I’m only 15 years old and I have lived
through three major hurricanes and have been evacuated from my home multiple times. I’ve
also experienced years of delay, waiting for my right to be heard in court, due to the actions of
our own DOJ. I’m excited that our case is finally moving forward and grateful that members of
Congress continue to support children’s fundamental rights for youth, like me and my little
sister.” Learn more about Levi and the other 20 Juliana plaintiffs here.

Since the case was filed in 2015, more than 85 lawmakers have rallied behind the Juliana youth
and their right to a safe climate. They joined U.S. Senate and House letters in November 2021
to President Biden expressing support for the fundamental rights of children to a safe climate.
Members stood with the Juliana plaintiffs by cosponsoring the Children’s Fundamental Rights
and Climate Recovery Resolution introduced during the 116th and 117th Congress
(S.Con.Res.8 & H.Con.Res.31) expressing that the current climate crisis disproportionately
affects the health, economic opportunity, and fundamental rights of children, and demands that
the United States develop a national, comprehensive, science-based, and just climate recovery
plan to meet necessary emissions reduction targets. They also signed on to two 2019 and 2020
amicus briefs filed in the Ninth Circuit.

“These young people have a right to access their courts and, after several long years, finally
have their evidence of climate harm caused by their own government–and how to stop it–heard
in open court,” said Julia Olson, lead counsel for the youth plaintiffs. “Attorney General Garland
should treat this like the urgent constitutional case that it is by litigating the case on its merits
and presenting their arguments in the light of day at trial, rather than once again seeking to push
this case into the dark corners of the shadow docket. Members of Congress who continue to
stand in solidarity with these 21 young Americans are sending a clear and urgent message to all
of our nation’s leaders to protect our children’s fundamental rights to a safe climate.”

Plaintiffs intend to seek a prompt trial date so that they and their experts can finally present their
evidence of their government’s active infringement of their constitutional rights.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The National Election Committee’s decision earlier this month to block the Candlelight Party from appearing on the ballot was deemed correct and based on the law, council spokesman Prum Vicheat Akara told reporters.

The ruling means Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party won’t have any major challengers on the ballot on July 23.

The decision is a setback for democracy in Cambodia and will disenfranchise thousands of people who have recently become supporters of the Candlelight Party, according to Rong Chhun, the party’s vice president.

The French foreign ministry echoed that, saying it was “a troubling signal that undermines the democratic nature of the vote.” 

“France calls on the appropriate authorities to take the necessary measures to allow the Candlelight Party to participate in this important democratic exercise,” it said in a statement.

The NEC said on May 15 that it wouldn’t accept a statement from the Interior Ministry confirming the party’s registration in 1998. The committee said it required the original certificate issued by the ministry, which was lost in 2017 when the offices of a previous opposition party were raided by government agents.

Candlelight Party members have cried foul because the party was allowed to compete in last year’s local commune elections. 

Public protest promised

Party officials had hoped the Constitutional Council, a judicial body that examines election disputes, might overturn the NEC’s ruling.

But the Constitutional Council – just like the NEC – was simply acting according to Hun Sen’s wishes, Finland-based political analyst Kim Sok said. 

“Hun Sen can’t find any solutions so he already threatened foreign diplomats,” he said. “He is afraid of a demonstration after the election results. He is afraid of the Candlelight Party and other social injustice issues.”

The Candlelight Party has two choices, said Australia-based social development researcher Seng Sary. One is to seek some kind of foreign intervention. Another is to persuade France-based opposition figure Sam Rainsy to return to the country for the first time since 2015. 

“The Candlelight Party can call for a small protest, but if Sam Rainsy returns, there will be a bigger movement,” he said. “If Sam Rainsy is in the country, there will be a bigger force.”

Party officials will organize a public protest of the Council’s decision soon, Rong Chhun said.

However, Hun Sen recently warned against holding any protest, saying a demonstration could lead to violence and mass arrests. He has ordered prisons to prepare their cells for opposition party members. 

Activists and party officials targeted

Authorities have arrested several top Candlelight Party officials in recent months. Some activists have complained of a campaign of intimidation, while others have been persuaded by the promise of a government position to switch their allegiance to the CPP. 

The Candlelight Party has attracted support over the last several years with a policy platform centered around improving social welfare benefits such as offering free check-ups and treatment at public hospitals and raising the minimum monthly wage for garment workers and civil servants.

Eng Sokha, a voter in Phnom Penh, said the CPP must be afraid of competing with the opposition’s popularity. It’s well-known that Candlelight’s paperwork was valid enough for it to compete in the 2022 commune elections, she said.

“So there is no reason that the party can’t join this election. I am disappointed,” she said, adding that she might not vote.

CPP spokesman Sok Ey San dismissed any concerns about the election’s validity. If Candlelight Party supporters don’t vote, then the CPP will continue to lead the country, he said.

Translated by Samean Yun. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

Sixty-six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), led by CPC Chair Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Deputy Chair Ilhan Omar (MN-05), and Whip Greg Casar (TX-35), are calling on President Biden to prepare to invoke his constitutional authority granted in the 14th Amendment to uphold the full faith and credit of the United States and end Republican hostage taking of the economy that could trigger a financial catastrophe.

The members released a letter today urging President Biden to “fulfill the Executive’s Constitutional duty to faithfully and impartially administer the funds already enacted by law at the direction of Congress,” citing the clause which states “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred…shall not be questioned.”

The lawmakers sent the letter “in light of unremitting efforts by Congressional Republicans to hold the economic health of our nation hostage.” The Republicans’ framework imposes “drastic cuts,” and could take jobs from 780,000 people, nutrition assistance from 1.2 million women, infants, and children, Medicaid coverage from up to 21 million Americans, rental assistance from 640,000 families, and more, the lawmakers warn. “Surrendering to these extremist demands also sets a dangerous precedent that emboldens Republicans to pursue additional, anti-democratic hostage taking, particularly after their having been told previously that a clean debt-ceiling increase was nonnegotiable,” they write.

The members also emphasize the clear legal authority for the President to raise the debt ceiling under the 14th Amendment. “If the options are either agreeing to major cuts to domestic priorities under the Republican threat of destroying the economy and moving forward to honor America’s debts, we join prominent legal scholars, economists, former budget officials, and a former president in advocating for invoking the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.”

They conclude by urging the President to prepare to invoke the Constitution’s 14th Amendment “rather than acceding to bad-faith Republican attempts to harm our hard-fought economic recovery, reverse the climate progress of this administration, impose painful, burdensome, and ineffective new work requirements for recipients of [public assistance programs], and slash essential federal programs that lift up millions of Americans.”

The letter can be viewed here.

Signatories include: Representatives Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Greg Casar (TX-35), Becca Balint (VT-AL), Nanette Diaz Barragán (CA-44), Earl Blumenauer (OR-03), Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01), Jamaal Bowman, Ed.D. (NY-17), Cori Bush (MO-01), André Carson (IN-07), Matt Cartwright (PA-08), Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (FL-20), Judy Chu (CA-28), David N. Cicilline (RI-01), Yvette D. Clarke (NY-09), Steve Cohen (TN-09), Danny K. Davis (IL-07), Madeleine Dean (PA-04), Rosa L. DeLauro (CT-03), Veronica Escobar (TX-16), Adriano Espaillat (NY-13), Maxwell Alejandro Frost (FL-10), John Garamendi (CA-08), Jesús G. "Chuy" García (IL-04), Robert Garcia (CA-42), Sylvia R. Garcia (TX-29), Daniel Goldman (NY-10), Jimmy Gomez (CA-34), Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07), Val Hoyle (OR-04), Jared Huffman (CA-02), Jonathan L. Jackson (IL-01), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18), Henry C. “Hank” Johnson, Jr. (GA-04), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (CA-37), Ro Khanna (CA-17), Barbara Lee (CA-13), Summer Lee (PA-12), Morgan McGarvey (KY-03), James P. McGovern (MA-02), Grace Meng (NY-06), Gwen S. Moore (WI-04), Jerrold Nadler (NY-12), Grace F. Napolitano (CA-31), Donald Norcross (NJ-01), Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC-AL), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), Chellie Pingree (ME-01), Mark Pocan (WI-02), Katie Porter (CA-47), Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Delia C. Ramirez (IL-03), Jamie Raskin (MD-08), Janice Schakowsky (IL-09), Melanie Stansbury (NM-01), Mark Takano (CA-39), Shri Thanedar (MI-13), Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), Jill Tokuda (HI-02), Paul Tonko (NY-20), Ritchie Torres (NY-35), Juan Vargas (CA-52), Nydia M. Velázquez (NY-07), Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12), Nikema Williams (GA-05), and Frederica S. Wilson (FL-24).

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The historic arraignment of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday highlighted how infrequently American political leaders are held accountable for any crimes.

"The last time anything remotely similar happened was" in 1872, when a police officer arrested then-President Ulysses S. Grant for speeding in a two-horse carriage—an incident that only came to light in a 1908 interview,The New York Timesreported.

Trump, now a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, faces 34 felony counts for allegedly "falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election."

As Free Speech for People noted, the twice-impeached former president still has not faced legal consequences for alleged "crimes related to the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the events leading up to it; crimes related to Trump's January 2, 2021 phone call demanding that the Georgia Secretary of State 'find 11,780 votes'... the obstruction of justice crimes identified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the second part of his report; crimes identified by the inspector general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence related to Trump's attempts to extort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy; and others."

"Trump may be the first former president to face criminal prosecution, but that fact in and of itself is a damning condemnation of the U.S. system of impunity."

Trump's prosecution in New York "is a good first step," according toThe Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, but it "is not evidence that our much-vaunted justice system can actually be applied fairly and evenly to all, even a former president."

"Trump may be the first former president to face criminal prosecution, but that fact in and of itself is a damning condemnation of the U.S. system of impunity that has long permeated our system of American exceptionalism," the journalist argued Tuesday. "This case against Trump would be a mere footnote of history, albeit a wild one, if the U.S. actually believed in holding presidents and other top officials accountable for their crimes, including those committed in office."

Pointing to former U.S. President George W. Bush; his vice president, Dick Cheney; and Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state and national security adviser in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he asserted, "The truth is that all of them should be serving substantial prison sentences for directing and orchestrating the gravest of criminal activity: war crimes."

However, former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) "steadfastly refused to even consider impeachment proceedings against Bush," and former President Barack Obama made clear that "no one would be prosecuted for running a secret global kidnap and torture regime under Bush and Cheney," Scahill wrote. "The system depends on such bipartisan impunity."

The prosecution of Trump comes on the heels of the 20th anniversary of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. Just ahead of that milestone last month, the U.S-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) renewed its call for reparations and accountability.

"Reparations are rooted in precedent and international law, as well as a strong tradition of justice-based organizing by civil rights movements, and we should not let the difficulty of securing justice deter us from seeking it—for Iraqis and for all others harmed by U.S. imperialism, exploitation, and genocide," CCR said. "Justice also entails accountability for the perpetrators of these horrific crimes, including those responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq."

CCR further demanded justice for those tortured and detained in the broader war against terrorism that Bush declared in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks—while also acknowledging that "legal efforts against high-level political and military leaders for the invasion itself and the many crimes committed in the 'war on terror' pose a different set of challenges, as demonstrated by our efforts to hold high-level Bush administration officials accountable at the International Criminal Court for crimes in or arising out of the war in Afghanistan or under universal jurisdiction."

The United States is notably not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the treaty which established the Hague-based tribunal to investigate and prosecute people from around the world for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.

Nearly a year after 9/11, Bush signed into law the American Servicemembers' Protection Act. Dubbed the "Hague Invasion Act" by critics, it empowers the president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release" of any U.S. or allied person "who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court."

Last month, roughly a year into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the ICC issued international arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for allegedly abducting Ukrainian children.

While Putin has "exhibited zero concern about his indictment," his "invasion of Ukraine has created an interesting predicament for the U.S. empire on these matters," Scahill highlighted, explaining that though President Joe Biden has called the Russian leader a war criminal, the United States has long "encouraged ad hoc tribunals" rather than supporting ICC prosecutions.

"The whole purpose of this from the U.S. perspective is to ensure that these laws will never be applied to Americans or their friends," he wrote. "The prosecution of Trump should thus serve as a reminder that the U.S. does not actually believe in holding its most powerful citizens accountable for even the most serious of acts. And that position has real consequences, including in how it can be weaponized by criminals like Putin."

"Make no mistake, Trump should be prosecuted for a variety of crimes, committed both as a private citizen and public official," Scahill concluded. "But if we want to claim that our system is exceptional, then the same fate should be brought to bear on the Bushes, Cheneys, and Kissingers of the world as well."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, was among the consumer advocates celebrating on Thursday as a federal court in New York City ruled that the bureau's funding structure is constitutional—rebuking years of right-wing and corporate attacks on the agency.

The Massachusetts Democrat expressed hope that the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to hear arguments in a separate but related case later this year, "follows more than a century of law and historical precedent" and also rules in favor of the CFPB, which has regulated debt collectors, payday lenders, credit card companies, and other financial businesses for more than a decade.

"Yet again, the constitutionality of the CFPB has been upheld, as it has been time and time before," said Warren.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the bureau Thursday in a case stemming from a debt collector's attempt to avoid a subpoena from the CFPB in 2017.

A lower court ruled in the case in August 2020 that the bureau's funding structure is constitutional, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said last year in the case set to be heard by the Supreme Court that the funding violates the Constitution's appropriations clause and the separation of executive and legislative powers.

The CFPB is funded by the Federal Reserve rather than through appropriations voted on annually by lawmakers.

Writing for the three-judge 2nd Circuit panel that voted unanimously in favor of the bureau, Judge Richard Sullivan noted that the justice system "has consistently interpreted the appropriations clause to mean simply that 'the payment of money from the Treasury must be authorized by a statute,'"—which doesn't apply to the CFPB since it receives no funding from the U.S. Treasury Department.

An upcoming ruling by the Supreme Court that supports the 2nd Circuit's finding would "mark a major win for everyday consumers impacted by abusive fees, predatory lenders, and corporate greed," said government watchdog Accountable.US.

"The CFPB is a vital voice for consumers and protects Americans from unfair and abusive practices," said Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.). "We can't allow these protections to be weakened."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the George W. Bush administration's illegal invasion of Iraq this weekend, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights on Wednesday renewed its call for reparations "for those harmed as a result of the U.S.'s unlawful act of aggression in its cruel, senseless, and baseless war-for-profit."

"Ten years ago, we teamed up with Iraqi civil society groups and U.S. service members to demand redress," the nonprofit explained, "and this need only becomes more urgent as the incalculable human toll of the war continues to grow: hundreds of thousands dead, some two million disabled, some nine million displaced, environmental devastation, countless people tortured, traumatized, or otherwise harmed in ways unseen, occupation and embrace of torture as policy in the so-called 'War on Terror,' and an entire generation that was born and raised in only war."

As Common Dreams reported earlier Wednesday, the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that already, "the total costs of the war in Iraq and Syria are expected to exceed half a million human lives and $2.89 trillion" by 2050.

The project also said that "an estimated 300,000 people have died from direct war violence in Iraq, while the reverberating effects of war continue to kill and sicken hundreds of thousands more."

"Justice also entails accountability for the perpetrators of these horrific crimes, including those responsible for the torture."

Such figures have fueled calls from groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which asserted that "reparations are rooted in precedent and international law, as well as a strong tradition of justice-based organizing by civil rights movements, and we should not let the difficulty of securing justice deter us from seeking it—for Iraqis and for all others harmed by U.S. imperialism, exploitation, and genocide."

"Justice also entails accountability for the perpetrators of these horrific crimes, including those responsible for the torture" in Iraq and beyond, argued the center—which since 2004 has filed three lawsuits against U.S-based military contractors on behalf of Iraqis tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison and also sued Erik Prince and his company Blackwater over the Nisour Square massacre

"Legal efforts against high-level political and military leaders for the invasion itself and the many crimes committed in the 'War on Terror' pose a different set of challenges, as demonstrated by our efforts to hold high-level Bush-administration officials accountable at the International Criminal Court for crimes in or arising out of the war in Afghanistan or under universal jurisdiction," CCR noted. "Those of us pursuing accountability can draw inspiration from activists in other countries like Argentina and Guatemala who waged successful campaigns over several decades."

Highlighting that "Congress continues its overbroad authorizations for use of military force," the center argued that "such authorizations must be repealed, and the unlawful policies of endless war and militarization must be replaced with international-law-based, rights-respecting policies and practices."

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote Thursday to repeal both the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force against Iraq. While the measure's sponsor, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), has been publicly optimistic about passage, it would then need approval from the GOP-controlled House of Representatives before being sent to President Joe Biden's desk for signature.

In a move decried by progressives as "madness," the president last week proposed a budget for fiscal year 2024 featuring a historic $886.4 billion in military spending, including $397.5 million to fight what is left of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Meanwhile, as CCR pointed out Wednesday, "just this month, the House voted 414-2 to maintain unilateral sanctions on Syria even though—or because—they have caused widespread suffering and hindered earthquake relief efforts. The U.S. has imposed similar deadly sanctions on Cuba for decades. Such manifestations of imperialism differ from the war on Iraq only in degree. Indeed, deadly sanctions on Iraq were a precursor to the U.S. invasion."

In its lengthy statement, the center also said that "as we call for justice for Iraqis, we stand in solidarity with all people who live in countries targeted by U.S. imperialism, and in particular, in Afghanistan, whose civilians have been subjected to endless war and destruction, politicization, and then abandonment of human rights protections, and state-facilitated humanitarian suffering."

"They include not only those killed and maimed by the U.S. military and its proxies but also those harmed by U.S. sanctions and coups, corporate plunder and extraction, and austerity regimes imposed by U.S.-dominated colonial institutions," the center added, pointing to the International Monetary Fund. "It also includes Palestinians, who are subjugated by Israel, a U.S. imperial outpost."

"U.S. warmaking has long fed fascism at home," the group continued, calling out police violence, immigration restrictions, racial and religious profiling, and mass surveillance. "The trillions of dollars spent on militarism and criminalization abroad and in the U.S. must be reallocated to address the material needs and fulfill the human rights of our most marginalized communities."

"On this ignominious anniversary," CCR concluded, "we recommit to our vision of a world in which revolutionary movements across countries and continents struggle together for liberation from U.S. imperialism and all other oppressive systems of power."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The post The Constitutional Right to a Healthful Environment (in New York State) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Elliot Sperber.

On February 2, U.S. prisoner and former al-Qaeda courier Majid Khan was released from the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba after more than 16 years of imprisonment. "We are very pleased with Majid's release," says J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

"Majid's transfer to Belize is the culmination of nearly 20 years of work by the CCR and the law firm Jenner & Block," Dixon tells The Progressive. "Our only regret is that he was not released sooner."

On October 7, 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States, together with Great Britain, launched "Operation Enduring Freedom," the war in Afghanistan and the beginning of the "global war on terror." It was followed, in March 2003, by the U.S. invasion of Iraq ostensibly to end Saddam Hussein's dictatorship and to destroy his alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

On January 11, 2002, the first 20 detainees were delivered from CIA black sites to the Guantánamo military prison, known as Camp X-Ray, on the island of Cuba. Over the following two decades, approximately 780 detainees would be held there. Today, 34 detainees remain imprisoned in the detention facility. Most troubling, this prison held more than 150 innocent men for years. The Guantánamo prison and associated military courts currently cost U.S. taxpayers about $540 million a year (with about $13.5 million being spent on each detainee).

Khan was born in Pakistan, where he lived as a child, and later grew up in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. After 9/11, he returned to Pakistan and became a courier for al-Qaeda. He was arrested in Karachi in March 2003 and spent about three years in CIA black sites. He was then taken to Guantánamo in September 2006, which is when CCR began to represent him. He was charged by a military commission in 2012, pleaded guilty, and agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities.

"I have a story that I have waited almost two decades to tell, so I want to start by thanking you for taking the time to listen to my statement," Khan begins in his October 2021 personal statement before his sentencing by a Guantánamo military commission. Khan said, "I want you to know what I did, what happened to me, and what I hope for the future."

Khan's testimony was also included in a report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He was the first former prisoner of a CIA black site to openly describe the violent and cruel torture he suffered under what was infamously dubbed "enhanced interrogation." "The more I cooperated and told them, the more I was tortured," he said.

The committee's report was approved on December 13, 2012, but not declassified until 2014.

Kahn admitted to helping finance the 2003 bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed eleven people. The Senate report notes that he was "an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks against U.S. water reservoirs." And, according to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered to be the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khan was "to deliver $50,000 to individuals working for a suspected terrorist leader named Hambali, the leader of al-Qaida's Southeast Asian affiliate known as 'J-I.'... Khan confirmed that the money had been delivered to an operative named Zubair..."

According to Khan, the CIA black site had dungeon-like conditions in which he was kept naked with a hood on his head, his arms chained in ways that made sleep impossible. The report chronicles that at the "[b]eginning in March 2004, and continuing until his rendition to U.S. military custody at Guantanamo Bay in September 2006, Majid Khan engaged in a series of hunger strikes and attempts at self-mutilation that required significant attention from CIA detention site personnel."

Most alarming was how the CIA responded to these actions:

Majid Khan was then subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration, which included two bottles of Ensure. Later that same day, Majid Khan's "lunch tray," consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was "pureed" and rectally infused. Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed. In addition to his hunger strikes, Majid Khan engaged in acts of self-harm that included attempting to cut his wrist on two occasions, an attempt to chew into his arm at the inner elbow, an attempt to cut a vein in the top of his foot, and an attempt to cut into his skin at the elbow joint using a filed toothbrush.

Majid also said during his sentencing that he was raped with a garden hose: "While I was hanging for these three days, I recall one instance where I saw a guard or interrogator's face," he said. "This man sexually assaulted me while I was hanging naked. He touched my private parts while we were alone. I told this man to stop and that I wanted to see a lawyer. He responded, ‘Are you kidding, a lawyer? You are in no man's land. No one even knows where you are.'"

"Belize's offer of humanitarian resettlement [for Khan] is a model for other countries to offer [resettlement to] the remaining men."

"Let me be very clear, enhanced interrogation techniques are torture. And torture is—and always has been in modern times—illegal," insists Majid's attorney, Dixon. "There is no exception under U.S. and international law for torture. And the torture that was inflicted on Majid was a war crime that should have been—and should in the future be—prosecuted as a criminal act."

Colonel Douglas K. Watkins, a judge at the Guantánamo military court, considered Khan's treatment "shocking." In his June 2020 ruling on Khan's case, he wrote, "there is no serious dispute that Mr. Khan was tortured and suffered other illegal pretrial punishment both in CIA detention and at Guantanamo."

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in November 2001, President George W. Bush issued an executive order establishing military commissions in Guantánamo. They had no legal obligation to grant basic U.S. Constitutional protections to prisoners because the prison was outside of the United States. In addition, they did have to adhere to the Geneva Conventions because these treaties did not apply to "unlawful enemy combatants."

In 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court found that the system of military commissions that was to be used to try selected prisoners held at Guantánamo was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Dixon points out that "when Majid Khan was brought to Guantánamo in September 2006, the assumption by the Bush Administration was that the U.S. military would go along with what the CIA had done, and would help to cover up what the CIA had done." He then adds, "But when push came to shove when Majid got in front of a military judge and a military jury, that military judge said this was torture—and the military jury condemned it."

"There are 34 men who remain, and the overwhelming majority of those men have been approved for transfer," Dixon adds. "Belize's offer of humanitarian resettlement [for Khan] is a model for other countries to offer [resettlement to] the remaining men."

Going further, he notes that "there [are] a small number of men who are still involved in the military commission system including the so-called 9/11 defendants—i.e., the five men who are accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks. So, what do we do about those men?"

"I'm not involved in those cases but having been through the military-commission system with Mr. Khan," Dixon argues. "I can say this, the military-commission system has failed to bring anyone to justice for anything through contested proceedings. The only success the military commission system has seen is through guilty pleas like that of Mr. Khan."

Dixon adds, "My point is that we will never have accountability for 9/11 if those cases continue toward trial because they will never get to trial, and if they get to trial, they will be overturned on appeal because of issue of the torture." He goes further, pointing out, "negotiated resolutions of the remaining military commission cases is the only way to obtain any modicum of justice and accountability. And it's the only way Guantánamo is going to close."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by David Rosen.

In November 2021, New Yorkers overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to amend the state constitution and enshrine their right to “clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” Those eight words created the potential for a new legal regime, offering communities the highest possible defense against pollution and environmental injustice.

But the strength of that defense depends on how courts interpret it. A county supreme court judge near Rochester provided the first indication of that in December when he ruled that a suit against the state can proceed. The state appealed the decision in late January, raising questions about whether it believes the new constitutional provision, commonly referred to as the “green amendment,” has any legal significance at all. 

“The vigor of the State’s opposition to this lawsuit does not bode well for its enforcement of the Green Amendment,” Judge John Ark wrote in his decision.

The suit was brought by Fresh Air for the East Side, a grassroots organization of neighbors to the sprawling High Acres landfill, one of the state’s largest. The 1,000-acre site straddles the border of Perinton and Macedon, two towns in western New York. Though it opened in the 1970s, the facility began receiving exponentially more trash — most of it from New York City — after private owner Waste Management installed a rail line in 2015. Around the same time, the company committed a “combination of errors” that inundated the town in foul smells, according to the group’s lawyer, Linda Shaw. Residents began organizing in 2017, forming a Facebook group to share information and creating an app to collect data on when, where and how often the stench returned. 

They’ve been fighting Waste Management and the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which regulates landfills, ever since. The agency and the company have taken steps to mitigate the problem, including covering parts of the site and installing gas collectors and air monitors, but residents say it still stinks. Regulators have ignored recommendations by a landfill expert hired by Fresh Air for the East Side to study the odor and emissions.

Once the green amendment passed, the group sued Waste Management, New York City, and the state, claiming they were violating residents’ right to clean air. The suit cites the odors as well as greenhouse gas emissions released by decomposing waste. 

All three tried to get the case dismissed. On December 7, Monroe County judge John Ark granted New York City’s motion, ruling that it is merely a customer of Waste Management and has no duty to police the site. He also let Waste Management off, finding that the green amendment cannot be held against private companies. But Ark refused the state’s request, allowing the suit to proceed. 

“Essentially what this lower court did was to give legal license to the New York green amendment,” said environmental attorney Maya van Rossum, who started a movement to pass environmental rights amendments in state constitutions across the country. The judge confirmed that environmental rights must be treated like most other constitutional rights, van Rossum noted, in that they apply to the government, not private actors.

In a court filing, State Attorney General Letitia James’ office argued otherwise. It said that the green amendment does not impose specific obligations on the state, and that it doesn’t empower courts to compel agencies to take particular enforcement decisions.

Shaw said she can’t understand why the state effectively sided with Waste Management. “It violates every other thing the state of New York is trying to do, which is reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

Grist and New York Focus asked the Department of Environmental Conservation and the attorney general’s office to clarify their interpretation of the green amendment and the protections it grants New Yorkers. Both offices said they do not comment on pending litigation.

“They’re trying to pretend nothing happened,” said Nicholas Robinson, an environmental law professor at Pace University who is not involved in the case. At the same time, Robinson said, the state’s response was not unexpected. “They feel they’re entitled to wait until the highest court in New York orders them to behave otherwise. Now, that’s kind of bad in the sense that they should want to support the bill of rights. But you can also understand that they want to be protected by a court order that tells them to do it.”

New York has many environmental regulations and protections in place, and in recent years has taken steps to strengthen them. But residents have little recourse when state officials’ fail to enforce those rules, or against contaminants like PFAS that aren’t yet regulated. Van Rossum said that’s why the ability to appeal to a higher, fundamental right is necessary. 

Her green amendments crusade started after she won a seminal case in Pennsylvania in 2013 striking down a pro-fracking law on the basis of the environmental rights clause in that state’s constitution. Since then, that state has seen more than a dozen cases challenging laws, permits, and zoning decisions, mostly over oil and gas drilling and pipeline construction. Montana is the only other state with environmental rights guaranteed by its bill of rights.

Green amendments don’t make every instance of pollution a constitutional infringement. All fundamental rights have limits, van Rossum said — if a government official tells someone to shut up, it’s not considered a violation of freedom of speech. “The role of the judiciary is to help us figure out when the environmental harms that we are contending with rise to that constitutional level,” she said. 

John Dernbach, a law professor at Widener University who has analyzed recent Pennsylvania court decisions on the green amendment, found that in the majority of cases in which courts required plaintiffs to demonstrate a significant level of harm to a protected resource, they failed.

While the case law in New York is still inchoate, legal experts say Ark’s decision could have significant implications. The ruling declared the green amendment self-executing, meaning it does not depend on additional legislation to go into effect. It found that the state may run afoul of the new constitutional protections even when it complies with state law. And it put the burden not on the plaintiffs to prove their rights have been violated, but on the government to show that they hadn’t been.

“That shifts the burden of proof from the individual, who is the victim, to the governmental body, that has all the resources and most of the scientific evidence, to bring that forward,” Robinson said, “and show to a judge that they have not harmed the health or the clean water or the clean air rights of the individuals who brought the case.”

At least four other green amendment cases have been filed in New York. In one, residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side are using it to fight construction of two skyscrapers. Another was brought by Seneca Lake Guardian, an environmental group, against the state for approving a waste transfer station that could leak toxic chemicals into Cayuga Lake, a source of drinking water. 

It’ll become clearer what the green amendment means in practice as those cases make their way through the courts. “You don’t change a big entity like the state of New York by just having a vote to amend the Constitution,” Robinson said. “We now have a decade-long process of implementing it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York’s new constitutional right to a clean environment faces first judicial test on Feb 15, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Pontecorvo.

A New Zealand-based professor in comparative politics says the Fiji constitution needs to clear up the role of the military.

Dr Jon Fraenkel of Victoria University, formerly of the University of the South Pacific, says the 2013 constitution revived the provision that existed in the 1990 constitution which gave the military responsibility for looking after the well-being of the Fiji people.

But he told Pacific Waves this needed clarifying.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES:  Jon Fraenkel talks Fiji constitution
• Other Fiji politics reports

“Of course, when that was first introduced in 1990, it was as part of an ethno-nationalist constitution that was seeking to codify indigenous paramountcy in the states. At that point, I think the Fiji military [Republic of Fiji Military Forces] contemplated briefly assuming power in an unconstitutional way for 16 years.

“But it didn’t do that. And by the early 1990s, things had calmed down there was a desire to read for civilian government, for the military to keep out of politics. It’s only really in the wake of the [George] Speight coup that Mohammed Aziz rehabilitated this provision in the 1990 constitution, and suggested that it was still applied under the ’97 constitution, and then they put it in the 2013 constitution.

“And what does this mean? Well, it could mean just about anything. What does it mean to look after the welfare of the Fiji people? You could interpret that to mean anything at all?

“I noticed that before the final result, when [Sitiveni] Rabuka, perhaps misguidedly, complained to the military commander about the glitch about the counting of the election ballots, the military commander said that that wasn’t within his remit.

Protecting ‘well-being’
“In other words, he thought that it didn’t fall under section 131 of the Constitution that gives the military right to intervene to protect the well-being of the Fiji people.

“But after the formation of the new government in early January, the military commander, Major-General Jone Kalouniwai did make a peculiar statement where he expressed concern about the ambition of the government and about the speed at which things were moving.

“And he also suggested that the military might have some responsibility for making sure that the separation of powers is guaranteed.

“Now, that’s usually a role for the courts, not for the military. So one has to be careful about this kind of expansive understanding of the role of the military and the new Fiji. I think there needs to be further discussions about what that actually means.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Breakfast they say, is the most important meal of the day.

But last Wednesday it was possibly also the most dangerous. Because that’s when many people were likely to be reading The Fiji Times and choking over their corn flakes.

They could have been reading more pontification from the former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum about “constitutionalism” and “rule of law” and “the embodiment of the values and principles surrounding constitutions” . . . etc.

I am not often at a loss for words. But the sheer brazenness of someone who, in the course of nearly 16 years in government, paid little regard to any of these things, brought me pretty close.

Last weekend Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum gave a rambling press conference complaining about all manner of things the new coalition government was doing. I was so irritated I put out a long statement debunking the so-called “breaches of the Constitution” he was alleging.

But the man doesn’t give up.

He is clearly unmoved by any embarrassment he may feel about having first accepted a Constitutional Offices Commission appointment that got him kicked out of Parliament under the Constitution he drafted; and then resigning the COC position when he realised he could not do that job and also be the FijiFirst party general secretary.

All in the space of three days. That’s the legal equivalent of shooting yourself in both feet.

So let’s begin by talking about “rule of law”, because I am beginning to wonder if anyone in the FijiFirst party even understands what it means.

Rule of law
Let’s begin with what it does not mean. Rule of law does not mean “I made the laws, so I rule”. Rule of law is a much more complicated idea than that. Many people have tried to define it, in many different ways.

For those of us who are interested in it, it’s one of those things you sort of know when you see. But a central point of it, I think, is the idea that the law is more important than the people who make it or exercise power under it.

So that means that our rulers — like the people they make the rules for — must respect it in the same way that we have to. Lord Denning, a famous British judge (millennials — look up his role in Fiji’s history) repeated (and made famous) the words of the 18th century scholar, Thomas Fuller: “Be you ever so high, the law is above you.”

For more than a decade, the government of which Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was part of, paid little heed to this idea. It followed the law when it suited them, but ignored it when it didn’t suit them.

Let’s assume, for the moment, that he believed that the 2006 military coup (which the grovelling Fiji Sun once memorably described as “a change in direction of the government”) was lawful, together with the military government which followed.

That government continued to tell us it would follow the 1997 Constitution. But in April 2009 Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum could no longer believe that the military government was lawful. Because, in a case brought by deposed by deposed Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase, the Fiji Court of Appeal clearly told him that it wasn’t.

If you believed in rule of law, you would accept what the court had told you, quit your post and allow the lawful government to return, as the court required. He did not. Instead, he and his government decided that the 1997 Constitution had become inconvenient.

So they just trashed it. This was not rule of law. Aiyaz and the then government had instead decided that they were above the law.

The new constitution
Fast forward to 2012 and the process of a new constitution. We were told (in a pompous government media statement on 12 March 2012) that the then government was “looking to the future of Fiji and all Fijians”.

“During the process of formulating a genuine Fijian constitution,” we were told, “every Fijian will have the right to put their ideas before the constitutional commission and have the draft constitution debated and discussed by the Constituent Assembl . . .

“As the process continues with the Constitution Commission and the Constituent Assembly all Fijians will have a voice.”

What actually happened?

The well-known constitutional scholar Professor Yash Ghai was flown in to chair a new constitutional commission. His commission travelled around the country, gathering the views of the people on what a new constitution should say.

Hardly a perfectly democratic process, but better than nothing. The Ghai Commission drafted a new constitution. But the government didn’t like it. So much for the “voices” of Fijians. Out it went — constitution, commission and all. Six hundred printed copies of the draft constitution were dumped into a fire.

Professor Ghai was sent packing. Instead we were handed the 2013 Constitution, pretty much from nowhere. No “Constituent Assembly”. Nobody “had a voice”. So, was that all a process Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum might call (his word) “constitutionalism”?

Did things get any better?

So, at least the new Constitution, and the elections of 2014, were a new start. Maybe we could expect the new elected government, of which Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was chief legal adviser, to begin thinking about “rule of law” and “constitutionalism” and “embodying values and principles surrounding constitutions”?

Here’s one more important point about rule of law. It’s not just about the laws which tell you what to do and what not to do. It’s also about the law protecting your rights and freedoms — and protecting what you are allowed to do.

Your rights and freedoms under the 2013 Constitution include your rights of free expression, your rights to assemble and protest, your right to personal liberty — yes, the right not to be locked up at whim — among many others.

They even include the right to “executive and administrative justice” — that is, to be treated fairly by the government and its institutions. So a government that is applying the laws of the land ought to, while applying them (in the words of Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum) “embody the values and principles” of that Constitution.

How, then, were the “values and principles” of our Constitution being embodied when unions were repeatedly being denied the right to assemble and protest? How were they being embodied when under our media laws, journalists were threatened with jail for writing stories which were “against the national interest” (whatever that meant)?

How were the “values and principles” of our Constitution being embodied when public servants lived in permanent fear of arbitrary dismissal?

How were the “values and principles” of our democratic Constitution being embodied when the government passed important laws in Parliament, affecting things like our voting rights, citizenship, our rights to a fair trial and the regulation of political parties, all by surprise, on two days’ notice?

No cell time
There was an outcry earlier this week when police, over two days of questioning our former attorney-general, did not put him in a cell overnight. After all, former opposition politicians such as Sitiveni Rabuka, Biman Prasad and Pio Tikoduadua, when taken in for questioning for objecting to bad laws, were not so fortunate.

They got to spend a night in police custody. Why, people asked, was Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum getting special treatment? The answer? He was not getting special treatment. What was actually happening was that — for the first time in many years — the police were applying the law correctly.

If the person you are questioning is not a flight risk, there’s no need to lock him up. He is innocent until proven guilty. His personal freedom is more important than the convenience of the police.

He can sleep in his own bed and come back for more questioning tomorrow.

That would be, in Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s words, “embodying the values and principles of the Constitution”. But that is not something his government appeared to extend to its opponents when the police came calling. So I think we all deserve to be spared his lectures on “constitutionalism” for a little while.

Perhaps instead our former attorney-general might find it more valuable to take some time to quietly reflect on how well the governments of which he was part “embodied constitutional values and principles”. He has a total of nearly 16 years to reflect on — and not all of us have forgotten.

That ought to take a little while. And a few of us might then be able to enjoy more peaceful breakfasts.

Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer and former journalist (although, to be honest, not a big breakfaster). The views in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Who’s broken the law? “Separation of powers” and all that stuff.

Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s hour-long news conference on Saturday, January 21, seems mostly to have followed the usual FijiFirst party format.

He pontificated at length while his party’s MPs stood silently behind him.

From what I could tell, Sayed-Khaiyum’s speech was a mixture of political criticism and claims about the law. The politicians can respond to the political rhetoric. But claims that the government has broken the law are a more serious matter.

Sayed-Khaiyum has raised a number of complaints suggesting that the new government has broken the law. He has not been very clear about why this is so. However, for the record, let’s go over these complaints (or at least what he seems to be suggesting):

that former Constitutional Offices Commission members were unlawfully removed from office

Wrong. The Commissioners were asked to resign. They did so. No law prevents them from resigning. If they had refused to resign, they would have remained in place (as others have done).

Sayed-Khaiyum says that the PM had “no authority” to ask them to resign. Wrong. Nobody needs “authority” to ask anyone else to commit a voluntary act. The former Constitutional Offices Commissioners are not the property of the FijiFirst party. No law has been broken.

that the Minister for Home Affairs should not have asked the Commissioner of Police to resign

Wrong. It is a free country. The minister may make any request he wants — and the commissioner may accept or refuse that request.

The commissioner refused the minister’s request, saying he wanted the Constitutional Office Commission process be followed. The commissioner remains in place.

No law has been broken.

that prayers at government functions breach the Constitution

Sayed-Khaiyum read out s.4 of the Constitution (“Secular state”) and claimed that at government functions prayers were now only offered in one religion (presumably the Christian one).

To suggest that this is something new — that this did not happen under the FijiFirst party government — is fantasy. And I too wish that those who offer prayers were sometimes a little more sensitive to other religions.

But that is not the point. The Constitution does not tell any of us how to pray.

No law has been broken.

“not referring to all citizens as Fijians”

The Constitution may refer to all citizens as “Fijians”. But the Constitution also guarantees freedom of speech. There is no law that says we must all call each other “Fijians”. We may call each other what we want.

No law has been broken.

replacing boards of statutory authorities before expiry of their terms

Sayed-Khaiyum should be specific. Which boards is he referring to? If board members have resigned and been replaced, then what I have already said about resignations also applies.

For a number of statutory bodies the minister has, under the relevant law, the power to appoint board members. This power generally includes the power to dismiss them.

Replacing boards or board members mid-term is certainly nothing new. Sayed-Khaiyum may recall a recent example while he was Minister for Housing. He requested the entire Housing Authority board to resign before the expiry of their terms (and they complied).

No law has been broken.

taking back ATS [Air Terminal Services] workers. Sayed-Khaiyum seems to think that because a court decided that ATS is not required to take the workers back, ATS cannot do so.

Wrong. Any parties to litigation — including employers and employees — can decide to settle their differences at any time — including after a court ruling. The new government has requested ATS to take its former employees back. If ATS has a legal problem with this, no doubt it will tell government.

No law has been broken.

that using vernacular languages in Parliament breaches Standing Orders

Other than for the formal process of electing the Speaker and the Prime Minister, Parliament has not yet even sat yet.

The new government wants to allow the use of vernacular languages in Parliament. The current Standing Orders do not permit this.

So, to allow the use of vernacular languages in Parliament, the government will have to propose changes to the Standing Orders and parliamentarians will have to vote for them. That is normal procedure (Standing Order 128).

No law has been broken.

“separation of powers”

Under the FijiFirst party government, this phrase seemed to be thrown around to justify anything. For example, the Parliament Secretariat would frequently refuse to allow opposition MPs to ask questions of government ministers because of “the separation of powers”.

This justification made no sense. Section 91 of the Constitution requires ministers to be accountable to Parliament.

In layman’s terms, “the separation of powers” means only that the legislature (Parliament), the executive (Cabinet and civil servants) and the judiciary (judges and magistrates) should each “stay in their lanes”.

They should not interfere in each other’s functions. Sayed-Khaiyum has made no specific allegations that the new government has breached this concept. What law does he say has been broken?

FijiFirst and the Constitution

Sayed-Khaiyum’s FijiFirst party government applied the Constitution as it suited them.

It never set up the Accountability and Transparency Commission that the Constitution required (s.121) It never set up a Ministerial Code of Conduct as the Constitution required (s.149).

It never set up a Freedom of Information Act as the Constitution required (s.150). This was, after all, his own government’s constitution.

His government treated Parliament — the elected representatives of Fiji’s people — with contempt. Almost all of its laws were passed under urgency (Standing Order 51).

Typically, parliamentarians got two days’ notice of what new laws the government was proposing, sometimes less. That meant no one had time to review the laws
or consult the people on them.

The FFP government treated the people’s laws as its own property. Sayed-Khaiyum complains about board members being removed and public service appointment rules not being followed. He says nothing about the numerous arbitrary terminations of many public servants under the FijiFirst party government, including the Solicitor-General and the Government Statistician.

It was no less than the Fiji Law Society president who this week described rule of law under the FijiFirst government as “sometimes hanging by a thread”.

Against this background, not many lawyers are prepared to listen to Sayed-Khaiyum lecture us on the law.

#LOCALNEWS Who’s broken the law? “Separation of powers” and all that stuff. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s hour-long news conference on Saturday, January 21, seems mostly to have followed the usual FijiFirst party format. #TimesNews #FijiNews #FijiPol https://t.co/sblh8koJBs

— The Fiji Times (@fijitimes) January 22, 2023

If you’ve got a problem, go to court

The “separation of powers” doctrine is also clear that if you have a problem with the lawfulness of any government action, the courts are there to solve that problem. It is the
courts who decide if anyone has breached the Constitution. It is not the secretary of the opposition political party.

So, if Sayed-Khaiyum has a complaint that the law has been broken, he should do what the rest of us do — take it to court. That is what he frequently told the Opposition to do when it complained about what his government did.

Sayed-Khaiyum has a little more time on his hands now. He is a qualified lawyer with a practising certificate. So — get on with it. Bring your complaints to court, because
that is where they belong. Should Sayed-Khaiyum really be lecturing us about the law?

Finally, Sayed-Khaiyum has still not explained to anyone how, in the space of three days in January, he got himself kicked out of Parliament by accepting a position on the Constitutional Offices Commission — and then had to resign from the Constitutional Offices Commission when asked how he could continue as general secretary of the Fiji First Party.

Should we really be taking legal advice from him?

Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer and a columnist. The views in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This Sunday marks what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. But the landmark decision was overturned by the ultraconservative Supreme Court just over six months ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. The court’s removal of the right to safe, legal abortions has led to total abortion bans in 12 states. Meanwhile, the push to ensure access to abortion has spurred new legal challenges and greater reliance on the abortion pill mifepristone, as medication abortions account for more than half of all U.S. abortions. We get an update from Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent at The Nation, whose most recent piece looks at how cities and states are acting to limit the damage from Dobbs. “There are an untold number of people staying pregnant against their will, despite the best efforts of activists,” she says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Twenty-one years after the George W. Bush administration opened the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and 13 years after then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order for its closure—more than 150 groups on Wednesday implored the Biden administration to "act without delay" to close the notorious lockup.

"Among a broad range of human rights violations perpetrated against predominantly Muslim communities over the last two decades, the Guantánamo detention facility—built on the same military base where the United States unconstitutionally detained Haitian refugees in deplorable conditions in the early 1990s—is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law," the groups said in a letter to President Joe Biden. "The Guantánamo detention facility was designed specifically to evade legal constraints, and Bush administration officials incubated torture there."

\u201cWe\u2019re proud to join 150+ organizations globally demanding Biden #CloseGuantanamo. \n\n21 years is 21 too many. As long as the US continues to cage and dehumanize people there, we\u2019ll keep fighting to shut it down.\u201d

— CODEPINK (@CODEPINK) 1673450992

Since 2002, 779 men and boys have been held at Guantanamo, many of them tortured, and nearly all without ever being charged or tried. According to retired U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson—who served as chief of staff to Bush-era Secretary of State Colin Powell—Bush, along with his vice president and defense secretary, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, knew that most of the Gitmo prisoners were innocent, but kept them locked up for political reasons.

Obama—whose vice president was Biden—issued executive orders after entering the White House in 2009 that were meant to end torture and close Gitmo. However, Obama—who was blocked by Congress from implementing the prison's closure—broke a campaign promise and the law by actively shielding Bush-era officials from accountability while torture continued at Gitmo.

"Thirty-five remain there today, at the astronomical cost of $540 million per year, making Guantánamo the most expensive detention facility in the world," the groups' new letter states. "Guantánamo embodies the fact that the United States government has long viewed communities of color—citizens and noncitizens alike—as a security threat, to devastating consequences."

"This is not a problem of the past," the signers stressed. "Guantánamo continues to cause escalating and profound damage to the aging and increasingly ill men still detained indefinitely there, most without charge and none having received a fair trial. It has also devastated their families and communities. The approach Guantánamo exemplifies continues to fuel and justify bigotry, stereotyping, and stigma. Guantánamo entrenches racial divisions and racism more broadly, and risks facilitating additional rights violations."

\u201cAs we mark 21 years since the Guant\u00e1namo Bay prison was opened as part of the so-called global \u201cWar on Terror,\u201d we remember the 35 men who remain detained. \n\nRead the statement we released at: \nhttps://t.co/OJ9248zdDR\u201d

— The CCR (@The CCR) 1673453843

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents three of the 21 Guantánamo prisoners who have been cleared for release and which signed the letter, said in a statement:

We should not be marking another year in the life of this ignominious product of U.S. imperialism and racism as we have every January since the first anniversary of its opening in 2002. Yet we will succeed in shutting it down. Despite the lack of will of presidents who have claimed to support closure and the express desire of some political leaders to keep the prison open forever, the prison population has shrunk by 95% from its peak—the result of pressure from a broad coalition from around the globe, including the imprisoned men themselves, their families, and Guantánamo survivors who have been released.

Asked shortly after taking office whether the Biden administration will move to close Gitmo, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said "that certainly is our goal and our intention."

However, the Biden administration has taken few steps toward that goal, while spending millions of dollars on a new secret courtroom at the prison.

\u201cIt's now 21 years since the Guantanamo Bay detention camp opened. A centerpiece of a war @POTUS declared over, it looms as a symbol of racial injustice and human rights abuses, while violating the U.S. Constitution and international law. #CloseGuantanamo https://t.co/i8fxDRozbW\u201d

— FCNL (Quakers) (@FCNL (Quakers)) 1673467282

Last year, the administration released four Guantánamo prisoners, including 75-year-old Saifullah Abdullah Paracha, the oldest person ever imprisoned there.

"It is long past time for both a sea change in the United States' approach to national and human security and a meaningful reckoning with the full scope of damage that the post-9/11 approach has caused," the groups' letter argues. "Closing the Guantánamo detention facility, ending indefinite military detention of those held there, and never again using the military base for unlawful mass detention of any group of people are necessary steps towards those ends."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

“The Ugandan constitutional court’s decision to nullify provisions of a law criminalizing ‘offensive communication’ is a great relief, as authorities have repeatedly used this legal tool as a cudgel against critical journalism and commentary,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative. “Authorities must reform other problematic sections of the Computer Misuse Act that could be used to criminalize the work of the press and ensure that all of the country’s laws are compatible with the standards of freedom of speech in a democratic society.”

The court found Section 25, which imposed prison terms of up to a year for anyone using electronic communication to disturb the peace, to be “vague, overly broad and ambiguous,” according to a copy of the judgment reviewed by CPJ. The court ordered that enforcement of Section 25 be stopped, according to the judgment.   

CPJ has documented authorities’ use of Section 25 to justify the detention of journalists.  

Other sections of the Computer Misuse Act are subject to separate litigation, including amendments introduced in 2022 that criminalized the dissemination of information without consent, “misuse of social media,” sending “malicious information,” and “creat(ing) divisions,” according to a copy of the amendments and news reports. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The opposition FijiFirst party still “seems to be confused” about the role of its general secretary Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, says prominent Suva lawyer Richard Naidu.

“Mr Sayed-Khaiyum appears to have triggered his exit from Parliament by accepting a position on the Constitutional Offices Commission,” he said.

“That means he is a ‘public officer’ as defined in the Constitution.

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“An MP who accepts appointment as a ‘public officer’ loses his seat in Parliament. That has already happened.

“Mr Bainimarama is now suggesting that Mr Sayed-Khaiyum will continue as general secretary of FijiFirst.

“But Mr Sayed-Khaiyum is still a ‘public officer’.

“Under section 14(1)(b) of the Political Parties (Registration Conduct Funding and Disclosures Act 2013) a ‘public officer’ is not eligible to be a political party official.

“In fact, under section 14(1)(a), while he holds office in the Constitutional Offices Commission, Mr Sayed-Khaiyum is not allowed even to be a member of the FijiFirst party.

“So FFP’s plans for Mr Sayed-Khaiyum, now that he is out of Parliament, still seem confused.

‘Other parties will be writing’
“No doubt other political parties will be writing to the Registrar of Political Parties, Mohammed Saneem, asking him to ensure that the FijiFirst party is complying with the law.”

Naidu was referring to a video statement on the FijiFirst party Facebook page on Tuesday night where FijiFirst leader Voreqe Bainimarama said Sayed-Khaiyum’s exit from Parliament would mean that “he will be able to fully concentrate on FijiFirst matters outside Parliament”.

“I will be leading the charge inside Parliament and he will be leading the charge outside Parliament,” Bainimarama said.

“So to ensure that we are constantly in touch with our supporters and all Fijians on a daily basis, I have tasked our general secretary to be our voice outside Parliament.

“He will be in our parliamentary office, he will give us advice and also issue statements on behalf of FijiFirst when Parliament is not sitting.”

Registrar of Political Parties Mohammed Saneem confirmed that any person taking up public office must ensure that they comply with section 14(1) of the of the Political Parties (Registration, Conduct, Funding and Disclosures) Act 2013.

In a media statement issued after questions from The Fiji Times, he said public office holders according to section 14(1) of the Political Parties (Registration, Conduct, Funding and Disclosures) Act 2013 (Act) were not eligible to be an applicant or a member of a registered political party, not eligible to hold office in a registered political party, are not to engage in political activity that may compromise or be seen to compromise the political neutrality of that person’s office in an election; or publicly indicate support for or opposition to any proposed political party or a registered political party or candidate in an election.

Felix Chaudhary is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Every year, child protective services agencies across the nation investigate the family lives of roughly 3.5 million children, or about 1 out of every 20 American kids.

In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely.

Child welfare cases, that is, operate a lot like criminal ones.

Yet the mostly low-income families who are ensnared in this vast system have few of the rights that protect Americans when it is police who are investigating them, according to dozens of interviews with constitutional lawyers, defense attorneys, family court judges, CPS caseworkers and parents.

“You get more due process protections when facing a couple months in jail than you do when you’re facing losing your kids forever,” said Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Family Defense Clinic at Columbia Law School and an expert on civil liberties as they apply to child protective cases.

The right to remain silent, the right to a public jury trial, the right to face your accuser and so on are not recognized and enforced by the courts in the child welfare system, according to our interviews and a review of case law. Neither is the related ideal of “innocent until proven guilty” or the standard that guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

A look at several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights reveals this disparity.

The Fourth Amendment, for example, says that citizens must be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and that a warrant to conduct a search should be based on “probable cause” that specific evidence will be found. Yet as ProPublica and NBC News reported this fall, child protective services agencies conduct millions of warrantless home searches every year, rifling through refrigerators and closets and inspecting children’s bodies without going to court first to say what they are looking for. (In New York City, child welfare workers obtain a warrant fewer than 94 times a year, on average, while conducting at least 56,000 searches annually.)

The Fifth Amendment, meanwhile, allows criminal defendants to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination, commonly called pleading the Fifth. But in a child welfare case, which is a civil proceeding, courts are legally permitted to assume the worst of a parent who has decided not to talk.

Then there’s the Sixth Amendment, which says that defendants have the right to a public trial by jury as well as the right to an attorney, among other protections. But if an accused parent in this system even gets a trial, it likely will not be public: Child welfare cases are heard in closed courtrooms in at least 30 states, according to a ProPublica survey of statutes.

Fewer than a dozen states offer the option of a jury trial in these cases.

As for a lawyer, while some states provide one for some types of child welfare hearings, the Supreme Court has found that even people facing permanent termination of their parental rights have no constitutional right to legal counsel — because they are ostensibly not at risk of losing their own physical liberty by going to jail.

Yet evidence gathered by CPS workers without a warrant can be passed to police and prosecutors for use in criminal prosecutions of parents, who may be locked up as a result, according to attorneys, caseworkers and police as well as cases we found in which this has happened.

Parents interviewed by ProPublica also felt that having a son or daughter taken from them forever is a far more severe punishment than spending time in prison, and therefore viewed these cases as equally deserving of due process.

Finally, double jeopardy, or prosecuting a person twice for the same offense, is also allowed in child welfare cases, even though it is otherwise prohibited by the Constitution. Some parents even have their rights to a newborn baby terminated because their rights to a previous child had been terminated, even if there hasn’t been any new allegation.

To be sure, constitutional rights are far from perfectly protected in the criminal justice system. Talk to public defenders and they will tell you that police routinely get away with unconstitutional home searches by using coercive tactics to avoid having to get a warrant, or by saying that something they found in a drawer was actually in “plain sight” and therefore could be collected without a warrant. The right to a trial in criminal court, too, is undermined by prosecutors dangling extreme prison sentences over defendants to get them to plead guilty before there’s a full hearing of the evidence; this plea bargaining process accounts for about 95% of felony convictions.

The right to an attorney in the criminal system is also hardly absolute, with underfunded public defender offices struggling to keep up with caseloads and lawyers facing rampant conflicts of interest.

Still, the rights themselves have been firmly upheld by the Supreme Court and other federal courts — and are therefore part of how police are trained — which is not true in child welfare.

One clear reason for this mismatch in rights is that there was no formal child welfare system when the Constitution was written, so some amendments in the Bill of Rights were worded to apply only to criminal matters.

More broadly, child welfare proceedings occupy a nebulous space between criminal and civil justice.

In the very few instances when the Supreme Court or federal circuit courts have addressed whether such rights should apply in child protection investigations, the rulings have largely said that if law enforcement is involved (like a police officer with a badge and gun being in the room while a CPS worker is interviewing a child), the rights exist. Otherwise, maybe not.

This reflects, in part, the history of child welfare courts, which were set up to be “problem-solving” rather than adversarial — to serve kids rather than to litigate guilt. This was a progressive vision of a system where social services workers, families and judges would work together to improve the child’s situation, rather than a prosecutor-versus-defendant setup.

So when the 1960s brought a due process revolution in criminal justice — the Supreme Court institutionalizing the right to an attorney in Gideon v. Wainwright and the practice of being read your rights in Miranda v. Arizona — child welfare practitioners were not thinking in the same terms.

“We are a pathetic field, still in our infancy,” said Marty Guggenheim, a longtime New York University family law professor who in 1990 founded what was for years the only parental defense clinic in the nation. (There are now about a dozen, according to a ProPublica review of law school offerings and interviews with heads of clinics.)

The problem is perpetuated by law schools, where criminal and corporate defense are deemed essential but family defense is not, ProPublica’s reporting has found. In a review of the curricula of every Ivy League law program and a dozen major state schools around the U.S., almost none appear to provide a class that’s strictly about defending parents accused of child maltreatment. Many offer family law coursework, but it is focused on typically middle-class issues like divorce, custody and wills and trusts.

Zoe Russell, a Harvard Law School graduate who is going into the family defense field, said that the classes she was offered centered on families with money, and that to develop her understanding of her area of interest, she had to read the footnotes of academic papers and attend conferences of her own volition.

And then there’s the stigma, the idea that this kind of law — with children in potential danger — is morally dubious. (Russell notes that many lawyers who are skittish about her field will still defend clients accused of murder, or of serious white-collar crimes, types of work that she says she doesn’t judge but shouldn’t be seen as more valuable or important than her own.)

“I describe my upcoming job differently depending on who I’m talking to and their reaction,” she said. “This is an area that is trivialized, demeaned.”

When ProPublica and NBC News in October found that child welfare agents in New York were routinely conducting warrantless home searches, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services disagreed with some of the rhetorical framing of that reporting.

Perhaps most importantly, agency officials said that when caseworkers enter a home, it is not to conduct a “search” but rather an “evaluation” of the residence. Based on what the workers see, they can then connect families with services to provide food if the fridge is empty or window guards to keep kids safe.

But child welfare experts including Tarek Ismail, a law professor and civil rights attorney at the City University of New York School of Law, noted that what the Administration for Children’s Services does is “suspicion-based” and thus deserving of due process.

In other words, Ismail said, these are not building inspectors going to every apartment in a building and “evaluating” whether each one has a proper window guard so they can generally protect kids. Instead, these are investigators who have received a specific allegation of wrongdoing and are being sent to a specific apartment to look for evidence of it.

And these agents, along with the prosecutors who follow up on what they find, have the power to punish.

Some of this boils down to a question of language, said Guggenheim, who began his career five decades ago in a parallel field: juvenile justice.

Juvenile detention officials, Guggenheim said, often used terminology suggesting that in their line of work there were “no convictions, no prisons, no punishment at all.” Instead, he said, “there were juvenile delinquents, adjudications, placements, training schools.”

And as he worked on legal challenges to the solitary confinement of children in youth prisons, officials called such isolation cells “time-out rooms.”

But the Supreme Court, in a landmark case called In re Gault, ruled in 1967 that “it doesn’t matter what the system calls these things, what matters is the reality of what they are doing,” Guggenheim said.

This push to describe the harms of juvenile incarceration in clearer language, and to enumerate the rights that should therefore be provided to the kids facing it, helped bring about real reforms in that system.

Meanwhile, the child welfare field still leans on benevolent language and concepts such as “child welfare” instead of “family policing” (a phrase that activists have begun using recently); “caseworkers” instead of investigators or agents; and “court-appointed special advocates” filling the shoes of lawyers.

In turn, the rights that most U.S. citizens consider fundamental are hardly rights at all when it is a child protective services “caseworker” knocking on the door.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

Fiji’s Minister for Home Affairs and Immigration has invited the Commissioner of Police to resign, citing concerns on matters of confidence in him.

Pio Tikoduadua said the commissioner, Sitiveni Qiliho, had, however, asked that the government follow the process of the Constitutional Offices Commission.

Minister Tikoduadua said he respected his decision, and we would let the law take its course.

• READ MORE:  Fiji lawyer Imrana Jalal’s warning: ‘No victimisation or targeted prosecutions’
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• Other Fiji elections reports

Brigadier-General Sitiveni Qiliho was formerly in the military and in July 2021 successfully completed studies at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London. He was awarded a postgraduate certificate in Security and Strategy for Global Leaders.

However, the minister added that he had no issue with the commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces.

I have invited the Comissioner of Police to resign, citing concerns on matters of confidence.

However, he prefers the process that goes through the Constitutional Offices Commision. I respect that, and we will let the law take its course. pic.twitter.com/WzTXRK33m0

— Pio Tikoduadua (@piotikoduaduafj) December 29, 2022

Border alert
A border alert has been issued by Fiji’s Police Criminal Investigations Department (CID) for Opposition MP and former Attorney-General and Minister for Economy Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.

“Mr Sayed-Khaiyum is a person of interest and is currently under investigation regarding a case of alleged inciting communal antagonism,” according to the CID.

It said it had yet to deal with Sayed-Khaiyum who was believed to be in Australia.

It said that according to his travel history, Sayed-Khaiyum had departed Fiji on 26 December 2022.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Qiliho said that was the normal monitoring mechanism of the CID to write to the Border Police to inform it if Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum returned.

Fiji Police CID orders border alert for former Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum @piotikoduaduafj @fijipoliceforce@IBIupdate @PacIsNewsAssn @PACNEWS2 @dfat @MFATNZ @ForumSEC @FijianGovt @AiyazSKFiji pic.twitter.com/UU9DHNhFDv

— Pita Ligaiula (@KaiSawaieke) December 29, 2022

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Image by Anthony Garand.

Donald Trump’s recent rant that the U.S. Constitution should be “terminated” so that he can be installed as president for life merits no response, given the Orange one-man crime wave’s tenuous connection to reality. Laughter is the appropriate riposte as Trump’s futile attempts at becoming the fascist dictator he clearly aspires to be become ever more futile.

But is his latest childish tantrum really something to be laughed off? Having skipped the “tragedy” phase and gone straight to “farce,” Trump is facing what is likely to become a politically terminal case of irrelevancy as new contenders for Mussolini’s crown, most notably but not only Ron DeSantis, emerge. The nascent fascist movement that has coalesced around Trump, and the varieties of extreme right menace that shade into it that are now expressed through the Republican Party, are no laughing matter. And while embarrassed silence or a quick change of subject might be Republicans’ default position when asked to comment on Trump’s increasing irrationality due to their fear of the Frankenstein monster they have let loose, eviscerating the Constitution is actually on their agenda.

More

The post Right-wing Attempts to Eliminate Constitutional Protections are No Joke appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

Are state lawmakers free to ignore the results of a presidential election?

If the right-wing Supreme Court justices embrace this latest effort to hinder free elections, then we must find a way to end their power to thwart American constitutional democracy.

Can they—in defiance of a state's own constitution—design its congressional districts so a minority of voters pick a large majority of the state's representatives?

Can they discard voting rules written into law by voters themselves?

In other words: Can state legislatures flout the basic principles of American constitutional democracy and destroy majority rule?

Yes, says the state of North Carolina, with the support of Republican attorneys general from other states—and many of those who conspired to overturn the 2020 election—in a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

No, say bipartisan groups of election officials, judges, lawyers, election experts, 50 chief justices of state supreme courts, members of redistricting commissions, and historians.

But what say the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court?

Three of them—Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch —  seem to agree. If they can win over two of the remaining three right-wingers, our democracy will be in deep trouble.

The case arose in 2021 when the Republican North Carolina legislature gerrymandered their congressional districts.

Though North Carolina voters are about equally split between the two parties, the GOP's re-districting plan gave the party three-quarters of the state's congressional seats. The North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the scheme, holding that it violated the state constitution's guarantee of free elections.

Republicans went to federal court, asserting that state court judges—and voters—have no power over anything a state legislature chooses to do regarding federal elections. They call it the "independent state legislature" theory. Legal experts call it bogus.

The argument rests on Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution: "The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof, but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations…"

The provision does not say only state legislatures control federal elections, nor that courts cannot intervene, as the plaintiffs argue. It certainly does not say state lawmakers can ignore their state constitutions, which created state legislatures in the first place, or override the rights of their own citizens under state law.

We wouldn't apply a standard like this to other parts of our Constitution.

Consider, for example, the First Amendment, which states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The First Amendment only speaks of Congress. But that doesn't mean the president is free to shut down newspapers that criticize him, that judges can decide praying in some churches is okay and not in others, or that the police can forbid peaceful demonstrations.

Likewise, the power of legislatures to prescribe voting procedures doesn't give them absolute, unreviewable dominion over elections.

But some Republican politicians support the theory because they've given up on democracy. Instead of trying to win elections fairly, they seek to make it harder for people to vote and box them into districts where their votes don't matter.

And they want to lay the groundwork for overthrowing election results should they lose. The "independent state legislature theory" is just fancy legalese dressing for the kind of putsch Donald Trump tried to pull after the 2020 election, when he called on state legislatures to overturn federal election results.

If the right-wing Supreme Court justices embrace this latest effort to hinder free elections, then we must find a way to end their power to thwart American constitutional democracy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Mitchell Zimmerman.

Civil society organisations which make up the National Alliance for Criminal Code Reform have slammed the decision by the Indonesian government and the House of Representatives (DPR) to ratify the Draft Criminal Code (RKUHP) which is seen as still containing a number of controversial articles, reports CNN Indonesia.

Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) chairperson Muhammad Isnur criticised the DPR and the government because the enactment of the law was rushed and did not involve public participation.

According to Isnur, a number of articles in the RKUHP will take Indonesian society into a period of being “colonised” by its own government.

• READ MORE: Protests erupt across Indonesia after House ratifies ‘colonial’ Criminal Code
• Other reports on the Indonesian Criminal Code

“Indeed the latest version of this draft regulation was only published on November 30, 2022, and still contained a series of problematic articles which have been opposed by the public because it will carry Indonesian society into an era of being colonised by its own government,” said Isnur in a statement.

The Civil Coalition, as conveyed by Isnur, has highlighted a number of articles in the RKUHP which are anti-democratic, perpetuate corruption, silence press freedom, obstruct academic freedom and regulate the public’s private lives.

According to Isnur, these articles will only be “sharp below but blunt above”, meaning they will come down hard on the poor but go easy on the rich, and it would make it difficult to prosecute crimes committed by corporations against the people.

“Once again this will be a regulation which is sharp below, blunt above, because it will be difficult to prosecute criminal corporations that violate the rights of communities and workers,” he said.

Criminalised over ideas
The Coalition for example highlighted Article 188 which criminalises anyone who spreads communist, Marxist or Leninist ideas, or other ideas which conflict with the state ideology of Pancasila.

According to Isnur, the article is ambiguous because it does not contain an explanation on who has the authority to determine if an idea conflicts with Pancasila.

According to Isnur, Article 188 has the potential to criminalise anyone, particularly government opponents, because it does not contain an explanation about which ideas conflict with Pancasila.

“This is a rubber [catchall] article and could revive the concept of crimes of subversion as occurred in the New Order era [of former president Suharto],” he said.

Then there are Articles 240 and 241 on insulting the government and state institutions.

He believes that these articles also have the potential to be “rubber” articles because they do not provide a definition of an insult. He is also concerned that the articles will be used to silence criticism against the government or state institutions.

The Coalition believes that there are still at least 14 problematic articles in the RKUHP. Aside from the spreading of communist ideas and insulting state institutions, there are several other articles such as those on morality, cohabitation and criminalising parades and protest actions.

Law ‘confusing’
The DPR earlier passed the RKUHP into law during a plenary meeting. A number of parties believe that the new law is confusing and contains problematic articles. These include the articles on insulting the president, makar (treason, subversion, rebellion), insulting state institutions, adultery and cohabitation and “fake news”.

Justice and Human Rights Minister Yasonna H. Laoly has invited members of the public to challenge the law in the Constitutional Court if they feel that there are articles that conflict with the constitution.

“So we must go through constitutional mechanisms, right. So we’re more civilised, be better at obeying the constitution, the law. So if it’s ratified into law the most correct mechanism is a judicial review,” said Laoly earlier.

Deputy Justice and Prosperity Minister Edward Omar Sharif Hiariej, meanwhile, is asking those who consider the law to be problematic or rushed to come and debate the issue with the ministry.

“You try answering yourself, yeah, is 59 years rushed? If it is said that many oppose it, how many? What is the substance? Come and debate it with us, we’re ready and we are truly convinced that if its tested it will be rejected,” said Hiariej.

Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was YLBHI Kecam Pengesahan RKUHP: Masyarakat Dijajah Pemerintah Sendiri. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Civil society organisations which make up the National Alliance for Criminal Code Reform have slammed the decision by the Indonesian government and the House of Representatives (DPR) to ratify the Draft Criminal Code (RKUHP) which is seen as still containing a number of controversial articles, reports CNN Indonesia.

Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) chairperson Muhammad Isnur criticised the DPR and the government because the enactment of the law was rushed and did not involve public participation.

According to Isnur, a number of articles in the RKUHP will take Indonesian society into a period of being “colonised” by its own government.

• READ MORE: Protests erupt across Indonesia after House ratifies ‘colonial’ Criminal Code
• Other reports on the Indonesian Criminal Code

“Indeed the latest version of this draft regulation was only published on November 30, 2022, and still contained a series of problematic articles which have been opposed by the public because it will carry Indonesian society into an era of being colonised by its own government,” said Isnur in a statement.

The Civil Coalition, as conveyed by Isnur, has highlighted a number of articles in the RKUHP which are anti-democratic, perpetuate corruption, silence press freedom, obstruct academic freedom and regulate the public’s private lives.

According to Isnur, these articles will only be “sharp below but blunt above”, meaning they will come down hard on the poor but go easy on the rich, and it would make it difficult to prosecute crimes committed by corporations against the people.

“Once again this will be a regulation which is sharp below, blunt above, because it will be difficult to prosecute criminal corporations that violate the rights of communities and workers,” he said.

Criminalised over ideas
The Coalition for example highlighted Article 188 which criminalises anyone who spreads communist, Marxist or Leninist ideas, or other ideas which conflict with the state ideology of Pancasila.

According to Isnur, the article is ambiguous because it does not contain an explanation on who has the authority to determine if an idea conflicts with Pancasila.

According to Isnur, Article 188 has the potential to criminalise anyone, particularly government opponents, because it does not contain an explanation about which ideas conflict with Pancasila.

“This is a rubber [catchall] article and could revive the concept of crimes of subversion as occurred in the New Order era [of former president Suharto],” he said.

Then there are Articles 240 and 241 on insulting the government and state institutions.

He believes that these articles also have the potential to be “rubber” articles because they do not provide a definition of an insult. He is also concerned that the articles will be used to silence criticism against the government or state institutions.

The Coalition believes that there are still at least 14 problematic articles in the RKUHP. Aside from the spreading of communist ideas and insulting state institutions, there are several other articles such as those on morality, cohabitation and criminalising parades and protest actions.

Law ‘confusing’
The DPR earlier passed the RKUHP into law during a plenary meeting. A number of parties believe that the new law is confusing and contains problematic articles. These include the articles on insulting the president, makar (treason, subversion, rebellion), insulting state institutions, adultery and cohabitation and “fake news”.

Justice and Human Rights Minister Yasonna H. Laoly has invited members of the public to challenge the law in the Constitutional Court if they feel that there are articles that conflict with the constitution.

“So we must go through constitutional mechanisms, right. So we’re more civilised, be better at obeying the constitution, the law. So if it’s ratified into law the most correct mechanism is a judicial review,” said Laoly earlier.

Deputy Justice and Prosperity Minister Edward Omar Sharif Hiariej, meanwhile, is asking those who consider the law to be problematic or rushed to come and debate the issue with the ministry.

“You try answering yourself, yeah, is 59 years rushed? If it is said that many oppose it, how many? What is the substance? Come and debate it with us, we’re ready and we are truly convinced that if its tested it will be rejected,” said Hiariej.

Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was YLBHI Kecam Pengesahan RKUHP: Masyarakat Dijajah Pemerintah Sendiri. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

© Photo credit: National Digital Archives, Polan

Did you know that Adolph Hitler named his special personal World War II train Amerika?

I ran across this interesting fact while leafing through the British historian Martin Gilbert’s massive history of the Second World War.

Some might find this strange, given the fact that Hitler’s Third Reich was formally at war with the United States between December 8, 1941, and April May 7, 1945.

I did some research on this curious nomenclature and quickly determined that it was exactly as I suspected. As the military enthusiast website We Are the Mighty reports:

“Hitler, oddly enough, seemed obsessed with America in many ways. He admired [fellow anti-Semite] Henry Ford and American industrialization. He liked American films and Mickey Mouse cartoons. And, perhaps most oddly for a man of Hitler’s obsession with perception and propaganda, he even named his rolling fortress of a train after the rival country, calling it ‘Amerika.’”

What was that name about? Precisely what I thought: “it wasn’t out of respect for the American nation or people. Hitler named the train for the destruction of Native Americans by western settlers” (emphasis added).

(Hitler switched to The Brandenburg in 1943, by which time US forces had engaged Third Reich troops in North Africa and Western Europe.)

It’s not so odd, after all. As scholars of German fascism have long known and as is clear from Hitler’s sickening memoir Mein Kampf, the genocidal Nazi dictator drew inspiration and lessons from the “democratic” United States.  He admired and envied not only (the United States of) “America’s” near-extermination of its Indigenous peoples but also its long history of Black chattel slavery, its racist Jim Crow segregation laws and practices, its rugged and violent frontier spirit, its breakneck industrialization, its pioneering mass production methods, its vast network of roads and rail lines, and the propagandistic power of its movie and radio industries. Intimately linked to his quest for racist German-imperial Lebensraum (“breathing room”) in Eastern Europe and Russia, Hitler wanted to replicate “America’s” racialized ethnic cleansing campaigns, slave practices, industrialization, and mass transport across Eurasia. The United States was a great role model for his fascist and genocidal vision.

As Third Reich forces marched into the Soviet Union in July of 1941, Hitler “made it clear that he was not contemplating anything resembling a semi-enlightened form of colonialism, which might include a modicum of decent treatment of the conquered people.  They would be subjugated mercilessly,” writes Adam Nagorski in his book 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War (2019). The goal, in Hitler’s words, was “to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans and look upon the natives as redskins…In this business, I shall go ahead cold-bloodedly.”

Yes, you read that correctly: “look upon the natives as redskins” – this said by Hitler as he was riding around in a train named after his national historical exemplar, the United States of Amerika.

For some chilling accounts of cold-blooded native extermination by white “settlers” seeking Lebensraum on the 17th-19th Century North American Frontier, see my November 23, 2022 Paul Street Report, sub-titled “A Little Matter of Genocide.”

(Perhaps young Hitler, a voracious reader, came upon Theodore Roosevelt’s noxious multi-volume celebration of American genocide, The Winning of the West. “American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, – in each case the victor,” The Winning of the West instructed, “horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people…It is of incalculable importance,” Roosevelt opined, “that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races…The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands…”)

An Ex-President Dining with Fellow Hitler Fans

Speaking of fascism and the United States, Donald Trump two weeks ago scandalously hosted a Mar a Lago dinner with the Black fascist lunatic “Ye” (the demented rapper formerly known as Kanye West) and the white supremacist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.  Trump, now an open supporter of the neo-Nazi QAnon cult, has offered no apology for this wicked gathering, preposterously claiming not to have known anything about who Fuentes is or his politics. More “mainstream” Republi-fascist Trump-enablers have played along with this ridiculous claim, with the next US House Speaker and slithering reptile Kevin McCarthy (Rf-CA) adding the false assertion that “President Trump came out four times and condemned [Fuentes].”

Here’s some of what Trump’s other dinner partner Ye said to the flummoxed right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones last week: “I see good things about Hitler… Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler….Also, Hitler was born Christian.”

Yes, you read that correctly: “especially Hitler.”

We learned in 1990 from his ex-wife Ivana that Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches in his bedside table in the 1980s. Recall also that Trump as president angrily asked his early chief of staff John Kelly why the US military brass didn’t line up in “totally loyal” obedience to him “like the German generals” under the Third Reich.

Perhaps Hitler’s “good things” were topics of discussion during the Trump-Ye-Fuentes supper. If so, it was consistent with his presidency.  As I show in my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America, US capitalism-imperialism shat an actual fascist, however sloppy and narcissistic, into the world’s most dangerous job between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021. (See chapters two and three of This Happened Here, titled “The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold,” and “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21.”)[1]

If you think it – a fascist in the White House – can’t happen here again, very possibly with a different, less clumsy, and younger fascist (Ron DeSantis) in the top job, please see my last Paul Street Report here. By the way, The New York Times reported last week that blatantly anti-Semitic hate speech and references to fascist “Great Replacement Theory” have “soared” on Twitter since the fascist billionaire Elon Musk took that platform over and loosened its restrictions on hate speech. Musk wants Trump to return to the venue.  He wants to highlight “view count” on every tweet, something that will mean more attention-grabbing shocking and inflammatory posts.

“The Termination of All Rules…Even Those in the Constitution”

More evidence that the nation’s 45th POTUS was a fascist came last Saturday. In a post on his Orwellian social network Truth Social, Herr Trump for the first time added an explicit call to “set aside the supreme law of the land” (in the Times’ accurate words) to his ludicrous claim that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” Demanding that the last election be overturned or re-run, Trump or (more likely) one of his hacks (the language is a bit too complex for Trump’s brain) wrote this: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Read that again.  I am not making it up: “the termination of all rules…even those found in the Constitution.” That’s an actual statement from the demented maniac who still qualifies as the post-republican Republikaner Party’s 2024 presidential front runner even if Ron DeSantis is closing fast on Trump.

“Lawlessness in the name of law and order” is a classic calling card of fascism, as the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley pointed out years ago.

After the media shit-storm this latest wild Trump elicited, the twice-impeached ex-President absurdly declared that he still supported the US Constitution. He did this while standing by his preposterous demand that the 2020-election should be re-run or he be returned to power, both of which would require …termination of the US Constitution.

Perhaps federal prosecutors will at some point next year ask Trump if he has ever called for the end of the nation’s cherished constitution.

Minus some mild criticism from the Christian white nationalist Mike Pence (the guy Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump thought should “maybe” be hanged by fascist thugs on January 6, 2021) and the longtime Trump-enabling Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the  Republi-fascist establishment has been chillingly quiet in response to Trump’s explicit calls for the end of bourgeois democracy and rule of law. The House Speaker elect McCarthy and the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Rf-KY) have yet to say a single word about Trump’s termination comment.

Where Orange Thing Should but Won’t Spend Its Final Days

Chances are rising that Trump will be indicted for one or more glaring felonies, including perhaps seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government and violation of the Espionage Act. As is rarely if ever noted in the mainstream media, both charges potentially carry the death penalty.

While I’m not a believer in capital punishment, I do think it would be entirely fitting for the deranged putschist Trump to spend his last years (or, preferably, months or weeks or days) on federal Death Row in Terre Haute, cowering in the shadow of the execution chambers that he started up again. The sadistic Trump administration rushed to make sure that a number of federal executions were carried out before he left office.

Among Trump’s many crimes, one is now rarely if ever mentioned: pandemicide, whereby Trump killed well more than a hundred thousand US-Americans through his bizarre and sickening covid denialism and inaction.

The execution of a former US president is of course unimaginable. Even incarceration is inconceivable – a precedent the US ruling class never wants to set for the presidency, whose imperial duties require the regular commission of massive crimes against humanity or at least the ever-present readiness to commit such crimes.

Trump Should Thank the Founders

One among many rich ironies in the “terminate the constitution” story is that Trump owes his initial election to the US presidency, his ability to stay in office, and (perhaps) his right to run again for the White House to the nation’s absurdly venerated 18th Century constitution.  It was thanks in great part to the ancient charter’s archaic Electoral College, which overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary states and reduces serious presidential campaigning to a small number of contested states, that the widely hated fascist pig Trump was able to become president after losing the popular vote by three million tallies to the highly unpopular and depressing neoliberal elitist Hillary Clinton. The constitutionally imposed minority rule malapportionment of the US Senate, which grossly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and voters, prevented Trump from being properly convicted and removed from office after his two US House impeachments.  And conviction, richly deserved in both cases, would have blocked him from running again (though here it should be admitted that Trump is now at serious risk of felony convictions that could accomplish this in 2023 or 2024).

We Do Need a New Constitution…After a Revolution

The Democrats have hardly distinguished themselves in their response to the tangerine-tinted tyrant’s terrible termination-ism.  They have belched up the usual sanctimonious paeans to the supposed greatness of the nation’s militantly anti-democratic and propertarian 18th Century slaveowners’ charter, whose deeply reactionary nature I have (with no special claim to originality) broken down again, again, again, again, and again some more (I literally lack the time and energy to link all the essays I have published on this topic — here’s a more recent one). . It is unimaginable to them that We the People might want to step outside the killing confines of this antiquated and deeply conservative straight-jacket on democracy, designed by and for slaveowners, landed gentry, merchant capitalists and publicists for whom popular sovereignty was the ultimate nightmare.

Strange as it may sound to say, Trump is on to something in his call for the termination of the Constitution. It is long past time for the transcendence of this charter not by fascist perversion but rather by a socialist constitution that abolishes the soulless and exterminist class rule system that is capitalism-imperialism, the taproot of the four great mutually multiplying and apocalyptic horsemen of our time: ecocide, pandemicide, potentially nuclear global war, and fascism.

And believe it or not, a draft version of the constitution required has already been written by the Revolutionary Communist Party’s leader Bob Avakian.  Read it here. Don’t like it? Write a better one. Seriously.  It’s important to have an alternative revolutionary socialist charter in place: (a) to construct and guide a genuine people’s  revolution built (unlike the socialist revolutions of the last century) to last and to spread to other nations; (b) to answer those who constantly nag Marxist and other radicals with the false allegation that “you’re only against stuff but you offer no alternatives, you’re not for anything.” Here’s an accurate translation of that false charge: “you propose alternatives that threaten us, so we claim they don’t exist.”

Just to be clear, the point of socialist constitution-drafting is not to wave a document around as if it itself is a magical answer to all our problems. A revolutionary charter like the one linked above could only be established after a dedicated, organized, and successful mass popular uprising conducted to liberate humanity from the unelected and eco-cidal class dictatorship of capital and the intimately related oppression structures of race, gender, empire, and theocracy.

“Why You Wanna Walk Around With Me?”

Back to the Democrats, who are deeply complicit in the creeping fascisation of the United States. Like any other actual US “radical Leftist,” I am so T-I-R-E-D of Bernie Sanders (please no emails denying that the “independent” Senator from Vermont is in fact and essence a Democrat). Kudos to CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair for the following dead-on reflection on how Sanders sickeningly tried to preserve his progressive brand identity while enabling bipartisan ruling class Congressional legislation enlisting the federal government as the pre-emptive breaker of a long- overdue strike by the nation’s badly overworked rail workers:

“The question as always with Bernie Sanders is what was he willing to do about it? Would he filibuster the strikebreaking bill? Or simply initiate a distraction by offering a sick leave bill he knew had no chance of becoming law? The latter, of course. Which he rationalized as a victory, even when it went down to defeat: ‘I’m proud that the House of Representatives passed legislation to guarantee seven days of paid sick leave for all rail workers. While I’m disappointed that we were unable to get the 60 votes we needed in the Senate, we did receive the votes of every Senate Democrat, but one, as well as six Republicans.’”

More from St. Clair, broadening his critique to the entire Democratic Party:

“Here are the EIGHT House Dems who voted against the strike-busting rail worker bill…Rep. Norma Torres (CA-35); Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI-13); Rep. Mary Peltola (AK-01); Rep. Mark Pocan (WI-02); Rep. Donald Norcross (NJ-01); Rep. Jared Golden (ME-02); Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11); Rep. Judy Chu (CA-27)

Has any party ever said ‘Fuck You’ to its base more forcefully (or repeatedly)? I’m reminded of the Ramones song…‘I don’t wanna walk around with you/I don’t wanna walk around with you/I don’t wanna walk around with you/So why you wanna walk around with me?’”

That’s a perfect musical reference for how the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems repeatedly and regularly betray the nation’s working- and lower-class majority in service to their corporate and financial overlords.

Lucy and Charlie Yet Again: “Sleeping Car Joe” and “Socialist” Bernie Know How the Ruling Class Senate “Works”

An equally apt popular cultural reference for the ruling class Dems’ pathological relationship with their base is a bit stodgier. It’s the old Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoon wherein Lucy keeps pulling the football away just as poor Charlie Brown is about to kick it for an imaginary field goal.  “Gosh darn,” Charlie lamely says over and over, “she did it again” (my paraphrase).

Did Bernie really think we don’t know that the filibusted, half-Republican US Senate would of course block his and the lame duck Democratic majority House’s sick-leave bill – this even as he would never dare to filibuster the strikebreaking bill? Seriously?

But, then, did “our” strikebreaking president Sleeping Car Joe Biden really think we didn’t know that same filibusted half-Republican body would of course block his absurdly promised bill to codify Roe v. Wade as national law if the Dems’ had kept the House in the midterm elections? How transparently disingenuous was it for him to follow up last month’s mid-term elections by saying that the Democrats wouldn’t have the House votes for him to move on his preposterous pre-election pledge after all?  Please. He knows damn well how the Senate “works.”  It was all a ruse, straight out of Peanuts.

(Caveat: come to think of it, Biden and his good friend Sanders probably DO know very well that most citizens in “the world’s greatest democracy” do NOT in fact know how “their” government works and are therefore unaware that bills passed by the House can’t become laws without 60 votes in the grossly malapportioned, deeply reactionary, and absurdly powerful Senate.)

“Despicable But Not Surprising”

Some instructive words from Railroad Workers United in a press release after the latest Lucy game was played on the rail unions by Amerikan state capitalism:

“Railroad Workers United (RWU) finds it despicable – but not surprising – that both political parties opted to side with Big Business over working people yesterday and vote against the interests of railroad workers – not once, but twice, within hours. We suffered a one-two punch at the hands of, first the Democratic Party; second the Republicans…First, responding to the wishes of President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House voted to legislate a contract that the majority of U.S. freight rail workers had previously voted to reject. The Senate would quickly follow suit. In effect, their actions simply overrode our voices and desires. Rail workers – like all workers – should have the right to bargain collectively and to freely engage in strike activity if and when the members see fit and when they democratically elect to do so…Within hours of the Senate vote sealing our fate on Thursday afternoon [came]… a second defeat, this at the hands of the other party of Big Business, the Republican Party. That bill – which would have mandated that all railroad workers receive seven days of paid sick leave – would receive just a handful of votes from Republicans in the House and, crucially, in the Senate, where it went down to defeat… ‘This one-two punch from the two political parties is despicable,’ according to RWU General Secretary Jason Doering. ‘Politicians are happy to voice platitudes and heap praise upon us for our heroism throughout the pandemic, the essential nature of our work, the difficult and dangerous and demanding conditions of our jobs. Yet when the steel hits the rail, they back the powerful and wealthy class every time’” (emphasis added).

Indeed. Welcome to the class dictatorship of capital. Strike anyway? (A revolutionary one big rail-workers union would, consistent with the legacies of the great US Socialist Eugene Debs and the IWW.)

Please Raise Your Sights

The liberal celebration over last Tuesday’s Senate run-off election in Georgia is over the top. Listening to liberal and progressive friends the last few days, you’d think some sort of great transformative breakthrough had occurred.

Don’t get me wrong. I get and share their relief that someone as morally and intellectually low as Herschel Walker won’t be a US Senator, to be sure, but: the Congress as a whole (with the Republifascists about to take over the lower chamber) is a stalemated ruling-class clusterf**k; the Supreme Court is a Christian fascist nightmare; millions upon millions of women face the terror and bondage of forced motherhood under the vile Dobbs v. Jackson decision (this even as liberals cynically and/or foolishly claim that the mid-terms were “Roevember” ffs); Sleeping Car Joe and the Dems (including numerous “socialist” Squad members) are state-capitalist strikebreakers (!); there is next to nothing being done to save livable ecology (just the biggest issue of our or any time) or slash the military budget…and..I could go on.

Walker was such an abysmally awful, stupid, and reactionary, CTE-damaged Christian fascist reptile of a candidate that it’s kind of hard to feel all that great about his defeat when one realizes that this open revanchist freak came within 1.6% or 3% of the polished liberal Raphael Warnock. It is horrifying to contemplate how close this moral and intellectual arch-troglodyte came to taking up a seat in the US Senate.

Democrats, including some lovely “progressives” I know, doing cartwheels over Georgia, is symptomatic of how depressed “left” expectations are today.

This lowering of portside sights is depressing and dangerous.

I have seen progressives arguing about the railroad legislation and strike. Biden should have done this, Bernie should have done that. People go on and on after each other about what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did or didn’t do or say.

Let me be blunt: who cares? There are no solutions to the grave existential problems of our time under the systemic death trip that is capitalism-imperialism. None. Repeat after me: This system’s elected officials and politicos Will. Not. Save. Us. Fellow workers, citizens and comrades, listen up: we’ve got maybe a decade to get out from under the insane ecocide, pandemical, fascism-generating and imperialist war-mongering racist sexist capitalist system or we can pretty much stick our collective heads between our collective legs and kiss our collective ass goodbye.

Please think bigger. Think systems. Think radical reconstruction of society as a whole. Think deeply about what it would take to make and keep and spread a many-sided people’s socialist revolution to put humanity on a path to real liberation. What other basic goal is there?

Rail workers: take the lesson from the corporate duopoly and become revolutionary socialists fighting as “tribunes of the people” (The Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin’s excellent phrase) against class rule and against all forms of oppression. Think political strikes, not just economic ones for more under the existing lethal order — many-sided political strikes and much more heading towards a new and better egalitarian social order consciously designed in the real material, social, psychological, cultural, biological, personal, collective, and dare I say spiritual interests of the preponderant majority of humanity — a species that comes to grasp its interdependent relationships and place within the broader web of life.

On this “radical” (ordinary common sense to the present writer since age 19) final note, please listen to this remarkable 24-minute speech by Charlie Kimber, National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party of the United Kingdom: “Time’s Running Out: Leninism in a Time of Crisis.” “Without revolution,” Kimber says, “we are looking in fairly short order at the strong possibility of the extirpation or the elimination of everything that matters, including the whole of humanity.” He’s right.

(Thank you to Cole Miller for sending me this speech. More on this extraordinary oration in a future Paul Street Report, when time and word count allow.)

Notes

1. So I argued in real time against scoffing and usually older white male “progressives” and “Marxists.” These insufferable clowns inspired my surprisingly useful invention of the term “Trumpenleft” by foolishly accusing those of us radicals who dared to identify the homegrown Amerikaner fascism staring the nation in the face as fascism of (a) “crying wolf, (b) “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and (c) alliance with the dismal Democrats, who we were accusing of complicity with the fascisation of US politics. It’s a shame more Germans didn’t develop “Hitler Derangement Syndrome” during the 1930s.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

Labor advocates on Tuesday applauded the passage of an Illinois state constitutional amendment enshrining what one proponent called "the strongest worker protections in the nation."

"Illinois is and always will be a workers' rights state. This victory is a historic moment for our workers and our entire state."

With 100% of precincts reporting Tuesday—a week after Election Day—the Associated Press reported that the Workers' Rights Amendment had received 58% of the vote.

The amendment codifies "the fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively." It further states that "no law shall be passed that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively over their wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and workplace safety."

Tim Drea, chair of the Vote Yes for Workers' Rights campaign, said in a statement that "the voters of Illinois sent a clear message by passing the Workers' Rights Amendment."

"Illinois is and always will be a workers' rights state," Drea added. "This victory is a historic moment for our workers and our entire state."

Labor and progressive groups, as well as a broad range of Democrats from Gov. J.B. Pritzker to U.S. Rep. Jesús "Chuy" García, backed the amendment, which was staunchly opposed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Illinois Manufacturers' Association, and Republicans.

"Yes" campaign spokesperson Joe Bowen asserted that "being able to protect everyone's ability to step up and organize their workplace is a critical component to making sure everyone has access to some higher paying jobs and safer workplaces."

"Specifically, you've certainly seen a lot of abuses—Starbucks baristas or folks who might work at Amazon warehouses," he added. "But these historical examples have existed for generations and it's really important that we do what we can to secure these rights for Illinoisans."

The Chicago Federation of Labor hailed the amendment's passage as "a win for every single working class individual in Illinois."

"Workers' rights are now in our state constitution," the organization tweeted. "We are proud of every single worker in Illinois who chose to vote for themselves on Nov. 8. WE are what makes Illinois great, and now OUR right to negotiate safe working conditions and fair pay will never be taken away!"

It was a good election for workers' rights, with voters in several states and cities saying employees—including those who earn tips—should be paid more. A measure that would pay medical workers in one California city $25 an hour is also expected to pass.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Michigan residents on Tuesday voted to enshrine abortion rights in the state's constitution, a major victory in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's deeply unpopular decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and amid a nationwide GOP assault on reproductive freedom.

The initiative, one of several abortion-related measures on the ballot across the country Tuesday, currently leads by a margin of 55.6% to 44.4% with 84% of the votes counted.

"When people can vote directly on abortion in a non-partisan ballot initiative, abortion rights win."

Approval of the ballot measure effectively spells the end of right-wing efforts to impose a draconian 1931 abortion ban in Michigan, where reproductive freedom advocates have been working for months to build support for the constitutional amendment as GOP officials did their best to tank it. The Reproductive Freedom for All campaign submitted more than 753,000 signatures in support of the amendment—a state record.

"Proposal 3's passage marks an historic victory for abortion access in our state and in our country—and Michigan has paved the way for future efforts to restore the rights and protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide," said Darci McConnell, Reproductive Freedom for All's communication director.

The amendment states that "every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care."

Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement that "this is a seismic win for abortion rights in a battleground state."

"This victory is also a win for people in the neighboring states of Indiana and Ohio, where abortion is banned," Northup added. "Until there is national legislation that protects abortion rights across the country, we will continue to work to ensure that state constitutions protect the right to abortion."

Passage of Proposal 3 in Michigan was one of several abortion rights victories Tuesday, as voters in a number of states approved reproductive freedom measures and fended off GOP-backed anti-abortion initiatives.

In California and Vermont, states where abortion is currently legal, voters approved ballot measures to affirm support for reproductive freedom in their states' constitutions.

Voters in Montana and Kentucky, meanwhile, are poised to defeat anti-abortion measures that would further roll back their reproductive rights.

"Voters are rejecting the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe and issuing a clarion call that they want their rights constitutionally protected," said Northup. "When people can vote directly on abortion in a non-partisan ballot initiative, abortion rights win."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Last month, seven Ontario youths made history when they held Premier Doug Ford’s government to account for its reckless climate policy in a court of law.

The case of Mathur v. Ontario — the first climate rights lawsuit to have its day in court in Canada — alleges that the government’s rollback of its greenhouse gas emissions target is unscientific, unsustainable and unconstitutional. Legal experts from across the country have long argued that Canadian governments’ woefully inadequate record on climate change is not only unacceptable, but may also be illegal in some circumstances. In particular, when government conduct like Ford’s greenhouse gas target falls far short of what the science requires, it also falls foul of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Representing youth and future generations, the applicants in Mathur v. Ontario argue that by failing to even attempt to achieve the emissions cuts that experts say are necessary to avoid climate catastrophe, the government has violated their constitutionally protected rights to life and security of the person under the Charter. They also argue that the government has violated their equality rights, since climate change will disproportionately harm children and youth, who are more vulnerable to the existing health effects of climate change and will live more of their lives in an era of climate crisis.

In the reams of documents and hours of oral argument presented by Ontario’s lawyers — paid by taxpayer dollars — the government never once tried to justify the validity of its target on the basis of climate science. Instead, they tried to get the court to punt the issue. First, Ontario argued that the target was only a “communications product” and not a law. The position reveals a staggering level of hypocrisy, considering that Ontario’s recent opposition to the federal carbon price relied heavily on an argument that the province was already handling climate change through its robust emissions reduction target. Second, Ontario’s legal team argued that climate change is too political to be dealt with by a court of law. The problem with this argument is that it totally ignores the constitutional role of courts in our legal system.

Any first-year law student knows that where a government policy violates a person or group’s Charter rights, the courts not only can but must intervene. Court supervision of government conduct — no matter how “political” — is a cornerstone of constitutional democracy. The raison d’être of the Charter is to prevent government intrusions on human rights. This is why Canadian courts have intervened in areas as controversial as medical assistance in dying, access to safe injection sites and (de)criminalization of the sex trade. Any of these issues could, in theory, have been resolved by voters, but at an unacceptable cost to those whose lives and quality of life were threatened by the government policies at issue. In the case of children and youth who lack the right to vote but will disproportionately bear the harmful consequences of the climate crisis in the future, turning to courts is in fact their only hope.

Before 1982, there were cases in which Canadians had no legal recourse when their human rights were violated by government actions. Since the Charter came into force, however, we are no longer at the mercy of politics to resolve issues that implicate our most fundamental human rights. As Canadians experience increasingly frequent climate-related disasters (heat domes, wildfires, flooding and hurricanes), it has become clear that climate change constitutes an unprecedented threat to the enjoyment of human rights in this country. And since our human rights are enshrined in the Charter and supervised by an independent judiciary, it seems only reasonable to seek constitutional recourse when governments contribute to dangerous climate change through unsustainable and unscientific laws and policies. Mathur v. Ontario is just one of a rising tide of constitutional climate suits in Canada. Expect more to come.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Lynda Collins, Nathalie Chalifour, Anne Levesque.

The post Constitutional Law and Class Struggle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Stephens.

Prime Minister James Marape says Papua New Guineans will be consulted on key constitutional questions relating to Bougainville’s 97.7 percent vote for independence.

In his maiden speech after being voted in as the country’s 9th Prime Minister, he said the issue infringed on PNG’s national unity and it touched on sovereignty, which was a huge constitutional burden for the government and the people.

He said the Autonomous Region of Bougainville was an important agenda for his government and that by 2024 the referendum vote issue would be brought to Parliament.

• READ MORE: Other PNG elections reports

“This question for Bougainville is a test to our national union. We will consult with the rest of the country because our people must have a say,” Marape said in his speech.

“This year and first half of next year we will consult the country on some of the key constitutional questions and we will work to the plan that we set out in Wabag, in that by 2024 we bring the matter to Parliament.

“It is a political question so a political solution must be found.

“I have and continue to have one vote. But the question on altering our national boundary is a constitutional matter, and the entire nation must be consulted. The result of the referendum stands as high as Mt Wilhelm. It cannot be diluted.

“We will deliver on that political commitment to find that political solution that is mutually acceptable to Bougainville and Papua New Guinea.

“The journey is still a long way ahead … when our union is in question, it infringes on our national unity, it touches on our sovereignty which is a huge constitutional burden on us.

“Our union together was placed together by the constitutional definition in 1975, it will only take a constitutional amendment to unbundle this union.

“I want to ask Bougainvilleans, fear not, Papua New Guineans fear not. Let’s take this journey together and we find a political solution to this political question to our people in Bougainville.”

Gorethy Kenneth is a PNG Post-Courier senior journalist. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

We go to Kansas, where voters today are deciding whether to pass a constitutional amendment that would override a 2019 state Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. If the amendment passes, it will clear the way for Republican state lawmakers to ban the procedure, which they have vowed to do. Kansas is the first state in the country to vote on the right to abortion and one of the last states in the region to still allow abortion, with clinics there having reported an influx of patients from neighboring states, including Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, after the Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade. Republicans are “strategically using tactics of voter suppression” to ensure the amendment passes by requiring strict registration guidelines and drafting “incredibly confusing” language in the amendment, says reproductive health reporter Amy Littlefield. Despite this, she says the abortion rights community feels “cautiously optimistic” that the enormous grassroots mobiliziation in response to the overruling of Roe “might just be enough” to strike down the amendment.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On December 1, 2021, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court delivered a landmark ruling revoking two previously-granted mining concessions from companies seeking to expand into the exceptionally biodiverse Los Cedros cloud forest. The decision, upheld by the Court with seven affirmative votes and two abstentions, obligates the Ecuadorian government to prevent mining and other extractive exploration within the protected forest area by repealing permits granted to ENAMI, Ecuador’s state mining company, and Cornerstone Capital Resources, its Canadian partner.

In voiding these mining concessions, the Constitutional Court ruled that the permits violated three key sets of rights granted by the Ecuadorian Constitution: i) The Rights of Nature, or “Pachamama,” held by the Los Cedros forest (Articles 10 and 73); ii) Human rights to water (Articles 12 and 313) and a healthy environment (Article 14); and iii) The right of local communities to consultation and public participation regarding state authorization that affect the natural environment (Articles 61.4 and 398).

Informed by these constitutional protections, Judge Agustín Grijalva Jiménez opined: "To resolve this case…the Court considers it essential to analyze the rights to the existence of the animal and plant species of Los Cedros, as well as the right of this ecosystem to maintain its cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary process" (translated from Spanish). This decision aligns with goals of the amicus curiae brief filed in September 2020 by Earth Law Center, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, and the Center for Biological Diversity calling upon the Constitutional Court to protect Los Cedros by enforcing its rights to existence and restoration, along with the corresponding rights of the intervening Magdalena River. In his statement, Jiménez affirmed that "the rights of nature, like all the rights established in the Constitution Ecuadorian law, have full normative force. They are not only ideals or rhetorical statements, but legal mandates."

As Ecuador affirmed its commitment to ecocentric legal paradigms in November and December of 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden opened up more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for auction to oil and gas drilling companies in direct opposition with his campaign promises and climate agenda. Following Biden’s January 2021 executive order to pause U.S. entry into new oil and natural gas leases on public lands and offshore waters, 13 states filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana declaring that the mandate violated provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act. Siding with the plaintiff states, Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote: "A President may not transgress constitutional limitations. Courts determine where constitutional boundaries lie." Unlike Ecuador, the U.S. has not yet adopted constitutional protections for Nature. If the country expanded its Bill of Rights to include the human right to a healthy environment along with the rights of ecosystems to thrive and regenerate, perhaps 'constitutional boundaries' would be broadened enough to reverse Doughty's decision. 

Without adequate protections for Nature, cases like the aforementioned effectively legalize environmental harm, exacerbating climate change and contributing to biodiversity loss. The precautionary principle, which has not yet been fully integrated into U.S. law and policy, guides decision-makers to take precautionary measures where detailed information about environmental impact has not been scientifically established. Time and time again, literature on environmental impact assessment suggests that this practice rarely results in any significant changes to developmental plans. The plaintiffs in the Louisiana v. Biden case argued that the postponements of the lease sales based on "an additional need for further environmental analysis" was "pretextual in order to give a reason (other than Executive Order 14008) for the Pause," implying that the need for robust environmental impact analysis does not provide sufficient grounds to apply the precautionary principle when approving a project that has been described by environmentalists everywhere as a "carbon bomb."

Much of the argument in the Louisiana v. Biden case centers around the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which directs the Secretary of the Interior to make the Outer Continental Shelf available for expeditious and orderly development, subject to environmental safeguards, in a manner which is consistent with "the maintenance of competition and other national needs." Louisiana State Representative Jerome Zeringue, a Republican, argues in the lawsuit that Biden’s attempted cancellation of drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico led to an immediate short-term loss for projected funds under OCSLA, threatening a key source of funds for Louisiana's $50 billion coastal recovery and restoration program. Ironically, it is extractive practices like oil and gas drilling that lead to climate change, exacerbating the flooding and extreme rainfall events that are directly responsible for the degradation of Louisiana's coastline.

That the plaintiffs in Louisiana v. Biden successfully convinced the Court that economic damage as a direct result of the pause on leases for drilling was concrete, particularized, and imminent points to an overarching failure of the U.S. legal system to adjudicate with an eye toward long-term environmental consequences; after all, environmental destruction caused by drilling and other extractive activities is also concrete and increasingly imminent over time. Even when the U.S. Department of Justice released a memorandum stating that the Doughty order "enjoins and restrains Interior from implementing the Pause, it does not compel Interior to take the actions specified by Plaintiffs," the Biden administration chose to proceed with the lease sales anyway, netting $191.6 million dollars in the process.

Meanwhile, in Ecuador, the court ruled that the government's failure to conduct studies analyzing the fragility of Los Cedros when the effects of the permitted mining activity were unclear violates the rights of Nature to exist and regenerate, constituting a violation of the ecosystem’s rights to existence and regeneration. Codifying protections for Nature that extend to U.S. waters would transform the relationship between humans and the global ocean by treating the ocean as a rights-bearing entity rather than merely a resource to be exploited, providing additional legal grounds to pause lease sales in the process.

Moreover, the incorporation of standards accounting for the intrinsic worth of biodiversity as well as externalities and overall lifecycle impacts within cost-benefit analyses of ocean mining operations would provide a more inclusive and realistic perspective on the need to maintain the balance between human economic activity and oceanic capacity. Although it often remains invisible to the human eye, oceanic mining does not exist in isolation; these activities have dire consequences for the health of species—including humans—and ecosystems as well as future generations who will inherit the destruction. 

Globally, Earth Law Center and partners continue to advocate for ocean rights in both territorial seas and international waters. ELC's "Framework for Marine Protected Areas" applies Rights of Nature principles to the governance of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), calling upon law and policymakers to recognize that marine ecosystems "own themselves and have intrinsic value apart from human uses; have the right to perform all of their natural functions; and have the right to have a voice in decisions that may affect their health, including the right to legally defend themselves for damage caused (through human representation)." While the resumption of drilling leases in U.S. national waters is disheartening, Ecuador's ban on mining in Los Cedros provides legitimacy and hope for the future implementation of Rights of Nature protections across the world.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Terra Baer.

The post Democracy Down on the Constitutional Killing Floor appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

Critics say the plan to amend how prime ministers are chosen is designed to allow Hun Sen to transfer power to his son Hun Manet by eliminating the need for the National Assembly, or legislature, to approve the pick.

“If Hun Sen were not able to stay in power, or he got sick, he might hurriedly [transfer power to his son],” Chan Pov Raksmey, a citizen from the northwestern province of Siem Reap, told RFA’s Khmer Service.

“He is afraid of power among the people because so far, what he has done is for himself and his children, not for the national interest,” he said.

The amendment to Article 119 would dilute the power of the National Assembly and allow the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) to sign off on transferring power from father to son, Ly Chandavuth, an environmental activist, told RFA.

“They will want to install Hun Manet to be the prime minister, and won’t give any consideration toward the opposition party,” he said.

As currently written, Article 119 requires a parliamentary vote before a new leader can be approved.

In 2017, Cambodia’s Supreme Court dissolved the country’s main opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), allowing the CPP to win all seats in the National Assembly in a general election the following year.

If Hun Sen were to step down and appoint his son, the selection would almost certainly be approved by the rubber stamp parliament.

But a new opposition party enjoyed some success in Cambodia’s June 5 commune council elections and could capture a significant portion of National Assembly seats in next year’s general election. Should that happen, members of the new Candlelight Party could provide resistance to Hun Sen’s succession plans under the current law.

Hul Sao, a resident of western Cambodia’s Battambang province, told RFA that the proposed amendment “doesn't reflect the people's will.”

“Any law amendment should seek the people's consent,” he said.

“The National Assembly is creating partisan [laws] and ignoring the people and [the concerns of] NGOs."

Even though the CPP will still likely control the National Assembly after next year’s elections, the amendment acts as a safeguard against people in the party who might not support Hun Manet, Phoung Ratha, a law student, told RFA.

"There will be a shakeup within the CPP, so Hun Sen doesn't trust the National Assembly members to approve the power transfer to his son,” Phoung Ratha said.

The amendment would not be the first attempt by Hun Sen to try to change laws to protect his family. 

Hun Sen’s political rival Sam Rainsy, who has lived in self-imposed exile in France since 2015, recalled in an interview with RFA on Friday that in 2014 the CPP chief said he would step down if the CNRP submitted legislation that would ensure that he and two of his political allies were pardoned.

The request was made at a time when the CPP held only a slim 65-58 majority over the CNRP, and could not pass such a law on its own. Sam Rainsy said he agreed to the request, but Hun Sen reneged on his promise to resign. 

“I am flexible. I want to make sure that the Khmer people live in peace,” Sam Rainsey said. “I can forgive Hun Sen. I don’t want revenge on him or to imprison him or send him to be prosecuted at an international court.” 

The proposed amendment to Article 119 has already been approved by the cabinet and the Constitutional Council, a body which verifies its legality. It must next be approved by the National Assembly, the Senate, and finally the king.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

This is a breaking news story... Check back for updates...

The right-wing U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on Friday, ending the constitutional right to abortion and imperiling access to reproductive healthcare nationwide.

"A right-wing Supreme Court has stripped women and people seeking abortions of their long-held rights to control their bodies."

The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was issued along ideological lines, with all three liberal justices in opposition. The majority opinion was written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, whose decision delivers a long-sought victory to the dark money-fueled movement that has been targeting Roe for decades.

More than half of all U.S. states are expected to respond to the decision by enacting total abortion bans, laws that will likely have deadly consequences. In anticipation of the high court's ruling, Republican lawmakers in states across the nation have already introduced dozens of bills that would restrict or completely prohibit abortion.

At the national level, top anti-abortion organizations and their Republican allies in Congress are currently plotting their push for a federal abortion ban. Last month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) signaled openness to legislation barring abortion care at the federal level.

"With this decision, the Supreme Court's extreme right-wing supermajority has struck a tremendous blow to our fundamental freedoms," said Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America. "It is undeniable proof of how broken our nation’s highest court has become."

"Our court has been overtaken by out-of-control political appointees with an extreme right-wing agenda," Harvey added. "If we don't do something to stop them, they will continue to attack our most basic rights, until we no longer recognize the country we live in."

Nelini Stamp, director of strategy and partnerships at the Working Families Party, said the ruling marks "a dark day for our nation."

"A right-wing Supreme Court has stripped women and people seeking abortions of their long-held rights to control their bodies," said Stamp. "This radical decision is out of step with the values and beliefs of the American people, and will cause lasting harm for millions of people."

The nation has been bracing for the Dobbs ruling since early May, when a draft opinion authored by Alito was leaked to the press.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Common Dreams staff.

Mount Washington from the B&B burn. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

+ In 1973 the Espionage Act case against Daniel Ellsberg for violating  was dismissed by Judge William Byrnes after it was revealed that the Nixon administration had bugged Ellsberg’s phones and broken into his shrink’s office. There was also a plot by Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy to use a Cuban exile hit team to “totally incapacitate” (ie, assassinate) him. Surely, the CIA’s very similar plot to kill Julian Assange is at least as odious as what Nixon’s plumbers did to Ellsberg and the thinly manufactured case against Assange is deserving of the same peremptory fate.

+ PEN America on Julian Assange’s extradition: “The Biden Administration must return to its stated principles and drop these charges, in the interest of press freedom and the United States’ global standing with respect to human rights.”

+ The key thing in American politics is to be the first to wrongly interpret a result (ie., the recent elections were a clear rebuke to criminal justice reformers) and to loudly stick with your take long after it has been disproven.

+ Big city crime waves? NYC’s homicide rate is down 13.3% and shootings are down 11.5%, year to date. Murder numbers are the 8th lowest of past 50 years.

+ Thirty years after cities started imposing juvenile curfews, there’s no evidence that these measures reduce juvenile crime.

+ Here’s Clarence Thomas invoking Justice Taney and his Dred Scott opinion in support of Thomas’ ruling to strike down NYC’s concealed carry law…

+ There’s nothing like applying an “historical test” for regulations governing weapons that didn’t exist in the historical epoch the Originalists fetishize. Here’s more from Thomas’ opinion: “Respondents do not offer any evidence showing that, in the early 18th Century or after, the mere public carrying of a handgun would terrify people.”

+ 83 million: the number of Americans who lived in communities were concealed carry permits were limited to those who had a demonstrated need for self-defense.

+ So states can’t regulate gun control, but can regulate when, where or whether you can get an abortion.

+ Meanwhile, in Vega v. Tekoh, the Supreme Court gutted what’s left of Miranda, with Alito concluding that you can’t sue cops who don’t provide you with your Miranda warnings and then use your statements against you in court. The Biden administration supported the ruling. During oral arguments, the DoJ’s attorney Vivek Suri told the court: “It isn’t a substantive right to receive the Miranda warnings themselves. A police officer who fails to provide the Miranda warnings accordingly himself doesn’t violate the constitutional right.”

+ Originalism is the anal stage of constitutional analysis.

+ According to a new Gallup poll, American confidence in the Supreme Court has collapsed to the lowest level ever recorded. Most of them have been hated or ridiculed all their lives. Can you imagine Gorsuch, Kavanaugh or Alito ever having any friends? Now they’re exacting their revenge…

+ William Koziarz told the Tampa Bay Times that two years ago he was walking on Pinellas Beach in Florida and noticed a sign: “It said ‘No motorized vehicles allowed,’ and 15 minutes later I get ran over by a police vehicle.”

+ The Texas public safety chief admitted this week that the classroom door in the Uvalde school shooting was not locked, even as police waited nearly an hour for the key. (If a street gang behaved with this kind of gross negligence and indifference to the lives of children they’d find some major crime to charge them with.)

+ An Oklahoma man in a tactical vest with an AR-15 and a holstered pistol prompted local businesses in the town of Broken Arrow to lock their doors. When people in a Target parking lot called 911 to say the armed man was headed inside, police said he wasn’t breaking the law. You have to wait until the shooting starts…unless he’s a black teen, then they’d shoot him on sight, no questions asked.

+ No Incel can feel like a man without one…

+ Biden’s budget doubles funding for the police (COPS) hiring program, from $157 million in Trump’s last year in office to $388 million.

+ The GOP is a lot more upset about the non-plot to assassinate Kavanaugh, than the ongoing plot to kill one of their own, Mike Pence. In part because the current Supreme Court is going to do more on its shadow docket to implement far-right ideology than any president or Congress.

+ Here’s Eric Greitens (wife batterer) calling on MAGA-chuds to attack “moderate” Republicans.

We are sick and tired of the Republicans in Name Only surrendering to Joe Biden & the radical Left.

Order your RINO Hunting Permit today! pic.twitter.com/XLMdJnAzSK

— Eric Greitens (@EricGreitens) June 20, 2022

+Of course, they would cower for an hour behind an unlocked door while school children are being slaughtered.

+ A Naval intelligence officer with the unlikely name of Hatchett Speed assigned to the NRO in Chantilly, Virginia, has been arrested on misdemeanor charges for his role in the Capitol Riot. Speed had been assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia. In an affidavit, FBI agents allege that Speed “panic-bought” an arsenal of weapons after Jan. 6 and praised the Unabomber, the Olympic Park Bomber and Adolf Hitler.

+ The laborious and repetitive J6 hearings have become a recruiting ad for MAGA, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and whatever foul monstrosity is fermenting-into-being to their right.

+ Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann told Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark about his plan to help Trump overturn 2020 election:”Good, fucking a-hole, congratulations, you just admitted your first step you would take as attorney general would be committing a felony.” Of course, you’re not really Attorney General until you’ve committed a felony or violated the constitution. It’s practically a prerequisite for the job…

+ So here’s Stacey Abrams, heroine of the liberals, urging more money for cops.

+ The median salary of the Uvalde cops who sat on their asses while kids and teachers were being gunned down behind an unlocked do0r: $58,000 a year and nearly $80,000, when you include overtime pay.

+ The average salary of a cop in Georgia: $58,000; average salary of a teacher in Georgia: $48,000.

+ A New York Times investigation into the killing of Shireen Abu Aklen pretty much demolished every scenario put forward by the IDF. According to the Times, 16 shots were fired from the location of the Israeli convoy, contradicting Israeli claims that the soldier had fired five bullets in the journalists’ direction. Moreover, there were no armed Palestinians near her when she was shot, disproving Israeli claims that, if a soldier had mistakenly killed her, it was because he had been shooting at Palestinian gunmen.

+ This is a disorder worthy of its own entry in the DSM: Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House Speaker who testified on Tuesday that he resisted former President Donald Trump’s strong-arm tactics to overthrow the 2020 election, said he’d still vote for Trump in 2024: “If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again.”

+ Ruby Freeman, Georgia election worker slandered by Trump and his legal goon squad: “The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small-business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton Co. run an election in the middle of the pandemic.”

+ Bidenism in a nutshell: After blasting oil companies for price gouging, Biden announced a suspension of the federal gas tax for three months, a move which will do almost nothing to reduce prices at the pump but will almost certainly provide an even bigger boost to oil company profits.

+ So much for that carbon tax…

+ If Biden was serious (he’s not), he would have called for a waiver of mass transit fares…

+ According to the latest FEC filings, two Republican billionaires, Paul Singer and Bernie Marcus, each contributed $1 million to the United Democracy Project in May, the new AIPAC-affiliated super PAC that has intervened in Democratic primaries in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Maryland and California.

In unannounced trip, Attorney General Merrick Garland Visits Ukraine, Reaffirms U.S. Commitment to Help Identify, Apprehend, and Prosecute Individuals Involved in War Crimes and Atrocities pic.twitter.com/GzHPGqOUYV

— Anthony Coley (@AnthonyColeyDOJ) June 21, 2022

+ If Garland wanted to investigate war crimes, he could have taken the Metro to Langley…

+ The Russian moves to restrict gas supply to Europe sent gas prices spiking by 60% in less than a week.

+ Putin’s air war doesn’t seem to be going all that well. Here are some numbers, as of the ned of May, from the normally reliable William Arkin: 20,000 Russian sorties, 3000 in Ukrainian airspace, 2275 long-range missiles expended, 630 from Belarus soil, 110 cruise missiles shot down, over all less than 40% success rate.

+ Substantial majorities in both Italy and Germany favor a negotiated peace in Ukraine over a protracted NATO-supported war against Russia.

+ Who will tell Zizek?

+ The National Right to “Life” Committee released model legislation for states to adopt after the Supreme Court overturns Roe. The language would criminalize providing information on self-managed abortion “over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication”. So much for free speech…

+ U.S. single-family rents climbed at a record pace of 14% from April 2021 to April 2020…

+ Even at this late date, a CDC study found that people who live in “disadvantaged areas” are half as likely as those in wealthier areas to be prescribed antiviral drugs as a treatment for COVID.

+ Covid is still killing 315 Americans a day, double the number who are dying from suicide or car crashes.

+ Despite the fact that he world has now administered more than 12 billion Covid vaccine shots, 73% of the global population remains un-boosted and 33% are completely unvaccinated.

+ At the end of 2020, more than a third of North Carolina residents were in collections for medical debt.

+ Child abuse as government policy: According to a new report by the Marshall Project, 1 in 3 people held in a U.S. Border Patrol “facility” since 2017 was a minor — 650,000 youths in all.

+ The Enlightenment?

+ So Colombia finally throws off the shackles of US imperialism, puts an end to the murderous PLAN Colombia, pulls the plug on the country being traditional staging area for US interventions across South America and the laughing stock of the Left, Jimmy Dore, prospective “independent” candidate for president, slams Gustavo Petro for being “too woke?”

+ Dumb and Dumber, live!

Dore and Hinkle on the newly elected leftist President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro:
– funded by George Soros
– ushering in "woke ideology"
– Petro's right wing rival, Rodolfo Hernández, was a populist, and "real lefty"
– Petro is "faux-lefty", propped up by identity politics. pic.twitter.com/1wF1xjdPqd

— Venerable Jorge (@Nitzky89) June 21, 2022

+ The Democratic Congressional Committee recorded  $7.8 million in itemized donations in May, a quarter of those ($1.37 million) were transfers from Nancy Pelosi’s PACs.

+ As the UK’s rail crisis deepens, it’s worth nothing that private companies operating and leasing UK trains have made at least £8.3 billion in dividend payments to shareholders since 1996.

+ Brexit for thee, Ireland and the EU for us… In 2016, only 47 British MPs & Lords held an Irish passport – by 2021, that figure went up to 227 . As of  this month, there are now 321 of them with an Irish passport.

+ Because of high turnover rates and job dissatisfaction, an internal memo warns that Amazon could run out of workers in the US within two years.

+ You just got “Frummed”…

+ An amendment to the California Constitution to ban involuntary servitude, such as prison labor, failed in the state Senate. The measure needed 27 votes (2/3s of the chamber) and only received 20.

+ I wonder what stumbling across an episode of the Benny Hill Show would have done to this fragile man’s mind…

+ Since June 1, mentions of Drag Queen Story Hour have bulged by 777%  on Twitter, according to Zignal Labs. The traffic is largely driven by right-wing influencers like LibsOfTikTok.

+ Elon Musk’s transgender daughter has applied to legally change her name and gender, saying she no longer wants to “be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.

+ Nearly one-third of divorce filings in the US in 2011 contained the word “Facebook.”

+++

+ The number of disasters related to climate increased by about 400% in recent decades, from 711 between 1970 and 1979 to more than 3,500 between 2000 and 2009. There were more than 3,100 climate-related disasters from 2010 to 2019.

+ On February 28, an unprecedented ‘rain bomb’ hit Lismore in New South Wales, dropping as much as 27.5 inches of rain in 24 hours, more than London typically receives in a year.

+ Meanwhile, in July 2021 Liguria received 7.1 inches in one hour and over 35.4 inches in a 24-hour period.

+ On June 16, Mawsynram, India–one of the world’s wettest regions, recorded an astounding 39.51 inches (1003.6 mm) in less than 24 hours.

+ Even with all this extreme rain, the UN estimates that by 2050, between 4.8 and 5.7 billion people will live in areas that are water-scarce for at least one month each year, up from 3.6 billion today.

+ In 2020, the EU pledged to plant 3 billion trees by 2030. A tracker launched in 2021 to monitor progress shows that as of last week the EU has planted less than 1% of the three billion goal, leaving 2,997,053,985 trees left to plant in the next seven and a half years.

+ In the last year, The global pipeline of offshore wind projects has nearly doubled from 429GW of potential new capacity to 846GW.

+ Despite pledging to reduce carbon emission, the global steel industry may have to write down as much as $518 billion in Stranded Assets over the next decade because it is still building coal blast furnaces.

+ The transportation of food from the field to the kitchen is responsible for more than 6% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, nearly triple earlier estimates, according to a new study in Nature Food.

+ A new economic analysis of Canada’s TransMountain Pipeline by the Parliamentary Budget Office shows that the pipeline has a Present Net Value of negative $600 million or about $1.6 billion less than the PBO’s previous estimate only two years ago.

+ The first confirmed case of transfer of Avian Flu to a mammal occurred in Sacajawea State Park near Pasco, Washington, where the virus was detected in young raccoons. Pasco? You’d think the radiation from the nearby Hanford Nuclear Reservation would have killed that virus off…

+ The Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots , outside of Foxborough, Mass has 213 acres of land paved for parking lots for people to watch games played on a 1.32 acre field. And the owners of the stadium want to add more…

+ Tesla’s are spontaneously exploding all over the place, even in junkyards.

+ On June 22, there were 56,000 lightning strikes in California, the 6th most on any day in the last decade.

+++

I went ahead and watched the Robbie Robertson documentary, Once We Brothers and it was just OK. Too much Springsteen and Clapton for my taste, though Clapton succeeds in revealing himself as a prick, showing up at Big Pink and demanding to join the Band. But the doc has lots of Super 8 and 16 mm footage from Woodstock I’d never seen, a scene which seems to’ve descended into darkness pretty quickly. Robertson’s French Canadian wife is very articulate. You really feel for what she had to endure from living with the two Richards (Danko and Manuel) and Levon Helm, including a blitzed Manuel wrecking her Mustang (with her in it) and a stoned Helm coming to get them and crashing into a police car. The yard at Big Pink was a junk (or perhaps junky) heap of wrecked vehicles. Dylan flits and out dropping inscrutable bon mots.

+ Every MLB player and fan owes a debt to Curt Flood. His lonely fight to free players from the plantation system, where they were the property of owners, was as important as Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier and Curt paid a heavier price.

+ Peter Bogdanovich put everything he knew about film into The Last Picture Show and had nothing left to say in his other films, where he seemed to have forgotten everything he’d once learned.

Can You Justify Your Cruelty to the World? Are You Terrified of Your Own Words?

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Against the Wall: My Journey From Border Agent to Immigration Rights Activist
Jenn Budd
(Heliotrope)

Internet for the People: the Fight for Our Digital Future
Ben Tarnoff
(Verso)

The Monster’s Bones: the Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World
David K. Randall
(Norton)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Moon Rappin’
Brother Jack McDuff
(Blue Notes)

World Construct
Matthew Shipp Trio
(ESP)

Scrutiny
Fashion Club
(Felte)

Turning Schools Into Armed Fortresses

“Will there be tragic events on school campuses? Yes, and having more armed police on campus has not proven effective in reducing them. Instead, they have been incredibly effective at driving young people out of school and into the criminal justice system by the hundreds of thousands. Even if armed police on campus were an effective tool for reducing a few violent incidents, the social costs of that approach are not acceptable. We must find better ways to keep kids safe than turning their schools into armed fortresses and prisons. It’s time to take police out of the schools and reject the harsh punitive focus of school management. Our young people need compassion and care, not coercion and control.”

– Alex Vitale, The End of Policing

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday warned that the court's right-wing majority had further eroded the nation's bedrock laws separating church and government when it ruled that Maine must include religious schools in a state-run tuition program.

"Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation," wrote Sotomayor in the minority's dissent of the 6-3 decision.

"Forcing American taxpayers to fund private religious education... erodes the foundation of our democracy and harms students."

Sotomayor was joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer to oppose the majority opinion in  Carson v. Makin, which centered on two families in Maine who wanted state taxpayers to pay for to send their children to attend private religious schools.

In Maine, where many rural communities do not have public high schools, towns must either contract with nearby public school districts so children can receive education there or pay tuition at a private "nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."

The schools named in the case aim to instill "a Christian worldview" in its students and are openly discriminatory against "homosexuals, individuals who are transgender, and non-Christians," according to a legal filing.

Under Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling, said one legal expert, those institutions and others like them now have "a right to taxpayer funding."

"Education is an opportunity for students to learn about themselves and others, which is why all students deserve to see themselves reflected in curricula and engage in learning that exposes them to new points of view," said Jesse O'Connell, senior vice president for education at the Center for American Progress. "By diverting tax dollars away from public schools and to schools that can openly discriminate, this ruling puts these core tenets in jeopardy."

In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the court's right-wing majority "continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build."

"In just a few years, the Court has upended constitutional doctrine," the justice wrote, "shifting from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars."

The ruling follows a number of decisions by the court favoring the religious right in recent years, including one allowing religious exemptions for employers that don't want to include contraception in healthcare coverage and one allowing Christian prayers before government meetings.

The latest "radical ruling," said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, will undermine "public schools and the students they serve."

"Forcing American taxpayers to fund private religious education—even when those private schools fail to meet education standards, intentionally discriminate against students, or use public funds to promote religious training, worship, and instruction—erodes the foundation of our democracy and harms students," Pringle said.

"We are witnessing one of the most extreme Supreme Courts in modern history rewrite the most basic social commitments of our society—that publicly-funded education should be free and open to all without discrimination is one of those commitments," she added. "Shamefully, today's decision tosses aside that social commitment."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday warned that the court's right-wing majority had further eroded the nation's bedrock laws separating church and government when it ruled that Maine must include religious schools in a state-run tuition program.

"Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation," wrote Sotomayor in the minority's dissent of the 6-3 decision.

"Forcing American taxpayers to fund private religious education... erodes the foundation of our democracy and harms students."

Sotomayor was joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer to oppose the majority opinion in  Carson v. Makin, which centered on two families in Maine who wanted state taxpayers to pay for to send their children to attend private religious schools.

In Maine, where many rural communities do not have public high schools, towns must either contract with nearby public school districts so children can receive education there or pay tuition at a private "nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."

The schools named in the case aim to instill "a Christian worldview" in its students and are openly discriminatory against "homosexuals, individuals who are transgender, and non-Christians," according to a legal filing.

Under Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling, said one legal expert, those institutions and others like them now have "a right to taxpayer funding."

"Education is an opportunity for students to learn about themselves and others, which is why all students deserve to see themselves reflected in curricula and engage in learning that exposes them to new points of view," said Jesse O'Connell, senior vice president for education at the Center for American Progress. "By diverting tax dollars away from public schools and to schools that can openly discriminate, this ruling puts these core tenets in jeopardy."

In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the court's right-wing majority "continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build."

"In just a few years, the Court has upended constitutional doctrine," the justice wrote, "shifting from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars."

The ruling follows a number of decisions by the court favoring the religious right in recent years, including one allowing religious exemptions for employers that don't want to include contraception in healthcare coverage and one allowing Christian prayers before government meetings.

The latest "radical ruling," said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, will undermine "public schools and the students they serve."

"Forcing American taxpayers to fund private religious education—even when those private schools fail to meet education standards, intentionally discriminate against students, or use public funds to promote religious training, worship, and instruction—erodes the foundation of our democracy and harms students," Pringle said.

"We are witnessing one of the most extreme Supreme Courts in modern history rewrite the most basic social commitments of our society—that publicly-funded education should be free and open to all without discrimination is one of those commitments," she added. "Shamefully, today's decision tosses aside that social commitment."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

The Vanuatu Prime Minister has again failed to push through controversial constitutional changes.

These include extending the term of Parliament, changing the definition of a Vanuatu citizen, and increasing the size of cabinet by nearly a third.

A second session of Parliament yesterday was adjourned because of a lack of MPs.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Port Vila lawyer Gary Blake speaks to Don Wiseman on the constitutional crisis
• Prime Minister Bob Loughman failed to amend the constitution
• Other reports on the Vanuatu constitutional crisis

Prime Minister Bob Loughman wants to push through at least 15 constitutional changes which the opposition and some MPs in both his coalition and his own Vanua’aku Pati oppose.

On Friday there were only 31 of the 52 MPs present.

For a constitutional change a minimum of 34 MPs is needed.

On Thursday, lawyers in Port Vila published a statement strongly criticising one of the planned constitutional amendments.

They say the government’s plan to put the Chief Justice’s position on a fixed-term contract undermines the credibility of that judicial office.

Costly process
The adjournment of the Vanuatu Parliament over the seven days to Friday cost the country’s taxpayers more than 3.7 million vatu (US$32,000).

This is because MPs and cabinet ministers each get daily allowances when the Parliament is in session.

“You cannot just pull a paper from a rubbish bin and bring it to Parliament for approval because you are dealing with Vanuatu’s Constitution,” former prime minister Charlot Salwai said. https://t.co/Bgq4z1XeXs

— RNZ Pacific (@RNZPacific) June 16, 2022

But on Friday a week ago the session was adjourned because many MPs had boycotted over government plans to push through the sweeping constitutional changes.

Ati George Sokomanu, who was the country’s first president, is calling for more communication among the leaders and respect for the procedures required under the constitution to avoid wasting taxpayers’ money.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Vanuatu’s opposition leader Ralph Regenvanu said Members of Parliament from the Opposition bloc would boycott the special Parliament sitting again today.

“We think there are a number of amendments that are very bad for the country, and very dangerous for the Parliament to be considering,” he said.

“We will not be turning up to Parliament in the hope that we can contribute to not having a quorum to pass the amendment.

• READ MORE:  MPs boycott forces delay in Vanuatu constitution amendments debate
• Other Vanuatu constitutional crisis reports

“We hope that RMC (Reunification Movement of Change) MPs will also absent themselves tomorrow. I also called on other MPs and parties in the government to boycott too, so that the required quorum would not be met.

“I hope that will force the government to do what it should do or [have] done in the first place, to follow the proper process of consultation and setting up of the Constitutional Review Committee to consider any amendment on the Constitution that it want to bring to Parliament.”

Regenvanu said yesterday’s Vanuatu Daily Post front page on “VP against proposed review to Chief Justice’s tenure” was a perfect example of why such a constitutional amendment has to go through the proper process of consultation and consideration by a committee.

“Just six days ago, the government headed by Vanua’aku Pati (VP) proposed this new amendment,” he said. “We don’t know where this amendment came from. There has never been any review or study suggesting that this should happen.

Careful consideration needed
“The VP-led government itself tabled this amendment in Parliament and six days later it came out in the media saying it is not going to support.

“This is why we are advocating such important affairs, such as trying to change the constitution of the country. It requires careful consideration and there is a process to follow before making amendments.”

The special sitting on the proposed constitutional amendment scheduled last Friday was adjourned to today, due to lack of quorum.

The government needs 34 votes to pass the amendment.

Kizzy Kalsakau and Anita Roberts are Vanuatu Daily Post reporters. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Vanuatu’s opposition leader Ralph Regenvanu said Members of Parliament from the Opposition bloc would boycott the special Parliament sitting again today.

“We think there are a number of amendments that are very bad for the country, and very dangerous for the Parliament to be considering,” he said.

“We will not be turning up to Parliament in the hope that we can contribute to not having a quorum to pass the amendment.

• READ MORE:  MPs boycott forces delay in Vanuatu constitution amendments debate
• Other Vanuatu constitutional crisis reports

“We hope that RMC (Reunification Movement of Change) MPs will also absent themselves tomorrow. I also called on other MPs and parties in the government to boycott too, so that the required quorum would not be met.

“I hope that will force the government to do what it should do or [have] done in the first place, to follow the proper process of consultation and setting up of the Constitutional Review Committee to consider any amendment on the Constitution that it want to bring to Parliament.”

Regenvanu said yesterday’s Vanuatu Daily Post front page on “VP against proposed review to Chief Justice’s tenure” was a perfect example of why such a constitutional amendment has to go through the proper process of consultation and consideration by a committee.

“Just six days ago, the government headed by Vanua’aku Pati (VP) proposed this new amendment,” he said. “We don’t know where this amendment came from. There has never been any review or study suggesting that this should happen.

Careful consideration needed
“The VP-led government itself tabled this amendment in Parliament and six days later it came out in the media saying it is not going to support.

“This is why we are advocating such important affairs, such as trying to change the constitution of the country. It requires careful consideration and there is a process to follow before making amendments.”

The special sitting on the proposed constitutional amendment scheduled last Friday was adjourned to today, due to lack of quorum.

The government needs 34 votes to pass the amendment.

Kizzy Kalsakau and Anita Roberts are Vanuatu Daily Post reporters. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Vanuatu’s Speaker was forced to suspend a special parliamentary sitting today after the opposition and several government MPs did not turn up.

They were protesting against the government’s plans to push through major constitutional amendments.

Speaker Seoule Simeon adjourned the session due to a lack of quorum until next Friday.

• LISTEN: Opposition leader Ralph Regenvanu talks to Pacific Waves
• READ MORE: Other Vanuatu political crisis reports

Prime Minister Bob Loughman’s government needs the support of 34 MPs out of 52 to make changes to the country’s constitution.

But Loughman’s side was short by 3 MPs after the boycott by 7 MPs from the Reunion of Movement for Change party, led by former prime minister Charlot Salwai.

Opposition leader Ralph Regenvanu confirmed this morning the government had repealed “certain items” from the 16 proposed overnight after objections.

Two ‘disturbing proposals’
But Regenvanu said: “There are two very disturbing and dangerous proposals in these Parliamentary amendments which directly attack good governance in the country.”

The two changes include introducing a term of five years for the office of Chief Justice, and a change to the process for the appointment of the Ombudsman.

Regenvanu said previously the Ombudsman was appointed by the President after consultation with the prime minister, the speaker, leaders of political parties, presidents of the council of chiefs and provincial councils, chairman of the Public Service Commission and the Judicial Services Commission.

However, the amendment will only require the president to make the appointment after consulting the prime minister.

Regenvanu has confirmed the opposition will also not attend the Parliament session next Friday.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In Vanuatu, one key party in the government says it will boycott tomorrow’s planned session of Parliament.

That session is due to consider several constitutional amendments and the leader of the Reunification of Movements for Change party, former Prime Minister Charlot Salwai, said there had been no consultation with civil society.

He said it was the people’s constitution and they had the right to have their say before approval by Parliament.

The planned changes include:

• extending the parliamentary term from four to five years,
• allowing cabinet to have 17 members — up from the current 13,
• involving mayors in the selection process for the head of state, and
• amendments that will allow a broader definition of who qualifies for citizenship.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In Vanuatu, one key party in the government says it will boycott tomorrow’s planned session of Parliament.

That session is due to consider several constitutional amendments and the leader of the Reunification of Movements for Change party, former Prime Minister Charlot Salwai, said there had been no consultation with civil society.

He said it was the people’s constitution and they had the right to have their say before approval by Parliament.

The planned changes include:

• extending the parliamentary term from four to five years,
• allowing cabinet to have 17 members — up from the current 13,
• involving mayors in the selection process for the head of state, and
• amendments that will allow a broader definition of who qualifies for citizenship.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post Abbott’s Border Antics: An Airtight Case for Under-Used and Over-Used Constitutional Clauses appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Montanans were justifiably shocked when the news broke last week that Governor Gianforte stopped the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks from enforcing its instream flow water rights on the nationally famous Smith River as well as the Shields River. Thanks to the “right to know” provision in Montana’s Constitution reporters were able to get the records revealing that the governor betrayed both his Bible-sworn Oath of Office to uphold the Montana Constitution as well as the Public Trust Doctrine, in which he serves as trustee to preserve our publicly-owned rivers and their world-renowned wild trout fisheries.

To make a long and complex story much shorter, Montana allocates water rights based on the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation — which means those who divert water from rivers, lakes, and streams for beneficial uses have rights to the water that are prioritized as “first in time, first in right.” Simply put, those who claimed their rights first have “senior” rights to the “junior” rights that were claimed later.

It’s no secret that Montana’s rivers, like most of the West, are over-appropriated — meaning more water rights have been claimed than there is water in the river. During the severe drought that gripped the state last year and has worsened this year, the senior water rights holders can “put a call” on their rights and legally require upstream junior users to cease diversion until the senior rights are fulfilled.

For many years the concept of holding water rights for instream flows — to protect the health of the river, aquatic ecosystems, fish and recreation — were not legally recognized. But in 1969 Montana filed “Murphy Rights” that gave the state allocations on 12 major rivers, including the Smith. While these rights are junior compared to many of the water rights filed in the 1800s, they nonetheless are senior to the water rights filed after that time — of which there are 82 on the Smith and 44 on the Shields rivers.

When the flows on the Smith and Shields dropped due to lack of runoff from low mountain snowpack, Fish, Wildlife and Parks did what the agency should have done — prepared to put a call on its instream flow water rights to preserve the rivers, their fisheries and ecosystems.

But before that happened, Gianforte stepped in and ordered the agency to halt. In effect, the governor unilaterally decided to forego both his and the state’s responsibility to preserve the public’s rivers in a stunning dereliction of duty and betrayal of the state’s Constitutional mandate that: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” (Art. IX, Sec. 1)

Obviously, a river with little or no water in it is neither clean nor healthful. When rivers are dewatered the effects are significant. Low flows and high temperatures force smaller fish into the deeper holes where they are summarily eaten by the larger fish they would normally avoid by remaining in shallow water and side-channels. When flows fall even further and water temperatures exceed the tolerance of cold-water fish like trout, the big fish die, too.

It takes a black heart to knowingly sign a death warrant on a Montana trout stream as Gianforte did. But then again, this is a guy who shoots trapped, treed, and collared Yellowstone National Park research wildlife…so what’s a few fish, ehh?

Last year was brutal on Montana’s prized wild trout rivers and this year promises to be even worse — especially with a governor who so willingly betrays his public trust and constitutional responsibilities.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

The Humanitarian Coalition for Papua says that the unilateral creation of three new provinces in Papua by the Indonesian central government is like repeating the management model of Dutch colonial power.

National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) head researcher Cahyo Pamungkas, who is part of the coalition, said that this policy would cause greater mistrust among the Papuan people against the government, reports CNN Indonesia.

“This top-down decentralisation which is being done arbitrarily by the central government is like repeating the model of Dutch power in order to continue exploiting natural resources and controlling the land of Papua,” said Pamungkas in a media release.

• READ MORE: Other Otsus and Papuan provinces reports

Pamungkas, who is also a member of the Papua Peace Network (JDP), said that the new Papua Special Autonomy Law (Otsus) and the policy on creating new provinces would be counter-productive.

Amnesty International Indonesia executive director Usman Hamid said that creating new provinces must involve the Papuan People’s Council (MPR) which represents the cultural interests of indigenous Papuan (OAP).

This is a mandate of Law Number 2/2021 on Papuan Special Autonomy (Otsus Law) as a form of protection for the rights of indigenous Papuans.

“Decentralisation in Papua must involve the MRP as the cultural representatives of OAP. This is regulated under the Otsus Law as a form of protection for the rights of indigenous Papuans,” said Hamid.

Call to wait for court ruling
Public Virtue executive director Miya Irawati said that the government must cancel or postpone the planned creation of new provinces in Papua until there was a ruling by the Constitutional Court (MK) on a challenge against the revisions to the Otsus Law which had been launched by the MRP.

According to Irawati, the move by the House of Representatives’ (DPR) Legislative Body (Baleg) and the government in agreeing to the draft law on the creation of three new provinces in Papua was a setback for democracy in Papua.

“We also urge the government to cancel the planned creation of new provinces in Papua or at least postpone the plan until there is a ruling by the MK in several months time,” said Irawati.

Indonesian Human Rights Watch (Imparsial) researcher Hussein Ahmad is concerned that the policy will be used to justify adding more military commands in Papua which have the potential to increase the level of violence and human rights violations.

“If there are three new provinces then usually this is followed by the formation of three [new] Kodam [Regional Military Commands] and new units underneath it which of course will impact on increasing the number of military troops in Papua,” he said.

The Papua Humanitarian Coalition is a voluntary partnership made up of a number of organisations and individuals including Amnesty International Indonesia, the Indonesian Communion of Churches (PGI) Papua Bureau, Imparsial, the Jakarta Institute for Public Research and Advocacy (Elsam), the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), the Democracy Alliance for Papua (ADP), the Land of Papua Peace and Unity of Creation Synod of the Papua Injili Christian Church (KPKC GKI-TP), the Jayapura Diocese Peace and Unity of Creation Justice Secretariat (SKPKC Keuskupan Jayapura), the Public Virtue Research Institute, the Indonesian Legal Aid and Human Rights Association (PBHI) and BRIN researcher Cahyo Pamungkas.

Aim to ‘improve public services’
DPR Speaker Puan Maharani claimed that the formation of three new provinces was to improve public services and social welfare.

Maharani said the additional provinces were aimed at accelerating even development in the Land of Cenderawasih as Papua is known.

“The additional provinces in the eastern part of Indonesia are intended to accelerate even development in Papua and to better serve the Papuan people,” said Maharani in a media release.

The chairperson of the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) Central Leadership Board said that the additional provinces were aimed advancing Papua and increasing the level and dignity of the Papuan people.

Maharani confirmed that the deliberations on the draft law on the creation of the new provinces will still be in line with Law Number 2/2021 on Otsus.

“In the deliberations on this draft law later it will pay attention to the aspirations and needs of the Papuan people”, said Maharani.

Baleg DPR Deputy Chairperson Achmad Baidowi said that the names of the three new provinces could still be changed.

Changed names
Earlier, it had been decided that the names would be Anim Ha for South Papua, Meepago for Central Papua, and Serta Lapago for the Papua Central Highlands.

“If there is a wish to change them, it can be done during the deliberations”, Baidowi told journalists.

Baidowi explained that the traditional names used for the prospective provinces were a recommendation from the Baleg. He claimed that the names were chosen in accordance with the wishes of the public and academic studies.

“Certainly we recommended that the traditional names be included in the draft law. For example Papua Central Highlands would be what, then Central Papua what, South Papua what”, he said.

Earlier, the Baleg agreed to the Draft Law on the Provinces of South Papua, Central Papua and Papua Central Highlands during a plenary meeting held on Wednesday April 6. The draft law will then be taken to a DPR plenary meeting for deliberation.

The draft law regulates the creation of three new provinces which will cover a number of existing regencies.

South Papua will have Merauke as the provincial capital and cover the regencies of Merauke, Mappi, Asmat and Boven Digoel.

Central Papua province’s provincial capital will be Timika and cover the regencies of Mimika, Paniai, Dogiyai, Deyiai, Intan Jaya and Puncak.

Papua Central Highlands provincial capital will be Wamena and cover the regencies of Jayawijaya, Puncak Jaya, Lanny Jaya, Mamberamo Tengah, Nduga, Tolikara, Yahukimo, and Yalimo.

Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was Koalisi: Pemekaran 3 Provinsi Baru Papua Ulangi Model Belanda.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post Police Drone Surveillance Raises Constitutional Concerns appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

The post Senate Bill Challenges Online Encryption, Constitutional Rights to Speech and Privacy appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.