Tag Archives: court

Fossil fuels are the problem, say fossil fuel companies being sued

by rosiemccorkle85 Posted on March 21, 2018

Big Oil and the cities suing them in federal court agreed on at least one thing on Wednesday: Human-made climate change is real.

In the country’s first court hearing on the science behind climate change, a lawyer for Chevron, Theodore Boutrous Jr., said the oil company accepts the scientific consensus. He quoted chapter and verse from the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change, the thousands of scientists assembled by the United Nations to figure out exactly what’s going on. “From Chevron’s perspective, there is no debate about the science of climate change,” Boutrous said.

Oil companies have recently started saying they’re on the side of science, but they’ve never said it so clearly in court.

San Francisco and Oakland are suing BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell, arguing that the corporations that profit from fossil fuels should pay for the seawalls and pumps needed to protect them from rising tides. But Boutrous, the only oil company lawyer to speak at the hearing, didn’t accept blame, pointing the finger instead at the people who burned the fossil fuels. In other words, oil doesn’t cause climate change. People burning oil cause climate change.

For five hours, the two sides tried to explain climate science, after U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup had asked for a tutorial. A gaggle of 100-some attorneys, climate advocates, and journalists packed the mid-century-modern courtroom. Alsup strode into the room dressed for science, wearing a smart-looking pair of browline glasses and a tie decorated with images of the solar system.

In the run up to this hearing, journalists compared it to the Scopes monkey trial in 1925, which found a teacher guilty of telling students about evolution, but Alsup shot down such comparisons. “We have these tutorials so the poor judge can learn some science — it helps to have science,” he said in a soft southern accent.

The big question going into the hearing: Would the oil companies try to cast doubt on the evidence that their business model is heating the earth? Climate skeptics have been trying to make their voices heard by sending in friend-of-the-court briefs with their own spin on the evidence, but Boutrous stuck to the scientific consensus unveiling a deft bit of legal jiu jitsu that could form the core of the oil company argument as the case moves forward. Alsup would occasionally raise some climate-skeptic argument, and both sides would explain why it didn’t make sense.

Big Oil’s POV

Boutrous started by citing reports from the IPCC as an unimpeachable authority. These reports are an “amazing resource” he said, before quoting them at length. Boutrous explained that the IPCC has found with increasing certainty over the years that humans fossil fuel use is the primary driver of climate change — but that’s not the only point Boutrous wanted Alsup to absorb. He twice read a quote from the IPCC that climate change is caused “largely by economic and population growth.”

Then, Boutrous added his interpretation. “It doesn’t say that it’s the production and extraction that’s driving the increase,” he said. “It’s the way people are living their lives.”

This appears to be the core of the oil companies’ strategy. First, believe everything the IPCC says. Second, the IPCC says the real problem is prosperity, economic growth! Therefore, blame the ones burning the oil — all we did was dig the stuff up.

To hammer it home, Boutrous showed an IPCC graph of emissions from the United States and China since 1970, with a scale that makes U.S. emissions look like a flat line.

“One thing that surprises me is that the U.S. has gone up, but not gone up much,” Alsup mused, leaning on folded hands. “But China has gone up dramatically.”

“Correct,” Boutrous responded. That’s because China’s population has grown, and its coal-burning economy has grown even more. The implication was clear: It is demand for energy driving carbon emissions, not the companies providing the fossil fuels.

Death by PowerPoint

While the oil companies just had one slick lawyer making a focused argument, the cities had three scientists scrolling through their very own PowerPoint presentations. The scientists hammered some simple points, aided by many graphs of temperature over time. They also skated quickly over some bewildering complexity.

Alsup didn’t let the tricky stuff fly over his head — he jumped in to make the presenters explain. At one point, he questioned Oxford scientist Myles Allen on the graph he was using: “Explain that graph there? I still don’t get it,” Alsup said.

Allen’s explanation only muddied the waters further. “I just don’t think your chart demonstrates what you’re telling me,” Alsup said. After a moment, Allen realized he must have grabbed the wrong figure. “You’re absolutely right,” he said.

At another point the court waited on tenterhooks as a scientist tried to get an animation of sea-level rise to work. It didn’t.

To be sure, the plaintiffs had a bogglingly complex task. There are hundreds of thousands of studies on climate change, and Alsup had asked them to boil it all down into a two-hour presentation, which just isn’t the way science works. Science advances through accumulation of evidence backed by piles of data, but law advances through argument.

After the final expert, University of Illinois scientist Don Wuebbles, had plowed through 20 minutes of facts and figures, Alsup tried to pull him from his PowerPoint. “Just in the last 10 minutes: You heard what the other side said right? What critique would you make?” But Wuebbles declined to respond and returned to his PowerPoint presentation.

The showdown that wasn’t

Alsup appeared to want to see some of the classic climate-skeptic arguments fought out, face to face, in his courtroom. But nothing doing. Each side agreed, for instance, that greenhouse gases are more important than water vapor in warming the planet. If nothing else, that seems like a victory for climate hawks: When all the Big Oil companies are willing to say, clearly and unambiguously, that humans burning fossil fuels are warming the planet, it means that the terms of debate have shifted.

Boutrous represents only Chevron, but Alsup held the feet of the other companies to the fire, too.

“You can’t just get away with sitting there in silence then saying, ‘He’s not speaking for us,’” Alsup told to the attorneys for the other companies. “You have two weeks to tell me if he said something you disagree with.”

This court tutorial was the first of its kind for climate science, but it’s not entirely out of the ordinary. Judges are frequently called on to serve as arbiters of scientific uncertainty, so it only makes sense that they sometimes ask for primers from scientists to get themselves up to speed. “In this age of science, we must build legal foundations that are sound in science as well as in law,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. “Scientists have offered their help. We in the legal community should accept that offer.”

Even if this tutorial persuades Alsup, the cities could still lose. The oil companies seem poised to argue that those who bought petro-products are just as responsible as those who sold them. And they will almost certainly argue that those suffering the ravages of climate change should try to fix things by passing laws rather than suing businesses. That’s a position even the most liberal members of the Supreme Court have held in the past.

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Fossil fuels are the problem, say fossil fuel companies being sued

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A court showdown poses climate change questions. Scientists have answers.

by AlfieEoy45 Posted on March 21, 2018

On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments about a California law that tries to clarify the facts that women receive about their reproductive rights. The accuracy of that information becomes increasingly important as environmental disasters — which are growing more, uh, disastrous — endanger women more than men. Women can be better prepared by having full control of their reproductive decisions.

Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations, often masquerading as medical clinics, that attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions. California’s Reproductive FACT Act, passed in 2016, requires reproductive health clinics and CPCs to post notices advising their clients that the state provides free or low-cost family planning, prenatal care, and abortion; and that CPCs publicize that they are not licensed to practice medicine.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization representing the centers suing the state of California, claims that the requirements of the Reproductive FACT Act are unconstitutional because they require CPCs to “promote messages that violate their convictions,” Bloomberg reports. The state of California argues that information provided by medical professionals is publicly regulated, and that women who depend on public medical care and are unaware of their options should not be provided with confusing information.

Last February, a Gizmodo-Damn Joan investigation found that women seeking abortion clinics on Google — because, let’s be real, that’s how a lot of us find medical care — could be easily led to CPCs instead, as Google Maps does not distinguish them from real medical clinics.

We’ll be watching this case.

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A court showdown poses climate change questions. Scientists have answers.

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Kids are beginning to picture scientists as women.

by MellisaVerbrugg Posted on March 21, 2018

We’ll be watching this case.

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Kids are beginning to picture scientists as women.

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Climate change will have its Scopes Monkey Trial this week

by WoodrowPantano Posted on March 19, 2018

In 1925, a Tennessee substitute teacher was indicted by a grand jury for teaching evolution to his high school class. That case, the Scopes trial, became famous for pitting science against the Bible, and it helped pave the way for educational reform.

On Tuesday, a case in California could do for climate change what the Scopes trial did for evolution. Last September, San Francisco and Oakland filed major lawsuits against five of the world’s largest oil companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.

All of those companies are constantly being sued for making large and sometimes permanent environmental messes. But the people of California aren’t suing BP and co. for spills, explosions, or other easily traceable disasters. Rather, they’re suing because those companies:

knew about climate change decades ago,
continued doing business as usual, and
engaged in a world-wide public relations campaign to sow confusion over climate science.

California says the companies have been using deception to profit as the planet warms, and they should pay for the infrastructure the state needs to protect itself against rising sea-levels.

The lawsuits join others in a new wave of court cases: the climate suits. Two weeks ago, a climate change lawsuit filed by 21 kid activists against the Trump administration was cleared for trial. A week later, Arnold Schwarzeneggar announced plans to sue Big Oil for committing “first degree murder.” And New York City hit polluters with a double whammy in January: the city decided to divest billions of dollars in pension money from fossil fuels and filed a lawsuit against some of the biggest polluters in the industry.

The cases pit people against industry and government, and, whether or not the people win, the legal battles could mark the beginning of a shift in the way fossil fuel companies are held accountable in court. This particular case is especially novel, thanks to an unorthodox judge named William Alsup.

The judge presiding over the Bay Area cities-vs.-oil companies case isn’t your average federal justice. Alsup’s the guy who blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end DACA, taught himself how to use a programming script for a Silicon Valley lawsuit, and, as part of another tech battle, asked two ride-sharing services to give him a tutorial on self-driving cars to make a better-informed ruling.

Alsup’s quest for a well-rounded education means that before this trial moves forward, both parties must give him a two-part, first-of-its-kind tutorial in climate science in no more than two hours each. It’s a highly unusual request from a judge, experts say, and it will give Americans the opportunity to follow along as big polluters finally go on record about climate science and climate denialism.

Judge Alsup has submitted 14 questions for each party in the case to answer, including:

What caused the various ice ages?
What are the main sources of CO2 that account for the incremental buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Why hasn’t plant life turned the higher levels of CO2 back into oxygen?

Most of the 14 questions could be answered by a precocious fifth grader. But the hearing, according to Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, will be the first time oil companies defend themselves in court against decades of climate science.

“Up until now, fossil fuel companies have been able to talk about climate science in political and media arenas where there is far less accountability to the truth,” Burger says.

The complaint

In addition to providing answers to Alsup’s questions, the plaintiffs will likely present evidence that oil companies knew about the harmful effects of CO2 on the atmosphere at least since the 1970s. They may also highlight the prize-winning 2015 investigation by InsideClimate News, which revealed that Exxon purposefully misled the public about the risks of fossil fuels in order to protect its business. Despite having long known about the dangers of fossil-fuel consumption, California will charge that the “defendants continue to engage in massive fossil fuel production.”

As CO2 levels spike and global temperatures increase, melting glaciers have caused flooding in California’s coastal cities. The state’s argument rests on the charge that fossil fuel producers have caused a public nuisance. While the accusation sounds like something you’d call a drunk guy making a ruckus in the street, in legalese, it’s dead serious, constituting a crime that jeopardizes the welfare of a community.

The defense

While the oil companies are unlikely to deny climate science, they are expected to highlight areas of uncertainty on its specifics. Even though climate science has made leaps and bounds in the past decade, scientists still readily admit how hard it is to pin down exactly how much sea-level rise we can expect in the next 50 to 100 years. You can be sure Big Oil’s lawyers will question the validity of some climate science’s conclusions in court.

But they won’t stop there. The defendants will probably try to get the case dismissed on the grounds that the complaint “calls into question longstanding decisions by the Federal Government regarding, among other things, national security, national energy policy, environmental protection, development of outer continental shelf lands, the maintenance of a national petroleum reserve, mineral extraction on federal lands.” And the lawyers will rightly point out that their clients have “produced billions of dollars for the federal government.” In other words, they’ll try to argue that, by putting this case on trial, the government is biting some of the hands that feed it.

The defendants have already achieved one victory — they requested that the case be heard in federal instead of state court, where local laws are tough on big polluters. Just Friday, fossil fuel companies suffered a blow when a different set of lawsuits from three Californian counties were successfully moved to state court. But, for this case, Judge Alsup agreed with industry, saying a “patchwork of 50 different answers to the same fundamental global issue would be unworkable.”

What happens if California wins

If San Francisco and Oakland win their respective suits, the five oil giants might have to pay billions of dollars into an “abatement fund,” a reserve that the cities can use to pay for seawalls and other infrastructure to protect their citizens against rising oceans.

But the case might not even make it to trial. California could quite possibly ace the upcoming climate change tutorial and lose the case nevertheless. The tutorial puts climate science in the spotlight, but the oil companies could persuasively argue that California’s sea-level concerns (and the damaging storm surges that accompany sea rise) can’t be pinned on individual companies.

“There are legal obstacles that could prevent this case from ever going to trial,” Burger says. “The science could play a role in some of these preliminary arguments, but the ultimate questions about whether the science equates with legal liability for these plaintiffs, the factual connection between these particular parties’ actions and the particular harm suffered by these cities, may never get heard.”

In other words, California could win the battle but lose the war. The oil companies hope the case will ultimately get dismissed or shunted up to the Supreme Court where legal precedent favors polluters. That doesn’t necessarily spell doom for the future of the climate suit.

If the court ultimately rules in favor of the defendants, there’s a long line of similar lawsuits waiting for their day in court. Buckle up, polluters! You’re in for it now.

Climate change will have its Scopes Monkey Trial this week

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A judge rules that rushing approval for the Dakota Access Pipeline violated the law.

by DaleneLake Posted on June 15, 2017

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg issued a ruling Wednesday that deemed the previous environmental review process inadequate. His decision comes in response to a legal challenge filed by Standing Rock Sioux in February, after President Trump greenlit the pipeline shortly after his inauguration.

Specifically, the judge said the Army Corps of Engineers, which must approve pipelines that cross water, “did not adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice, or the degree to which the pipeline’s effects are likely to be highly controversial.” According to Jan Hasselman, the Earthjustice attorney representing the tribe, the ruling represents possibly the first time that a federal judge has dinged the Army Corps for not considering environmental justice concerns.

The Army Corps must now do additional review. Hasselman is unsure what form that will take. “Do they just try to paper this over with a supplemental or revised environmental assessment, which is likely to lead to more litigation?” he says. “Or do they go back to the environmental impact statement process?”

The tribe has argued for months that the pipeline would endanger their drinking water and ancestral lands. Since oil began flowing in March, the pipeline has already leaked several times. Oil will continue flowing for now, but Standing Rock Sioux Chair Dave Archambault II said the tribe “will ask the Court to shut down the pipeline operations immediately” while it undergoes further environmental review. A ruling could come on that demand in as soon as six weeks.

Related: Read Grist’s investigation of the paramilitary tactics used to track and target pipeline opponents.

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A judge rules that rushing approval for the Dakota Access Pipeline violated the law.

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Trump Wants to Let Your Boss Take Away Your Birth Control

by CesarColmenero Posted on May 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Trump administration is considering a broad exemption to Obamacare’s mandate on contraceptive coverage, according to a leaked draft of the proposed rule published by Vox on Wednesday.

Since 2011, the Obamacare provision has required that most employers provide insurance that covers birth control, without any cost to the patient. The rule has been the target of a number of lawsuits by religious employers who felt that the requirement violated their religious beliefs. Showing sensitivity to such concerns, in 2014 the Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby that some religious employers could opt out of the coverage. But the court required them to file paperwork indicating their objection, in turn triggering separate contraceptive coverage for employees provided directly by the insurance company. That ruling, though, didn’t settle the issue for religious groups. In a follow-up 2016 Supreme Court case, Zubik v. Burwell, a number of religious organizations said that even this accommodation required them to violate their beliefs, as the paperwork made them complicit in providing birth control coverage. The Supreme Court sent the case down to the lower courts, where it has still not been resolved.

Now, the Trump administration seems ready to extend the birth control exemption beyond just religious employers. According to the leaked draft, dated May 23, the new rule would allow virtually any organization to opt out of the mandate if they feel contraception coverage violates “their religious beliefs and moral convictions.”

“This rule would mean women across the country could be denied insurance coverage for birth control on a whim from their employer or university,” said Dana Singiser, vice president for public policy and government relations of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in a statement. “It would expand the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling to allow any employer—including huge, publicly traded companies—to deny birth control coverage to their employees. Think about it: Under this rule, bosses will be able to impose their personal beliefs on their female employees’ private medical decisions.”

What’s more, this draft doesn’t require employers opting out of the mandate to notify the government they are doing so; they’re only required to notify employees of a change in their insurance plans. Insurance companies could also themselves refuse to cover contraception if it violates their religious or moral beliefs.

This appears to provide an even broader exemption than what team Trump has previously signaled it would enact. Throughout the campaign, Trump assured religious leaders their organizations would not have to comply with the contraception mandate: “I will make absolutely certain religious orders like the Little Sisters of the Poor are not bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs,” he wrote in a letter to Catholic leaders last year, referring to the order of nuns that were party to the Zubik Supreme Court case. And on May 4, Trump, flanked by the Little Sisters of the Poor, signed an executive order about religious liberty, which encourages several agencies to address religious employers’ objections to Obamacare’s preventive care requirements, including contraception.

It is unclear what changes may have been made to this draft since May 23, but what is clear is that the rule is in an advanced stage of the process; the Office of Management and Budget announced that it is currently reviewing it, the penultimate step before the rule is enacted via posting in the Federal Register.

You can read the full draft, obtained by Vox, below:

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Preventive Services Final Rule (PDF)

Preventive Services Final Rule (Text)

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Trump Wants to Let Your Boss Take Away Your Birth Control

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“This Isn’t Science”: We Have No Idea How Much Pain Inmates Feel During Execution

by CrystleOgren Posted on May 15, 2017

Mother Jones

Just weeks after Arkansas attempted to execute eight men in 11 days, lethal injection in back in the news. On Tuesday, Georgia is scheduled to execute J.W. Ledford for a 1992 murder. Texas was slated to put Tilon Carter to death on Tuesday as well, but he received a stay last week after the state’s court of criminal appeals decided to hear his claims that the jury was misled.

Georgia will use a controversial one-drug protocol—a heavy dose of pentobarbital, an anesthetic that critics say can fail to render inmates fully unconscious. On Monday, Ledford requested that Georgia execute him by firing squad, instead. He argues that a pain medication he takes has altered his brain chemistry so much that the pentobarbital may not work properly, leading to excruciating pain. (Texas was planning to use pentobarbital to kill Carter, as well.)

Americans generally accept the claim that lethal injection is a humane and painless way to kill convicted murderers. A 2014 Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Americans believe that lethal injection is the “most humane” form of capital punishment. According to a 2015 YouGov poll, just 18 percent of respondents described lethal injection as “cruel and unusual punishment,” which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. But, despite its widespread use, there is virtually no scientific data to suggest that lethal injection is humane. There’s been very little research done on the effects of lethal injections on humans at all—but the science that is available suggest that inmates may actually experience immense pain before dying.

On a recent episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast, Kishore Hari interviews Teresa Zimmers, an associate professor of surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine. Zimmers, who has spent years researching lethal injection, is sharply critical to the ways in which states kill the condemned.

“What we have here is masquerade,” says Zimmers. “Something that pretends to be science and pretends to be medicine but isn’t.”

Prior to 1972, when the Supreme Court halted executions nationwide, states used a variety methods to put inmates to death, including gas chambers and the electric chair. After the court ruled in 1976 that the death penalty did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, an Oklahoma state legislator called the state’s medical examiner, Jay Chapman, and asked him if he could come up with a new and humane way to execute prisoners. Chapman has said that he initially thought he wasn’t qualified for the task, but he nonetheless proposed using fatal doses of pharmaceuticals that are typically used to put patients.

Chapman came up with a three-drug protocol: Sodium thiopental, an anesthetic to put the inmate to sleep; pancuronium bromide, which causes paralysis; and potassium chloride to stop the heart. Other states soon adopted this protocol, but there was never much scientific evidence showing it was truly humane.

“It’s not at all clear that the protocol works as advertised,” explains Zimmers.

In 2007, Zimmers was part of a team that analyzed execution records from California and North Carolina and found that lethal injection might actually lead to painful chemical asphyxiation. Zimmers’ team suggested that the thiopental dosages being uses might not be high enough to induce sleep and that potassium chloride might not reliably stop the heart. The potential result: a paralyzed inmate who remains aware while dying from the inability to breathe. Zimmers’ paper concluded:

Our findings suggest that current lethal injection protocols may not reliably effect death through the mechanisms intended, indicating a failure of design and implementation. If thiopental and potassium chloride fail to cause anesthesia and cardiac arrest, potentially aware inmates could die through pancuronium-induced asphyxiation. Thus the conventional view of lethal injection leading to an invariably peaceful and painless death is questionable.

Beginning around 2009, European pharmaceutical companies began refusing to sell their drugs to American states that intended to use them to put inmates to death. The shortages led to a rush to find different lethal injection methods, such as replacing the sodium thiopental with a drug called midazolam or using a single fatal dose of an anesthetic.

And just like with the original cocktail, these new lethal injection techniques have been developed with little scientific rigor. “There’s been a very active substitution of drugs into this protocol with, of course, no corresponding investigation,” says Zimmers.

When Oklahoma used the one-drug protocol of pentobarbital in the execution of Michael Wilson in January 2014, the inmate’s last words were, “I feel my whole body burning.” A few months later, the state tried to put Clayton Lockett to death using a three-drug protocol that included the anesthetic midazolam. Lockett mumbled and writhed on the gurney, before dying of a massive heart attack about 40 minutes after the procedure began. Oklahoma’s executions are now on hold.

Despite the controversy surrounding midazolam, last month Arkansas rushed to execute eight men in 11 days when its supply of the drug was set to expire. After a series of legal setbacks for the state, only four were put to death. The last man to die, Kenneth Williams, reportedly convulsed, jerked, lurched, and coughed for 10 to 20 seconds after prison officials administered midazolam.

Often, the debate over capital punishment centers around the morality of government-sponsored killing or the potential for an innocent person to be executed. But Zimmers suspects that for many people, support for the death penalty relies on the notion that states are using compassionate, scientifically validated method to kill inmates. That notion, Zimmers argues, is simply wrong.

“They should understand that this isn’t science,” she says. “This is a pretense of science.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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“This Isn’t Science”: We Have No Idea How Much Pain Inmates Feel During Execution

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Texas’ Governor Just Signed the Most Anti-Immigrant Bill in Years

by EddieCornwell Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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During an unannounced, five-minute livestream on Facebook Sunday night, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation outlawing sanctuary cities and granting law enforcement unprecedented powers in tracking down undocumented immigrants.

“Texans expect us to keep them safe—and that’s exactly what we’re going to do by me signing the law,” Abbott told the camera, punctuating his remarks by tapping the bill before signing it. “Texas has now banned sanctuary cities in the Lone Star State.”

“It won’t be tolerated in Texas,” Abbot continued. “Elected officials and law enforcement agencies, they don’t get to pick and choose what laws they will obey.”

Immigration advocates are describing it as the most hostile state law to undocumented immigrants in the country and point out that sanctuary cities are actually safer than other cities, according to FBI crime data. The Facebook Live event allowed the governor to avoid protests a typical signing would have likely drawn, the Texas Tribune noted. A spokesperson for the governor claimed the move was an effort to reach people directly where they’re consuming news.

Abbott declared banning sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that refuse to fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities, a legislative priority this year, and Texas has quickly become one of the battlegrounds in the national debate over them. When Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez announced her department would no longer comply with immigration authorities after taking office earlier this year, the governor cut off funding in retaliation and even threatened to oust her. Meanwhile lawmakers in the statehouse have been debating how wide-reaching the ban on sanctuary cities should be, settling on legislation late last month after a 16-hour marathon hearing. Horrified by the outcome, immigration advocates have pushed back, protesting at the state capitol during the lengthy hearing on the bill last month and gathering outside the governor’s mansion last night.

SB 4 does far more than simply outlaw sanctuary cities. When the new rules go into effect, law enforcement officials and other local leaders who refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities could face to up to a year of jail time and be personally fined up to $4,000. Additionally, any local government violating the law will also be subject to fines—$1,000 at first with each single subsequent infraction adding penalties that can potentially reach $25,500.

The law also grants law enforcement throughout the state sweeping new powers that many immigration advocates consider a form of profiling. One of the most controversial provisions of the new law allows police officers to question someone’s immigration status during encounters such as a routine traffic stop as opposed to during a lawful arrest.

David Leopold, an immigration lawyer and the former head of the American Immigration Lawyers Associates, says it’s the most hostile state law to undocumented immigrants in the country. “It’s like SB1070, the Arizona ‘show me your papers’ law, on steroids,” Leopold says, referring to the controversial legislation that required police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain if they believe that person might be in the country illegally.

“This is a license to racially profile,” Leopold says. “What Texas has done here is told the police…if a person has an accent, is brown, you should probably start asking questions about their immigration status.”

While much of the Arizona law was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2012, the “show me your papers” portion was not struck down—though the justices left open the possibility that such laws could be ruled as being unconstitutional at a later time.

When SB 1070 passed, it sparked outrage across the country and businesses as well as other state governments boycotted Arizona. Immigration activists are strenuously protesting the Texas measure, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund is planning to sue before it takes effect in September. But so far, the new law isn’t attracting nearly the kind of national attention that Arizona’s law once did.

Leopold points out that this law “came up quietly.” In the seven years since SB1070 was debated, he says, the capacity for outrage about these measures has waned because “we’ve had so much outrageous news about immigration, so many outrageous things and shocking things have happened since Donald Trump took office.”

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Texas’ Governor Just Signed the Most Anti-Immigrant Bill in Years

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The Voting Rights Act May Be Coming Back From the Dead

by BernardR08 Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court killed the core provision of the Voting Rights Act. Four years later, it may be coming back from the dead.

Before Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case, the 1965 Voting Rights Act barred nine states with a history of discrimination against minority voters, and portions of six others, from passing new voting laws without federal approval. The court’s 5-4 decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, found that the formula for determining which jurisdictions needed approval—or “preclearance”—was outdated and therefore unconstitutional.

“Coverage today is based on decades-old data and eradicated practices,” Roberts wrote, and “‘current burdens’ must be justified by ‘current needs.'” In other words, states couldn’t be subject to preclearance based on the pervasive discrimination of the Jim Crow era, which Roberts wrote was now firmly in the past. Implicit in that ruling was the idea that states could be brought back under preclearance if they showed new evidence of discrimination. The law contains a provision specifically for that purpose, allowing courts to place jurisdictions under preclearance if they demonstrate intentional discrimination.

Freed by the court’s ruling from oversight for the first time in decades, many of the formerly constrained state and local governments quickly began imposing new restrictions on voting. But by passing measures that curtail voting by minorities, these jurisdictions are essentially calling Roberts’ bluff—and could force the Supreme Court to consider restoring preclearance.

Texas is the likeliest setting for the return of preclearance. In the last two months, federal courts have three times ruled that the state intentionally discriminated against minority voters. Its 2011 voter ID law and two redistricting maps it drew that year—for the state House and for Congress—were intended to limit the voting power of minorities, the courts found. Plaintiffs in the cases are asking the courts to place Texas back under preclearance. One or more of the cases could reach the Supreme Court as early as its next term. If so, the Roberts Court will have to decide what to do with states that demonstrate that racial discrimination in voting laws is not just a thing of the past.

“Shelby County said that any preclearance had to be based on current evidence,” says Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “And these trials are based on current evidence, not based on something that happened in the 1960s. And so one way of reading this is that the courts are being faithful to what the Supreme Court said in Shelby County, which is that in order to have the extraordinary remedy of preclearance, you need to show that there is a current problem with intentional race discrimination. That’s exactly what’s at stake in these cases.”

In 2010, a conservative backlash to President Barack Obama put Republicans in charge of legislatures and governorships across the country. They quickly passed new voter ID requirements, restrictions on early voting and same-day registration, and other measures that have been found to reduce voting among minorities, the poor, young people, and the elderly. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, by the time of the 2012 elections, 19 states had passed 25 restrictive voting laws.

Fourteen of those laws were blocked by the courts or the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance rule, and the torrent of voting restrictions began to slow. Shelby changed that. It set in motion a new wave of voter suppression laws across the country. Weeks after the court’s ruling, for example, North Carolina passed a voter suppression bill that the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals, in striking it down, called “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow,” targeting “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

No state moved more quickly than Texas to implement a wish list of election reforms that had been blocked under preclearance. Hours after the court’s decision, the state’s attorney general, Gregg Abbott, announced, “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately.” The next day, Gov. Rick Perry signed into law maps for congressional and state Legislature districts that were based on the ones that had been struck down by a federal court under preclearance in 2012 as deliberately discriminatory against minority voters.

Those moves have not fared well in the courts. In April, a federal judge in Corpus Christi ruled that the voter ID law was passed with discriminatory intent. In the past two months, a federal court in San Antonio found both the congressional and the statehouse maps from 2011 intentionally discriminatory. In July, a federal court will determine whether the maps Texas adopted after Shelby are also discriminatory; that case could result in court-drawn maps for the 2018 elections. The string of rulings might lead the courts to reimpose preclearance on Texas. After all, preclearance was intended to target repeat offenders so that the courts wouldn’t be left playing whack-a-mole to strike down discriminatory measures every time they emerged.

“You see the consequence of not having preclearance,” says Mark Gaber, an attorney on the plaintiffs’ legal team in the redistricting cases. “It’s 2017 and we’re still having to litigate about something that happened in 2011.” He adds, “In that period of time, we’ve now gone through three election cycles under maps that quite clearly are—the court’s going to find to be discriminatory.”

Any court that finds intentional discrimination could put Texas back under preclearance for up to 10 years. The courts can decide what types of election laws, if not all of them, would be subject to federal approval.

Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center, who is part of the plaintiffs’ litigation team in the Texas voter ID case, says there’s a “reasonable chance” that one or more of the Texas cases will result in Texas being placed under preclearance. “The thing that persuades me that this is more likely than not is…the existence of multiple findings of discrimination in the state during this period,” she says. “So it really feels quite widespread.” Hasen concurs that there’s “a fair chance” that at least one of the Texas cases will result in preclearance. Texas would almost certainly appeal a preclearance order, putting the ultimate decision before the Supreme Court.

Texas is not the only place facing the potential return of preclearance. In the days and months after Shelby, Alabama and Mississippi enacted voter ID laws that had previously been held up by preclearance. North Carolina has stood out for the sheer number of voting bills Republicans have passed to preserve their power, including a redistricting map currently before the Supreme Court and a voter ID bill on which it could also rule. At least two cities have already been placed under preclearance in the aftermath of Shelby: Evergreen, Alabama, for gerrymandering its city council districts to produce a majority-white council in a city that is 62 percent African American, and Pasadena, Texas, which also restructured its city council to reduce the power of Hispanic voters. Pasadena is appealing that decision. But if a court places Texas under preclearance, it would mark the return on a much bigger level of a policy thought to be all but dead.

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The Voting Rights Act May Be Coming Back From the Dead

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Trumpcare Will Make the Opioid Crisis Worse

by london Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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There are plenty of reasons why the Obamacare repeal bill that House Republicans passed Thursday afternoon is so controversial. It slashes funding for Medicaid, threatens to raise health insurance premiums for older Americans, and allows states to roll back protections for people with preexisting medical conditions.

But there’s another, less publicized, way in which the GOP’s American Health Care Act could disrupt health care throughout the country. In the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic in US history, the legislation could disrupt addiction coverage for millions of Americans. And thanks to a provision added to the bill last week, insurance companies in some states might no longer include mental health and substance abuse coverage in their health plans.

Because of the speed with which Republicans rushed the bill through the House, the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t yet had time to estimate the number of Americans who would lose their health insurance or how premiums would be affected. But according to a CBO report from March, an earlier version of legislation would have resulted in 24 million fewer people having coverage than under Obamacare. The current legislation will likely result in a similar number of uninsured Americans, says Richard Frank, a professor of health economics at Harvard University. Frank and his colleague, Sherry Glied of New York University, estimate that if Obamacare is repealed, 3 million Americans with addiction disorders would lose some or all of their coverage.

Many of the states that voted Trump into office are among the hardest hit by the opioid epidemic—and are the most dependent on Obamacare for substance abuse treatment. The maps below, produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services in the last days of the Obama administration, show this overlap: Red states on the left have the highest overdose rates per capita; red states on the right have the highest rate of residents who would lose coverage if Obamacare is repealed.

US Department of Health and Human Services

Obamacare was particularly important for those seeking addiction treatment, according to Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University psychiatry professor who advised the Obama administration on drug policy. “It was designed to be very broad, but at the same time we knew that if there was anything that this would help a lot for, it’s addiction,” he told me in February.

That’s largely because of two big changes that Obamacare made to insurance markets—changes that the GOP legislation would roll back or undo completely.

First, Obamacare required insurance companies to cover certain “essential benefits,” including substance abuse and mental health treatment. In order to sell insurance in the individual marketplaces, companies would have to cover addiction treatment, as well as other care such as contraception, emergency services, and pediatric services. (Here‘s the full list of essential benefits.) This was a significant change. In 2011, before Obamacare went into effect, “somewhere close to 40 percent of individual and small group market plans didn’t offer substance abuse and mental health coverage,” says Frank. “And when they did, it was quite limited.”

The bill passed by the House would allow states to opt out of the essential benefits requirements, which means that insurers might once again refuse to cover treatment for mental health and addiction.

The second big Obamacare change for substance abuse treatment was the expansion of Medicaid coverage to millions of additional poor Americans. As I wrote earlier this year:

Under the Affordable Care Act, those who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for this government-funded insurance program. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that states could choose whether or not they wanted to participate in the program, and 31 states have done so—resulting in health coverage for an additional 11 million Americans through Medicaid expansion. Of those, an estimated 1.3 million used their newly acquired insurance for substance abuse or mental health services, according to an analysis by researchers Richard Frank of Harvard Medical School and Sherry Glied of New York University. In states that expanded Medicaid, 20 percent of hospital admissions for substance abuse and mental health disorders were uninsured in 2013, before the bulk of the expansion provisions kicked in. By the middle of 2015, the uninsured rate had fallen to five percent.

The Republicans’ health care plan would freeze Medicaid expansion, cutting off funds for states adding new enrollees starting in 2020. Those already enrolled in Medicaid expansion plans by 2020 would continue to receive the benefits, but they would be at constant risk of losing that insurance. Anyone who has a gap in insurance coverage of more a month—say because they miss a deadline or their income temporarily changes—would lose eligibility. (A lack of private health insurance would be penalized too: Going more than 63 days without coverage would increase premiums by 30 percent for a year.) These provisions have a lot of public health advocates worried. It’s not uncommon for people, particularly those with serious mental health and addiction problems, to drift in and out of insurance coverage.

Without Obamacare, said Humphreys, “We’re back where we were before: bad access, low quality of care, and a lot of patients being turned away.”

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Trumpcare Will Make the Opioid Crisis Worse

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