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A New Lawsuit Claims a Secretive, Bush-Era Program Is Delaying Muslims’ Citizenship Cases

by JoesphTierney8 Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Thirteen Muslim Missouri residents are suing the US Citizenship and Immigration Services along with the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, alleging the agencies have unlawfully delayed their applications for citizenship.

The complaint alleges that the immigrants’ applications were funneled into a secretive Bush-era program called the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP) that requires immigration officials to flag applicants as national security threats based on a broad range of criteria.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which uncovered the program in 2013, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations say it illegally discriminates against applicants from Muslim-majority countries. Last year, Buzzfeed reported that this heightened review process was being used to screen incoming Syrian refugees.

The federal lawsuit was filed today by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Missouri and a local immigration litigation law firm that’s representing the Missouri Muslims who applied for citizenship.

“The CARRP definition illegally brands innocent, law-abiding residents, like the plaintiffs—none of whom pose a security threat—as ‘national security concerns’ on account of innocuous activity and associations, innuendo, suppositions and characteristics such as national origin,” the lawsuit says.

USCIS does not comment on pending litigation and a spokesman declined to comment specifically about the case. The agency would not say if the plaintiffs were subject to the heightened vetting program, citing privacy concerns.

By law, USCIS is expected to process applications for naturalization within six months of receiving them, and it must make a decision on a case within four months of interviewing the applicant. However, if an immigrant is flagged for national security concerns, USCIS places the case on the CARRP track, without notifying the applicant, according to the lawsuit. Such cases are often subject to lengthy delays and cannot be approved, “except in limited circumstances,” the lawsuit says, citing the testimony of a USCIS witness in a previous case.

One of the plaintiffs in the Missouri lawsuit, a 49-year-old woman from Iraq named Wafaa Alwan, applied for citizenship in December 2014. She waited eight months for an interview, which finally took place Aug. 31, 2015. She has been waiting for a decision ever since. Syed Asghar Ali, a 47-year-old man from Pakistan, named filed his application in March 2014 and has been in limbo for more than two years, the lawsuit says.

An immigrant who is subject to the heightened vetting program can be flagged for, among other things, donating to a charitable organization that was later designated a financier of terrorism, traveling through or living in an area with terrorist activity as well as making or receiving a large money transfer.

Immigrants may also be flagged if their names appear on the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the Terrorist Watch List, which is estimated to include over a million names. More than 40 percent of those on the watch list have been described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation,” according to The Intercept.

The lawsuit alleges that this process places an unnecessary burden on law-abiding applicants from Muslim-majority countries in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. It also argues that the program violates the Constitution because was enacted in secret, without the approval of Congress.

Although USCIS declined to respond directly to these allegations, a spokesman told Mother Jones that the agency often needs additional time to thoroughly vet each immigrant who applies for citizenship. The program is meant to ensure that immigration benefits and services are not given to people who may pose a threat to public safety, the spokesman emphasized.

The last time a major civil rights organization filed this kind of lawsuit was in 2014, when the ACLU sued USCIS on behalf on five California residents. However, shortly after it was filed, the government quickly wrapped up the pending citizenship applications, granting three of the plaintiffs citizenship and denying the applications of the other two. After that, the ACLU and their clients dropped the legal case.

This happens frequently, said Jim Hacking, the lead attorney on the Missouri case that was filed today. That includes a 2008 lawsuit he filed on behalf of three dozen immigrants whose applications were pulled into the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program.

“When I filed for the 36 clients, cases that had been delayed for three, four, five years all of a sudden became a priority,” he said. “This is because the government tries to root out the case. They don’t want a federal judge ruling on whether CARRP is legal or illegal. So they try to get rid of all the plaintiffs by either approving or denying their case.”

Hacking expects the new Missouri case may end the same way.

USCIS also declined to comment on the decision to resolve the applications of immigrants in the 2014 case.

Even if the new case doesn’t end in a court ruling, Hacking hopes it will put the program back in the spotlight. If society is going to hold Muslims to a higher standard when it comes to immigration and assume that they’re terrorists then we should do it out in the open and debate it, Hacking said.

“Let’s not just let an agency decide on its own that this is the way things are going to be,” he said “That’s not how America is supposed to work.”

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A New Lawsuit Claims a Secretive, Bush-Era Program Is Delaying Muslims’ Citizenship Cases

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When Parole Boards Trump the Supreme Court

by DesireeNMKC Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story is published in partnership with The Marshall Project.

Almost everyone serving life in prison for crimes they committed as juveniles deserves a shot at going home. That’s the thrust of a series of Supreme Court rulings, the fourth and most recent of which was decided this year. Taken together, the high court’s message in these cases is that children are different than adults when it comes to crime and punishment—less culpable for their actions and more amenable to change. As such, court rulings have determined all but the rarest of juvenile lifers are entitled to “some meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.”

When He Was 16, This Man Threw One Punch—and Went to Jail for Life Courtesy of Deborah Buchanan

The court left it up to states how to handle this year’s new ruling but suggested parole boards were a good choice. “Allowing those offenders to be considered for parole,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in January, gives states a way to identify “juveniles whose crimes reflected only transient immaturity—and who have since matured.” Most states have taken this option, changing juvenile lifers’ sentences en masse from life without to life with the possibility of parole.

But prisoner’s rights advocates and attorneys have begun to argue that parole boards, as they usually operate, may not be capable of providing a meaningful opportunity for release. A handful of courts have agreed.

Last month, a New York state appeals court judge ruled that the state’s parole board had not “met its constitutional obligation” when it denied parole to a man who had killed his girlfriend when he was 16. Dempsey Hawkins is now 54 and has been denied parole nine times in hearings that, the court said, did not adequately weigh what role his youth and immaturity had played in his crime.

Also last month, a group of juvenile lifers in Maryland filed suit, arguing that not a single juvenile lifer had received parole in that state in the last 20 years. “Rather than affording youth a meaningful and realistic opportunity for release…grants of release are exceptionally rare, are governed by no substantive, enforceable standards, and are masked from view by blanket assertions of executive privilege,” the lawsuit says.

Similar suits are proceeding in Iowa, Michigan, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, where a judge heard oral arguments last week.

“There are just two relevant kinds of sentences: those that provide a meaningful opportunity for release and those that don’t,” says Sarah French Russell, a Quinnipiac University law professor who studies juvenile justice. “Sentences that are not technically labeled life without parole can deny a meaningful opportunity for release because of the procedures or criteria used by the parole board.”

In almost every state, parole board members are political appointees with little incentive to release prisoners who committed violent crimes, The Marshall Project has reported. Boards operate with wide discretion to make decisions for almost any reason, and in many states, their decisionmaking is shielded from public view and not subject to appeal. A recent analysis by the University of Minnesota law school found that parole release rates in many states remain stuck under 10%, even as the country searches for solutions to mass incarceration. In Ohio, 7% of hearings result in parole being granted. In Florida, the 2014 grant rate was 2%.

One common basis for parole denial is the seriousness of the crime. This may be an allowable metric for adult offenders, these lawsuits argue, but in light of the Supreme Court’s rulings, juvenile lifers must be judged by a different standard.

“No meaningful opportunity to prove rehabilitation can be granted where the only consideration at a parole hearing is the severity of the offense,” wrote attorneys for Blair Greiman, who was sentenced as a teenager in Iowa to life without parole for kidnapping and rape, then re-sentenced after the Supreme Court’s rulings.

At 16, high on horse tranquilizers he had stolen from the veterinary supply at his family’s farm, Greiman raped a woman, stabbed her, and left her for dead. Now 50, Greiman says he has a “simple desire to live a decent life and not be defined by the worst act of my life.” In prison, he has earned a degree, become a master woodworker, participated in counseling and treatment and published a novel, the lawsuit says. Yet, repeatedly denied parole because of the seriousness of his crime, Greiman “is effectively placed in the same situation as he was previously—a juvenile offender serving life sentences without eligibility for parole,” his lawyers argue. Fred Scaletta, assistant director of Iowa’s corrections department, said the board cannot comment on pending litigation. Since Greiman filed suit, the board has approved him for placement in minimum security, a step towards work release, and will review him again next year, Scaletta said.

A handful of states have implemented special parole board procedures for juvenile lifers. Massachusetts and Connecticut provide funding for attorneys to represent juvenile lifers before the board. The Massachusetts Supreme Court also said juvenile lifers were entitled to fees for expert witnesses and to appeal the outcome to a judge—all protections that adult offenders do not enjoy.

“In the case of a juvenile homicide offender—at least at the initial parole hearing—the task is probably far more complex than in the case of an adult offender,” the Massachusetts court wrote. Juvenile lifers must be given the chance to prove that their crime was committed, at least in part, because they were young—immature, impressionable, dependent on adults—but to do that requires gathering educational, medical, and legal paperwork, sometimes decades old, from behind bars. “An unrepresented, indigent juvenile homicide offender will likely lack the skills and resources to gather, analyze, and present this evidence adequately,” the court wrote.

California, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Nebraska have all passed laws providing new rules and procedures for parole boards to follow in cases of juvenile lifers.

In New York, attorneys for Mr. Hawkins are lobbying the governor to widen the scope of the court’s ruling in his case and put protections in place for all juvenile lifers facing the state’s parole board.

Even with special protections, lawyers and advocates say, whether juvenile lifers get parole is still largely dependent on the political atmosphere and whims of the board members. From 2013 until last year, half of juvenile lifers who went before the Massachusetts board were granted parole; that rate dropped to zero when a new board chair took over last September. Lawyers for the last 14 juvenile lifers to go before the board—all of whom were denied parole—say they plan to begin filing lawsuits.

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When Parole Boards Trump the Supreme Court

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An Ex-Marine Killed Two People in Cold Blood. Should His PTSD Keep Him From Death Row?

by CarsonBrownell Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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At 12:44 p.m. on March 6, 2009, John Thuesen called 911. “120 Walcourt Loop,” he told the dispatcher, breathing hard. “Gunshot victims.”

The dispatcher in College Station, Texas, asked what had happened. “I got mad at my girlfriend and I shot her,” he said. “She has sucking chest wounds…”

He’d not only shot Rachel Joiner, 21, but also her older brother Travis. Thuesen had broken into the house after midnight, not sure what he’d do but wanting to see his estranged girlfriend. She was out with her ex-boyfriend, but when she returned later that morning, things “got out of hand.” Thuesen, a 25-year-old former Marine reservist, called 911 and almost immediately expressed remorse. When he was arrested, he repeatedly asked the police about the victims and tried to explain why he’d kept shooting Rachel and her brother: “I felt like I was in like a mode…like training or a game or something.”

The prosecution in the case gave it’s opening statement on May 10, 2010. With DNA evidence and no other suspects, it only took prosecutors three days to make their case. Over the next week, the defense team touched on the facts that Thuesen suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from his service in Iraq, but pleaded for leniency in his sentence. None of that swayed the jury: On May 28, 2010, he was sentenced to death.

While on death row, Thuesen was given new lawyers, death penalty experts from the state’s Office of Capital and Forensic Writs. In Texas, there are often two trials, one to determine guilt or innocence and the second to determine sentencing. Lawyers argued in their 2012 petition to have both the death penalty and the conviction vacated, and for a new sentencing trial, arguing that if his lawyers had served him adequately, “John Thuesen would not be on death row today, awaiting an execution date.” In July 2015, Judge Travis Bryan III—the same judge who had presided over the criminal trial—agreed, and ruled that Thuesen’s lawyers hadn’t adequately explained the significance of his PTSD to jurors, and how it had factored into his actions on the day of the murders. Bryan also ruled that Thuesen’s PTSD wasn’t properly treated by the Veterans Health Administration. He recommended that Thuesen be granted a new punishment-phase trial. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could rule on Bryan’s recommendation at any time.

John Thuesen shortly after his arrest in 2009 Brazos County Sheriff’s Office

The ruling on his case has implications for a question that has concerned the military, veterans’ groups, and death penalty experts: Should service-related PTSD exclude veterans from the death penalty? An answer to this question could affect some of the estimated 300 veterans who now sit on death rows across the country, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But it’s unclear how many of them suffer from PTSD or traumatic brain injuries, given how uneven the screening for these disorders has been.

Experts are divided about whether veterans with PTSD who commit capital crimes deserve what is known as a “categorical exemption” or “exclusion.” Juveniles receive such treatment, as do those with mental disabilities. In 2009, Anthony Giardino, a lawyer and Iraq War veteran, argued in favor of this in the Fordham Law Review, writing that courts “should consider the more fundamental question of whether the government should be in the business of putting to death the volunteers they have trained, sent to war, and broken in the process” who likely would not be in that position “but for their military service.” In a Institute of Medicine study estimated that between 13 and 20 percent of the 2.6 million Americans who’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan showed at least some of the symptoms of PTSD.

Add to that the training these soldiers receive. “The current efficacy of military training means we are sending to war the most proficient and lethal killers in our nation’s history,” Joshua London, a veterans’ defense lawyer and advocate for reformed judicial treatment of veterans, wrote in a 2014 law journal article, “Why Are We Killing Veterans?” “Likewise, the warriors that return home to our communities are conditioned in a manner that makes them more dangerous, volatile, and amenable to violence than any previous generation of veterans.” If a soldier seems troubled, some psychiatrists have noted, often the preferred treatment option is to provide psychotropic drugs without additional follow-up. For some, especially when combined with other drugs or alcohol, this can result in difficulty with self-control. In April 2014, journalist Ann Jones documented dozens of killings by veterans since 2002.

During his trial, the jury was presented two stark versions of Thuesen. The first was of a cold-blooded murderer. The night before the murders, Thuesen went to see Rachel, but she told him to leave her alone. He broke into her house and lay in her bed, and after she got home he shot her, then Travis, three times each. But Thuesen was also presented as a deeply traumatized soldier who, one of his fellow Marines testified, was forced to fire a heavy machine gun into a car carrying several people and at least one child. Several experts agreed that Thuesen suffered from PTSD and had tried to seek treatment over the course of at least two years. Six months before the murders, Thuesen was suicidal and taken by the police to the VA Medical Center in Houston. He stayed just a few days while he detoxed from alcohol abuse, and he was given anti-depressants and referred to counseling sessions at his local VA clinic.

Tim Rojas, the Marine who’d served with Thuesen and testified about the time he shot up the car, finds himself somewhere in the middle. “People are going to say, ‘Well then, post-traumatic stress does not give you the license to shoot or kill,” he says. “I agree with that. Of course not. But in this case, does John deserve to be on death row? No. Absolutely not. Does he need to be accountable for his actions? Yes. But there’s no way, no way, he needs to lose his life. No way.”

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An Ex-Marine Killed Two People in Cold Blood. Should His PTSD Keep Him From Death Row?

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Pop Goes The Digital Media Bubble

by NorineAlison Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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You don’t always hear the bubble burst. Often, it’s more a gradual escaping of air, signaled by nothing more than the occasional queasy feeling you bat away: One house for sale on the block, oh well. Two, three—maybe just a robust market? Five, six, seven—and suddenly everyone’s underwater and the sheriff is at your door.

That’s kind of how it’s feeling in the digital media business. For a few years now, investors have been pouring money into online news with the kind of fervor that once fueled the minimansion boom. But in the past year, the boarded-up windows have started showing up: The Guardian, which bet heavily on expanding its digital presence in the United States, announced it needed to cut costs by 20 percent. The tech news site Gigaom shut down suddenly, with its founder warning that “it is a very dangerous time” to be in digital media. Mobile-first Circa put itself on “indefinite hiatus.” Al Jazeera America, once hailed as the hottest thing in bringing together cable news and digital publishing, shut down and laid off hundreds of journalists.

Pop.

And it’s been getting worse. As the New York Times’ John Herrman put it, “in recent weeks, what had been a simmering worry among publishers has turned into borderline panic.” Mashable, which had made a big investment in news and current affairs, laid off dozens of journalists and pivoted to a new, video-heavy strategy. Investor darling BuzzFeed fought reports that it had slashed earnings projections by nearly 50 percent. Salon laid off a string of veteran staffers. Yahoo put its core business, including its news and search features, up for sale.

Pop. Pop.

Here’s the thing: It was not hard to see this coming. For years now, smooth-talking guys (yes, mostly guys) with PowerPoint decks have offered up one magic formula after another to save the business of news. Citizen journalism—all the reporting done by users, for free, with newsrooms simply curating it all. “Brand You”—each journo out there on her own, drawing legions of followers to her personal output. (Even Andrew Sullivan couldn’t make that work.) Viral headlines—every news shop Upworthy-ing its way into the Facebook swarm. Aggregation, curation, explainer journalism, explainer video, branded content, text bots, video, branded video, branded virtual reality video…each fueling the hope that here, at last, was the way to make news profitable again. A whole class of future-of-news pundits made a living pontificating about how “legacy media” were getting their lunch eaten by digital-native startups.

And the investor money kept coming. BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, Fusion, Mic (not to mention their 1stGen cousins Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, and Gawker)—for a while they all were too fast to fail, hiring Twitter-famous names out of established newsrooms, rolling out sexy technology systems, and exploding watermelons on live video. As Josh Topolsky, a veteran of digital media (most recently at Bloomberg) wrote the other day, “I can tell you from personal experience over the last several months, having met with countless investors and leaders of media companies and editors and writers and technologists in the media world that there is a desperate belief that The Problem can be solved with the New Thing. And goddammit someone must have it in their pitch deck.”

But while a ton of great work has come (and continues to come) out of all the New Things, none of them have answered the burning question of how to pay for journalism—especially the public-interest, watchdog, feet-to-the-fire kind that democracy needs to function. For one thing, all the big new digital shops today employ, between them, a few thousand journalists—compared with the ten-thousand-plus laid off in the great retrenchment of 2007 to 2010. For another, like virtually every other hot property across the internet, digital media startups are better at growing than at showing a profit. And since a profit is what the people supplying those giant piles of cash are ultimately looking for…

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Mother Jones is a nonprofit—precisely to avoid this fate. Tax-deductible donations from readers give us stability.

Remember when Chris Hughes put The New Republic up for sale earlier this year? His letter to TNR staff subtly blamed the very same people it was addressed to: “I will be the first to admit that when I took on this challenge nearly four years ago, I underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate.”

Bullshit. “Transitioning” was not The New Republic‘s main challenge. Refusing to work on, with, and for the internet was once a pervasive problem in news organizations, but while vestiges of that still linger, it is no longer what keeps publications from succeeding financially.

What keeps them from making money now is that online advertising pays pennies. (Actually, a penny per reader is pretty good these days—CPM, or “cost per thousand” ads, is often far less than half that.) And there are a ton of people competing for those fractions of a penny—including Google and Facebook, which collectively pulled in a whopping 85 percent of new ad spending in the first quarter of this year. The only way to make ends meet in that environment is to turn up the fire hose of fast and cheap content or rent your pages out to native advertising (sorry, branded content).

Look at it this way: A reporter doing even modestly original work might produce five stories a week (and that’s not allowing for anything more than a few phone calls and a couple of rounds of editing per piece). If each of those stories gets, on average, 50,000 readers, and each of those page views generates 0.01 cents (again, a very generous rate), you’ll end up grossing $2,500 a week, or $130,000 a year, with which you’ll have to pay the reporter and her editor, their benefits, web tech, sales and ops staff, taxes, insurance, electricity, rent, laptops, phones…

And this calculus assumes a brutal pace of hour-by-hour filing and publishing, with journalists constantly looking over their shoulder at the traffic numbers. (When a New York Daily News editor was fired last week for dropping attributions from columnist Shaun King’s stories, he noted that he was expected to process 20 stories from five reporters each day.) And the kind of digging that an investigative story requires—months of research and reporting, plus fact-checking, editing, and maybe multimedia production—forget it. The math just doesn’t work.

So what does? At MoJo, the answer is: You.

From the very beginning, 40 years ago this year, our newsroom has been built on the belief that journalism needs to be untethered from corporate interests or deep-pocketed funders—that the only way a free press can be paid for is by its readers. This can take a few different forms: subscriptions, donations, micropayments, all of which we’re experimenting with. It can be something the audience is forced to do (via the paywalls you’ll find at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal) or something they choose to do, as in public radio.

At Mother Jones, we’ve gone the latter route: Our mission is to make our journalism accessible to as many people as possible. Instead of requiring you to pay, we bet on trust: We trust you’ll recognize the value of the reporting and pitch in what you can. And you trust us to put that money to work—by going out there and kicking ass.

Because of your trust, we can choose which stories we go after, rather than chasing the spin du jour. We can look where others in the media do not. We can, as our colleague David Corn puts it, get off the spinning hamster wheel and dig deep.

And we can do it without fearing that some corporate overlord will pull the plug. Remember what happened when casino magnate and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson bought Nevada’s largest daily newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal: as the sale was being negotiated, reporters were mysteriously tasked with digging up dirt on a judge who’d antagonized Adelson. Then the newsroom was told to back off covering the biggest story in town—their boss. This was a paper where a columnist had already been hounded into bankruptcy by Adelson over a few words. (We faced a similar attack recently from another billionaire upset about our critical coverage of his past.) Your support is what keeps Mother Jones‘ journalists from having to fear that kind of intimidation and control.

If you’re a regular reader of Mother Jones, you’ll have noticed that we’ve been in the equivalent of a pledge drive this month: We need to bring in $175,000 by Saturday to stay on track. This is something we do three times a year, and it’s the most important way we raise money to pay for everything we do.

But we’re not crazy about these monthlong fundraisers, and maybe you aren’t either. So we’re looking at ways to make it easier (“frictionless,” as they say in the tech world) for you to support the journalism you believe in. One of our big initiatives is an online sustainer program, where readers agree to give us a bit of money every month. That could make a big difference for our stability: Just 1,200 more readers who value our reporting enough to pitch in $20 a month would get our “sustaining” revenue up to $50,000 a month, or $600,000 every year. If that’s an option for you, it would be a big help.

Become a monthly donor.

Make a one-time gift.

Meanwhile, that $175,000 by the end of the month? It’s not some arbitrary goal, but the cold, hard number required in our budget to keep our reporters on the beat. In the first 26 days of this month we’ve raised about 75 percent of that, so we need $45,000 in the next four days. But that’s how these campaigns typically work: Everyone waits until the last minute to pitch in.

If that’s you, remember that ultimately this is about something bigger than MoJo. If we’re going to have a functioning democracy, we’ll need a press that can turn over rocks, and the days of that being financed by deep-pocketed media companies are drawing to a close. The new moguls are in the technology business, not the journalism business. And while some of them say wonderful things about journalism, money talks—and right now, the money is saying “pop.”

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Pop Goes The Digital Media Bubble

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Kids clear key hurdle in their federal climate change lawsuit

by DaneMartinez Posted on April 8, 2016

Kids clear key hurdle in their federal climate change lawsuit

By on 8 Apr 2016commentsShare

Should kids be able to sue for a safe climate? A federal judge just said yes.

Last month, in Eugene, Ore., a district court heard 21 youth plaintiffs’ arguments as to why their case should proceed to trial. The kids allege that by failing to act on climate change, the U.S. government — including the president and a handful of federal agencies — have violated several of their constitutional rights. As we reported in March:

The complaint alleges violation of the kids’ Fifth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection. By failing to act on climate change, it argues, the government discriminates against youth as a class. Without access to a healthy climate, they’re deprived of their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property.

The complaint is also built on the public trust doctrine, a carryover from English common law that says a government has the duty to protect certain natural resources and systems on behalf of current and future generations. “It originated with Emperor Justinian in Rome,” Alex Loznak, a 19-year-old plaintiff, explained to the press. “It’s reflected in the Magna Carta, the writings of Thomas Jefferson, and cited in U.S. court decisions dating back to the 1800s.”

Backed by a slew of fossil fuel interests, the Justice Department filed a complaint arguing for the case’s dismissal. Now, with the new decision in hand, the 21 youth plaintiffs will head back to federal court for a proper hearing.

Said lead attorney Philip Gregory in a statement, “This decision is one of the most significant in our nation’s history.” If the kids win in the big leagues, that might actually be true.

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Kids clear key hurdle in their federal climate change lawsuit

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Over Dinner, Clinton and Sanders Bash Wisconsin’s Scott Walker

by LethaStover Posted on April 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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With just a few days left before the Wisconsin primary, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are trying their best to convince Democrats in the state that they’re the real anti-Scott Walker.

On Saturday night, Wisconsin’s Democratic elite gathered at a convention center in downtown Milwaukee to listen to a string of Democratic politicians—including both Sanders and Clinton—offer speeches at the party’s annual Founders Day Gala. The crowd was swank, well-connected: Tickets for the gala started at $150 and ran up to $5,000 for a “prime table,” and based on cheers and stickers, the party insiders heavily favored Clinton. But attendees were united in shouting support for any denunciation of their governor, first when Sanders spoke and then again when Clinton took the stage later in the evening (the presidential candidates swept quickly through the convention hall just for their slotted speaking times, so unfortunately there was no public crossing of paths).

“It is terrible to see the damage Gov. Walker and his allies in the legislature have done in just five years,” Clinton said.

“Think about all of the things Gov. Walker does, and I will do exactly the opposite,” Sanders promised for how he’d govern in the White House.

Polls released over the past week have generally shown Sanders holding a narrow lead over Clinton in Wisconsin, including the well-respected Marquette Law School poll that had Sanders ahead by 4 percent earlier this week. Meanwhile, Walker’s approval numbers in the state have sunk since he won reelection in 2014 and then turned his attention to his failed presidential run. Voters in the state now give him a net negative 10 percent favorability. Running by bashing Walker is a reliable way to inspire passion among Wisconsin Democrats.

Clinton tied a host of her regular campaign issues into a referendum against Walker. “We believe that a governor that attacks teachers, nurses, and firefighters, it doesn’t make him a leader, it makes him a bully,” she said. She warned that Ted Cruz and the other Republican presidential candidates would export Walker-style policies nationally, and that the result would be cataclysmic for the country.

In a not-so-subtle jab at Sanders, who has been hesitant to throw his weight behind down-ballot Democrats, Clinton promised to do everything in her power to get Walker out of office and get Democrats back in control of the Wisconsin legislature. “In 2018, we will defeat Scott Walker,” Clinton guaranteed.

She trained her harshest criticism on Rebecca Bradley, a state Supreme Court justice appointed by Walker and who is up for election on Tuesday. During the campaign, liberals in Wisconsin have highlighted Bradley’s past writings, which included a 2006 column in which the judge likens use of birth control to murder. “I had to read this three times, she has actually said birth control is morally abhorrent and doctors who provided it, namely birth control, and women who use it, namely birth control, are party to murder,” Clinton said, her voice full of astonishment.

“There is no place,” she said, “on any Supreme Court, or any court in this country, no place at all for Rebecca Bradley’s decades-long track record of dangerous rhetoric against women, survivors of sexual assault, and the LGBT community.”

Half an hour before Clinton took the mic at the center of the room, Sanders had ripped into Walker for pushing laws to restrict voting access. “I have contempt, absolute contempt, for those Republican governors who do not have the guts to support free, open, and fair elections,” Sanders said. Thanks to Walker, Wisconsin has new strict photo ID law that has made it difficult for some groups—that just happen to skew Democratic—from being able to cast a vote. “I say to Gov. Walker, and all of the other Republican governors who are trying to make it harder to vote for poor people and old people and people of color and young people—trying to make it harder for them to participate in the political process,” Sanders said, “I say to them, if you don’t have to guts to participate in a free and fair election, get out of politics and get another job.”

Continued here:

Over Dinner, Clinton and Sanders Bash Wisconsin’s Scott Walker

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Porter Ranch CEO got a $3 million bonus after a massive natural gas leak

by RebeccaQ50 Posted on March 31, 2016

Porter Ranch CEO got a $3 million bonus after a massive natural gas leak

By on 31 Mar 2016commentsShare

Most of us aren’t rewarded for causing major health, environmental, and public relations disasters on the job. But most of us aren’t the CEOs of fossil fuel companies.

The Los Angles Times reports that Debra L. Reed, chairman and CEO of Sempra Energy, the parent company of the natural gas producer responsible for the enormous natural gas leak at Porter Ranch received a $3.17 million bonus in 2015, bringing her total compensation for the year to $16.1 million. But before you start moaning about the 1 percent and executive compensation, take heart: Before Reed received her bonus, her salary was cut by a whooping $130,000, or less than 1 percent of her total pay, because of the disaster. Poor thing.

At its peak, the Porter Ranch leak released 60 tons of natural gas per hour, and residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood reported headaches, nausea, and severe nosebleeds, as well as eye, ear and throat infections. More than 10,000 Porter Ranch residents (and two schools) were forced to temporarily relocate, which cost the company about $2 million a day. The leak lasted from October 2015 until February 2016.

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The environmental impact was massive as well. The leak was particularly damaging because of the amount of methane — a greenhouse gas more potent that carbon dioxide — released. Porter Ranch’s greenhouse-gas impact was even larger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and every day of the leak was equivalent to building six coal-fired power plants or putting an extra 4.5 million cars on the road.

And for this, Debra Reed received an extra $3 million.

So how is it possible that Reed would receive anything other than a boot out the door? LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik put it well: “It’s the result of a daisy-chain culture among corporate executives who sit on each others’ boards and judge each others’ performance in a near-vacuum.”

In other words, it’s friends voting on friend’s compensation.

Porter Ranch residents, naturally, were not pleased at the revelation of Reed’s bonus. “This sends out a signal that as long as the dollars are there, the impact on people, homes and the environment doesn’t matter,” Paula Cracium, president of the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council, told Hiltzik. “That’s not the signal we need to send to executives who have so much power.” But for every under-performing CEO who gets handsomely rewarded for his or her mistakes, that’s exactly the message we’re sending.

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Porter Ranch CEO got a $3 million bonus after a massive natural gas leak

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Yet More Obama Tyranny Turns Out to Be Pretty Non-Tyrannical

by JarredMessina Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stanley Kurtz is yet again in a lather about a HUD program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, the centerpiece of President Obama’s plan to fight housing discrimination:

Federal Tyranny Gags GOP in Hillary’s Backyard

The Obama administration’s AFFH policy has morphed from “mere” massive regulatory overreach into a bald attempt to quash the freedom of speech of its political opponents. The new federal effort to muzzle Westchester County Executive Robert Astorino’s attacks on the Obama administration’s housing policy is very arguably designed to silence public opposition to AFFH, and to remove a potential political time-bomb from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Hillary Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua, in Westchester County, New York is ground zero in the national controversy over AFFH….And now it just so happens that the “Federal Monitor” appointed to oversee the settlement of a court case compelling Westchester to “affirmatively further fair housing” has asked a court to muzzle Astorino.

But here’s a funny thing: Westchester’s problems were caused by a private lawsuit filed in 2006, which it lost in February 2009. It hardly seems likely that Obama had much to do with that. And it seems doubly unlikely that AFFH, which was announced a mere nine months ago, could possibly be “ground zero” for a fight that’s been ongoing for over a decade.

Still, I suppose those are nits. Regardless of when it all started, it’s certainly outrageous for the feds to try to gag an opponent of their policies. This is the kind of thing that—

What’s that? Maybe I should take a look at the federal monitor’s actual court filing? How tiresome. But we’re professionals around here. Let’s see now…ah, here it is on page 55: “Recommended Remedies.” This is what the monitor wants:

a Court declaration reemphasizing the essential terms of the Settlement and issuing findings making clear that none of the terms have been changed and the County’s statements analyzed in Section II of this report are false;
distribution by the County, voluntarily or by order, of the declaration and findings described above to the leadership of all of the eligible communities;
posting the declaration and findings described above prominently on the County website and the removal of press releases inconsistent with the declaration and findings;
unsealing the videotapes of the depositions of, at the least, the County Executive, the Commissioner of Planning, and the Director of Communications, inasmuch as each made or reviewed unsupported public statements that were inconsistent with both the terms of the Settlement and their own sworn testimony; and
hiring, within 30 days of the issuance of this report, a public communications consultant that will craft a message and implement a strategy sufficiently robust to provide information broadly to the public that describes the benefits of integration, as required by Paragraph 33(c)….

Basically, Westchester is under court order to do certain things. They haven’t done them. In fact, county leaders have been loudly and habitually lying about both the consent decree and HUD’s affordable housing requirements for years. So now the monitor wants (a) the actual terms of the settlement to be widely distributed, (b) depositions to be unsealed so everyone can see what county leaders have been saying under oath, and (c) a third-party consultant to craft the court-ordered PR plan, since the county plainly has no intention of obeying the consent decree on its own.

But nobody is being muzzled. As near as I can tell, Astorino can continue saying anything he wants. However, the county, in its official capacity as an arm of the government, is required to carry out the consent decree. In the face of repeated intransigence, the federal monitor is asking the court to force it to do just that.

I like reading The Corner. It’s a good place to get a lot of different conservative opinions on the headlines of the day. But there are a few bylines I routinely skip because the authors are basically unhinged. Kurtz is one of them. Among other things, he was part of the crowd that went bananas about Bill Ayers during the 2008 campaign, and he’s been flogging Obama’s “war on the suburbs” for years. Today’s post is just the latest installment.

Anyway: No muzzling. No gagging. No tyranny. Just a county that refuses to obey a court order and a federal monitor who wants a judge to push harder on them. It’s hard to think of anything more routine.

Excerpt from:  

Yet More Obama Tyranny Turns Out to Be Pretty Non-Tyrannical

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Merrick Garland Was Accused of Protecting a Judge Charged With Ethics Violations

by MindyDortch906 Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, DC Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Merrick Garland, is widely respected by members of both parties. His judicial background is largely devoid of controversy over hot-button issues such as abortion or gay marriage. But two years ago, he angered civil rights groups, death penalty lawyers, and other legal observers who accused him and his colleagues on the DC Circuit of protecting a fellow judge accused of serious ethical lapses.

The episode dates back to 2014, when Garland was in charge of ruling on an ethics complaint against Texas Judge Edith Jones of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

A Reagan appointee, Jones is an archconservative darling of the right-wing Federalist Society and a favorite of presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who has pointed to her as the kind of Supreme Court justice he’d nominate. In 2006, the Texas Observer dubbed her one of the “worst judges in Texas,” in part because of her decision to uphold the death sentence for a man whose lawyer slept through the entire trial. She has been especially hostile to sexual harassment claims, once dismissing such lawsuits in a Federalist Society speech as “petty interoffice disputes.” In one case, a woman provided graphic testimony about the severe sexual harassment and abuse she’d suffered at work, saying that a male co-worker had pinched her butt with a pair of pliers and another had pinched her breast. Jones replied to the latter charge, “Well, he apologized.”

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Merrick Garland Was Accused of Protecting a Judge Charged With Ethics Violations

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Should kids be able to sue for a safe climate? This federal court is about to decide

by DelorisBourassa Posted on March 10, 2016

No Kidding

Should kids be able to sue for a safe climate? This federal court is about to decide

By on 10 Mar 2016commentsShare

This post was co-published with Moyers & Company.

EUGENE, Ore. — Courtrooms usually aren’t jovial places, but with 21 youth plaintiffs and two busloads of supporting junior high-school students in tow, the air in the U.S. District Courthouse here on Wednesday felt more field trip than federal court.

The occasion for the youthful energy was a hearing on a complaint filed on behalf of the plaintiffs, aged 8–19, by Oregon nonprofit Our Children’s Trust. The kids’ lawyers assert that their clients, and the younger generation as a whole, have been deprived of key rights by their own government. By failing to act on climate change, they argue, the United States government — including President Obama and a baker’s dozen federal agencies — has valued its own generation more than future generations, which will bear a greater burden with respect to the climate crisis.

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The Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the complaint, and Wednesday’s hearing had a federal judge considering that motion. The youth plaintiffs’ counsel sparred with government lawyers as well as attorneys representing fossil fuel interests. This kind of case might sound, well, juvenile, but trade groups with ties to the oil and gas lobby — the American Petroleum Institute, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and the National Association of Manufacturers — were concerned enough about it that they joined as co-defendants in November of last year. Now, the Oregon U.S. District Court will decide whether or not the complaint will proceed to trial.

Xiuhtezcatl Tonatiuh Martinez, a 15-year-old indigenous activist and a plaintiff on the case, summed up the kids’ perspective at a press conference after the hearing. “We are valuing our futures over profits,” he said. “We are valuing this planet over corporate greed.”

Xiuhtezcatl Tonatiuh Martinez (15) stands in front of his fellow plaintiffs and addresses the press.

Clayton Aldern

This isn’t the first time Our Children’s Trust has brought forth a youth climate lawsuit. Indeed, the group has at one time or another filed suit in all 50 states and currently has cases pending in five states. Back in November, in a case brought by a coalition of Seattle teenagers, a Washington judge ruled that the state was constitutionally obligated to protect its natural resources “for the common benefit of the people of the State” — a notable win for the young plaintiffs — but she did not go so far as to rule that the state’s carbon emissions-limiting standards in question needed to adhere to the “best available science.” A 2011 suit, which the youth plaintiffs ended up losing, also targeted the federal government for failing to keep the atmosphere safe for future generations. It perhaps goes without saying that these types of complaints are incredible long shots.

Julia Olson, a lawyer with Wild Earth Advocates and Our Children’s Trust who argued the plaintiffs’ case on Wednesday, is optimistic about the outcome of this complaint, though. “I believe in our Constitution, and I think it can work to address even the most systemic, intractable problem of our generation,” she told me.

The complaint alleges violation of the kids’ Fifth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection. By failing to act on climate change, it argues, the government discriminates against youth as a class. Without access to a healthy climate, they’re deprived of their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property.

The complaint is also built on the public trust doctrine, a carryover from English common law that says a government has the duty to protect certain natural resources and systems on behalf of current and future generations. “It originated with Emperor Justinian in Rome,” Alex Loznak, a 19-year-old plaintiff, explained to the press. “It’s reflected in the Magna Carta, the writings of Thomas Jefferson, and cited in U.S. court decisions dating back to the 1800s.”

An important question at hand on Wednesday was whether the public trust doctrine applies to the federal government. The U.S. government and its fossil-fuel industry co-defendants argued that legal precedent only considers it to apply to states. That’s a crucial distinction, because it will help determine whether or not the plaintiffs even have standing in the federal court system.

Youth plaintiff Isaac Vergun (13) poses outside the U.S. District Courthouse in Eugene, Ore.

Clayton Aldern

The defendants also contend that if the federal court took on the case, it would amount to an egregious overstep of authority by the judiciary. “This is the type of problem that is designed to be solved by the political branches,” argued U.S. counsel Sean C. Duffy at the hearing. He said that denying the U.S. government’s motion for dismissal would effectively turn the judicial branch into a “de facto super-agency.”

Another core argument of the defense is that all cases addressing constitutional rights must demonstrate that the government, through its actions, has infringed upon these rights or exceeded its authority. Instead, the defense argued, the kids’ case alleges a failure to act, and you can’t require the government to simply “do more.” “Our Constitution is one that limits the power of government,” argued intervenor counsel Quin Sorenson, who represented industry interests at the hearing.

That’s not how Olson sees it, though. “What we have today is not just a failure to act,” she told the press after the hearing. “The government is not just sitting by and doing nothing. They are doing everything to cause this problem.” Indeed, the complaint calls out the government for its continued actions to “permit, authorize, and subsidize fossil fuel extraction, development, consumption and exportation.”

It’s also not unprecedented for a court to demand that the government meet a specific standard to ensure its citizens’ safety, she said. In Brown v. Plata, for example, a 2010 Supreme Court case concerning prison reform, the court required a mandatory limit on prison populations for the sake of health and safety. Summarizing the decision, she said that while the Supreme Court had no scientific standards to apply at the time, it ruled that it could rely on expert evidence. “The Court selected the number — it set the standard — to keep those prisoners safe.” And when it comes to determining the safe level of climate pollution in the atmosphere, “we have scientific standards,” she said.

Supporters of the youth plaintiffs assemble on the steps of the U.S. District Courthouse in Eugene, Ore., after the hearing. The banner reads, “Our future is a constitutional right.”

Clayton Aldern

“The way I hope it will go is that the judicial branch will say, ‘You’ve got to do something,’” said James Hansen, adjunct professor at Columbia University and former director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hansen’s granddaughter is a plaintiff in the case, and he’s formally listed in the complaint as the legal guardian of “Future Generations.” He continued, “Hopefully the court will ask for a plan: How are you going to ensure the rights of young people?”

In a time of gridlock and sorely needed climate action, the case couldn’t come soon enough, Hansen said. “It gets harder and harder to stabilize the climate if you go longer and longer without turning the curve.”

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Addressing climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time, and it necessarily causes us to ask some big questions. Is there a constitutional right to be free from climate change? Is there a constitutional right to a safe climate? Is youth a class, or simply a mutable trait? If the federal government takes actions that worsen the climate crisis, does that amount to an abuse of its power?

Said Olson: “We are not just in a climate crisis. We will have a significant constitutional crisis and a crisis in our democracy if this doesn’t work.”

The 21 youth plaintiffs, along with climatologist James Hansen (top, third from left) pose with Our Children’s Trust attorneys Phil Gregory (top left) and Julia Olson (bottom left).

Clayton Aldern

Watch Bill Moyers’ 2014 interview with youth plaintiff Kelsey Juliana:

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Should kids be able to sue for a safe climate? This federal court is about to decide

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Should kids be able to sue for a safe climate? This federal court is about to decide