Tag: racist: african-american

Sessions Made What Might be His Most Racially Discriminatory Decision Yet and Barely Anyone Noticed

In an extraordinary move that is not getting nearly enough attention, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded a Justice Department letter that warned state courts about the unlawful practice of forcing low income defendants to pay fines or face jail. Courts across the country were (and many still are) enforcing these type of fees in order to generate revenue. When people fail to pay the fees typically imposed for minor traffic infractions or city code violations, courts will issue arrest warrants, send people to jail or take away their driving licenses.  The problem with all that? In America, we don’t believe in debtor’s prisons. Oh, and the practice is unconstitutional. That means illegal. The U.S. outlawed debtor’s prisons in 1833. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled that jailing indigent debtors was illegal under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause

“The idea that the Department of Justice doesn’t care about the United States Constitution in courts is so wrong, and really unfortunate. It is a message that should not be sent, and has practical implications,” the Honorable Lisa Foster, who served as the Director of the Office for Access to Justice at the U.S. Department of Justice said to Law&Crime.  Foster authored the “Dear Colleague” letter that was sent out in March 2016, and was rescinded by Sessions on Thursday.

Maybe the worst part of all about this decision? The fines and fees disproportionately impact minorities who can’t afford to pay fines right away and often find themselves in jail. It’s not just me saying this, there is study after study proving this.

Imagine getting pulled over for failing to stop at a stop sign. You get a $100 ticket. You can’t pay it right away, so your license gets suspended. Then you have to drive to work to support your family but get pulled over and thrown in jail for having a suspended license. Don’t believe me? The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit in 2015 alleging that the small town of Alexander City, Alabama (population 15,000) was running a “modern-day debtor’s prison” where poor people who couldn’t pay city fines were forced to sit in jail instead. 

The stories go on and on.

Now to be clear, the “Dear Colleague” that was sent last year under the Obama administration was not some kind of earth shattering, super left-wing mandate. The letter was literally just guidance notifying local judges, prosecutors, attorneys and advocates about the law. It was a letter that state municpalities had asked for. Here are some examples of what the letter instructed:

 (1)Courts must not incarcerate a person for nonpayment of fines or fees without first
conducting an indigency determination and establishing that the failure to pay was
willful;
(2) Courts must consider alternatives to incarceration for indigent defendants unable to
pay fines and fees;
(3) Courts must not condition access to a judicial hearing on the prepayment of fines or
fees;
(4) Courts must provide meaningful notice and, in appropriate cases, counsel, when
enforcing fines and fees

The DOJ attorneys go on to cite very well-established Supreme Court opinions like Bearden v. Georgia (1983) to back up their guidelines.  The SCOTUS opinion found that the due process and equal protection principles of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibit “punishing a person for his poverty.”  In fact, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held tha tthe government can’t jail someone for failure to pay a fine.  The strange thing about all of this is that until Attorney General Sessions came along, this was a pretty non-partisan issue. Both Republicans and Democrats agreed there was a problem here.

In fact, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which is a well-known conservative non-profit organization for state legislators, was also opposed to these type of excessive fees and fines. In their resolution against the practice they wrote: “excessive criminal justice financial obligations can contribute to unnecessary incarceration as some studies have found 20 percent of those in local jails are incarcerated because of failure to pay a fine or fee, which can make it even harder for the person to obtain employment and add to the burden on taxpayers.”

The initial “Dear Colleague” letter, which has now been rescinded, was in response, in part, to the DOJ’s Ferguson Report which found that police were unfairly targeting minorities, and saddling residents with fines. For example, a Ferguson woman parked her car illegally in 2007, and somehow ended up having to pay $1,000 and serve 6 days in jail. That’s insane.

“It is tragic for the Department of Justice to retreat from concerns about and constitutional commitments to equal and fair treatment,” Judith Resnik, the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, said in an email to Law&Crime.

“I think it shocking and unfortunate,” Judge Foster said.

[Law and Crime]

Trump still privately questions Obama’s birth certificate

President Trump is still privately questioning the authenticity of former President Obama’s birth certificate, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

A senator, who asked not to be named, told The Times that Trump is having difficulty moving on from his past claims that Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

Trump led the “birther” movement against Obama, claiming for years that the former president was born outside of the U.S.

Obama eventually released his birth certificate to counter Trump’s claims.

Trump said that Obama was born in the U.S. during a campaign stop last year.

Trump advisers reportedly told The Times that Trump has continued to talk about conspiracy theories that aren’t based in fact since taking office.

The newspaper first reported last week that Trump has been questioning the authenticity of the “Access Hollywood” tape that features audio of him bragging about groping and kissing women without their consent.

Trump acknowledged that it was him on the tape when it was first released last year and apologized for the comments.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to say if Trump thinks the tape is fake at a press briefing Monday.

“The president addressed this, this was litigated and certainly answered during the election by the overwhelming support for the president and the fact he’s sitting here in the Oval Office today,” Huckabee Sanders said Monday.

“He’s made his position on that clear at that time, as have the American people in support of him.”

[The Hill]

Trump bizarrely responds to article suggesting he criticizes black people for racist reasons

President Donald Trump on Thursday offered a bizarre but familiar response to a tweet with an article from The Washington Post’s liberal-leaning Plum Line blog suggesting that he criticizes prominent black people to play on racist sentiment within his base.

The article’s author, Greg Sargent, tweeted, “Trump regularly attacks high-profile African Americans to feed his supporters’ belief that the system is rigged for minorities,” to which Trump responded, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Earlier this week, Trump went after LaVar Ball — the father of LiAngelo Ball, one of the three UCLA basketball players released from detention in China after Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month — on Twitter.

After Ball refused to thank Trump for the president’s role in the release of the three players, who were accused of shoplifting from several stores in China, Trump called Ball an “ungrateful fool” and compared him to a “poor man’s version of Don King.”

Sargent’s article linked this to Trump’s other criticisms of well-known black people in sports and politics, calling it “a gratuitously ugly pattern.” It ended by suggesting that Trump engages in a “pattern of race-baiting” that “might be designed to resonate with” his supporters.

Throughout his career, Trump has gone after dozens of politicians, media personalities, and sports stars of many races, but his response to Sargent’s tweet was bizarre because, minutes later, he tweeted the same thing on its own.

Trump has previously tweeted things erroneously. For example, in late October, he wished a happy birthday to Lee Greenwood, the singer who wrote “God Bless the USA,” but tagged another Lee Greenwood who appeared to have protested Trump’s immigration ban.

[Business Insider]

Reality

Trump could have been unaware of a new UI change to the Twitter app, where if you are viewing a tweet the “new tweet” button won’t create a new tweet but issue a reply. But this tweet hasn’t been deleted.

Trump calls LaVar Ball an ‘ungrateful fool’

President Donald Trump took to Twitter to continue to rail against LaVar Ball, the father of a UCLA basketball player who was detained for shoplifting in China.

At 5:25 am, ET, Trump rehashed his beef with Ball, who has been reluctant to thank the President for his role in his son’s release from China.

“It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence – IT WAS ME. Too bad! LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair,” Trump tweeted in part.

Trump called Ball an “ungrateful fool,” adding that getting his son home is “a really big deal.”

The tweets come after Ball said Monday in an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he didn’t know what the President had done to get his son and two other UCLA basketball players out of China.

After Ball’s refusal to thank Trump in an interview with ESPN a few days after the players’ release, the President said he should have left the three players in jail.

LaVar Ball’s 39 most amazing lines on Donald Trump in Monday’s CNN interview
“Did he help the boys get out? I don’t know. … If I was going to thank somebody I’d probably thank President Xi (Jinping),” Ball said Monday night when asked about his back-and-forth with the President by CNN’s Chris Cuomo.

“It wasn’t like he was in the US and said, ‘OK, there’s three kids in China. I need to go over and get them.’ That wasn’t the thought process,” he told Cuomo.

Ball suggested Trump, who frequently brought up the conversation he had with Xi about the release during a trip to Asia, should stay quiet.

“If you help, you shouldn’t have to say anything,” he said. “Let him do his political affairs and let me handle my son and let’s just stay in our lane.”

[CNN]

Carson Doubles-Down: Slaves Were ‘Involuntary Immigrants’

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson doubled-down Monday on his description of slaves as immigrants, arguing that the label fits anyone who comes into a country from the outside – even “involuntary immigrants.”

Speaking to department employees in his first full day on the job, Carson stoked controversy when he said America is “a land of dreams and opportunities,” even for “immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships” and “worked even longer, even harder for less.”

The remarks provoked uproar on social media, where many on the left lambasted the HUD secretary for describing slaves as immigrants aspiring for a better life. Both Chelsea Clinton and Samuel L. Jackson also weighed in with disbelief.

On Monday evening, speaking on the Sirius XM radio show of his friend and business partner Armstrong Williams, Carson refused to back away from the remarks.

“I think people need to actually look up the word immigrant,” Carson said. “Whether you’re voluntary or involuntary, if you come from the outside to the inside, you’re an immigrant. Whether you’re legal or illegal, you come from the outside to inside, you’re an immigrant. Slaves came here as involuntary immigrants but they still had the strength to hold on.”

One woman who called into the show said she disagreed with Carson, arguing, “you can’t be an immigrant if you’re brought over here in chains.”

“Yes you can, you can be an involuntary immigrant,” Carson responded.

“We should be proud to have ancestors that had the mental strength to endure what so many others had not been able to endure,” he continued.

“They tried to enslave all kinds of people but they were not able to survive it and that requires a tremendous amount of toughness and will power and strength and hope and they had that. Don’t let someone turn that into something bad.”

Carson said the department employees he addressed earlier in the day understood his message, accusing the media of seizing on a non-existent controversy and overlooking the reception he received.

“Everyone in that auditorium was with me,” Carson said. “They knew exactly what I was saying. It’s only those people who are always trying to stir up controversy. Did they talk about the good things? Or the prolonged standing ovation? All the people standing in line to get pictures, the people who asked very good questions and got answers for them? The lady who stood up and said some of us were concerned but we’re not concerned about you anymore – no, they don’t cover that. They say, ‘ah, he said that slaves were immigrants and that’s a terrible thing to say and he’s out of contact with reality and he’s crazy.’ You know it’s really kind of sad what the media has degenerated into.”

“There were numerous people brought over here on slave ships and it was a horrible thing, I’m not saying that it wasn’t a horrible thing,” Carson continued. “But what I’m saying is that those people were strong, they were strong-willed. They didn’t just give up and die like many of the other people who they tried to enslave. And one of the reasons they didn’t just give up and die is because they used the brain god gave them and they figured a time would come when there would be freedom, a time would come when their children could achieve, so unless you have the ability to maintain that hope and that aspiration, you just give up and you die. Our ancestors did not do that.”

Carson then posted a statement on Facebook that walked back his claims.

(h/t The Hill)

Carson Refers to Slaves as ‘Immigrants’ in First Talk to HUD Employees

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson referred to slaves as “immigrants” dreaming of a better life in a talk with department employees, according to Monday reports.

“That’s what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity,” Carson said. “There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less.”

He added: “But they, too, had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

Carson, longtime supporter of President Trump who was sworn in as HUD secretary last week, compared abortion to slavery during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

“During slavery — and I know that’s one of those words you’re not supposed to say, but I’m saying it — during slavery, a lot of the slave owners thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to the slave,” Carson told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in October of 2015.

“What if the abolitionists had said, ‘I don’t believe in slavery, I think it’s wrong, but you guys do whatever you want to do?’ ” added the retired neurosurgeon, who opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest.

(h/t The Hill)

 

Betsy DeVos Press Release Celebrates Jim Crow Education System as Pioneer of “School Choice”

Donald Trump met Monday at the White House with the leaders of a number of historically black colleges and universities. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos commemorated the meeting with one of the more bonkers statements you will ever see a 21st century politician make, somehow twisting an attempt to bring up her pet issue of school choice into praise for the segregated higher education system of the Jim Crow South:

First of all, it sounds like a seventh-grader wrote this, which is perhaps what happens when you put someone who has never really had a real job in charge of the Department of Education. Second, this official 2017 federal government press release celebrates legal segregation (!!!) on the grounds that the Jim Crow education system gave black students “more options,” as if there was a robust competition between HBCUs and white universities for their patronage. (When black Mississippian James Meredith chose the “option” of enrolling at the University of Mississippi in 1962, a massive white mob formed on the campus; two people were shot to death and hundreds injured in the ensuing battle/riot, during which federal marshals came under heavy gunfire, requiring the ultimate intervention of 20,000 U.S. soldiers and thousands more National Guardsmen.)

DeVos is delivering the keynote address Tuesday at an HBCU event at the Library of Congress. Should be interesting.

(h/t Slate)

 

AG Sessions Says DOJ to ‘Pull Back’ on Police Department Civil Rights Suits

Donald Trump’s attorney general said Tuesday the Justice Department will limit its use of a tactic employed aggressively under President Obama — suing police departments for violating the civil rights of minorities.

“We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness. And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“So we’re going to try to pull back on this,” he told a meeting of the nation’s state attorneys general in Washington.

Sessions said such a move would not be “wrong or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.” Instead, he said people in poor and minority communities must feel free from the threat of violent crime, which will require more effective policing with help from the federal government.

While crime rates are half of what they were a few decades ago, recent increases in violent crimes do not appear to be “an aberration, a one-time blip. I’m afraid it represents the beginning of a trend.”

Sessions said he will encourage federal prosecutors to bring charges when crimes are committed using guns. Referring local drug violations that involve the use of a firearm, for example, to federal court can result is often a stiffer sentence than would be imposed by state courts.

“We need to return to the ideas that got us here, the ideas that reduce crime and stay on it. Maybe we got a bit overconfident when we’ve seen the crime rate decline so steadily for so long,” he said.

Under the Obama Administration, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations into police departments and sheriff’s offices and was enforcing 19 agreements at the end of 2016, resolving civil rights lawsuits filed against police departments in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, New Orleans, Cleveland and 15 other cities.

On Monday, Sessions said he is reviewing the Justice Department’s current policy toward enforcing federal law that prohibits possession of marijuana, but has made no decision about whether to get tougher.

His opposition to legalization is well known, and he emphasized it during an informal gathering of reporters . “I don’t think America will be a better place when more people, especially young people, smoke pot.”

States, he said, can pass their own laws on possession as they choose, “but it remains a violation of federal law.”

The current policy, spelled out in a 2013 memo from former deputy attorney general James Cole, said federal prosecutions would focus on distribution to minors, involvement of gangs or organized crime, sales beyond a state border, and growing marijuana plants on federal land.

(h/t NBC News)

Trump Asked a Black Reporter If the Congressional Black Caucus Are “Friends of Yours”

President Trump’s press conference Thursday had many unbelievable moments. But one of the most shocking was an exchange in which Trump asked a black reporter to set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus, and asked if the caucus members were “friends” of hers.

April Ryan, the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks in Baltimore, asked Trump whether he would include the Congressional Black Caucus in conversations about his “urban agenda” for the “inner city.”

But Ryan used the abbreviation “CBC” for the Congressional Black Caucus at first — and Trump didn’t appear to know what she was referring to.

“Am I going to include who?” he asked.

Ryan clarified: “Are you going to include the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — ”

“Well, I would,” Trump interrupted. “I tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting? Do you want to set up the meeting?”

“No, no, no, I’m just a reporter,” Ryan said.

“Are they friends of yours?” Trump asked.

Ryan replied, before Trump cut her off again, “I know some of them, but I’m sure they’re watching right now — ”

“I would love to meet with the Black Caucus,” Trump said. “I think it’s great, the Congressional Black Caucus, I think it’s great.”

As it turns out, the CBC asked Trump for a meeting weeks ago and never heard back:

Trump seems to have assumed that just because Ryan was black and asked a question about the CBC, she would know the caucus members personally and be able to set up a meeting with them. Trump’s question also reveals a basic ignorance of how reporters do their job.

As my colleague Jenée Desmond-Harris has explained, Trump has a big problem with racially stereotyping black people. He seems almost incapable of mentioning black Americans without also mentioning the “inner city,” which he strictly describes as a blighted, crime-ridden hellscape. But that association is not only racist stereotyping — it also doesn’t reflect how black Americans really live.

(h/t Vox)

 

Trump Rips ‘All Talk,’ ‘No Action’ Civil Rights Icon Lewis

President-elect Donald Trump harshly responded to civil rights icon and Georgia Rep. John Lewis on Saturday, calling him “all talk” and “no action” after Lewis said Trump was not a “legitimate” president.

“Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad,” Trump tweeted Saturday, which happened to fall on the weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday.

Lewis — an ally of King who was brutally beaten by police in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 while marching for civil rights — represents a Georgia district that includes most of Atlanta. On the campaign trail, Trump regularly decried crime in urban areas while pledging to revitalize neighborhoods primarily populated by black Americans.

A Hillary Clinton supporter, Lewis criticized Trump’s ascension to head of state due to Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election.

“I don’t see this President-elect as a legitimate president,” the long-serving Democrat told NBC News’ Chuck Todd in a clip released Friday.

It was an astonishing rebuke by a sitting member of Congress toward an incoming President. Trump, however, largely launched his political career by calling into question the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s presidency by repeatedly suggesting he wasn’t born in the United States.

(h/t CNN)

Reality

Here is a photo of a young John Lewis being beating by police at Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic march to Selma.

Here is a photo of a young John Lewis with a bloody nose.

Here is John Lewis being yanked from a “white’s only” diner.

Here is John Lewis being arrested for fighting for civil rights.

 

 

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