James.galbraith

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Georgians have two choices for the Senate seat in this year’s midterms. One is the incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock. He’s the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a Democrat, the first Black senator serving on the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee; Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; and the Special Committee on Aging and the Joint Economic Committee. The other is Herschel Walker, a retired NFL star with questionable business practices who doesn’t believe in evolution. Not a challenging decision if you ask me. But … it is Georgia.

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Walker gave a speech at Sugar Hill Church in Georgia Sunday where he actually questioned the science of evolution, not just implying but challenging the notion that if apes and humans coexisted, that means there is no evolution. He’s the GOP front-runner. 

“At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not? ... If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it,” Herschel said. 

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Thousands of mail-in ballots were thrown out in the Texas primaries due to new ID requirements.

This story has been updated to include new Associated Press data and reporting.

You might remember the uproar last year over Texas’s new voting law: Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature fled the state for weeks in an attempt to block the bill, which they said would disenfranchise voters, and Republicans threatened them with arrest upon their return. The law eventually did pass, and with Texas’s primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.

Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.

And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.

“It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”

But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.

Here’s what we saw in the primary and what it could mean for other states that have enacted or are considering similar laws.

Thousands of mail-in ballots were thrown out in Texas

The new law does a few things: It bans 24-hour and drive-through voting, prevents officials from mailing unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, requires monthly voter roll checks, and gives more latitude to poll watchers. It also adds a requirement that voters provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when applying for a mail-in ballot and write that same number on their mail-in ballot when sending it in.

Democrats and voting rights advocates were adamant that the new ID requirement for mail-in ballots introduced huge room for human error, and huge amounts of human error occurred. Some 27,000 mail-in ballots were initially flagged for rejection across 120 counties in the state. The secretary of state’s office has yet to publish statewide mail-in ballot rejection figures, but the AP data, collected from 187 of Texas’s 254 counties, found 22,898 were rejected.

The statewide rejection rate for mail-in ballots has typically been between 1 and 2 percent in past elections and was about 1 percent in the 2020 general election when mail-in voting rates were much higher. But in the 2022 primaries, county-level rejection rates ranged from 6 to 22 percent, according to data compiled by the Texas Civil Rights Project and shared with Vox.

Sergio Flores/Getty Images

In four counties that reported the reason they had rejected mail-in ballots, those identification requirements were to blame over 90 percent of the time. In Harris County, which encompasses Houston and is the most populous county in the state, it was 99.6 percent.

This was foreseeable. Even some Republican officials were worried about mail-in ballot rejections ahead of the primary. Texas Secretary of State John Scott said during a February town hall that it was his “biggest concern” of this election cycle. In a statement Tuesday, Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for Scott, acknowledged the issues with mail-in ballots during the primaries and said his office is devoting a significant portion of its voter education efforts to the new ID requirements.

“We are confident we will have all the information we need to apply any lessons learned during the primary to an even more robust voter education campaign heading into the November general election,” Taylor said.

But others have continued to defend Senate Bill 1. Gov. Greg Abbott has blamed local election officials for misinterpreting the new law. And state Rep. Briscoe Cain, the law’s leading proponent, has argued that it had no adverse effect on the chaotic vote counting process in Harris County — if anything, he said it made it a “whole lot easier” to fire the county election administrator who oversaw it.

Voters whose mail-in ballots were flagged for rejection did have the opportunity to correct them to ensure that they were counted. But the process proved confusing and looked different depending on when the problem with a voter’s ID number was discovered.

“You can see all the different ways that this can go wrong. What if the ballot never gets back to the voter? Or they don’t see it and think it’s junk mail? Or they correct the number issue online but don’t realize they need to send the ballot back?” Slattery said.

For some voters, the process was just too arduous.

“A lot of voters get these letters of rejection, and they just don’t bother,” said Michele Valentino, a Democratic election judge in Dallas.

Some flaws can be expected when implementing a new system for the first time, but this bodes poorly considering how low turnout was relative to general elections: Fewer than 1 in 5 voters cast ballots in the primaries, which is higher than in the past six midterm primaries but still a lot lower than the roughly 46 percent of Texans who showed up for the last midterm general election in 2018.

“I can see this issue compounding and worsening as we reach the midterms this year,” said Jasleen Singh, counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she focuses on voting rights and elections. “That there’s even this much hardship that voters are encountering at this stage is incredibly concerning and dangerous for democracy.”

The AP analysis showed a higher rate of rejections in Democratic than Republican counties (15.1% to 9.1%). That was also predictable: Voters of color typically bear the biggest burden from any restrictions on voting, and they make up a large share of many of those Democratic-leaning counties.

But there are reasons for Republicans to be concerned too. Mail-in voting was already restricted primarily to people over age 65, people with disabilities, and college students. That means that the population of people who vote by mail in Texas has historically skewed older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative, and the new voting law isn’t likely to change that. Some smaller counties were not yet accounted for in the AP data.

Sergio Flores/Getty Images

There are already staggering rates of mail-in ballot rejections in urban centers such as Harris County, and there are still a lot of rural counties in Texas that have yet to report their own rejection data, but it’s possible that the new ID requirements might end up hurting the constituents of the Republicans who wrote the law more so than others, Slattery said.

What this means for states that have already implemented similar laws

Florida and Georgia have already enacted similar bills, both passed by party-line votes, that impose new restrictions on mail-in voting. It’s part of Republicans’ national push to curtail access to mail-in voting and discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election, when many states expanded mail-in voting due to the pandemic.

Florida now requires voters who are requesting mail-in ballots to provide a driver’s license number, another non-driver identification number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number on their application. It doesn’t go as far as requiring that information to be written on the ballot itself, as Texas has. But Texas did reject thousands of mail-in ballot applications over its new ID requirements. Florida could encounter similar issues, though the state has a much bigger and more established mail-in voting operation that could make it easier for voters to adjust. Voting rights groups have sued over the law, and a federal judge is expected to rule in the case before the state’s primaries in August.

Georgia’s Senate Bill 202 similarly requires a voter to provide their driver’s license number or other ID number and date of birth when requesting a mail-in ballot and write that information on the mail-in ballot before sending it in. It has drawn legal challenges from the Biden administration and civil rights groups arguing that it makes it harder to vote for people of color and people with disabilities.

“What we’re seeing with [the Texas law], and I think with many of the laws passed last year, are these layering effects. In places where it was already harder to vote, it’s now even harder to vote,” Singh said.

Other states are still considering similar measures, and though the outcome of the Texas primaries should make them wary of doing so, Republicans pushing those bills haven’t shown any signs that they intend to reverse course.

According to the Brennan Center, at least 18 bills in five states would newly require voters to provide their Social Security number, driver’s license number, or voter record number when applying for a mail-in ballot. An Arizona bill would require voters to present an ID when return­ing a mail-in ballot and reduce the list of acceptable forms of voter ID to those that include a signature, a fingerprint, or a unique security code. And three bills in Missouri, New Jersey, and Washington propose new grounds for rejecting a mail-in ballot, including if the signa­ture “does not appear to be valid,” though the New Jersey and Washington bills are unlikely to pass.

“​​These cookie-cutter laws that a national organization has drafted without close consultation with local election officials and that are jammed through without really serious and careful debate could end up blowing up,” Slattery said.

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As we gradually approach midterm elections, we’re seeing a notable amount of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation popping up around the nation. Anti-queer initiatives are not new, of course, but there’s certainly something to be said for the sheer number of anti-trans bills, especially without cause—trans youth have been receiving gender-affirming care and playing sports, for example, without issue for a long, long time. Conservatives aren’t motivated by anything but hate—and hyping up their voter base with undue hysteria, of course.

With this in mind, some legislation has gotten a lot more attention in mainstream media than others. The hateful Don’t Say Gay bill in Florida, for example, as well as the directive from Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for state agencies to investigate families who support their children receiving gender-affirming care. One state in particular has a deeply insidious anti-trans health care bill brewing, and it’s important we educate ourselves and others before it’s too late.

RELATED: DeSantis and Florida Republicans turn to Jan. 6 convict to defend ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill

When it comes to gender-affirming health care, we have to talk about Alabama’s SB184 and companion HB 266. These pieces of legislation were introduced in February 2022 and it’s likely they’ll have the opportunity to advance this March. For reference, the legislation was introduced as the “Alabama Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act (V-CAP),” which is as misleading and manipulative as ever. 

As a review, the bills seek to make providing safe, age-appropriate health care to minors in the state a class C felony. This felony charge would be punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $15,000. Notably, Alabama’s legislation defines minors as people under 19.

As Daily Kos has stressed before, major medical associations like the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) agree that safe, age-appropriate, gender-affirming health care is an effective and valid way of treating gender dysphoria. We also know that trans youth face higher rates of bullying, harassment, and abuse, and have high reports of mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Gender-affirming health care is lifesaving health care, and most actual experts agree. 

The bill would also require public schools to basically “out” trans students if staff, like teachers or coaches, feel a student's “perception” of their gender is “inconsistent” with their sex. In addition to blatant transphobia, it’s also easy to see how this could lead to all queer students being “outed,” especially when we consider the ways people have different gender presentation or expression—for example, a masculine-presenting lesbian, a bisexual male who wears makeup, and so on.

In this way, Alabama’s legislation is quite broad and sweeping, and it feels like it’s pulled the most heinous details from what other states are doing to try and punish trans people. Queer—and especially trans—students can’t express themselves at school, can’t learn about people like them, can’t check out certain books from the library (if they’re not burned), can’t seek gender-affirming health care … So what are they supposed to do? The only logical explanation is that conservatives want to stomp out LGBTQ+ youth in the hope that they won’t become queer adults. 

The sheer number of these bills—including ones that don’t make it out of committee—may set a precedent of such legislation being “normal” or “expected” from a Republican, and that’s dangerous in itself. The last thing we need is for moderates (or even progressives) to start to feel like this is the new normal for conservatives, instead of calling it for what it is: extreme, archaic, and far-right.

Conservatives want to pull our country to the right by any means necessary, and we can’t let trans folks be their latest scapegoat to do so. 

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

Less than a year after Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said, “I am not aware of any school district that currently allows for” the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in his state, he sounded the alarm about the alleged spread of CRT that had forced him to sign a bill banning it. 

“Students are being force-fed an unhealthy dose of progressive fundamentalism that runs counter to the principles of America’s founding,” Reeves said as he signed the law, in a pretty straightforward admission that racism is one of the principles of America’s founding. “Children are dragged to the front of the classroom and are coerced to declare themselves as oppressors, that that they should feel guilty because of the color of their skin, or that they are inherently a victim because of their race.”

Big claim there, but, “He did not point to any real-life examples of the scenario he described happening in Mississippi, though he may have been referring to a single alleged incident at a public charter school in Las Vegas, Nevada,” the invaluable Ashton Pittman of the Mississippi Free Press noted. Nor could the bill’s author point to any such examples at the time he introduced it in the state Senate.

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Critical race theory “threatens the integrity of our kids’ education and aims only to humiliate and indoctrinate,” according to Reeves’ social media posts about the new law. And the only humiliation and indoctrination that’s going to happen on his watch are in service of white people.

“I want to set the record straight about critical race theory because the radical left and the media continue to spread misinformation on this critical issue,” said Reeves in his statement about the law. “And while they may be okay lying to you, I believe you deserve the truth. Across this great country, we’re seeing a full-court press by a vocal minority of well-organized and well-funded activists who seek to tear down the unity that has helped make our country great.”

We are in fact seeing a full-court press by a vocal minority of well-organized and well-funded activists, but they’re on Reeves’ side. They’re the reason Reeves is signing a law banning something he said less than a year ago was nonexistent in Mississippi schools, without offering any evidence that anything had changed in the intervening months. They’re the reason state after Republican-controlled state has passed anti-CRT laws, just all of a sudden discovering a massive problem they hadn’t even been aware existed until right-wing think-tanker Christopher Rufo began an organized campaign to make it an issue—“We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” Rufo tweeted in March 2021—with Fox News eagerly offering a platform.

This is something cooked up in a right-wing think tank and spread on a right-wing cable network, and Republican lawmakers across the country are seizing on it eagerly. Of course, they’re not actually banning critical race theory, because they know it’s not being taught in K-12 schools. They’re banning, in the Mississippi case, teaching students that “any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior.” Which sounds unobjectionable, except that very similar language in other states is being used to ban children’s books and intimidate teachers away from teaching basic facts of history, let alone touching on current events.

In his remarks, Reeves insisted that wouldn’t happen, saying, “critical race theory proponents will claim that this law prevents the teaching of history. They’ll claim that our kids won’t learn about important historical events like slavery or the Civil Rights Movement. But we know the truth. Contrary to what some critics claim, this bill in no way, in no shape, and in no form prohibits the teaching of history.”

But we know the truth, which is that this law is part of a movement that is very much about limiting what histories can be taught, what books will be available to children, and which children’s feelings will be protected by powerful people.

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A second unconstitutional six-week ban on abortion is passed, and more are on their way.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: The Senate passed a measure that would make Daylight Savings Time permanent across the U.S. The bill -- the Sunshine Protection Act co-sponsored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) -- was passed by unanimous consent. It would make Daylight Savings time permanent in 2023. If the legislation clears the House and is signed into law by President Biden, it will mean Americans will no longer have to change their clocks twice a year. Health groups have called for an end to the seasonal shifting of clocks, a ritual first adopted in the U.S. more than a century ago. At a house hearing last week, health experts cited sleep deprivation and health problems as negative effects associated with changing clocks. Nearly two-thirds of Americans want to stop changing their clocks, according to a 2021 Economist/YouGov poll. Axios has learned that Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) "will be leading a letter to Speaker Pelosi calling for immediate House passage of his bill." By making DST permanent, legislators are prioritizing more daylight in the evening, which could improve our health and allow for more sunshine during the most productive hours of the day. According to a new study published yesterday, sleeping in the dark may reduce your risk of heart disease and diabetes. "The results from this study demonstrate that just a single night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation, which are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome," said study author Dr Phyllis Zee.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has worried for years that it tricks customers into signing up for Prime subscriptions. A previously undisclosed inquiry from the Federal Trade Commission has put more pressure on the company to fix it. Business Insider: Internal documents obtained by Insider show the company has been concerned since at least 2017 that user interface designs on Amazon.com have led customers to feel manipulated into signing up for Prime. These design decisions, commonly known as "dark patterns," push customers into acting unintentionally often through misleading imagery or intentionally vague offers. For example, a single click on the "Get FREE Two-Day Delivery with Prime" tab at check out -- with no additional confirmation step -- gets shoppers automatically enrolled into a 30-day free trial of Amazon's Prime program, which later converts to a paid membership unless the user cancels it. For cancellations, users have to jump through a number of pages to end the subscription. Amazon was aware of these complaints for years but did not take serious action, according to these previously unreported internal documents and six current and former employees who spoke to Insider. In several cases, fixes for these issues were proposed and considered, but resulted in lower subscription growth when tested, and were shelved by executives, the documents show.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Florida Republicans are leveraging uncertainty to terrorize teachers and school administrators.

In the likely event that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill — the legislation widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” proposal — becomes law, no one actually knows the full extent of the behaviors it forbids. Indeed, that may be the point.

The bill, which passed the Florida House in late February and the state Senate last week, imposes several vague restrictions on classroom instruction. The most notable part of the bill provides that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

The bill, however, does not define key terms like “age appropriate” or “developmentally appropriate.” It doesn’t even define the term “classroom instruction.”

Suppose, for example, that Ms. Smith is a second grade teacher married to a woman. One evening, while Smith and her wife are shopping at the mall, she runs into one of her students and they say hello to each other. The next day, the student asks Ms. Smith who the woman she was shopping with is, and Smith responds, “Oh, that’s my wife.”

If this conversation with the student occurs in a classroom, does it constitute “classroom instruction”?

The insidiousness of Florida’s law is that teachers who won’t understand how to comply with the new law are likely to overcensor their speech in order to protect themselves from being accused of violating the law.

Under current law, the Don’t Say Gay bill isn’t just vague, it is unconstitutionally vague. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), for example, the Court struck down a web of New York laws intended to prevent communists and other “subversives” from becoming teachers or professors — one statute, which barred employment of anyone who “‘advises or teaches the doctrine’ of forceful overthrow of government” was so broadly worded that it could potentially have forbidden state-run universities from teaching the Declaration of Independence.

A statute governing classroom speech, the Court established in Keyishian, must not be so vague that people “of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application.” If Keyishian remains good law — and there is no guarantee that the US Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority will apply Keyishian fairly to an anti-LGBTQ law — then Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill does not clear this bar. It’s simply too vague.

In fairness, it’s not unusual for Florida education statutes to use vague phrases like “age appropriate.” A different state law, for example, requires schools to teach “comprehensive age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate K-12 health education.”

But that same statute also itemizes several specific topics that teachers should cover, including “Mental and emotional health,” “Nutrition,” and “Substance use and abuse.” The state Education Department also writes more detailed standards fleshing out teachers’ obligations, and it even provides educators with a toolkit they can use to ensure they’re complying with the law. The state, in other words, does not require teachers “of common intelligence” to guess what the state’s health education law requires of them.

The Don’t Say Gay bill, by contrast, would take effect on July 1 if signed — one year before it requires the Education Department to update its standards to provide guidance on how to comply with the bill. That means that, even if state officials eventually provide comprehensive standards explaining when educators are allowed to mention sexual orientation or gender identity, teachers will likely have to fly blind for an entire school year.

The Don’t Say Gay bill also uses an enforcement scheme reminiscent of Texas’s SB 8 abortion ban: Under the bill, parents can bring private lawsuits against school districts that violate the ban. This means that any school district that is even suspected of violating the law could face crushing legal fees. And even if a school district complies with whatever standards the Education Department eventually comes up with, a parent may still sue — and there’s no guarantee that judges will agree with the department’s interpretation of the law.

These private lawsuits are a recipe for intimidating individual teachers into overcompliance, as the only way a school district can fully protect itself from expensive litigation is to make sure its teachers don’t say anything that angers the most sensitive parents.

The Don’t Say Gay bill deputizes the most prudish parents to enforce it

The bill, at least according to its text, seeks to prevent teachers from providing information about sexual orientation or gender identity that is not “age appropriate.” The bill’s official title, “Parental Rights in Education,” suggests that many Florida lawmakers are concerned that teachers are teaching things that some parents would prefer their children remain ignorant about.

As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who has not yet signed the bill but has praised its general concept, claimed last week, “we’ve seen instances of students being told by different folks in school, ‘Oh, don’t worry, don’t pick your gender yet.’” According to DeSantis, it is “entirely inappropriate” when schools “won’t tell the parents about these discussions that are happening.”

Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Setting aside the question of whether any Florida teacher has actually told a student to wait to “pick your gender,” the Don’t Say Gay bill does a whole lot more than simply require teachers to provide more information to parents. It effectively turns the most squeamish, anti-LGBTQ parent in any public school into the bill’s enforcer.

The bill relies on private lawsuits for enforcement. It permits parents to file a lawsuit against their child’s school district to compel compliance with the bill’s vague requirements, and those parents can potentially win money damages plus “reasonable attorney fees” if they prevail in court.

Lawsuits are expensive to defend again, especially when the defendant could be forced to pay for both its own lawyers and its opponents’. So, in the likely event that DeSantis signs this bill into law, school districts are likely to crack down on any discussion related to sexual orientation or gender identity. Any mere mention of these forbidden topics could provide fodder for litigation.

May a gay teacher display a picture of their spouse on their desk? May a straight teacher do so? Suppose that a third grade student asks a teacher who the highest-ranking openly gay official is in the US government. Is the teacher allowed to respond with the correct answer (Pete Buttigieg), or do they have to blow off the question? What if a book taught in a high school English class has a gay character? Or what if the book has no openly gay characters but a parent reads the book and concludes that it has homoerotic undertones? If a second grade student has two mothers, may a teacher casually mention this fact in the same way they might mention any other student’s parents, or is such a thing forbidden?

As mentioned above, one problem with the Don’t Say Gay bill is that it doesn’t define what constitutes “classroom instruction.” It also doesn’t define inherently subjective terms like what sorts of classroom discussions about sexual orientation or gender identity are “age appropriate” — although the state Education Department may eventually flesh out these terms when it releases new education standards a year after the bill takes effect.

Spend any time reading advice columns for parents and you’ll be bombarded by questions about what kind of activity is appropriate for children of a certain age. Is a 12-year-old girl old enough to date? Is this same child old enough to be left at home alone? Should 14-year-olds be allowed to see R-rated movies?

The reasons parents seek advice on questions like this is that there aren’t clear answers regarding what is “age appropriate” for preteens and teenagers. And there certainly aren’t answers that are clear enough that judges can consistently interpret a law requiring “age-appropriate” instruction to reach predictable results.

Within the context of individual households, it’s not really a big deal if one child is allowed to date at age 12 while the child next door has to wait until they are 14. But the Don’t Say Gay bill is likely to soon have the force of law. And that means people could face very serious consequences if they are accused of violating its vague prohibitions. Teachers need to know what sort of instruction could cost them their jobs. School administrators need to know if their district is vulnerable to lawsuits.

And if they can’t figure out what sort of instructions is allowed, they’re likely to avoid certain topics altogether — even when doing so could cause real harm to students. As American Psychological Association president Frank Worrell said in a statement on the bill, blocking discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity “is inherently wrong” and risks “stigmatizing and marginalizing children who may realize their difference at a young age.” It can also lead to “depression, anxiety, self-harm and even suicide.”

States can decide not to teach certain subjects, but they have to be clear about what teachers are and are not allowed to do

Having laid out this criticism of the Don’t Say Gay bill, I want to be precise about what the Constitution does and does not allow. Florida has fairly broad discretion to determine which subjects its teachers will cover, and which subjects they should avoid. (Florida’s state statutes include a whole 1,400-word section on required education.) But it has to offer more clarity regarding what is and is not allowed than the Don’t Say Gay bill provides.

Think of it this way: Suppose that Mr. Lopez is hired to teach high school algebra, but he decides instead to spend all of his classroom instruction time lecturing about Japanese art history. There’s nothing inherently wrong with teaching high school students about Japanese art, but Florida may decide that algebra is part of the high school curriculum and art history is not. And if Mr. Lopez refuses to teach what he was hired to teach, he may be fired.

States may also choose not to teach politically controversial topics, even if there are real concerns that avoiding those topics causes harm to students. During the second Bush administration, for example, the federal government tried to pressure states into adopting abstinence-only policies that did not include lessons about contraception in the state’s sex education curriculums.

As a matter of policy, abstinence-only education is a terrible idea. According to a 2017 paper published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, abstinence-only policies “have little demonstrated efficacy in helping adolescents to delay intercourse,” while simultaneously denying students information they may need to avoid pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections.

Nevertheless, abstinence-only education, while ill-advised, is also constitutional. The Constitution generally permits the government to determine what messages it will convey to others, and that includes the instruction that teachers provide to students. Thus, so long as a state’s abstinence-only law is drafted clearly enough that teachers understand what they are and are not allowed to teach, it should not be vulnerable to a vagueness challenge under decisions like Keyishian.

Finally, and most significantly for the future of the Don’t Say Gay bill, an unconstitutionally vague statute may be rescued if courts or other bodies with the power to interpret a statute narrow its meaning and offer additional clarity about what sort of behavior it forbids. In the Keyishian case, for example, the Court specifically noted that it did “not have the benefit of a judicial gloss by the New York courts enlightening us as to the scope of” New York’s anti-sedition laws.

Wilfredo Lee/AP

Florida’s courts, in other words, might rescue the Don’t Say Gay bill from a lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutionally vague by providing clear definitions for terms like “classroom instruction” and “age appropriate” that would allow a person “of common intelligence” to determine what sort of instruction is allowed and what kind of instruction is forbidden. The state Education Department could potentially do so as well, when it gets around to updating its standards to explain how teachers can comply with the Don’t Say Gay bill — although, again, it is possible that state court judges will reject these standards and substitute their own interpretation of the Don’t Say Gay bill’s language.

In the meantime, any parent could potentially sue their kid’s school district if a teacher even alludes to the concept of homosexuality in a classroom discussion. That’s likely going to terrorize teachers into avoiding discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity altogether.

It’s also worth noting that Florida’s Supreme Court is dominated by Republicans — every one of its seven members was appointed by a Republican governor, including three by DeSantis. So even if the Florida Supreme Court effectively rewrites the Don’t Say Gay bill to make it constitutional, the rewritten law could still be quite awful for LGBTQ students and teachers.

There’s no guarantee that the US Supreme Court will enforce decisions like Keyishian against Republican lawmakers

One other worrisome thing about the Don’t Say Gay bill is that there is no guarantee that the Supreme Court will enforce decisions like Keyishian that restrict excessively vague laws, at least when enforcing those decisions would go against many of the conservative justices’ sense of morality.

In Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), for example, the Supreme Court held that Texas could effectively immunize SB 8, its ban on abortions prior to the sixth week of pregnancy, from federal judicial review. If taken seriously, Jackson could permit any state to negate any constitutional right, simply by drafting a law similar to SB 8. But it’s exceedingly unlikely that this Court’s Republican majority would permit a state to nullify the Second Amendment using an SB 8-style law — or any other constitutional right that Republicans approve of.

Similarly, the Court has often protected “religious liberty” selectively, giving expansive rights to conservative Christians while denying similar rights to Muslims.

It’s unclear whether the void-for-vagueness doctrine will receive the same selective treatment if LGBTQ rights groups invoke it to challenge Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill. But, given this Court’s recent history of applying one set of rules to conservative litigants and a different set of rules to liberals, no one can be sure whether this Court will strike down an unconstitutionally vague law that hurts LGBTQ students.

Enough is enough. It’s time to throw Wells Fargo away. Just throw the whole company away. It is trash. I wrote in 2019 that the big banking business had practically become synonymous with discriminatory lending accusations; a Bloomberg News report released on Friday shows the bank apparently has no plans of changing. 

In 2020, the same year that Wells Fargo agreed to pay $7.8 million in back wages and interest to resolve allegations of hiring discrimination, the company approved only 47% of refinancing applications launched by Black homeowners, Bloomberg reported. That number for white homeowners was 72%.

For a few points of comparison:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. approved 81% of Black homeowners' refinancing applications compared to 90% approved from white homeowners. Bank of America gave 66% of Black applicants the green light compared to 78% of white ones, and Rocket Mortgage approved 79% of Black applicants compared to 86% of their white counterparts, Bloomberg reported.

Engineer Mauise Ricard III, one of those Black applicants Wells Fargo rejected, told Bloomberg he paid $560.42 to apply to have his home refinanced on Valentine's Day in an Atlanta suburb. The loan officer told Ricard, who has a credit score above 800 and is married to a doctor, that his appraisal would probably be fast-tracked. Instead, the loan officer emailed him to say that “perhaps the area is not eligible,” and that he would have to pay a higher interest rate of 4.5%—even amid what were historically low interest rates at the time. Ricard told Bloomberg his property is located in a Black neighborhood.

“They kept moving the needle,” Ricard says. “They didn’t want to move forward for whatever reason.”

In 2012, Wells Fargo settled a $175 million lawsuit after being accused of charging Black and Latino customers higher rates on mortgages, according to Reuters.

Six years later, in 2018, the city of Sacramento accused the company of a "long-standing pattern and practice" of illegal lending that lowered home values, upped foreclosures, and capped property tax revenue used to fund schools in minority communities, according to CNN. 

And in 2019, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Dec. 16 that Wells Fargo was set to pay Philadelphia $10 million to settle a lawsuit alleging lending discrimination targeting minorities. 

Wells Fargo didn't immediately respond to a Daily Kos request for comment, but the company told Bloomberg it treats its potential borrowers the same, "is more selective than other lenders, and an internal review of the bank’s 2020 refinancing decisions confirmed that 'additional, legitimate, credit-related factors' were responsible for the differences."

Ricard told Bloomberg he was ultimately able to get his home refinanced through another lender—at a 3.35% interest rate.

“It’s sad that as a banking institution that they essentially can’t be trusted,” Ricard told Bloomberg. “As an African American, a person of color, we deal with enough hardships that life hands us. To be discriminated against financially is a hardship.”

RELATED: Despite outstanding rating, banks still aren’t lending to black business owners like they should be

RELATED: Lawsuit: In two years, this bank granted mortgages to only 37 Black borrowers

RELATED: Repeated errors cost hundreds of people their homes—now Wells Fargo wants to buy their silence

Microsoft has begun testing promotions for some of its other products in the File Explorer app on devices running its latest Windows 11 Insider build. From a report: The new Windows 11 "feature" was discovered by a Windows user and Insider MVP who shared a screenshot of an advertisement notification displayed above the listing of folders and files to the File Explorer, the Windows default file manager. As shown in the screenshot, Microsoft will use such ads to promote other Microsoft products, for instance, about how to "write with confidence across documents, email, and the web with advanced writing suggestions from Microsoft Editor. As you can imagine, the reaction to this was adverse, to say the least, with some saying that "File Explorer one of the worst places to show ads," while others added that this is the way to go if Microsoft wants "people ditching Explorer for something else."

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This is revenge for the time a guy grilled me in Heathrow for 20 minutes after an all-night flight because I couldn't convince him I was in town for a science comedy show.

Today's News:

In a period when conservatives lean heavily on anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policies in order to distract voters from issues that actually matter—like the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic—it can become overwhelming to even begin to decide who is the worst, most dangerous Republican out there. But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is certainly on the list. Abbott’s been steadfast in ignoring pleas from LGBTQ+ people and allies, but now that a number of global businesses are speaking up, it’s possible he’ll get the message.

In this case, 65 major companies signed an open letter published in The Dallas Morning News on Friday, in which the signees implore the governor to stop anti-LGBTQ+ efforts in the state. There are some seriously big names on the list, including Google, IBM, Patreon, Ikea, LinkedIn, Apple, PayPal, Microsoft, Capital One, and more. 

RELATED: DeSantis won’t like this move by Disney, but is it enough to change his mind?

"Our companies do business, create jobs, and serve customers in Texas,” the letter, which was a joint effort with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) reads in part. “We are committed to building inclusive environments where our employees can thrive inside and outside of the workplace," the letter said. "For years we have stood to ensure LGBTQ+ people—our employees, customers, and their families—are safe and welcomed in the communities where we do business."

In the letter, which ran with the headline “Discrimination is Bad for Business,” signees call out Abbott and Republican legislators in Texas specifically by referencing the “recent attempt” to “criminalize” a parent supporting their trans youth in accessing safe, age-appropriate gender-affirming health care. The letter (accurately) points out that Abbott’s latest directive to have state agencies investigate supportive families “creates fear” for all involved, including children, who may feel pressured to choose between accessing potentially life-saving medical care and being taken from their families. 

Writing discrimination into “law and policy,” as the letter puts it, is ethically wrong. It also has an “impact on our employees, our customers, their families, and our work,” the letter states.

It’s no surprise that companies have a hard time recruiting talent to places where discrimination is the word of law, and especially at a time when many companies are making an overt effort to be inclusive—it’s a hard bargain to set up shop in a new location, for example, if that place has hate against marginalized people signed into law. This is also true in terms of workers who have kids, and who may decide where to work and live at least partially based on the needs and opportunities for their families. 

At the end of the day, it’s hard to know what will finally make the difference when it comes to Republicans who are doubling down on their transphobia. As Daily Kos has covered, the assault on trans rights has been building especially over the last two years, though it’s not new. We’ve seen discriminatory bathroom bills. Efforts to keep trans girls out of girls’ sports. Attempts to stop trans folks from updating legal identification documents.

More recently, we’ve also seen the infamous Don't Say Gay bill out of Florida, efforts to make it a felony to provide gender-affirming health care to trans youth, and, as is the case in Texas, investigations into parents who support their trans youth in receiving gender-affirming health care, like hormonal therapy and puberty blockers. 

There are both victories and losses to acknowledge here. In many states, anti-trans bills have fizzled before reaching the governor’s desk. Judges have stepped in to provide injunctions when possible. Republicans have sided with Democrats to combat hateful measures. And, sadly, these legislations have passed at every level and been signed into law, too. And in Abbott’s case with this anti-trans directive, it’s not even a law—it’s a directive from Abbott based on an opinion by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. And yet it’s being treated as the word of law, with state agencies already investigating a number of families.

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to rely on big businesses to appeal to people in power. But few efforts seem to be reaching a certain handful of powerful conservatives in particular—I’m thinking of fellow Republican governors Kristi Noem and Ron DeSantis, for example—so while it’s unknown how much of an impact this ad will have, it’s certainly a better effort than nothing.

A presidential run by Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger could be just what the party needs to recover its marbles.

Welcome back to the weekly Nuts & Bolts Guide to small campaigns. Over the course of more than a decade, I’ve taken time to speak with campaign managers, field directors, communications directors, finance directors, and, of course, be a part of as many campaigns as I can. Through the feedback I receive, I try to build out Nuts & Bolts to better inform Democratic voters and donors how a campaign can and does work. Some of the questions I get aren’t about the inner workings of a campaign, though; they’re about the party: Why has the Democratic Party held onto the core concept of the caucus? Why has the Iowa caucus survived so long? And is the Party really thinking of addressing issues with the caucus system?

With the Democratic National Committee meeting, one of the topics that came up again is strongly considering changing the primary calendar in presidential election years. I’ve given a few rants on this before, but now is the time to look at why this is the right time to change our way of looking at nominating a president.

Democratic growth and the census continues to teach us

The Democratic Party is a party of diversity, a party where we have growth. What we are seeing over time is that our methodology as currently presented is not representative of our party. One of the biggest problems with managing a caucus is that it is a core conflict with our Democratic belief that every vote should count; we are the party of ballot access, but a caucus limits access.

The traditional caucus is difficult for people to participate in, complicates voting, and can be a true hassle. In 2020, Democratic parties around the country tried new tactics, the best of which was the “firehouse caucus” style. A firehouse caucus allows people to vote via mail-in ballot; this increased voter participation in 2020. 

Using that as a standard isn’t a long-term viable option. When it is up to state parties to pay for a caucus, state parties lose out on resources they need to help put funds toward anything else—like actually electing candidates and winning electoral delegates.

Why does this happen?

Even in the best of circumstances, with tons of training and pre-planning, state parties aren’t equipped or staffed to manage full elections today. The Des Moines Register covers it:

The conversation follows disastrous 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses in which technological and logistical failures coalesced, preventing the party from declaring a timely winner. The caucuses’ ugly conclusion undermined more than a year’s worth of organizing and campaigning that preceded it, stoking renewed calls to move the nation toward primaries and replace Iowa as the first state to cast its presidential preferences.

There is simply too much room for failure—and too many opportunities to make the party look bad. Why put ourselves in that situation? Simply, we can do better.

2024 is the best shot

It is very difficult to change the direction of the caucus in a year when everyone is running for president. Candidates don’t want to come out against Iowa being first, as long as Iowa is first. It just guarantees they will fall into a deficit right off the bat. 

When the White House is held by a Democratic president who will run for re-election, we have the best chance to change the order of the process. It is easier to rearrange so that no candidate in the future is burdened by new processes. It is also the time when it can happen so that states feel the least loss.

If we cannot get movement on this issue before 2024, we’ll be waiting again for quite some while, I predict.

On the brink of gaining control in Washington, Sen. Chuck Schumer said emphatically in 2020 that "I am going to do EVERYTHING I can to end the federal prohibition on marijuana" if Democrats took back the Senate.

But 14 months since winning, Senate Democrats haven’t even succeeded at changing the little things.

This week offered the most dramatic example yet of Democrats’ inability to make any progress on their cannabis promises: The new government spending package released on Wednesday continues to prohibit Washington, D.C. from establishing a cannabis marketplace, more than seven years after District voters overwhelmingly backed legalization.

That wasn’t the only weed provision left on the cutting room floor.

The spending bill also failed to protect state-regulated recreational cannabis markets, nor did it expand medical marijuana research or protect veterans who use cannabis — two issues with widespread bipartisan backing.

“I’m very frustrated and really disappointed,” said Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.), a champion of cannabis policy changes. “Polling in this country is off the charts that people want to normalize the use of cannabis … So what’s the hang up?”

More weed woes

It’s just the latest example of Democrats’ inability to accomplish meaningful change on cannabis policy when it is seemingly within their grasp. Earlier this year, Senate Democrats removed language from the National Defense Authorization Act that would have made it easier for the industry to access banking services. That legislation has twice cleared the House with huge majorities, including more than 100 Republicans, but has made no progress in the Senate.

Democrats have been locked in an internal debate about the correct approach to overhauling federal cannabis policies. Schumer and other key senators have resisted piecemeal changes, insisting that any cannabis legislation address broader criminal justice reforms, even though there’s little evidence that they can corral 60 votes for a major package.

Many advocates saw supporting D.C.’s choice to legalize as an easy step toward the criminal justice reform that Schumer champions.

“It’s hard to have faith in congressional leadership on comprehensive reform when they can't even commit to allowing for local reform that, in theory, should be an easy lift,” said Queen Adesuyi, senior manager for national policy at Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group that lobbies for the decriminalization of all drugs.

Democrats insist they still plan to make big changes to federal cannabis policy in this Congress’ remaining nine months. Schumer, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) released draft legislation to federally decriminalize and regulate marijuana last summer, but the formal bill has yet to materialize. Schumer said last month that he hopes to introduce it in April, though time is running out for passing such a substantial bill before the end of 2022.

"The path for marijuana legislation has always faced hurdles, but the discussion around marijuana legalization has advanced further in 15 months than over the last decade because of Democratic leadership," Schumer said in a statement to POLITICO on Friday.

Broader policy failures

The lack of progress on cannabis policy is illustrative of the larger failures of Democrats to follow through on their campaign promises — from immigration reform to President Joe Biden’s social spending bill. In the end, additional pandemic aid was even removed from the 2022 budget, due to squabbling among House Democrats over how to pay for it.

When confronted with these failures, Democrats point to the many hurdles they’ve faced since taking office, including the war in Ukraine and a single-vote majority in the Senate.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), a longtime champion of marijuana legalization, called the behind-the-scenes budget negotiations a “collapse” of the entire appropriations process, complaining that back room deliberations give individual lawmakers too much veto power over small provisions. A leadership source, meanwhile, told POLITICO that Republican leadership drew a line on legacy riders, meaning that pushing for removal on the prohibition on D.C. sales — known as the Harris Rider — could have been a poison pill for the budget bill.

But ultimately, the buck stops with Democrats, who have slim majorities in both chambers.

“Probably the most important power of the majority leader is the ability to put bills on the floor,” Schumer told POLITICO in April 2021, when he announced his plan to federally decriminalize cannabis.

John Hudak, an expert in cannabis policy at the Brookings Institution, argues that no legislator is going to vote against the federal budget because it removes the Harris Rider, which was originally introduced by Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.).

“I can guarantee you,” Hudak said, “If Chuck Schumer wanted the Harris Rider removed, the Harris Rider would be removed.”

Ultimately, Hudak said, Democrats can’t be blamed for not getting comprehensive reform across the finish line — especially when they have such a narrow margin in the Senate. But their inability to pass smaller provisions shows the lengths to which leadership is willing to fight for cannabis policy.

In fact, many dumbfounded advocates and frustrated pro-cannabis lawmakers pointed on Wednesday to the broad support among voters for cannabis legalization. Eighteen states, the District of Columbia and three territories legalized recreational marijuana in the last decade. Two-thirds of American voters support legalization — including half of Republican voters and 83 percent of Democrats.

Why that isn’t translating into cannabis policy on Capitol Hill, however, isn’t clear.

“You give us both chambers, [you] give us the president — and [we’ll give you] cannabis,” Correa said Wednesday, adding that Democrats made similar promises in 2020 on immigration policy, which also has not yet received its day in Congress. “What happened?”

Democratic National Committee members blasted Iowa’s lack of diversity and spoke about shaking up the presidential nominating process on Friday. But the Democratic National Committee isn’t any closer to actually dethroning Iowa with formal changes yet.

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison opened the latest meeting of the committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which handles the presidential nominating calendar, by acknowledging that the “rumor mill has started swirling” about changes to the process, referencing a proposal in circulation to add a fifth state to the early nominating window, favor primaries over caucuses and require states to reapply for their early-state status. But the co-chairs of the subcommittee dismissed it, saying, “there is no prepared resolution floating around out there,” describing it instead as a “working document.”

“The substance of a resolution is coming out of the discussion at this committee, and we will be getting to that eventually, but not today,” said James Roosevelt, co-chair of the committee.

Instead of big changes, a half-dozen DNC members used the meeting to rehash their frustrations about Iowa both directly and indirectly, calling for greater diversity in the states that vote early in presidential nominating contests. The state has been under pressure since its disastrous caucuses in 2020, when problems counting the vote delayed results and led to a lengthy dispute.

One DNC member suggested adding more battleground states to the mix, and another argued for rural representation in the early window. And while the meeting ended with no concrete plans or next steps to address the question, there’s evident interest in changes — “not four years from now — now,” said Mo Elleithee, a DNC member who’s been a vocal proponent for reimagining the presidential contest, focusing the slate of early states on diversity, inclusivity and general election competitiveness.

“I think states like New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina can make a compelling argument as to how they fit into that picture,” Elleithee said. “I have a harder time seeing it with Iowa, but Iowa should have the right to make that case to us.”

A number of members made clear that Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status shouldn’t be kept out of habit. “Tradition is not a reason to keep doing something,” said Maria Cardona, a DNC member.

But inertia has helped Iowa before. Reordering the nominating calendar runs into a host of logistical and legislative headaches, tangled up by state laws and partisan legislatures. And Scott Brennan, a DNC member from Iowa, defended the status quo, arguing that the “four early state process worked.”

“I would like us as Democrats to focus on winning elections, not academic exercises,” he said.

Rethinking the presidential calendar gained new strength after 2020, but Iowa’s come under harsh criticism among Democrats before for its lack of racial diversity, as the party built much of its national success around voters of color.

“We cannot be righteous about a particular tradition or a particular state in the process because that righteousness is what turns off a new immigrant,” said Luis Heredia, a DNC member. “They don’t understand what Iowa means in this process.”

If the DNC does dethrone Iowa, the state will likely not go quietly. For more than a year, some party officials there have discussed the possibility of holding an unsanctioned caucus — daring candidates to skip Iowa on the bet they still will come.

“There’s an entire ecosystem of event planners and consultants and four-year campaign staff and everybody else, and there’s just so much of that, that I think they would hold it no matter what,” said Sean Bagniewski, chair of the Polk County, Iowa Democrats.

If future candidate fields are small, he said — or if only one, President Joe Biden, is running in 2024 — the caucuses might fold. But in a large field, Bagniewski said, “a couple candidates show up, and then a couple more show up, and then all of a sudden it’s the Iowa caucuses again.”

Iowa would not be the first state party to hold a nominating process in defiance of party rules. Florida and Michigan did so in 2008, running primaries earlier than called for by the DNC.

“We’ll just go anyway,” said Dave Nagle, a former member of Congress and Iowa state Democratic Party chair. “Being unsanctioned is not a big thing … So, 50 people don’t get to go to the national convention. Big deal.”

The more existential problem for Iowa Democrats, he said, is if they give up their position without a fight.

“If we ever give it up,” Nagle said, “we’ll never get it back.”

Asked about the possibility of hosting an unsanctioned caucus, Iowa’s Democratic Party chair, state Rep. Ross Wilburn, said simply, “Nothing has been decided.”

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This sounds depressing but I've had a decent weakea.

Today's News:

Ending health care providers’ case challenging a horrific law, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that because state officials do not have the ability to enforce Texas' six-week abortion ban, they cannot be sued. With one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, Texas allows ordinary people to file suit against anyone who helps someone get an abortion—whether that be the clinic itself, clinic employees, or even those who transport a person to the clinic.

Instead of leaving enforcement up to government officials, like other states, Texas prohibited officials from enforcing the law and gave the power to anyone else—including people who reside outside of the state—to sue those who violate it. As a result, when taken to the Supreme Court, cases against the law failed. The Heartbeat Act will now remain in place.

"Texas law does not grant the state-agency executives named as defendants in this case any authority to enforce the Act’s requirements, either directly or indirectly," Texas Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey S. Boyd wrote in the unanimous opinion released Friday. Crucially, Boyd explained the issue more fully:

"Senate Bill 8 provides that its requirements may be enforced by a private civil action, that no state official may bring or participate as a party in any such action, that such an action is the exclusive means to enforce the requirements, and that these restrictions apply notwithstanding any other law."

The case went to the Supreme Court after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed abortion providers to issue a lawsuit against state officials in January. Because state officials claimed they were immune to the lawsuit, the appeals court sent the case to the state’s supreme court to confirm whether or not the state officials named as defendants in the case, including the attorney general and those tasked with doctor licensing, could take action against those who violate the ban.

The Court sided with the state: Abortion providers cannot sue state officials in order to challenge the law. With this ruling, courts have now blocked providers from suing every defendant they had named, meaning abortion providers now have no one left to sue to stop the policy.

"SB 8 will remain in place in Texas for the foreseeable future," the ACLU said in a tweet. "This is a devastating blow for abortion rights in Texas and across the country."

According to Reuters, suing the officials would have allowed reproductive health clinics to overcome “a novel feature that has frustrated their ability to challenge it in federal court by placing enforcement in the hands of private citizens, rather than the state officials.”

While the Texas Supreme Court's ruling focused on the procedural question—not on whether the law is constitutional—the fact remains the abortion ban will continue.

“With this ruling, the sliver of this case that we were left with is gone,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “The courts have allowed Texas to nullify a constitutional right. We will continue to do everything in our power to right this wrong.”

The ruling comes at a time when other states have passed their own version of restrictive abortion laws. This week Missouri went as far as to ban residents from seeking abortions out of state, Daily Kos reported. GOP dominant states are stopping at nothing to get advances in their anti-life policies.

The case will now return to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Other cases challenging the controversial Texas law are pending.

 

By JM McNab Published: March 10th, 2022

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries "unfriendly" to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. The Washington Post reports: The decree, issued this week, illustrates the economic war waged around Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as the West levies sanctions and pulls away from Russia's huge oil and gas industry. Russian officials have also raised the possibility of lifting restrictions on some trademarks, according to state media, which could allow continued use of brands such as McDonald's that are withdrawing from Russia in droves. The effect of losing patent protections will vary by company, experts say, depending on whether they have a valuable patent in Russia. The U.S. government has long warned of intellectual property rights violations in the country; last year Russia was among nine nations on a "priority watch list" for alleged failures to protect intellectual property. Now Russian entities could not be sued for damages if they use certain patents without permission. The patent decree and any further lifting of intellectual property protections could affect Western investment in Russia well beyond any de-escalation of the war in Ukraine, said Josh Gerben, an intellectual property lawyer in Washington. Firms that already saw risks in Russian business would have more reason to worry. "It's just another example of how [Putin] has forever changed the relationship that Russia will have with the world," Gerben said. Russia's decree removes protections for patent holders who are registered in hostile countries, do business in them or hold their nationality. The Kremlin has not issued any decree lifting protections on trademarks. But Russia's Ministry of Economic Development said last week that authorities are considering "removing restrictions on the use of intellectual property contained in certain goods whose supply to Russia is restricted," according to Russian state news outlet Tass, and that potential measures could affect inventions, computer programs and trademarks. The ministry said the measures would "mitigate the impact on the market of supply chain breaks, as well as shortages of goods and services that have arisen due to the new sanctions of western countries," Tass stated. Gerben said a similar decree on trademarks would pave the way for Russian companies to exploit American brand names that have halted their business in Russia. He gave a hypothetical involving McDonald's, one of the latest global giants to suspend operations in Russia under public pressure.

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Trump and the Republican party wanted to undercount BIPOC in the 2020 census. They’re continuing to do everything in their power to erase underrepresented communities; how else will they stay in power? They keep millions from communities in need and gerrymander districts in their favor. Classic GOP racist play. Classic. 

A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday shows that Latinos were left out of the 2020 census at more than three times the rate of a decade earlier, and the count for Native Americans living on reservations and Black people was static from the 2010 rates. Now, that doesn’t sound right at all. 

According to NPR, those who identified as white and not Latino were overcounted at almost double the rate of 2010, Asian Americans were also overcounted, and the 2020 tally count for Pacific Islanders remains unclear. 

Oddly enough, the Bureau insists the census remains “fit to use" for reallocating each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes, as well as redrawing voting districts.

As Daily Kos staff writer Aysha Qamar wrote in November of last year, the Urban Institute estimated that, nationwide, the net undercount rates by race or ethnicity were highest for Black people, followed by Latino people and Pacific Islanders, and the count could be the largest miscount of the true U.S. population in 30 years.

Related stories: 

• 'There was a definite undercount of immigrant cities': Advocates say Trump influenced 2020 census
• New census data shows six states gaining House seats and seven losing out for the coming decade
• Our new data shows exactly how new House districts are made up of old ones for every state

Make no mistake, the undercount of BIPOC is absolutely intentional. It effectively rips away the possibility of distribution of an estimated $1.5 trillion each year in federal money to communities for health care, education, transportation, and other public services—not to mention the political power of redistricting. 

As Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro so succinctly tweeted: 

“This was intentional. After Trump tried to use the Census to enforce his racism and xenophobia, Latinos were undercounted at 3X the 2010 rate. The undercount will strip Latino communities of government funding and electoral power. Congress must not allow this to happen again.”

Arturo Vargas, chief executive of NALEO Educational Fund, told The Washington Post undercounting by the census was not surprising as the Trump administration’s efforts to silence and erase those communities of color continue.

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All philosophical questions have now been explained via God yelling.

Today's News:

After two Republican members of Congress spoke at a white nationalist event last month, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called it “appalling.” This week, he expanded on that, saying, “There’s no place for what has gone on with that organization. There never will be in this party. It will never be tolerated.” There’s just one small thing here. At the same time McCarthy said “It will never be tolerated,” he signaled that it absolutely will be and is being tolerated. Maybe even rewarded.

After Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar spoke at the America First Political Action Conference, it took McCarthy 10 days to get around to having a chat with Greene. He’s still playing phone tag with Gosar. Clearly it wasn’t urgent to McCarthy to address two members of his conference associating with white nationalists at an event at which the organizer led the crowd in cheers for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It was an issue important enough for McCarthy to tell the press that he was upset and would be talking to his members who had cozied up to white nationalists. But it wasn’t an issue important enough for him to do that.

Before McCarthy got around to talking to Greene, some Republican House members defended him by saying there wasn’t much he could do about Greene and Gosar, since by stripping them of committee seats, Democrats had also stripped McCarthy of his leverage over them. After he spoke to Greene, though, McCarthy let reporters know that he was more interested in putting them back on committees than finding a harsher sanction.

Gosar and Greene “have the ability to be able to get committees based upon that time when it comes,” McCarthy told reporters. In other words, if Republicans retake the House, the punishment Gosar and Greene have faced will end and they will be unleashed on committees.

McCarthy said Greene “will not go again” to the white nationalist event, though he obviously gave her no reason not to break her word on that. This year was Gosar’s second time speaking at the event; he faced no consequences for his previous appearance.

As a reminder, Gosar was censured and removed from committees because he posted an edited video showing himself murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden. Greene liked social media posts calling for the assassination of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others and embraced conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings having been staged. After she’d been stripped of committee assignments, Greene made comments about the Holocaust that later necessitated an apology tour of the Holocaust Museum.

Now both Green and Gosar have spoken at an event put on by someone prone to saying things like, “We can’t play this game of, ‘We disavow white supremacy.’ Notice how the claws come out,” and:

“You can call us racists, white supremacists, Nazis, & bigots. You can disavow us on social media from your cushy Campus Reform job. But you will not replace us. The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming. And they know that once the word gets out, they will not be able to stop us. The fire rises!”

And in response, Kevin McCarthy has pledged that they can get back on committees if Republicans win the House.

That’s McCarthy making clear that he cares much more about his own chances of being speaker—for which he needs the votes of the far-right Freedom Caucus—than he does about separating the Republican Party from white nationalism and assassination fantasies.

In 2019, then-Rep. Steve King had his committee assignments stripped by Republican leadership, of which McCarthy was the head, for saying, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” In 2021, McCarthy declined to act against Gosar for appearing at a white nationalist event or posting assassination fantasies, or against Greene for conspiracy theories and assassination fantasies. In 2022, McCarthy is affirmatively saying that their place in the Republican Party is secure despite it all, very much including their white nationalist associations. This isn’t about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar being disgusting trolls. It’s about the Republican Party and the direction people like them are pushing it, with the approval—in deed if not in words—of its leaders.

The red-state drive to roll back civil rights is entering a new phase, perhaps best symbolized by Florida’s passage this week of the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill censoring how schools discuss sexual orientation. President Joe Biden’s administration is leaning more heavily into the fight, even as business leaders are retreating from the battlefield.

In multiple states, prominent companies that regularly tout their commitment to diversity and inclusion have largely stood aside as GOP-controlled legislatures and governors have approved laws that restrict voting access, curtail abortion rights and LGBTQ freedoms, and limit how teachers can discuss race, gender, and sexual orientation in public schools. The refusal of the Walt Disney Company, one of Florida’s most powerful employers, to publicly criticize Florida’s “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill as it moved through the legislature has quickly come to symbolize a retreat from the loud public opposition that many companies expressed to earlier state initiatives restricting civil liberties, such as the “bathroom bill” North Carolina Republicans approved in 2016.

Across the broad range of socially conservative initiatives that Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and the GOP state legislature have advanced since 2021, business has been “silent, silent as fuck, they are so silent,” says Florida Democratic State Representative Anna Eskamani, echoing a complaint I heard across several states from Democrats and civil-rights advocates this week. “[Businesses] have other priorities, which impact their bottom line and their profits, and they view that as more important.”

The Biden administration is pointedly moving in the other direction. During 2021, many activists complained that the president was largely ignoring the red-state offensive while focusing on passing his Build Back Better economic plan and stressing his willingness to work with governors from both parties on the pandemic.

But in the past few months, the administration has notably sharpened its tone on many of these red-state efforts. The Justice Department is challenging a steadily growing list of state actions that it views as violating federal constitutional or statutory rights. In his State of the Union address last week, Biden singled out for criticism the new state laws on voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights.

“The president is the first to say we want to work together and we want to work in bipartisanship for the American people but … we are also going to call out some of these really hateful bills that have gone after some of our most vulnerable communities,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, told me.

Since 2021, Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana have advanced a torrent of socially conservative legislation. This includes laws limiting access to abortion, restricting voting rights, banning transgender girls from participating in high-school or college sports, barring transition medical treatment for transgender minors, censoring how teachers can talk about current or historical racial and gender inequities, removing licensing requirements to publicly carry firearms, increasing penalties for public protesters, and immunizing drivers who hit and injure protesters.

[Read: Watch what’s happening in red states]

Florida alone has passed almost every item on that list, and this week added the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill restricting classroom discussion of sexual orientation. Today the legislature passed DeSantis’s “Stop Woke” act, which restricts how not only schools but also private companies holding diversity training can discuss racial-equity issues. “The last two or three years has definitely been not even a wave; it’s an onslaught,” Eskamani told me. “It’s so intense, and every direction you turn, you have another culture war to fight back against.”

In many ways, the 23 states where Republicans now control both the governorship and state legislature are attempting to unravel “the rights revolution” of the past 60 years, in which both the Supreme Court and Congress have generally expanded the range of basic rights and liberties available nationwide. As I’ve written, the cumulative aim of these proposals is to return the U.S. to a pre-1960s world in which those basic rights and liberties vary much more from state to state.

In the process, the red states are enshrining the social priorities of a GOP coalition centered mostly on the experiences and preferences of older white Christian and nonurban voters over those of more demographically and culturally diverse younger generations. The contrast is sharpest with Generation Z, young Americans born after 1996: Almost half of the generation is nonwhite, about one-fifth of its members identify as LGBTQ, and more than one-third describe themselves as secular, unaffiliated with any religious tradition. Among the Millennial generation, born from 1980 to 1996, the numbers on each front are not quite as high, but still far above older generations.

In the first stages of the current struggle, business leaders appeared acutely conscious of staying on the sympathetic side of those rising generations, who represent most of their future employers and customers. Arguably the opening bell for the current round of socially conservative legislation was the 2016 passage of North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which required people to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth.

That drew a furious backlash from a wide array of business interests. Multiple companies, including PayPal, Adidas, and Deutsche Bank, rescinded plans to invest in the state. Artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, and Ringo Starr canceled concerts there. Maybe most damaging of all, in a place that so reveres basketball, the NCAA announced it would not host championship tournaments in the state and the National Basketball Association pulled its all-star game from Charlotte. Almost 70 companies joined a lawsuit against the bill. In North Carolina, companies “stepped up … and it created a real spotlight that activists on our own could not bring,” Chad Griffin, who was then the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ-rights organization, told me.

The pressure worked: The state repealed the law in 2017. That same year, a broad coalition of business leaders in Texas blocked a similar bill pushed by staunchly conservative Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.

Many large employers in Georgia fought a succession of socially conservative bills there through the second half of the last decade, including a six-week abortion ban and “religious freedom” bills that would have given businesses more discretion to refuse to serve customers or hire employees who are LGBTQ. Prominent in that resistance was Disney, which cast a long shadow over the Georgia economy through its filming of Marvel movies there.

Nothing comparable to that business opposition has emerged in response to the new wave of socially conservative laws. In some cases, individual companies have spoken out against specific legislation, as Delta Air Lines, another powerful Georgia presence, did on the restrictive voting law that state Republicans passed last year. In other cases, business groups have sent letters opposing some of these initiatives. Prominent Tennessee employers, including Nissan, Dell, Amazon, and Vanderbilt University, sent a letter last year opposing a suite of bills targeting LGBTQ rights, and a similarly gilded group of Texas’s business leaders declared their opposition to Governor Greg Abbott’s recent directive to investigate parents and others who provide transition treatment for transgender minors.

But in this round of conflict, companies have not backed up their words with equivalent actions. After Tennessee last year passed all of the bills that targeted LGBTQ rights—including measures restricting classroom discussion, barring transgender girls from high-school sports, and its own version of a bathroom bill—it faced nothing like the North Carolina boycotts. Companies “really did make an example of North Carolina, and that started with one company saying ‘We’re not coming here,’ and then there was a pile-on effect,” Joe Woolley, the CEO of the Nashville LGBT Chamber of Commerce, told me. “You just don’t see that right now.”

Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a racial-equity organization, similarly says that the record of companies in resisting either the restrictive voting bills or legislation censoring how K–12 schools and even public universities can talk about race has “been absolutely abysmal.” Although many big corporations touted their commitment to Black History Month in February, he notes, they “are not willing to put their hand on the scale to stop the removal of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks from our public schools” or to stand up unequivocally for voting rights.

The corporate response was even more muted to the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” legislation Florida passed Tuesday. The bill provoked a series of walk-out protests from high-school students around the state. They were joined by “educators, child-welfare advocates, parents at the PTA” who have all “been on the very front line of pushing back against this,” Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, a prominent LGBTQ-rights group in the state, told me. All of that activism, she said, underscored “the overwhelming silence of the business community.”

Especially frustrating for activists was Disney’s refusal to publicly criticize the bill as it moved through the legislature. Disney World, outside Orlando, is an enormous economic force in Florida: The company’s website says it is both the most visited vacation resort on Earth and, with nearly 70,000 employees, or “cast members,” the nation’s largest single-site employer. Disney’s reticence on the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill contrasted with its activist role against other conservative legislation under its former chairman and CEO Robert Iger. Bob Chapek, Iger’s successor as CEO, has tried to sidestep these culturally polarizing political fights. In a Monday memo to Disney staff disclosed by The Hollywood Reporter, Chapek argued that the company can do more to promote tolerance “through the inspiring content we produce, the welcoming culture we create, and the diverse community organizations we support.”

That argument did not quiet a chorus of internal critics. Griffin, now a political and public-relations strategist in Los Angeles, predicted to me on Monday that Chapek’s position of dodging fights over equality would prove “unsustainable” because it “horrified” so many of the workers and creative talent the company relies upon. “I’ve heard from many folks internally at Disney at all levels, and I get the sense that the anger and unrest is at a fever pitch,” Griffin said. “The view is: Bob Chapek is either getting really, really bad advice or he is forging a path at Disney that abandons years of goodwill that company’s worked to build with LGBTQ employees and customers and talent.” Yesterday, Chapek suddenly reversed course and told a shareholders’ meeting that the company had privately opposed the bill and that he had called DeSantis that morning to condemn it. But even after the switch, Chapek is still facing continued pressure from employees and activist groups for more concrete actions against the legislation.

To many critics of this corporate behavior, the most visible manifestation of the waning commitment is companies’ refusal to cut off donations for political officials pushing the ideas that they claim to oppose. The independent journalist and activist Judd Legum has chronicled a long list of businesses that assert their support for LGBTQ rights but have contributed to officeholders in Florida and Texas who are pushing to retrench those rights.

Why have so many companies backed away from these fights? Some corporate lobbyists I spoke with said one reason is they believe public opposition is counterproductive because more Republican elected officials in the Donald Trump era find it politically valuable to be seen fighting big companies. Businesses also frequently complain that the widening gulf between the parties leaves them in a lose-lose position of alienating an important block of potential customers wherever they come down in policy debates. (Activists, though, point out that businesses often try to have it both ways by rhetorically identifying with causes such as inclusion and diversity without taking tangible steps to defend them.)

But another factor probably looms larger than any of those considerations: However much they want to publicly align with the values of younger consumers and workers, big companies want to go only so far in fighting these proposals, because they still mostly prefer Republicans to control state governments and deliver the low-tax, light-regulation policies they favor. State Republicans in turn have grown more overt about threatening those benefits when business leaders raise objections to the culture-war components of their agenda. When American Airlines criticized the restrictive voting bill Texas passed last year, Lieutenant Governor Patrick openly threatened to kill other legislation the company cared about.

As business steps back, the Biden administration, after a slow start, is leaning in. “We are looking at where we can be a critical voice of support—from the president lending his voice and making sure folks know he has their back … [to] working with our agencies to see what they can do to continue to uphold some of the basic rights for these communities,” Chavez Rodriguez said.

The White House recently convened Florida activists and elected officials to discuss the state’s newly passed 15-week abortion ban, and has held similar sessions with LGBTQ advocates from Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. When Abbott issued his directive labeling transition care for minors “child abuse,” Biden issued a pointed statement declaring that “the Governor’s actions callously threaten to harm children and their families just to score political points.” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra called the action “discriminatory and unconscionable” and promised to “use every tool at our disposal to keep Texans safe.”

Biden also tweeted stern opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill, and when it passed on Tuesday, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona issued a stronger statement of condemnation than he’s offered on any of the earlier state-level bills targeting curriculum. Cardona hinted that the Florida law might violate Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in education (defined last year by the department as including sexual orientation), and could trigger a civil-rights investigation.

Month by month, the Justice Department has joined, or initiated, a much broader range of legal actions against these state moves than is commonly recognized. It has filed lawsuits against voting restrictions passed in Georgia and Texas and the Texas abortion law, and sued to overturn a Missouri law barring local officials from enforcing federal gun legislation. It has also joined litigation against an Arkansas law restricting transition care for transgender youth, a West Virginia statute barring transgender girls from school sports, and a Florida school district requiring a transgender student to use the bathroom of his gender identity at birth. It joined a Texas case arguing that Governor Abbott’s ban on school mask mandates violated the Americans With Disabilities Act (as well as a similar lawsuit in South Carolina) and sued Texas directly to block another Abbott order requiring state troopers to stop vehicles transporting undocumented migrants through the state. The department has also joined a lawsuit against a Florida statute DeSantis signed making it easier to charge protesters as rioters, and the litigation against the Mississippi 15-week abortion ban that the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices may use to overturn Roe v. Wade. The common theme, as Attorney General Merrick Garland declared when he announced the lawsuit against the Texas abortion law, is that “the United States has the authority and responsibility to ensure that no state can deprive individuals of their constitutional rights.”

[Joshua Prager: Sarah Weddington’s unexpected path to Roe]

This record is winning praise even from some civil-rights activists who questioned the administration’s early commitment to these fights. “I do see an effort to engage, an effort to use the bully pulpit and to highlight their willingness to fight,” Nsé Ufot, the chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project, a community organizing group founded by Stacey Abrams, told me.

Although activists welcome the White House’s increased political and legal attention, how much the administration can practically do to slow the red-state advance is unclear. Biden has backed federal legislation that would largely undo the red-state actions on voting, LGBTQ rights, and abortion, but each of those bills, after passing the House, has been blocked by Senate Republican filibusters. All legal challenges from the administration or civil-rights groups ultimately face the steep wall of the six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices; far from limiting these laws, the Court has already opened the door for states to roll back voting access and is expected to do the same on abortion rights later this year. Indeed, some officials in the Biden administration believe that signals of sympathy from the six justices are one of the principal reasons for the explosion of state laws crimping civil rights and liberties.

Robinson, from Color of Change, said that the most important thing Biden can do now is mobilize more public opposition by better defining the stakes and contours of the struggle unfolding on so many fronts across so many states. “You are in the middle of a deep fight with people who want to take us backwards … and he is not treating opponents like we are in that kind of fight,” Robinson said. “As a result, he is not welcoming people into the fight.” Although Robinson welcomes the administration’s legal challenges to many of the red-state laws, “if all of the fight is happening with lawyers at the Department of Justice, it’s not a mobilizing force.”

One priority that’s clear to the civil-rights activists confronting the red-state cultural offensive is that mobilization on these issues can’t be confined solely to the political arena. Each person I talked with said they believe that companies have engaged in fights to protect civil rights and civil liberties not out of altruism but because of pressure from their employees and consumers—more and more of whom are drawn from the kaleidoscopically diverse younger generations. More of that pressure to organize workers and consumers, they maintain, will be necessary to compel business back into the ring as these struggles rage on.

“As more stories come out about how these bills are being [implemented],” Robinson said, these companies “are going to be held accountable for their role in this in ways that will only become more challenging and more intense for them.”