James.galbraith

The Philips Hue line of lights is gaining several new additions this summer, including a bright white bulb, a Bluetooth version of the Lightstrip Plus, and a revamped Hue Bloom.


Priced at $20, the new Philips Hue White A21 bulb is the brightest bulb in the Hue lineup with 1,600 lumen output that's equivalent to a 100W bulb. That's much brighter than the standard Hue White and Color Ambiance bulbs, which are 60W equivalent. The Hue White A21 bulb can fully illuminate a kitchen, garage, or other room, plus it offers wireless dimming. It will launch in late July.


Also new is the Bluetooth-enabled Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus, a Bluetooth version of the popular Hue Lightstrip Plus that connects to WiFi. This new Bluetooth model does not require a hub to work, though it is compatible with the Hue hub. Up to eight extensions can be added.


A two-meter Bluetooth Lightstrip will be available from Target for $79.99 starting this week, and it will come to other retailers later in the summer. A one-meter extension will also be available for purchase for $24.99.

Along with the new A21 bulb and the Lightstrip, the Hue line is also gaining a redesigned Bluetooth-compatible Hue Bloom table lamp, which features richer colors and an improved white light with brightness up to 500 lumens compared to the prior version. It has also been updated with a more consistent experience with the rest of the Hue range, and the color temperature can now be tuned from 2000K to 6500K.


The Philips Hue Bloom will be available in late July and it will cost $69.99. More information on all of the new announcements can be found on the Philips Hue website.
This article, "Philips Hue Line Gains Brighter A21 Bulb, Bluetooth Lightstrip and Revamped Bloom Lamp" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Everything is bad and we can't have nice things so, instead, please enjoy this long, drawn-out Twitter war between two of the least liked Republican lawmakers in America and ... um, famous actor Ron Perlman, for some reason. The pushing-off point was Florida man Rep. Matt Gaetz grunting that well, if there's going to be be kneeling during the national anthem, maybe we just shouldn't have soccer at all, you soccer meanies.

It all went downstream from there because Rep. Matt Gaetz and Sen.(!) Ted Cruz both think they are crackerjack twitterers who can easily Own Any Libs they come across. And it's not like they have day jobs, right?

Which resulted in this response. After this point the tweets mostly speak for themselves, so I'm just going to insert running commentary about other things here like my personal irritation at the lowercase "g," or whatever.

A fairly typical response on the daily twitters. But I suppose coming from someone with 900,000 followers it was a wound too deep for, sigh, the Matt Gaetzes of the world.

Woah, take that, professional actor who takes on roles and portrays often-unsavory people. (The "you played a white supremacist!" attack was an odd one from Gaetz, who—as onlookers pointed out—invited an actual, not-fictional white supremacist to be his State of the Union speech guest.

Anyhow, my problem with the lowercase "g" is that it doesn't look like an uppercase "G." It looks different depending on the font, but in all cases it has that little dangly bit dangling down there—the monkey-tail part—and the uppercase G doesn't. The uppercase G is just a C sitting down at a library table, attempting to maybe get some work done.

Ah, the if people think I am an asshole that means I am winning argument. Ha ha, I am "threatening" to you! Otherwise you would be ignoring me, the asshole!

So what's the point of having lowercase letters that look nothing like uppercase letters? Why would you even do that to people? In cases like P it is perfectly reasonable to have p: We get it, the P's little leg fell into a hole and got stuck there. It needs assistance. But G and g? Those are clearly two different letters. Get out of here with that nonsense.

Anyhow, the next Ron Perlman insult would get actual sitting-U.S.-Senator-Because-Texas Ted Cruz into the mix, for some reason.

It's a little weird that Ted Cruz wouldn't defend his wife when Donald Trump insulted her looks during a campaign, but is here willing to jump into the fray uninvited because calling Matt Gaetz ugly is a bridge too far. We get it. It's because every Republican loves Donald Trump and wants to have little Fascist Hitler Babies with him, so literally anything Donald does can be forgiven even as the same behavior from anyone else results in a right stern talking-to.

But volunteering someone else to go fight about it?

Volunteering that if you don't behave, they’re going to send Jim Jordan out to "wrestle" you?

Oh, that is … not good.

Seriously, again we see this odd Republiconservative tendency to choose the weirdest guys as their templars of supposed manliness. There's supposed alpha male Donald Trump, whose idea of "toughness" is teetering around in precarious lifts and having absolute meltdowns about even the slightest little thing, and we've got Jim Jordan, who became a Republican man-knight for the alpha male act of … covering up the sexual molestation of teen boys.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. I don't care who it is, if it results in Ted Cruz getting the stuffing knocked out of him in a legally sanctioned setting, I'm all for it.

Anyway, my problem with G and g specifically is that we already have a perfectly good glyph for a lowercase G. We call it a schwa. Here, look at it. ə. (If you can't see that, it's because there's a worldwide anti-schwa conspiracy to hide it, but much progress has been made in recent years.)

That's pretty good, right? It looks exactly like an uppercase G, but smaller and backwards. We can say it's just temporarily backwards because it's disoriented from being inserted into our alphabet without warning. “It’s shy—just make sure it has food and water and give it its own space until it gets used to things,” we’ll tell people. Then in a decade or two, we can reverse it. Yes, I know there's already a Unicode character that would—you know what, never mind. I’m just throwing these ideas out there. If you don't like them, it's because you find my thinking "threatening" to your Hollywood worldview, you jerks.

All right, I'm sorry I called you jerks. I apologize. Things got heated, and I was very upset from having to spell "schwa" so many times in a row. Where were we? Oh, right. Ron Perlman taunting Republican lawmakers while they preen and threaten to let loose screeching man-parrot Jim Jordan. No, Republican lawmakers don't really have anything better to do right now. During a pandemic. And economic collapse. And nationwide movement against police brutality.

Also, we don't need both the letter C and the letter K. You know it, I know it, linguists know it, we all know it. One or the other has to go. We also don't need both a Matt Gaetz and a Ted Cruz, and yet here they both are anyway. Still. Again.

Uuuugh.

The Senate is unlikely to take up a police reform bill until after the Independence Day recess, Republican leaders said on Monday, raising the prospect that it could be a month or longer before a measure heads to President Donald Trump’s desk.

A group of GOP senators, led by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), is expected to file legislation this week that would address policing practices in the aftermath of the May 25 killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American, at the hands of law enforcement. But according to GOP leaders, any floor votes would likely have to wait until at least the week of July 20, after senators return from a two-week recess.

“I think it has enough support if we can get a process to move it, possibly,” Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said, referring to Scott’s bill. “But I would say at this moment probably unlikely in this work period — July, more likely.”

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), also a member of Republican leadership, concurred. He also said he does not think the two-week July 4 recess would be canceled.

“I’d be surprised if it happens before the July recess,” Blunt said in a brief interview.

Scott, for his part, said it would be a mistake to wait. He is urging Senate leaders to take swift action, on the heels of a “positive” phone call he had with Trump on Sunday night.

“Without the bill becoming law — whether it’s my bill or some other version of some other bill — then we’ve kind of failed the moment,” Scott said. “Us waiting a month before we vote is a bad decision. So I hope we are willing to take up legislation and just get on the record. If it fails, it fails.”

It remains unclear how the Senate will proceed, especially as GOP leaders grapple with whether to draw up another stimulus package to address the economic and public-health challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) reiterated on Monday that he will make a decision in July “about whether to go forward with a rescue package.” Expanded unemployment benefits expire on July 31, likely necessitating congressional action to aid out-of-work Americans this summer.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a member of Scott’s working group, noted that the Senate also has to pass the annual defense policy bill, presenting lawmakers with a busy calendar ahead of the August recess.

“This is really not a moment where the country cares about partisanship on it. They want to just get it solved,” Lankford told reporters. “It’s hard to determine in a presidential election year because the all the politics get pretty noisy as everyone tries to dig in.”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), another member of GOP leadership, said he was optimistic that both parties and both chambers could come to an agreement to address the racial injustices that have plagued the criminal justice system.

“I expect a bill to become law,” Barrasso said. “I can’t tell you the timing on it, but the goal is to get this done.”

House Democrats are scheduled to vote this week at the committee level on a sweeping police reform bill that has the backing of a wide swath of House and Senate Democrats. Republicans have expressed an openness to several provisions laid out in the proposal, but Scott’s plan — which is expected to be released on Wednesday — is expected to garner the backing of congressional Republicans in addition to the White House.

McConnell said last week that he had tapped Scott, the lone African-American Republican senator, to helm a police reform proposal to address “the obvious racial discrimination that we’ve seen on full display on our television screens over the last two weeks, and what is the appropriate response by the federal government.”

Public opinion has swung sharply in favor of reforming the nation’s policing practices in recent days, amid a nationwide uproar over the police killings of Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky.

Scott’s plan, which is still in the works, would establish new reporting requirements on the use of deadly force by police officers and would threaten to cut off federal funding for localities that fail to comply.

One of the outstanding issues includes whether to explicitly ban the use of chokeholds — a feature of the Democrat-authored proposal, but one that Republicans are hesitant to codify into law at the federal level. Scott’s plan would slash funding for police departments that do not ban the use of chokeholds.

In addition to Lankford, Scott’s working group includes GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska.

The White House will host leaders from Serbia and Kosovo later this month in an effort to kickstart stalled efforts to reach a permanent peace settlement, according to Richard Grenell, the U.S. special envoy for the talks.

The two Balkan states have been locked in a frozen conflict since 1999, when a NATO air war ended Serb control of Kosovo in the last of a series of conflicts that raged as Yugoslavia was torn apart. The EU has overseen years of dialogue between the two sides but the Trump administration has seized the initiative in recent months, sidelining European powers.

Grenell, who recently stepped down as U.S. ambassador to Germany but retains the special envoy role he took on last year, said each side had made commitments to allow the White House talks to take place. Kosovo agreed to pause efforts to join international bodies and Serbia pledged to halt a campaign to get countries to revoke their recognition of Kosovo, he said.

"If either side is unsatisfied with the June 27 discussions then they will go back to the status quo after they leave Washington. As we have consistently said, we must first make progress on growing the economies. This is the focus. I look forward to these discussions," Grenell tweeted on Monday.

The U.S. moves put the Trump administration in the driving seat in the EU's volatile back yard — to the alarm of some European officials. They have voiced fears that Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovan President Hashim Thaçi will agree to change borders as part of a deal that could revive violent campaigns for territory elsewhere in the region.

Grenell himself has insisted that a land swap has not been mentioned in his presence and that he does not regard it as an option.

The European Union has been caught flat-footed by the U.S. moves, which critics have alleged are an effort to gain kudos for Trump in an election year by sealing a peace deal. The EU has been unable to agree on a common line on border change and took six months to appoint a special envoy of its own after Trump named Grenell in October of last year.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and has been recognized by more than 100 countries, including most EU members and the United States. But Belgrade continues to regard the territory as a rebel province and had blocked Kosovo's membership of international organizations, with the backing of Russia and China.

OAKLAND — California’s “sanctuary” immigration enforcement law will not go before the U.S. Supreme Court, handing California a capstone victory in an ongoing clash with the federal government.

The high court on Monday turned down the Justice Department's request to review a federal appeals court decision that largely upheld three California laws. One of the laws passed soon after Donald Trump became president, Senate Bill 54, partitions local law enforcement from federal immigration authorities, protecting arrested immigrants and low-level offenders from deportation.

The federal government asked the Supreme Court to review SB 54. The court announced Monday that it declined that review, though Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would have heard the case.

Trump and allies have lambasted California's sanctuary law as an example of what they called Democratic lawlessness on immigration, but it has withstood federal attacks. In addition to rejecting the administration’s argument that California was preempted by federal law, judges have turned back a Trump administration effort to withhold law enforcement funding from “sanctuary” jurisdictions.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra hailed the Supreme Court's decision for bolstering California’s effort to build “trust between law enforcement and our hard-working immigrant communities.”

“That’s why this fight mattered so much,” Becerra said in a statement. “We’re protecting Californians’ right to decide how we do public safety in our state. The Trump Administration does not have the authority to commandeer state resources. We’re heartened by today’s Supreme Court decision.”

President Donald Trump on Monday claimed to be a victim of double standards when it comes to perception of his decision to resume campaign rallies in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, declaring that attempts to “covid shame” his campaign “won’t work!”

In a tweet, the president complained about discrepancies in media coverage of his upcoming rally in Tulsa, Okla., compared to that of mass protests across the country over police killings of unarmed black Americans.

“The Far Left Fake News Media, which had no Covid problem with the Rioters & Looters destroying Democrat run cities, is trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies,” he wrote, continuing a pattern of failing to distinguish between the majority peaceful protesters and those who engaged in property destruction and looting at some of the events.

Efforts to shame his campaign, he added, “Won’t work!”

Public health experts have faced accusations of hypocrisy for backing the protests, spurred by the police killing of George Floyd last month, while criticizing smaller protests of state coronavirus restrictions. They've argued that protesting systemic racism is worth the risk, and that while still dangerous, mass gatherings are safer outdoors than indoors, as Trump’s rally will be, as long as demonstrators take appropriate precautions.

And the press has come under fire as well for its coverage of the protests, with less emphasis on the pandemic or the need for social distancing.

It’s the first time the president has personally vocalized the sentiment, which has been percolating on the right since he announced last week his plan to resume rallies.

Saturday’s rally, the first for Trump since coronavirus-related shutdowns began in March, comes as parts of the country see an uptick in infections — including Oklahoma.

Several states and cities have paused or threatened to pause the reopening process and lifting of restrictions as cases have begun to spike, raising fears of a potential second wave of infections. The president’s plans to resume rallies have faced pushback, and even his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday warned that large gatherings in confined places pose the highest risk for spreading the coronavirus.

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, also said Friday that attending any type of mass gathering, be it a campaign rally or a protest, is "risky" and that attendees who can’t or won’t avoid crowds should wear masks.

Over the weekend, Tulsa’s top health official told the Tulsa World that he wished Trump would reschedule the rally for a later date, citing a “significant increase in our case trends.”

“I think it’s an honor for Tulsa to have a sitting president want to come and visit our community, but not during a pandemic,” Bruce Dart, director of the Tulsa City-County Health Department, told the paper. Dart added that he had concerns both for rally attendees as well as the president himself.

The paper’s editorial board on Monday also pushed back on the rally plans, writing that due to a number of factors, “this is the wrong time and Tulsa is the wrong place for the Trump rally.”

Gov. Kevin Stitt reiterated that he was “excited” for Trump’s visit and would still roll out the welcome mat for the president, though he said that because of the demand for tickets a change of venue — potentially to an outdoor location — was a possibility.

But Stitt, a Republican, brushed off the notion that he would let coronavirus fears cancel the rally altogether, while writing off the state’s increased number of cases as merely the result of increased testing and a consequence of reopening the state.

“That is the thing about our society. We are a free society. You are free to come to that event. If you are immune compromised in any way, we suggest you wouldn’t come. You are free to come. You are free to stay home,” he told reporters Monday, according to the Tulsa World.

He argued that while precautions need to be put in place and stressed that he was trying to make the rally as safe as possible, “we also have to learn how to deal with COVID” and “we can’t let it dictate our lives.”

In an acknowledgment of the continued risk of coronavirus, the campaign is making potential attendees agree not to sue if they contract the disease after attending the rally.

On Monday morning Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale announced that each attendee would receive a temperature check, hand sanitizer and a face mask before heading into the rally and said the campaign had received 1 million ticket requests for the roughly 20,000-person event.

It's a "recognition that there's guidelines in place that should be followed," Kellyanne Conway, a senior counselor to Trump, told reporters Monday afternoon.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel had raised a similar complaint to the president's in an interview on Fox News moments before his tweet.

Asked about health precautions the campaign was putting into place for Saturday’s rally, McDaniel said that she wasn’t in charge of planning the rally but predicted that those with the highest risk of contracting the virus would stay away from the rally and that anyone who felt the need to wear a face covering as the CDC recommends would be free to do so.

“It is interesting to see how we weren't hearing about this during the protest last week,” she went on, noting that African Americans have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and accusing Democratic leaders of ignoring the issue of personal protective equipment at the protests. “It's funny that now we are having a Trump rally and we’re bringing people out to celebrate the nominee for their party, all of the scrutiny is coming up on this,” McDaniel said.

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Donald Trump on Monday afternoon reacted to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court 6-3 ruling that LGBTQ people are protected under federal employment discrimination laws in cases involving whether someone can be fired from their job for being gay or transgender.

Trump reacts to SCOTUS' LGBTQ ruling pic.twitter.com/leDEIwCUVm

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) June 15, 2020

Said Trump to reporters: “I’ve read the decision, and some people were surprised. But they’ve ruled and we live with their decision. That’s what it’s all about. We live with the decision of the Supreme Court. Very powerful. Very powerful decision actually. But they have so ruled.”

The post Trump Reacts to SCOTUS Ruling on LGBTQ Rights: ‘We Live With Their Decision. Very Powerful’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Sen. Susan Collins is very concerned about the Trump administration's decision to eliminate protections for transgender patients, calling it "simply wrong." She's also applauding the Supreme Court decision on Monday barring employers from discriminating against LGBTQ workers, and calling for Congress to pass the Equality Act to extend those protections to LGBTQ people in all public accommodations. So she must be fretting, furrowing her brow, and wringing her hands over what her boy Justice Brett Kavanaugh did in this case.

It wasn't enough for him to just be one of the three justices in dissent on the case. He also had to write his own dissent. "Both the rule of law and democratic accountability badly suffer when a court adopts a hidden or obscure interpretation of the law, and not its ordinary meaning," he wrote, saying the majority was making "a mistake of history and sociology." But he did congratulate LGBTQ people for having "advanced powerful policy arguments" and saying they "can take pride in today's results," even though he still thinks their livelihoods should be in jeopardy because of who they love. All of which must come as a big shock for Collins, seeing as how Kavanaugh promised her he wouldn't discriminate against them on the court.

Tired of this schtick from her? Let's make sure her time is up. Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these crucial Senate races, but especially the one in Maine!

That's not what Collins said Kavanaugh told her back when she was justifying her vote to confirm him. Back then she said that Kavanaugh agreed with Justice Kennedy's opinion on Masterpiece Cakeshop: "The days of treating gay and lesbian Americans or gay and lesbian couples as second-class citizens who are inferior in dignity and worth are over in the Supreme Court." Unless you're Brett Kavanaugh, apparently. They can still be second-class citizens in the workplace as far as he's concerned.

Not that Collins wasn't more or less prepared for him to do this. When the Supreme Court was hearing the oral arguments in the case, Collins made it clear that she didn't ask Kavanaugh about any case beyond Obergefell, the case that decided marriage equality. "The issue that I raised with Justice Kavanaugh was on what is known as the [Obergefell v. Hodges] decision which legalized same-sex marriage and whether he considered that to be settled," she told reporters. "And he said that he did, because the Supreme Court has obviously ruled on that issue." She also assured reporters that Kavanaugh respects and feels bound by "settled law" and judicial precedent.

Uh huh. He also feels like LGBTQ people shouldn't have employment protections, and if he's going to think that, it's hard to imagine he'd agree that they should be able to get health care and housing without discrimination. Something that apparently Collins is very, very concerned about.

Too little, too late, senator. That vote for Kavanaugh sealed the deal when it comes to civil rights for all Americans (and abortion rights, too, when it comes down to it).

Just weeks after Democratic primary voters ousted an Ohio sheriff who for years collaborated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), another sheriff with ties to the mass deportation agency is out of a job. The Appeal reports Athens-Clarke County, Georgia sheriff Ira Edwards lost the Democratic primary to challenger John Williams, who ran on a platform of no longer honoring ICE’s unlawful detainers.

“Edwards, the incumbent, had come under fire from immigrants’ rights advocates for agreeing to honor so-called ICE detainers,” the report said. “These are warrantless requests that a sheriff’s department voluntarily keep people detained in jail beyond their scheduled release to give federal agents more time to come and claim custody.”

The Appeal reports that Edwards announced in 2018 that he would no longer honor ICE’s demands, criticized by local advocates like Athens Immigrant Rights Coalition for helping ICE with its mass deportation efforts. But, “At the time, advocates told the local press that they did not trust that Edwards would maintain that policy given some of his other statements,” the report said.

“Williams, who works as a detective in the Athens police department, met with immigrants’ rights advocates after entering the race, and he said he felt affected by those conversations,” the report continued. In fact, Williams seemed to recognize the fear that undocumented communities across the nation are experiencing under ICE, calling it a “level of terrorism,” he told The Appeal. “I talk about treating people with dignity and respect. You go against that when you bring in fear of being deported and having your life changed.”

Williams’ victory follows another primary win by Ohio’s Charmaine McGuffey this past April, who similarly unseated another pro-ICE sheriff by a “resounding” 70% to 30%. The Appeal reports Neil had already pissed off Democrats by attending a rally by then candidate Donald Trump back in 2016, which he was later forced to apologize for. ”Neil repeatedly said ... he attended the Trump rally to show appreciation for Trump's support of law enforcement. Neil wore his sheriff's uniform to the event,” Cincinnati.com reported at the time.

The Appeal said Williams further promised to “not take donations from the bail bond industry to facilitate bail reform.” The report said he stands a good chance of winning November’s general race against Republican challenger Robert Hare, who supports ongoing cooperation with ICE. 

Localities should make every effort to protect their undocumented communities and block local resources from being used to aid ICE’s terror campaign. In a stunning court victory, the Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the Trump administration’s appeal of landmark legislation in California mostly blocking local resources from being used to aid ICE.

“In rejecting the administration’s lawsuit, the court has recognized the power of local and state governments to use local resources for the common good and protect residents from federal abuses of power,” ICE Out of California Coalition said in a statement received by Daily Kos.

Even some of the conservative justices know when the GOP's position has become untenable.

On Saturday, the American embassy in Seoul, South Korea, hung a large "BLACK LIVES MATTER" banner from their building in support of "fellow Americans grieving and peacefully protesting to demand positive change."

That banner is now gone again, after Donald Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo learned of its presence. According to Time, both were "displeased" with the display.

The official reason for the removal is, according to a report from CNN, that Black Lives Matter refers to a "non-profit organization" in addition to being a nationwide rallying cry, and the Donald Trump-led government can't (cough) be seen as encouraging support for a specific organization. It could be seen as a violation of the Hatch Act, and everybody knows that the Trump team are sticklers when it comes to not running afoul of the Hatch Act.

More to the point, everybody also knows that the Trump administration only tolerates promotion of for-profit groups, not nonprofit ones, and only if those businesses belong to Donald Trump or one of Trump's more loyal supporters. If the U.S. embassy wanted to display a multistory banner promoting one of Trump's various hotels or golf courses, now that would be allowed. A rallying cry that could possibly be construed as support for a nonprofit despite the embassy saying it was in support for the protests at large, though, is right out.

Curiously, however, there is an additional catch to all this. At the time time the embassy removed the Black Lives Matter banner from the building, it also removed a LGBTQ Pride banner that had been hanging directly above it. There is no similar confusion as to whether the rainbow flag represents a non-profit group or a movement, and neither Time nor CNN have so far been able to get any clarification as to why that banner was removed as well. Was it also done on order of the State Department, or not?

Nobody will say, which is usually a sure sign that Mike Pompeo has f--ked with something again. Embassies have been allowed to fly those flags, so long as they do not fly from the same flagpole as the U.S. flag, so an order to remove that, too, would be a change.

When sex discrimination was originally added to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1974, its introduction reportedly drew a round of howls in the lower chamber of the U.S. Congress. Based on several reports, Representative Howard W. Smith, a Virginia Democrat who opposed the bill, added it as a floor amendment to weaken and potentially kill support for the bill.

The original text of the legislation banned employment based on race, creed, religion, or color. When Smith stood up to offer his amendment, he reportedly drawled, "After the word religion, insert sex," urging his colleagues to right "this grave injustice." According a New York Times reconstruction of the moment, the amendment prompted "laughter from his colleagues, who mockingly offered other suggested additions."

As difficult as it was for many '60s-era lawmakers to embrace the idea that people of color shouldn't live a second class existence in America, the notion that women needed to be defended in the workplace was apparently preposterous.

But the legislation did ultimately pass, sex included, and ever since the mid-aughts that prohibition has increasingly been viewed by federal courts as covering transgender workers from anti-trans bias. But, as I wrote for The Advocate in 2014, the first appeals court ruling to resolutely equate anti-trans bias with sex discrimination came in 2011 in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. In Glenn v. Brumby, Vandy Beth Glenn sued after being fired from her job as a legislative editor for the Georgia General Assembly based on her intent to transition.

That federal appeals court decision made the explicit connection that discriminating against transgender workers is a type of discrimination on the basis of not conforming with sex stereotypes. Within several months, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws, formalized its view in an unanimous ruling on Macy v. Holder that anti-trans bias in the workplace "is discrimination 'based on. . .sex'" and therefore violates Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964. The codification by the EEOC, while only legally binding for federal agencies, gave federal courts another point of reference for interpreting the law. 

Interestingly, the original expansion of the landmark civil rights legislation to cover LGBTQ workers was pioneered by transgender plaintiffs. Those legal successes were later built upon in further litigation to also cover sexual orientation. The two cases that finally reached the Supreme Court last year were brought by two gay male plaintiffs and a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, who said she had been fired by her employer after announcing her intent to identify as a woman.

Naturally, the Trump administration sided with the defendants in the case on rejecting both sexual orientation and gender identity as being legitimately covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"The ordinary meaning of 'sex' is biologically male or female; it does not include sexual orientation," the Justice Department wrote in its brief. "An employer who discriminates against employees in same-sex relationships thus does not violate Title VII as long as it treats men in same-sex relationships the same as women in same-sex relationships."

In other words, as long as an employer discriminates as much against its gay male employees as it does against it lesbian employees, all is right with the world. 

The administration similarly argued that the "ordinary public meaning of 'sex' was biological sex" in 1964 and did "not encompass transgender status." The Justice Department also managed to write an entire 110-page brief on the matter in which it entirely omitted pronouns, never once referring to Stephens as "she" or "her."

Pronouns or not, the Supreme Court disagreed on both counts. "An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. "Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids."

The ruling confounds the Trump administration both legally and politically. Not only did Trump and Co. argue in favor of perpetuating discrimination against LGBTQ Americans and lose, the fact that Gorsuch penned the majority opinion kneecaps one of Trump’s key appeals to religious conservatives—that he’s delivered them the perfect justices to the Supreme Court. 

Looks like the last laugh is on Trump.

LGBTQ advocates gathered in front of the Supreme Court on October 8, 2019. | Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion is clear, straightforward, and correct.

Bostock v. Clayton County, a landmark Supreme Court decision holding that federal law prohibits employment discrimination against LGBTQ workers, was a test of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s principles. He passed.

Gorsuch is a vocal proponent of “textualism,” the belief that the meaning of a law turns on its words alone, not on the intentions of the law’s drafters. And Bostock forced Gorsuch to decide between his own conservative politics and following the broad language of a landmark civil rights law. Gorsuch didn’t simply honor his textualist approach in Bostock; he wrote the majority opinion.

In Bostock, the Court considered Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids employment discrimination that occurs “because of [an employee’s] race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Though there is little doubt that the people who drafted this law in 1964 did not believe they were enacting a ban on LGBTQ discrimination, the thrust of Gorsuch’s opinion is that the expectations of lawmakers in 1964 simply do not matter.

Only the text of Title VII matters. And, as Bostock explains at length, that text clearly prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Gorsuch lays out why in just five crisp sentences on the first page of his majority opinion:

In Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

Remarkably, Bostock is a 6-3 opinion. Both Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, and Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush, joined the majority. Roberts joined Gorsuch’s opinion in full and did not write a separate opinion. Neither man has shown much sympathy for LGBTQ rights plaintiffs in the past.

But the sheer force of the plaintiffs’ textual arguments in Bostock appears to have weighed heavily on both men. At the very least, Bostock suggests that this conservative Supreme Court can follow the clear text of a law, even when that reading points in a liberal direction.

Why discrimination against LGBTQ people is sex discrimination

Title VII bans any employment discrimination that occurs “because of ... sex.” As Bostock explains, this means that if an employer “intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee” or “if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer,” then Title VII has been violated.

Having laid out this rule, Gorsuch then explains why discrimination against LGBTQ employees constitutes “sex discrimination” by laying out two examples:

Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague.

That is, if an employer permits its female employees to have sexual and romantic attractions to men but denies that same right to male employees, it is engaged in sex discrimination. It treats men differently than women.

Gorsuch also applies similar logic to a transgender employee:

Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.

Thus, Bostock turns on a simple application of Title VII’s text. Discrimination “because of ... sex” occurs whenever an employer treats male employees differently than female employees, or vice-versa. And, because discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity necessarily requires an employer to treat some male employees differently than some female employees, or vice-versa, such discrimination is illegal.

The text of the law is the only thing that matters in Bostock. As Gorsuch concludes his opinion, “ours is a society of written laws,” and that means that “judges are not free to overlook plain statutory commands on the strength of nothing more than suppositions about intentions or guesswork about expectations.” Because Congress “adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee,” the Court must hold that anti-LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace is illegal.

Anti-LGBTQ employers may still gain a religious exemption to Title VII

Bostock is, undoubtedly, a major victory for LGBTQ rights — before Bostock, it was still legal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in most states.

But it is unclear whether Bostock will entirely ban workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. That’s because the Court is also considering whether to grant employers with religious objections to LGBTQ people an exemption from anti-discrimination laws.

In a concurring opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), Gorsuch suggested that religious conservatives should enjoy sweeping exemptions from laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. And the Supreme Court is expected to hear a case next fall asking whether religious organizations have a broad right to engage in anti-LGBTQ discrimination.

So the fate of individual LGBTQ workers remains unclear — at least for employees with bosses who object to LGBTQ people on religious grounds.

---

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine, the unproven coronavirus treatment Donald Trump repeatedly boosted and even (said he) took himself. That emergency use authorization came under pressure from Trump, with whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright saying he was removed from his job for pushing back. Trump owns the promotion of this risky treatment at official levels.

Now, the FDA says it has concluded that “it is no longer reasonable to believe that oral formulations of HCQ and CQ may be effective in treating COVID-19, nor is it reasonable to believe that the known and potential benefits of these products outweigh their known and potential risks.”

The benefits of the drugs as COVID-19 treatments were extremely dubious at the outset, but Trump continued pushing them for weeks, even as study after study undercut the initial claims of their effectiveness, with significant safety concerns as well.

“Recent data from a large randomized controlled trial showed no evidence of benefit for mortality or other outcomes such as hospital length of stay or need for mechanical ventilation of HCQ treatment in hospitalized patients with COVID-19,” the FDA letter revoking the EUA notes. 

The thing is, with a fast-moving pandemic like this in which doctors are constantly learning new things about the virus and trying to treat them on the fly, there are going to be a lot of things that doctors and scientists try and have hopes for, only to find after more careful study that they don’t work. The problem comes when the president stands up on national television day after day claiming that one particular thing is The Answer, even though it hasn’t been fully studied, and even after studies are starting to suggest it is a bad idea. 

California’s 2017 legislation mostly blocking local resources from being used to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents round up and deport undocumented immigrants remains in place after the the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected impeached president Donald Trump and former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Session III’s challenge to the landmark legislation, the Los Angeles Times reports. 

“As is the usual custom, the court declined to say why it won’t hear the issue,” NBC News reported. What is known is that only two of the court’s justices were on board with taking up the administration’s appeal: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. “The Supreme Court just denied the administration’s attempt to force local law enforcement to do ICE’s bidding,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) tweeted Monday morning. “This is a win for all communities, particularly communities of color, and keeps us all safer.”

Under the California Values Act, which was signed into law by former Gov. Jerry Brown in October 2017: “State and local law enforcement agencies and school police and security departments cannot engage in immigration enforcement except in narrow circumstances,” ICE Out of California Coalition said. “With a few exceptions, no state or local resources will be used to investigate, detain, detect, report, or arrest persons for immigration enforcement purposes.”

Of course, the Trump administration lost its shit over the law, with former acting ICE director Thomas Homan threatening to escalate raids in the state over it (making a pretty good case for why we shouldn’t be lifting one finger to assist ICE in its terror campaign). “ICE will have no choice but to conduct at-large arrests in local neighborhoods and at worksites,” he barked, “which will inevitably result in additional collateral arrests.”

“Collateral arrests” is the crass term the agency uses to describe when someone who isn’t the target of a raid gets swept up just because they happened to be at the location. Maybe it’s a roommate or a relative, like when ICE targeted a Seattle dad—and then also detained his son, who happened to be asleep in his own home. Daniel Ramirez Medina, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who’s supposed to be protected from deportation by the program, was jailed for six weeks and stripped of his status. A federal judge ultimately blocked officials from revoking his DACA, further finding that ICE had lied and made up gang ties in order to try to deport him. 

“The Trump administration, led by Sessions, filed suit against California seeking to having the state law declared invalid,” LA Times continued. “But a federal judge in Sacramento and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco refused and ruled state and local officials were not obstructing federal agents.” Following the court’s rejection of the appeal, this is the end of the road for the administration on this one. The administration will no doubt try to find other ways to fuck over localities, because Trump and Stephen Miller are always gonna Trump and Stephen Miller, but California’s law stands.

“The court’s action today is a blow to the Trump administration’s racist agenda, and a rebuke to federal attempts to coerce local governments into carrying out its dirty work,” ICE Out of California Coalition said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “In rejecting the administration’s lawsuit, the court has recognized the power of local and state governments to use local resources for the common good and protect residents from federal abuses of power.”

But while immigrant communities and immigrant rights advocates welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision, many continue to be anxious due to the ongoing wait regarding a decision on the Trump administration’s inhumane and unlawful termination of the DACA program. No decision on that case came on Monday; the next decision day is this upcoming Thursday, June 18. We’ll keep you updated here.

The official story about the violent clearing of Lafayette Square so Donald Trump could have a photo op has changed several times, and it’s still filled with lies. Lie after lie has come from the Trump administration—Attorney General William Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the White House itself. The protesters were violent, they’ve claimed. Falsely. The protesters were warned to move, they’ve claimed. Also falsely. There was no tear gas, they said. Also falsely. There were a lot of reporters on the scene, and The Washington Post did a video reconstruction of what happened that clearly shows the lies.

But the Trump administration and U.S. Park Police (an agency with a loooong history of being the bad guys when it comes to protest) keep making those false claims. So The Washington Post went to other officials who were in on the planning, and found that, yup, the Trump administration and Park Police are lying, specifically and in particular about the claim that there was a plan in place to expand the security perimeter before Trump’s decision to do a photo op outside St. John’s Church.

“I never heard any plan, ever, that police or National Guard were going to push people out of Lafayette Square,” said Gen. Joseph Lengyel, chief of the National Guard Bureau. He further said that while there was a discussion about moving the perimeter at some point, “there was no talk that ‘we’re going to go in and push it out.’”

A D.C. Police spokesperson similarly said: ”We knew that they were considering the perimeter expansion, but there was no indication if or when it would happen.”

And: “No one said in the room, ‘We are going to push the perimeter back X amount of feet,’” according to an unnamed defense official. “However, there was discussion about the possibility of having to do that if certain conditions existed.” 

The Justice Department and Park Police continue to insist that the decision was made before Trump decided to take his little walk.

In addition to violations of the protesters’ constitutional rights, the Park Police violated a very specific federal settlement they entered into in 2015—not exactly ages ago—requiring that they give protesters repeated warnings audible to people at the back of a crowd and leave a clear exit path before clearing a protest. The clearing of Lafayette Square and the expansion of the perimeter—which was only fenced off hours later, showing again that this was not a carefully planned action but rather a last-minute push—also violated “everything we train to do,” according to a former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police.

The Trump administration is going to keep lying about the fact that they brutally attacked peaceful protesters so Donald Trump could get a photo op. But the lies are provable and visible. It’s not a tough call regarding what happened here, and this is one of the reasons so many retired generals are calling Trump out on his abuses of authority.

Houston gay bars Buddy’s (in Montrose) and Blur Bar (in Midtown) have closed after employees and owners tested positive for COVID-19.

Said Christopher Barry, the owner of Buddy’s, on Facebook: “I don’t have an elevated temperature. I am asymptomatic. I have a cough every once and awhile. Still, we feel it’s the most responsible thing to do.”

Barry said four other staffers have coronavirus.

Additionally, Blur Bar in Midtown has also closed, writing on Facebook: “We value the safety of all of our customers and accordingly we have decided to close the club for UP TO two weeks due to some members of our staff having tested positive for the Coronavirus. We will be deep cleaning during this period to make the club safe for your return. Please see our Facebook page for updates as to re-opening.”

KHOU reports: “Doctors are concerned about Houston and Harris County’s rising rate of hospitalizations of people suffering from COVID-19 in the last three weeks. Since Memorial Day weekend, hospitalizations in the Texas Medical Center are growing by an average of 3 percent every day. … Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo released a new coronavirus “public threat level system,” to help residents better understand the status of coronavirus in the area and what actions they need to take to help maintain the spread of the virus.”

The post Houston Gay Bars to Close After Employees and Owner Test Positive for COVID-19 appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

[He views the doctrine as likely not authorized by the text of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, or the legal principles that it may have implicitly absorbed; instead, he argues, it was created it just "because of a 'balancing of competing values' about litigation costs and efficiency."]

From Justice Thomas's opinion today in Baxter v. Bracey, dissenting from the denial of certiorari; congratulations to our own Will Baude, who was cited twice:

Petitioner Alexander Baxter was caught in the act of burgling a house. It is undisputed that police officers released a dog to apprehend him and that the dog bit him. Petitioner alleged that he had already surrendered when the dog was released. He sought damages from two officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging excessive force and failure to intervene, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Applying our qualified immunity precedents, the Sixth Circuit held that even if the officers' conduct violated the Constitution, they were not liable because their conduct did not violate a clearly established right. Petitioner asked this Court to reconsider the precedents that the Sixth Circuit applied.

I have previously expressed my doubts about our qualified immunity jurisprudence. See Ziglar v. Abbasi (2017) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Because our § 1983 qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text, I would grant this petition….

In the wake of the Civil War, Republicans set out to secure certain individual rights against abuse by the States. Between 1865 and 1870, Congress proposed, and the States ratified, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. These Amendments protect certain rights and gave Congress the power to enforce those rights against the States.

Armed with its new enforcement powers, Congress sought to respond to "the reign of terror imposed by the Klan upon black citizens and their white sympathizers in the Southern States." Congress passed a statute variously known as the Ku Klux Act of 1871, the Civil Rights Act of 1871, and the Enforcement Act of 1871. Section 1, now codified, as amended, at 42 U.S.C. § 1983, provided that "any person who, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of any State, shall subject, or cause to be subjected, any person within the jurisdiction of the United States to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution of the United States, shall … be liable to the party injured in any action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress …." Put in simpler terms, § 1 gave individuals a right to sue state officers for damages to remedy certain violations of their constitutional rights….

The text of § 1983 "ma[kes] no mention of defenses or immunities." Instead, it applies categorically to the deprivation of constitutional rights under color of state law.

For the first century of the law's existence, the Court did not recognize an immunity under § 1983 for good-faith official conduct. Although the Court did not squarely deny the availability of a good-faith defense, it did reject an argument that plaintiffs must prove malice to recover. Myers v. Anderson (1915). No other case appears to have established a good-faith immunity.

In the 1950s, this Court began to "as[k] whether the common law in 1871 would have accorded immunity to an officer for a tort analogous to the plaintiff 's claim under § 1983." The Court, for example, recognized absolute immunity for legislators because it concluded Congress had not "impinge[d] on a tradition [of legislative immunity] so well grounded in history and reason by covert inclusion in the general language" of § 1983. The Court also extended a qualified defense of good faith and probable cause to police officers sued for unconstitutional arrest and detention. Pierson v. Ray (1967). The Court derived this defense from "the background of tort liabilit[y] in the case of police officers making an arrest." These decisions were confined to certain circumstances based on specific analogies to the common law.

Almost immediately, the Court abandoned this approach. In Scheuer v. Rhodes (1974), without considering the common law, the Court remanded for the application of qualified immunity doctrine to state executive officials, National Guard members, and a university president. It based the availability of immunity on practical considerations about "the scope of discretion and responsibilities of the office and all the circumstances as they reasonably appeared at the time of the action on which liability is sought to be based," rather than the liability of officers for analogous common-law torts in 1871. The Court soon dispensed entirely with context-specific analysis, extending qualified immunity to a hospital superintendent sued for deprivation of the right to liberty. O'Connor v. Donaldson (1975); see also Procunier v. Navarette (1978) (prison officials and officers).

Then, in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), the Court eliminated from the qualified immunity inquiry any subjective analysis of good faith to facilitate summary judgment and avoid the "substantial costs [that] attend the litigation of " subjective intent…. The Court has subsequently applied this objective test in § 1983 cases….

In several different respects, it appears that "our analysis is no longer grounded in the common-law backdrop against which Congress enacted the 1871 Act."

There likely is no basis for the objective inquiry into clearly established law that our modern cases prescribe. Leading treatises from the second half of the 19th century and case law until the 1980s contain no support for this "clearly established law" test. Indeed, the Court adopted the test not because of "'general principles of tort immunities and defenses,'" Malley v. Briggs(1986), but because of a "balancing of competing values" about litigation costs and efficiency.

There also may be no justification for a one-size-fits-all, subjective immunity based on good faith. Nineteenth-century officials sometimes avoided liability because they exercised their discretion in good faith. See, e.g., Wilkes v. Dinsman (1849); see also Nielson & Walker, A Qualified Defense of Qualified Immunity, 93 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1853, 1864–1868 (2018); Baude, Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful? 106 Cal. L. Rev. 45, 57 (2018); Engdahl, Immunity and Accountability for Positive Governmental Wrongs, 44 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1, 48–55 (1972). But officials were not always immune from liability for their good-faith conduct. See, e.g., Little v. Barreme (1804) (Marshall, C. J.); Miller v. Horton (Mass. 1891) (Holmes, J.); see also Baude, supra, at 55–58; Woolhandler, Patterns of Official Immunity and Accountability, 37 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 396, 414–422 (1986); Engdahl, supra, at 14–21.

Although I express no definitive view on this question, the defense for good-faith official conduct appears to have been limited to authorized actions within the officer's jurisdiction. See, e.g., Wilkes; T. Cooley, Law of Torts 688–689 (1880); J. Bishop, Commentaries on NonContract Law § 773, p. 360 (1889). An officer who acts unconstitutionally might therefore fall within the exception to a common-law good-faith defense.

Regardless of what the outcome would be, we at least ought to return to the approach of asking whether immunity "was 'historically accorded the relevant official' in an analogous situation 'at common law.'" The Court has continued to conduct this inquiry in absolute immunity cases, even after the sea change in qualified immunity doctrine. We should do so in qualified immunity cases as well.

{Qualified immunity is not the only doctrine that affects the scope of relief under § 1983. In Monroe v. Pape (1961), the Court held that an officer acts "'under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of any State'" even when state law did not authorize his action. Scholars have debated whether this holding is correct. Compare Zagrans, "Under Color of " What Law: A Reconstructed Model of Section 1983 Liability, 71 Va. L. Rev. 499, 559 (1985), with Winter, The Meaning of "Under Color of " Law, 91 Mich. L. Rev. 323, 341–361 (1992), and Achtenberg, A "Milder Measure of Villainy": The Unknown History of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Meaning of "Under Color of " Law, 1999 Utah L. Rev. 1, 56–60. Although concern about revisiting one doctrine but not the other is understandable, respondents—like many defendants in § 1983 actions—have not challenged Monroe.}

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that LGBTQ people are protected under federal employment discrimination laws, specifically Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in cases involving whether someone can be fired from their job for being gay or transgender.

Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts joined Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor to form the majority ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Altitude Express v. Zarda, and R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Gorsuch wrote the court’s opinion. Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh were the dissenting justices.

Wrote Gorsuch: “Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

Altitude Express v. Zarda from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Bostock v. Clayton County from the Eleventh Circuit were argued together and dealt with sexual orientation. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission dealt with transgender rights. The Court ruled on all the cases together. They had been expected to rule separately.

Read the opinion:

17-1618_hfci by towleroad on Scribd

The Washington Post reports: “The issue was one of the most consequential of the term. More than 70 friend-of-the-court briefs were filed, dividing states, religious orders and members of Congress. More than 200 of the nation’s largest employers are supporting the workers. The Trump administration sided with the employers, a position that put it at odds with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which decided in 2015 that gay and transgender individuals were federally protected.”

SCOTUSblog offered background on Zarda and Bostock before arguments in October: “Zarda (who died in 2014, and who is represented in the Supreme Court by the executors of his estate) was a skydiving instructor who sometimes told female clients that he was gay to make them feel more comfortable when they were strapped to him for a jump. Gerald Bostock received good performance reviews while working as the child-welfare-services coordinator for Clayton County, Georgia, for over a decade. Both men were fired – according to them, because they were gay. Zarda and Bostock went to federal court in New York and Georgia, respectively, where they argued that firing them because they were gay violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination “because of sex.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that Bostock’s case could not go forward, because Title VII does not apply to discrimination based on sexual orientation. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reached the opposite conclusion: It reasoned that discrimination based on sexual orientation is a ‘subset of sex discrimination.'”

SCOTUSblog added: “In their briefs in the Supreme Court, Bostock and Zarda argue that the text of Title VII clearly applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation: Someone who is fired or otherwise the victim of discrimination because of his sexual orientation – in their cases, for being men who are attracted to men – is undoubtedly a victim of discrimination because of his sex. After all, they reason, a woman would not have been fired for being attracted to men. Moreover, Title VII also bars employers from discriminating against individuals who do not conform to conventional gender stereotypes such as the idea that women should be attracted to men and men should be attracted to women.”

The ACLU’s background on R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: “Aimee Stephens had worked for nearly six years as a funeral director at R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes when she informed the funeral home’s owner that she is a transgender woman. Her employer fired her, and the EEOC sued on her behalf. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Aimee’s employer engaged in unlawful sex discrimination when it fired her because she’s transgender. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes is asking the Supreme Court to review the case. The ACLU represents Aimee Stephens.”

More background on the cases HERE. Read the argument transcript of the two consolidated cases, Bostock v. Clayton County and Altitude Express v. Zarda, HERE. The transcript of the transgender case Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC can be read HERE.

Last October, The Washington Post reported: “The issue for the court is the reach of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, besides protecting against workplace discrimination because of race, also prohibits discrimination ‘because of sex.’ For 50 years, courts read that to mean only that women could not be treated worse than men, and vice versa, not that discrimination on the basis of sex included LGBTQ individuals. The Trump administration says that is what the Supreme Court should find as well.”

Also last October, The Washington Blade‘s Chris Johnson reported that Justice Neil Gorsuch emerged as a potential ally for LGBTQ workers based on his questioning: “Gorsuch, a Trump-appointed justice who considered himself a textualist, asked many questions suggesting he’s at least considering the idea of anti-LGBT discrimination is a form of sex discrimination, thus prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. … Throughout the arguments, Gorsuch made several inquiries on whether the concept of sex is inseparable from anti-LGBT discrimination. At one point, Gorsuch asked, “Isn’t sex also at play here?” and gave an example of a employer firing a man for being attracted to another man as an example of sex discrimination. … To be sure, Gorsuch also asked questions about whether employers could keep sex-segregated bathrooms under LGBT-inclusive Title VII.”

Bloomberg reported on arguments last October: “The two-hour session Tuesday suggested that LGBT advocates had at least a chance to win the vote of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, along with the court’s four liberal members. Gorsuch sent mixed signals, calling the case ‘really close.’ … Trump’s other appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, said very little and didn’t tip his hand. … Another conservative justice, Samuel Alito, was skeptical of the workers’ claims, at one point telling the lawyer for two gay men that ‘your whole argument collapses.’ … Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concern about the impact on religious organizations if the high court were to side with LGBT workers. He was one of several justices who asked what the cases could mean for single-sex bathrooms.”

Reactions:

Today, #SCOTUS has ruled that no LGBTQ American can be fired because of who they are or who they love.

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) June 15, 2020

As of sunup this morning, many parts of America did not fully protect queer Americans from workplace discrimination, despite the Civil Rights Act. This is a major step.

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) June 15, 2020

But our country has shown that it’s capable of moving in the right direction, and quickly. Sometimes. Let that be a source of hope, and urgency, in these times of anguish and expectation.

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) June 15, 2020

Being who you are shouldn’t be a fireable offense, and today the Supreme Court has affirmed that truth for the LGBTQ community under our laws.

It’s a victory for liberty and justice for all.

Happy Pride.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 15, 2020

This is an historic day. Congratulations to the LGBTQ+ community on this monumental victory for equality. We must never stop fighting to end all forms of discrimination and build a nation based on justice for all. https://t.co/dnbdig2hUT

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 15, 2020

Grateful for today’s decision by the Supreme Court. LGBTQ people deserve equal treatment in the workplace and throughout society, and today’s decision further underlines that federal law protects their right to fairness.

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 15, 2020

Great good news from SCOTUS. LGBTQ rights are human rights. #EqualityForAll #PRIDE2020 https://t.co/JFFlNfZMAE pic.twitter.com/ngIRLjqkkQ

— Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) June 15, 2020

No one should have to live in fear of discrimination. The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold protections for LGBTQ+ workers preserves the LGBTQ+ movement’s hard-won progress—but we must keep up the pressure to ensure every LGBTQ+ person is free to be who they are without fear.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 15, 2020

This is a great day for all LGBTQ+ people in this country. An unexpectedly really, really great day.

— Kate Kendell (@KateKendell) June 15, 2020

I genuinely think this is a full win. We fully won. The HHS rule is completely void.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) June 15, 2020

Thanks for the anniversary present of basic human rights, SCOTUS! pic.twitter.com/e3pu8obPZz

— Chasten Buttigieg (@Chasten) June 15, 2020

Huge news: #SCOTUS affirms that sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination are prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. This is a landmark victory for #LGBTQ equality.

— Alphonso David (@AlphonsoDavid) June 15, 2020

No matter who you are or who you love your work is valued in the United States. Thank you to the Supreme Court for making the right decision for equality, inclusivity, and for a more resilient economy. Happy Pride! https://t.co/Fww6Gl8a3T

— Jared Polis (@PolisForCO) June 15, 2020

Note at the end that Gorsuch does cabin the decision in terms of what is not specifically resolved in this case — namely bathrooms and locker rooms, as well as religious liberty. pic.twitter.com/KbRwrYs6qt

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) June 15, 2020

The post SCOTUS Rules 6-3 That LGBTQ People are Protected Under Federal Employment Discrimination Laws appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Lisa Alexander, the CEO of LAFACE skincare, who trended nationwide on Saturday after calling the police on a man of color she saw stenciling “Black Lives Matter” on a neighborhood wall. It turned out that wall was part of the man’s home.

ICYMI: Skincare CEO ‘Karen’ Calls Police on Man of Color for Stenciling ‘Black Lives Matter’ on His Own Home: WATCH

Alexander apologized to the man, James Juanillo, in a statement, writing, in part: “The last 48 hours has taught me that my actions were those of someone who is not aware of the damage caused by being ignorant and naive to racial inequalities. When I watch the video I am shocked and sad that I behaved the way I did. It was disrespectful to Mr. Juanillo and I am deeply sorry for that. … I did not realize at the time that my actions were racist and have learned a painful lesson.”

Read Alexander’s full statement below.

#BlackLivesMatter  | Lisa Alexander says she wants to apologize directly to Mr. Juanillo:

“The last 48 hours have taught me that my actions were those of someone who is not aware of the damage caused by being ignorant”

Story:https://t.co/Wnxpe4CSpC@abc7newsbayarea pic.twitter.com/rhtjbVvJ7R

— Luz Peña (@LuzPenaABC7) June 14, 2020

The post Skincare CEO ‘Karen’ Apologizes to Man She Called Police on Over ‘Black Lives Matter’ Stencil: ‘My Actions Were Racist’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Donald Trump is heading to Tulsa on Saturday for his first campaign rally in months, and not everyone in the city is happy to hear it. The editorial board of the local newspaper, for instance, which says “This is the wrong time” and “the wrong place” for Trump to rally.

“We don’t know why he chose Tulsa, but we can’t see any way that his visit will be good for the city,” a Tulsa World editorial says, citing the pandemic, the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, and the big question mark around the choice of Tulsa to begin with.

When it comes to the pandemic, the editorial points out, “It will be our health care system that will have to deal with whatever effects follow.” That’s not just about Trump: “The public health concern would apply whether it were Donald Trump, Joe Biden or anyone else who was planning a mass rally at the BOK.”

With protests against police brutality and racism still happening around the country, and with Trump being “a divisive figure” (no kidding on that), the editorial writers worry about “confrontation and inappropriate behavior from some,” with Tulsa stuck with the burden of handling the fallout. Not noted in the editorial, Trump rallies have left a lot of cities with big unpaid bills for the security they had to provide.

And why Tulsa, for that matter?

“There’s no reason to think a Trump appearance in Tulsa will have any effect on November’s election outcome in Tulsa or Oklahoma,” the editorial points out—Trump won Oklahoma by more than 35 points in 2016, after all—and “It has already concentrated the world’s attention of the fact that Trump will be rallying in a city that 99 years ago was the site of a bloody race massacre.”

(But hey, at least he changed the rally's date from Juneteenth, the day celebrating the end of slavery!)

First and foremost, donate to local bail funds (there are a lot of them, and they’re easy to find with a Twitter or Google search). Then and only then, if you have a few bucks to spare to help keep TMW sustainable in 2020, please consider joining Sparky’s List.

A Trump rally along Northwest 154th Street in the Miami suburb of Miami Lakes turned hateful on Sunday, as organizers turned their wrath toward Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. The rally was held in the same area a Black Lives Matter rally, which angered conservative residents, was held in the same area.

Participants wore Trump 2020 t-shirts, MAGA hats, and carried Trump/Pence signs, according to videos shot by Miami herald reporter Aaron Leibowitz, who was harassed by some of the protesters.

At one point, organizer Maria Martinez grabbed a megaphone and launched into a homophobic tirade targeting Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community: “Black Lives Matter wants to dismantle the Biblical definition of family. Black Lives Matter, they champion the celebration of homosexuality! Black Lives Matter touts gender confusion. And let’s be clear there’s only two genders, and that is female and male. God created them both.

Rally organizer Maria Martinez addressed the protests over George Floyd’s death. She condemned the officers in Floyd’s case, but said that if you “stay out of trouble” and “don’t resist” you’ll be okay. She also decried the BLM movement’s support of LGBTQ people. pic.twitter.com/elw2eancgd

— Aaron Leibowitz (@aaron_leib) June 14, 2020

Martinez’s talking points echoed those of Niger Innis, the National Spokesperson for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and executive director of Tea Party Forward, who told FOX News host Laura Ingraham last week that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization using African-Americans as a shield to push the LGBT agenda and destroy “traditional” families.

When a couple showed up with a “Black Voices Matter” sign the crowd around them grew angry, and the couple was escorted away by police.

Tense few minutes here as a couple showed up with a “Black Voices Matter” sign and moved to the front of the group. Many crowded around them, screaming and chanting “comunistas.” Police led them away across the street, no one was hurt. pic.twitter.com/86Jm5Cvowq

— Aaron Leibowitz (@aaron_leib) June 14, 2020

The group has grown to about 50-75. pic.twitter.com/40cnHDvPQU

— Aaron Leibowitz (@aaron_leib) June 14, 2020

This woman just tried to take a picture of my license plate and called me some obscenities. She said she’s a Miami Lakes police officer but declined to give her name. pic.twitter.com/TOvgyrJyFO

— Aaron Leibowitz (@aaron_leib) June 14, 2020

A report from the Miami Herald:

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Harry Enten/CNN:

Joe Biden is winning female voters by a historic margin

Biden is earning a historic amount of support from female voters for a presidential nominee when examining polling over the last 70 years.

With less than 5 months to go, the polls are still shaping up as terrible for the incumbent. And as you’ll see below, it’s state polls as well as national polls (which is no surprise, as they would be expected to move together.)

The thing is, they’re not likely to change for a number of reasons and the leading one is that Trump is who he is, and can’t be anyone else. Perhaps the next leading reason after that is that his people think that’s just fine, and keep setting him up to fail.

You know, the ones who thought the St John’s church photo op was a brilliant idea. The ones who thought gassing Americans peacefully protesting was a symbol of strength. The ones who think an indoor rally without masks in coronavirus-plagued America is a good idea.

The ones who are in the WH and running his campaign.

Sure, this doesn’t mean ‘we’ve won ‘ but no one is saying that. So there’s no reason for you to say it either.

OTOH, increasing his lead is as likely as decreasing it, given who Trump is and how things are going.

WaPo:

These are the 9 Senate seats most likely to flip. Things don’t look good for Republicans.

From a 30,000-foot view, this map looks bad for the GOP. Republicans are playing a lot of defense: They’re defending purple seats in Colorado, Maine, Arizona and North Carolina, and they might end up having trouble in red states such as Iowa, Montana, Georgia or even Texas. Democrats, on the other hand, don’t have many weak spots. Doug Jones will very likely lose the Alabama Senate race, and Republicans could try for a win in swing-y Michigan or red-trending Minnesota. But for the most part, the blue team is playing offense this year.

That includes Joni Ernst trailing the Democrat, Theresa Greenfield, in the quality Selzer poll in Iowa.

Here’s a point I can’t emphasize enough: the EC bias toward Republicans kicks in for very close elections. So, “never mind an 8 point lead, whattabout the states?” misses that point entirely. Read this →

Greg Kaufmann/USA Today:

Pandemic and police killings reveal brutal status quo. We can fix this. Why won't we?

We have the money. The challenge lies in overcoming a history of demonizing poor people and racializing poverty to reduce support for good policy.

I’ve covered poverty in America for more than 10 years and, for me, there is a certain kind of madness that comes with the beat.

It stems primarily from witnessing profound and unnecessary human suffering caused by bad policy choices, from food to health care to policing, and a rage towards policymakers who maintain a steady drumbeat of baseless claims such as “we need more data to know what to do,” or worse, blame people for their poverty by portraying them as lazy, scheming, dependent, or anything else to suggest that the system is just fine but these individuals are broken and unworthy of assistance

David Frum/Twitter:

The Trump campaign decision to bump its Tulsa rally from June 19 to June 20 is so fascinatingly revealing ... 

1) Those who complained about the June 19 rally date were complaining that there was something inconsistent about a Trump rally on an anniversary of Emancipation. You wouldn't expect Trump to agree to that - but he did!

2) Why would a presidency that never admits error, never accepts responsibility, never apologizes for anything - why would it back down in the face of complaints about a June 19 event?

3) I think you can safely rule out "regard for the feelings of others" as a motive.

…

11) Trump has to worry: what if the protests are huge? What if the police panic and hurt somebody? He's confronting a responsibility he cannot dodge, at a time when his only political trick has ceased to work for him.

12) The rescheduling of the Tulsa rally is a reveal of weakness by a president who normally values the show of strength above all else. The rescheduling confirms how fast Trump's strength is ebbing - and that he (or his campaign) knows it.

Resign from SWAT?? Reminds me of Col. Blake:

 God dammit, Hot Lips, resign your goddamn commission. ~ M*A*S*H

Brian Resnick/Vox:

“Totally predictable”: State reopenings have backfired

“We managed to disrupt our economy [and] skyrocket unemployment, and we didn’t control the damn virus,” one scientist says.

Well, here we are. It’s June 12, and Covid-19 hospitalizations are rising in Arizona, the Carolinas, Utah, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, and perhaps Florida. Those states are also seeing higher numbers of positive Covid-19 tests, as well as increases in the percentage of tests that come back positive. This indicates that the higher case counts aren’t simply due to more widespread testing finding milder cases.

Call it a reopening backfire. But really: No expert thought that reopening this quickly was going to work in the first place.

Donald M Berwick MD/JAMA:

The Moral Determinants of Health

Decades of research on the true causes of ill health, a long series of pedigreed reports, and voices of public health advocacy have not changed this underinvestment in actual human well-being. Two possible sources of funds seem logically possible: either (a) raise taxes to allow governments to improve social determinants, or (b) shift some substantial fraction of health expenditures from an overbuilt, high-priced, wasteful, and frankly confiscatory system of hospitals and specialty care toward addressing social determinants instead. Either is logically possible, but neither is politically possible, at least not so far.

Neither will happen unless and until an attack on racism and other social determinants of health is motivated by an embrace of the moral determinants of health, including, most crucially, a strong sense of social solidarity in the US. “Solidarity” would mean that individuals in the US legitimately and properly can depend on each other for helping to secure the basic circumstances of healthy lives, no less than they depend legitimately on each other to secure the nation’s defense. If that were the moral imperative, government—the primary expression of shared responsibility—would defend and improve health just as energetically as it defends territorial integrity.

Jennifer Gerson/Bustle:

Talking About Racism Must Be A Part Of Health Care, According To A Doctor

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I only see patients in the exam room, but I know that their lives are affected by everything that goes on beyond those walls. It’s important for us as doctors to acknowledge what’s happening [with the protests]. Sometimes my patients know Chicago’s history of race and police violence and talk about it with me. Other times, you can tell they’re affected by it without even knowing it by name.

I had one patient recently who just wanted to talk. I spent the majority of that visit just listening, and we conducted the medical care they’d come in for at the end. Systemic racism prevents us as doctors from promoting people’s health and well-being in a broad sense, beyond addressing disease. I hear a lot of doctors say, “Well I’m just going to take good care of my patients,” in response to the protests, and leave it at that. But taking good care of your patients means acknowledging racism.

Philip Bump/WaPo:

Americans broadly understand why protesters are in the streets. Does Trump?

The partisan gaps were far wider across the board, with Republicans (and Republican-leading independents) being most likely to identify people taking advantage of the situation to commit crimes as having contributed a great deal to the demonstrations. Less than half of Republicans — the vast majority of whom are white — thought that long-standing concerns about mistreatment of black Americans contributed a great deal.

This is, frankly, an unexpected result. While one might disagree that black people face particular mistreatment in American society (which many Republicans do), it’s clear that such concerns are a primary factor in the demonstrations. The Black Lives Matter movement isn’t only about the relationship between police and black Americans but also about how that relationship reflects broader systemic problems centered on race.

Barry Friedman/WSJ:

Amid Calls to ‘Defund,’ How to Rethink Policing

Cops shouldn’t be sent to deal with social problems—substance abuse, mental illness, homelessness—they aren’t trained to handle

The idea of defunding the police is hardly revolutionary, though, at least as it’s understood in the broader context of criminal justice reform. It ought to make good sense to anyone who cares about effective governance. The problem, simply put, is this: We send police officers to deal with too many social problems—substance abuse, mental illness, homelessness, domestic disputes, even civil unrest—for which they are grossly unprepared.

This mismatch has a range of negative consequences. Not only do the underlying social issues not get addressed, but the police overuse enforcement, including arrests, in dealing with them. This results too often in force and violence against black people, which is what launched the defund movement in the first place. The mismatch also hurts the police, fraying their relationship with the communities they are supposed to serve. Many police would be the first to say they are being asked to do things for which they are not trained.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With some reimagining, we can find ways to address our most pressing social ills instead of trying to enforce our way out of them.

Peter Wehner/NY times:

Trump Has Made Alternative Facts a Way of Life

The president has taken his degradation of the truth to new lengths, but the basic project has been the same from the start.

But this, too, has a cost. What Mr. Trump requires of his supporters is that they enter his world of unreality. For most people it’s too psychologically painful to acknowledge that the person they support is deeply corrupt, pathologically dishonest and brutish. Human beings feel a need to justify their defense of such a person; this can only be achieved by distorting reality, by pretending that Mr. Trump is not who he is and that facts are not what they are.

If Trump is drifting down in Arkansas, it’s happening everywhere. Big “if”, though.

And finally:

CHICAGO — It was October 2008 and I was inside the federal courthouse in Tampa, Fla., blinking back disbelief. Across the courtroom, a white-haired older man, overweight and unremarkable in a denim short-sleeved shirt, complaining of a bad knee, sat in the defendant’s chair. This was the infamous Jon Burge, a former Chicago police commander whose misdeeds, alleged in countless civil lawsuits, I had covered for years. Now the man who had once seemed untouchable was in custody.

Burge wasn’t just any old corrupt cop. His maniacal methods of torturing black men into confessing in the 1970s and '80s had been the subject of scores of complaints. Suspects described mock lynchings, electroshock, beatings and burning—all at the hands of Burge and his team of rogue underlings. He was the sadistic monster who played the starring role in the “House of Screams,” as the legendary Chicago Reader would put it.

Though he had been fired 15 years earlier, Burge had never really been held accountable for his misdeeds, shielded by a police code of silence that protected its own. Burge retired to Apollo Beach, just south of Tampa, working as a security consultant while Chicago taxpayers footed the bill for his $4,000-a-month pension. After all the millions of dollars the city had spent defending him, the pension was a final outrage.

But federal prosecutors in Chicago hadn’t given up. They got creative, charging him with lying as part of a more recent civil lawsuit alleging torture. The thin blue line finally broke when one officer offered details to a grand jury. Burge was later convicted and served prison time, putting to rest one of the most disgraceful chapters in Chicago’s police history.

I found myself thinking about Burge in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, as protests have raged in Chicago and across the country. So much of the public anger has been directed at the way police for decades have covered up their worst behavior and blocked efforts to reform. And I also heard people try to explain away killings of black people by police as isolated incidents, not evidence of patterns of racist behavior that had endured over decades.

But the Burge saga refutes the idea of isolated incidents. His years of violent abuse, and the cover-up inside the department that enabled it, stained the Chicago police force long after Burge was convicted and sent to prison. As a longtime reporter in Chicago, I would argue that a more or less direct line can be drawn between Burge and another high-profile case of police misconduct: the 2014 shooting of a black teenager Laquan McDonald. The same reflexive urge of officers to protect their own—even when they’ve done wrong—and a political infrastructure too jittery to take on the same police organization it relies on to defend its streets.

“Jon Burge is a symbol—just like a burning cross is a symbol, just like a swastika is a symbol— of police lawlessness fueled by racism, in Chicago and throughout the nation,” U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) told me. The Burge-era cover-up only hardened an internal police culture whereby cops didn’t call out the bad apples, but protected them, Rush argued, singling out the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police. “They were protecting Jon Burge then and they protect lawbreaking police officers now.

“They have eviscerated the trust between the Chicago police department and the citizens in the black community.”

“'N-----, look around,” one of the detectives said to the handcuffed man. “Nobody’s gonna see or hear anything we do to you today.”

It was Nov. 2, 1983, when Chicago police picked up Darrell Cannon, 32, for questioning in a gang-related murder and drove him to a desolate spot on the city’s South Side.

What happened next caused Cannon to weep in the retelling, even 32 years later.

“They pulled my pants and shorts down, they took an electric cattle prod … turned it on and he stuck me on my genitals with that cattle prod,” Cannon would testify at a City Hall hearing where Burge’s victims sought reparations in 2015. “I had never in my life experienced that kind of pain.”

The detectives were part of the so-called midnight crew, a group of cops who took orders from Burge, a burly, fierce-eyed Vietnam vet who had joined the department in 1970 and risen to control the Area 2 district on the South Side, an area historically plagued with crime and gang warfare. Burge’s solve rate was celebrated within the department.

But on the street, he was feared. For years, complaints poured in: of Burge forcing arrestees to play Russian roulette, suffocating them with plastic typewriter covers, handcuffing them to a radiator and shocking them. “He tried to kill me,” one suspect would later testify in federal court. “He laughed while he was torturing me.”

Internal inquiries went nowhere. Chicago’s superintendent of police turned a blind eye to Burge’s practices, doing little to investigate reports of brutality. In 1982, he did forward a doctor’s letter describing one suspect’s unmistakably fresh wounds while in police custody— including those consistent with radiator burns—to then-state’s attorney Richard M. Daley. Daley did not investigate and the superintendent didn’t follow up. Daley was later elected mayor in 1989, serving for 22 years.

Burge wouldn’t be fired until 1993, at the age of 46, after more than 50 complaints had been filed by suspects who say they were coerced into confessing, including Cannon. Some of the coerced confessions had led to convictions that put men on death row.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and defense attorney who headed the Chicago Police Board, the department’s civilian oversight body, and chaired the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, noted the significance of Burge’s expulsion from the force. “At that time, the firing of a police commander was essentially unheard of,” she said this week in an interview with POLITICO.

But unprecedented as it was, Burge had largely escaped accountability. As he continued to cash his pension checks over the years, and traveling to Las Vegas to work private security jobs, the statute of limitations on his alleged crimes was ticking away. A special prosecutors’ report issued in 2006 detailed a pattern of abuse, but pursued no charges. The statute of limitations on torture had run out.

Burge was the subject of hundreds of complaints, dozens of lawsuits, a full special prosecutor’s investigation; he was the reason four death row inmates were freed from prison and an impetus for Illinois halting its executions.

But it wasn’t until 2008 that federal prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald found a way to charge him for lying when he gave a false written answer in November 2003 in an ongoing federal civil lawsuit. Prosecutors put victims on the stand to describe the torture. But even then the case hit a snag: The first officer to ever crack and testify against Burge in front of a grand jury backtracked in the public trial.

“I've changed my mind about this,” he testified. “I don't think there was abuse in any way.” The prosecutor read back his own damning grand jury testimony of witnessing Burge’s tactics. They convicted Burge and the judge sentenced him to 4½ years in prison.

“I think it's important to send a message to people that this sort of thing doesn't happen in a civilized society, it doesn't happen in our law enforcement system,” Fitzgerald said after Burge’s sentencing. “It should never happen again.”

Burge got out of prison after three years. He died in 2018. His legacy lived on, and not in a good way.

Among the lessons of Burge’s legacy was that without consequences for his enablers, the pattern of police wrongdoing was simply passed down the line. Even today, with overwhelming pressure to hold police accountable, charges have come only in the face of incontrovertible video evidence.

It was a video, of course, that led to murder charge against the Minneapolis officer. The initial account of George Floyd’s death by police officials said Floyd had died of a medical condition, making no mention that an officer had pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. An initial police account in Buffalo, New York, said a protester was injured after he tripped and fell. Video evidence widely redistributed over social media showed that it was an officer who pushed the 75-year-old man to the ground, leaving him there as blood pooled around his head. The city apologized, and the officers were swiftly charged.

The tentacles of Burge’s behavior were far reaching, starting with sowing deep distrust between the black community and its police force. The city of Chicago paid at least $120 million in legal fees and settlements and it established a reparations fund to specifically compensate Burge’s victims. Gov. George Ryan, in 2003, cited allegations of coerced confessions when he took the extraordinary move of pardoning four men from death row, freeing them immediately and halting all executions in Illinois.

Yet despite all the negative consequences stemming from Burge’s misconduct, one fundamental problem inside police culture never changed: the willingness of officers to cover for each other even when they know it’s wrong.

It would come to bear in 2014 when a police shooting rocked the city. Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shot to death 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, firing 16 bullets at him even as he lay on the ground. Chicago police officers falsified reports to cover up for Van Dyke, who claimed McDonald had lunged at him. They falsified their reports even though there was a dash-cam video that showed a very different and much more damning version of events. Fortunately, for the officers, City Hall fought its release until a judge ordered it to do so more than a year after the shooting.

Then-Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez had both the statements from the police and the contradictory video in hand, but for 13 months didn’t announce charges against Van Dyke. After a court ordered the video to be made public, Alvarez, in a move viewed with great cynicism, rushed to announce first-degree murder charges against Van Dyke. Three officers were charged with trying to cover up for Van Dyke but were acquitted. Four other officers were fired for lying about the shooting.

Unlike Daley, who held the same post decades earlier, Alvarez paid with her job after critics accused her of trying to protect police until the publicity of a video forced her hand.

Before she was elected mayor last year, Lightfoot headed the police accountability task force, charged with reviewing police practices in the wake of McDonald’s killing. “Videos really changed everything,” she said. “The reality is for far too long, the union coached their members to lie and not very well. It continues to be a problem now.”

While on the task force, Lightfoot pushed for a set city policy that would publicly release video in high-profile cases and make public initial police reports.

“I wanted officers to understand, that if they lied in those initial police reports and there was video and audiotape that contradicted their statements, that there were going to be consequences,” she said. “It’s important to say there’s a process by which we and the public will be examining what you do. But we wanted to make sure that individual police officers understood that they shouldn’t go along and get along and sign their name to anything. That didn’t make any sense and wasn’t truthful. There would be real consequences if they lied.”

Still, the protect-one-another culture played out again just last week, when as many as 13 Chicago police officers were captured on camera lounging in Rush’s Chicago office, each covering for one another as they popped popcorn, napped and made coffee, when they were supposed to be out on the streets dealing with looters who tore up storefronts nearby.

Now mayor, Lightfoot called the officers’ behavior indefensible. The video from the incident was immediately made public. At a news conference on Thursday alongside Rush, an emotional Lightfoot recalled the injustices from Burge that still haunted the city.

“One of the things that continuously troubles me is thinking about Jon Burge. Jon Burge caused immeasurable harm to so many people, even if you calculated the dollars, this city has probably spent $200 million related to conduct by Jon Burge and his midnight crew,” Lightfoot said at the end of the news conference last week. “And every minute, he enjoyed his police pension. There’s nothing right about that. That’s offensive.”

By most conventional indicators, Donald Trump is in danger of becoming a one-term president. The economy is a wreck, the coronavirus persists, and his poll numbers have deteriorated.

But throughout the Republican Party’s vast organization in the states, the operational approach to Trump’s re-election campaign is hardening around a fundamentally different view.

Interviews with more than 50 state, district and county Republican Party chairs depict a version of the electoral landscape that is no worse for Trump than six months ago — and possibly even slightly better. According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it.

“The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump.’ Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.”

This year, Stephens said, “We’re thinking landslide.”

Five months before the election, many state and county Republican Party chairs predict a close election. Yet from the Eastern seaboard to the West Coast and the battlegrounds in between, there is an overriding belief that, just as Trump defied political gravity four years ago, there’s no reason he won’t do it again.

Andrew Hitt, the state party chairman in Wisconsin, said that during the height of public attention on the coronavirus, in late March and early April, internal polling suggested “some sagging off where we wanted to be.”

But now, he said, “Things are coming right back where we want them … That focus on the economy and on re-opening and bringing America back is resonating with people.”

In Ohio, Jane Timken, the state party chair, said she sees no evidence of support for Trump slipping. Jennifer Carnahan, the chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, said the same. And Lawrence Tabas, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, went so far as to predict that Trump would not only carry his state, but beat Biden by more than 100,000 votes — more than twice the margin he mustered in 2016.

“Contrary to what may be portrayed in the media, there’s still a high level of support out there,” said Kyle Hupfer, chairman of the Indiana Republican Party. He described himself as “way more” optimistic than he was at this point in 2016.

The Republican Party apparatus that Trump heads in 2020 is considerably different than the one that looked at him warily in 2016. At the state level, many chairs who were considered insufficiently committed to the president were ousted and replaced with loyalists. But their assessments would be easier to dismiss as spin if the perception of Trump’s durability did not reach so far beyond GOP officialdom.

When pollsters ask Americans who they think will win the election — not who they are voting for themselves — Trump performs relatively well. And if anything, Trump’s field officers appear more bullish than Trump and some of his advisers. Even the president, while lamenting what he views as unfair treatment by his adversaries, has privately expressed concerns about his poll numbers and publicly seemed to acknowledge he is down.

“If I wasn’t constantly harassed for three years by fake and illegal investigations, Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Hoax, I’d be up by 25 points on Sleepy Joe and the Do Nothing Democrats,” he said on Twitter last week. “Very unfair, but it is what it is!!!”

Yet in the states, the Republican Party's rank-and-file are largely unconvinced that the president is precariously positioned in his reelection bid.

“The narrative from the Beltway is not accurate,” said Joe Bush, chairman of the Republican Party in Muskegon County, Mich., which Trump lost narrowly in 2016. “Here in the heartland, everybody is still very confident, more than ever.”

At the center of the disconnect between Trump loyalists’ assessment of the state of the race and the one based on public opinion polls is a distrust of polling itself. Republicans see an industry that maliciously oversamples Democrats or under-samples the white, non-college educated voters who are most likely to support Trump. They say it is hard to know who likely voters are this far from the election. And like many Democrats, they suspect Trump supporters disproportionately hang up on pollsters, under-counting his level of support.

Ted Lovdahl, chairman of the Republican Party in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, said he has friends who will tell pollsters “just exactly the opposite of what they feel.”

When he asked one of them why, his friend told him, “I don’t like some of their questions. It’s none of their business what I do.”

Recalling that polls four years ago failed to predict the outcome, Jack Brill, acting chairman of the local Republican Party in Sarasota County, Fla., said, “I used to be an avid poll watcher until 2016 … Guess what? I’m not watching polls.”

Instead, as they prepare for a post-lockdown summer of party picnics and parades, Republican Party organizers sense the beginnings of an economic recovery that, if sustained, is likely to power Trump to a second term. They also see a more immediate opening in the civil unrest surrounding the death of George Floyd.

“The further and further the Democrats tack left, and the further you get to where it’s the defunding the police,” said Scott Frostman, GOP chairman in Wisconsin’s Sauk County, which Obama won easily in 2012 but flipped to Trump four years later. “I think we have the opportunity as Republicans to talk to people a little bit more about some common sense things.”

Biden has rejected a national movement to defund police departments. But elections are often painted in broad strokes, and local party officials expect Trump — with his law and order rhetoric — will be the beneficiary of what they see as Democratic overreach.

“The other side is overplaying its hand, going down roads like defunding the police and nonsense like that,” said Michael Burke, chairman of the Republican Party in Pinal County, Arizona, a Trump stronghold in 2016.” “Most of the American people are looking like that saying, ‘Really?’”

By most objective measures, Trump will need something to drag Biden down. He has fallen behind Biden in most swing state polls, and he lags the former vice president nationally by more than 8 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. A Gallup poll last week put Trump’s approval rating at just 39 percent, down 10 percentage points from a month ago. Democrats appear competitive not only in expected swing states, but in places such as Iowa and Ohio, which Trump won easily in 2016.

Little of that data is registering, however. State and local officials point to Trump’s financial and organizational advantages and see Biden as a weak opponent. They’re eager for Trump to eviscerate him in debates. “While the Democrats have been spending their time playing Paper Rock Scissors on who their nominee is going to be, we’ve been building an army,” said Terry Lathan, chair of the Alabama Republican Party.

James Dickey, chairman of the Texas Republican Party, said it took Biden “days to figure out how to even successfully operate, or communicate out of a bunker” and that he “has clearly not been able to deal with any real challenging interview.”

Local officials brush off criticism of Trump by Republican fixtures such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said last week that Trump “lies all the time.” They dismiss press accounts of the race. Dennis Coxwell, the chairman of Georgia’s Warren County Republican Party, said: “It’s gotten to a point where I cannot believe anything that the news media says.”

Many admire Trump’s bluntest instincts — the same ones that have cost him among women and independent voters, according to polls. “The left called George Bush all kinds of names and just savaged him all the time … and Bush never said a word,” said Burke, who worked for Trump in the late 1980s and early 1990s overseeing his fleet of helicopters. “It was frustrating for those of us on the right. Now a guy comes along, you attack him, you’re getting it back double barrel. And everybody’s sitting around saying, ‘Yeah, that’s right, give it to ‘em.’”

And most of all, they put their confidence in an expectation that the economy will improve by fall.

Doyle Webb, chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party and general counsel to the Republican National Committee, said the only concern that he would have about Trump’s reelection prospects is “if the economy had another downturn.”

“But I don’t see that happening,” Webb said.

Instead, he predicted an improving job outlook and a return to “the old Clinton mantra: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’”

“I think that people will be happy,” Webb said, “and [Trump] will be re-elected.”

It’s a widely-held view. In Pennsylvania last week, Veral Salmon, the Republican Party chairman of the state’s bellwether Erie County, measured enthusiasm for Trump by the large number of requests he has received for Trump yard signs. In Maine, Melvin Williams, chairman of the Lincoln County Republican Committee, saw it in a population he said is “getting sick of this bullshit,” blaming coronavirus-related shutdowns on Democrats. And across the country, in heavily Democratic San Francisco, John Dennis, the chairman of the local GOP, was encouraged by the decreasing number of emails from the “Never Trump” crowd.

Not in his city, but nationally, Dennis said, “I’m pretty confident that [Trump] is going to pull it off.”

Sen. Ron Johnson wouldn’t appear to be one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies at first glance.

The Wisconsin Republican doesn’t flood the airwaves to defend the president. He isn’t a fixture in the conservative media world, and he hasn’t seen his political stock boosted by a barrage of tweets and retweets from the president. In 2018, he even criticized Trump’s mix of tariffs and bailouts as a “Soviet-style economy.”

But Johnson, the chairman of the Senate’s chief oversight body, is playing a major role in advancing a key theme of the president’s reelection bid — that he and his associates were targeted unfairly by the outgoing Obama administration.

He is also investigating corruption allegations involving Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential nominee, stemming from the younger Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Trump and congressional Republicans have claimed the former vice president sought to shield his son from a Ukrainian-led investigation into Burisma — though Biden denies the allegation.

In both instances, Democrats have accused Johnson of abusing his power, misusing the Senate’s oversight resources to boost Trump’s political prospects, and even operating a Russian disinformation front that jeopardizes U.S. election security — all serious allegations, even in today’s hyperpartisan Senate. But Johnson insists it’s just the opposite.

“I’m a very nonpartisan guy. I just am,” Johnson said in an interview. “I like using the word nonpartisan.”

Privately, Senate Republicans are worried that the efforts to relitigate the Russia investigation and the events of 2016 could backfire, according to a GOP senator who was granted anonymity to candidly address the situation. Republicans are especially concerned about the perception that their priorities are not in order as the country is reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, staggeringly high unemployment and unrest over recent police killings of unarmed African Americans.

Despite the partisan tensions and the intensifying harshness of the disputes, Johnson is unfazed by the criticism — even as he increasingly finds himself on defense.

“I’m not doing anybody’s bidding,” said Johnson, who has chaired the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee since 2015. “I am doing this because I’m concerned about this democracy, and I’m concerned about what happened starting before the election, during the transition, and what continued certainly through the impeachment trial.”

According to Johnson, the Homeland Security panel’s probe has uncovered information that shows the incoming Trump administration was “sabotaged” by the outgoing Obama team. Johnson portrays his investigation as an honest effort to find the truth and reform the presidential transition process to ensure a peaceful transition of power.

“I’m just a straight shooter. I call them as I see them,” he said.

Democrats contend that’s far from the truth. They note that Johnson intends to release reports in the summer and the fall on his twin investigations, which would thrust the issues back into the spotlight as Election Day nears. They also point to his comments earlier this year in which he said former Vice President Joe Biden “has not adequately answered” for his son’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, adding: “If I were a Democrat primary voter, I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote.”

And after Johnson released a declassified list of former Obama administration officials who potentially “unmasked” former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s name in intelligence reports, the Trump campaign seized on the fact that Joe Biden’s name was on the list — even as Biden’s precise involvement was not clear.

“We’re in the middle of a pandemic and a peaceful uprising against police brutality, and [Johnson is] running errands for the Republican National Committee,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in a brief interview. “And it’s a misuse of his position.”

Minutes later, Schatz ran into Johnson outside the Senate chamber and told him: “Hey Ron, somebody asked me about your investigations and I wasn’t that nice.” Johnson laughed and replied, “That’s OK.”

Johnson later dismissed the interaction as being representative of the “collegial” nature of the Senate. But it also underscored the reality of how investigations into Trump’s political enemies that began after the Senate’s impeachment trial have been gripping the body ever since.

As he defended himself, Johnson contended that Democrats are simply “afraid of the truth.”

“Anybody that could take a look at what we already know and say, well we should just close our eyes and ears to this, let’s stop looking at this — I would say doesn’t really care about the fact that the transition was corrupted,” Johnson said.

“I’m just tenacious. I’m dedicated to getting the information,” he added. “And the question I have for my Democratic colleagues — what are you afraid of? What part of the truth that I hope we can reveal are you worried about?”

Johnson’s allies say his concerns are legitimate and require appropriate congressional oversight — an area in which Johnson has distinguished himself among conservatives, in particular during the saga over Hillary Clinton’s email server and the attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. Both of those probes were led by Republicans.

“I think he’s genuinely upset about what happened,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is conducting a similar investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation and the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. “Now, how could you have Hunter Biden milking the most corrupt company in the Ukraine for millions of dollars while you’re trying to have, you know, Joe Biden there to reform corruption?”

“So I think [Johnson] is just sort of a good-government guy, and that’s driving his passion,” Graham added.

Graham also pushed back against the allegation that he and Johnson are simply doing Trump’s bidding, citing recent revelations that call into question the genesis of the counterintelligence investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

“Nobody said that about me when I supported the Mueller investigation. I was a great guy,” Graham said. “Now that I want to know how it got so off the rails and got so corrupt, I’m shilling for Trump. Not gonna work.”

Trump has mentioned Johnson by name on Twitter just twice — both coming in the past two months, when the senator’s investigations intensified and gained new momentum. In one tweet, Trump wrote: “America is proud of Ron Johnson. He never gives up!”

Still, that’s a stark contrast to the number of times Trump regularly boosts his top House defenders on Twitter, including Reps. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

But unlike Nunes and Jordan, Johnson has a committee gavel — and he’s using it in a way that is, wittingly or unwittingly, advancing the president’s political interests.

His role has also strained his relationship with Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the Homeland Security Committee’s top Democrat. Peters, one of the most bipartisan senators, rarely engages in the types of spats that have overtaken the committee in recent weeks, but he has been forced into that role given his seniority on the panel. As a result, he has treaded carefully so as to not further inflame his relationship with Johnson.

“Certainly, I would say it is more difficult. But I’ve tried not to let that get in the way,” said Peters, who is up for reelection this year. “It makes no sense to me. We’re in the middle of a pandemic, dealing with a whole host of threats to our national security. That’s where we should be focused. Not on what basically looks like a political witch hunt.”

Even some of Johnson’s fellow Republican senators have put the Wisconsin Republican in an awkward spot by warning him — directly and indirectly — that the investigation itself could be a front for Russian disinformation.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee until stepping aside last month amid a federal probe into his stock trades, privately warned Johnson in December that going after Hunter Biden could aid Russian efforts to sow chaos and distrust in the U.S. political system. Burr’s temporary replacement as chairman, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), has expressed similar concerns about Russian disinformation, though he has declined to specifically call out Johnson.

And the Intelligence Committee is notably in the dark about the investigations. “I just hope that, when all the facts come out, the committee’s not being unwittingly used by Russia,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said in a brief interview.

Those tensions boiled over during a classified election security briefing in March, during which several Democratic senators confronted Johnson over his Biden investigation, POLITICO previously reported.

Johnson was accused of playing politics with national security and enabling a repeat of Russian interference in the presidential election, especially as he was initially relying on disputed pro-Russia Ukrainian sources of information. One of those sources, former Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko, had leveled unsubstantiated allegations about coordination between the Ukrainian government and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 campaign. Concerns over Telizhenko’s credibility prompted Johnson to scrap a scheduled subpoena vote for him in March.

And at least one committee member, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), said it’s “apparent on its face” that the Hunter Biden probe is politically motivated, given that the elder Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee. Romney chose his words carefully, declining to explain why he has voted for Johnson’s subpoena authorizations targeting former Obama officials despite his criticisms. When asked if Johnson is doing a good job, he declined to answer.

In recent days, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has dubbed the GOP the “conspiracy caucus” over its election year investigations, arguing that Republicans are more consumed with helping Trump get reelected than working to solve the country’s problems.

Rank-and-file Democrats have largely echoed that message, though some Democrats are privately frustrated that the party has not responded to the investigations more substantively. But Schatz suggested that it might not be breaking through the partisan jabs, which have become increasingly vitriolic.

“Let me just be as crystal clear as I can — nobody cares. I don’t think the public is paying any attention to this,” an animated Schatz said. “This is a fool’s errand for them, and my response is: ‘Meh.’”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

Seven Minneapolis police officers have quit and more than six additional officers are in the process of quitting after calls to defund police and disband the department left them feeling unsupported, according to the Star Tribune. Deputy chief Henry Halvorson wrote in an e-mail the Star Tribune obtained that he’s heard “second-hand information” that officers “separated with the city without completing paperwork.” Police spokesman John Elder told the Star Tribune on Friday that the officers’ leave would not impact policing services in the city, which employs about 850 officers. 

Mylan Masson, a retired Minneapolis cop and use-of-force expert, however, defended officers. “Why should I stay?” he asked the Star Tribune. “They don’t feel appreciated. Everybody hates the police right now. I mean everybody.”

That might have a little something to do with one of them kneeling on an unarmed man’s neck for more than eight minutes while other officers stood by and watched. The visible loss of faith in Minneapolis cops following George Floyd’s death in police custody might also be related to their response to unrest throughout the city—more violence. A reporter was blinded in one eye when an officer shot a rubber bullet at her while she was covering a protest in the city, and a lawsuit filed on behalf of journalists lists several similar incidents.

“When law enforcement officers target members of the press with impunity, they strike at the root of our democracy,” the ACLU of Minnesota said in a news release after filing the lawsuit. “Law enforcement officers who perpetrate these abuses must be held accountable for their actions to the fullest extent of the law.”

Along those lines, the Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a resolution Friday to disband the city's police force and create a "transformative new model" in its place, council member Alondra Cane announced. “We acknowledge that the current system is not reformable—that we would like to end the current policing system as we know it," Cane told CNN. 

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was booed off stage at a rally June 6 for refusing to back that measure. “Go home, Jacob, go home!” protesters shouted.

RELATED: Minneapolis City Council to announce plan to dismantle police department after George Floyd's death

Four days later, he appeared to support Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo's decision to refuse to negotiate a new contract with the police union. “We don’t just need a new contract with the police,” Frey tweeted. “We need a new compact between the people of Minneapolis and the people trusted to protect and serve – and we need to go farther than we ever have in making sweeping structural reform.”

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