Lindsey

Fantasy author LL McKinney sets off trend for authors to reveal the amounts paid for their work, pointing to stark differences between ethnicities

Authors from Roxane Gay to Matt Haig have been sharing what they were paid to write their books in order to highlight the disparity between what black and white writers earn from their publishers.

Started by black fantasy author LL McKinney, the #publishingpaidme hashtag called on white authors to share what they had been paid by publishers, with many major names weighing in with their advances.

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On Wednesday, June 3, DC Police Chief Peter Newsham addressed tactics his force used two evenings earlier when arresting a group of protesters on the 1400 block of Swann Street, Northwest. “It was a mass arrest,” he said. “[It’s] something we don’t like to do, but we feel like we have to do it in […]

Sen. Cory Booker, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Karen Bass, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and other congressional Democrats kneel in silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds in the US Capitol Visitor Center to honor George Floyd. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Among other measures, Democrats want to end qualified immunity and chokeholds.

House and Senate Democrats unveiled a new policing reform bill on Monday in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of a now-former Minneapolis police officer and the weeks of protests against police brutality that followed.

The Justice in Policing Act of 2020 contains a number of measures that make it easier to prosecute police misconduct and demilitarize police departments around the country.

The bill’s biggest provision seeks to end qualified immunity, a thorny legal issue that gives police officers and other public officials broad immunity from civil lawsuits. The US Supreme Court, which has upheld the qualified-immunity doctrine in past rulings, is currently deciding whether to hear arguments next term in a case challenging qualified immunity.

The legislation also incorporates a proposal from Sen. Cory Booker that would create a new national registry to track misconduct as a way to prevent repeat offenders from being rehired at other police departments.

In addition, the bill seeks to ban the use of chokeholds and certain no-knock warrants at the federal level, as well as to incentivize state and local governments to do the same. Both tactics have been factors in police killings of unarmed black people: A no-knock warrant used by police in Kentucky in March ended in the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT who died after officers broke down her door without warning and fatally shot her.

“We cannot settle for anything less than transformative structural change,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Monday. “The martyrdom of George Floyd gave the American experience a moment of national anguish. … True justice can only be achieved with full comprehensive action. That’s what we are doing today.”

Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) unveiled the bill alongside leaders and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, led by Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA). The Congressional Black Caucus — members of which include prominent African American senators like Booker and Kamala Harris (D-CA) — was instrumental in writing the bill.

“Empathy and sympathy and words of caring for those who have died and suffered is necessary, but it’s not enough,” Booker said Monday. “We must change laws and systems of accountability. We must pass legislation that makes our common values and our common ideals real in the law of our land.”

While it’s unlikely the Republican-led Senate will support the bill in its current form, or that President Donald Trump would sign it into law, the legislation still signals where Democrats want to take criminal justice reform should they win back the White House and Senate in November. Pelosi also noted that the bill is a “first step” and said there is “more to come” from Democrats on the subject of policing reform.

Multiple lawmakers on Monday called the bill “transformative.” While the expansive bill doesn’t contain any new money for police, it is clearly an attempt to establish federal guidelines for reform rather than defund police departments altogether. That falls short of what some activists are calling for — and what the Minneapolis City Council is attempting to do.

“We want to work with our police departments,” Pelosi said. “There are many things we call upon our police departments to deal with — mental health issues, policing in schools and the rest — that we could rebalance some of our funding to address some of those issues more directly. But this isn’t about that.”

By and large, the bill would give federal agencies like the Justice Department the ability to hold state and city entities more accountable for police misconduct. Because so many policies are determined at the local level, though, the legislation faces limitations. In several points, the bill conditions federal funding on state and local governments adopting the reforms it proposes.

Pressure for reforms in state and local governments is crucial: “Almost all policing is done at the local and state, not federal, level; out of the nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the US, a dozen or so are federal. It’s at the local and state level, then, where reforms can and should happen,” Vox’s German Lopez previously reported.

With over 200 co-sponsors in the House and Senate, the bill is likely to pass the House. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he will call the full House back to vote “as soon as this legislation is ready to hit the floor,” and Democrats are eyeing passage by the end of the month.

But it probably won’t get much further, especially after Trump tweeted his opposition to Democrats’ proposed reforms. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown very little appetite for taking up bills that don’t have Trump’s support, and an anti-lynching bill stalled in the Senate less than a week ago.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), will hold a hearing on police violence next week that is likely to provide more insight into what lawmakers are interested in doing. Meanwhile, Democrats on Monday condemned the inertia they’ve seen thus far.

“Just last week, we couldn’t even pass an anti-lynching bill in the US Senate,” Harris noted, mentioning a bill that was held up due to the objections of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

What’s in the police reform bill

The Justice in Policing Act is a wide-ranging bill that attempts to get at the problem of police brutality toward black communities through a number of different means.

One of the most significant parts of the bill is a provision changing the law to make it easier to prosecute police officers who harm or kill someone, as well as those who are charged with other forms of misconduct. But the bill contains a number of other measures, including a requirement for the US attorney general to create new standards for law enforcement accreditation, the establishment of a national registry to track police misconduct, and mandatory racial bias training at the federal level.

Here are some of the key parts of the bill:

Revising federal law on criminal police misconduct and qualified immunity reform: The new bill would change one very significant word in federal law when it comes to prosecuting police: “willful.” That word means prosecutors charging police have to demonstrate there was willful intent on the part of the police officer to kill or harm someone — which can be extremely difficult to prove and successfully prosecute. The bill would change the word “willful” to the phrase “knowingly or with reckless disregard.” It would also define a “death resulting” as any act that was a “substantial factor contributing to the death” of an individual.

In addition, the bill changes something called qualified immunity, which courts have interpreted to give police officers and other public officials broad immunity from being sued if they have violated the constitutional rights of an individual. The bill would make it easier for plaintiffs to recover damages against police officers if the officer is sued and found guilty.

“Qualified immunity is something that has evolved over time. It’s not written into any law,” Booker told NPR’s Weekend Edition on Sunday. “But our highest courts in the land have decided that police officers are immune from civil cases unless there’s been specifically in the past a case of generally the exact circumstances that has led towards a successful action. It creates this bar towards civil action against a police officer for violating your civil rights.”

Ban no-knock warrants in drug cases at the federal level: The use of a no-knock search warrant in Louisville on March 13 had fatal consequences. Police shot and killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor after using a battering ram to break down her door and exchanging fire with Taylor’s boyfriend. The police were executing a search warrant for a drug case, pursuing two other men, but broke down Taylor’s door because they believed the men were receiving packages at her apartment. The Democratic bill would ban these kinds of no-knock warrants in federal drug cases, but also condition federal funding for state and local law enforcement agencies on prohibiting their use as well.

Ban chokeholds at the federal level: In 2014, Eric Garner was killed by New York police, who used a chokehold to restrain him during an arrest. And in May, Floyd died after a police officer placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes.

The legislation would put a federal ban in place on the use of police chokeholds, which is defined by the bill as an act putting pressure on an individual’s throat or windpipe that impedes their ability to breathe. Such bans have already been supported by localities across the country including, most recently, Minneapolis.

A federal chokehold ban would further condemn the use of this tactic by police and give the Justice Department more power to levy charges against law enforcement officers that use this maneuver. Activists have raised questions about the efficacy of such bans: Despite the New York Police Department banning chokeholds in 1993, police using the method killed Eric Garner in 2014.

Establish a national registry of misconduct by law enforcement officers: There’s currently very little data available about police misconduct, making it difficult to pin down past offenders and ensure that they don’t receive jobs in new places. According to a USA Today report, punishment for misconduct also varies at the state level, with some requiring police to decertify while others are far less punitive. Creating a national registry about misconduct would enable lawmakers to better understand its frequency and craft targeted responses to combat it.

Require states to report use of force to the Justice Department: Similarly, little is currently known about the frequency with which police officers currently use force, something the bill is striving to change. By mandating state documentation of use of force, law enforcement agencies can begin to determine how often police are engaging in such actions.

Mandate racial bias training at the federal level: A reform that’s been implemented in some police stations across the country, racial bias training is aimed at getting law enforcement officers to recognize their own explicit and implicit biases — and how these attitudes affect the way they respond in different situations. Researchers have found implicit racial biases could be tied to officers being quicker to shoot black subjects versus white subjects. The training involves providing officers with evidence of these biases playing out so they are forced to recognize their existence.

In addition to requiring it at the federal level, the bill would condition funding for state and local police based on their commitment to implementing racial bias training programs. Among critics of racial bias training, questions remain about how effective it is in deterring police abuses and disparate use of force.

Require that deadly force only be used as last resort: The bill would change the use of force standard for federal officers from “reasonableness” to only when it is necessary to either prevent death or “serious bodily injury.” It would require federal officers to use deescalation techniques and only resort to force as a last resort, and would condition federal funds to state and local agencies on their adoption of the same standard.

Make lynching a federal crime: The killings of both Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, a black jogger who was shot by two white men in Georgia while he was out on a run, have been described as modern-day lynchings. Despite more than 200 attempts to consider bills addressing such acts, there remains no law on the books classifying lynchings as a federal crime.

While the House and Senate have respectively passed their own legislation that would do so, the two have yet to approve one bill and get it signed into law. This bill would guarantee that lynching — described by Hoyer as “the premeditated, extrajudicial killing by a mob or group of people to instill fear” — would be treated as a federal crime. It would also classify conspiring to commit civil rights offenses, such as a hate crime, as a lynching.

Require police to use more body and dashboard cameras: The bill would require federal police officers to wear body cameras and put dashboard cameras on all federal police vehicles. It requires state and local departments to use existing federal funds to increase body camera use, which has been on the rise since the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. However, research has shown that more cameras aren’t the whole story; police don’t always turn them on or review the footage while writing an incident report, and footage is not always made public.

Limit the transfer of military equipment to local police departments: Currently, the military is able to distribute excess equipment including armored vehicles and ammunition to local law enforcement agencies. The bill would prohibit the distribution of equipment like drones and armored vehicles.

The policies don’t go as far as activists have been demanding

The focus for many activists in the recent protests has been a straightforward one: Defund the police.

The idea, as Vox’s Matt Yglesias explains, centers on reducing funding for police and redistributing that money to other programs such as social services like food assistance programs and workforce development. This approach could ensure that more funding can be dedicated to providing support for communities and addressing the fundamental causes of crime. Congressional lawmakers and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have stopped short of backing this idea both in this bill and in recent statements.

“I can’t imagine that happening in a federal way, but let me just tell you that part of that cry is a desire for there to be significant higher investment in communities looking at why police are needed, what happens, what are the root causes of the problems in communities,” Bass said Monday. “A lot of people feel when it comes to the defense budget, maybe that money could be used in different ways, and I think that’s a similar issue.”

Democrats’ bill doesn’t reduce police funding or provide any new money for policing, though there is a provision in it that allocates grants for “projects that begin to ‘re-envision’ what policing might be about in a particular neighborhood,” according to Bass.

Biden, too, supports bolstering funding for social programs but does not back defunding the police, according to a statement from his spokesperson Andrew Bates. He instead supports additional money for community policing programs and other training. Democrats’ broader position on this subject is likely driven, in part, by the support that police still have from a majority of the public — even though people have become more aware of the racial biases behind their work. According to a Monmouth poll conducted in early June, 71 percent of people are satisfied with the job that police are doing in their local neighborhoods.

Activists, meanwhile, note that much of the pressure around police reform and defunding needs to come at the state and local levels, and requires national Democrats to acknowledge specific failings by members of their own party.

Cities, including those run by Democratic mayors, like Baltimore and New York City, for example, are among those where there have been high-profile incidents of police violence killing black individuals during those leaders’ tenure.

“While the Democrats are taking these relatively bold steps in Congress, how are you going to hold these Democrats accountable in these cities and states where these deaths are taking place?” Jordan Giger, a Black Lives Matter organizer in South Bend, Indiana, asked.

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On Saturday morning, the recently erected tall fence on the north side of Lafayette Square was still mostly a black, imposing grate. But over the weekend, as peaceful protests filled DC’s streets, people began to treat it as a blank, inviting slate instead, and it bloomed into something of a scrapbook and a gallery of […]

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by Allan Sloan

Do you want to see how legislation that was supposed to be a bailout for our economy ended up committing almost as much taxpayer money to help a relative handful of the non-needy as it spent to help tens of millions of people in need? Then let’s step back and revisit parts of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act and look at some of the numbers involved.

The best-known feature of the CARES Act, as it’s known, is the cash grant of up to $1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households whose income was less than $99,000 for single taxpayers and $198,000 for couples. These grants are nontaxable, which makes them even more valuable. Some 159 million stimulus payments have gone out, according to the IRS.

The income limits suggested that the plan benefits the people most in need, those most likely to spend their stimulus payments and thus help the economy. The rhetoric conveyed the same: “The CARES Act Provides Assistance to Workers And Their Families” is how the Treasury’s website puts it. There were no grants to more-fortunate people, who for the most part aren’t in financial distress and are less likely than the less-fortunate to spend any money that Uncle Sam sent them.

But when I began looking at details of the legislation, I realized that several of its provisions quietly provided benefits that were worth much more than $1,200 to some upper-middle-class people who didn’t qualify for stimulus payments. Some other provisions provided vastly bigger benefits to the rich, to corporations and to a relative handful of ultra-rich folks.

So let me show you five provisions of the legislation that benefited the upper middle class (including yours truly); the families of Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; high-income people who make large charitable donations; and Boeing and other corporations that are showing losses; as well as indirectly benefited people who have substantial investments in U.S. stocks.

These five provisions that help the well-heeled will cost the Treasury — which is to say, U.S. taxpayers — an estimated $257.95 billion for the 2020 calendar year. That’s nearly as much as the estimated $292.37 billion price tag for the stimulus grants to regular folks. The numbers are from Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, the official scorekeeper of the financial impact that legislation has on the Treasury. (I used those figures to calculate the spending for the 2020 calendar year rather than for 10 federal fiscal years because I’m interested in today’s impact, not the projected long-term impact.)

I’m writing this now, more than two months after the CARES Act took effect, as a cautionary tale. That’s because with massive unemployment upon us and the fall elections drawing near, there’s a temptation for Congress and Trump to produce legislation that will help needy people a bit but help the non-needy a lot more by doing things like reducing capital gains taxes.

Now, let me take you through the provisions, only one of which — the break for the Trumps, the Kushners and their ilk — has attracted meaningful public attention.

Eliminating Required Distributions From Retirement Accounts: $11.72 billion

People ages 72 and up who have IRAs or 401(k)s or other “defined contribution” retirement accounts must take federally taxable required minimum distributions from them every year. (Some states also tax these distributions.) People who inherit such accounts are also required to take annual distributions, regardless of their age.

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The required distribution amount is based on year-end age and account balances. For example, if you were 75 at year-end — as I was — your RMD for this year is 4.37% of your year-end 2019 retirement account balances. If you were 76, it’s 4.55%.

But this year, thanks to the CARES Act, I don’t have to take any retirement distributions at all.

Not having to take distributions matters a lot to some people. For instance, if I took my full RMD this year, which I don’t plan to do, it would be one of my larger income sources. And I would have to pay federal and state income tax on it, regardless of whether I spent the money or saved it.

I’d like to tell you how many people the JCT expects to benefit from this year’s RMD waiver; how much their distributions would have totaled and what the tax rate on them would have been; and how many people the JCT expects to take distributions this year even though they’re not required to take them. Alas, the JCT doesn’t disclose this information and declined to share it with me.

But even though I don’t have specific numbers, it’s clear that most of the benefit from this year’s RMD waiver goes to well-off people. Why? Because people who need retirement account money to live on are going to take distributions, and people who don’t need the money are unlikely to take distributions.

The reason for the no-RMD provision is that the stock market was sinking rapidly in March, when the CARES Act was being discussed. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, for example, fell by 30.8% from the end of 2019 through its low for 2020 (at least so far) on March 23, a few days before Trump signed the CARES Act legislation. Congress didn’t want to penalize retirees by forcing them to sell stock during a market crash.

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So if someone with a 4.37% required distribution had money in an S&P 500 index fund, our investor would have had to withdraw 6.32% of the fund’s balance (4.37 divided by 69.2) rather than 4.37% of it if the investor took the distribution on March 23. That would have hurt our investor’s future financial security.

If the market fell by 50% through year-end, which in the scary days of March seemed to be a distinct possibility and could still happen, our theoretical investor would have to cash out 8.74% of the account if RMDs were still required.

There were other ways to deal with this problem, such as letting people take a pass on their first $15,000 of RMDs, rather than giving a big break to the likes of me and a far bigger break to people with far larger retirement accounts than mine. But Congress and Trump didn’t do that.

Charitable Deductions: $4.83 billion

Normally, people who itemize deductions on their federal tax return can deduct no more than 60% of their adjusted gross income for charitable contributions. But for this year, the limit is 100% of AGI.

The Tax Policy Center, whose research helped inform this article, estimates that about two-thirds of the people who donated more than 60% of their AGI in past years had incomes of less than $100,000. But although such people accounted for the bulk of those making such large contributions relative to their income, the TPC says, “Most of the value of the deduction goes to just a small number of the very wealthy.”

The theory behind raising the limit this year is that it will encourage people to make larger donations than they otherwise would. But I can’t imagine how this provision — like the provision allowing people who take the standard deduction to subtract $300 from their taxable income for charitable contributions — is going to significantly increase donations to charities trying to help people cope with COVID-19.

The $4.83 billion JCT number for this provision’s cost to the Treasury includes tax savings for both individuals and corporations.

Pass-Through Entities: $140.61 billion

Now, we come to the huge item that benefits the likes of Trump and Kushner, their families, other wealthy real estate types, hedge fund investors and all sorts of ultra-high-income people, who derive large amounts of money from partnerships, LLCs and other so-called pass-through entities.

As you’ll see in a bit, this big-time break provides a big-time benefit to a relative handful of people.

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Now that it’s a fait accompli, this provision is belatedly getting a lot of media attention. So I’ll spare you most of the details about how it allows the ultra-wealthy to use paper losses to offset income that was taxed in previous years, when tax rates were higher than they are now, and get refunds based on those old, higher rates.

Suffice it to say that the JCT estimates that about 82% of these benefits — let’s call it $115 billion — will go to about 43,000 taxpayers with $1 million or more in annual income. That’s an average of about $2.68 million each.

The new proposed stimulus package passed by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives — the HEROES (for Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions) Act — would repeal this provision. However, its prospects for passage in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has called the HEROES Act a “totally unserious effort,” seem remote. He and other Senate Republicans insisted on making the break for pass-through entities part of the CARES legislation. It’s hard to imagine them allowing any new bailout legislation to reverse that benefit. I’m sure Democrats realized this but wanted to go on record as opposing the pass-through break.

The HEROES Act would also repeal the $10,000 limit on deductions for state and local income and real estate taxes, which Republicans included in the 2017 tax cut legislation to reduce the cost to the Treasury of the big cuts they gave to corporations and ultra-high-income people. (Not coincidentally, the cap hurt people in high-income, high-tax blue states.) It’s hard to imagine this provision becoming law, either.

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Now, let’s look at two corporate tax breaks inserted in the CARES Act. One lets corporations increase their interest deductions; the second lets them use tax losses from 2018, 2019 and this year to get immediate, substantial refunds rather than having to wait until they show future profits that offset those losses.

The people who benefit most from these corporate tax breaks, of course, are the corporations’ owners. (Workers, in theory, benefit to some extent, as well.)

By increasing companies’ cash flows and reported earnings, these breaks help the share prices of corporations whose stock is publicly traded and help increase the value of privately held corporations.

Stock ownership by individuals is concentrated among higher-income people.

Corporate Interest Deductions: $12.09 billion

One of the reforms of the 2017 tax act was reducing the amount of interest that corporations could deduct on their federal tax returns. The idea was to reduce the attractiveness of debt, which is subsidized by taxpayers and carries big risks to corporate owners as well as employees. (For examples, see the recent bankruptcies of Neiman Marcus and J. Crew, which were burdened with debt, part of it incurred to pay fees and distributions to the buyout firms that had taken them over.)

The CARES Act undid part of the 2017 act by increasing the deductible level to 50% of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization from the previous 30%.

Like some of the other provisions that we’ve looked at, this doesn’t involve a lot of money relative to the numbers that we’re dealing with. But it’s symbolic. And the people benefiting the most from it because they have major investments in stocks aren’t likely to be worrying about how to pay for food or avoid losing their homes.

Corporate Loss Treatment: $88.70 billion

This does the same kind of thing for corporations that the pass-through provision we discussed earlier does for LLCs and partnerships and such. But it hasn’t attracted anything like the same attention that the pass-through giveaway has gotten because it doesn’t involve names like Trump and Kushner.

Until now, corporations that had losses last year and this year could carry them forward to offset taxes for future years, but they couldn’t apply them to get refunds of taxes paid in previous years.

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Corporations can now apply losses from this year, last year and 2018 to income from the previous five years. That’s going to be a big deal for companies — can you say Boeing? — that are likely to show losses.

What’s more, these companies can get refunds of up to 35% of the losses they carry back to 2017 and earlier years, even though the corporate tax rate is now only 21%. The rationale is that because the corporate tax rate was 35% before 2018, companies should be able to get refunds today based on what they paid then, not on what they’d be paying now.

So this pays off on multiple levels: The beneficiaries not only benefit today from current and recent losses rather than having to wait until they have profits in the future, but they get a much bigger bang for the buck.

Our country is suffering through major, major problems. We’ve got more than 100,000 people dead from COVID-19, unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, and protests and civil unrest in cities and towns across the country. We’re appropriately adding trillions of dollars to our national debt to try to forestall an economic meltdown. Let’s just hope that further federal aid goes to those who really need it. And doesn’t go to those who don’t.

Protesters chant and wave signs at the CPD during a protest on June 6, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois. | Natasha Moustache/Getty Images

As with much else in American life, there’s a stark partisan divide.

It’s not just the people protesting in the streets — most Americans are concerned about police violence, and specifically the killing of George Floyd, new polls show.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Sunday found that a majority of Americans are more troubled with the actions of the Minneapolis police that led to Floyd’s death, rather than by violence at some protests. The poll was conducted among 1,000 people from May 28 to June 2, just days after Floyd was killed on May 25 by a police officer who pinned him down by the neck with his knee, and early on in the (largely peaceful) protests.

Despite some criticism surrounding images of looting and arson, the poll found that only 27 percent of voters thought the violence of protesters was more concerning than the actions of the police and Floyd’s death — a contrast to the 59 percent that found the latter far more troubling. A big caveat: As with much else in American life, there’s a stark partisan divide. Nearly half of Republicans (48 percent) said they were more concerned about the protests, while 81 percent of Democrats found the police killing of Floyd a bigger issue.

Opinions differed by race as well. 78 percent of African Americans were more concerned with the police’s actions in contrast to the 15 percent that were troubled by the protesters’ violence. The gap between the two opinions dwindled among white Americans: 54 percent found the police violence that led to Floyd’s death more troubling, while 30 percent were more concerned with violent protests.

Regardless of politics or race, a majority of Americans are more bothered by police brutality — which could explain the strong support for police reform measures revealed in another recent survey. The poll, conducted by YouGov from May 29 to 30 among 1,060 people, showed that 67 percent of Americans supported banning any type of neck restraints, which was a police tactic used when Floyd died. Implementing an early warning system to identify problematic officers was also popular among 80 percent of Americans. The most supported reform measure was training officers on deescalation tactics, which was approved by 88 percent of Americans.

And while police may have historically been popular among Americans, these polls could indicate that their popularity might be faltering due to the recent waves of protest. A survey of over 6,000 people from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape found that the favorability figures for the police plunged 10 percent in one week — 66 percent to 56 percent — just days after Floyd’s death.

“This is a unique moment in American history,” Robert Griffin, research director for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, told the New York Daily News. “To see shifts like this really speaks to what a monumental event these protests have been.”

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

A still from the viral video of two officers pushing protester Martin Gugino to the ground in Buffalo, New York. | WBFO

Two cops pushed a 75-year-old protester to the ground. A viral video brought them to justice.

Two police officers seen in a viral video shoving a 75-year-old man to the ground in Buffalo, New York, were charged with second-degree assault on June 6. The officers, Aaron Torgalski, 39, and Robert McCabe, 32, have pleaded not guilty and have been released without bail, but if convicted, they could face a maximum of seven years in prison.

The charges represent the latest of a number of cases in which viral videos showing evidence of police violence have led to disciplinary action. As Catherine Kim noted for Vox, since the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, countless videos have circulated on social media of officers beating, tasing, and violently arresting protesters — and in many of these cases, the officers have begun to face consequences.

In Chicago, the state attorney’s office has opened an investigation into a group of officers who were filmed swarming a car in a parking lot, breaking the car windows, and dragging people out. In Brooklyn, a police officer was suspended without pay after an officer pulled down the mask of a black protester and pepper sprayed him in the face.

What happened in Buffalo was one of the most graphic videos to come out of the current protests. On June 4, local NPR station WBFO tweeted a video showing a group of police officers walking toward an elderly man in the city’s Niagara Square while enforcing curfew. Two officers then push the man back, one using his baton, which causes him to stumble and hit his head on the sidewalk. Blood pours from his ear as dozens of police continue to walk past his unconscious body.

The video directly contradicted the Buffalo Police Department’s earlier statement that the man had been injured “when he tripped & fell,” a statement that neglected to mention any interaction with the police. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown released a statement later that night, writing that he was “deeply disturbed” by the video, and that the two officers who pushed the man down had been suspended without pay. Brown also noted the victim, Martin Gugino, was taken to the hospital in “stable but serious” condition.

Gugino is a community organizer and longtime member of People United for Sustainable Housing Buffalo, whose deputy director, Harper S.E. Bishop, told the Washington Post, “Martin shows up for his people, our community, to dismantle systems of oppression. That’s what he was doing tonight at City Hall. He shouldn’t have been met with police violence for showing up and demanding accountability for the ongoing brutality and murder of Black lives.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the officers’ actions “utterly disgraceful,” while Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said in a press conference, “They’re not trained to shove a 75-year-old man with a baton and knock him to the ground.”

Despite public outcry, other police officers are standing by Torgalski and McCabe

Despite widespread condemnation from city and state officials and the general public, however, the entirety of Buffalo’s 57-person Emergency Response Team (ERT), of which Torgalski and McCabe were a part, “resigned in disgust” from the team after the two were suspended, “because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” said John Evans, the president of the BPD union. Though they did not quit their jobs, the members have refused to participate in the crowd control duties of the ERT. And at the courthouse on Saturday where Torgalski and McCabe were charged, dozens of people gathered outside to cheer, many wearing “blue lives matter” T-shirts.

The solidarity from fellow police officers is indicative of a growing divide between people calling for restrictions on police power and budgets and those who are staunchly supportive of the current system. “Defund the police” has become a rallying cry among protesters, who argue that fewer public dollars should be allocated to a historically racist institution that continuously harms people of color. Instead, they argue, taxpayer money should go toward social work and less militarized forms of community safety measures.

Cities around the country are now evaluating the effectiveness of their forces and some, like in Minneapolis, are calling for a dramatic restructuring of public safety services. Meanwhile, police unions and city mayors have, for the most part, defended current police department budgets. President Donald Trump has also tweeted that he wants “a great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT,” while campaigning on promises of “law and order.”

That divide is one that can be seen at the protests themselves: As New York Times Magazine writer Carvell Wallace argued, “in a demonstration against police brutality, police are not law enforcement, they’re counter protesters.” Though ostensibly there to prevent violence or looting, videos like the one in Buffalo have shown that in policing protests against them, police officers can’t be considered neutral parties. “They are treating protesters like the enemy, lashing out violently, using disproportionate force, and attacking people who pose no threat to them,” write Vox’s Catherine Kim and Anna North.

The irony here is that the biggest threat posed to police officers by unarmed protesters is their ability to film that officer doing something unlawful. The support the officers in Buffalo have received from their colleagues reflects a history of police standing by one another even through indefensible acts of violence — one also seen in the cases of Sandra Bland and Eric Garner. But as recent arrests and suspensions have shown, as long as there’s video evidence and platforms on which to share it, the public will hold them accountable.

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Former Secretary of State Colin Powell at the US Capitol in 2018, paying his respects to former President George H.W. Bush. | Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images

Powell’s announcement comes amid reports of eroding support for Trump among former Republican leaders.

Colin Powell, former secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush, said Sunday morning that President Donald Trump has “drifted away” from the Constitution and that he’ll be voting for Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

While the 2020 election would not mark Powell’s first time backing a Democrat for the nation’s highest office (he supported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016), his comments are remarkable given that they come as a number of other Republican leaders express hesitation or outright opposition to Trump’s candidacy.

“I think he has been not an effective president. He lies all the time,” Powell told CNN’s Jake Tapper, adding that he’s “close” to Biden and plans to support him.

“Every American citizen has to sit down, think it through, and make a decision on their own,” Powell said. “Use your common sense, say is this good for my country before you say this is good for me.”

Powell also said Trump’s response to the anti-police brutality protests show that he has strayed from the principles enshrined in the US Constitution — and added he’s “deeply troubled” by the president’s willingness to attack those who oppose him.

The president insults “anybody who dared to speak against him. That is dangerous for our democracy, it’s dangerous for our country,” Powell said.

Trump reacted to Powell’s comments with insults Sunday morning, tweeting that Powell is “a real stiff” who led the country into war in the Middle East. He then retweeted JT Lewis, a Republican state Senate candidate in Connecticut, who wrote that “retired bureaucrats” hate Trump because he’s “ending the corruption that pads their retirement accounts!”

Sunday is not the first time Powell has publicly criticized Trump — he said he voted for Clinton in 2016 and called Trump “a national disgrace and an international pariah” in emails leaked that year. But in speaking out now, he joins a number of other prominent Republicans who are reportedly unhappy with the leader of their party.

Republicans and military leaders are questioning Trump as he further slips in the polls

Former President George W. Bush and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah won’t support Trump’s re-election campaign, the New York Times reported Saturday. People close to Jeb Bush told the Times he isn’t certain how he will vote, and Cindy McCain, widow of Sen. John McCain, is “almost certain” to support Biden.

NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell reports an aide to former President Bush has pushed back on this reporting, calling it “completely made up.” The aide added, “President Bush is retired from presidential politics and hasn’t indicated how he will vote.”

Regardless, it seems unlikely Bush would support Trump in his campaign: None of these figures supported Trump in 2016, but some of those who did — including former Speakers of the House Paul Ryan and John Boehner — have not actively endorsed the president’s re-election bid.

The Biden campaign reportedly sees enough of an opportunity with these and grassroots Republicans that it even plans to launch a “Republicans for Biden” group later in the campaign, Democrats close to the campaign told the Times.

And it is not only Republicans who are criticizing the president. A number of elite military officials — who usually work to remain nonpartisan — have also criticized Trump in recent days over his response to protests against racism and police brutality that have occurred in cities across the country. Some of his controversial moves include reportedly calling for 10,000 active duty service members to deploy to stop them, and using US Park Police and other law enforcement officials to tear-gas peaceful protesters to make way for Trump to take a photo in front of a nearby church.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who resigned from his post in the Trump administration in 2018 over the president’s Syria policy and remains widely respected on both sides of the aisle, released an excoriating statement earlier this week.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis wrote. “We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said Friday he agreed with Mattis.

And Gen. John Allen, the former commander of US troops in Afghanistan, penned an op-ed in Foreign Policy, writing that Trump “has failed to show sympathy, empathy, compassion, or understanding (for those protesting racial injustice)—some of the traits the nation now needs from its highest office.”

How widespread the sentiments of Powell, top Republicans, and some military leaders are will be revealed in the fall; polling, however, shows Biden has held a slight advantage over Trump for months, one that’s been rising in the weeks since nationwide anti-racism protests arose after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

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Police officers advance after firing tear gas during a demonstration on May 31, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Participants in Black Lives Matter protests are recording police brutality to keep officers accountable.

Police officers across the country are now under investigation or facing disciplinary action, after viral videos captured their violence against participants in peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.

Countless videos uploaded on social media have documented officers using excessive force against the protesters, who have been marching since last week, following the police killing of George Floyd on May 25. As these videos have spread online, they have further incensed citizens advocating for stricter police regulations, while others are having even more tangible impacts. Some city officials have responded to the videos by opening investigations into the depicted incidents, putting the offending officers on administrative leave, or even terminating them from their positions.

In Buffalo, New York, two officers were suspended without pay on Thursday night after they pushed a 75-year-old man to the ground, an incident which was filmed by a local NPR reporter and subsequently went viral on Twitter. The police initially reported that the man had tripped and fallen on his own, but the video evidence shows otherwise — which sparked immediate outrage. (The man is now in stable but serious condition, according to the city’s mayor.)

Some officers in New York City have also been disciplined for their violence against protesters. One officer was suspended with pay on Friday following an Internal Affairs Bureau investigation, after he was caught pushing a woman to the ground on May 29 in Brooklyn. The officer’s supervisor, who was on the scene but did not intervene, was also “transferred,” according to NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot Shea.

Another NYPD officer stationed in Brooklyn was also suspended without pay after pulling down a protester’s mask and pepper spraying him in the face on May 30. The incident was captured on video and shared to Twitter, where it’s received more than 3 million views so far.

In Atlanta, six police officers were arrested for illegally tasing two college students on May 30. The students were driving when the police stopped them for violating the city’s curfew and repeatedly asked what was going on as the officers opened the car door. The officers then aggressively dragged the students out of the car after tasing them, then slashed their tires and broke the driver’s side window — all of which was captured on air by a local CBS affiliate. Two of the six officers were fired and three were placed on desk duty before prosecutors issued arrest warrants for charges of aggravated assault, illegally pointing a taser, and criminal damage to property against all six officers.

And in Chicago, two officers were relieved of their duties pending an investigation into a violent arrest they made on May 31. A video shared on social media showed police, including the two officers who were disciplined, swarming a car in a mall parking lot and breaking the car windows while dragging people out. One woman was thrown to the ground, and an officer put his knee to her neck — the same restraining method that killed George Floyd. The officers said they had pulled over the car because the passengers had “assembled with three or more persons for the purpose of using force or violence to disturb the peace.” The passengers deny any wrongdoing, NBC Chicago reported.

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office has now opened an investigation into potential criminal charges, and the FBI is investigating the incident as well, according to State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

Viral videos have been crucial in keeping the police accountable

Viral videos have been essential in capturing police brutality, particularly as the current wave of Black Lives Matter protests takes hold. One Twitter thread alone, posted by lawyer T. Greg Doucette, shares over 300 examples of police brutality — many of which depict cars running into protesters, the police firing an excessive amount of tear gas, and groups of officers assaulting individuals. The thread has been shared widely, with more than 58,000 retweets.

In recent years, technology has become more essential and accessible to protesters, and almost everyone carries a high-quality camera, thanks to their smartphones. This has made it easier for anyone to capture police brutality, often in real time, since they can easily upload the videos to social media on the spot. Incidents that might have been erased in the past are now recorded for the entire world to see.

“The ability for the public to document what is going on is an important tool for holding powerful people and institutions accountable, including the police,” Evan Greer, deputy director of the digital advocacy group Fight for the Future, told the Washington Post earlier this week regarding the use of cameras by protesters. “The availability of, particularly, smartphone cameras has dramatically increased the number of instances that we see.”

The officers who faced disciplinary action in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York would likely not have been reprimanded if not for the viral videos that captured their misconduct. That’s why so many protesters are filming and uploading scenes from the demonstrations to keep the police accountable.

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Police cars are seen in Portland, Oregon, on May 31, as demonstrators are enveloped in tear gas during a protest over the death of George Floyd. | John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Elected officials are banning police chokeholds and the use of tear gas.

Since the start of the nationwide protests against police violence following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a former Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer, protesters and other criminal justice reform advocates have proposed banning the use of tear gas and certain chokeholds. Now, through court orders and policy changes, cities like Minneapolis and Seattle are beginning to adopt those reforms.

The Minneapolis city council voted Friday to ban police from using chokeholds and neck restraints like the one used by the officer in the course of Floyd’s death. They’ve also proposed disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department, and replacing it with a new model of law enforcement focused on community safety.

“My assessment of what is now necessary is shaped by the failure of the reforms we’ve attempted, in the face of opposition from the department and the Police Federation,” wrote City Council Member Steve Fletcher in a Time op-ed Friday.

Details about what the police department’s replacement would look like have not yet been announced, but the chokehold ban will be instituted immediately.

California has also rolled out a chokehold ban — Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he would direct police not to use chokeholds in the state. That follows San Diego Police Chief David Nisleit’s Monday announcement of a ban on the use of chokeholds by the city’s police officers.

Those announcements come amid ongoing protests against police brutality — ones that have revealed numerous incidents of police aggression, and that have been characterized by the use of chemical irritants, including pepper balls and tear gas, as methods of controlling largely peaceful crowds.

Viral videos of such incidents, including one of the tear gassing of a peaceful crowd assembled outside the White House, has led protesters and others calling for reform to decry these tactics — and that outcry has begun to lead some cities to issue or consider bans on the use of certain irritants.

For instance, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan banned the use of tear gas by police against protesters and demonstrators in the city for the next 30 days. The Allegheny County Council, which includes Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has proposed legislation defining nonlethal weapons and banning the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and bean bag rounds. That measure is up for a vote on Tuesday.

New Orleans City Councilmember Jay Banks also proposed banning the use of tear gas during Thursday’s city council meeting. His proposal came after community outcry over the police department’s deployment of tear gas against protesters on a bridge, the Crescent City Connection, Wednesday.

Similarly, Washington, DC, Councilmember Brianne K. Nadeau announced Thursday she would be proposing legislation to ban the use of tear gas by district police.

In Denver, Colorado, the judicial system has weighed in on the issue. Friday, a federal judge temporarily banned the city’s police department from using chemical weapons, such as tear gas and pepper spray, as well as projectiles such as rubber bullets, against peaceful protesters.

“The Denver Police Department has failed in its duty to police its own,” Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote in his ruling. The Denver Police Department said Friday it would comply with the judge’s order.

Portland, Oregon-based advocacy group Don’t Shoot PDX also hopes to have a judge rule on the use of tear gas in that city — Friday, it filed a class-action lawsuit against the city for the police department’s “indiscriminate use” of tear gas.

“We’re out screaming for justice for Black people and asking the state to stop its violence against us, and the City responds by using tear gas when we’re in the middle of a pandemic of respiratory disease,” said Teressa Raiford, a leader of Don’t Shoot PDX.

Calls for banning such weapons have grown as the nation has witnessed numerous gruesome injuries, and, according to a Forbes report, at least 12 deaths from their use by police in attempting to control large crowds this week. Protesters, journalists, and bystanders alike have been left bloody and wounded by police while demonstrating, covering the protests, or simply driving by. Most cities and states have yet to adopt such bans — however, those that have represent a small step toward the larger reforms protesters are calling for.

Bans like these are part of what the protests are about

Broadly, protesters are calling for an end to violent policing, of which the use of chemical irritants is a part.

Tear gas is considered a chemical weapon, and it’s banned from use in military conflicts. But it’s also a “riot-control” weapon, meaning that its use by police in many localities is legal, as explained by Vox’s Jen Kirby:

In the United States, what we call “tear gas” is often CS gas, a chemical compound credited to two American scientists, Ben Corson and Roger Stoughton, who discovered it in 1928. (The C and S in “CS” come from the first initial of each man’s last name.) But its use predates that, to the battlefields of World War I — from where it migrated not long after to America’s police forces. And there it has stayed, ever since.

Mostly because it was ruthlessly effective. It dispersed crowds and could turn a “protest into a screaming mob,” Anna Feigenbaum, an associate professor at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, told me.

“Because it doesn’t normally leave blood, there’s no trace,” said Feigenbaum, who is the author of the book Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today.

Protesters and bystanders have complained about the negative effects of tear gas, with some saying they’ve received lacerations or broken bones from the canisters, beyond the negative respiratory effects of the gas itself. And as Jason Johnson noted for Vox, the weapons are also dangerous because the heat given off by canisters can — and has — started fires at demonstrations.

But while limits on the use of tear gas are a significant step forward, perhaps the more impactful change comes with the chokehold bans. Banning chokeholds is one of the key police reforms proposed by the 8 Can’t Wait movement, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias explained:

The essence of the campaign is eight procedural rules that Campaign Zero claims “data proves” can conjointly decrease police violence by 72 percent.

...

When you place a person in a chokehold or a stranglehold, there is always a chance that things will go badly wrong. Instructing officers not to use these holds and training them in other modes of restraint will likely reduce deaths. Shooting at moving vehicles is inherently dangerous, and most departmental guidelines restrict it to some extent, but 8 Can’t Wait calls for banning it altogether.

The Use of Force Project points to research indicating that banning chokeholds and neck restraints would reduce police violence by 22 percent, suggesting the policy — if widely adopted — would be a important step toward meeting protesters’ demands.

Of course, a ban does not necessarily guarantee that police will follow the new rules. Eric Garner, a black man killed by police in 2014, died after police used a banned chokehold technique while arresting him. And that is a reminder that while bans of chokeholds and irritants are a good start, the sort of full police reform demonstrators desire will have to go beyond quick — and sometimes temporary — bans on violent police actions to address underlying and systemic issues of inequality and racism.

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NYPD officers block the exit of the Manhattan Bridge as hundreds protesting police brutality and systemic racism attempt to cross into the borough of Manhattan from Brooklyn hours after a citywide curfew went into effect in New York. | Scott Heins/Getty Images

The police crowd-control tactic has been used at protests across the country.

Just before the 8 pm curfew in New York on Thursday, protesters in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx approached a line of police officers who blocked the street. From the other side, police charged the crowd, hemming them in. “This wasn’t even a confrontation, it was a trap,” Gothamist reporter Jake Offenhartz wrote.

The chaos looked to be an example of “kettling,” a crowd-control tactic used by police that corrals demonstrators into a confined space, so they can’t leave. Once blocked from getting out, police can make arrests or slowly disperse the demonstrators. The situations can become volatile if cops use force, leaving people without a way to escape.

After the Bronx incident, dozens of people were detained, with reporters, protesters, and eyewitnesses saying the march did not become chaotic until cops charged in. New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea disputed this and said the NYPD had received information that the group had intended “to burn things down” and “cause mayhem,” according to amNY.

The disconnect has increased tensions between the police and protesters, who see “kettling” as another example of cops using disproportionate force, effectively turning peaceful demonstrations into tense affairs or confrontations. The New York Times reported that police used the tactic in downtown Brooklyn on Wednesday, and Gothamist reported that demonstrators had been kettled in the Upper West Side on Friday. On Tuesday, the NYPD trapped hundreds of protesters on the Manhattan Bridge, refusing to let them off into Manhattan. The standoff ended when police allowed everyone to exit on the Brooklyn side.

Kettling is not just being used at protests in New York. In Dallas, more than 600 protesters were detained Monday after demonstrators say police trapped them on Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, forcing a confrontation. In Washington, DC, protesters were also pinned into a street on Monday and surrounded by police.

Kettling is not a new tactic; it was used notably during climate protests at the G20 summit in London in 2009, and Occupy Wall Street demonstrators sued after hundreds were trapped on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011. But as nationwide protests stretch into their second weekend, police use of kettling is coming under scrutiny. And, for many protesters, it’s adding to the perception that the police are provoking conflict.

What is kettling?

Police use kettling as a form of crowd control. The goal is to confine a crowd to a specific space — think a city block or a bridge — and blocking the means of escape. As Colin Groundwater wrote in GQ, it’s the opposite of other crowd control or riot control tactics, like setting off tear gas, which are intended to disperse big crowds, and get people to flee. Kettling hems them in, and it’s often up to law enforcement when, and how, people can escape.

That can mean keeping people trapped until cops feel ready to release them, or sometimes, it can involve detaining people or making mass arrests. And, in cases where a crowd is rioting or engaging in violence, kettling helps cops control a space and detain those causing mayhem.

This is what the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio have said to justify use of the tactic in some circumstances. “I don’t want to see protesters hemmed in if they don’t need to be,” de Blasio said during the Ask a Mayor portion of WNYC’s the Brian Lehrer Show on Friday, but added, “sometimes there’s a legitimate problem and it’s not visible to protesters.”

Kettling, though, tends to pack crowds together, which can make a standoff with police more tense and volatile, as people who would otherwise walk or move away simply can’t. And when the tactic is used, especially on city blocks or in public spaces, it can also risk sweeping up bystanders, people who are just trying to get to work or run errands or go for a walk.

Scott Michelman — legal director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia and lead counsel in the lawsuit brought against Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Police Department for “kettling” of protesters in DC on Inauguration Day in 2017 — told me that this inability to just get away increases unnecessary contact with law enforcement.

Even if police have legitimate law enforcement or safety reasons to want to disperse a demonstration — beyond shutting down a message they don’t like — kettling also brings up two other concerns: constitutional issues and, particularly amid the coronavirus pandemic, public health concerns.

“The Constitution restricts whom the cops may detain — not just arrest, but stop — and the stops raise constitutional concerns.” Michelman added that the kettle is often “sweeping people [up] who haven’t done anything wrong, and may have been either simply exercising their right to protest, which is not just legal, but constitutionally protected, or people have no relationships whatsoever to the reason that the cops are detaining anyone.”

Crowding people in a tight space, for a prolonged period of time, can also be dangerous. It can be legitimately frightening to pack people that closely together, putting people on edge and adding to the volatility. And during the coronavirus pandemic, a tactic like kettling does not at all allow for social distancing. While the six-feet rule has been largely broken through the act of protesting (many protesters are wearing masks, though), tightly crowding demonstrators or people together only enhances that risk.

“The police tactics — the kettling, the mass arrests, the use of chemical irritants — those are completely opposed to public health recommendations,” Malika Fair, director of public health initiatives at the Association of American Medical Colleges, told Politico. “They’re causing protesters to violate the six-feet recommendation. The chemicals may make them have to remove their masks. This is all very dangerous.”

At the same time, cities like New York have instituted curfews, which makes the question of kettling — and other police attempts to control or break up crowds — a little knottier. Peaceful protesters have defied curfews in many places. “The way that it usually goes is [the police] line up and then they usually do not actually execute it until there’s some lawful reason to,” Carol Archbold, a professor of criminal justice at North Dakota State University, told me. “And oftentimes they do use the reason of the curfew.”

And there’s a legitimate question as to whether kettling increases the chance that a peaceful protest will lead to more violent confrontation. If police choose to use a kettling tactic, “there’s the problem of potential overuse or misuse of police force, whether it be through the use of batons or some other items like tear gas,” Archbold said.

Ali Watkins, writing in the New York Times, described a protest in Cadman Plaza in downtown Brooklyn on Wednesday where hundreds of demonstrators were chanting, hands up, as protest leaders tried to steer the group out of the area. But, by that point, they had been hemmed in by police. “For the next 20 minutes in Downtown Brooklyn, officers swinging batons turned a demonstration that had been largely peaceful into a scene of chaos,” she wrote.

Sarah Einowski, a cooperating counsel on the ACLU of Oregon’s lawsuit against the city of Portland for “kettling” protesters at a June 4, 2017 protest, said overall, tactics like kettling can have a chilling effect on protest. Like tear gas or rubber bullets, being trapped without water or bathrooms for an extended period of time may make people less likely to want to exercise their right of assembly.

Jacqui Karn, a criminal justice researcher, described her experience being kettled at a 2010 student fees protest in London in a column in the Guardian, which she called a “shocking experience.”

“The dilemma remains: how do the police protect the rights and safety of protesters but also deal with a disorderly minority without using excessive force, or inflaming the situation?,” she wrote. “I am not sure I have the answer. All I know is that I was effectively put in danger and held without cause. That did not feel like the actions of a country that respected my rights.”

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Crowds Assemble Across Washington In Mass Demonstrations Against Police Violence

New York state: 57 police resign to support officers fired for shoving 75-year-old

… yeah

Anthony Brennan III, the Kensington man accused by police of assaulting three teenagers on the Capital Crescent Trail, has issued a statement through his attorneys, Andrew Jezic and David Moyse: Anthony Brennan recognizes that his outrageous behavior toward the young adult victims on the Crescent Trail was unacceptable and wrong. The outrage felt in our […]

Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event in Fort Madison, Iowa. | John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

He’ll officially become the party’s presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in August.

After months of fierce campaigning — and a worldwide pandemic interrupting the normal primary schedule — former Vice President Joe Biden has officially earned enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination for president.

Biden, who has been the presumptive Democratic nominee since Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped out on April 8, earned the last few delegates he needed to reach the 1,991-delegate threshold for nomination following primary races in seven states and the District of Columbia Tuesday. He now has 1,995 delegates with eight states and three US territories still left to vote.

“It was an honor to compete alongside one of the most talented groups of candidates the Democratic party has ever fielded — and I am proud to say that we are going into this general election a united party,” Biden said in a statement Friday evening.

The former vice president’s campaign got off to a slow start: He finished fourth in Iowa and left New Hampshire early, having finished near the bottom of the pack in that primary. His prospects turned around on the strength of a victory in the South Carolina primary, which kicked off successive wins across the South, giving him an insurmountable delegate advantage.

But the coronavirus pandemic interrupted Biden’s campaign plans, postponing many primary races, and forcing the candidate to run virtual events from his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

Biden will officially be nominated at the Democratic National Convention, which was originally scheduled to be held in mid-July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — however, the pandemic forced the party to reschedule for the week of August 17. He won’t be able to use general election funds until his nomination is made official at the convention.

The Biden campaign, along with the Democratic National Committee, raised $60.5 million in April, the last month for which reported data is available. The fundraising haul brought them close to even with the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s fundraising efforts for that month, although the Republicans have a massive ($255 million to Biden’s $97.5 million) cash-on-hand advantage.

Despite that financial disadvantage, Biden has enjoyed a steady lead in general election polling. A recent NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll of 1,062 US adults found Biden leading Trump 50 percent to 43 percent, a 7 percentage point lead — which is outside the margin of error of 3.8 percentage points.

The president’s approval rating has fallen as the twin crises of mass protests against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the pandemic have deepened. Biden seemed to recognize the unsettling moment as he acknowledged reaching the delegate threshold Friday.

“I’m once again asking every American who feels knocked down, counted out, and left behind, to join our campaign,” he said in the statement. “Because we aren’t just building the movement that will defeat Donald Trump, we are building the movement that will transform our nation.”

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Update: The alleged bike assaulter has issued an apology, appears to have lost his job. Read more here. After a video was widely circulated of an incident that occurred on the Capital Crescent Trail in Bethesda on June 1, the Maryland-National Capital Park Police announced Friday evening that they have identified and arrested a suspect. […]

Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Whether or not your state has already been hit hard by Covid-19, there is still reason for concern.

No two coronavirus outbreaks are the same. While the country waits to see what effect the combination of economic reopenings, anti-police violence protests, and warmer weather will have, different places are facing different kinds of danger as the pandemic progresses.

In some places, new cases might have started to level off, but because those areas have already been hit hard by Covid-19, infections are still widespread. Their health systems could still be at risk of exceeding their capacity, even if cases are plateauing or starting to decline.

In other places, they are starting from a lower baseline in case numbers, but worryingly, their rate of positive coronavirus tests has increased in parallel to their increase in testing capacity. That suggests the outbreak is still growing.

Either situation should be a warning against reopening too fast, too soon, experts told me.

“Reopening with an already increasing epidemic (estimated by new positives, new hospital admissions, % positive, all imperfect) means that the trend will only accelerate,” Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me over email. “Reopening with high case numbers means that even if we plateau and don’t have increasing cases per day, the amount of damage is proportional to the number of cases per day, as is the difficulty of controlling transmission by test and trace.”

Some examples would be illustrative, right? The best example of the first scenario — a high baseline, with hospital capacity threatened even though new cases are relatively flat — would be Maryland.

Maryland (where I live) has endured a rough coronavirus outbreak. Among the 50 states plus Washington, DC, it ranks ninth in Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people and 11th in deaths. If you look at raw numbers, its outbreak does appear to be plateauing: Cases have dropped by 17 percent over the past 14 days.

But such a small decline in new cases still means there are a lot of new cases happening in Maryland every day, because the coronavirus was already widespread. If you look at the number of new Covid-19 cases per million people, Maryland ranks second among states, behind only Massachusetts.

And those new cases are popping up in a state where hospitals are already stretched. Just 4 percent of Maryland’s ICU beds are currently available and just 14 percent of all hospital beds are free, according to the folks running the Covid Exit Strategy dashboard.

The goal has been to lower the reproductive rate of Covid-19, to get it below 1 (meaning one person only infects one other person or preferably less, on average). But it will take a long time for the outbreak to peter out if so many people have already been infected and are still spreading the virus, just more slowly.

“A reproductive number slightly above 1 isn’t going to translate to an immediate surge because of the doubling time. But if the number you are doubling is quite large, that will only help you so much,” William Hanage, who studies communicable diseases at Harvard, told me.

And now new risks have been introduced as social distancing starts to relax and people gather both informally and for the protests happening in Maryland and elsewhere across the country. Public health experts like Hanage continue to worry about “superspreader events.”

Other states don’t look quite as bad as Maryland, especially in terms of hospital and ICU capacity, but some face the same set of problems. Rhode Island and Massachusetts, for example, have high rates of new cases per million people (112 and 147, respectively), and their health system capacity is not particularly strong (their ICU and general hospital bed availability rank as low or extremely low).

So that is one type of Covid-19 danger: persistent if plateauing spread and low health system capacity. The other is best represented by Alabama: a parallel increase in both testing capacity and positive test rate, which would indicate an outbreak that is continuing to grow.

To date, Alabama has experienced a relatively mild coronavirus outbreak. It ranks 23rd among states in cases per 100,000 residents and 26th in deaths. But Alabama has its own set of problematic trends, which might be different from Maryland’s but still give experts cause for concern.

Over the past two weeks, Alabama’s testing rate has increased, from an average of 4,100 tests per day to 5,000. That’s good; everybody agrees on the need for more testing to better track the disease. But what’s worrying is the percentage of those tests that are coming back positive has also started to increase.

The hope would be that as testing increases, the positive rate goes down; that would suggest that public health officials have a fuller picture of what the outbreak looks like in their state. But if the positive test rate is going up, that indicates that testing still has not been ramped up sufficiently to totally capture the pandemic’s spread but also that the virus is continuing to spread undetected.

“If the more you test, the more you find, you’re incubating yourself a problem,” Hanage said.

Much like the Maryland scenario, other places have the same problems as Alabama. Arizona, for example, increased its testing from 5,300 per day to 6,700 per day over the past 14 days, but the positive test rate has also jumped from 7.2 percent to 10.7 percent. Mississippi, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are experiencing the same trends, even if they are not quite as stark.

What are we to do with all this information? First, it is simply a reminder that just because two places are experiencing very different kinds of coronavirus outbreaks does not mean one is necessarily doing “better” than the other.

But maybe most fundamentally, it is a reminder that the coronavirus is going to be with us for a long time. Whether your state has already peaked and now must contend with a long, slow decline or your state is seeing its Covid-19 cases increase, the end to the pandemic is still a long way off — especially as social distancing relaxes, whatever the reason.

“My big thing is that we should accept we are in a pandemic which isn’t going away,” Hanage said. “And it would be a good idea to decide what we are going to do, if and when it gets bad again, now (as if it’s not already bad enough).”

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As the federal response to protests in Washington over the death of George Floyd have added urgency to the quest for DC statehood, we look at why achieving that status has proven so complicated.

Part of Issue #6 of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

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A decade ago, Washington, DC, was on the cusp of gaining real representation in Congress. DC dwellers — who outnumber the populations of both Wyoming and Vermont — had been able to cast their votes in presidential elections since 1964, but they still lacked any voting power at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Washington has one congressional representative, currently Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can serve on committees but is not permitted to vote.

The proposal back then was this: DC’s nonvoting delegate would be replaced by a full-fledged House member. In exchange, an additional seat would be created, which initially would have gone to a safely Republican part of Utah, balancing DC’s heavily Democratic voter base. In many ways, the deal was a Band-Aid for the problem residents actually want fixed.

DC doesn’t have a vote in Congress because it isn’t a state, and becoming one is a long political ordeal: The last states joined the union 60 years ago, if that gives you an idea of how impossible adding another one seems now.

The 2009 deal, which would have circumvented the statehood process, made it through the Senate but died in the House. Democrats objected to provisions attached to the Senate bill to gut DC’s gun control laws. But Republicans weren’t too happy, either — including Jason Chaffetz, then still a representative from Utah. He didn’t like the trade-off, even though it meant more power for his state. “This whole thing strikes me as political bribery,” Chaffetz complained. “If Washington, DC, is due representation, make that case. … Don’t try and dangle a carrot out there.”

This month, the widespread protests over the death of George Floyd may have helped make that case to the entire nation. After President Trump sent federal National Guard troops to patrol DC, the District’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, seized on the moment to remind Americans of the District’s diminished position.

“We’re the capital city, we’re a federal district, we’re 700,000 taxpaying Americans, and I’m the mayor, governor and county executive all at once,” Bowser told PBS NewsHour this week. Because the long quest for statehood has yet to be fulfilled, she said, “the federal government can encroach on our autonomy” — including taking widely criticized actions this week on DC soil.

The effort for DC statehood has been growing for some time: Residents drive around with license plates that complain about “taxation without representation.” DC statehood bills have been introduced in every Congress since 1965. A standalone House bill on statehood received just one Republican vote back in 1993, the only time the question has come to the floor. Late last year, Congress held its first hearing on DC statehood in more than 25 years. But Chaffetz wasn’t wrong about the state of affairs.

Political bribery is what the creation of states has been all about, with some exceptions. Whenever there’s a desire to create a new state, all Congress has to do is vote for it. But like animals on Noah’s ark, states have historically entered the union in pairs, with lawmakers using new states to maintain the balance of partisan power — or at least try to.

“It was never written down, but it’s not an accident you got states in pairs,” says Louisiana State University historian Jonathan Earle.

A majority of representatives are already co-sponsors of the bill that would make DC a state. In March 2019, the chamber passed a resolution that endorsed statehood. Still, the reality was that statehood for DC — or Puerto Rico, for that matter — didn’t stand a chance. This moment could change national public perception around that.

However, if the House passes a statehood bill, it faces certain death in the Senate, where the Republican majority is adamantly opposed to adding a state where only 4 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016. Democrats view DC statehood as a way to rebalance a Senate and Electoral College that have stymied progressive priorities, and Republicans oppose the idea for that very reason. And public opinion is on their side. More than 60 percent of Americans oppose statehood for DC, according to a recent Gallup poll.

A similar share support statehood for Puerto Rico, according to the same poll. But history has shown that the creation of new states generally involves some form of power-sharing agreement. Right now, the GOP has no incentive to bless the creation of new states that Democrats would surely dominate. “DC and Puerto Rico are both likely to be Democratic states,” says Robert Pierce Forbes, a historian at Southern Connecticut State University. “It’s hard to see what you trade to get even one of them in.”

Insisting on tit for tat is part of a long pattern in American politics. The most recent additions to the US, Alaska and Hawaii, were brought in almost simultaneously in 1959 because one was understood to be Democratic and the other Republican.

Admitting states in ways that preserve partisan balance may sound cynical. The habit grew out of something much uglier. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, Southerners repeatedly blocked attempts to admit Northern free states unless they got a new slave state in return.

The birth of a state has frequently involved wrenching compromise, with the debate turning directly on the question of extending slavery or battles over race. The preservation of power has always been central to the equation.

Making new states wasn’t supposed to be complicated

The Constitution was written to make it easy to achieve America’s deeply rooted ambition to expand. But shortly after the founding, statehood fights devolved into a struggle involving the nation’s original sin of slavery.

What’s known as the new states clause (Article IV, Section III of the Constitution) gives Congress the power to create states with few restrictions. Delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 rejected the idea of imposing a voting requirement beyond the simple majority typically required to pass the House and Senate. Whenever there’s political will to create a state, Congress has free rein to do so.

Typically, Congress first passes an enabling act to allow residents to form a territorial government and propose a constitution. It later passes a law or resolution to admit a territory as a state — nearly always imposing conditions that have involved everything from voting rights, the state’s political rules, language requirements, and, in the case of Utah, a ban on polygamy.

This system worked for the first few decades of the new United States — for settlers, if not the Native Americans they forced out nor enslaved people across the country. Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, and Mississippi were all admitted shortly after the War of 1812, which, “by removing the threat of the woodland Indians and the Creeks in the South, accelerated both the white settlement of these areas and the alacrity with which Congress acted to incorporate them as states,” writes historian Sean Wilentz.

The nation expanded rapidly, thanks to passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 (which covered much of what we now call the Upper Midwest) and the Louisiana Purchase. That favorable 1803 deal with France brought in land that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rockies, more than doubling the size of the country. “If you had a bona fide amount of settlers, you could apply to Congress,” says Earle. “It worked without a hitch until Missouri applied for statehood in 1819.”

In 1819, the Senate was evenly divided between North and South, with senators from the 11 states that allowed slavery and an equal number from the 11 free states. Missouri threatened to extend slavery west of the Mississippi River. The following year, House Speaker Henry Clay crafted the Missouri Compromise.

Missouri would enter the union as a slave state, but its admission was coupled with that of the free state of Maine, which until then had been part of Massachusetts. In addition, slavery was banned from any new states north of 36°30’ latitude, a line stretching out from Missouri’s border with the South.

“When that was proposed, it was considered shockingly transactional,” says Forbes, author of The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. “There was a huge backlash in Maine. There was a famous comment by one legislator that his constituents would rather wait a thousand years for statehood than to take it on condition of bringing in a slave state.”

Southerners weren’t happy about the arrangement, either. Until that time, they had successfully blocked any attempt by Congress to regulate slavery in the states. They recognized that any limits meant its potential abolition. An elderly Thomas Jefferson saw that a “geographic line, coinciding with a marked principle” would forever be a source of irritation. “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” Jefferson wrote. “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

Statehood was a central front in the battle over slavery

If the idea of coupling free states with slave states was initially shocking, it soon became the norm. Due to Southern fears of being outvoted in the Senate, during the 1830s Michigan had to wait on Arkansas being admitted first. In its 1844 platform, the Democratic Party linked the entry of the vast slaveholding republic of Texas to the organization of the Oregon territory.

“Since control of the Senate, and more broadly the federal government, was vital to preserving the slave system, any change in the balance of free and slave states presented an existential threat to one side or the other,” says Queens College historian Joshua B. Freeman.

The issue remained a tinderbox. After the Gold Rush, California was flooded with settlers and quickly admitted to the union, without having first spent time as a territory. Admitting California required the Compromise of 1850, a “comprehensive scheme” that was again cobbled together by Henry Clay.

The slave trade was abolished in DC, but to appease those who favored slavery, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah officially became territories without reference to it, leaving the question to settlers. In addition, the brutal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it clear that African Americans were still legally considered property even after escaping to free states. Presciently, Free Soil Party co-founder and future Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase said, “The question of slavery in the territories has been avoided. It has not been settled.”

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a final attempt to maintain sectional balance by organizing two new territories split between the North and South. But its passage only fueled discord and prompted the formation of the anti-slavery Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln declaring, “The spirit of ’76 and the spirit of Nebraska are utter antagonisms.” The “Bleeding Kansas” border war over whether the territory would become a slave state became an immediate precursor to the Civil War.

Southern secession meant, among other things, that the region was no longer represented in Congress. The party of Lincoln took full advantage, admitting Nevada as a state in 1864 and approving new territories in the North: Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas.

In 1889 and 1890, Republicans solidified their power, admitting as states Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming, while splitting the Dakota Territory into two states. Territories with substantial populations that were perceived as less of a lock for the GOP — Arizona, New Mexico, Utah — had to wait.

“State admission was explicitly used as a partisan tool by Republicans who dominated Congress and wanted to maintain their position,” says Eric Biber, a Berkeley law professor. “Republicans pushed through a number of states to improve their position in the Senate and the Electoral College.”

The remainder of the continental US was admitted as states by the early 20th century — except DC. Long debate over the district’s unique constitutional status — and Southern opposition to enfranchising black voters — kept residents waiting. And admitting the 49th and 50th states required making a new deal to keep both parties on board.

Alaska stops being ignored, while some considered Hawaii a threat

When Trump floated the idea of buying Greenland this summer, part of his motivation was to secure a legacy akin to the one Dwight D. Eisenhower cemented with his admission of Alaska as a state, according to the Wall Street Journal. The problem with that idea — okay, one of the problems with that idea — is that Eisenhower never wanted to admit Alaska.

The Democratic Party started promoting the idea of statehood for Alaska and Hawaii as early as 1916. By the 1950s, polls showed overwhelming approval, leading the GOP to endorse statehood as part of the party’s 1952 platform.

Eisenhower, elected president as a Republican that year, wasn’t convinced. He worried that Alaska would be a “tin cup state,” forever dependent on the federal government for support. “The area was so vast, so uninhabited, so removed from the rest of the nation that it hardly seemed to warrant consideration in his view,” according to Eisenhower biographer Jim Newton.

Conservatives were worried that Hawaii would be dominated by the West Coast longshoreman’s union, which they viewed as Communist. (A loyalty oath for public officials was a condition of Hawaii’s enabling act.) Southern Democrats disapproved of the nonwhite population of the islands, worrying that Hawaii would send senators of Asian descent who would represent two more votes against filibuster rules that helped them kill civil rights legislation.

“If Hawaii had been settled and primarily populated by Americans from the mainland, there might be no great problem admitting it as a state,” Nebraska Republican Sen. Hugh Butler said at the time. “Unfortunately, that is not the case.” (More bluntly displaying his racist beliefs, Butler also said he didn’t want two lawmakers of Japanese descent in the Senate.)

Given overwhelming public support for admission, Eisenhower decided in the end that a promise was a promise. Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Senate Democratic leader, dropped his opposition to admitting Hawaii as part of his broader switch in favor of civil rights legislation.

Leaders in both parties came to believe it was a fair deal all around, largely because Alaska at that time was Democratic and Hawaii was Republican. “The expectation that Alaska would be a Democratic state forever — how foolish we all are when we make these projections,” says Gerald McBeath, an emeritus political scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Without something for the GOP, Puerto Rico and DC are left to wait

In recent decades, statehood has largely been a backburner issue. Most of the current territories are too small in population to generate serious consideration.

For DC and Puerto Rico, as has been the case with statehood arguments for 200 years now, the question remains what’s in it for the other side. And race remains a factor, if less overtly than in the past: During the 1960s, the chair of the House committee that controlled DC’s purse strings responded to a budget from the city’s first black mayor by sending a truck filled with watermelons. Amid the George Floyd protests this month, the current mayor, Bowser, unveiled a message for President Trump on the city’s streets: She renamed the plaza in front of the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and emblazoned a thoroughfare visible from the executive mansion with a massive, bright yellow mural reading “Black Lives Matter.”

Puerto Rico has held several referendums on statehood, with public opinion split. Statehood might help with the territory’s financial problems, while presumably making it harder to neglect in the wake of natural disasters (or for FEMA officials to commit fraud). Still, there are concerns that statehood would increase the tax bill for residents and corporations and make it harder to maintain Spanish as the dominant language.

In 2017, 97 percent of those participating in a Puerto Rico referendum favored statehood. Turnout was less than 25 percent, however, with the pro-territorial status quo Popular Democratic Party boycotting the vote.

In DC, opinion about statehood is less mixed. A statehood referendum in 2016 drew support from 78 percent of voters. Bowser sees the lack of representation as nothing less than the “denial of our fundamental rights as American citizens” of residents, a majority of whom are people of color, in the “capital of the free world.”

The main hurdle then, as now, is the fact that DC is overwhelmingly Democratic.

In March 2019, the House passed HR 1, a broad election reform bill that included an endorsement of DC statehood. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has called the package “a terrible proposal” that “will not get any floor time in the Senate.”

If the question of DC or Puerto Rican statehood were ever resolved politically in Congress, it would be a straightforward matter to admit them both, says Biber, the Berkeley law professor. For that to happen without sweeping Democratic majorities, however, something big has to be on the table for Republicans, and after all these years, it’s still not clear what that could be.

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Alan Greenblatt is a writer covering politics and policy issues. He has been a reporter for Governing, NPR, and CQ.

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Listen to Today, Explained

Residents in the District of Columbia have been living with “taxation without representation” from Day 1. In September 2019, they took their call for statehood to Congress.

Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.

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President Trump is fond of non-disclosure agreements. He's been this way for far longer than he's been president, but his insistence on foisting them on anyone who has worked for him has become problematic now that he's the ultimate public figure.

Some of these NDAs have been broken inadvertently during the course of dubious lawsuits filed by former Trump associates against journalists. In other cases, the DOJ itself has gotten involved, trying to invoke possibly non-existent agreements with the government to block publications by former Trump staffers.

Now, a former Trump campaign staffer is in court challenging the legality of the NDA she signed when managing phone banks for Trump before moving up to be his director of Hispanic engagement. She argues the NDAs serve no purpose but to block speech critical of her former employer. (Non-paywalled version here.)

In the complaint, Ms. Denson’s attorneys argue that the campaign’s nondisclosure agreement, which all staffers were required to sign, “is wildly broad, prohibiting a vast array of speech about a candidate for the highest office and the current President of the United States—forever. And the campaign has repeatedly invoked its prohibitions in an effort to chill truthful political speech it dislikes.”

As is the case with any agreement, people can voluntarily give up some of their rights (in this case, free speech) in exchange for employment. But there's more to it than simply preventing the release of any information Trump might want to remain secret. It also says everyone who signed one must continue to play nice in perpetuity.

[I]t contains a nondisparagement clause that prevents staffers from ever demeaning or disparaging the president, his family or his companies.

Denson is arguing this violates the state's contract law, as well as her free speech rights under both the New York constitution and under the First Amendment. And it will probably be greeted with a strong defense from the Trump campaign, given the fact that Denson has already sued the Trump campaign for allegedly subjecting her to sexual discrimination and slander. That lawsuit, filed in 2017, has led directly to this legal challenge of the NDA itself, which Trump lawyers say Denson violated when she filed her discrimination lawsuit.

NDAs may be common but they're never as necessary as those forcing them on employees think they are. Campaign staffers may have access to a lot of information candidates may not want to see released, but a lifelong gag isn't the only way to handle this. The Wall Street Journal reports the Biden campaign does not require staffers to sign NDAs, indicating it's possible to run a presidential campaign without swearing everyone to secrecy.

If this challenge is successful, it will be a nightmare for Trump and his campaign team. Very rarely has any former staffer or employee stepped forward with anything positive to say about the President. The criticism tends to flow faster now, given the turnover rate in the White House. Not every NDA is foisted on employees by bad employers, but a lot of them are. And when the employer ends up being the leader of the free world, it makes little sense for the man up top to continue to insist former employees can't have full access to their rights.

Coronavirus-related closures have limited access to public restrooms at the same time that anti-police brutality protests demanding justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others are bringing people out of their homes and into the streets. But as demonstrations continue this weekend, buildings around DC are opening their doors and offering access to water, outlets, […]