Billionaire Betsy DeVos was the target of Democratic senators, as her confirmation hearing as Secretary of the Department of Education got underway. Whether she will be a good secretary or not has yet to be seen, and isn’t the point. What is the point is that education in America has serious problems and that the “American Dream” of getting a college degree and being assured of a stable comfortable middle class future is no longer true.

Yet, the myth persists, much to the detriment of those who follow it, do everything right, end up with insurmountable debt, no decent job and no expectation of improvement.

The Democrats held the office for the past eight years. The problems have not been fixed. So Democratic senators went after DeVos.

When Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent, asked if she would support making public colleges and universities free, she called it “a really interesting idea” but was noncommittal.

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So glad Jessica Valenti decided to return to social media, as she never disappoints. With the Women’s March to counter the inauguration of Donald Trump coming, there was a chance that it would attract the broader identity group of feminists rather than the smaller group of people of whom Jessica Valenti approves.

Nope.

Some of you with less finely attuned senses of orthodoxy might think Valenti’s “definition” of inclusivity is, well, exclusive. But that’s only because you lack Valenti’s mad rhetorical spin skillz. And probably suffer from heterodox privilege anyway. Continue reading →

As Brazoria County Sheriff’s Deputy Aaron Kindred delightfully explained, “I ain’t getting up close and personal with your women areas.” Not that someone wasn’t about to, but Kindred was too much of a gentleman to conduct his own probe, as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals explained.

On Memorial Day weekend in 2012, Hamilton and Randle were pulled over by DPS Officer Turner for speeding. Turner smelled marijuana and asked the women to exit the vehicle. Hamilton was wearing a bikini bathing suit, and Randle was similarly dressed. Turner did not allow the women to cover themselves before exiting the vehicle. He used his radio to request help from local law enforcement and a female officer to conduct a search of the women. On the radio, Turner stated that the car smelled like marijuana and that one of the women “had the zipper open on her pants, or Daisy Duke shorts, whatever they are.”

It’s like they were asking for it. Not the “Daisy Dukes,” but the pungent odor of weed. After all, where there’s a smoke, there could be fire. Or pot, if they hadn’t already smoked it, which would explain the smell. But there could be some left, and the police would never forgive themselves if they didn’t find it.

Bui arrived, she parked next to Turner’s patrol car. When he had completed the vehicle search, Turner informed Bui and Kindred that he had finished the search but wanted Bui to search the women. Bui asked the men if they had any gloves, and Turner gave her the gloves he had used to search the vehicle.

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Reading Sari Horwitz’s post at The WaPo, my first concern was that Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates didn’t get hurt patting herself on the back.

“Everyone has killed themselves here to get the final recommendations to the president,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates said in an interview. “We were in overdrive. We were determined to live up to our commitment. It was 24-7 over the Christmas break.”

U.S. Pardon Attorney Robert A. Zauzmer has not taken a day off since Yates brought him on in February 2016 to sift through the backlog of thousands of petitions. From her home in Atlanta, Yates said she reviewed hundreds of petitions during the holidays.

How horrifying that she spent her holidays reviewing hundreds of petitions instead of drinking egg nog. Maybe she would have had time to go caroling if the DoJ hadn’t screwed the former Pardon Attorney, Deborah Leff, who quit in frustration as she was denied the ability to do her job. Continue reading →

Many remember Martin Luther King for the words that warm our hearts.

Many white Americans focused on one line of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — that he longed for the day when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” — and molded him into a gentle champion of colorblindness.

There was far more than that, even if you don’t realize it, and contrary to the glowing homages you will see today, he was the subject of vast criticism at the time.

The establishment responded bitterly to King’s speech. The New York Times editorial board blasted King for linking the war in Vietnam to the struggles of civil rights and poverty alleviation in the United States, saying it was “too facile a connection” and that he was doing a “disservice” to both causes. It concluded that there “are no simple answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country.” The Washington Post editorial board said King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people.” In all,168 newspapers denounced him the next day.

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John Lewis stood with Martin Luther King in the 1960s. He now sits in the House of Representatives as the Congressman from the 5th District of Georgia. On this Martin Luther King day, it is worthy to note that he is, without question, a civil rights leader deserving of a nation’s appreciation and respect.

But that doesn’t mean his every utterance is above reproach. John Lewis is an elected official, and every elected official should be subject to scrutiny and criticism. It does not diminish his accomplishments, which stand on their own. But his accomplishments do not make him immune from criticism. And criticism of an elected official can come from high or low. Even from another elected official, no matter how incomprehensible it may be, for which he too should be criticized.

The problem isn’t that he was criticized, but what he was criticized for and whether the criticism is sound.

Lewis, D-Ga., told moderator Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press in an interview set to air Sunday that he does not see Trump as a “legitimate president.” Continue reading →

He’s not doing what everyone always did, and that’s wrong. He’s not doing what everyone always did and that’s why he was elected. Change the name underlying the “he” in those sentences and pick which one you prefer. But the incoming administration is, if nothing else, defying the “norms” of the presidency. A random example:

Monday, January 9th

Family Matters, Part I: The Kushner Appointment. On Monday, Trump appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner as senior adviser in the White House, raising questions from ethics experts as to whether the role would violate federal anti-nepotism laws. Whether or not Kushner is ultimately cleared under law, Trump is challenging legal norms and democratic principles against nepotism, an appointment characteristic of the policies of dictatorship regimes writes Jon Schwartz.

The Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute, 5 U.S. Code § 3110, states that a public official may not appoint a relative to a position in the agency in which the official is serving. While the law establishes that the President is a public official and a son-in-law is included as a relative, the interpretation of “agency” as including the White House or the Executive Office of the President could be debated based on the reading of a circuit court case in 1993, reported Ailsa Chang at NPR in November.

Who does this? Well, aside from JFK appointing Bobby as Attorney General, and Bill appointing Hillary to head his health care task force.* Continue reading →

When my father bought a Volkswagen Beetle in 1967, my mother was furious. World War II was still fresh in people’s memory, and Americans, Jews, didn’t buy things made in Germany. We were supposed to hate them. The mantra was “Never Again,” and it was drilled into my head as a child.

But my father, who fought in the infantry in WWII, winning a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, told her the war was over. We won. It was time to move on. He wasn’t exactly ready to forgive the Germans for what happened, but he wasn’t going to let hatred guide his decisions forever.

Cubans who escaped Castro loved their island and hated his regime. America hated communism in general after World War II, and Castro was the communist in our backyard. It was completely unacceptable, and as the Cuban Missile Crisis taught us, the threat was real. We embraced Cubans who risked their lives to escape Castro unlike any other group of people.

Flotillas of Cubans braved death to escape, and our Coast Guard and regular people with boats saved them, brought them to our shores, where we took them in as refugees of a cruel communist dictator. Then the Mariel Boatlift happened in 1980, changing our perception. The Marielitos, we were told, weren’t just refugees, but Castro’s way of cleaning house, emptying his prisons and asylums and making them our problem. Continue reading →

On the one hand, a march is never a complete waste of time, as you get some exercise. On the other, it rarely does any more than create a spirit of camaraderie amongst the marchers, who often lock arms to show their solidarity and create great optics. We remember, and adore, marchers decades, even centuries later when their cause comes to fruition. We forget the marches that never went anywhere.

There will be a march on Washington soon, which has been denominated the Women’s March. The name may be something of an exaggeration.

Attending the “Women’s March on Washington” has not once crossed my mind. I could conjure up a multitude of reasons why, but will raise what I consider to be most significant: In this event black women are merely peripheral interlocutors for what are supposed to be women’s rights and human rights writ large. There is a long history of black women being overlooked by, excluded from and co-opted into events that profess to be for the benefit of all women but that at their core almost exclusively benefit middle class, straight, white women (á la All the Women Are White). Continue reading →

Lawyers are regularly put in the awkward position of explaining to a client why an idea that strikes the client as eminently reasonable won’t work. There’s no law, we say, to support such an argument. Every once in a while, we get smacked for sound advice: but what about qualified immunity for police, the client responds. And they’re right.

The doctrine of qualified immunity operates as an unwritten defense to civil rights lawsuits brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. It prevents plaintiffs from recovering damages for violations of their constitutional rights unless the government official violated “clearly established law,” usually requiring a specific precedent on point.

University of Chicago lawprof Will Baude argues that QI is unlawful. This comes at the same time the Supreme Court issued a per curiam opinion in White v. Pauly, which Greg Doucette contends is the Court’s way of telling us the QI exception has just swallowed the rule.

As every lawyer is taught in law school, each case is unique and “rises or falls on its own merits.”  Meaning, in practice, any trial or appellate judge even remotely inclined to protect bad police from the consequences of their bad decisions can easily distinguish any given case from all prior precedent sufficiently to avoid finding a “clearly established” right. Continue reading →