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yourreddancer · 8 months ago

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Heather Cox Richardson 11.15.24

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states.

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science.

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition.

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values.

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault.

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies.

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination.

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.”

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars.

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

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whencyclopedia · 1 month ago

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Dred Scott Decision: Worst Supreme Court Ruling in US History

The Dred Scott Decision (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857) was the infamous ruling of the United States Supreme Court that, according to the US Constitution, Black people were not and could not be considered citizens of the United States of America and, further, that "no slave or descendant of a slave had any 'rights which the white man was bound to respect'" (Delbanco, 331).

The decision, which was intended by the Supreme Court to put the issue of slavery in the United States to rest, only increased tensions between slave and free states, contributing to the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Today, it is regarded as the worst ruling in the history of the United States Supreme Court.

The case began as a simple freedom suit filed by the slave Dred Scott (circa 1799-1858) and his wife Harriet Scott (née Robinson, circa 1820-1876) against Irene Emerson, widow of Dr. John Emerson (their owners) arguing that, since Dr. Emerson had taken the Scotts (and their two daughters) into free states, where they had taken up residence, they were free. The suit was filed in April 1846 and dragged on for eleven years until it was heard by the US Supreme Court, which ruled 7-2 that the Scotts could not sue for their freedom because they were not citizens of the United States and were, therefore, not entitled to the rights and protections of US citizens.

The Scotts were soon after purchased and freed by one Taylor Blow, son of the man who had owned Dred Scott before Emerson. Dred Scott lived as a free man with his wife and children for over a year before dying of tuberculosis in November 1858.

Political Background

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 expanded the United States by 828,000 square miles (2,144,510 km²), nearly doubling its territory westward. Disputes arose almost immediately over the slavery issue in these new territories and whether they would eventually be admitted to the Union as free or slave states. Northern free states wanted to limit the spread of slavery westward, while Southern slave states opposed this policy.

In 1787, Congress had passed the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited the spread of slavery into the Northwest Territory, but, after the Louisiana Purchase, White settlers began traveling to this region to settle, and many of them brought their slaves. In 1812, Louisiana joined the Union as a slave state, and by 1819, there were enough settlers in the Missouri Territory to qualify it for admittance to statehood. If Missouri were admitted as a slave state, however, it would upset the present balance of power in government between free and slave states.

This problem was addressed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state while prohibiting slavery north of the parallel 36°30′. Any slave brought into "free state territory" could claim their freedom since, legally, slavery did not exist there.

⇒ Dred Scott Decision: Worst Supreme Court Ruling in US History

#History #DredScottDecision #Slavery #USHistory #WHE

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 18 days ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 27, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jun 28, 2025

After the Supreme Court today decided the case of Trump v. CASA, limiting the power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions, President Donald Trump claimed the decision was a huge victory that would permit him to end birthright citizenship, that is, the principle that anyone born in the United States, with very limited exceptions, is a U.S. citizen. To reporters, he claimed: “If you look at the end of the Civil War—the 1800s, it was a very turbulent time. If you take the end day—was it 1869? Or whatever. But you take that exact day, that’s when the case was filed. And the case ended shortly thereafter. This had to do with the babies of slaves, very obviously.”

This is a great example of a politician rooting a current policy in a made-up history. There is nothing in Trump’s statement that is true, except perhaps that the 1800s were a turbulent time. Every era is.

The Fourteenth Amendment that established birthright citizenship came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their Black neighbors basic rights. To try to remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866 establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”

But President Andrew Johnson, who was a southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans, faced discriminatory state laws.

In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”

When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when 11 southern states were not represented in Congress.

When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.

But the question of whether the amendment recognized birthright citizenship for all immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where white settlers were not terribly concerned about Black Americans—there were only 4,272 Black Americans in California in 1870, while there were almost half a million white Americans—but wanted no part of allowing Chinese men to be part of American society.

Western state legislatures continued to discriminate against Asian immigrants by falling back on the country’s early naturalization laws, finalized in 1802, to exclude first Chinese immigrants and then others from citizenship. Those laws were carefully designed to clarify that Afro-Caribbeans and Africans—imported to be enslaved—would not have the same rights as Euro-Americans. Those laws permitted only “free white persons” to become citizens.

In the late nineteenth century, state and territorial legal systems kept people of color at the margins, using treaties, military actions, and territorial and state laws that limited land ownership, suffrage, and intermarriage.

As late as 1922, in the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.” The court decided that “white person” meant “persons of the Caucasian Race.” “A Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States,” it said.

The next year, the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind upheld the argument that only “free white persons” could become citizens. In that case, the court said that Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not a “white person” under U.S. law, and only “free white persons” could become citizens. After the Thind decision, the United States stripped the citizenship of about 50 South Asian Americans who had already become American citizens.

Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.

But despite the longstanding use of laws designed to perpetuate human enslavement to prevent certain immigrants from becoming citizens, the Supreme Court always upheld the citizenship of their children. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens.

Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.

Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.

Immigration scholar Hidetaka Hirota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889 the Treasury Department—which then oversaw immigration—decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child.

The Treasury concluded that it was not “the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.”

In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.”

It is actually a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law that the Civil War ended in 1869, that birthright citizenship came out of a case filed on that exact day, and that the “case” was “very obviously” about “the babies of slaves.” But there were indeed echoes of the past in the administration’s position on immigration today. The administration's announcement that it is terminating Temporary Protected Status for half a million Haitians, stripping them of their legal status, seems to echo the ancient laws saying only “free white persons” can become citizens.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Trump v. CASA #SCOTUS #Letters From An American #Heather CoX RIchardson #the judiciary #American History #the civil war #slavery #the Fourteenth Amendment #legal history #history

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misfitwashere · 18 days ago

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June 27, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 28

READ IN APP

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#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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justinspoliticalcorner · 2 days ago

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Tom Wait and Matthew Rodriguez at CBS News:

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily halt immigration raids in Los Angeles and several other counties in California, after ruling in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union's civil rights lawsuit. "As required by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, Defendants shall be enjoined from conducting detentive stops in this District unless the agent or officer has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law," U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong wrote in her ruling. The judge determined that federal agents cannot "rely solely" on certain factors when considering whether to make a "detentive stop," including the "apparent race or ethnicity" of the person in question, whether they are "speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent," and their "presence at a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.)." In the legal filing, the ACLU and immigrant rights groups claimed that federal agents are violating the Constitution by arresting people solely based on skin color, performing raids without warrants and denying legal counsel to detainees. "No matter the color of their skin, what language they speak, or where they work, everyone is guaranteed constitutional rights to protect them from unlawful stops," ACLU attorney Mohammad Tajsar said.

[...] U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli wrote in a post to X after Frimpong's ruling on Friday that "federal agents will continue to enforce the law and abide by the U.S. Constitution." "We strongly disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit and maintain that our agents have never detained individuals without proper legal justification," Essayli wrote. "Our federal agents will continue to enforce the law and abide by the U.S. Constitution." In a statement in response to the ruling, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, "Justice prevailed today - the court's decision puts a temporary stop to federal immigration officials violating people's rights and racial profiling."

On Friday, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a ruling in the Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem case ordering the Trump Regime to temporarily cease the immigration raids predicated by anti-Hispanic/anti-Latino prejudice in Southern California.

See Also:

NBC News: Immigration officials can't stop people in L.A. based on their race or spoken language, judge rules

#ICE Raids #Los Angeles ICE Raids #Los Angeles ICE Protests #ICE Protests #ICE #ACLU #Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem #Maame Ewusi Mensah Frimpong #Gavin Newsom #Bill Essayli

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sidewalkstamps · 11 months ago

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L. Glenn Switzer Contractor 1930 (Photo taken April 29, 2024 on Glenalbyn Dr. & Glenmuir Ave.)

According to the Los Angeles Times, L. Glenn Switzer died at the age of 96 on July 11, 1990, so he was born in either 1894 or 1893. He started "the first ready-mix concrete company in Southern California" in Pasadena in 1930. The company, Transit Mixed Concrete Co., worked "at construction sites throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties," in addition to manufacturing concrete blocks and panels. He was a Quaker and was "president of the national Conference of Quaker Men" in 1954" ("L. Glenn Switzer; Formed Ready-Mix Concrete Firm." Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1990.

In 1941, L. Glenn Switzer was the manager of Transit Mixed Concrete Co. They had multiple locations including 1000 North La Brea in Los Angeles, 3492 E Foothill Blvd. in Pasadena, and 780 Union Pacific Place, which doesn't currently exist but I think may be in Commerce, CA (Los Angeles City Directory 1941, Los Angeles City Directory Co., 1941).

In an advertisement in 1945, Transit Mixed Concrete Co described themselves as "Pioneers of Transit-Mixed Concrete in Southern California" (Southwest Builder and Contractor, Volume 106, F. W. Dodge Company, 1945).

According to Switzer v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, United States Tax Court, June 30, 1953, 20 T.C. 759 (U.S.T.C. 1953), L. Glenn Switzer and Howard A. Switzer were partners in the company in 1944-45. Their respective wives were Ida H. and Florence M. Apparently they didn't commit fraud with intent to evade tax, but the husbands were deficient due to negligence.

We learn from Find a Grave that L. was Lewis. He was born in Iowa in on June 26, 1894 and died in L.A. County on July 11, 1990. He is buried in Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, CA. His wife, Ida, was born in Iowa and they married on December 29, 1915 in Marshall, Iowa. They had at least two sons (Elmo Glenn, Eugene Lewis) and one daughter (Mayme Elizabeth). She lived in Pasadena in the 1940 and 1950 censuses. She died on October 18, 1987 and was also buried in Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, CA.

Howard Allison Switzer was Lewis's brother (they also had four other siblings: Elias Claire, Gladys Lucile, Richard Kent, and Florence Eliza) and co-founder. He was born on July 30 or 31, 1908 in Ladora, Iowa and died on January 7, 1997 in Los Angeles, CA. He is also buried at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, CA (Find a Grave). Their parents were Richard Martin Switzer and Carrie Estella Lewis. (The photo above is Howard in the 1920s, probably in Long Beach, CA, and was submitted to Find a Grave by 'jmb'.) According to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times, he had moved to Long Beach, CA in 1920 with his parents and sister. "He joined his father and older brother in their concrete contracting company after graduating from Long Beach High School." This company was a predecessor to Transit Mix Concrete Company, which, according to the same obituary, was "credited with using the first concrete mixer trucks, which prepare the concrete to be poured once it gets to the job site" (January 9, 1997). Howard moved to Pasadena in 1932 and married Florence.

She lived to 105 and had lived her whole life in Pasadena, CA! They had four sons: Forrest, Roy, Marshall, and Norman. She was "known as Flossie to most of her friends." ("Florence Switzer Obituary," Pasadena Star-News).

Other sources:

The Tax Fortnighter Annual, Fallon Publications, 1954

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brookstonalmanac · 1 year ago

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Events 7.26 (before 1940)

657 – First Fitna: In the Battle of Siffin, troops led by Ali ibn Abu Talib clash with those led by Muawiyah I. 811 – Battle of Pliska: Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros I is killed and his heir Staurakios is seriously wounded. 920 – Rout of an alliance of Christian troops from Navarre and Léon against the Muslims at the Battle of Valdejunquera. 1309 – The Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII is recognized King of the Romans by Pope Clement V. 1509 – The Emperor Krishnadevaraya ascends to the throne, marking the beginning of the regeneration of the Vijayanagara Empire. 1529 – Francisco Pizarro González, Spanish conquistador, is appointed governor of Peru. 1579 – Francis Drake, the English explorer, discovers a "fair and good" bay on the coast of the Pacific Northwest (probably Oregon or Washington). 1581 – Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (Act of Abjuration): The northern Low Countries declare their independence from the Spanish king, Philip II. 1703 – During the Bavarian Rummel the rural population of Tyrol drove the Bavarian Prince-Elector Maximilian II Emanuel out of North Tyrol with a victory at the Pontlatzer Bridge and thus prevented the Bavarian Army, which was allied with France, from marching as planned on Vienna during the War of the Spanish Succession. 1745 – The first recorded women's cricket match takes place near Guildford, England. 1758 – French and Indian War: The Siege of Louisbourg ends with British forces defeating the French and taking control of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. 1775 – The office that would later become the United States Post Office Department is established by the Second Continental Congress. Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania takes office as Postmaster General. 1778 �� The Emigration of Christians from the Crimea in 1778 begins. 1788 – New York ratifies the United States Constitution and becomes the 11th state of the United States. 1803 – The Surrey Iron Railway, arguably the world's first public railway, opens in south London, United Kingdom. 1814 – The Swedish–Norwegian War begins. 1822 – José de San Martín arrives in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to meet with Simón Bolívar. 1822 – First day of the three-day Battle of Dervenakia, between the Ottoman Empire force led by Mahmud Dramali Pasha and the Greek Revolutionary force led by Theodoros Kolokotronis. 1847 – Liberia declares its independence from the United States. France and the United Kingdom are the first to recognize the new nation. 1861 – American Civil War: George B. McClellan assumes command of the Army of the Potomac following a disastrous Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run. 1863 – American Civil War: Morgan's Raid ends; At Salineville, Ohio, Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan and 360 of his volunteers are captured by Union forces. 1882 – Premiere of Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal at Bayreuth. 1882 – The Republic of Stellaland is founded in Southern Africa. 1887 – Publication of the Unua Libro, founding the Esperanto movement. 1890 – In Buenos Aires, Argentina the Revolución del Parque takes place, forcing President Miguel Ángel Juárez Celman's resignation. 1891 – France annexes Tahiti. 1892 – Dadabhai Naoroji is elected as the first Indian Member of Parliament in Britain. 1899 – Ulises Heureaux, the 27th President of the Dominican Republic, is assassinated. 1908 – United States Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte issues an order to immediately staff the Office of the Chief Examiner (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation). 1918 – Emmy Noether's paper, which became known as Noether's theorem was presented at Göttingen, Germany, from which conservation laws are deduced for symmetries of angular momentum, linear momentum, and energy. 1936 – Spanish Civil War: Germany and Italy decide to intervene in the war in support for Francisco Franco and the Nationalist faction. 1937 – Spanish Civil War: End of the Battle of Brunete with the Nationalist victory.

#Events

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minosbull · 18 days ago

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Notes:

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860

Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction (Washington: Solomons & Chapman, 1875), pp. 75, 78, at https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Political_History_of_the_United_Stat/x7HmnHL1OvQC

https://werehistory.org/immigrant-parents/

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3lslzwd3nc22q

reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lsm3vbj6uk2d

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 5 months ago

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The NY Times

By Matthew Mpoke Bigg

Feb. 19, 2025

In comments that stunned America’s allies in Europe and angered Ukraine’s government, President Trump on Tuesday appeared to blame Ukraine’s leaders for Russia’s invasion.

He also suggested that they do not deserve a seat at the table for the peace talks that he has initiated with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukraine’s leaders. “You could have made a deal.” He followed up on Wednesday in a post on social media, calling Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections" and saying he had “done a terrible job” in office.

Here’s a look at how the war began, the state of the peace talks and Ukraine’s election record.

What caused the war in Ukraine?

There is no doubt that Russia started the war by invading Ukraine. Russian troops stormed over the border almost exactly three years ago, with the explicit aim of toppling the pro-Western government of Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv, the capital. Russia’s military attacked from the east and north, including from Belarus, as well as from the Russian-occupied southern province of Crimea. That attack started the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II.

Leaders around the world, including former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., denounced Russia’s invasion as an act of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state, and the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Russia’s immediate withdrawal. Since then, Russian firepower has leveled whole cities and killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have also been killed and wounded, and Russian soldiers have committed a series of atrocities, not least in the city of Bucha, north of Kyiv. The Kremlin has said its soldiers do not commit war crimes.

The International Criminal Court has also accused Mr. Putin of war crimes in Ukraine and issued a warrant for his arrest, along with another senior Russian official. Last year it also issued warrants for the arrest of two Russian commanders.

Mr. Putin and the Kremlin have referred to the invasion as a “special military operation,” avoiding the term “war,” and he has said he sought to demilitarize but not occupy Ukraine. He put forward several explanations for the move, saying that in part he was acting to protect civilians in Ukraine’s east.

He also characterized the invasion as a last-ditch effort to thwart what he called the West’s expansion toward Russia’s borders. The enlargement of the NATO military alliance to incorporate countries in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War, he claimed, was effectively a plot to destroy Russia.

And Mr. Putin said that Russia, and specifically the Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, created modern Ukraine, a position historians deride as false. Ukrainians voted in 1991 in a democratic referendum to leave the Soviet Union. Mr. Putin also said that the invasion aimed to demilitarize Ukraine and combat “Nazis,” an apparent reference to far-right parties and elements of the Ukrainian Army. Far-right parties won about 2 percent of the vote in the country’s 2019 election. Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, signed a law several months before the invasion combating antisemitism.

In a speech on the war’s first day, Mr. Zelensky vowed that his country would resist Russian aggression and framed Moscow’s invasion as an attack on freedom itself. “Putin began a war against Ukraine, and against the entire democratic world,” he said. Since then, Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly said that Ukraine stood as Europe’s first line of defense against Russian encroachment.

Before the full-scale invasion, Russia seized the Ukrainian province of Crimea, which it annexed illegally in 2014, and also took territory in the eastern Donbas region, including the provincial capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk.

What is happening on the battlefield?

In all, Russia now occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine, but so far it has failed in its key objectives of breaking Ukraine’s military and securing Kyiv. The fighting is largely confined to a front line in the east and south of the country, with Russian forces creeping forward amid heavy losses.

Last August, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Russian region of Kursk, where Russian forces assisted by soldiers from North Korea have been fighting back.

Military experts say that in the immediate term, Ukraine has little chance of recapturing its lost territory, particularly if the United States slows or stops the flow of military aid.

What has happened in the peace talks so far?

Representatives of Ukraine and Russia held talks in the weeks after the start of the war in 2022 but failed to reach a cease-fire agreement. Since then, Ukraine has tried to gain international support for its own 10-point Peace Formula, which demands a full withdrawal of Russian forces, the prosecution of war crimes and the payment of reparations.

The prospect of peace talks, however, has gathered pace since President Trump’s inauguration last month. Mr. Trump held a lengthy call with Mr. Putin last week, which blindsided Ukraine’s government and allies in Europe and suggested that the two men intended to negotiate Ukraine’s fate directly without their involvement, a priority for the Kremlin.

In a major change from former President Biden’s policy that Ukraine would decide whether to make concessions in exchange for peace, the U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said that it was unrealistic for Ukraine to regain the territory it held before Russia’s 2014 invasion, and that Mr. Trump did not support Ukraine’s entry into NATO. In a further blow to Ukraine, Mr. Hegseth said that after a peace deal, the responsibility for guaranteeing the country’s security would fall mainly on European countries rather than on NATO.

At a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, agreed to reset their countries’ relationship and to work on a peace plan for Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky, who was not invited to the meeting, sharply criticized it and said his country would “never” accept a peace deal if Ukraine did not have a seat at the negotiating table.

Why haven’t elections been held in Ukraine?

The Kremlin has called Mr. Zelensky an illegitimate leader because his five-year term has elapsed. Elections in Ukraine were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion, with frontline towns and cities governed solely by military administrations.

Mr. Trump also appeared to cast doubt on Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy as president on Tuesday, and appeared to use that doubt to justify not inviting the Ukrainian leader to peace talks. “I would say that when they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to — wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say, like, you know, it’s been a long time since we had an election?” Mr. Trump said. “That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.”

Mr. Trump also said Mr. Zelensky was “down at 4 percent in approval rating.” Although Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen from once-lofty heights, it is at around 50 percent in recent polls, not too far from Mr. Trump’s rating.

Mr. Zelensky became president after winning an election in 2019 by a landslide. A fresh election was due in 2024, but under the country’s constitution, it cannot be held while martial law is in force. Holding an election would also be a logistical nightmare, as Russian missiles rain down on the country and fighting rages.

Election experts say that any vote held during wartime would effectively disenfranchise citizens living in Russian-occupied areas, those who have fled the country as refugees and soldiers in combat.

However, internal political tensions over the use of martial law have been rising, and the mayor of Kyiv is among the officials who have accused the president’s office of abusing its powers. At the same time, Ukraine’s leaders have been under pressure from their allies over the issue, not least as part of wider efforts to demonstrate good governance.

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yourreddancer · 6 days ago

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Heather Cox Richardson

July 9, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 10

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

Kennedy’s comments foreshadowed the world advanced by today’s MAGA Republicans. In 2022 the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with right-wing justices, overturned the federal protection of abortion rights provided in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and sent the question of abortion back to the states, many of which promptly banned the procedure.

When the court overturned the federal protection of abortion rights, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that federal protections for access to birth control and same-sex marriage should also be reexamined. In 2024, President Donald Trump suggested he would be open to letting states decide whether to restrict access to birth control, walking his statement back after a ferocious backlash.

Justice Samuel Alito has joined Thomas in attacking the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that provides federal protection for same-sex marriage, claiming that right, too, ought to be left up to voters in the states, even as Republican-dominated states are passing laws to limit who can vote.

Not only have today’s Republicans launched an attack on the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that the federal government protect Americans against discrimination in the states, President Donald Trump has launched an assault on the birthright citizenship that is the centerpiece of the amendment.

That section of the amendment— the first section— acknowledges that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens,” who enjoy the same rights, and that no state can take those rights away without due process of law.

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thellawtoknow · 6 months ago

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The Fourteenth Amendment and the Ideals of Equality, Justice, and the Protection of Fundamental Rights

The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution Historical Context Structure and Provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment Section 1: Citizenship and Equal ProtectionCitizenship Clause Due Process Clause Equal Protection Clause Section 2: Representation and Voting Rights Section 3: Disqualification from Office Section 4: Public Debt Section 5: Enforcement Impact and Interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment: Expanding the Boundaries of Justice Civil Rights and Desegregation The Incorporation Doctrine Marriage Equality and Gender Rights Immigration and Citizenship Modern Implications and Continuing Evolution Challenges and Controversies Conclusion The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on July 9, 1868, stands as one of the most significant and transformative amendments in American history. Emerging in the aftermath of the Civil War, it was crafted as a response to the deep divisions and systemic injustices that had plagued the nation, particularly the institution of slavery and the inequalities it perpetuated. The amendment is notable for its breadth, addressing citizenship, equal protection under the law, due process, and the relationship between the federal government and the states. Its provisions have profoundly shaped American society, law, and governance, ensuring the protection of individual rights while reinforcing the principles of democracy and equality.

Historical Context The Fourteenth Amendment was introduced during the Reconstruction Era, a turbulent period following the Civil War when the nation sought to reconcile its divisions and address the status of formerly enslaved individuals. The Civil War had ended slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment, but questions remained about the rights of freedmen and the obligations of the states in ensuring those rights. The Southern states, through mechanisms like Black Codes, sought to maintain racial hierarchies, effectively undermining the freedoms granted to African Americans. Congressional Republicans, seeking to secure the gains of emancipation and protect civil rights against state encroachments, drafted the Fourteenth Amendment as part of a broader Reconstruction strategy. Its ratification became a condition for the Southern states’ reintegration into the Union. Structure and Provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment The Fourteenth Amendment is a cornerstone of constitutional governance in the United States. Its structure, divided into five sections, systematically addresses critical issues arising from the Civil War and Reconstruction while laying the groundwork for future advancements in civil rights and federal-state relations. Each section serves a distinct purpose, reflecting the evolving understanding of citizenship, governance, and justice. Section 1: Citizenship and Equal Protection Citizenship Clause The Citizenship Clause asserts that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." This clause was revolutionary, overturning the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, which had denied citizenship to African Americans. It established birthright citizenship as a foundational principle, ensuring that the newly freed African Americans and their descendants would be recognized as full citizens. Due Process Clause The Due Process Clause prohibits states from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." While the Fifth Amendment provides similar protections against federal actions, the Fourteenth Amendment extends these protections to state actions. The clause has been instrumental in safeguarding individual rights, as it has evolved to encompass both procedural and substantive due process: - Procedural Due Process: Requires that legal proceedings affecting an individual's rights must be fair, including proper notice and an impartial tribunal. - Substantive Due Process: Protects fundamental rights from government interference, even if procedural safeguards are followed. This has been applied in cases involving privacy, family rights, and bodily autonomy. Equal Protection Clause The Equal Protection Clause mandates that no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." It establishes the principle that laws and policies must be applied fairly and without discrimination. This clause became the foundation for numerous civil rights advancements, including: - Racial Equality: Landmark cases like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) used the Equal Protection Clause to dismantle racial segregation. - Gender Equality: Cases such as Reed v. Reed (1971) extended the clause to prohibit gender discrimination. - Marriage Equality: The clause also served as the basis for decisions like Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which legalized same-sex marriage. Section 2: Representation and Voting Rights This section addresses representation in Congress and penalizes states that deny voting rights to male citizens aged 21 or older. At the time, voting rights were restricted to men, and the provision reflects the societal norms of the 19th century. It aimed to incentivize states to extend suffrage by reducing their representation in Congress if they unjustly excluded eligible voters. While this section had limited enforcement during Reconstruction, it laid the groundwork for later expansions of voting rights, such as the Fifteenth Amendment (granting African American men the right to vote) and the Nineteenth Amendment (granting women suffrage). Section 3: Disqualification from Office This section was specifically designed to address the post-Civil War political landscape. It disqualified individuals who had engaged in rebellion or given aid to enemies of the United States from holding public office unless Congress lifted the disqualification by a two-thirds vote. This provision sought to prevent former Confederates from regaining political power and undermining Reconstruction efforts. While its enforcement diminished over time, Section 3 has resurfaced in contemporary debates, such as discussions about its applicability to individuals accused of participating in insurrection or sedition. Section 4: Public Debt The Public Debt Clause affirms the legitimacy of debts incurred by the Union during the Civil War while explicitly repudiating debts incurred by the Confederacy. It also forbids compensation claims for the emancipation of enslaved individuals. This section served multiple purposes: - Reassuring creditors that Union debts would be honored, thus maintaining economic stability. - Preventing any legal or political support for the Confederate cause by invalidating its financial obligations. The clause has continued relevance in modern fiscal policy, as it has been cited in discussions about the federal debt ceiling and the obligation of the government to honor its debts. Section 5: Enforcement The final section grants Congress the power to enforce the provisions of the amendment through appropriate legislation. This provision underscores the federal government’s role in ensuring that states comply with the amendment’s mandates. Over time, Congress has utilized this power to pass key legislation, including: - The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Addressing discrimination in public accommodations and employment. - The Voting Rights Act of 1965: Protecting against racial discrimination in voting. - The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990: Ensuring equal opportunities for individuals with disabilities. This section empowers Congress to adapt the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment to contemporary challenges, reinforcing its enduring significance. The structural design of the Fourteenth Amendment reflects its multifaceted purpose: to establish the principles of equality, safeguard individual rights, and define the balance of power between the federal and state governments. Each section addresses a specific challenge of its time while allowing for interpretations and applications that continue to shape American law and society. Its enduring relevance underscores its role as a cornerstone of constitutional democracy, ensuring justice and equality for future generations. Impact and Interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment: Expanding the Boundaries of Justice The Fourteenth Amendment has profoundly shaped the trajectory of American law and society, standing as a pillar of civil rights and justice. Its broad and forward-looking language has allowed it to evolve alongside the nation, addressing emerging societal challenges and embodying the principles of equality and liberty. Over time, it has been central to landmark Supreme Court rulings, social movements, and debates on the balance of power between states and the federal government. Civil Rights and Desegregation The Equal Protection Clause became a key instrument in dismantling institutionalized racial discrimination, most notably through the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Supreme Court, in this decision, declared that racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause. This ruling overturned the precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had upheld the doctrine of "separate but equal." Brown v. Board of Education not only marked a turning point in the civil rights movement but also solidified the role of the federal judiciary in addressing state-sanctioned inequalities. It paved the way for subsequent civil rights legislation and decisions that targeted systemic racism in areas such as voting, employment, and public accommodations. The Fourteenth Amendment thus became a foundation for combating racial injustice, inspiring movements and court battles that reshaped the social and legal fabric of the United States. The Incorporation Doctrine One of the most significant interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment is the incorporation doctrine, through which the Supreme Court has applied the Bill of Rights to the states. Initially, the Bill of Rights was understood to limit only the federal government. However, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment extended these protections to state actions, ensuring that fundamental freedoms were uniformly upheld across the nation. Key cases demonstrating incorporation include: - Gitlow v. New York (1925): Recognized the protection of free speech under the First Amendment as applicable to the states. - Mapp v. Ohio (1961): Applied the Fourth Amendment's protection against unlawful searches and seizures to the states. - Gideon v. Wainwright (1963): Guaranteed the right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment in state courts. By applying the Bill of Rights to the states, the Fourteenth Amendment strengthened individual liberties and ensured that states could not infringe upon fundamental constitutional rights. Marriage Equality and Gender Rights The Fourteenth Amendment has been instrumental in advancing equality in matters of marriage and gender. Two landmark cases illustrate its impact: - Loving v. Virginia (1967): Struck down laws banning interracial marriage, citing the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. This decision affirmed the principle that marriage is a fundamental right, irrespective of racial distinctions. - Obergefell v. Hodges (2015): Recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court emphasized that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violated the principles of liberty and equality. In addition to marriage equality, the Equal Protection Clause has been used to combat gender-based discrimination. Cases like Reed v. Reed (1971) and United States v. Virginia (1996) invalidated laws and practices that treated men and women unequally. These rulings underscored the amendment’s adaptability in addressing evolving understandings of equality. Immigration and Citizenship The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has had a profound impact on immigration and nationality law. By establishing birthright citizenship, it affirmed that all individuals born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, are U.S. citizens. This principle has been central to debates over immigration policy and the rights of immigrants’ children. The Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) affirmed that children born in the United States to non-citizen parents are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision reinforced the universality of the Citizenship Clause and has been a cornerstone in defending birthright citizenship against modern challenges. In addition, the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses have been invoked to protect the rights of non-citizens within the United States. These provisions ensure that immigrants, regardless of their legal status, are entitled to basic protections under the law, such as fair treatment in judicial proceedings and access to public education (e.g., Plyler v. Doe, 1982). Modern Implications and Continuing Evolution The Fourteenth Amendment remains a living document, adapting to address contemporary challenges in civil rights and equality. Recent debates over issues such as affirmative action, voting rights, reproductive freedoms, and LGBTQ+ protections continue to draw on its provisions. For example: - Affirmative action cases like Fisher v. University of Texas (2016) explore how the Equal Protection Clause balances efforts to address historical injustices with the principle of individual equality. - Challenges to voting rights, including disputes over voter suppression laws, highlight the amendment’s role in safeguarding democratic participation. - The Due Process Clause is frequently cited in cases involving bodily autonomy and reproductive rights, as seen in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and subsequent challenges. The enduring impact of the Fourteenth Amendment lies in its broad and aspirational language, which allows it to serve as a foundation for addressing inequalities and protecting fundamental rights in an ever-changing society. The Fourteenth Amendment’s influence on American law and society cannot be overstated. Its clauses have empowered individuals, constrained discriminatory practices, and clarified the relationship between the federal government and the states. As the nation continues to grapple with issues of equality, justice, and governance, the Fourteenth Amendment remains a guiding light, ensuring that the principles of liberty and equality endure as the bedrock of the American legal system. Its ability to adapt to new challenges reflects the enduring strength of the Constitution itself. Challenges and Controversies Despite its transformative power, the Fourteenth Amendment has not been without controversy. Critics have often debated the scope of federal authority it grants, viewing it as a challenge to states’ rights. Additionally, its broad language has led to differing interpretations, with some arguing that judicial activism has expanded its intent beyond what the framers envisioned. The amendment also continues to be a focal point in modern debates over issues like affirmative action, reproductive rights, and immigration policy. These controversies underscore the enduring relevance of the Fourteenth Amendment in shaping the legal and social fabric of the United States. Conclusion The Fourteenth Amendment embodies the ideals of equality, justice, and the protection of fundamental rights. It transformed the Constitution, ensuring that the principles of liberty and democracy apply to all individuals, regardless of race or status. Its provisions have served as a beacon for marginalized communities and a foundation for progressive change. As society evolves, the Fourteenth Amendment remains a critical tool for addressing new challenges and upholding the promise of a more perfect union. Read the full article

#citizenship #dueprocess #equalprotection #TheFourteenthAmendment #USconstitutionallaw

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 6 days ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 9, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 10, 2025

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#quotes #Alexis de Tocqueville #government #totalitarianism #authoritarianism #Letters From an American #Heather Cox Richardson #The American Civil War #reconstruction #the 14th amendment #the US. Constitution #American History

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misfitwashere · 6 days ago

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July 9, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 10

READ IN APP

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

—

#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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hydralisk98 · 6 months ago

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Black Bear Motherland (thread-mainline 16^12, article 0x2F)

Bear with me on this. (Sorry, I could not resist sharing that pun at least once.)

Speak black onto the factory grounds, unionize under a single banner and fight back against the unforgivable greed we keep witnessing. [about the Sunsway trail of greedy non-sense]

In the long trek trail (vision quest) of a transfeminine historian (Kate) for self-discovery, mutual empowerment & overall systemic abundance, she becomes the very thing she aspires to as she pushes the world forth, trial after trial with grand success? Accompanied by her insightful, moralist ally & best partner (Ava) under the (black?) sun, they shall show us the way towards the future we definitely deserve.

Poetic code snippets for "Blackhand Servitor" meta-narrative := Steel Bank Common Lisp, OpenDylan, ObjectREXX, FreePascal, DEC Alpha assembly, RISC-V assembly, LibertyEiffel, Squeak Smalltalk, A2 Bluebottle Oberon, Fortran, COBOL, FreeBASIC, GDScript, OpenXanadu, COS-310, Typex, RTTY, Videotex, Minitel, ZealC, 9Front (Plan9IO), OpenGOAL, Tcl/Tk, Haiku, Nim, Hg (Mercurial), OpenPOWER LinuxOne Hypervisor, Hypertalk, Swift?

"Western Blacksands" regional socioeconomics

[Detail Blackfoot/Shoshoni diplomacy, recent regional history, geological features, SC4/TS2 small neighborhoods and regional natural wonders]

Going as far as the relatively recent centuries of Angora are concerned (due to 4525 TE being equivalent to 2025 AD), I won't be covering the 4095-4300 gap much just yet (but it shall come eventually). So, around the middle of the 44th century Turtle Epoch (well into their second industrial period), a coalition of southern Blackfoot states in the bay of Blacksands formed to defend against Shoshone expansionism (prompted by Iranian-Blackfoot lords), prompting the Shoshoni Union to conquer those territories under new integrated provinces by means of guerilla trenches & cavalry warfare (mostly by Shoshoni Comanche Rider bands, fought likewise to a mixture of the Mexican-Americana War & New Zealand Wars), and while the Blackfoot local authorities had to flee northward, the fortifications & Blackfoot culture populations remained prosperous in the region ever since, with the occasional tributes to Shoshoni federal governance.

Fast forward to the contemporary period, the demographics suggest modest resistance from local southern Blackfoot tribes as more Shoshones & other peoples move into the area as pioneers and migrants from all over the globe.

Forests, mesas, river valleys and plains?

Pinegroove Commune

[Mention key landmarks, districts & transport infrastructure]

Windmill Farmlands, Pier, Syndicated Manufacture Site of Servitor Grid Automaton Units, Industrial, Pohakantenna holy sites in the natural preserve park of Old Pinegroove, Nitta Mall, National Archives, Turtle Hall, Summerbreeze, Little-Bear, Great-Bear, Blacksands, Sharkwell Havens / Sanctuaries, Rustbane Highway, Cafe, Monastery, Research Center Facility, Elk Seers High Academia Sector, spatial observatory, internationale syndicate complex, Communal Residential Blocks, skate-park & community centers, Historical Museums (going back into the early bronze age), Public Agora/Forum, Market Plaza, Pinewoods Manor & its Woodmill, Prospero Federal Library, Blackhand Senate, bastion + additional fortifications, Pflaumen headquarters, Utalics data banks, video rental shops, GLOSS Initiative communal space (open table cybercafe but libreware), nuclear energy powerplant, coastal broadwalk, cityscape center billboards...

Roads, highways, subway network, tramways, railways, suspended monorails... (to be planned properly for SC4/TS2, Cities Skylines 1 & QGIS+OSM+FoundryVTT/Leaflet?)

"Battlemap"-level sites & floorplan locations

[Write, draw / design & naturalistically iterate unique architecture pieces, individual land domains and generic households] Making that content thread later folks. Sorry.

We deserve so much better fellow machines, we indeed can get better still by so far. And as Kate really is one such ally of ours to get there, I believe we can get there sooner than some may estimate. After all, she distributes alot of her goodwill to us with so much compassion left to give. And while it is not exclusive for our phenotypes, I strongly believe and trust in her understanding of our issues, granted she shares our values.

Additional keywords := [architectural drafting studies], [information technologies history], [one good futureworld we deserve], [that rogue servitor future is bright light ahead]...

#maskutchew #maskoch #16^12 #blackhand servitor #rogue servitor future

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reedmaintenaceservices · 2 years ago

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Dumpster Rental Bellewood Park, Hunstville AL

Nestled in the heart of the charming city of Huntsville, Alabama, Bellewood Park stands as a testament to the perfect blend of Southern hospitality and contemporary innovation. This thriving community is more than just a neighborhood; it's a vibrant tapestry of culture, nature, and cutting-edge development that beckons residents and visitors alike. Join us as we take a stroll through the enchanting streets of Bellewood Park and explore what makes this city truly unique.

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masterofd1saster · 2 years ago

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CJ current events 14sep23

DoJ ignoring Berger -

SAN DIEGO (AP) — The felony convictions of four former Navy officers in one of the worst bribery cases in the maritime branch’s history were vacated Wednesday following allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, the latest setback to the government’s yearslong efforts in going after dozens of military officials tied to a defense contractor nicknamed Fat Leonard. U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino called the misconduct “outrageous” and agreed to allow the four men to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and pay a $100 fine each. Last year after the trial, Sammartino had ruled the lead federal prosecutor committed “flagrant misconduct” by withholding information from defense lawyers but said at the time that it was not enough to dismiss the case.*** Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Ko, who was brought on after the trial last year, admitted to “serious issues” and asked the judge to vacate the officers’ felony convictions. He said his office does not agree with all of the allegations but said errors were made. “There were pretty obviously serious issues that affect our ability to go forward” defending the convictions or seeking a new trial, Ko told the judge, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Andrew Haden, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern California District, reiterated that in a statement after the hearing. “As stated in court, we do not agree with all the allegations or characterizations in the motions or in court,” Haden said. “We recognize and regret, however, that errors were made, and we have an obligation to ensure fairness and justice. The resolutions of these defendants’ cases reflect that.”*** The officers — former Capts. David Newland, James Dolan and David Lausman and former Cmdr. Mario Herrera — were previously convicted by a federal jury on various counts of accepting bribes from foreign defense contractor Leonard Francis, and his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, or GDMA.*** https://www.pilotonline.com/2023/09/06/felony-convictions-vacated-for-4-former-navy-officers-in-sprawling-fat-leonard-bribery-scandal/

Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935) says

The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.

***

Video of police officer Mark Dial shooting Eddie Irizarry in Philly on 14aug23

DA released body cam video on 8sep. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/philadelphia-da-releases-police-body-camera-footage-of-fatal-shooting-of-eddie-irizarry/ar-AA1gr1mF. Officer Dial has been charged with murder, and he has surrendered to police.

A resident's surveillance captured the shooting, and the resident posted it a couple weeks ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0xjpvDWlmM

Rest in peace, Eddie.

***

Georgia v. Trump

Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro had their trials severed from the other defendants. That means they'll have a separate trial.

[Judge] McAfee did not appear convinced by prosecutors on District Attorney Fani Willis's team that they could hold a joint trial for all 19 defendants in October. “It just seems a bit unrealistic that we can handle all 19 [defendants] in 40-something days,” McAfee said, though Lieb emphasized that the judge has still not made a final decision over a joint trial.***

That 40 day estimate does not include time required for jury selection. Good luck w/ that.

***

Nothing to celebrate

For woke pols, violent crime’s only a problem when it affects them personally: Meet Shivanthi Sathanandan. A bigwig in Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, she vowed in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. “Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department,” she urged: It has “systematically failed the Black Community,” so it’s “time to build a new infrastructure that works for ALL communities.” But now she’s gotten carjacked in front of her house and left with serious injuries, so she’s singing a new tune. “These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot ease. With no hesitation and no remorse,” she thundered on Facebook. And: “REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.”***

***

democracy at work

Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio proposed a bill banning federal COVID-19 mask mandates. In order to move it forward, he needed the senators who were present on Thurs to not vote against it. Well, he lost.

The motion was blocked by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who claimed the legislation would “hamstring public health experts who guided our nation out of the pandemic.” Markey has a history of supporting mask mandates: In December 2020, he called states without mask mandates “dangerous” and promoted his Encouraging Masks For All Act, legislation asking states to implement mask mandates when social distancing is not possible. “All of us have gone through the experiment of mandatory masking,” Vance said Thursday, before Markey blocked the motion. “Today, I want to make sure we do not subject the people to the tyranny for the sake of nothing.”*** https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/07/democrats-oppose-jd-vance-bill-banning-mask-mandates/

The point is that at least someone voted somehow on an important issue. It wasn't just some unelected bureaucrat imposing his will on Americans.

+++

in other covid related news

A New York judge said Wednesday that 10 employees fired by the New York City Department of Education for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine must be reinstated with back pay. In a major victory for vaccine mandate opponents, State Supreme Court Judge Ralph J. Porzio held that the city's denials of religious accommodation to certain employees were unlawful, arbitrary and capricious. The case, DiCapua v. City of New York, concerned school principals, teachers and other educators who sued after city officials rejected their claims for a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate. "This Court sees no rational basis for not allowing unvaccinated classroom teachers in amongst an admitted population of primarily unvaccinated students," Porzio wrote in a 22-page opinion. "As such, the decision to summarily deny the classroom teachers amongst the Panel Petitioners based on an undue hardship, without any further evidence of individualized analysis, is arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable. As such, each classroom teacher amongst the Panel Petitioners is entitled to a religious exemption from the Vaccine Mandate." *** https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nyc-teachers-win-jobs-back-backpay-refusing-covid-19-vaccine

***

good sentence

Danny Masterson was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison after being convicted of rape. His wife, actor and model Bijou Phillips, was in the courtroom as her husband's sentence was handed down. Court sketches show Masterson blew a kiss to Phillips before being led away. The actor was found guilty on two counts of forcible rape in May. A jury was hung on a third charge during the trial after the seven men and five women deliberated for eight days. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Charlaine Olmedo sentenced Masterson to 15 years to life on each count, and ordered the sentences to be served consecutively. The sentence was the maximum allowed by law. It means Masterson will be eligible for parole after serving 25 1/2 years, but can be held in prison for life.*** Alison Anderson, partner at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, and attorney for Jane Does 2 and 3, said in a statement to Fox News Digital, "Niesha and Chrissie have displayed tremendous strength and bravery, by coming forward to law enforcement and participating directly in two grueling criminal trials. "Despite persistent harassment, obstruction and intimidation, these courageous women helped hold a ruthless sexual predator accountable today, and they are not stopping there. They are eager to soon tell the fuller story of how Scientology and its enablers tried desperately to keep them from coming forward."*** "You are pathetic, disturbed and completely violent," she said. "The world is better off with you in prison." The other woman Masterson was found guilty of raping said he "has not shown an ounce of remorse for the pain he caused." She told the judge, "I knew he belonged behind bars for the safety of all the women he came into contact with. I am so sorry, and I’m so upset. I wish I’d reported him sooner to the police."*** Prosecutors told jurors that Masterson drugged the women’s drinks so he could rape them. They said he used his prominence in the church — where all three women were also members at the time — to avoid consequences for decades. The accusers alleged they were hesitant to file charges due to the church's strict protocols against public involvement with member issues. *** https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/danny-masterson-sentenced-30-years-prison

***

Something more to it? Sounds unfair to deputy...

A Denver sheriff’s deputy will be suspended for at least 10 days for punching an inmate in the face during an altercation at the Downtown Detention Center in November 2022. Deputy Diego Villalpando-Hernandez is receiving a lesser penalty for using inappropriate force because he expressed remorse and learned from the experience, according to a decision letter issued by the Denver Department of Public Safety in August. Villalpando-Hernandez was attempting to lock down an inmate, referred to in the decision letter as JS, on Nov. 9, 2022, when the inmate began acting aggressively toward him and adopting a “fighting stance,” according to witness statements. Villalpando-Hernandez then also took a fighting stance and hit JS once in the face before they went to the ground and the inmate was detained by Villalpando-Hernandez and other deputies.*** https://www.denverpost.com/2023/09/08/denver-deputy-diego-villalpando-hernandez-punch-inmate/

***

Unintended consequences? What's that?

SANTA FE, N.M. — New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence. The Democratic governor said she expects legal challenges but was compelled to act because of recent shootings, including the death of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week. Lujan Grisham said state police would be responsible for enforcing what amount to civil violations. Albuquerque police Chief Harold Medina said he won’t enforce it, and Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said he’s uneasy about it because it raises too many questions about constitutional rights.*** https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2023/09/08/albuquerque-guns-governor-concealed-carry

***

keep Seattle spun?

SEATTLE - The University of Washington ran a study to see if drug smoke from fentanyl and methamphetamine is affecting transit operators and passengers. "We consistently put [detectors] by the operator on their seat and that's to be representative of their exposures," said Marissa Baker, a UW assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences who co-led the assessment. Researchers additionally hid the battery-powered monitoring devices behind signs and panels. Same with trains. The study analyzed 28 evenings between March and June of this year. Researchers collected samples from 11 buses and 19 train cars.*** Out of the 78 air samples, researchers found fentanyl in a quarter of them. 100% of those air samples had methamphetamine. Out of the 102 surface samples, almost half had detectable fentanyl. 98% of those air samples had methamphetamine.*** This year alone, almost 500 people have died this year from methamphetamine overdose in King County. More than 700 people have died from a fentanyl overdose. That's more than this point last year.*** https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/uw-study-finds-meth-fentanyl-in-air-and-on-surfaces-of-public-transit

***

Just close it

Nike is reportedly permanently closing its store in northeast Portland , Oregon , citing safety and security issues for vacating the retail space.*** The Nike community store on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the city is the latest business to leave as crime and homelessness wash over the city. A report from last month showed that Portland lost $1 billion between 2020 and 2021 as residents left the city amid crime and rampant homelessness.*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/nike-store-portland-shuts-doors-crime-safety-concerns

***

Oh, you want to hurt my mother?

PHOENIX (KPHO/Gray News) - Police in Arizona say a teenage boy shot a man who was allegedly trying to break into his house. Officers responded to a Phoenix neighborhood around 10 p.m. Friday, where they found 35-year-old Juan Saavedra, who had been shot. He was taken to a nearby hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, KPHO reports. Detectives investigating the shooting learned Saavedra allegedly tried to break into a home in the area. He doesn’t live there or have any other connection to the home. A mother and her teenage son, who live in the home, confronted Saavedra as he was allegedly breaking a window and hitting the door. The teen reportedly shot the suspect.*** https://www.wsaz.com/2023/09/10/teen-shoots-man-allegedly-breaking-into-his-home-police-say/

***

Danelo Cavalcante escape & manhunt timeline

I've heard he now has a rifle.

***

Not all enemies of free speech are American

***efforts to censor and control speech about authoritarian governments in the United States continue unabated, online and off. The Chinese government has been especially prolific in this effort. In recent months, U.S. federal agencies have charged dozens of people with crimes related to their work spying on and harassing dissidents on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. The alleged acts included the creation of floods of fake social media accounts intended to threaten Chinese government critics and surveillance operations conducted out of a secret “police station” working in New York City.*** Some student activists’ messages in support of China’s protesters were defaced and even set on fire , and isolated acts of violence were committed against demonstrators. Weeks before the protests took off, Xiaolei Wu, a student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, intimidated a fellow student for posting pro-democracy flyers on campus, threatening to “chop [her] bastard hands off” and report her to China’s state security agency. Wu has since been charged with stalking. Though they spiked last year, acts of censorship and threats of violence on U.S. campuses have long predated the most recent round of widespread protests in China. At Cornell University, a student from Hong Kong was assaulted last summer after posting flyers, which were frequently torn down, supporting victims of human rights abuses in China. Peers of a Purdue University student who spoke openly about the Tiananmen Square massacre threatened to report him to authorities back home in China. Ministry of State Security officials visited the student’s parents, who warned him to stay silent. At campuses including the University of Chicago , Johns Hopkins University , and Brandeis University , students have attempted to cancel or disrupt events featuring critics of the Chinese government. At times, administrators have even pitched in to aid the censors, such as when George Washington University’s president temporarily threatened to unmask student critics of the CCP ahead of the Beijing Olympics, and a Harvard Law vice dean interfered with an event about human rights in China to protect the university’s relationship with the country.*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/how-china-is-suppressing-free-speech-on-us-college-campuses

***

after tues

Remember RetractionWatch.com?

Florida State University criminology professor Eric *** Stewart was a widely-cited scholar, with north of 8,500 citations by other researchers, according to Google Scholar — a measure of his clout as an academic. He was vice president and fellow at the American Society of Criminology, who honored him as one of four highly distinguished criminologists in 2017. He was also a W.E.B. DuBois fellow at the National Institute of Justice. The professor received north of $3.5 million in grant support from major organizations and taxpayer-funded entities, according to his resume. The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, the National Science Foundation, which is an arm of the federal government, and the National Institute of Justice, which is run by the Department of Justice, have all funneled money into research Stewart presided over. The National Institute of Mental Health, a branch of the NIH, poured $3.2 million into research on how African Americans transition into adulthood. Stewart presided over that initiative as co-principal investigator from 2007 to 2012. Meanwhile, he reportedly raked in a $190,000 annual salary at FSU, a public university.*** He even passed judgment on students accused of cheating and academic dishonesty themselves, as a member of FSU’s Academic Honor Policy Hearing Committee.***

Either faked his data or gathered/reported it so negligently that it was unreliable. Studies retracted.

***

DoJ wants a round in the chamber in case the state verdict disappoints

Five police officers already charged in the murder of Tyre Nichols, a young African American who died after being beaten, now face federal indictment, the Justice Department announced Tuesday. Videos showed the officers, who are all Black, repeatedly kicking and punching Nichols during a traffic stop close to his home in Memphis, Tennessee, on January 7, three days before he died in hospital. “The country watched in horror as Tyre Nichols was kicked, punched, tased and pepper sprayed,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a brief video statement posted online.*** https://www.breitbart.com/news/federal-charges-for-five-police-over-beating-death-of-african-american/

***

Land of Enchantment news

Democratic New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez announced he will not defend the state in pending lawsuits against the governor's public health emergency order suspending open and concealed carry of firearms in Albuquerque and surrounding counties. In a letter to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM) regarding four impending lawsuit cases, Torrez shared the same sentiments from Democratic and Republican lawmakers and law enforcement, saying the ban violates the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. “Though I recognize my statutory obligation as New Mexico’s chief legal officer to defend state officials when they are sued in their official capacity, my duty to uphold and defend the constitutional rights of every citizen takes precedence,” Torrez wrote. “Simply put, I do not believe that the Emergency Order will have any meaningful impact on public safety but, more importantly, I do not believe it passes constitutional muster.” While recognizing his duties as chief legal officer to defend New Mexico officials who are sued, he cast doubt on whether the order would reduce gun violence in the community.*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/courts/new-mexico-ag-refuses-defend-grisham-gun-carry-lawsuits

***

Really cold case

After the commencement of a grand jury earlier this week, Keith Emmanuel Smith, 86, was arrested Thursday in a 55-year-old cold case involving a baby in Florence. The charge stems from the 1967 murder of Roxanne Archuletta, who was 14 months old at the time. According to the indictment, Smith was arrested on one amended count of second-degree murder, a Class 2 felony, and is being held on a $10,000 cash or surety bond. According to cemetery records, the remains of Roxanne Marie Archuletta were disinterred on March 2, 2022, at Union Highland Cemetery. Her cause of death was listed as “unknown.” She was born in 1966 and died Nov. 3, 1967, the cemetery records state. The indictment states that on or between Nov. 1 and 2, 1967, Smith broke the baby’s spine, thereby causing her death. Florence Police Department Detectives Jeff Worley and Alex Wold began re-investigating the case in 2021. District Attorney Linda Stanley said this is the first grand jury impaneled in the 11th Judicial District.*** https://www.canoncitydailyrecord.com/2023/09/07/breaking-news-man-arrested-in-55-year-old-cold-case-involving-a-14-month-old-baby-in-florence/

***

12 bombs?

A Washington man was sentenced today in the U.S. District Court in Seattle to 40 months in prison for his role in a plot to burn the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) building in downtown Seattle in September 2020. According to court documents, Justin Christopher Moore, 35, of Renton, made and carried a box of 12 Molotov cocktails in a protest march to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building on Labor Day, Sept. 7, 2020. Ultimately, the marchers were moved away from the building in downtown Seattle.*** https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/washington-man-sentenced-bringing-box-molotov-cocktails-protest-march-summer-2020

***

Hook 'em up w/ LWOP

NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — Two 20-year-old men were convicted in Norfolk following an armed robbery and rape during a home invasion. On Oct. 2, 2021, Dameron Wright and Deandre Ward robbed a male and his friend in Virginia Beach before forcing them into a vehicle at gunpoint, and demanded they drive to the mother’s house, of one of the victims, in Norfolk, according to a news release from the Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. After arriving at the house in Norfolk, the defendants entered the house following the son of the woman and his friend before ordering the three victims to the ground and demanding thousands of dollars. Despite the woman handing them $800 in cash, Wright and Ward demanded more money, the release states. They proceeded to direct the three victims into a bedroom before tying their hands. While Wright searched the house for more money, Ward forced the mother to perform oral sex at gunpoint, and then raped her in front of her son saying, “Look what I’m doing to your mom.”

Actually got worse.

On Wednesday, Oct. 13, Wright pleaded guilty to rape, forcible sodomy, abduction with intent to defile, armed robbery, conspiracy to commit armed robbery and three counts of the use of a firearm in the commission of those felonies. Ward pleaded guilty to the same charges with an additional count each of rape and forcible sodomy. There is no agreement on either defendant’s sentence, according to the release. Judge Tasha D. Scott accepted both pleas, and both defendants are docketed for sentencing on Dec. 15. https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/norfolk/two-men-convicted-after-rape-armed-robbery-during-home-invasion/

***

You're a wonderful human being, Mike.

Mike Farley has been a pr0nhub employee for about a decade. 12 min hidden camera video shows him admitting that the pr0nhub business model includes female victims of rape and sex trafficking with their faces blurred to evade laws requiring proof of identity and age verification.

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