Mueller, Transgender Rights, #sayhername: 3 Stories You Should Read 10/22/2018

October 22, 2018 Confluence

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In the category of: Voter suppression is the sign of a dying democracy.

Voter-Suppression Tactics in the Age of Trump

The suppression of minority votes is the homegrown corollary of the Administration’s xenophobic rhetoric—an attempt to place a white thumb on the demographic scale.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, ninety-nine bills designed to diminish voter access were introduced last year in thirty-one state legislatures. Many of the recent Republican-led efforts stem from the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder. In an opinion that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that discrimination still exists, but not sufficiently to warrant the “extraordinary” remediation measures that the act imposed on the states of the former Confederacy. That argument is roughly equivalent to saying that a decline in the prevalence of an infectious disease means that we should stop vaccinating against it. Within hours of the decision, Texas announced a strict new voter-I.D. law. Mississippi and Alabama shortly afterward began enforcing similar laws that previously had been barred.

The decision added a layer of severity to a voter-access crisis precipitated by state laws that prohibit six million Americans with past convictions from voting. In three Southern states—Florida, Tennessee, and Kentucky—this means that at least twenty percent of eligible-age African-Americans cannot vote. Meanwhile, North Carolina enacted restrictions on early voting, a policy that particularly affects African-Americans, who are likely to be hourly-wage workers and cannot always get to the polls on Election Day. Last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to reinstate a voter-I.D. law in North Carolina that a federal court had found targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.” In effect, the question posed by Roberts’s ruling is how much discrimination there has to be before you can justify protecting voters.

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In the category of: The continued effort to make people illegal.

The Trump administration’s latest anti-transgender action explained

Despite Trump’s promises, his administration’s anti-LGBTQ record just keeps growing and growing.

The proposal would effectively erase protections for trans people, who identify with a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth, from federal civil rights laws — ensuring that the laws do not prohibit discrimination against trans people in any setting, including the workplace, housing, schools, and health care.

HHS has refused to comment on “alleged leaked documents,” CNN reported. Civil rights groups and LGBTQ advocacy organizations, meanwhile, have suggested that they will take the administration to court should it move forward with the change.

The move would be far from the first time that the Trump administration has taken action that hurts LGBTQ people. For much of the past couple of years, the administration has been mired in court battles over its attempts to ban transgender people from the military after the Obama administration lifted the original ban. And different parts of the Trump administration have already taken steps to prevent federal civil rights protections from applying to trans and gay people.

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In the category of: With police like this they don’t really need a KKK.

#SayHerName: Florida Police Viciously Beat 14-Year-Old Black Girl for ‘Resisting Arrest’

And so it continues, with the vicious beating of a 14-year-old girl, whom a big grown ass cop can be seen punching twice in her side as she lays prone with her face in the dirt, with his knee in her back, gripping and yanking her by the hem of her jean shorts (which is violating in and of itself). According to the Coral Gables police, her treatment was warranted because she “resisted arrest.”

But as anyone with eyes can see, the girl is a victim of excessive force, in a scenario we have seen play out far too many times; just another day in the hood for so many black people, again captured on video.

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