You must vote DEMOCRAT🐴 🔵 for ONE single reason; The GOP make WHITE ONLY COURTS 👨🏼‍⚖️ for 40+ YEARS

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

4 years ago. They're coming for Brown v Board.

 

[™BlackPearl The Empress™]

Honestly I wasn't paying attention to what was going with the GOP, but a video about Cornell West popped up in my feed. I watched it and few others.



Thus video and the comments really made me nervous. These Conservatives/Racist are outta control.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Honestly I wasn't paying attention to what was going with the GOP, but a video about Cornell West popped up in my feed. I watched it and few others.



Thus video and the comments really made me nervous. These Conservatives/Racist are outta control.

Cornel West is honestly an unserious goof right now playing on people's emotions when we need solid strategy of acquiring actual power at the moment. No thanks.

 

[™BlackPearl The Empress™]

Cornel West is honestly an unserious goof right now playing on people's emotions when we need solid strategy of acquiring actual power at the moment. No thanks.

I agree but this was the video about Cornell West.



The other video is about critical race theory. The comments are wild. People really compare CRT to Marxism?

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

A Black prosecutor was elected in Georgia – so white Republicans made their own district

After Jared Williams was elected Augusta DA, a lawyer and state lawmaker made an unusual proposal: that the whitest county split from the circuit

www.theguardian.com

A Black prosecutor was elected in Georgia – so white Republicans made their own district
After Jared Williams was elected Augusta DA, a lawyer and state lawmaker made an unusual proposal: that the whitest county split from the circuit

Justin Glawe
‘It’s a way … to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.
‘It’s a way … to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.’ Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Since 1870, the Augusta judicial circuit has been home to the criminal justice system of a three-county area on Georgia’s border with South Carolina. In that time, no African American has been elected district attorney of the circuit – until 2020, when a Black lawyer named Jared Williams upset a conservative, pro-police candidate with just more than 50% of the vote.

But that historic win was short-lived. The day after his election, a lawyer and state lawmaker in the area proposed something unusual: that the circuit’s whitest county separate itself from the Augusta circuit, creating a new judicial circuit in Georgia for the first time in nearly 40 years.

“Does the board of commissioners want to be there [sic] own judicial circuit,” Barry Fleming, a Republican state legislator from nearby Harlem, asked the Columbia county commission chair, Doug Duncan, in a text message.

Duncan supported the plan, and in December 2020 issued a resolution asking the area’s lawmakers, including Fleming, to introduce legislation that would separate Columbia county from the judicial circuit it had been a part of for 150 years. Fleming’s bill passed with bipartisan support.

The split caused the disenfranchisement of the old circuit’s Black voters, voting advocacy organization Black Voters Matter Fund contended in a lawsuit that was eventually dismissed by the state supreme court. Those voters had chosen Williams, who ran on a pledge to uphold criminal justice reforms such as not prosecuting low-level marijuana possession, a crime which disproportionately affects Black and minority communities.

Instead of Williams, Black voters in Columbia county got as their prosecutor Bobby Christine, a Trump-appointed US attorney who was appointed by the Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Christine then chose Williams’s opponent as his chief deputy.

Voting advocates say the circuit split is an example of the type of minority rule that Republicans are accused of engaging in across the US.

“There was a time when as we started to win these elections, white people would leave,” said Cliff Albright, executive director of Black Voters Matter Fund. “But now they’ve figured out, we don’t actually have to leave, we can just change the jurisdiction. It is a way, even when the political minority is losing, to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.”

Despite voting advocates’ opposition, the circuit split had bipartisan support and was welcomed by some Black Democrats in the legislature, who argued that a backlog of felony cases in Richmond county could be reduced if the circuit were smaller and didn’t include Columbia county.

Fleming and Duncan did not respond to requests for comment. In response to a public records request, Duncan’s office said it had no communications with Fleming related to the Augusta split.

The splitting of the Augusta judicial circuit and the resulting creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit is not the only split to have been proposed in recent years. Nor is it the only split to have involved Fleming, a hardline conservative lawyer who was the architect of Georgia’s 2021 sweeping voter suppression law.

Following the Augusta split, two Republican lawmakers in Georgia proposed a circuit split in Oconee county after the election of a progressive prosecutor who ran on a platform of addressing systemic racism. Since then, Republican legislators statewide created a prosecutor oversight commission that holds the power to remove prosecutors for misconduct. The commission has been heavily criticized by Democratic prosecutors such as Fani Willis, who is investigating the Trump campaign’s meddling in the 2020 election in Georgia. Willis and others told lawmakers the commission was created so white Republicans could target minority prosecutors.

The splits come at a time when criticism of prosecutors like Williams – who refuse to toe the line of tough-on-crime conservative policies – abounds on the right. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has made punishment of so-called progressive prosecutors part of his presidential campaign, firing a prosecutor who signed a pledge criticizing the criminalization of transgender people. In Mississippi, white Republican leaders have created a judicial district with hand-picked judges and law enforcement to oversee a majority-Black city.

The Florida prosecutor who was removed by DeSantis has sued the governor, saying that by “challenging this illegal abuse of power, we make sure that no governor can toss out the results of an election because he doesn’t like the outcome”.

Tossing out the outcome of an election is exactly what happened in Georgia when Republicans pushed for the creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit, Williams and others said.

Before Fleming spearheaded the Augusta split, others had proposed breaking up the circuit. In 2018, state senator Harold Jones, who is Black, requested that the judicial council of Georgia conduct a workload study for courts in the three counties that comprise the old circuit – Columbia, Richmond and Burke. The study found that workloads were high for local judges, especially in the majority-Black county of Richmond, Jones said, so he argued that the 200,000 people there should have their own circuit. But he couldn’t make any headway.

“As a Democrat, to do something that monumental, it’s next to impossible,” Jones said.

It wasn’t until December 2020 that the study was used as rationale for a circuit split. Then, the Columbia county board of commissioners issued a resolution requesting that its local legislative delegation – which includes Fleming – introduce a law that would formalize the split. The resolution cited Jones’s 2018 study, but that was only part of the story.

Behind the scenes, Columbia county leaders were coordinating to separate the county in response to Williams’s historic election win. Among those working to institute the split was Fleming himself.

Fleming, an attorney who works on behalf of nearly 40 state and county governments throughout Georgia, is a full-throated Trump supporter. He has been heavily involved in election matters through his former role as chair of the special committee on election integrity. Fleming and Duncan were vocal opponents of Williams and supported his opponent, Natalie Paine.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Elections matter

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[Huda2daf]

Y’all was too focused on if op was Indian and or working from a call center to be bothered with engaging with the topic.

 

[Huda2daf]

Plus something something democratic plantation

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

THANK YOU DEMOCRATS!

Court Finds that Texas Law Requiring the Rejection of Mail Ballots and Applications Violates the Civil Rights Act

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled yesterday that portions of Texas Senate Bill 1, adopted in September 2021, violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court found that parts of S.B. 1 require officials to reject mail-in ballot applications and mail-in ballots based...

www.justice.gov

Court Finds that Texas Law Requiring the Rejection of Mail Ballots and Applications Violates the Civil Rights Act​

Friday, August 18, 2023
For Immediate Release
Office of Public Affairs
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled yesterday that portions of Texas Senate Bill 1, adopted in September 2021, violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court found that parts of S.B. 1 require officials to reject mail-in ballot applications and mail-in ballots based on errors or omissions that are not material in determining whether voters are qualified under Texas law to vote or cast a mail ballot.

“The District Court’s decision affirms what the Justice Department has argued for nearly two years: these provisions of Texas Senate Bill 1 unlawfully restrict the ability of eligible Texas voters to vote by mail and to have that vote counted,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The Justice Department will continue to defend against unlawful efforts that undermine the right to vote and restrict participation in our democracy.”

“In requiring rejection of mail ballots and mail ballot applications from eligible voters based on minor paperwork errors or omissions, Texas Senate Bill 1 violates the Civil Rights Act,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “This ruling sends a clear message that states may not impose unlawful and unnecessary requirements that disenfranchise eligible voters seeking to participate in our democracy. The Justice Department will continue to use every available tool to protect all Americans’ right to vote and to ensure that their voices are heard.”

“The right to vote is one of the fundamental rights in our democracy,” said U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza for the Western District of Texas. “This important ruling protects the rights of eligible Texas voters to cast a vote and have it counted consistent with federal law.”

The court issued a preliminary ruling yesterday in favor of the United States’ motion for summary judgment, which asserts that two provisions of S.B. 1 violate Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act by requiring rejection of mail ballots and mail ballot request forms because of paperwork errors that are not material to establishing a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot. The first provision requires that early voting clerks “shall reject” mail ballot applications that do not include a Texas driver’s license or ID number that identifies “the same voter identified on the applicant’s application for voter registration.” The second provision provides that a mail ballot “may be accepted only if” the ID numbers on the carrier envelope or signature sheet identifies “the same voter identified on the applicant’s application for voter registration.”

Section 5.07 requires that early voting clerks “shall reject” mail ballot applications that do not include a Department of Public Safety (DPS) number or the last four digits of a Social Security Number (SSN) that identifies “the same voter identified on the applicant’s application for voter registration.” Section 5.13 provides that a mail ballot “may be accepted only if” the DPS number or last four digits of an SSN on the carrier envelope or signature sheet identifies “the same voter identified on the applicant’s application for voter registration.”

The United States presented evidence to the court that S.B. 1 has resulted in Texas election officials rejecting tens of thousands of mail ballot applications and mail ballots cast in elections since the bill was enacted in 2021. The Department asserts that these rejections violate federal law, denying Texas voters the statutory right to vote protected by Section 101.

Yesterday’s preliminary ruling from the court grants the Justice Department’s motion for summary judgment, which the Department filed in May 2023, in its entirety. The decision addresses the Justice Department’s sole pending claim in La Unión del Pueblo Entero v. Abbott, No. 5:21-cv-844 (WDTX), a case in which the United States and several private parties are challenging various aspects of S.B. 1. The court noted that the ruling will be followed in the coming weeks by a final written opinion and order. A group of private plaintiffs will be going to trial on the remaining claims in the case, which have not yet been resolved. That trial is scheduled to begin on Sept. 11.

Complaints about discriminatory practices may be reported to the Civil Rights Division through its internet reporting portal at www.civilrights.justice.gov or by calling (800) 253-3931.

Additional information about the Civil Rights Division’s work to uphold and protect the voting rights of all Americans is available on the Justice Department’s website at www.justice.gov/crt/voting-section.

 

[Mindfield333]

Inaction + racism(republicans) Vs inaction + Benign neglect(Democrats)

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

News segment from July 2023


Story from Aug. 23, 2023

News segment from July 2023


Story from Aug. 23, 2023

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Supreme Court Is Asked to Hear a New Admissions Case on Race (Published 2023)

Parents, backed by a legal foundation, say admissions standards at Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia are not truly “race neutral.”

www.nytimes.com

Supreme Court Is Asked to Hear a New Admissions Case on Race
Parents, backed by a legal foundation, say admissions standards at Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia are not truly “race neutral.”

Aug. 21, 2023
Thomas Jefferson High School’s facade, at night, with classroom lights on and a student entering school.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., changed its admissions standards in 2020, which included getting rid of a rigorous test.Kenny Holston for The New York Times
Sign Up for the Education Briefing From preschool to grad school, get the latest U.S. education news.

In the latest challenge to the role race may play in school admissions, a legal activist group asked the Supreme Court on Monday to hear a case on how students are selected at one of the country’s top high schools, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in May that Thomas Jefferson, a public school in Alexandria, Va., did not discriminate in its admissions. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law group, wants the Supreme Court to overturn that decision, arguing that the school’s new admissions policies disadvantaged Asian American applicants.

At issue is the use of what the school board said were race-neutral criteria to achieve a diverse student body. The constitutionality of such practices was left open in the Supreme Court’s decision in June against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, effectively banning the use of race-conscious admissions practices by colleges, though the majority opinion said, quoting an earlier decision, that “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.”

Although the new case involves a prestigious magnet high school, the decision could ultimately affect colleges, which are implementing new admissions criteria after the June decision. “This is the next frontier,” Joshua P. Thompson, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, has said of the litigation.

In its filing Monday asking the Supreme Court to review the case, the Pacific Legal Foundation argued that Thomas Jefferson’s admissions plan was “intentionally designed to achieve the same results as overt racial discrimination.”

Specifically referring to the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, the filing said that its “guarantees might mean little if schools could accomplish the same discriminatory result through race-neutral proxies.”

“The longer this question is not resolved,” the petition said, “the more incentive school districts (and now universities) will have to develop workarounds that enable them to racially discriminate without using racial classifications.”

The Thomas Jefferson case arose in late 2020, after protests over the murder of George Floyd. Officials in Fairfax County, Va., concerned about the few Black and Hispanic students at Thomas Jefferson, changed admissions standards. In addition to eliminating a rigorous entry exam, the school decided to offer admission to the top students from each middle school in its area rather than the top applicants from any school.

Admissions officers were also instructed to consider “experience factors,” such as whether students were poor, learning English or attending a middle school that was “historically underrepresented.” But the officers were not told the race, sex or name of any applicant.

A group of parents, many of them Asian American, objected to the plan and started the Coalition for T.J. The Pacific Legal Foundation, which has filed similar lawsuits in New York and Montgomery County, Md., is representing the organization for free.

The parents, arguing that the plan was not truly race-neutral, said that gifted Asian American students were clustered in a few middle schools, and that limiting the number of students from each school shut out worthy Asian American applicants.

After the changes went into effect in 2021, the percentage of Asian American students offered admission dropped to 54 percent from 73 percent. The percentage of Black students grew to 8 percent from no more than 2 percent; the percentage of Hispanic students grew to 11 percent from 3 percent; and the percentage of white students grew to 22 percent from 18 percent.

In the Fairfax County school system, about 37 percent of students are white, 27 percent are Hispanic, 20 percent are Asian and 10 percent are Black.

Writing for the majority in the appeals court’s decision in May, Judge Robert B. King, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, said the before and after numbers were not the right place to start the analysis. That would, he said, quoting from the school board’s brief, turn “the previous status quo into an immutable quota.”

He added that the school, widely known as T.J., had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.”

In dissent, Judge Allison J. Rushing wrote that the majority had refused “to look past the policy’s neutral varnish” and consider instead “an undisputed racial motivation and an undeniable racial result.”

Judge Rushing, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, added that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection “would be hollow if governments could intentionally achieve discriminatory ends under cover of neutral means.”

The decision reversed a 2022 ruling by Judge Claude M. Hilton of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, who found that the changes made by the school board had disproportionately burdened Asian American students and were “racially motivated.” The discussion of the planned changes, he wrote, was “infected with talk of racial balancing from its inception.”

“It is clear that Asian American students are disproportionately harmed by the board’s decision to overhaul T.J. admissions,” Judge Hilton wrote. “Currently and in the future, Asian American applicants are disproportionately deprived of a level playing field.”

The Supreme Court has already had one encounter with the case. In April 2022, the court rejected an emergency request from the Coalition for T.J. to block the new admissions criteria while the case moved forward. That was before the court’s decision in June banning race-conscious admissions in higher education.

Even so, the court’s three most conservative members — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — said they would have granted the request.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22, 2023, Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Supreme Court Is Asked to Hear New Admissions Case on Race. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

N.C. justice sues claiming ethics probe seeks to chill diversity critique

North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit accusing a judicial ethics commission of launching an investigation into her that aims to stifle her criticism of the lack of diversity in the state's courts.

www.reuters.com

N.C. justice sues claiming ethics probe seeks to chill diversity critique​

Nate RaymondAugust 29, 20233:39 PM EDTUpdated 7 hours ago

REUTERS/Chip East Acquire Licensing Rights

Aug 29 (Reuters) - North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit accusing a judicial ethics commission of launching an investigation into her that aims to stifle her criticism of the lack of diversity in the state's courts.

Earls, one of two Democrats on the seven-member state high court, said in her lawsuit that the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission began a probe after she spoke to a legal news organization about her court's recent record on issues concerning diversity.

Earls spoke to Law360 in a June article about "implicit biases" among her colleagues, a lack of Black law clerks being hired and how the court's new conservative majority had disbanded a commission tasked with examining racial and gender inequality in the judicial system.

Earls' lawyers are seeking to block the probe, arguing in the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina that her comments were political speech protected by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls appears in an undated handout photo. North Carolina Judicial Branch/Handout via REUTERS Acquire Licensing Rights

In a declaration filed in court, Earls said the commission's actions were a "blatant attempt to chill my First Amendment rights to freedom of speech" and had prompted her to turn down opportunities to speak and write about race and gender issues.

"I believe that the First Amendment provides me and every American the right to free speech and to bring to light imperfections and unfairness in our political and judicial systems," she said.

Brittany Pinkham, the non-partisan commission's executive director, in a statement said the commission "is statutorily obligated to investigate all instances of alleged judicial misconduct and cannot comment on pending investigations.

Earls, a former civil rights lawyer, was first elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2018 and is today the only Black women serving on the state's high court, which lost its 4-3 liberal majority in last November's elections.

According to her lawsuit, the 16-member Judicial Standards Commission on Aug. 15 notified Earls that it was reopening a previously closed investigation into other comments she made after she spoke with Law360 about a lack of racial diversity at her court and the lawyers who appeared before it.

Patricia Flood, counsel to the commission, in an Aug. 15 letter to Earls said she may have violated the North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct by alleging her colleagues were "acting out of racial, gender, and/or political bias in some of their decision-making."

Flood said that conduct potentially violates Canon 2A of the Code of Judicial Conduct, which requires a judge to conduct herself "at all times in a manner which promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary."

The case is Earls v. North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission, et al, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, No. 23-cv-00734.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/07/sba-8a-program-ruling-affirmative-action/