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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder May 22, 2023
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American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom
America was not founded as a Christian nation. Church and state were separated. The founding fathers were mostly deists, not Christians. They did not believe in a personal all powerful God that knew everything and intervened in human affairs
They separated church and state because they understood from European history that bad and bloody results resulted when the government acted in the name of God.
All this is changing in America now under the thumb of a right wing activist politicized majority on our Supreme Court. They were put there by an extremely well funded well organized conglomeration of ultra right wing figures and organizations. They have an agenda and they are carrying it out.
The newest Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett had a message for new lawyers. She said being a lawyer “is but it means to an end. … and the end is building the kingdom of God.“ This ascendant ultra-right wing can best be described as white Christian nationalists. These white Christian nationalists have won significant victories and are on roll. Taking away a woman’s right to control their own bodies in the recent overturn of Roe versus Wade is just the latest example. They have stacked the federal courts and particularly the Supreme Court where they have a 6 to 3 majority.
Guest – Andrew Seidel, author of American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom. He is a constitutional attorney with more than a decade of experience arguing about religion and law as a vice president at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a director at the Freedom From Religion Foundation He is the author of “The Founding Myth” the definitive book which demonstrates that America’s not founded by Christians as a Christian country.
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John Pilger: The Coming War With China
Is China a threat to (the United States)? Is the fear being stirred up about China legitimate? We speak with 83-year-old renowned journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker John Pilger from his home in Australia about his most recent article The Coming War With China.
China has the second largest economy in the world. It will soon be the first. In response to China’s commercial threat the United States of America has responded militarily by surrounding the Chinese industrial heartland with 400 bases in what has been called “a noose“. The USA has some 1100 bases around the world, China has six.
President Obama initiated a multi trillion dollar vast nuclear buildup. This was coordinated with what he termed “a pivot towards Asia.” Most of the U.S. Navy now patrols the waters off of China. Tensions have been exacerbated with respect to who governs Taiwan.
The US Government has shored up it’s military alliances with the surrounding countries around China of South Korea, Japan the Philippines, and Australia, The USA is selling billions of dollars worth of nuclear submarines to Australia.
We live in a country whose government has been in a perpetual war the last 3/4 of a century, except with a brief interlude after its 20 year old war Vietnam ended in defeat. 3 million Vietnamese died in the American war.
Guest – John Pilger covered that war as a young reporter and understood that it was based on the lie that Lyndon Johnson told falsely stating that the North Vietnamese had attacked an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. Another 1 million people died in the Iraq war That war was based on the now well known lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he was going to use against us and that he was responsible for 911. A similar campaign of fear mongering is going on now about China. The major news media parrot the government’s fact free line that China is our enemy. In his article “The Coming War With China” John Pilger wrote “a US war against China beckons and we have a responsibility to speak out. We know what is coming. Silence must be broken.”
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Maria Hall
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Law and Disorder May 15, 2023
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Justice Thomas Fails To Disclose Luxury Gifts From Billionaire Harlan Crow
It has recently come to light that rightwing billionaire and GOP megadonor Harlan Crow paid for decades of luxury travel, gifts, and family property for Clarence Thomas, a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Crow sits on the board of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that frequently files amicus briefs in pending Supreme Court cases.
In 2019, Crow flew Thomas to Indonesia in his private jet and funded a nine-day island-hopping cruise aboard Crow’s superyacht, a trip valued at more than $500,000, nearly double Thomas’s annual salary.
But in spite of the Ethics in Government Act’s requirement that federal judges disclose gifts over $415, Thomas failed to file such a disclosure.
In 2004, Thomas refused to recuse himself from a case in which Crow’s real estate company was being sued, despite a federal law requiring federal judges to recuse themselves when their impartiality might reasonably be questioned.
And in 2021 and 2022, Thomas failed to recuse himself from cases involving the January 6 insurrection and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, even though Thomas’ wife Ginni was a prominent organizer of the “Stop the Steal” campaign.
While a Code of Conduct binds lower federal court judges, members of the Supreme Court are bound by no such code of conduct.
Guest – Professor Ellen Yaroshefsky is the Howard Lichtenstein Professor of Legal Ethics and Director of the Monroe Freedman Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University. Ellen is the longstanding co-chair of the Ethics Advisory Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Ethics, Gideon and Professionalism Committee of the Criminal Justice Section.
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The Right to Housing In California
The state of California has been described as ground zero in a national housing crisis. Plagued by escalating housing costs, lack of affordable housing stock, and stagnating wages, more than half of the country’s unsheltered residents and a quarter of all unhoused people live in California, even though state residents comprise just 12% of the nation’s population. Humanitarian concerns there disproportionately impact Black and Brown residents. To address this crisis, California legislators have introduced constitutional amendment proposals that would enumerate the right to housing in the state constitution.
In a recent report, “Recognizing the Right to Housing,” the ACLU and other organizations assert that guaranteeing every person the right to housing provides an important government obligation and legal tool to ensure that Californians have access to affordable and adequate housing. Such a rights-based approach will bolster California’s existing Housing First policy, based on decades of empirical evidence that houselessness is best remedied by access to permanent and stable housing, with minimal requirements for entry. A 2020 poll shows that 60% of Californians support the constitutional amendment.
Guest – Attorney Kath Rogers from the ACLU of Southern California. Before joining the ACLU, Kath was Program Manager and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California, where she co-authored the housing report. She also served as Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles. Kath’s legal work has included defending unhoused clients and activists, and co-counseling on a federal constitutional class action lawsuit, Arundel v. City of San Diego, challenging the criminalization of houselessness. It resulted in a settlement to change discriminatory policing practices.
Hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian and Marjorie Cohn
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Law and Disorder May 8, 2023
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The pending criminal case against journalist Julian Assange is the most significant far reaching First Amendment matter in our lifetime. It will have, in fact it already has had, an impact on publishing and journalism. This is so because it constricts our freedom to know as well as journalists and publishers freedom to publish.
Our government functions as the executive committee of the ruling rich. It intends to keep it this way, in the words of the great civil rights attorney William Kunstler, “by any means necessary and for as long as possible.”
If as is likely the imprisoned journalist Julian Assange is extradited at America’s request from his solitary prison cell in London’s Belmarsh prison where he has been kept for four years and sent to Virginia to be tried for espionage he will be certainly be convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
His victimization is being accomplished under the 1917 Espionage Act, a law originally put into place during World War I to imprison spies. It is now used to get truth tellers like Julian Assange silenced.
Julian Assange Fact Sheet: Why Julian Must Be Freed
Guest – Kevin Gosztola who more than anyone has covered the whistleblower situation since he attended the court martial trial of Sergeant Chelsea Manning. Manning was convicted of giving government secrets to Julian Assange. Kevin Gosztola‘s book “Guilty of Journalism “was published by Seven Stories Press and Censored Press last month.
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Attorney Stephen Rohde: A Set Of Ideas Under Threat
American history has been marked by ongoing conflicts between those who are seeking an open, equal and inclusive society and those who cling to the racist origins of the United States and seek to literally whitewash that history and perpetuate white privilege.
We find ourselves in the midst of one of those conflicts today. The right of Black people to learn their own history is being denied them. The same is true of anyone who is not heterosexual.
The teaching of critical race theory is increasingly disallowed. The study of human sexuality in schools is being obliterated. Books are being banned in record numbers, and curricula is being rewritten to conform to a sanitized version of American history. Seven states, including Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Utah, have already passed laws limiting materials in libraries…and at least 113 bills are pending across the country that would negatively impact libraries or curtail peoples’ freedom to read.
As Jonathan Friedman, the Director of free expression and education at PEN America, a free speech organization said, “People need to understand that it’s not a single book being removed in a single school district, it’s a set of ideas that are under threat just about everywhere.”
Guest – Stephen Rohde is a noted constitutional scholar and activist. He is the past Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the founder and current Chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; the author of American Words of Freedom, and of Freedom of Assembly. Steve Rohde is a regular contributor to TruthDig as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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