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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 July 18, 2022
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Far Right Supreme Court Decisions Not Seen Since 1931
During its last term, the Supreme Court demonstrated that it is the most right-wing court since 1931. In cases involving reproductive rights, entanglement of church and state, the right to carry guns, and the ability of congressionally-mandated administrative agencies to regulate climate change, the high court’s conservative members handed down reactionary rulings. The court has agreed to hear a case next term that could radically change our electoral system.
Guest – Stephen Rohde is an author and social justice advocate who practiced civil rights and constitutional law for more than 45 years, including representing two men on California’s death row. He is the former chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and former national chair of Bend the Arc, a Jewish Partnership for Justice. He is also a board member of Death Penalty Focus.
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ALEC: Five Decades of Government Influence
The United States underwent a “public interest” revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the first half of the ’60s, Congress passed precedent-setting environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Water Quality Act. And in just three years, from 1969 to 1972, the federal government adopted a raft of new environmental, public health, workplace and consumer protections and established new agencies to administer them, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
That revolution sparked a counterrevolution that is still reverberating today. Wealthy conservatives, corporations and libertarian foundations poured money into new think tanks and advocacy groups, including the Heritage Foundation and Charles Koch’s Cato Institute. A less-well-known group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, was founded around the same time. It goes by its acronym, ALEC.
Unlike Heritage and Cato, ALEC—a network of nearly 300 corporations, trade groups, law firms, and libertarian foundations—operates at the state level. The group provides state legislators with a variety of ready-made bills that, among other things, roll back voting rights, thwart efforts to address climate change, and bolster corporate profits.
State lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on ALEC’s recommendations from 2010 through 2018, according to an investigation by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity. More than 600 of them became law.
Lately ALEC has been coaching state legislators on how to spin the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. ALEC has also been working behind the scenes to amplify the false GOP narrative on voter fraud. Writer Elliott Negin has been following ALEC off and on for the last decade, and he recently posted an essay that explains in detail how ALEC turns disinformation into law. We are fortunate to have Elliott as our guest today.
Guest – Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national science advocacy organization. Prior to joining UCS in 2007, he was the Washington communications director for the Natural Resource Defense Council, a former news editor at National Public Radio, the managing editor of American Journalism Review, and the editor of Nuclear Times and Public Citizen magazines.
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Law and Disorder July 11, 2022
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Kennedy v. Bremerton School District: Rights To Religious Expression In The Workplace
On June 27, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. At issue was school employees’ First Amendment rights to religious expression while on the job. The Court held that a school district infringed on football coach Joseph Kennedy’s First Amendment rights when it disciplined him for engaging in “private” prayer. Kennedy was a coach at the Bremerton School District in Washington State. After games, he knelt on the field with some students joining him in prayer.
That so-called private prayer occurred on the 50-yard line. The school district forbade the coach to pray on the field after games. It did allow him to pray in a private location behind closed doors. After Coach Kennedy continued on the field to give his thanks to God, the school district placed him on administrative leave. It gave him a poor evaluation, despite a history of positive ones. Kennedy did not return the following year and sued, seeking reinstatement. He also relocated to Florida. The Supreme Court upheld Kennedy’s right to pray in public on the field after the game.
Guest – Andrew Seidel is a constitutional attorney and vice president of strategic communications at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which litigated Kennedy v. Bremerton. He’s also the author of several books including The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom, which hits shelves in September and explains a lot of what is happening at the court right now.
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Attorney John Philo: Sugar Law Center
Maurice Sugar was a workers’ lawyer and a socialist, one of the founding members of the National Lawyers Guild, the first General Counsel to the United Auto Workers and a staunch defender of working people’s rights. He was also a talented poet and songwriter of political songs and poems. In the 1950’s, during the height of the Cold War, Walter Reuther was elected President of the UAW. His first official action was to fire Sugar. Maurice and his wife Jane Sugar, who was an activist and union organizer of teachers, homesteaded over 100 acres of property in the Black Lake area of Michigan. At their deaths – he in the 1970s and she in the 1980s – a trust was created which formed the financial seed money for the founding of the Maurice and Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice in Detroit, Michigan.
In 1990, shortly after the death of Jane Sugar, a group of National Lawyers Guild national leaders, including NLG founding member Ernie Goodman, former National President Bill Goodman – both Trustees of the M & J Trust – and former national president Debra Evenson, used the endowment from the Sugar Trust to establish the Sugar Law Center. It brought to life a long-standing vision of creating a national public interest project of the NLG that would tackle the critical questions of the intersection between civil rights and economic justice. The Sugar Law Center began with a primary focus on plant closings and worker dislocation and Julie Hurwitz was the founding Director. Now, 32 years later, as a nationally recognized public interest workers rights’ law project, the work of the Sugar Law Center has expanded to take on issues of runaway corporate power, racism, community dislocation, gentrification, poverty, environmental injustice; women’s rights and many others.
Guest – Executive Director of the Sugar Law Center, John Philo. John has litigated cases in dozens of states representing low-wage workers, communities, and injured persons on matters of employment, constitutional, and tort law. John is also a former president of the Detroit Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and a contributing author to the National Lawyers Guild’s Employee and Union Member Guide to Labor Law and the Institute of Continuing Legal Education’s Torts: Michigan Law and Practice.
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Law and Disorder July 4, 2022
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Lead Up To Roe v. Wade Overturn
Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, its opponents have mounted a sustained effort to overturn it. The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society (which is funded largely with untraceable dark money by wealthy right-wingers, climate damaging industries and conservative think tanks) compiled lists of anti-choice judges. Samuel Alito was helped into his seat on the court by Leonard Leo, former executive vice president of the Federalist Society.
The same funding sources power the Attorney General’s Association, which is made up of 27 right wing attorneys general. The attorneys general bring their lawsuits in front of sympathetic judges whose appointments were secured by the same entities that supported them.
Donald Trump drew his three Supreme Court nominees – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – from those lists. In spite of their promises to adhere to stare decisis (which means respect for the court’s precedents) Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett all voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (which reaffirmed the central holding of Roe in 1992).
On June 24, five right-wing Christian zealots on the court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that abortion is no longer a fundamental constitutional right. Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion and Clarence Thomas joined it as well. Chief Justice John Roberts did not vote to overturn Roe and Casey.
Alito’s draft opinion, which was leaked to Politico in May, largely became the majority opinion in Dobbs. After oral argument in December, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett indicated in a straw poll that they were inclined to overturn Roe and Casey.
Although we knew that the court would likely erase the right to abortion, it still came as a shock when they actually did that in the Dobbs case.
The fallout has been swift. Twenty-six states have laws that could ban or severely limit abortion. Thirteen states had “trigger laws” that would immediately ban abortion. Five states with pre-Roe abortion bans could enforce them. And 14 states would ban abortions before fetal viability. Bans and restrictions on abortion would disproportionately affect poor women and people of color.
Guest – Law and Disorder co-host Marjorie Cohn, who has written extensively about the Supreme Court and reproductive rights, predicting in several articles that the Supreme Court would overrule Roe v. Wade. Marjorie is a former criminal defense attorney, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She has published several books and she writes a regular column for Truthout.
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Labor Notes Conference 2022
We live in ominous times. But one extremely hopeful development was the well-attended Labor Notes conference in Chicago over the June 19th weekend. Upwards of 4,000 mostly young workers from across the country came to the labor conference which was distinguished by its militancy and enthusiasm.
Speakers at the Friday night rally included Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union president who recently led the historic Amazon warehouse workers’ organizing drive on Staten Island.
Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, a multibillionaire and the second richest person in the United States. Also speaking was Michelle Eisen, the Starbucks barista from Buffalo who is helping to organize Starbucks workers. Starting at zero, 160 stores have unionized in the last six months.
Speaking last was Bernie Sanders who has personally donated tens of thousands of dollars to union organizing. He spoke about the income and money inequality in the U.S. Sanders said that between Bezos and Elon Musk (the world’s richest man), the two own more than the bottom 40% of the entire U.S. population and he added that the top one percent in our country own more than the bottom 90%. He said that after the pharmaceutical company Moderna received $3 billion in Covid money from the government, its recently retired CEO got a golden parachute worth $900 million.
This is why the Labor Notes conference was organized – to explore and struggle against such wealth inequality. The organizers understand that workers produce all wealth and that we can’t fight the one percent in the traditional ways.
The old bureaucrats and labor liberals in the AFL-CIO held a convention the week before in Philadelphia. They believe in “a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work.” The new militants who attended the Labor Notes conference understand that they may have to break the law, fight injunctions, risk fines, and mobilize sympathizers and other unions as well as the population in general. They believe in class struggle unionism.
Guest – Joshua DeVries is a long time rank and file union activist who attended the conference from his hometown of Austin, Texas. Joshua DeVries has been a local officer in Amalgamated Transit union and the Association of Flight Attendants as well as an organizer with the AFA. He writes for the magazine “Against The Current.”
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