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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 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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Law and Disorder June 27, 2022
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Extradition Of Journalist Julian Assange
On June 17, Priti Patel, the UK Home Secretary, ordered the extradition of journalist Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial on Espionage Act charges that could lead to 175 years in prison. The Obama administration, which prosecuted more whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined, decided not to file criminal charges against Assange. But Donald Trump’s regime indicted Assange for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. And Joe Biden’s government is continuing to pursue the extradition of Assange to the United States.
Assange has been confined in the UK for more than a decade. If he is extradited to the United States, he will be tried in the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the most conservative districts in the country. The judge to whom his case has been assigned jailed Chelsea Manning for refusing to appear before a grand jury investigating Assange.
Assange will appeal Patel’s decision. But if he is ultimately extradited, tried and convicted, it will pose a major threat to investigative journalism. People around the world are supporting Assange but the Biden administration is continuing Trump’s campaign to extradite Assange and try him in the United States.
Guest – Kevin Gosztola, an American journalist who writes about whistleblowers, WikiLeaks, national security and civil liberties. Kevin is managing editor of Shadowproof and he curates The Dissenter. He is producer and host of the weekly podcast Unauthorized Disclosure and co-author of Truth and Consequences: The US vs. Bradley Manning. Kevin has covered the Assange case extensively.
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Chicago Torture Cases Cost Taxpayers 210 Million
Sixty years ago, the great social satirist and comedian Lenny Bruce quipped that “Chicago is so corrupt, it is thrilling.“ Today the corruption may not be so transparent but the amount of money spent to protect and defend cops who kill and torture people is staggering.
A few years ago, the city of Chicago sold its parking meters to a private corporation even as it was closing public schools and mental health clinics ostensibly for lack of funding. But as of now and for the last 15 years, Chicago, Cook County and the State of Illinois has spent at least $212 million of taxpayer money for expenses in torture cases involving the infamous Chicago torturing cop, Jon Burge, and his crew. They operated in Chicago’s brutal Area 2 where they extracted false confessions from more than 125 African-American men through the use of torture.
$37.5 million of the $212 million has gone to what has been called “pinstripe patronage lawyers,“ who defended the police torturers. $19-1/2 million has been spent on special prosecutors in Cook County where Chicago is located. At least $38.7 million has been applied to pension payments for the offending cops, $7.9 million has been spent on the state Torture Commission and Court of Claims payouts, and finally, $108.2 million has gone for settlements, verdicts, and reparations. And the cases, and the payments, continue to this day and will continue into the future.
Guest – Chicago civil rights attorney Flint Taylor who led the litigation against Jon Burge and his torture crew. Taylor is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago and has represented dozens of clients subjected to torture and other police misconduct. He is the author of The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago. His most recent case involves the police murder of Joseph Lopez in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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