Jim Crow Laws – immigrationcourtside.com

FOR TRUMP & HIS GOP, BOGUS “RULE OF LAW” ARGUMENTS ARE MERELY TOOLS TO BE USED FOR PERSONAL AND POLITICAL CORRUPTION: “Trump learned to see the law as Cohn did: ‘not as a system of rules to be obeyed . . . but as a potent weapon to be used against his adversaries.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-legal-strategy-if-you-cant-beat-the-case-beat-the-system/2019/11/21/1555586a-f998-11e9-8190-6be4deb56e01_story.html

David Farenthold in the Washington Post:

Donald Trump’s friend, lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn had an adage: “F— the law,” he liked to say, according to a new book by attorney James D. Zirin. “Who’s the judge?” He meant that, although idealists might imagine that the courts were august and impartial, the judiciary was in fact made up of people who could be bullied or bamboozled or bought off. To Cohn, politics was a brutal and unfair game, and the law was just an extension of politics, with extra paperwork. If you understood that, he believed, you could get a huge head start on the idealists.

For a young Trump, this was a foundational lesson, according to Zirin. In his book “Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits,” Zirin argues that Trump learned to see the law as Cohn did: “not as a system of rules to be obeyed . . . but as a potent weapon to be used against his adversaries.” Trump sued often but rarely won big. Winning in court wasn’t always the point: The lawsuit itself was the thing, a tool of intimidation cloaked in legalese, an outgoing missile that left your enemies buried in costs and hassle. That approach had costs for Trump, too. But he could bear them. He lost friends, wives, lawyers and business partners — but always found new ones, who thought their fate would be different.

. . . .

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Go to the link to read the rest of the review.

Trump has betrayed his country and everyone around him. His “skill” is that he keeps his gang of gullible GOP sycophants believing that he will treat them differently from everyone else, right up to the time of the final betrayal.

Anytime the word “law” comes out of Trump’s mouth or is uttered by one of his sycophants, you can be sure that a stream of outrageous lies is about to follow.

It’s also worth remembering that the entire Jim Crow Era was cloaked in a bogus use of the “rule of law” and BS about “states’ rights” while the “justice” system, including many morally and intellectually corrupt “judges” and “prosecutors” at all levels, were “weaponizing” the law to deny the Constitutional and human rights of African-American citizens!

PWS

11-25-19

GO FIGURE: BKavs Stands Up For Rights Of African-Americans, While Clarence Thomas Presents Incoherent & Disingenuous Defense Of Jim Crow!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/brett-kavanaugh-clarence-thomas-racist-juries-mississippi.html

Mark Joseph Stern reports for Slate:

Much of the Supreme Court’s 7–2 decision in Flowers v. Mississippi on Friday reads like a nightmare. The facts are straight out of the Jim Crow South: A white Mississippi prosecutor, Doug Evans, prosecuted a black man, Curtis Flowers, for the exact same crime six times in search of a capital conviction that might stick. In the process, Evans struck 41 of 42 black prospective jurors, an obvious attempt to secure an all-white jury. Several convictions were overturned due to flagrant prosecutorial misconduct. At Flowers’ sixth trial, however, Evans finally got a death sentence upheld by the Mississippi Supreme Court. Can that punishment possibly comport with the Constitution’s command of equal protection?

In a decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the U.S. Supreme Court said no, reversing Flowers’ conviction in light of obvious racial bias. To Kavanaugh’s credit, his opinion confronts Evans’ racism head-on and bolsters constitutional safeguards against prosecutorial attempts to purge minorities from juries. Meanwhile, Justice Clarence Thomas penned a scorching dissent, joined in part by Justice Neil Gorsuch, savaging the majority for trying to “boost its self-esteem” while “needlessly prolong[ing] the suffering of four victims’ families.” Thomas, in fact, is eager to overturn decades of precedent limiting prosecutors’ ability to exclude minority jurors on the basis of their race.

The facts of Flowers are simply appalling. In 1996, someone murdered four people at Tardy Furniture in Winona, Mississippi; Evans, the district attorney, decided Flowers was the killer. The evidence against Flowers was astonishingly meager: It rested largely on eyewitness testimonies, provided weeks and months after the crime, that often provided conflicting details. No eyewitnesses came forward until the state offered a $30,000 reward, and several later reported being coerced by prosecutors into implicating Flowers. Investigators never found DNA evidence or fingerprints tying Flowers to the murder. Instead, they identified a single particle of gunshot residue on Flowers’ hand—which, they acknowledged, could have come from the police car that took him to the station, or from the fireworks he set off the day before.

Throughout the six trials, three “jailhouse snitches” testified that Flowers confessed to them; each later recanted, admitting that they had lied. One conceded that he fabricated the confession to receive a sentence reduction. The victims were executed with chilling efficiency, several execution-style, yet Flowers had no criminal history; he did not even own a gun. His cousin, Doyle Simpson, owned the gun allegedly used in the killings. Multiple eyewitnesses saw a man who looked like Simpson outside Tardy Furniture on the morning of the crime. Their evidence was not contradictory or coerced.

Nonetheless, Evans relentlessly targeted Flowers, engaging in a quest to remove black Mississippians from the jury each time. He did so using peremptory strikes, which allow trial attorneys to strike prospective jurors without providing a reason. In 1986’s Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court attempted to come up with a tool to combat racist peremptory strikes: If a defendant challenged a strike on racial grounds, prosecutors had to provide a “neutral explanation” for their decision. The court explained that the Constitution “forbids the States to strike black [jurors] on the assumption that they will be biased in a particular case simply because the defendant is black.” Otherwise, the “core guarantee of equal protection … would be meaningless.”

Nonetheless, at Flowers’ first trial, Evans used peremptory strikes to remove every potential black juror, obtaining an all-white jury that sentenced Flowers to death. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed because the prosecution acted “in bad faith” by baselessly disputing the credibility of a defense witness and mentioning facts not in evidence. Next time around, Evans once again used his peremptory strikes to remove all black jurors, but this time the trial judge objected and seated one black juror. The jury convicted Flowers, but its verdict was reversed again for essentially the same reasons.

Third time up: Prosecutors used all their peremptory strikes to remove black prospective jurors. Only one black juror was seated. The jury sentenced Flowers to death, but the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed, finding a Batson violation. At the fourth and fifth trials, prosecutors ran out of peremptory challenges and had to settle for juries with multiple blacks. Both times, the jury failed to reach a verdict, resulting in mistrials. Finally, at Flowers’ sixth trial, prosecutors used five out of six peremptory strikes on black potential jurors. A jury of 11 whites and one black sentenced Flowers to death. He argued another Batson violation, but the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld his sentence, so he appealed to SCOTUS.

Technically, only the peremptory strikes at Flowers’ sixth trial are at issue in this case. But Kavanaugh recounted the history of Evans’ racist machinations and clarified that this “historical evidence” matters. Across Flowers’ many trials, he wrote:

[T]he State employed its peremptory strikes to remove as many black prospective jurors as possible. The State appeared to proceed as if Batson had never been decided. The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury.

“We cannot ignore that history,” the justice concluded, when assessing Evans’ removal of blacks from the jury at Flowers’ most recent trial. “We cannot take that history out of the case.”

Kavanaugh also pointed to “dramatically disparate questioning of black and white prospective jurors in the jury selection process for Flowers’ sixth trial.” Prosecutors “asked the five black prospective jurors who were struck a total of 145 questions.” Yet they asked “the 11 seated white jurors a total of 12 questions.” Put differently, each prospective black juror was grilled with an average of 29 questions; each seated white juror was asked an average of one.

Why? By “asking a lot of questions of the black prospective jurors,” Kavanaugh wrote, “a prosecutor can try to find some pretextual reason—any reason—that the prosecutor can later articulate to justify what is in reality a racially motivated strike.” But a court “confronting that kind of pattern cannot ignore it.” This “lopsidedness” can demonstrate that the prosecutor was attempting to “disguise a discriminatory intent.”

Assessing all this damning evidence, Kavanaugh found that prosecutors struck at least one potential black juror from Flowers’ sixth trial on the basis of race. He tossed out the death sentence and sent the case back down to Mississippi for a new trial. Evans still serves as district attorney and could handle Flowers’ seventh trial—even though SCOTUS has now made clear that his conduct in this case has been permanently tainted by racism.

In dissent, Thomas accused the majority of taking Flowers’ case because it wanted to “scorn” Mississippi state courts, or perhaps “because the case has received a fair amount of media attention.” (The media, he warned, often prefers “to titillate rather than to educate and inform.”) Thomas dismissed Kavanaugh’s opinion as “manifestly incorrect,” insisting that Evans had perfectly good reasons to strike five black prospective jurors from the sixth trial. And he wrote that the majority “builds its decision around the narrative that this case has a long history of race discrimination. This narrative might make for an entertaining melodrama, but it has no basis in the record.” (It does; Thomas just rewrites the record to excuse every single instance of Evans’ egregious racial bias.)

Gorsuch joined those portions of the dissent, but declined to sign onto its most radical assertion: that Batson itself should be overruled. Black defendants tried by all-white jurors created by racist prosecutors, Thomas wrote, suffer “no legally cognizable injury.” The accused suffer no equal protection violation when they are tried by a jury selected on the basis of race. Moreover, prosecutors should be permitted to make “generalizations” about black jurors, because “race matters in the courtroom.” Thomas ended his screed by berating the court for “needlessly prolong[ing] the suffering of four victims’ families” in an effort to “boost its self-esteem,” and declared: “If the Court’s opinion today has a redeeming quality, it is this: The State is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers again.”

It’s an encouraging sign that Kavanaugh just ignored Thomas’ dissent, as it is really too wacky, too hostile, and aggrieved to merit a response. Rather, with a majority of the court behind him, Kavanaugh made the case that courts can identify discriminatory intent without a smoking gun of overt racism. Evans never used racial epithets in the courtroom or stated his desire for a white jury; his actions alone told the court everything it needed to know about his motivations. This Supreme Court may not always confront unconstitutional prejudice with such clear-eyed pragmatism, but it’s worth celebrating a decision that enforces constitutional limits on racist prosecutions.

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I admit to not being a big BKavs fan. But, I appreciate his strong and courageous leadership on this case.

PWS

06-23-19

EUGENE ROBINSION @ WASHPOST & DAVID BROOKS @ NY TIMES: GOP IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONISTS’ PROPOSALS TO CUT LEGAL IMMIGRATION LEVELS HAVE NO RATIONAL BASIS! – That’s Going To Be A Big Problem In Trying To Forge A “Compromise!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-trying-to-make-america-white-again/2018/01/29/9afa7afa-053d-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html

Robinson writes:

“. . . .

There’s a simple question here: Do you believe in America or not?

Throughout its history, the country has accepted waves of mostly low-skilled immigrants — German, Irish, Italian, Eastern European, now Latino. There are highly skilled immigrants, too; African newcomers, for example, are better-educated than the U.S. population as a whole, and an estimated 63 percent of people holding “computer and mathematical” jobs in Silicon Valley are foreign-born. But most immigrants over the years have arrived bearing not much more than grit, ambition and a dream.

Does an influx of workers with entry-level skills tend to depress wages? That’s the wrong question. Instead, we should be asking why the federal minimum wage is so low as to be almost irrelevant.

And we should recognize that immigration gives the United States a tremendous competitive advantage. In other advanced countries, populations are aging rapidly. Immigration provides a steady stream of younger workers whose brain and brawn keep programs such as Medicare and Social Security viable.

The only coherent — if despicable — arguments for Trump’s plan are racial and cultural. The way they used to put it in the Jim Crow days was succinct: White is right.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/east-germany-immigration-usa.html

Meanwhile, over at the NY Times, Brooks writes:

“. . . .

The results are just as clear as in the German case. Between 2014 and 2016 the counties that embrace diversity accounted for 72 percent of the nation’s increased economic output and two-thirds of the new jobs. The approximately 85 percent of counties that support restrictionists like Donald Trump accounted for a measly 28 percent of the growth.

Republicans’ problem is that since George W. Bush left town they’ve become the East Germans of the 21st century. They have embraced a cultural model that produces low growth and low dynamism. No wonder they want to erect a wall.

Progressives say Republicans oppose immigration because of bigotry. But it’s not that simple. It’s more accurate to say restrictionists are stuck in a mono-cultural system that undermines their own values: industry, faithfulness and self-discipline. Of course they react with defensive animosity to the immigrants who out-hustle and out-build them. You’d react negatively, too, if confronted with people who are better versions of what you wish you were yourself.”

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You can can read the complete versions of both op-eds, which I highly recommend, at the above links.

Yup!
When you’re coming from the same places as Jim Crow and the East Germans, there is no acceptable “rational basis” for the restrictionist agenda. It’s bad for America as well as for immigrants. But, it’s difficult or impossible to make rational arguments against deeply held, factually incorrect, irrational beliefs, particularly those based on racial, economic, cultural, and class bias. That’s probably why rational “immigration reform” has been, and remains, so difficult to achieve.

And, having seen thousands of migrants and their families come before me at the Arlington Immigration Court over the years, gotten to know many of their stories, and having represented immigrants, entrepreneurs, and businesses during my time in private practice, there is no doubt that Brooks is right: they “out-hustle and out-build” many of those “native-born” Americans who despise and look down on them.

And, it’s not just the doctors, professors, and top execs — folks who pound nails, lay foundations, make food, sweep floors, put on roofs , and pick our produce are also performing essential services that keep our country going — and, in many if not all cases, doing it better than the rest of us could or would. Really, how long would YOU last picking lettuce or laying shingles on a 100 degree day? And, how GOOD would you really be at it? There is more “skill” to so-called “unskilled” work than most of us in the “privileged classes” want to admit!

PWS

01-30-18

MARK JOSEPH STERN IN SLATE: Rule Of Scofflaws! — Trump, Sessions Have No Regard For Law Unless It Suits Their Disingenuous Purpose!

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/09/the_trump_administration_s_lawless_attacks_on_sanctuary_cities.html

Stern writes:

“The Trump administration’s latest attempt to punish sanctuary cities hit a snag on Friday when a federal court ruled the Justice Department cannot withhold public safety grants from jurisdictions that refuse to assist federal immigration authorities. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had attempted to prevent cities and states from receiving these funds unless they cooperatedwith immigration officials’ crackdown on undocumented immigrants. The court held that Sessions in fact has no power to attach new restrictions to the grants, rendering most of his new rules unlawful.

MARK JOSEPH STERN

Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate. He covers the law and LGBTQ issues.

Friday’s decision marked the second time a court has blocked Sessions’ attempts to penalize sanctuary cities by depriving them of federal grants. It also comes on the heels of a sweeping ruling that froze the most controversial provisions of Texas’ new anti–sanctuary cities bill. Earlier this month, the White House declared that Donald Trump is “restoring law and order to our immigration system.” But in their haste to adopt a restrictionist immigration regime, Trump, Sessions, and their fellow Republicans have shown a consistent disdain for federal statutes and constitutional protections.

Consider Sessions’ latest sanctuary cities imbroglio. In July, the attorney general created new criteria for Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance grants, which dispense hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local law enforcement. Under these rules, jurisdictions would not be eligible for Byrne grants unless they collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Most pertinent here, law enforcement officials would have to give ICE agents access to local jails and, if the agency is interested in detaining an undocumented immigrant, notify ICE 48 hours before that person is set to be released. Chicago sued, alleging that the new rules were illegal.

Where does Sessions get the authority to impose these conditions on Byrne grants? Nowhere, as Judge Harry D. Leinenweber of the Northern District of Illinois pointed out in his ruling siding with Chicago. The Constitution grants Congress, not the executive branch, authority to impose conditions on federal funding. And Congress has never authorized the Justice Department, which is part of the executive branch, to force Byrne grantees to work with ICE. Sessions simply usurped Congress’ authority to make new rules.

When Chicago sued Sessions over the Byrne conditions in August, the attorney general put out a Trumpian statement asserting that the city “proudly violate[s] the rule of law” by protecting undocumented immigrants. But as Leinenweber explained on Friday, it was Sessions, not Chicago, who was acting lawlessly.

It’s surprising that Sessions would try to meddle with Byrne grants given that his first foray into sanctuary city–bashing failed so spectacularly. In Trump’s first days in office, the president issued an executive order directing the attorney general and Homeland Security secretary to withhold all federal grants and funding from sanctuary jurisdictions. Multiple cities quickly filed suit to defend their sanctuary policies. Sessions’ Justice Department, which apparently realized this order would violate multiple constitutional provisions, told a federal court that in reality, the order was nothing more than a narrow warning to sanctuary cities that the government would enforce current grant conditions.

In April, U.S. District Judge William Orrick blocked the order as an unconstitutional abomination. In his decision, Orrick essentially mocked the Justice Department, writing that he would not accept the DOJ’s “implausible” interpretation as it would transform Trump’s order into “an ominous, misleading, and ultimately toothless threat.” Instead, he analyzed the text of the order and found that it infringed upon constitutional separation of powers; coerced and commandeered local jurisdictions in violation of the 10^thAmendment; and ran afoul of basic due process principles.

The White House promptly complained that Orrick “unilaterally rewrote immigration policy for our Nation” in an “egregious overreach.” Ironically, that is almost exactly what Trump had done through his executive order, illegally attaching new conditions to federal funds without congressional approval. Orrick had merely enforced the law; it was Trump who tried to change it unilaterally.

Neither of the Trump administration’s unlawful immigration power-grabs is as startling as SB 4, a Texas bill targeting sanctuary cities that Sessions’ Justice Department has defended in court. Confident in their measure’s legislative success, Texas Republicans turned SB 4 into a compendium of the most draconian possible attacks on sanctuary jurisdictions. The bill compelled local police to enforce immigration law, cooperate with ICE agents, and detain potentially undocumented immigrants; it also censored local officials who wished to speak out against the law. Law enforcement officers who ran afoul of SB 4 would face massive fines, jail time, and removal from office. Government employees who criticized the measure could also be fined and stripped of their positions.”

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Let’s get this straight: the “rule of law” to Sessions means laws aimed disproportionately at Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, undocumented migrants, non-white immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, ethnic communities, jurisdictions that voted for Democrats, legal marijuana users and businesses, innocent victims of civil forfeitures, and “leakers” (many would say “whistleblowers”) who are career civil servants. In other words law enforcement that in some disturbing ways parallels the “Jim Crow” laws in Alabama and other Southern States to which Sessions would apparently like to return (only with a greater emphasis on targeting Latinos, rather than Blacks, although he has little use for the latter now that the confirmation process is complete during which he “conned” a couple of Blacks into saying he wasn’t a racist.)

I remember from my youth hypocritical Southern racists like George Wallace asserting the false mantle of “the rule of law” and “states rights” for enforcing blatantly discriminatory racial laws while stomping on the actual legal and constitutional rights, and often lives, of Black citizens. Sessions has little or no intention of enforcing laws relating to civil rights protections, voting rights, protections for LGBTQ individuals, protections against local police abuses, due process for migrants in and outside of the U.S. Immigration Court process, environmental protection, constitutional conditions of detention, and ethics. Sessions is clearly a liar, if not a perjurer (which he might be) under legal definitions.

We should all be concerned that this totally unqualified and disingenuous individual has been put in charge of the U.S. justice system. I’ve commented earlier on the glaring unsuitability of individuals like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton to be governing a state with a significant Hispanic population.

And, Stern’s article didn’t even raise Trump’s greatest and most audacious abuse of the rule of law: his totally unjustified and inappropriate abuse of the Presidential Pardon authority by pardoning the unrepentant, unapologetic “Racist Joe.” Think about what “Racist Joe” stands for, as described by a U.S. District Judge who found him guilty of contempt of court after trial for his continuing, knowing, and intentional abuses of the constitutional rights of Latino citizens and prisoners, among others. In what way does “Racist Joe” deserve a pardon? How would you feel if you were a Hispanic citizen or a detainee who had his or her constitutional rights intentionally violated and was victimized by this arrogant, bullying, racist? The innocent suffer while the guilty go unpunished. What kind of “rule of law” is that?

Then think of all the GOP “politicos” who “palled around” with “Racist Joe” and his toxic sidekick Kris Kobach and even sought their endorsements! That’s because it would help with the racist, White Supremacist “core vote” that has allowed the GOP to gain control of much of the U.S. governing structure notwithstanding the party’s extremist views and generally destructive agenda.

This is very reminiscent of how the “White Southern racist base” helped the Democrats maintain a stranglehold on government for the bulk of the mid-20th Century. Assume that the “Trump base” is 20% of the electorate and only 15% fit my foregoing description. That means without the racist White Supremacist vote, the GOP and Trump would have polled around 31% of the popular vote, not enough to win even with the idiosyncrasies of our electoral system that favor the GOP minority!

PWS

09=19-17

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