Here's a light one for the day.

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre we've seen a nationwide debate about gun control, guns, and their role in American society. One thing we've seen is that the anti-gun-control people see themselves as the true defenders of American liberty. If you listen to them they'll argue that widespread gun ownership is our indispensable bulwark against tyranny.

They also complain about civil libertarians who are strong defenders of the Bill of Rights, but somehow overlook the Second Amendment in our civil libertarian zeal.

So here's what we're hearing today from the anti-gun-control civil libertarians: They don't like what CNN talker Piers Morgan has been saying, so they want to kick him out of the country.

That's right: according to HuffPo, over 30,000 people have signed a petition calling for the deportation of Piers Morgan because he's in favor of gun control.

 It demands he be deported immediately for “exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.”

They're calling his support for gun control “a hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution”.

Apparently in their view freedom of speech isn't part of the Constitution. 

Robert Bork is dead, and that is, as Martha Stewart would say, a good thing.

The first thing that most of us learned of Robert Bork was in 1973, when as Solicitor General he cooperated with Richard Nixon's efforts at obstruction of justice by firing Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a date that will live in infamy as the Saturday Night Massacre. The Massacre was Nixon's attempt to prevent Cox, whom he had appointed special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate and other Nixon administration crimes, from gaining access to the tapes Nixon had secretly made of conversations in the White House. When Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both refused to fire Cox on Nixon's orders, and resigned instead, Bork was only too willing to do the deed. 

Fortunately, the effort was unsuccessful, Nixon's tapes were eventually unearthed, the firing of Cox was ruled to have been illegal, and Nixon finally made it out of town just ahead of the impeachment. Bork's effort to help Nixon with the coverup had failed.

This episode alone would have been enough to mark Bork as one of the greatest political criminals of our time. 

Fast forward almost fifteen years. Ronald Reagan is president and one of his less-remembered programs was his campaign to reverse the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement. Not only did he launch his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, famous primarily for the murders of three civil rights workers, but his presidency was marked by support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, support for racist policies at Bob Jones “University”, and racist attacks on welfare recipients.

For such a president Bork was the ideal candidate. With his academic and judicial credentials and his policy preferences that the federal government had no business trying to prevent private businesses from discriminating against black people or trying to prevent the Southern state and local governments from thwarting black people's right to vote, and that the Equal Protection Clause should never have been read to apply to women, he was everything Reagan wanted.

The first time I met our senior Senator, and now the senior member of the U.S. Senate, was with a group of activists urging Senator Leahy to oppose Bork . He generously gave us his time, probably an hour or more, and I left feeling confident that Senator Leahy would do everything he could to block Bork's confirmation. He didn't fail us.

The hero of this episode, though, was Senator Ted Kennedy, and I will reproduce in full his speech on why Bork would be such a blight on the Supreme Court.  

Mr. President, I oppose the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and I urge the Senate to reject it.

In the Watergate scandal of 1973, two distinguished Republicans — Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus — put integrity and the Constitution ahead of loyalty to a corrupt President. They refused to do Richard Nixon's dirty work, and they refused to obey his order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. The deed devolved on Solicitor General Robert Bork, who executed the unconscionable assignment that has become one of the darkest chapters for the rule of law in American history.

That act — later ruled illegal by a Federal court — is sufficient, by itself, to disqualify Mr. Bork from this new position to which he has been nominated. The man who fired Archibald Cox does not deserve to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Mr. Bork should also be rejected by the Senate because he stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court that would have placed him outside the mainstream of American constitutional jurisprudence in the 1960s, let alone the 1980s. He opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed the one-man one-vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He has said that the First Amendment applies only to political speech, not literature or works of art or scientific expression.

Under the twin pressures of academic rejection and the prospect of Senate rejection, Mr. Bork subsequently retracted the most neanderthal of these views on civil rights and the first amendment. But his mind-set is no less ominous today.

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks. Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.

The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term. President Reagan is still our President. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robert_Bork%27s_America

The United States was spared the injuries that would have inevitably flowed from the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, but we were not spared years of his bitter, hectoring screeds against the country that rejected him.

Conservatives love to show the bloody shirt of the Bork nomination, and they even invented a word, “borking”, to describe their view of his treatment in the confirmation process. The fact is, though, that Bork was rejected not because his positions were distorted, but because they were revealed. As far as we have to go as a country, in 1987 it was clear that Bork's extremist conservative ideology was far too far out of the American mainstream to survive the public scrutiny he received.

When Bork's confirmation failed Reagan's next choice was a very conservative but less well-known Anthony Kennedy, who evolved into a principled swing vote on the Court. We can all be glad that in the last twenty-five years that seat has been occupied by Kennedy and not by Bork.

 In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre and their threat to picket the funerals there's a petition on the White House site to have the Westboro Baptist Church “legally recognize[d] as a hate group”. It already has over 158,000 signatures.

Tempting as it is, you shouldn't sign it.

 First off, there is no such “legal recognition as a hate group”. It's a political label but it has no legal significance.

Second, and more importantly, this is a proposal to have the government single out one group for some kind of adverse treatment based on the religious or political views of that group. This is entirely antithetical to the First Amendment and the core values that underlie our system of government and way of life.

I take a back seat to nobody in my loathing of this organization. That is why they need and are entitled to the protection of the First Amendment.

There is no basis to claim that it isn't a bona fide church: plenty of church and religious groups espouse hateful ideas. Even churches that espouse hateful ideas are entitled to the protection of the First Amendment.

Granted, the Phelpses and their followers are undoubtedly among the vilest, most hateful people on the face of the earth.

On the other hand, so far as I know the Westboro Baptist Church has never done anything to actually hurt anybody.

They never killed anybody, burned down any buildings, or put a price on anyone's head for publishing a book or cartoon they didn't like.

 There's no sign that they ever harrassed or beat women and girls for wearing what they considered indecent clothing.

And there is certainly no evidence that they ever delivered thousands of children to the hands of child rapists, and then established religious edicts to prevent the exposure of the criminals. 

No, as far as I can see, the Westboro Baptist Church has done a lot less damage than almost any “mainstream” church.

Besides, it's not the popular ideas and groups who need the protection of the First Amendment.

So don't sign the petition. Hate the Westboros all you like, but don't ask the government to use the power of the state to silence them. 

If we start taking away rights from the Westboros because they express political views we don't like, where do we stop, and who will protect us when someone tries to silence us.

I'm finally getting to this story that kind of got buried around election time, but it really shouldn't be.

One of the most effective advocates in the State House is my friend and colleague Laura Ziegler. She's worked for many years as a paralegal, representing New Yorkers in involuntary mental health cases, and she's lived in Vermont for years, spending time at the Legislature on mental health issues, completely on her own.

Laura's general method of operation is to spend hours reading bills, court precedents from other jurisdictions, scholarly articles, and then use what she's read, together with her great memory of the law and her powers of analysis to bug the professional advocates and lobbyists in the building and let us know what we're missing, why what we're missing is important, and why we have to pay more attention to somem overlooked issue.

I think she realizes that her attentions are sometimes inconvenient to the people she's trying to talk to, but she also knows, as to the people who know her in the State House, that she's pretty much always right. 

Laura's not the kind of person who gets a lot of recognition or appreciation, but that changed this year. On November 10, at its annual meeting, the Vermont chapter of the ACLU honored her with their David W. Curtis Civil Liberties Award.

Here's the citation:

 The American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont

presents its Thirtieth Annual David W. Curtis Civil Liberties Award to

Laura Ziegler

 for protecting the rights of psychiatric survivors and people with disabilities and for her steadfast commitment to government accountability.

 Laura Ziegler has been a tireless, self-appointed advocate for citizens who are frequently marginalized and unheard in our society. For them, she simply seeks a measure of justice. In her advocacy work, Laura often clashes with public officials. She files many public records requests to learn the details of government actions. She attends public meetings to understand and follow difficult issues, often reminding participants of past actions they did or did not take. She complains when she feels the open meeting law is being violated. But she also expresses appreciation for a good law passed or a bad one defeated. A society could ask for no better public citizen, and we are proud to honor Laura with our David Curtis Civil Liberties Award.

 November 10, 2012

Montpelier, Vermont

I can't think of anyone more deserving of this recognition. 

How badly do the police need Tasers?

 Pretty badly. After all, if police in Nashua, New Hampshire hadn't had Tasers this woman might have gotten away with the crime of buying more iPhones than the Apple store policy allowed.

 In a story that's bound to be widely picked up, local TV news stations in New England were having a field day Wednesday with blurry cellphone video of a tiny 44-year-old Chinese woman being held to the ground and tasered outside an Apple Store by a pair of Nashua, N.H., police.

Yes, according to CNN, the woman, who apparently speaks no English, bought two iPhones on Friday and was sent away when she tried to buy more for relatives in China. When she ordered more online and returned to the store to pick them up they again refused her and told her to leave.

She got upset, they called the police, and the police decided to hit her with 50,000 volts.

What I found most striking in this story is that the police didn't even pretend that they needed to do it to protect the safety of the officers or bystanders.

 “The officer approached her, told her she wasn't welcome in the store, and she refused to leave,” Nashua police captain Bruce Hansen told WCVB TV. He described the use of electroshock weapons as standard procedure when a subject refuses to obey a lawful order or resists arrest.

The Republicans in Michigan's legislature are turning the clocks back on decades of progress for workers' rights, as they prepare to take the final steps to enact Right to Work for Less legislation today.

To pass the legislation the governor and legislative Republicans engaged in blatant and high-handed departures from regular process. They released the bills at 11:00 this morning, moved the bills directly to the floor without holding any committee hearings, locked the doors of the State House to keep out opponents (a plan thwarted by an injunction obtained by organized labor), and are reported to have brought in seat-fillers to make sure there was no space in the chamber for the bills' opponents. Following the lead of Wisconsin's anti-union thugs, they also created a special exemption for police and firefighters to minimize opposition from supporters of public safety workers.

Why was it so important to ram the bill through today? Because the legislature is in a lame duck session and in the new year there would not be enough Republicans to pass it. 

I lived in Michigan for a long time and I hate to see this. People fought and risked their lives in Michigan to create the United Auto Workers. Unions are what made Michigan great. Unions, and especially the UAW, made it possible for working people across the state to enjoy the benefits of the middle class: homeownership, reliable health care, workplace safety, and higher education for their children.

Of course, these advantages come at a price to the Kochs and Devosesof the world, and as a consequence the ruling class took this opportunity to ram through this legislation and eliminate any chance for the workers to have a voice on issues that affect their lives.

While some procedural steps remain, the outcome is clear. Unlike in Wisconsin, Michigan lacks the kind of procedural rules that allowed the Democrats to delay passage of union-busting legislation, although Senate Democrats did walk out before the vote was taken. No, the bosses in Michigan have won. 

Here's just a quick note on the Currier murder case, one I haven't seen elsewhere.

Although the press in Vermont has covered the story extensively, it's worth taking a look at this story in Salon this morning. 

Here's what Salon says in a report originally published by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

A confessed serial killer and bank robber who took his own life in an Alaska jail cell on Sunday was exposed to the racist and anti-Semitic beliefs of Christian Identity theology during his childhood in a rural corner of Washington state, Hatewatch has learned.

If you read today's article in VtDigger you know that the Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA) has confirmed that they are talking to Vince Illuzzi to take over the job as legislative affairs director. The job is available because Cassandra Gekas, who had confirmed just before the election that she had been offered the job, has decided not to take it.

The question I have to ask about this story is a simple one: are they crazy?

We know that Illuzzi has had good relations with organized labor, and over the years he has run for office with the endorsement, if not the active support, of some of Vermont's biggest unions. Still, if VSEA thinks that Vince Illuzzi is a friend to Vermont's working people they're kidding themselves.

I'll just talk about one chapter in recent history. In 2010 Vermont's unemployment compensation trust fund was in trouble, closing in on a zero balance. This wasn't surprising, since the economy had collapsed,, Vermont, like the rest of the country, was experiencing high unemployent, so many more people were drawing on the fund.

In addition, for decades Vermont law had systematically underfunded the system with artificially low caps on payroll levels subject to the unemployment tax. In other words, Vermont businesses had received the benefit of having their employees covered by the unemployment system but had not had to pay taxes at levels needed to sustain the system. We had undercollected from employers, and that led directly to the fund balance shortages in 2009-10.

There had to be a legislative solution, and advocates for unions, unemployed people, and employers spent hours at the State House trying to work out a solution. The advocates for the unemployed had to fight hard to limit attacks on benefit levels, expansion of disqualifications, and other anti-worker proposals.

What did Vince Illuzzi propose?

For one thing, he proposed $22 million in new taxes on Vermont's workers. As Peter Hirschfeld reported in Vermont Today:

 A proposal under consideration in the Senate would raise up to $22 million annually by assessing a new tax on the vast majority of working residents. The new revenue, Senate lawmakers say, could allow the state to rescue the bankrupt fund without cutting the benefits of out-of-work Vermonters. The additional money, according to Sen. Vince Illuzzi, would also tamp down the tax increases on businesses that will be needed to return the fund to solvency.

You got that, right? Illuzzi's proposal was to raise taxes on workers specifically in order to avoid raising taxes on businesses. This tax was such an extreme measure that even the anti-worker Douglas administration would not support it.

 For another thing, the bill that Illuzzi introduced, S. 290 (technically it was a committee bill, but it was a bill from the committee he chaired) included other anti-worker provisions. His proposal, which became law, was to slash unemployment benefits by imposing a one-week waiting period on benefits for newly eligible workers. While couched as merely a delay and not a cut, since most workers don't exhaust their benefits the waiting period actually reduces the total benefits they receive by one week's worth.

His bill also included harsher treatment for workers who are disqualified for benefits because they were fired for misconduct in connection with their employment.

The cuts and other program changes would have saved money by cutting benefits to unemployed workers by $100 million. 

Fortunately, Democrats were able to limit, roll back, or sunset some of the worst provisions of Illuzzi's bill. The bill would have been a lot worse, and specifically a lot worse for workers, if Illuzzi had gotten his way.

There are plenty of organizations in the State House who hire lobbyists without regard to ideology. To a degree, if you know your way around the building and do your homework you can do a job even for a client you don't really agree with. Traditionally, though, unions rely on union people to represent them in the building; it's seen as more than a job.

While Illuzzi has a reputation of being a determined fighter for the things he really wants, is there any reason to think that he is committed to the cause of workers in Vermont? 

Just a little point of comparison here.

Here's a picture of what Occupy is doing now.

 As is now being reported in the Detroit Free Press:

  NEW YORK — The social media savvy that helped Occupy Wall Street protesters create a grassroots global movement last year is proving to be a strength in the wake of Superstorm Sandy as members and organizers of the group fan out across New York to deliver aid, including hot meals, medicine and blankets. They're the ones who took food and water to Glenn Nisall, a 53-year-old resident of Queens' hard-hit and isolated Rockaway section who lost power and lives alone, with no family nearby.

And in the Times:

ON Wednesday night, as a fierce northeaster bore down on the weather-beaten Rockaways, the relief groups with a noticeable presence on the battered Queens peninsula were these: the National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Police and Sanitation Departments — and Occupy Sandy, a do-it-yourself outfit recently established by Occupy Wall Street.

 So the response from Occupy: We Got This. Go to the page and you'll see link after link of ways the Occupy movement is helping people hurt by Hurricane Sandy.

 And it doesn't stop there. Occupy Wall Street has been making headlines again thanks to its new role as the main source of mutual aid to those affected by Hurricane Sandy. In addition to supplying blankets, food and clean water to those who are still without power and shelter, the OWS movement recently announced a new plan to bolster the 99%. 

 Through a new effort called the”Rolling Jubilee,” Occupy Wall Street plans to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. This brilliant idea has been in development for months, and it has the power to mobilize the power of crowdfunding to help those who are struggling in a way that has never been seen before. 

And the response from the Tea Party? This is Obama's Katrina. We should be trying to hit him hard on this!

Ask me if I'm surprised.

Here's a quick non-election diary. (Might as well get used to it.)

If you're a member of the Vermont chapter of the ACLU you know that the annual meeting is coming up this Saturday at National Life in Montpelier. This year's meeting should be of interest to GMD readers because the keynote speaker, Garret Keizer, is the author of a new book about privacy, which I commend to your attention. 

One of the activities of the annual meeting, and you need not be present to participate, is the election of seven members of the ACLU-Vt board of directors. Because this is the group of people that will give direction to the organization in the coming years, I encourage everyone who's a member to fill out their ballot and send it in even if you can't attend the meeting.

If you haven't voted yet I would like to encourage you to particularly support two candidates whom I know to be effective voices for civil liberties and the values I think most of our readers here are committed to.

First is Euan Bear of Bakersfield. Regular readers here may not know the name, but will recognize the contributions of nanuqFC, her nom de GMD. Euan is a lifelong writer and activist, working hard for civil rights and civil liberties, LGBT empowerment, and the rights of those who would be considered unpopular minorities. Even when you don't see her posting here her editing and political insights contribute to making GMD the great source for news and political analysis that it is. I greatly value her work and her friendship. In addition, her attention to detail and parliamentary procedure qualifies her to make a unique and possibly irreplaceable contribution to the work of the ACLU.

Second is Jeffrey Dworkin, a Montpelier lawyer and psychologist. I got to know Jeff a few years ago when he was appointed to chair the citizens' committee evaluting whether the city of Montpelier should acquire Tasers for its police force. The committee's report was so exhaustive that it is destined to be the starting point for any serious consideration of Taser acquisition and use by law enforcement in Vermont, and after consideration of the work of the Committee the proposal to acquire Tasers was dropped. Jeff's experience and knowledge make him a great candidate for the ACLU board.

I know that there are other great candidates for the Board, and if I knew them I'm sure I could say very positive things about most of them, but from my own personal knowledge I think that Euan and Jeff are deserving of your consideration and support.