“No More Immunity From Punishment”: At Last, Violence Against Women Act Lets Tribes Prosecute Non-Native Domestic Abusers
Two years after Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, Native American tribes can finally take advantage of one of the law’s most significant updates: a provision that allows tribal courts to investigate and prosecute non-Native men who abuse Native women on reservations.
Starting Saturday, tribes can claim jurisdiction over non-Native men who commit crimes of domestic violence, dating violence or who violate a protection order against a victim who lives on tribal land. Until now, that jurisdiction has fallen to federal or state law enforcement, who are often hours away from reservations and lack the resources to respond. The result has effectively allowed non-Native abusers immunity from punishment.
For the first time, tribal law enforcement will now have the ability to intervene.
“I want to encourage all tribal governments to get this law on their books,” said Juana Majel of the National Congress of American Indians. “On most reservations, there are a handful of bad actors who have figured out how to slip between jurisdictional boundaries. They need to get the message. If they continue to assault our women, we will prosecute and put them in jail.”
There are epidemic levels of domestic violence on tribal lands. Three out of five Native women have been assaulted in their lifetimes, and 34 percent will be raped, according to the National Congress of American Indians. Getting to the heart of the VAWA provision, 59 percent of assaults against Native women take place at or near a private residence, and, as of 2010, 59 percent of Native women were married to non-Native men.
On some reservations, Native women are murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average.
House Republicans nearly torpedoed the entire VAWA bill in 2013 because they opposed the new protections for Native victims of abuse. Vice President Joe Biden, an original Senate sponsor of the 1994 law, stepped in and negotiated directly with then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). Congress ultimately reauthorized VAWA, but with Democrats providing the bulk of votes for it.
Three tribes have already been granted the new jurisdiction as part of a 2014 pilot project authorized by VAWA. Those tribes — the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and the Tulalip Tribes — had to submit applications laying out their proposed codes and procedures, and were approved by the U.S. attorney general. To date, they have charged a total of 26 offenders.
As of Saturday, tribal courts may take advantage of the new authority with only the approval of their tribal council. The courts must provide people with the same rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.
“This is a major step forward to protect the safety of Native people, and we thank all members of Congress for passing the Violence Against Women Act of 2013 and recognizing tribal authority,” said Brian Cladoosby, president of the National Congress of American Indians.
In related news, Acting Associate Attorney General Stuart Delery on Friday gave the green light to two tribes to move forward immediately with the new jurisdiction. The Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation, are both large tribes in rural areas with larger populations, which means they can be a model for other large rural tribes interested in rolling out the new authority.
By: Jennifer Bendery, The Blog, The Huffington Post, March 6, 2015
“A Contest Of Anti-Tax Purity”: The Fight For The Soul Of The Republican Party Is Over: The Rich Won Again
It was just eight months ago that a New York Times Magazine profile giddily described the rise of “a small band of reform conservatives, sometimes called reformicons, who believe the health of the G.O.P. hinges on jettisoning its age-old doctrine — orgiastic tax-cutting, the slashing of government programs, the championing of Wall Street — and using an altogether different vocabulary, backed by specific proposals, that will reconnect the party to middle-class and low-income voters.”
After the Republican Party had turned itself into a machine committed relentlessly to the singular goal of cutting taxes for the rich, the reformicons seemed to be poised to take control of the party’s intellectual apparatus.
The reformicons always assumed they could bypass Congress and focus all their attention on developing an innovative platform for a presidential candidate. (This was a shaky plan to begin with, as a prospective Republican president would need to sign something passed by Congress.) But as the Republican candidates have formulated their early platforms, the party’s center of gravity, rather than jettisoning its hoary policy of orgiastic tax-cutting, has instead continued and even deepened its fervor.
The Republican Party’s determination to cut taxes for the rich was never rooted in electoral calculation. (Indeed, this has always been a handicap for the party to overcome.) It arose from the fact that extremely powerful forces within the party, including but not limited to its funders, believed in it as a matter of ideology as well as self-interest. The plutocrats initially held back in the face of the reformicon movement, perhaps unaccustomed to facing any challenge within the party, which for decades has treated their doctrine as holy writ revealed to the world by Reagan himself.
They were never going to yield control of the party without a fight. The disintegration of campaign-finance restrictions has given the funding class greater leverage over the nomination, and as the presidential field has formed its domestic-policy platforms, its influence has been evident. Jeb Bush is wooing the fanatically anti-tax Club for Growth. Scott Walker has firmly allied himself with the party’s most unreconstructed supply-siders. Rand Paul is promising “the largest tax cut in American history.” Ted Cruz is, well, Ted Cruz. The Republican primary has turned into a contest of anti-tax purity. “We’ve got maybe an embarrassment of riches here in that we’ve never been able to support somebody before, and now we may get overwhelmed with people we think are worthy of support,” gloats recently departed Club for Growth president Chris Chocola.
Nowhere is the triumph of the supply-siders more evident than in the progress of Marco Rubio and Mike Lee. Rubio and Lee are the paradigmatic spokesmen for the reformicon platform — Lee as an ideas pitchman, Rubio as a candidate.
Last year, Rubio and Lee unveiled a tax-reform plan that their allies touted as a manifesto of reform conservatism, positioning the Republican Party on the side of hard-press working families rather than the rich. Lee’s plan “actually help[s] middle-class families rather than mostly cut taxes on the investor class,” gushed Ross Douthat, one of the most fervent and optimistic advocates of the reform-conservative faction.
Eventually, the Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers on Lee’s plan and found that it did nothing of the sort. Its provisions to benefit hard-pressed low-income workers turned out to be wildly oversold. Brookings economist Isabel Sawhill concluded, “very few if any low income families with children would benefit from the plan.” And, far from being the “tax reform” it claimed to be, Rubio and Lee had merely constructed a gigantic tax-cut plan that would reduce federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over a decade, a larger tax cut than George W. Bush passed in 2001. What’s more, the Lee-Rubio plan lavished far more benefits on the rich. The average earner in the lowest income quintile would save on average $79 a year, or 0.5 percent of her income, from the plan. An earner in the second-lowest quintile, the heart of the working class, would save $338 a year, or one percent of her income. The top one percent earner would see its income boosted by 2.8 percent on average, or more than $40,000 a year. The plan was simply a reprise of Bush-era debt-financed regressive tax cuts.
Reform conservatives took the setback in stride. Perhaps this was just an oversight or a mild computational error. Douthat hopefully suggested that Rubio and Lee would take a second pass at the issue and rectify the problem:
The liberal response to the Lee plan’s disappointing score, from Chait and others, has been to suggest that it illustrates the continuing unrealism of G.O.P. proposals. But notably, Lee himself didn’t respond by, say, denouncing TPC and insisting that some version of dynamic scoring would make the deficit numbers come out right; he responded by announcing that he was partnering with Marco Rubio (cough, 2016, cough) to develop a revised family-friendly proposal.
And, indeed, Rubio and Lee have come out with a revised version of their plan. But it didn’t get better. It got much, much, much worse. The new Rubio-Lee plan keeps most of its old structure, with its stingy treatment of low-income workers. It layers on top of that two changes: a far more generous treatment of business income, and a complete elimination of all taxes on capital gains and dividends. [Update: The plan would also, unbelievably, completely eliminate the tax on inherited estates, which for a married couple only begins to apply to inheritances above $10 million.] Both of these new features would lavish massive additional tax cuts on the rich, in addition to those already in the original version. The new Rubio-Lee plan would surpass anything George W. Bush or Mitt Romney ever proposed to do in its ambitions to relieve the richest Americans of their tax burdens.
Perhaps the fullest measure of the supply-siders’ triumph can be seen in the acquiescence of many of the reformicons themselves. Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin, both reform conservatives featured prominently in the Times story, responded to the new Lee-Rubio plan with fawning praise. James Pethokoukis, a reformist conservative, calls the plan “a big step toward persuading middle-income America that Republicans care about more than just the richest 1 percent.” (If this is a big step toward persuading America that Republicans care about more than the rich, what would the next step be? Legalizing servant-flogging?)
Perhaps the reform conservatives have capitulated completely in the name of party unity. Or maybe they were misunderstood from the beginning and never proposed to deviate in any substantive way from the traditional platform of massively regressive, debt-financed tax-cutting. Either way, the movement has, for now, accomplished less than nothing.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 5, 2015
“The Historical Trends Could Hardly Be Clearer”: Strong February Job Numbers Underline Obama’s Performance — And GOP Failure
When Republicans complain about economic policy under President Obama – and especially job growth, as Jeb Bush does almost every day – someone might inquire how they think he compares with the last couple of presidents from their party (both of whom happened to bear the surname Bush). Underlined by February’s data released today, Obama’s record is outstanding and continues to smash the idiotic economic predictions promoted by Republicans (and their Fox News echoes) about the stimulus, the deficit, the Affordable Care Act, the auto bailout, the federal budget, and nearly every policy of this administration.
Perhaps someday a television personality on a Sunday chat show will muster the tiny amount of courage needed to pose the question to a guest like Jeb: Why do Democratic administrations result in so many more jobs than Republican administrations? This bold interrogation wouldn’t require much research effort. Helpful information that contrasts the success of recent Democratic presidents — and the abject failure of the GOP presidents who preceded them — may easily be found here, for instance (h/t Eclectablog and our friend @LOLGOP). And many other places, too.
The short version is that under Barack Obama (6.7 million so far) and Bill Clinton (22.6 million), we saw the creation of nearly 30 million net jobs; under George H.W. Bush (2.6 million) and George W. Bush (1.3 million), just short of 4 million net jobs. Even if you award Bush 41 another couple of million jobs for the second term he never won, the essential point should not be lost on even the dimmest voter.
Overall, the historical trends could hardly be clearer. Even Democratic presidents who aren’t named Clinton or Obama tend to score far better than their Republican counterparts, whether named Bush or otherwise – and the consequences can be devastating.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog; The National Memo, March 6, 2015
“In Concert With U.S. History”: America’s ‘Ferguson’ Confusion; Why The Problem Has Been Completely Misunderstood
Before I had a chance to peruse the Department of Justice’s long-awaited report on the killing of Michael Brown by former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson, I had three predictions. The first was that the DOJ would find the city of Ferguson’s finances to be a house of cards built upon a foundation of anti-tax absolutism and white supremacy. That’s what the Washington Post’s Radley Balko found last September, and while I may not share Balko’s libertarian politics, he’s a good journalist, and that report — which described the criminal justice system in St. Louis County as one “guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment” — is an excellent piece of investigative work.
My second prediction about the DOJ report was that it would find the Ferguson Police Department to be rife with bigotry, which would manifest itself most conspicuously through emails filled with the kind of racist “jokes” that many Americans prefer to call “politically incorrect.” I guessed this not because I had any special insight into the office culture of the Ferguson PD, but because the embarrassing disclosure of racist jokes disseminated among employees by email has become a recurring media story throughout the Obama years. And if the problem is widespread enough to infect the self-styled Hollywood progressives at Sony, it’s hardly a stretch to figure it’s prevalent within a police force with as much historical baggage as Ferguson’s, too.
My third and final prediction, meanwhile, was that the media’s coverage of the DOJ report would devote much more attention to the second prediction (the racist emails) than the first (the systemic dysfunction); and that the response on the part of Ferguson’s civilian leadership would similarly concern itself more with “politically incorrect” jokes than with institutional corruption. I imagined that it would play out this way primarily because that’s how it always does. For a recent example, look no further than former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who saw a decade-spanning empire, which was always fundamentally built on an edifice of bigotry, crumble because he was caught saying what any right-minded person already assumed him to think.
Well, now that the DOJ report has finally been released, and now that I can look back with the benefit of hindsight, the verdict is in. And wouldn’t you know it, I went three-for-three. The report says the Ferguson PD is structurally driven to extort its African-American subjects to fill budget gaps. It also says the Ferguson PD’s email server was a like an online Comedy Cellar for the kind of racist jokes that middle schoolers tell one another when trying to be edgy. And the media has since devoted far more time and digital ink to cataloging jokes unworthy of even Carlos Mencia than it has explaining how a municipality could allow itself to so obviously rely on a system of race-based plunder.
What’s more, the early indications from authorities in Ferguson suggest that I was right to expect their response to focus primarily on the nasty jokes. Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III, last seen informing the folks at MSNBC that his city suffered from “no racial divide,” was quick to respond to the DOJ’s damning report — by firing or placing on administrative leave three officers involved with the racist emails. While he refused to answer any questions, Knowles also informed the media that the police department had recently hired three African-American women, was launching programs intended to build a stronger relationship with Ferguson’s African-American communities, and would institute mandatory diversity training for staff. Knowles also mentioned a few administrative tweaks intended to make the city’s criminal justice system less rapacious, but he also said “there is probably another side to all of [the DOJ report’s] stories.” Gotta hear both sides.
Before you start trying to make “Isquith” and “Nostradamus” rhyme, however, you should be aware of a few realities (besides that being impossible, I mean). For one thing, I’d strongly suspect my predictions were widely shared by those in the American media who focus on politics and race because, again, this story is fundamentally nothing new. For another, not everyone in the media chased the shiny red ball of racist emails, which aren’t even bad in themselves, anyway, but are simply too numerous. Lastly, while it’s very tempting to throw all of our culture’s shortcomings on these issues at the feet of the media — which, to be clear, is far from blameless — the press’s failures here are the result of larger, society-wide problems that are more deep-seated than our fondness for listicles or our penchant for calling others out.
Because, as Ta-Nehisi Coates implies in his response to the DOJ report, one of the major stumbling blocks separating the Fergusons of today from what a city in the United States is supposed to be is a level of historical ignorance and denial that makes confronting white supremacy head-on all but impossible. So long as the mainstream refuses to own up to the way race-based plunder is not contrary to but rather in concert with U.S. history, we will continue to understand racism as what happens when a bunch of mean cops sit around forwarding each other racist jokes. And until we’re willing to recognize that Ferguson is New York City is Los Angeles is Chicago and so on, fewer “politically incorrect” emails is all the change we’re going to get.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, March 7, 2015
“Photographer Helped Expose Brutality Of Selma’s Bloody Sunday”: The ‘Segregation Beat’ That Helped Shape American History
This month Selma, Ala., will mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” That’s the day police beat demonstrators attempting to march to Montgomery in support of voting rights. Some of the most iconic images of that day were captured by a white photographer — the late Spider Martin.
Spider Martin’s real introduction to the civil rights movement came on a late night at home in February 1965. He was 25, a photographer for The Birmingham News. He explains in a video from 1987 that he got the call because he was the youngest staff member and no one else wanted to go. That assignment would lead to his most famous work.
“About midnight I get this phone call from the chief photographer and he says ‘Spider, we need to get you to go down to Marion, Ala.’ Says there’s been a church burned and there’d been a black man who was protesting killed. He was shot with a shotgun. His name was Jimmie Lee Jackson.”
James “Spider” Martin grew up near Birmingham. Small in stature, he earned the nickname “Spider” for his quick moves on the high school football field. He said while he grew up with a few black friends, he was largely ignorant of the injustice blacks faced. That changed once he started covering the Jimmie Lee Jackson case, according to his daughter Tracy.
“He realized that it was history and that it was important,” she says. “He got wrapped up in it.”
Jackson’s killing helped spur the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches a few weeks later. Martin was in Selma for Bloody Sunday when state troopers attacked protesters. Holding a camera made him just as much a target. He recounted in an interview with Alabama Public Television, what happened when a police officer saw him.
“He walks over to me and, blow! Hits me right here in the back of the head,” he said. “I still got a dent in my head and I still have nerve damage there. I go down on my knees and I’m like seeing stars and there’s tear gas everywhere. And then he grabs me by the shirt and he looks straight in my eyes and he just dropped me and said, ‘scuse me. Thought you was a nigger.'”
Martin kept covering the marchers until they reached Montgomery two-and-a-half weeks later.
Martin’s collection contains thousands of photographs, clippings and other notes — much of it previously unpublished before it was purchased by the University of Texas. Even producers of the movie Selma used his pictures to recreate scenes for the film. Exhibitions of his work are going up around in Selma for the anniversary, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, and in New York.
The exhibit at ArtsRevive includes his most noted pictures from the marches. Executive director Martha Lockett says some of her favorites are less recognized including a close-up of an officer’s leg with his billy club.
“It’s very still, but very energetic,” she says. “You know what’s getting ready to happen and to me that’s one of the most dynamic pictures that’s in the show.”
That artistry was calculated, according to Morehouse College history professor Larry Spruill. He says Martin was one of a handful of photographers on what’s dubbed the “segregation beat.” They were mostly college-educated, white men in their 20’s who reflected the liberal optimism of a post-World War II generation.
“They took complex issues layered in race and made them very simple,” he says.
Spruill says the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., understood the power of visuals and tipped off photojournalists. And while the optics of Bloody Sunday were credited with shocking middle America — leading to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — back then the pictures were considered disposable. That was partly because in the mid-’60s, photojournalism was beginning to take a backseat to the flash and immediacy of television. Spruill says he found pictures newspapers didn’t run with holes punched through them.
“It’s like finding original copies of important American history documents trashed,” he says.
A similar thing happened to the photographers. Martin’s daughter says it was decades before he became known for his civil rights pictures. He died in 2003 and she says he’d be excited about exhibiting his work around this 50th anniversary. But in his interview it’s clear he was uncomfortable with the attention.
“I mean it’s kind of fun sometimes being a celebrity, you might say, or a little bit famous. But then again, I’d rather not be famous,” he said.
Still the attention he offered through his camera, helped shape American history.
By: Andrew Yeager, Code Switch; Cross Posted at NPR, March 6, 2015
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