“State Passes Anti-Abortion Bill Described As ‘Insane'”: Don’t Policymakers In Oklahoma Have Real Work To Do?
Republican policymakers in Oklahoma are aware of the fact that they cannot simply ban all abortions. The Supreme Court has already considered flat prohibitions and deemed them unconstitutional.
Oklahoma’s GOP-led legislature has nevertheless concluded that it can ban doctors from performing abortions. Tulsa World reported today:
The Oklahoma Senate on Thursday sent Gov. Mary Fallin a bill that would make it a felony to perform abortions in Oklahoma, despite a federal court case legalizing it.
Senate Bill 1552, by Sen. Nathan Dahm, R-Broken Arrow, would also allow the revocation of medical licenses for physicians who perform abortions. The measure passed by a vote of 33-12 with no debate.
The article added that there’s one physician in the state Senate, Republican Ervin Yen, who characterized the legislation as an “insane” measure that would invariably face a court challenge.
Of course, it will first have to be signed into law by Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), who recently received some good advice from the editorial board of the New York Times: “For years, anti-abortion forces have relied on onerous regulations on providers to limit abortion services and lied about their true purpose because they know that a vast majority of Americans support a woman’s right to choose and that the Supreme Court has affirmed that right for more than four decades. Governor Fallin would save everyone the time and expense of litigation by vetoing the bill.”
Keep in mind, by approving a policy that’s obviously unconstitutional, and which is certain to fail in the courts, state lawmakers are asking Oklahoma taxpayers to foot the bill for a political exercise that will serve no practical or policy purpose.
But just below the surface, there’s another nagging question: don’t policymakers in Oklahoma have real work to do? Why invest time and resources in a culture-war bill that will inevitably be struck down?
During a debate in the state House over the anti-abortion proposal, state Rep. David Brumbaugh (R) told his colleagues, “Everybody talks about [Oklahoma’s] $1.3 billion deficit. If we take care of the morality, God will take care of the economy.”
This, evidently, was the prevailing attitude, which is why Oklahoma will soon have an unconstitutional ban on doctors performing a legal medical procedure, but won’t have a balanced budget.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 19, 2016
“A Law Embedded Then Civil War-Era”: Restoring Voting Rights To Felons Is The Right Thing To Do
Of all the consequences of the nation’s decades-long infatuation with building more and more prisons and locking up more and more citizens, perhaps the most curious is this: More than 4 million Americans who have been released from prison have lost their right to vote, according to the non-profit Sentencing Project.
Even after men and women have served their time — after they have paid their debt to society, as the cliche goes — most states restrict their franchise. It’s an odd idea: Those men and women are harmless enough to release onto the streets, but they can’t be trusted to vote. They have finished serving their sentences, but they are barred from full citizenship.
A disproportionate number of those second-class citizens are black. Because black Americans, particularly men, are locked up at a higher rate than their white peers, this peculiar practice falls heavily on them. Nationwide, one in every 13 black adults cannot vote as the result of a felony conviction, as opposed to one in 56 non-black voters, according to the Sentencing Project, which advocates for alternatives to mass incarceration.
It’s undemocratic, it’s unfair and it’s un-American. While ancient Greek and Roman codes withdrew the franchise from those who had committed serious crimes, most Western countries now see those codes as outdated.
Recognizing that, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, used his executive power earlier this month to sweep away his state’s laws limiting the franchise for felons. With that action, about 200,000 convicted felons who have completed their prison time and finished parole or probation are now eligible to vote.
McAuliffe noted that Virginia’s law — one of the nation’s harshest and embedded in a Civil War-era state constitution — didn’t hobble the voting rights of black citizens through mere coincidence. That was its purpose. McAuliffe’s staff came across a 1906 report in which a then-state senator gloated about several voting restrictions, including a poll tax and literacy tests, that, he said, would “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years,” according to The New York Times.
You’d think that McAuliffe’s fellow Virginia politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, would celebrate his decision. Eliminating barriers to the franchise — especially those with obviously racist roots — can only polish the state’s image and strengthen the civic fabric.
But GOP leaders have objected, accusing McAuliffe of “political opportunism” and a “transparent effort to win votes.” Well, OK. Let’s stipulate that politicians are usually in the business of trying to win votes.
Having conceded that, though, isn’t restoring the voting rights of men and women who have served their time a good idea? If a crime renders a man beyond the boundaries of civilized society, he should be imprisoned for the rest of his life. Otherwise, his crime shouldn’t place him in an inferior caste, without the privileges of full citizenship.
Curiously, though, many conservatives seem to disagree. After Democrat Steve Beshear, then Kentucky’s governor, issued an executive order last year similar to McAuliffe’s, his Republican successor, Matt Bevin, overturned it. Bevin signed a law allowing felons to petition judges to vacate their convictions — a bureaucratic hurdle not easily overcome. Maryland’s GOP governor, Larry Hogan, vetoed a bill to restore voting rights to felons, but the Democratically controlled legislature overrode him.
Those Republican governors are simply following the party’s script, which has focused for the last several years on ways to block the ballot, starting with harsh voter ID laws. While advocates of such laws claim they are meant to protect against voting fraud, the sort of in-person fraud they would prevent hardly exists.
The real motivation for GOP lawmakers is to restrict the franchise from people unlikely to vote for them — especially people of color and millennials. Rather than campaign on a platform that attracts support, they rely on barriers to voting.
That’s wrong. The strength of American democracy depends on persuading more citizens that their votes count; carelessly — or intentionally — disenfranchising those with whom you disagree rends the civic fabric, distorts the political process and stokes the flames of discontent.
We surely don’t need more of that in this political season.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, April 29, 2016
“Addicts Deserve Alternatives To Prison”: Misguided War On Drugs Has Left Many Victims With Scars
Earlier this month, five Republican presidential contenders addressed a New Hampshire forum concerned with a crisis swamping certain regions of the country, including New England: heroin addiction. The candidates spoke passionately, some sharing personal experiences, according to news reports.
Jeb Bush spoke of his family’s turmoil as his daughter Noelle, now 38 and in recovery, struggled with an addiction to prescription drugs and cocaine. “What I learned was that the pain that you feel when you have a loved one who has addiction challenges and kind of spirals out of control is something that is shared with a whole lot of people,” he said.
Carly Fiorina also talked about her family’s struggles; her stepdaughter, Lori Ann, died at 34 after years of battling drug and alcohol abuse.
“… As Lori grew progressively sicker, the sparkle, the potential, the possibilities that had once filled her life — disappeared from behind her eyes,” she said.
This new frankness and sympathy concerning the physical, emotional and financial costs of drug addiction comes as white middle-class Americans have found their lives upended by the emergence of heroin as the drug of choice for their children and grandchildren. Nationwide, the number of deaths from heroin rocketed from fewer than 2,000 in 2001 to more than 10,000 in 2014, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And experts say that nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.
As a result of their experience, there has been a stark change in public perceptions of drug abuse. You see it not only in the more sympathetic rhetoric on the campaign trail, but also in the less aggressive methods of law enforcement and the softer penalties meted out by legislative bodies. Police chiefs now speak of addiction as a medical and psychological problem that deserves treatment, not incarceration. And parents insist that their children be treated as victims, not as perpetrators.
If this signals an end to the wretched, misguided and punitive war on drugs, I welcome it. Still, I find it heartbreaking that the nation didn’t have the clearheadedness, the courage and the compassion to see addiction as something other than a crime during the 1980s, when crack was the scourge of poor black neighborhoods.
Back then, lawmakers, especially conservatives, competed to see who could impose the harshest measures on poor drug addicts, and police officers routinely rounded up penny-ante dealers to bolster their arrest records. I can recall the wild accusations about crack users, the phony science, the harebrained predictions.
When Congress passed the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, it enacted mandatory minimum sentences for drugs and enshrined into law harsher penalties for the use of crack cocaine than for powdered cocaine, which was more likely to be used by whites. Offering up invalid assertions not backed by any data, lawmakers insisted that crack was more dangerous — as were its users.
Remember the dire warnings about crack babies? According to some so-called experts, the nation would see a wave of children born to crackhead moms, babies whose intelligence would always be stunted and whose physical capacities would always be limited. In fact, those pseudo-facts turned out to be gross exaggerations. Some babies were, in fact, born addicted, but, given appropriate medical care, most have turned out to be no different than their non-addicted peers.
The crack epidemic finally died away, but the after-effects of the misguided war on drugs linger in the lives of countless black men and women. That so-called war has drained the national treasury of billions of dollars, torn apart countless black families and decimated entire black neighborhoods.
It has made permanent second-class citizens, forever marginalized, of tens of thousands of black men and women because felony records have rendered them virtually unemployable. In some states, those with felony convictions are not even permitted to vote.
Now that we seem to have finally figured out that addicts deserve alternatives to prison, perhaps we can find a way to help those who bear the scars of the war on drugs. They are victims, too.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, January 9, 2016
“A Nation Divided, With Liberty And Justice For Some”: White-Collar Crimes Are Not Considered “Appropriate For Jail”
It swallowed people up.
That’s what it really did, if you want to know the truth. It swallowed them up whole, swallowed them up by the millions.
In the process, it hollowed out communities, broke families, stranded hope. Politicians brayed that they were being “tough on crime” — as if anyone is really in favor of crime — as they imposed ever longer and more inflexible sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. But the “War on Drugs” didn’t hurt drugs at all: Usage rose by 2,800 percent — that’s not a typo — in the 40 years after it began in 1971. The “War” also made America the biggest jailer on Earth and drained a trillion dollars — still not a typo — from the Treasury.
Faced with that stunning record of costly failure, a growing coalition of observers has been demanding the obvious remedy. End the War. The Obama administration has been unwilling to go quite that far, but apparently, it is about to do the next best thing: Declare a ceasefire and send the prisoners home.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that the government is embarking upon an aggressive campaign to extend clemency to drug offenders. Those whose crimes were nonviolent, who have no ties to gangs or large drug rings and who have behaved themselves while incarcerated will be invited to apply for executive lenience to cut their sentences short.
Nobody knows yet how many men and women that will be. Easily thousands.
Combined with last year’s announcement that the government would no longer seek harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, this may prove the most transformative legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency, excluding the Affordable Care Act. It is a long overdue reform.
But it is not enough.
As journalist Matt Taibbi observes in his new book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, Holder’s Justice Department has declined, essentially as a matter of policy, to prosecute the bankers who committed fraud, laundered money for drug cartels and terrorists, stole billions from their own banks, left taxpayers holding the bag, and also — not incidentally — nearly wrecked the U.S. economy. But let some nobody get caught with a joint in his pocket during a stop-and-frisk and the full weight of American justice falls on him like a safe from a 10th-story window.
For instance, a man named Scott Walker is 15 years into a sentence of life without parole on his first felony conviction for selling drugs. Meantime, thug bankers in gangs with names like Lehman Brothers and HSBC commit greater crimes, yet do zero time.
We have, Taibbi argues, evolved a two-track system under which crimes committed while wearing suit and tie — or pumps — are no longer considered jailable offenses. Taibbi said recently on The Daily Show that prosecutors have actually told him they no longer go after white-collar criminals because such people are not considered “appropriate for jail.”
Who is “appropriate”? Do you even have to ask?
Black people. Brown people. Poor people of whatever hue.
Thousands of whom are apparently coming home now. One hopes there will be a mobilization — government agencies, families, churches, civic groups — to help them assimilate into life on the outside. But one also hopes we the people demand reform of the hypocritical system that put them inside to begin with.
These men and women are being freed from insane sentences that should never have been imposed, much less served. Contrary to the pledge we learned in school, it turns out we are actually one nation divided, with liberty and justice for some.
So yes, it is good to see the attorney general dismantle the War on Drugs. But while he’s at it, let him dismantle the War on Fairness, too.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; Published in The National Memo, April 28, 2014
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