YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TRAYVON MARTIN: If you haven’t already heard about this case, you need to. Late last month, 17-year-old Trayvon, an African American, was shot and killed in Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old white and/or Hispanic man. Zimmerman, who was armed with a gun, claimed self-defense; Martin was armed with a pack of Skittles and an ice tea. Zimmerman saw Martin walking through a gated community to a friend’s house where he and his parents were visiting, after going to get a snack. Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, saw Martin and called 911, claiming that Martin looked “real suspicious” and that he was “up to no good” and may be on drugs. “These assholes. They always get away,” he told the 911 dispatcher. Zimmerman followed Martin on foot, despite the 911 dispatcher telling him expressly not to. After that, it’s not entirely clear what happened. ABC News reports that Trayvon was on the phone with a friend and told her that a man was following him. She told him to run away, but he thought he had escaped the follower. Suddenly he was there again, and the girl told ABC News she heard Trayvon ask, “What, are you following me for?” before she heard pushing noises and the phone drop to the ground, disconnecting the call. In other 911 calls from neighbors, you can hear someone screaming for help and pleading -- Martin’s parents say it’s his voice -- and then a gun shot go off, silencing the pleas. The shooting itself is tragic enough, but the real horror started when the police arrived. They apparently accepted Zimmerman’s story completely at face value, and failed to administer a drug or alcohol test -- a standard part of normal procedures. And then they let Zimmerman go. He was never arrested, and remains free today. The police say that nothing has disproven Zimmerman’s self-defense claim. Late Monday afternoon, the Department of Justice announced that it would open an investigation into the state police’s handling of the case, a welcome development. The police chief is certainly raising questions into the adequacy of the investigation he ran. He declared that, while he’s sure Zimmerman would change things if he could, so would Martin -- the victim who did nothing wrong. And then he suggested that it was himself, a white man in uniform, who was somehow the victim of racial targeting. (This evening, that police chief temporarily stepped down.)
Ta-Nehsis Coates* has been covering this story beautifully and compellingly. Read his posts here, here, and here; here he highlights what a grand jury investigating Zimmerman will be focusing on, and provides a link to an interview he did on the topic on the Brian Lehrer Show. He also has this essential post highlighting two other cases of “Stand Your Ground” killings. James Fallows urges people (and journalists) not to think of this just as a “race story.” Emily Bazelon has a history of Florida’s self-defense/stand your ground law here, and here she concludes that Zimmerman is almost certainly lying about what happened. Charles Blow covers the story here, and Mother Jones has a comprehensive and thorough run-down of the story (along with lots of very upsetting 911 calls) here. And not-so-liberal-at-all John McWhorter shares a moving and personal perspective.
COURT SHUTS ITS EYES TO GENDER DISCRIMINATION: This week, in a five-to-four split, the Supreme Court held that state employees cannot sue the state (their employer) when the state violates the Family Medical Leave Act, a federal law requiring employers to grant employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to recover from illness or care for a sick family member. A 2003 case allowed suits against state employers for violations of the portion of the law dealing with caring for sick family members; this week’s decision came to the opposite conclusion regarding violations of the self-care component of the law. This is a bit confusing, and it sounds dry, but this has extraordinary bearing on the legality of state-sanctioned gender discrimination, and it’s seriously important. So stick with me!
Because of something called “sovereign immunity,” normal people can’t sue states unless Congress has specifically allowed it. And Congress can only allow such suits pursuant to their power under the Fourteenth Amendment (authorizing Congress to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation”). So the question in this week’s case was whether the self-care provision was enacted to combat sex discrimination (and was thus enacted under the Fourteenth Amendment), or rather was passed only through Congress’s interstate commerce power -- a power which cannot abrogate state sovereign immunity. The 2003 case I mentioned above found that the care-for-others provision was a key part of Congress’s effort to break down gender roles: Justice Rehnquist (Rehnquist!), writing for the Court, explained that Congress had authority to remove “the pervasive sex-role stereotype that caring for family members is women’s work.”
But the current Court is far, far to the right of even Justice Rehnquist. Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court to find that the self-care provision was not similarly part of a congressional anti-discrimination project. Since it was not a “congruent and proportional” response to documented sex discrimination, it could not be part of Congress’s Section 5 power and thus could not abrogate sovereign immunity.
This is a really big deal, I promise you. The conservative majority was blind to this argument (or just ignored it), but the people who absolutely reap the most protection from the FMLA self-care provision are pregnant women and new moms. As you know, the United States has no automatic maternity leave; the FMLA is the closest thing we have. As Justice Ginsburg wrote in dissent, “[T]he overarching aim of the FMLA [was] to make it feasible for women to work while sustaining family life.” This decision allows state employers to violate the FMLA -- meaning they can fire women who take maternity leave -- without fear of monetary consequence, since wronged employees cannot sue them for damages. Though states could face injunctive suits, they essentially have immunity to fire pregnant women and new moms. I’m hoping that, day by day, I’ll start getting used to living in 1961...
RYAN EXTREMO BUDGET V.2: Since last year’s right-wing budget was such a hit [Note: It was not a hit], GOP whiz kid Paul Ryan decided to release another right-wing fantasy budget this year, which passed the House budget committee by exactly one vote after two Republicans defected. ThinkProgress lists the five worst parts about the budget, but by far the most troubling has to be its absolutely massive and unprecedented cuts to programs benefitting the poor, especially Medicaid, even as it gives what some estimate to be a $3 trillion tax cut to corporations and the wealthy. “Ryan's budget asks for enormous sacrifice from, say, disabled Medicaid beneficiaries even as it appears to provide enormous tax benefits to wealthier Americans,” Ezra Klein explains. “The Republican Party has backed itself into a fiscal strategy in which this kind of concentrated sacrifice on the part of the poor is the only possible path forward.” Ryan’s projected deficit savings depend entirely on the assumption that, by 2050, everything the federal government does besides Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending will have to cease to exist -- no more air traffic control, Pell grants, scientific research, food safety regulation, highway spending, etc. “Republicans don’t really want to shut down the FDA, the FBI, and the national parks, not to mention patrolling the border and farm programs and roads,” Jonathan Bernstein insists. “And yet that’s the implication of this document. It’s not even remotely realistic — and neither is Ryan’s claim that his budget would cut the deficit way down.” It’s also important to remember that his budget would explode the ranks of the uninsured. “Altogether, the CBO says, spending on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for private insurance would be nearly 75 percent lower in 2050 than projected under current law,” which at least one group says means between 14 and 27 million people would lose their insurance. If you think this represents an extremely extreme -- one might say “severely” extreme -- position, you’d be right. It’s also the position that Mitt Romney enthusiastically and unequivocally embraced this week. Your Republican nominee, folks!
RELUCTANT GOP UPDATE: I don’t know about you, but I am officially sick of covering the GOP primary race. It was fun for a moment there, when it looked like a series of certifiably crazy people may have taken the prize. But now it’s just boring and painful and boring; all we have is Romney’s Uncanny Valley-esque demeanor and his flabbergastingly omnipresent mendacity. So Romney won Illinois by a huge margin this week, and keeps his steady track toward the nomination (though he likely won’t accumulate enough delegates to make it official until mid-June). God knows what Gingrich is still doing in the race. John Dickerson points out that Gingrich’s plan -- to deny Romney the magic number of 1,444 delegates so that it all gets thrown open at the convention, where he will sweep in as the only nominee who can take Obama on in a debate (side note: Has Gingrich ever actually watched his own debate performances? Or Obama’s?) -- has a major flaw (besides the obvious, reality-based reasons): The GOP rules require the eventual nominee to have won a plurality in at least five state primaries. So far, Gingrich has won only 2.
So Romney may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean he’s at all -- and I mean at all -- good at campaigning. The big story this week was not, it turns out, his double-digit Illinois win but rather a comment one of his advisors made the very next morning. (This isn’t the first time Romney has stepped on his own narrative the day after a big win.) When asked on CNBC whether the drawn-out GOP fight would force Romney to take hard-right positions that could hurt him in the general campaign, Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom replied:
Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.
GOOD NEWS -- Court Holds Defendants Entitled to Effective Assistance of Counsel During Plea Bargaining: For the first time, the Supreme Court held this week that criminal defendants are entitled to the effective assistance of counsel during the plea bargaining stage. Given that 98 percent of criminal matters are resolved through plea deals rather than trials, the decision “‘constitute[s] the single greatest revolution in the criminal justice process since Gideon v. Wainwright provided indigents the right to counsel,’ said Wesley M. Oliver, a law professor at Widener University, referring to the landmark 1963 decision.”
Must-Read of the Week: Three reasons why Republicans are blocking the Violence Against Women Act: Gays, immigrants, and Native Americans.
Must Watch Video of the Week: There are no words to describe how impressive this is.
*Ta-Nehisi Coates will be at Yale next week to participate in an incredible panel discussion on the Civil War. Moderator David Blight is a truly incredible speaker and scholar. If you’re at all interested in the Civil War and you're in the New Haven area, you won’t want to miss this!
Details: Thursday, March 29, 2012. 4:30 p.m. Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High Street, Room 102
To commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Emancipation, the GLC will host a roundtable discussion with five major historians and writers, moderated by GLC Director, David W. Blight. The group takes up questions of the changing character and controversies over the memory of the Civil War and Emancipation over the past 150 years. The panel includes: Gary Gallagher, Stephanie McCurry, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Andrew Delbanco, and John Fabian Witt. Books will be available for sale following the event.
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