The men who killed Ahmaud Arbery will not get away with it. Yet the most surprising aspect of the trial is not the verdict, but the fact that the trial happened at all.On Wednesday, a Georgia jury convicted Travis McMichael; his father, Gregory McMichael; and their friend William Bryan of felony offenses after the trio chased down and then shot Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, in February of last year.
The United States is a nation awash in firearms, and gun owners are a powerful and politically active constituency. In state after state, they have helped elect politicians who, in turn, have created a permissive legal regime for the carry and use of firearms, rules that go far beyond how courts originally understood the concept of self-defense.
John Henry Ramirez is going to die. The state of Texas is going to kill him. The question that came before the Supreme Court this week is whether Dana Moore, his longtime pastor, will be able to lay hands on him as he dies.Given the grand, even alarmed pronouncements about religious liberty made by the right-wing justices recently, you might think this would be an easy decision.
The state of Florida is silencing those opposing its efforts to disenfranchise its own citizens.A lawsuit filed by a coalition of civil-rights groups contends that Florida’s Republican-controlled government has repeatedly attempted to restrict the franchise, including curtailing third-party registration campaigns, cutting early voting, and imposing an onerous poll tax on formerly incarcerated Floridians after the state voted overwhelmingly to restore their rights.
Governor Greg Abbott is afraid. Not of COVID-19, which is killing thousands of Texans, but of losing his primary.Last week, Abbott announced that he was banning COVID-vaccine mandates by “any entity” in Texas, a policy so absurd that you’d be forgiven for thinking, as the running joke on social media goes, that the coronavirus wrote the executive order itself.
Last month, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the Supreme Court’s critics are wrong. The Court is not “a dangerous cabal” that is “deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view,” he said. Reading aloud from a piece I wrote in the aftermath of the Court’s recent ruling on an abortion law, Alito insisted that it was “false and inflammatory” to say that the 1973 Roe v.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has leaned into the culture war, signing laws effectively banning abortion and critical race theory, loosening gun restrictions, and approving an almost certainly unconstitutional law barring social-media companies from moderating content.
On the verge of a landmark victory by judicial fiat, the Republican Party is being strangely quiet.As my colleague David Graham has written, Republican Party leaders and conservative intellectuals haven’t been trumpeting the Supreme Court’s decision to allow a Texas ban on abortions to go forward, which for women in the state has all but nullified the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court was so eager to nullify Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent securing the right to abortion, that it didn’t even wait for oral arguments.Instead, in the middle of the night, five of the high court’s conservatives issued a brief, unsigned order allowing a Texas law that bans abortion at six weeks.
It was after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that she would pursue a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for all city employees that the local Fraternal Order of Police president, John Catanzara, finally understood what it was like to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.“We’re in America, G-ddamn it. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period,” Catanzara said, as transcribed by the Chicago Sun-Times.
On Tuesday, the National Fraternal Order of Police decided to “clear up confusion” about its position on the January 6 assault on the Capitol by enraged Donald Trump supporters. “Those who participated in the assaults, looting, and trespassing must be arrested and held to account,” it said in a statement.
Democratic leaders have a plan for overcoming the Republican Party’s attempts to restrict the franchise: Just vote harder.Civil-rights leaders expressed their frustrations to The New York Times last week, telling the outlet that “White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression.
Democrats did not like the Fifteenth Amendment.In the late 1860s, as Congress debated the proposal to bar disenfranchisement on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” Democratic senators and representatives charged Republicans with imposing a vile despotism on the southern states by enfranchising Black men.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning Black journalist. She is also one of the developers of the 1619 Project, a journalistic examination of slavery’s role in shaping the American present. Last year, that work won her a Pulitzer Prize. Now it appears to have cost her a tenured chair at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism.
Liz Cheney, the representative of Wyoming, the daughter of a former vice president, and a lifelong conservative Republican, is facing a purge.Cheney’s transgression? She has continued to insist, truthfully, that former President Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election are false, after having voted to impeach him in March for inciting a mob that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the result.Yesterday, Steve Scalise, the No.
Last week, far-right Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar distanced themselves from a proposal to create an America First Caucus, after a document bearing the group’s name made reference to “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.
Republicans are ready to take on “woke capital.”After losing elections for president and U.S. Senate, Georgia Republicans passed a series of restrictions that specifically targets the voting methods used disproportionately by Democratic constituencies during the unusual circumstances of the pandemic.
What is the border crisis? Is it the recent surge of migrants, or is it the treatment of those migrants in detention facilities? The answer to that question—or whether you consider the situation at the border to be a crisis at all—most likely determines what you think the Biden administration should do about it.For conservatives, the answer is clear: Democrats invited the increase in migrants with their permissive, open-borders immigration policies.
The Alabama that John Lewis was born into in 1940 was a one-party authoritarian state. Forty years before Lewis was born, the white elite of Alabama, panicked by a populist revolt of white and Black workers, shut Black men out of politics in a campaign of terror, fraud, murder, and, finally, disenfranchisement.“We had to do it. Unfortunately, I say it was a necessity. We could not help ourselves,” Alabama Governor William C. Oates confessed.
Seven Supreme Court justices ruled yesterday morning that Donald Trump is not a king.But Trump still got what he wanted.Since Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, he has vowed to release his tax returns, and has also refused to release his tax returns.
After an elderly protester in Buffalo, New York, was pushed to the ground by police officers and left to lie there as blood pooled beneath his head, the head of the local police union, John Evans, said his colleagues were disgusted.Disgusted, that is, that two of the officers seen in the video were suspended without pay.