Tag: african americans

Fact check: Biden makes false claims about the debt and deficit in jobs speech | CNN Politics

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CNN
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During a Friday speech about the September jobs report, President Joe Biden delivered a rapid-fire series of three false or misleading claims – falsely saying that he has cut the debt, falsely crediting a tax policy that didn’t take effect until 2023 for improving the budget situation in 2021 and 2022, and misleadingly saying that he has presided over an “actual surplus.”

At a separate moment of the speech, Biden used outdated figures to boast of setting record lows in the unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanics and people with disabilities. While the rates for these three groups hit record lows earlier in his presidency, he didn’t acknowledge that they have all since increased to non-record levels – and, in fact, are now higher than they were during parts of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Here’s a fact check.

Biden said in the Friday speech that Republicans want to “cut taxes for the very wealthy and big corporations,” which would add to the deficit. That’s fair game.

But then he added: “I was able to cut the federal debt by $1.7 trillion over the first two-and-a – two years. Well remember what we talked about. Those 50 corporations that made $40 billion, weren’t paying a penny in taxes? Well guess what – we made them pay 30%. Uh, 15% in taxes – 15%. Nowhere near what they should pay. And guess what? We were able to pay for everything, and we end up with an actual surplus.”

Facts First: Biden’s claims were thoroughly inaccurate. First, he has not cut the federal debt, which has increased by more than $5.7 trillion during his presidency so far after rising about $7.8 trillion during Trump’s full four-year tenure; it is the budget deficit (the one-year difference between spending and revenues), not the national debt (the accumulation of federal borrowing plus interest owed), that fell by $1.7 trillion over his first two fiscal years in office. Second, Biden’s 15% corporate minimum tax on certain large profitable corporations did not take effect until the first day of 2023, so it could not possibly have been responsible for the deficit reduction in fiscal 2021 and 2022. Third, there is no “actual surplus”; the federal government continues to run a budget deficit well over $1 trillion.

CNN has previously debunked Biden’s false claims about supposedly having cut the “debt” and about the new corporate minimum tax supposedly being responsible for deficit reduction in 2021 and 2022. The White House, which declined to comment on the record for this article, has corrected previous official transcripts when Biden has claimed that the debt fell by $1.7 trillion, acknowledging that he should have said deficit.

As for Biden’s vague additional claim that “we end up with an actual surplus,” a White House official said Friday that the president was referring to how the particular law in which the new minimum tax was contained, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, is projected to reduce the deficit. But Biden did not explain this unusual-at-best use of “surplus” – and since he had just been talking about the overall budget picture, he certainly made it sound like he was claiming to have presided over a surplus in the overall budget. He has not done so.

Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank, said in response to the White House explanation: “Well he didn’t say ‘budget surplus’ I suppose. But in federal budget conversations, the word surplus has a very specific meaning. It doesn’t mean ‘additional,’ it means revenues exceed spending.” He noted earlier Friday that there hasn’t been a federal budget surplus since 2001.

It’s worth noting, as we have before, that Biden’s Friday comments would be missing key context even if he had not inaccurately replaced the word “deficit” with “debt.” It’s highly questionable how much credit Biden himself deserves for the decline in the deficit in 2021 and 2022. Independent analysts say it occurred largely because emergency Covid-19 relief spending from fiscal 2020 expired as scheduled – and that Biden’s own new laws and executive actions have significantly added to current and projected future deficits. In addition, the 2023 deficit is widely expected to be higher than the 2022 deficit.

More on the corporate minimum tax

When Biden spoke Friday about “those 50 corporations that made $40 billion, weren’t paying a penny in taxes,” he was referring, as he has in the past, to an Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis published in 2021 that listed 55 companies the think tank found had paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year.

But it was imprecise, at best, for Biden to say Friday that we made “them” pay 15% in taxes. That’s because the new 15% minimum tax applies only to companies that have an average annual financial statement income of $1 billion or more – there are lots of nuances involved; you can read more details here – and only 14 of the 55 companies on the think tank’s list reported having US pre-tax income of at least $1 billion. In other words, some large and profitable companies will not be hit with the tax.

The federal government’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation projected last year that the tax would shrink deficits by about $222 billion through 2031, with positive impacts beginning in 2023. Gardner said Friday that he fully expects the tax to play a role in reducing deficits going forward, but he said its deficit-reducing impact “might be lower than expected” in 2023 because the Treasury Department – which has been the subject of intense lobbying from corporations that could be affected – has taken so long to implement the details of the law that the Internal Revenue Service ended up waiving penalties on companies that don’t make estimated tax payments on it this year.

Regardless, Gardner said, “The minimum tax did not reduce the deficit at all in fiscal years 2021 or 2022 because it didn’t exist during those years.”

Early in the Friday speech, Biden boasted of statistics from the September jobs report that was released earlier in the day. But then he said, “We’ve achieved a 70-year low in unemployment rate for women, record lows in unemployment for African Americans and Hispanic workers, and people with disabilities – folks who’ve been left behind in previous recoveries and left behind for too long.”

Facts First: Three of these four Biden unemployment boasts are misleading because they are out of date. Only his claim about a 70-year low for women’s unemployment remains current. While the unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanics and people with disabilities did fall to record lows earlier in Biden’s presidency, they have since increased – to rates higher than the rates during various periods of the Trump administration.

Women: The seasonally adjusted women’s unemployment rate was 3.4% in September. That’s a tick upward from the 3.3% rate during two previous months of 2023, but it’s still tied – with two months of the Trump administration – for the lowest for this group since 1953, 70 years ago.

African Americans: The seasonally adjusted Black or African American unemployment rate was 5.7% in September, up from the record low of 4.7% in April. The current 5.7% rate is higher than this group’s rates during four months of 2019, under Trump.

Hispanics: The seasonally adjusted Hispanic unemployment rate was 4.6% in September, up from the record low of 3.9% from September 2022. The current 4.6% rate is higher than this group’s rates for every month from April 2019 through February 2020 under Trump, plus a smattering of prior Trump-era months.

People with disabilities: The unemployment rate for people with disabilities, ages 16 and up, was 7.3% in September, up from a record low of 5.0% in December 2022. (The figures only go back to 2008, so the record was for a period of less than two decades.) The current 7.3% rate is higher than this group’s rates during eight months of the Trump presidency, seven of them in 2019.

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August 2, 2023
Conservative justices suggest South Carolina GOP gerrymandering was based on politics, not race | CNN Politics

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The Supreme Court’s conservatives expressed doubt at oral arguments Wednesday that South Carolina GOP lawmakers engaged in impermissible racial gerrymandering when they redrew congressional lines for a House seat to benefit Republicans.

The case is one of several racial and political gerrymandering-related lawsuits that could impact which party controls the House after next year’s congressional elections.

The district at issue was reworked in 2020 to benefit the GOP and current incumbent, Rep. Nancy Mace – one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as House speaker last week.

The South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and a Black voter named Taiwan Scott say the use of race dominated the decision-making process and that the state worked to intentionally dilute the power of Black voters. A federal court agreed, referring to the revised map as “bleaching.”

Several of the conservative justices on Wednesday suggested that map drawers had taken politics into consideration, not race.

Chief Justice John Roberts said those challenging the map had “no direct” evidence that race had predominated in the decisionmaking process. He said that there were no “odd-shaped” districts drawn and that there existed a “wealth of political data” that would justify the chosen boundaries. He said the challengers had only presented “circumstantial evidence” and suggested the court would be “breaking new ground” in its voting jurisprudence if it were to side with them.

Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly suggested that a lower court had made serious legal error in invalidating the map by relying upon erroneous expert testimony. He said the Supreme Court could not “rubber-stamp” the district court’s finding and he noted that the individual charged with drawing the maps had years of experience and had worked for both Democrats and Republicans.

Alito contended that there was “nothing suspicious” if a map drawer is aware of race as long as it is not a predominant factor when drawing lines.

Justice Neil Gorsuch said there was “no evidence ” that the legislature could have achieved its “partisan tile in any other way.”

For their part, the liberals on the court suggested that the Republican-controlled South Carolina Legislature adopted the maps by considering race as a predominant factor, in violation of the equal protection clause of the US Constitution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that Republicans were launching “pot shots” at the experts who claimed the maps could only be explained by race. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that the challengers are not required to produce a “smoking gun” to prove their point.

The dispute comes as the justices this year ordered Alabama to redraw its congressional map to account for the states’ 27% Black voting population. That decision, penned by Roberts, came as a welcome relief to liberals who feared that the court was poised to make it harder for minorities to challenge maps under Section 2 of the historic Voting Rights Act. A federal court approved a new map last week that significantly boosts the Black population in a second district, which could lead to the pickup of a Democratic seat next year.

The South Carolina case raises different questions rooted in the Constitution concerning when a state crosses the line between permissible partisan goals and illegal racial discrimination.

The state chapter of the NAACP and Scott are challenging the state’s 1st Congressional District, located along the southeastern coast and anchored in Charleston County. Although the district consistently elected Republicans from 1980 to 2016, in 2018 a Democrat was elected in a political upset.

Two years later a Republican candidate, Mace, regained the seat in a close race. When the state House and Senate began considering congressional reapportionment in 2021, the Republican majorities sought to create a stronger GOP tilt in the district, one of seven in the state. A new map could make the seat more competitive.

After an eight-day trial featuring 42 witnesses and 652 exhibits, a three-judge district court panel in January held that District 1 amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because race was the predominant factor in the district’s reapportionment plan.

“To achieve a target of 17% African American population,” the court said, “Charleston County was racially gerrymandered and over 30,000 African Americans were removed from their home district.” The court referred at one point to the “bleaching” of Black voters out of the Charleston County portion of the district.

“State legislators are free to consider a broad array of factors in the design of a legislative district, including partisanship, but they may not use race as a predominant factor and may not use partisanship as a proxy for race,” the court concluded.

South Carolina Republicans, led by state Senate President Thomas Alexander, appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the maps had not been drawn impermissibly based on race, but instead with politics in mind.

The person who devised the map testified in federal court that he was instructed to make the district “more Republican leaning,” but that he did not consider race while drawing the lines. He did, however, acknowledge that he examined racial data after drafting each version and that the Black voting-age population of the district was viewed during the drafting process.

“If left uncorrected, the panel’s holding would place States in an impossible bind by exposing them to potential racial gerrymandering liability whenever they decline to make majority-white, modestly-majority Republican districts majority-Democratic,” argued John Gore, a lawyer for the Republicans.

Mace filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the high court in support of the Republicans, charging that the lower court “ignored one of the most important traditional districting principles – the preservation of the core of existing districts.”

Joined by other GOP members of Congress from South Carolina, Mace argued that constituent services, voter education and the seniority of long-serving members of the House are “vital interests” and that the lower court was “bent on destroying the legislatures’ duly enacted and carefully negotiated map.”

Lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund told the justices in court papers that the state impermissibly used race as a predominant factor when drawing the district.

“Using race as the predominant means to sort voters is unconstitutional even if done for partisan goals,” they argued.

They said the lower court made clear that the state “intentionally exiled more than 30,000 Black Charlestonians from CD1 predominately because of their race.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
Redistricting fights in these 10 states could determine which party controls the US House | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Around the country, politicians are waging high-stakes battles over new congressional lines that could influence which party controls the US House of Representatives after the 2024 election.

In North Carolina, the Republicans who control the state legislature have crafted a map that could help them flip at least three seats. Democrats, meanwhile, could pick up seats in legal skirmishes now playing out in New York, Louisiana, Georgia and other states.

In all, the fate of anywhere from 14 to 18 House seats across nearly a dozen states could turn on the results of these fights. Republicans currently hold just a five-seat edge in the US House. That razor-edge majority has been underscored in recent weeks by the GOP’s chaotic struggle to elect a new speaker.

“Given that the majority is so narrow, every outcome matters to the fight for House control in 2024,” said David Wasserman, who follows redistricting closely as senior editor and elections analyst for The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

And with fewer competitive districts that swing between the political parties, Wasserman added, “every line change is almost existential.”

Experts say several other factors have helped lead to the slew of consequential – and unresolved – redistricting disputes, just months before the first primaries of the 2024 cycle.

They include pandemic-related delays in completing the 2020 census – the once-a-decade population count that kicks off congressional and state legislative redistricting – as well as a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that threw decisions about partisan gerrymandering back to state courts.

In addition, some litigation had been frozen in place until the US Supreme Court’s surprise ruling in June, which found that a Republican-crafted redistricting plan in Alabama disadvantaged Black voters in the state and was in violation of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

That decision “is functionally reanimating all of these dormant cases,” said Adam Kincaid, the president and executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which supports the GOP’s redistricting efforts.

Kincaid said it’s too soon to tell whether Republicans or Democrats will emerge with the advantage by Election Day 2024. In his view, either party could gain or lose only about two seats over redistricting.

In many of the closely watched states where action is pending, just a single seat hangs in the balance, with two notable exceptions: North Carolina and New York, where multiple seats are at stake. Republicans control the map-drawing in the Tar Heel State, while the job could fall to Democrats in New York, potentially canceling out each party’s gains.

“Democrats kind of need to run the table in the rest of these states” to gain any edge, said Nick Seabrook, a political scientist at the University of North Florida and the author of the 2022 book “One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America.”

Here’s a state-by-state look at recent and upcoming redistricting disputes that could shape the 2024 race for control of the US House:

In one of the cycle’s highest-profile redistricting cases, a three-judge panel in Alabama approved a map that creates a second congressional district with a substantial Black population. Before the court action, Alabama – which is 27% Black – had only one Black-majority congressional district out of seven seats.

The fight over the map went all the way to the Supreme Court – which issued a surprise ruling, affirming a lower-court opinion that ordered Alabama to include a second Black-majority district or “something quite close to it.” Under the map that will be in place for the 2024 election, the state’s 2nd District now loops into Mobile to create a seat where nearly half the population is Black.

The high court’s 5-4 decision in June saw two conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, side with the three liberals to uphold the lower-court ruling. Their action kept intact a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act: that it’s illegal to draw maps that effectively keep Black voters from electing a candidate of their choice.

The ruling has reverberated around the country and could affect the outcome of similar court cases underway in Louisiana and Georgia that center on whether Republican-drawn maps improperly diluted Black political power in those states.

Given that Black voters in Alabama have traditionally backed Democrats, the party now stands a better chance of winning the newly reconfigured district and sending to of its members to Congress after next year’s elections.

The new map – approved in recent days by the lower-court judges – also could result in two Black US House members from Alabama serving together for the first time in state history.

A state judge in September struck down congressional lines for northern Florida that had been championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, ruling that the Republican governor’s map had improperly diluted Black voting power.

This case, unlike the Alabama fight decided by the US Supreme Court, centers on provisions in the state constitution.

The judge concluded that the congressional boundaries – which essentially dismantled a seat once held by Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, that connected Black communities across a northern reach of the Florida – violated the state’s Fair Districts amendments, enacted by voters. One amendment specifically bars the state from drawing a district that diminishes the ability of racial minorities “to elect representatives of their choice.”

Arguments before an appeals court are slated for later this month, with litigants seeking a decision by late November. The case is expected to land before the all-Republican state Supreme Court, where DeSantis appointees hold most seats.

A separate federal case – which argues that the map violates the US Constitution – is pending.

But observers say the outcome of the state litigation is more likely than the federal case to determine whether Florida lawmakers must restore the North Florida district, given the state constitution’s especially strong protections for the voting rights of racial minorities and the lower burden of proof required to establish that those rights were abridged.

A redistricting case now before a federal judge could create a more competitive seat for Democrats in the Atlanta suburbs.

The plaintiffs challenging the congressional map drawn by Georgia Republicans argue that the increasingly diverse population in the Peach State should result in an additional Black-majority district, this one in the western Atlanta metro area. A trial in the case recently concluded and awaits a final ruling by US District Judge Steve Jones.

In 2022, Jones preliminarily ruled that some parts of the Republicans’ redistricting plan likely violated federal law but allowed the map to be used in that year’s midterm elections.

A separate federal case in Georgia challenges the congressional map on constitutional grounds and is slated to go to trial next month.

Currently, Republicans hold nine of the 14 seats in Georgia’s congressional delegation. Black people make up a majority, or close to it, in four districts, including three in the Atlanta area.

The Kentucky Supreme Court could soon decide whether a map drawn by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature amounts to what Democrats assert is an “extreme partisan” gerrymander in violation of the state’s constitution.

Much of the case focuses on disputes over state legislative maps, but the congressional lines also are at stake, with critics saying lawmakers moved Kentucky’s capital city – Democratic-leaning Frankfort – out of the 6th Congressional District and into an oddly shaped – and solidly Republican – 1st District to help shore up Republican odds of holding the 6th District.

The 6th District, represented by GOP Rep. Andy Barr, was one of the more competitive seats in Kentucky under its previous lines. (Democrat Amy McGrath came within 3 points of beating Barr in 2018; last year, Barr won a sixth term under the new lines by 29 points.)

A lower-court judge already has ruled that the Republican-drawn map does not violate the state’s constitution.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Alabama could pave the way for a new congressional map in Louisiana ahead of the 2024 election, but the case has quickly become mired in appeals.

Although Black people make up roughly a third of the state’s population, Louisiana has just one Black lawmaker in its six-member congressional delegation.

A federal judge threw out the state’s Republican-drawn map in 2022, saying it likely violated the Voting Rights Act. Republican officials in the state appealed to the US Supreme Court, which put the lower-court ruling on hold until it decided the Alabama case, which it did in June this year.

Once the high court weighed in on the Alabama case, the legal skirmishes again lurched to life in Louisiana.

Louisiana Republicans have filed an appeal with the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals and successfully halted a district court hearing to discuss imposing a new, court-ordered map.

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court declined to allow the federal district judge to move forward with discussions about drawing a new map while the appeal advances through the courts.

GOP state officials say, among other things, that they are seeking time to redraw the map themselves. Critics of the state’s original map argue that Republicans are using legal maneuvers to delay a new redistricting plan, which could result in a second Democratic-leaning seat.

Legal battles that drag on risk judges invoking the so-called Purcell Principle, a doctrine that limits changing voting procedures and boundaries too close to Election Day to guard against voter confusion.

“Some of the reason it becomes too late is because, in many of these cases, the state is prolonging the litigation … and buying more time with an illegal map,” said Kareem Crayton, senior director for voting and representation at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice.

Republicans in New Mexico say the congressional lines drawn by the Democrats who control state government amount to an illegal gerrymander under the state’s constitution.

At stake: a swing district along the US border with Mexico. If Republicans prevail, the seat – now held by a Democratic Rep. Gabe Vasquez – could become more favorable to Republicans.

A state judge recently upheld the map drawn by Democrats, but the New Mexico Supreme Court is expected to review that order on appeal.

Republicans flipped four US House seats in New York in the 2022 midterm elections, victories that helped secure their party’s majority in the chamber.

Current legal fights in the Empire State over redistricting, however, could erase those gains.

A state court judge oversaw last year’s process of drawing the current map following a long legal battle and the inability of New York’s bipartisan redistricting commission to agree on new lines. But Democrats scored a court victory earlier this year when a state appellate court ruled that the redistricting commission should draw new lines.

Republicans have appealed that decision, and oral arguments are set for mid-November before New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. The commission’s map-making also is on hold.

If Democrats prevail, it could make it easier for their party to pick up as many as six seats now held by Republicans.

North Carolina’s legislature, where Republicans hold a supermajority, has drawn new congressional lines that observers say could prove a windfall for the GOP and boost the party’s chances of retaining its House majority next year.

The state’s current House delegation is split 7-7 between Democrats and Republicans.

A map that state lawmakers recently approved puts three House Democrats in what one expert called “almost impossible to win” districts.

The affected Democrats are Reps. Jeff Jackson, who currently represents a Charlotte-area district; Wiley Nickel, who holds a Raleigh-area seat; and Kathy Manning, who represents Greensboro and other parts of north-central North Carolina.

A fourth Democrat, Rep. Don Davis, saw his district retooled to become more friendly toward Republicans while remaining competitive for both parties.

State-level gains in the 2022 midterm elections have given the GOP new sway over redistricting in this swing state. Last year, Republicans flipped North Carolina’s Supreme Court, whose members are chosen in partisan elections. The new GOP majority on the court this year tossed out a 2022 ruling by the then-Democratic leaning court against partisan gerrymandering.

A map that had been created after the Democratic-led high court’s ruling resulted in the current even split in the state’s House delegation.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper does not have veto power over redistricting legislation.

A redistricting case pending before the US Supreme Court centers on the future of a Charleston-area seat held by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who made headlines recently for joining House GOP hard-liners in voting to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker.

Earlier this year, a three-judge panel concluded that lines for the coastal 1st Congressional District, as drawn by state GOP lawmakers, amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The Republican lawmakers appealed to the US Supreme Court. And, during oral arguments earlier this month, several justices in the court’s conservative majority expressed skepticism that South Carolina officials had engaged in an improper racial gerrymander and seemed inclined to reinstate the lawmakers’ map.

The state Supreme Court, in a case it heard in July, is considering whether it even has the authority to weigh in on map-drawing decisions by the GOP-controlled state legislature.

Republican state officials argue that the court’s power over redistricting decisions is limited.

Advocacy groups and a handful of voters are challenging a congressional map that further carved up Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County between four decidedly Republican districts.

Doing so, the plaintiffs argued in their lawsuit, “takes a slice of Salt Lake County and grafts it onto large swaths of the rest of Utah,” allowing Republican voters in rural areas and smaller cities far away from Salt Lake to “dictate the outcome of elections.”

Redistricting fights over congressional maps are ongoing in several other states – ranging from Texas to Tennessee – but those cases might not be resolved in time to affect next year’s elections.

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August 2, 2023
DeSantis faces new leadership test as Hurricane Idalia barrels toward Florida | CNN Politics

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CNN
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With the eyes of the country on Hurricane Idalia as it spins toward Florida’s Gulf Coast, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential ambitions are also under the spotlight as he puts his campaign on hold to manage the crisis at home.

DeSantis flew back to Tallahassee from Iowa on Saturday night and has since appeared regularly on Florida televisions with updates on Idalia’s path and state efforts to prepare for the approaching storm. From behind a lectern with the state seal, the Republican governor has matter-of-factly shared logistics and warnings.

The coming days will present a range of tests for DeSantis to navigate during a critical juncture in his governorship and White House bid. His stewardship of the hurricane response and recovery efforts will be closely scrutinized by his political opponents and Republican voters, watching whether he can lead through difficult moments, comfort the aggrieved and learn from the lessons of past storms.

It is not clear when DeSantis will return to the campaign trail. In a text message to supporters, his campaign said it would go dark for a few days, adding: “Before we sign off, can we ask you to chip in any amount you can to support our end-of-month fundraising push?”

For his part, DeSantis said he will be in Florida for as long as necessary.

“You do what you need to do,” DeSantis said Tuesday. “So that’s what we’re doing. It’s going to be no different than what we did during Hurricane Ian [last year]. I’m hoping that this storm is not as catastrophic as Hurricane Ian was, but we’re gonna do what we need to do because it’s just something that’s important.”

While no Florida executive would publicly suggest a hurricane is an opportunity to showcase leadership chops, past storms have certainly tested governors and forged their legacies. DeSantis’ predecessor, Republican Rick Scott, dealt with Hurricane Michael just weeks before the 2018 election, when he was running for US Senate against incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. Scott leaned into managing the crisis with gusto and ultimately won his race in a recount.

Perhaps no one did more to solidify their standing among Floridians during such disasters as former GOP Gov. Jeb Bush, whose handling of eight hurricanes during a deadly two-year stretch of tropical weather is still remembered by those who experienced the devastation. One of those hurricanes, Katrina, forever altered perceptions of the presidency of Bush’s older brother, George W. Bush, showcasing how storms can also plunge an executive into crisis.

Those past Florida governors, though, were not running for president. Rarely have incumbent state executives faced a disaster of Idalia’s potential magnitude in the throes of a White House bid.

The most notable recent exception is Republican Chris Christie, who as New Jersey governor in 2016 returned to his home state to manage a blizzard amid criticism for putting the presidential race ahead of his elected duties. At the time, Christie was campaigning in New Hampshire, which was just weeks away from holding the first-in-the-nation primary. Christie is once again running for the GOP nomination.

“I don’t think any presidential candidate wants to be taken off the campaign trail. But you can’t ignore your day job,” said Alex Conant, a senior adviser to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Insufficient responses to storms have ended political careers. Every governor takes the threat of a hurricane seriously because if the response is mishandled, not only are lives at stake, but there’s political fallout.”

In the past 24 hours, DeSantis’ team has signaled it would not shy away from showcasing the governor’s storm response to Republican voters. His aides have shared posts on social media of people praising DeSantis’ activity so far, with his office press secretary writing on X, “Find you a leader that shows up like @GovRonDeSantis.” In a memo sent Tuesday, DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo wrote that DeSantis is “now at the helm of Florida’s hurricane response and is working with local officials across the state to do everything necessary to ensure Florida is fully prepared.”

“This is the strong leadership in times of crisis that Americans can expect from a President DeSantis,” Romeo added.

Just as he did last year, when Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida amid his race for reelection, DeSantis has vowed to put partisan politics aside for the time being. Though a regular critic of President Joe Biden – including over the Democrat’s response to the Maui wildfires – DeSantis said he has spoken with the president and expects the two administrations to work in concert toward Florida’s recovery.

“There’s time and a place to have political season, but then there’s a time and a place to say that this is something that’s life-threatening. This is something that could potentially cost somebody their life, it could cost them their livelihood, and we have responsibility as Americans to come together,” DeSantis said Monday.

(Coming off the devastation in Hawaii, Biden is facing a separate range of questions about his administration’s response to yet another natural catastrophe.)

DeSantis’ departure from the campaign trail comes just days after the first GOP presidential debate at a moment when his team believes voters are starting to tune into the race. He is trailing Donald Trump in GOP primary polling but is aggressively challenging the former president in early nominating states.

The Florida governor is also staving off a field of GOP contenders, who must now also balance sensitivities around Hurricane Idalia with their attempts to overcome DeSantis in the polls.

“DeSantis is going to get a breather in terms of attacks,” said Todd Belt, director of the political management program at George Washington University and author of “The Post-Heroic Presidency.”

“This is similar to what we see in the rally-around-the-flag phenomena,” Belt said. “When there’s something that affects the country more generally, the other party ceases attacks on the incumbent party. It helps in the polls, at least temporarily. It would look really bad for other Republicans to criticize DeSantis during this time, and the question is how long will they wait? It’s worth noting that Florida is an extremely important electoral state.”

Storm response has already become part of DeSantis’ pitch to voters. On the campaign trail, he has often shared the story of the swift reopening of two bridges destroyed by Hurricane Ian as evidence of his executive management. DeSantis has also asserted that he could send his “Florida people” to the southern border to build a wall.

“Come on, Joe (Biden),” he said earlier this year. “Let us get it done. We’ll do it.”

But Ian also generated some negative attention for DeSantis. Images of the governor wearing white rain boots and campaign gear as he surveyed storm-ravaged regions provided fodder for his political detractors and were spread widely on social media by Democrats and Trump supporters.

DeSantis was also forced to defend the late local evacuation orders last year that left many coastal residents in Lee County unprepared for Ian’s deadly turn, despite the persistent threat of cataclysmic storm surge.

Though DeSantis said this week that the state has not changed its evacuation protocols, he and state officials have emphasized that Idalia could bring dangerous storm surge all along Florida’s west coast, even outside the projected path of the storm. This year, he has spent time warning residents who are outside the forecasted “cone” – or the probable track of the center of the storm.

Idalia is forecast to make landfall near Florida’s Big Bend area as a Category 3 hurricane or stronger, potentially bringing record storm surge to a part of the state’s west coast that has not experienced a storm of this magnitude in more than 150 years.

While the storm is perhaps an opportunity for DeSantis to show strength in mobilizing his administration to respond to a storm, the expected devastation also has the potential to challenge DeSantis’ limitations as a consoler in chief, a role Biden has embraced during national tragedies.

DeSantis’ capacity for compassion has already come under fire this week following his rushed response to Saturday’s killing of three Black people by a White gunman in Jacksonville. His office on Saturday shared a video statement from DeSantis that seemed hastily shot in front of white vinyl siding in Iowa, during which he called the racially targeted attack “totally unacceptable.” The next day he attended a vigil for the victims where he called the shooter a “major league scumbag.”

The tone of his remarks and his appearance at the vigil drew criticism from those who wanted DeSantis to acknowledge efforts by his administration to alter how Florida students learn about race and the lived experience of Black Americans.

“A white man in his early twenties specifically went to kill BLACK PEOPLE,” Democratic state Rep. Angie Nixon, who represents Jacksonville and was photographed next to DeSantis at the vigil wearing a “Stand with Black Women” shirt, posted on X. “The governor of our state of Florida has created an environment ripe for this.”

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August 2, 2023
Federal court strikes down Alabama congressional map after legislature snubbed Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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A federal court blocked a newly drawn Alabama congressional map on Tuesday because it didn’t create a second majority-Black district as the Supreme Court had ordered earlier this year.

In a unanimous decision from a three-judge panel, which had overseen the case before it reached the Supreme Court, the judges wrote that they were “disturbed” by Alabama’s actions in the case.

The state had snubbed the Supreme Court’s order – a surprise 5-4 decision in June – that the maps should be redrawn. White voters currently make up the majority in six of the state’s seven congressional districts, although 27% of the state’s population is Black.

“We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires,” wrote the judges, two of whom were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

Alabama officials on Tuesday filed notice that they are appealing the ruling.

“While we are disappointed in today’s decision, we strongly believe that the Legislature’s map complies with the Voting Rights Act and the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court,” the office of Alabama Attorney General Steven Marshall said in a statement. “We intend to promptly seek review from the Supreme Court to ensure that the State can use its lawful congressional districts in 2024 and beyond.”

Alabama officials also asked the three-judge court to freeze its opinion invalidating the congressional map but said they will formally ask the Supreme Court for a stay on Thursday.

This redistricting battle – and separate, pending litigation over congressional maps in states such as Georgia and Florida – could determine which party controls the US House of Representatives after next year’s elections. Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority in the chamber.

The three federal judges overseeing the Alabama case on Tuesday ordered a special master to submit three proposed maps that would create a second Black-majority district by September 25.

The panel wrote that it was “not aware of any other case” in which a state legislature had responded to being ordered to a draw map with a second majority-minority district by creating one that the state itself admitted didn’t create the required district.

“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” and Alabama’s new map, they wrote, “plainly fails to do so.”

JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, which has been fighting the case, praised the ruling: “Elected officials ignored their responsibilities and chose to violate our democracy. We hope the court’s special master helps steward a process that ensures a fair map that Black Alabamians and our state deserve.”

This summer, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, had affirmed an earlier decision by the three-judge panel and ordered the state to redraw congressional maps to include a second majority-Black district or “something quite close to it.”

The Supreme Court’s surprise decision in Alabama – coming after the right-leaning high court has chipped away at other parts of the Voting Rights Act in recent years – has given fresh hope to voting rights activists and Democrats that they could prevail in challenges to other maps they view as discriminating against minorities.

But the new map approved by Alabama’s Republican-dominated legislature – and signed into law by GOP Gov. Kay Ivey – in July created only one majority-Black district and boosted the share of Black voters in a second district from roughly 30% to nearly 40%.

The pending cases center on whether GOP state legislators drew congressional maps after the 2020 census that weakened the power of Black voters in violation of Section 2 of the historic Voting Rights Act.

Republicans control all statewide offices in Alabama and all but one congressional seat. The single Black-majority congressional district is represented by Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, the state’s first Black woman elected to Congress.

Alabama officials have argued that the map as redrawn by state lawmakers was aimed at maintaining traditional guidelines for congressional redistricting, such as keeping together communities of interest. And they have signaled that they hope to sway one of the Supreme Court justices who sided with the majority in June.

The state’s briefs before the three-judge panel referenced a concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh – one of the two conservatives who sided with the liberal justices on the high court to vote against the original Alabama map – that questioned whether “race-based redistricting” can “extend indefinitely into the future.”

The lower-court judges weren’t convinced by the state’s arguments.

They wrote that after reviewing the concurrence, as well as a part of the Supreme Court’s ruling which Kavanaugh didn’t join, “We do not understand either of those writings as undermining any aspect of the Supreme Court’s affirmance; if they did, the Court would not have affirmed the injunction.”

The judges also rejected Alabama’s argument that drawing a second Black-majority district would unconstitutionally constitute “affirmative action in redistricting.”

“Unlike affirmative action in the admissions programs the Supreme Court analyzed in [this year’s affirmative action case], which was expressly aimed at achieving balanced racial outcomes in the makeup of the universities’ student bodies, the Voting Rights Act guarantees only ‘equality of opportunity, not a guarantee of electoral success for minority-preferred candidates of whatever race,’” the panel wrote.

“The Voting Rights Act does not provide a leg up for Black voters – it merely prevents them from being kept down with regard to what is arguably the most ‘fundamental political right,’ in that it is ‘preservative of all rights’ – the right to vote.”

Earlier, in a letter to state lawmakers, Marshall had argued that a separate Supreme Court ruling in June – after the high court’s Alabama redistricting decision came down – that ended affirmative action in college admissions meant that using a map in which “race predominates” would open up the state to claims that it was violating the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
Democratic worries bubble up over Cornel West’s Green Party run as Biden campaign takes hands-off approach | CNN Politics

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Cornel West’s candidacy on the Green Party line confuses some of his longtime political allies and friends – while also alarming top Democrats and Black leaders as a potential ticking time bomb for President Joe Biden in next year’s election.

The political philosopher and proud agitator is tapping into his semi-celebrity to attack Biden from the left – where the president has never been fully embraced – and describing his administrations as a mere “postponement of fascism.” And as concerns over Black voter enthusiasm bubble among Democratic operatives, West is also making a deliberately race-based argument, accusing the Democratic establishment of treating the electorate like “a plantation where you got ownership status in terms of which way you vote.”

Most top Democrats remain skeptical West will raise enough money to mount an extensive operation – he jumped from the little-known People’s Party to the Greens after a rocky rollout – and are following the Biden campaign’s lead of deliberately not engaging with him.

But his decision to run on a ballot line which Democrats blame for spoiling both the 2000 and 2016 elections, when Green presidential nominees drew enough votes to help give Republicans key states in the Electoral College, has made his candidacy a running source of angst and, increasingly, a topic of private conversations among multiple Democratic leaders nationally and in battleground states

And while many political insiders have been buzzing about the group No Labels trying to get on the ballot in many states with a presidential candidate, the Greens are already there in 16 – and in 2016, got up to 44, including the most competitive states.

“This is going to sneak up on people,” said David Axelrod, a former Barack Obama adviser who also serves as a CNN political commentator. “I don’t know why alarm bells aren’t going off now, and they should be at a steady drumbeat from now until the election.”

There are no sirens blaring, but top Democrats in swing states have taken notice.

“We should be concerned. I don’t think time’s necessarily on our side. The longer these things hang out there, the worse it tends to get,” said Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, who acknowledged that the conversation about West has, so far, been more among insiders than voters. “We should try to deal with it rather quickly if we can.”

For now, Biden advisers remain hopeful that the president’s record and voters’ memories of 2016, when Jill Stein’s campaign won tens of thousands of votes in battleground states Hillary Clinton lost, will keep supporters from straying to West. It’s an approach much like the one being taken by Michigan Democratic chair Lavora Barnes, who told CNN, “I don’t think Cornel West or the Green Party is something we need to worry about, but it’s absolutely something we need to keep an eye on.”

Barnes has been already begun to talk about what she’s seeing, telling CNN that she recently met with her Black caucus chair about strategies to head off West by stepping up talk about the Biden administration’s accomplishments for Black voters.

Personal affection and respect for West, a giant of the American left and pioneering political theorist, has led many to try to avoid discussing their dismay over his run.

At the top of that list, to the frustration of several top Biden supporters who discussed their feelings with CNN: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose two presidential campaigns prominently featured West as a speaker at his rallies and included the professor as part of his traveling inner circle.

Sanders declined multiple requests to discuss West’s campaign, only telling CNN that he did not speak to the candidate before launching. He shut down questions when asked directly about some of West’s comments about Biden.

“Dr. West is one of the most pure, good, and honest souls I have ever encountered,” said Ari Rabin-Havt, a Sanders confidant and one of his deputy campaign managers in 2020. “That can lead someone, even one of the most brilliant minds on the planet, to make incredibly wrong political choices.”

Multiple sources in leadership roles at several new progressive establishment groups told CNN they were surprised by West’s candidacy and their silence has been intentional. Even media outlets and leftist commentators who have held him in high regard for decades are urging West to reconsider and, in some notable cases, run as a Democrat in a primary challenge to Biden. Multiple top former Sanders aides told CNN they opposed the Green Party run and don’t understand what he is trying to accomplish through it.

The most the senator himself has discussed the run was back in April, saying, “People will do what they want to do.”

West was one of the early boosters of the modern Democratic Socialists of America in the early 1980s and later served as an honorary chair. But even two prominent members, asking for anonymity to speak critically about a man they admire, questioned West’s timing and reading of the political moment.

“He’s missing the mark in two ways: He’s either a threat to bringing the GOP back (as a spoiler) or, if you don’t care about that, he’s not doing the right gestures and organizational discipline” to appeal to far-left groups, one of the influential DSA members said.

Some high-profile Sanders supporters, though, are moving West’s way.

Nina Turner, a national co-chair of Sanders 2020 campaign who has remained a consistent Biden critic, described West’s run as a “moral calling,” though she is not currently working with the campaign in any formal capacity.

Another ally from the Sanders’ team, Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, told CNN he had not spoken to West since the campaign began and that he had “no idea” about his friend’s plans but would donate to the campaign. He said he would “see how things are panning out” when the election nears before deciding how to vote.

While Biden has consistently registered strong support among Black voters, strategists looking ahead to 2024 are already worried about what those trends may mean for Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin – all of which are critical to the president’s reelection hopes – if Black voters don’t show up for Biden in force. (Though there are fewer Black voters in Arizona, it’s also a state with a long history of left-leaning voters going Green, and where Biden edged out Trump by a little under 13,000 votes.)

Sensing that Black voter engagement will be a problem for them, the Congressional Black Caucus this week already launched a new PAC to fund a wider array of efforts to make the case into 2024. Davis said that will be part of the work he is looking to do, too, citing Black unemployment at the lower rate on record, the high rate of creation for new Black-owned businesses and investments in local projects like bus rapid transit in Pittsburgh and new water lines.

Asked about West’s candidacy, New York Rep. Greg Meeks – the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC – said he is confident the support will be there, citing other elements of Biden’s record, including money to take lead out of pipes, reduced insulin costs and low-cost broadband

“In this election, we’re going to take our case directly to Black voters to ensure our community is not bamboozled by perennial distractions,” Meeks said.

Billy Honor, the director of organizing for the New Georgia Project Action Fund, told CNN his group is also planning a campaign to highlight Democrats’ accomplishments, since Biden, despite enjoying a trusted brand with older Black voters, “is not popular in Atlanta.”

“West has the potential because he is – whether people like it or not, it’s the consequence of having such a long life in public service and in the public eye – he is the most famous Black intellectual of our generation,” Honor said. “There’s W.E.B. Du Bois and then there’s Cornel West.”

That public esteem and name recognition, along with a progressive agenda aligned with many organizers and activists, Honor said, could also add to West’s appeal with younger voters.

The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee declined comment on West.

West still has to secure the Green nomination, but he insists he will not be a spoiler next November. He disputed that Jill Stein was when she ran on the Green line in 2016 and won more votes than the margin of difference in several states, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, saying those people otherwise wouldn’t have voted at all.

But Democrats remain traumatized by that and many still blame Stein – also accusing her of being another pawn of Vladimir Putin’s attack on the 2016 elections, by virtue of her attendance at a state-owned “Russia Today” party in Moscow in 2015 and Russian troll farm activity boosting her campaign.

Stein, who is now working as the West campaign’s “interim coordinator” to help build out his team and fortify relationships with other Greens, told CNN in an interview that Democratic backlash to West’s candidacy hardly warranted a mention in their early discussions.

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager in 2020, who said news of West’s campaign announcement “hit me completely out of the blue,” voiced a concern that is shared by many leaders on the left: “I just hope and pray that he’s not being taken advantage of and not being exploited by others for ulterior motives.”

West bristled at such suggestions.

“When people say, ‘Well, the Green Party’s using West,’ I mean, I don’t look at it that way. I think that we’re all in this movement together,” West added. “We’re trying to do the best that we can to bring some kind of light on the suffering and to bring some kind of vision and organization to try to minimize the suffering.”

Andrew Wilkes, a pastor in Brooklyn, said his longtime friend and ally’s aim was simple.

“At the heart of it,” he said, “is the desire to make sure you have a truly representative and equitable democracy.”

The first Black student ever to get a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, West will be on sabbatical after finishing the spring semester teaching at the Union Theological Seminary.

But he’s been a force in politics directly since his best-selling 1993 book “Race Matters,” still frequently cited by younger movement progressives as one of the texts that drew them into left-wing politics.

“What makes Dr. Cornel West so formidable is that he does have a relationship across generations,” Turner said. “Because of what’s he’s done in the classroom with four walls – and the classroom with no walls.”

In 2000, he campaigned for Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee that year. In 2008, he backed Obama, though some Black leaders and older Black voters have never forgiven West for turning into one of the harshest critics of the first Black president.

He says he was just doing what he had always promised in pushing Obama to go harder on Wall Street and in tackling poverty.

“It looked like I was turning on him,” West added. “No, no. I was turning toward the people and he was the one that turned away from the people, poor and working people.”

After supporting Sanders in 2020, West endorsed and even stumped for Biden as part of what he described as an “antifascist coalition” arrayed against Trump.

But he told CNN he could not bring himself to pull the lever for Biden.

“Once I got in there, I thought about mass incarceration, the Crime Bill, thought about the invasion, occupation of Iraq. Those are crimes against humanity, for me,” West said, explaining that because Sanders had asked him not to use his name as a write-in, he “ended up not being able to vote for anybody.”

West’s view of Biden has only grown dimmer.

“Biden will only be a caretaker government against fascism,” West said. “You don’t fight fascism by simply supporting postponement administrations.”

Jeff Weaver, who ran Sanders’ 2016 campaign before becoming a senior adviser four years later, suggested that Biden’s relationships on the left were more durable than many pundits realize.

Weaver said the “respect” with which Biden has treated progressives – coupled with the threat of Trump looming – “goes a long way.”

West still harbors complaints about how he feels Sanders was not treated fairly by the Democratic Party. And though he did not dispute the assessment that Biden has worked collaboratively with progressives, he argued that the partnership was unbalanced.

“When we talk about a coalition, this is not a jazz band where everybody’s got equal voices,” West said. “Not at all. This is one that is hierarchical.”

West doesn’t yet have a campaign website with a list of specific policy prescriptions, though he has been fiercely critical of NATO and the Biden administration’s decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine.

In a tweet accompanying his campaign launch video last month, West indicated that his campaign’s message would mirror his past work and rhetoric – ending poverty and mass incarceration, pushing for guaranteed housing, health care, education and living wages.

Despite frequent appearances in the media since launching, West still has not held a proper, in-person campaign rally.

That will change toward the end of the summer, he said, when he plans to do a “symbolic kickoff” in Mississippi for an event marking the anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. West says the family invited him, and he decided to make that his first public event as a candidate.

In the run-up to that more traditional launch, West said, he hopes to build his currently bare bones campaign up and raise the money to pay for it.

“We are wrestling with it,” he said, “day-by-day.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Andrew Wilkes’ relationship with Cornel West. The two are longtime allies and friends.

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July 21, 2023
Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticize each other in unusually sharp language in affirmative action case | CNN Politics

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The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling Thursday on affirmative action pitted its two Black justices against each other, with the ideologically opposed jurists employing unusually sharp language attacking each other by name.

The majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts said colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, saying programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race.

Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s other four conservatives joined Roberts’ opinion. But Thomas, who in 1991 became the second Black person to ascend to the nation’s highest court, issued a lengthy concurrence that attacked such admissions programs and tore into arguments posited by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to join the court, who penned her own fiery dissent in the case.

Thomas has previously acknowledged that he made it to Yale Law School because of affirmative action, but he has long criticized such policies. He spoke in personal terms in his concurrence as he put forth his argument against the use of the policies, which he described as “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”

“Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color,” Thomas wrote.

“While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination,” he added, “I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”

As he read his concurrence from the bench on Thursday, Jackson, who joined the court last year, stared blankly ahead. Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, Jackson did not read her own dissent, in which she went after Thomas’ concurrence and accused the majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

A footnote near the end of Jackson’s dissent went after the concurrence by Thomas, with the liberal justice accusing her colleague of demonstrating “an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.”

“Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here,” Jackson wrote. “The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

In her broader dissent, Jackson said that the argument made by the challengers that affirmative action programs are unfair “blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.”

“But the response is simple: Our country has never been colorblind,” Jackson said.

(While Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case, she did hear the UNC case, and her dissent was focused on the latter.)

Thomas then explicitly attacks Jackson’s opinion.

“As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” Thomas wrote.

“Worse still, Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims,” Thomas wrote at another point in his concurrence. “Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me.”

‘You don’t have to be perfect’: Watch Judge Jackson’s emotional message to her girls

Thomas, one of the court’s most conservative members, has long been known for his distaste for affirmative action policies. He has been open about the fact that he made it to Yale because of affirmative action, but says the stigma of preferential treatment made it difficult for him to find a job after college.

In his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas says he felt “tricked” by paternalistic Whites at Yale who recruited Black students.

“After graduating from Yale, I met a black alumnus of the University of Michigan Law School who told me that he’d made a point of not mentioning his race on his application. I wished with all my heart that I’d done the same,” he wrote.

“I learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for White graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it,” Thomas wrote. “As a symbol of my disillusionment, I peeled a fifteen-cent price sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it one the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale.”

He dissented in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed for the limited use of race in college admissions.

“I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators,” he wrote in his dissent.

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June 29, 2023
One of the first Black Marines is seeking recognition decades after being wounded in World War II | CNN

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Decades after Lee Vernon Newby Jr. was one of the first Black recruits to break the color barrier in the Marine Corps, he and his family are still fighting for recognition.

The 100-year-old and his four children want him to be honored with a Purple Heart for his service but so far, he’s been denied one despite his extensive injuries.

“I was over there serving the government, serving this country. They put me in harm’s way, but still they didn’t give me the acknowledgment,” Newby told CNN.

Newby, who now lives at a senior living facility outside of Detroit, was just a teenager when he fought in World War II. He says he felt fortunate to serve his country despite being one of the few Black people in the Marine Corps.

After being drafted, Newby was assigned to Montford Point, a segregated training facility in North Carolina.

Newby headed to the Solomon Islands for the Battle of Guadalcanal, as fighting took place between 1942 and 1943. During that time, Newby’s family says he suffered fourth-degree burns after gasoline exploded in a hole. The burns covered more than 60% of his body, his family said.

“All of a sudden, something hit me right in my chest. Just all of a sudden, it just burnt the clothes off of me,” he said. “When I hit the deck and got up, all the skin was just laying out.”

Ellena Dione Newby-Bennette, one of Newby’s daughters, said her father received medical treatment for several months and later was sent back into action. “He wasn’t 100% healed,” she said.

Newby received an honorable discharge in 1946 and returned home, where he struggled with racism and Jim Crow laws, his family said. He found work as a janitor and chauffeur, and eventually started a family.

“America is one of the greatest countries in the world, but I didn’t get a fair deal,” he said. Newby is still hoping it will change.

Newby received a letter from President Joe Biden on his 100th birthday earlier this year, and he has been recognized by state and local officials. But last month, he received a letter from the Navy, telling him he is not eligible for a Purple Heart.

The rejection, Newby says, reinforced feelings that Black people have been “getting a short deal.”

The Purple Heart has specific criteria for when is awarded to US service members, and is limited to those who are wounded or killed in combat. It is described as one of the most respected military awards.

In the letter, shared with CNN, Navy officials said Newby is considered ineligible because he was not wounded “at the hands of the enemy.”

The letter states at the time, Newby was working with another service member who was attempting to kill rats by pouring gasoline from a cup down a hole next to a stump.

The unnamed service member threw the cup when it ignited and set Newby’s clothing on fire, the letter said.

Newby and his family said they are planning to appeal the decision. Newby’s daughters said their father doesn’t recall that rats were involved and “doesn’t understand where that story came from.”

The Pentagon further clarified the rules, noting there are two key conditions which both must be met for the Purple Heart to be awarded.

“First, the wound must have resulted from enemy action. Second, the wound must have been of such severity that it necessitated treatment, not merely examination, by a medical officer. If the wound does not meet both standards, the Purple Heart may not be awarded,” spokesperson Yvonne Carlock told CNN.

Newby’s children said he experienced PTSD symptoms and they grew up listening to stories of enemy planes flying overhead bombs being dropped, and friends dying due to their injuries.

“How much more of his heart did he have to give? More than half of his body was burned,” said Newby-Bennette.

Newby’s children hope their father and other Black Marines who did not live long enough to receive notoriety are honored for their service.

“He deserves to have his due,” Newby’s daughter Jannise Newby said.

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June 19, 2023
As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery | CNN
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Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.

The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.

She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”

“When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”

That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.

Juneteenth has since become known as “America’s Second Independence Day.” Now a federal holiday, it will be celebrated by parades, proclamations, and ceremonies throughout the US. Though it commemorates a moment when enslaved African Americans were freed, the US is still held captive by several myths about slavery and people like Cummins.

One of the biggest myths that historians and storytellers have successfully challenged in recent years is that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until White abolitionists and “The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln freed them. Black soldiers, for example, played a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. This new understanding of slavery has led to a rhetorical shift: It’s no longer proper to refer to people like Cummins as simply “slaves.”

“There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.

“There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”

Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.

“The enslavement of an estimated ten million Africans over a period of almost four centuries in the Atlantic slave trade was a tragedy of such scope that it is difficult to imagine, much less comprehend,” Albert J. Raboteau wrote in “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South.”

Here are three other myths about slavery that historians say persist:

There is a popular conception that the formerly enslaved were freed after the Civil War ended. But many had to continually fight for their freedom because so many Whites still tried to keep them in captivity and were willing to use deceit and violence to do so.

The author Clint Smith described this dynamic in his New York Times bestselling book, “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with The History of Slavery Across America.” Smith said the Juneteenth jubilation didn’t last for many formerly enslaved people. Former Confederate soldiers still tried to round up Black “runaways” to return them to their owners though that term no longer had any legal merit. And White vigilantes tracked down and punished formerly enslaved people.

Smith unearthed the narrative of a woman named Susan Merritt of Rusk Country, Texas, who recounted what happened when some people like Cummins in Texas tried to claim their freedom:

“Lots of Negroes were killed after freedom…bushwhacked, shot down while they were trying to get away,” Merritt said. “You could see lots of Negroes hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom. They would catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.”

And then there was the practice of taking away Black freedom through other means, like convict-leasing programs and a corrupt justice system throughout the South that the historian Douglas A. Blackmon documented in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery By Another Name.”

The lesson from history: Slavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Black people still had to literally fight for their freedom long afterward. Smith quotes the historian W. Caleb McDaniel who wrote:

“Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process.”

Mention slavery and it still evokes images of half-naked Africans stumbling onto the American shores, struggling to learn to read and write in a strange and alien land. The focus of many stories about the formerly enslaved is what was taken from them. But they gave plenty to America in ways that are still not appreciated.

Captive Africans who came here didn’t need to be civilized. They came to the US as fully formed individuals, not blank canvases, with their own cultures and specialized knowledge, says Leslie Wilson, a historian at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

The thumbprints of the culture that formerly enslaved people created are now stamped on virtually every facet of American culture, Wilson says. By the Civil War, Black people had already changed American concepts of architecture, burial, music, storytelling and medicine, Wilson says.

“Much of Southern culture is nothing more than blackness,” Wilson says. “It is the blues and jazz of the 19th century and the rock and roll of the 20th. It is the chicken and grits, the way that people rock in church or the cadence of the pastor.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider how much of Americans’ contemporary landscape is shaped by the legacy of the formerly enslaved:
The Statue of Liberty was originally created to commemorate freed enslaved people, not the arrival of immigrants.
An enslaved person called Onesimus changed the way Americans treated epidemics, pioneering a technique to prevent the spread of smallpox that he had learned from his native West Africa.

Country music owes much of its musical legacy to the influence of the formerly enslaved. The banjo, for example, is a descendant of an instrument that was brought to America by enslaved West Africans and many of the genre’s earliest hits were adapted from slave spirituals.

Bugs Bunny cartoons and other stories like Brer Rabbit featuring clever, talking animals were originally inspired by African folktales first told by enslaved people.
Black and White culture is so intertwined that the cultural critic, Albert Murray, declared in his book, “The Omni-Americans,” that “American culture is “incontestably mulatto.” White and Black people in the US “resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

“The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,” Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.”

In the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, there is a special exhibit of an artifact that is so rare that there are only a handful now in existence. It is what historians call a “Slave Bible.” It is a copy of a Bible that was used by British missionaries to convert enslaved African Americans. Published in 1807, the Bible deletes any passages that may inspire liberation – about 90% of the Old Testament is missing along with half of the New Testament.

“They literally blacked out, portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk,” says Leon Harris, a theology professor at Biola University in California.

There is misconception that Christianity was successfully used to create docile slaves who were conditioned to heed New Testament passages such as “slaves obey your earthly masters.” Malcolm X derided Christianity as a White man’s religion used to brainwash Black people to “shout and sing and pray until we die ‘for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter’” while the White man “has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!”

But historians like Harris say most slaves disdained the type of Christianity that was taught to them. Many instead discovered those missing passages in the Slave Bible, such as the Old Testament stories of God freeing the Israelites from Egyptian captivity. It’s no accident that many Black leaders who have led freedom struggles, from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were Christian ministers.

“Instead of Christianity being a religion of African oppression, many interpreted it as a religion of freedom,” Harris says.

The historical record shows that enslaved African Americans revitalized Christianity in other ways, historians say. They injected emotionalism and an emphasis on ecstatic worship into evangelical Christianity that can still be seen in how many White Pentecostal worship today. And Negro spirituals, often called the nation’s first musical form unique to America, continue to be sung throughout churches of all races and ethnicities today.

Former slaves remade Christianity – it didn’t remake them, says Raboteau, author of “Slave Religion.” He wrote that it had a “this-worldly” impact:

“To describe slave religion as merely otherworldly is inaccurate, for the slaves believed that God had acted, was acting, and would continue to act within human history and within their own particular history as a peculiar people just as long ago he had acted on behalf of another chosen people, biblical Israel,” Raboteau wrote.

This year, Juneteenth comes at a time when White educators and politicians are passing laws that ban the teaching of Black history in schools that could make White students or others feel “discomfort.” How many students will be able to learn about the resilience of the formerly enslaved?

That’s a question that no holiday celebration can answer. But one historical debate has been settled:

Even as the stories of the formerly enslaved are forgotten by history, we live in a contemporary America that was profoundly shaped by how they resisted captivity – whether some of us care to know it or not.

John Blake is a Senior Writer at CNN and the author of “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”
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June 18, 2023
Celebrate Juneteenth by promoting Black health, wealth and joy | CNN

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June 19, 2023 is the third annual observance of Juneteenth. The federal holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their emancipation two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although Juneteenth has recently become more widely recognized, the date has long been a deeply spiritual time of remembrance and celebration for the Black community.

Across the country, African Americans have rejoiced with fireworks and cookouts, sipping red drinks – a nod to ancestors’ bloodshed and endurance.

“We know the horrors that we went through,” explained Kleaver Cruz, writer of the forthcoming book “The Black Joy Project” and creator of a digital initiative of the same name. “It’s always concurrent: the joy and the pain. We use one to get through the other.”

On a particularly joyous note, this June 19, CNN and OWN (both properties of Warner Bros. Discovery) will simulcast Juneteenth: A Global Celebration for Freedom at 8 PM Eastern time. The concert will feature artists across multiple genres including Charlie Wilson, Miguel, Kirk Franklin, Nelly, SWV, Davido, Coi Leray, Jodeci and Mike Phillips. CNN will kick off pre-show coverage at 7 PM Eastern time, highlighting Black advocates, trailblazers, and creators.

“We get to celebrate our freedoms; we get to celebrate the dismantling of things and lean into what we want in the future,” Cruz said of Juneteenth observance. “We want more of that space and less of the one that harms us.”

The Black community still struggles with pain and inequity. Impact Your World has gathered ways you can help reject the pathology of racism and thoughtfully celebrate Juneteenth through non-profits that support Black health, wealth, joy, and overall empowerment. You can donate to those charities here.

For Black Americans, the end of slavery was just the beginning of a 158-year quest for equality. Along the way, the cumulative effect of institutional and systemic racism fomented stark disparities in income, health, education, and opportunity.

“Those that came before us were physically free but were unable to earn livable wages or receive an education without its share of defeating challenges,” said Marsha Barnes, Founder of The Finance Bar.

Data collected by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System shows that in the fourth quarter of 2022, the average Black household’s net worth was about one-fourth that of the average White household.

“Taking the time to address the racial wealth gap highlights many of the roadblocks we as Black Americans currently face,” explained Barnes, a certified financial therapist. She sees the well-documented connection between financial literacy and financial wellness as a key to enhancing wealth in the Black community.

“We still are at a disadvantage, but it’s important we become comfortable with having to learn while playing the game,” Barnes told CNN.

HomeFree-USA is a non-profit aiming to close the racial wealth gap by improving financial education, homeownership, and opportunities. Their Center for Financial Advancement (CFA) recruits, trains, and places Historically Black College and University students into internships and careers with mortgage and real estate companies. The goal is to enhance diversity in the financial sector, expose students to credit and money management and help them become savvy consumers and future homeowners.

The African American Alliance for Homeownership is a non-profit counseling agency that helps families obtain, retain, maintain, and sustain their homes. The organization offers HUD-certified counselors who support first-time homebuyers and foreclosure prevention. The group recently expanded its services to help homeowners with estate plans, resource navigation, home repairs, and energy-efficiency upgrades.

Former NFL Player Warrick Dunn started Warrick Dunn Charities in 1997 to help single parents buy homes by providing $5,000 down payments and home furnishings.

“The more I learned, we wanted to get into the business of giving people the potential to break their cycle of poverty,” Dunn explained in a 2021 interview with CNN.

The non-profit has expanded its priorities to include financial literacy, health and wellness, education attainment, workforce development, and entrepreneurship support.

The National Urban League is committed to the advancement of African Americans through economic empowerment, equality, and social justice. The organization champions education, job training, workforce development, and civic engagement through community and national initiatives.

The legacy of racism in America continues to fuel health and healthcare inequities for Black people.

“We’re seeing diseases that, when I was in medical school, I thought to be diseases that would start to develop in people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. I’m seeing these diseases sometimes in teenage years,” said Dr. Barbara Joy Jones, an Atlanta-based family medicine physician.

According to the CDC, five health conditions particularly affect the Black community at higher rates: cardiovascular disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), metabolic syndrome, colon cancer, and mental health conditions.

“I consider hypertension, Diabetes, and obesity the triad,” said Jones.

The leading contributor to that triad is what you eat.

“Diet is 80% of health, and just access to quality food and education about food has been very hard,” Jones explained.

“When you go back and look at slavery, the foods we had to eat were the last scraps, so through the passing down of culture, you’re eating foods that are not the healthiest because it was simply for survival,” said Jones.

According to Feeding America, eight of the ten US counties with the highest food insecurity rates are at least 60% Black and one in every four Black American children is affected by hunger.

Addressing food insecurity, nutrition education, and better food access can make a difference.

Feeding America runs a network of food banks in those mostly Black hard-hit counties.

Share Our Strength runs a program called Cooking Matters offering cooking classes, grocery store tours, and digital content to help marginalized families across the country shop and cook with an eye towards health and budget.

The African American Diabetes Association uses targeted outreach projects to help Black people prevent or delay type 2 diabetes.

Despite progress over the years, racism continues to impact the mental health of African American people.

“The stress and microaggressions that happen daily for a person of color in the work environment and everyday life add up, and unmitigated stress can lead to disease,” Jones told CNN.

The Black Mental Health Alliance and the Trevor Project, provide training and networks of mental health providers specifically supportive of the Black and Black LGBTQ communities.

In 2019, the CDC found that Black people comprised 41% of the new HIV infections in the US. The Black AIDS Institute was founded in 1999 to mobilize and educate Black Americans about HIV/AIDS treatment and care. The Black AIDS Institute advances research, support groups, and education and runs a clinic catering to BIPOC and underserved communities.

As recently as the 1990’s, unethical medical research was conducted on Black Americans. The Tuskegee Study is one of the most widely recognized examples of the racist practice that led many Black people to distrust the healthcare system and avoid doctors altogether.

Beyond investing in cultural sensitivity training and prioritizing preventative care, Jones said, “For anti-doctor people, find someone that looks like you; representation matters.”

“Half of the getting to know your part of medicine is to know why psychosocial and economically you are where you are, and having a doctor that looks like you can support that.”

Only about 5.7% of US physicians identify as Black or African American, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The White Coats Black Doctors Foundation is working to increase diversity in the medical profession, supporting educational preparation to become a doctor and helping offset the costs associated with applying and transitioning to residencies.

Black joy has been essential for survival, resistance, and self-development for centuries. But these days, it’s often exploited and misunderstood.

“I see the ways that Black joy at this moment is being commercialized or co-opted to make it feel like it’s Black people smiling,” lamented Cruz. “It’s much, much deeper than that.”

Cruz launched the Black Joy Project as a photo essay on social media in 2015 following the deaths of Michael Brown and Sandra Bland to help the Black community process its collective pain.

“I posted it on Facebook in the stream of consciousness and said, ‘Let us bombard the internet that joy is important too, and as people are sharing these traumatic videos, we have to make space for joy.’ And it was an invitation for anybody else that wanted to do that.”

Enslaved Black people knew they weren’t free but still hoped their future generations would be. That empowering optimism gave them the will to press forward, no matter the circumstance.

“This (joy) is just a continuation of those practices,” Cruz said. “Joy is intrinsic. It’s something that can’t be taken from us because it comes within us; it’s always ours to have.”

Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom, culture, and history, and it’s important to uplift non-profits that positively nourish the arts, music, and all the things that foster Black joy.

The Robey Theatre Company was founded in 1994 by actors Danny Glover and Ben Guillory to tell the complex stories of the Black experience. The theater showcases and develops up-and-coming actors and playwrights to sustain Black theater.

The Debbie Allen Dance Academy uses dance, theater, and performance to enrich, inspire and transform students’ lives.

As some states are moving to block Critical Race Theory and Black history from public education, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration gives visitors an interactive history lesson on the harsh repercussions of slavery and systemic racism in the US. The immersive exhibition carries visitors through the transatlantic slave trade up to the current mass incarceration of Black people. The museum occupies a site in Montgomery, Alabama where enslaved Black people were historically auctioned off.

“If we’re being serious about Black joy, that means we’re being serious about Black lives, period,” Cruz concluded.

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June 16, 2023
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, enters the 2024 GOP primary | CNN Politics

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South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott on Monday formally entered the Republican presidential primary, promising to take on “the radical left” and bring faith and conservative, business-friendly policies to the White House, as he seeks to upend a contest that has so far been dominated by coverage of former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to enter the fray in the coming days.

The most prominent Black figure in the Republican Party, Scott addressed supporters at his alma mater, Charleston Southern University, in his hometown of North Charleston.

“I’m the candidate the far-left fears the most. You see, when I cut your taxes, they called me a prop. When I refunded the police, they called me a token. When I pushed back on President Biden, they even called me the ‘n-word,’” Scott said. “I disrupt their narrative. I threaten their control. The truth of my life disrupts their lies.”

Following the announcement, Scott heads to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina – states he frequented on his “Faith in America” tour in the run-up to his announcement – before returning to the Hawkeye State next week for GOP Sen. Joni Ernst’s annual “Roast and Ride” gathering.

Scott, 57, is no stranger to pathbreaking campaigns. In 2010, he became the first Black Republican elected to the US House of Representatives from South Carolina in more than a century. Years later, after being appointed to his Senate seat (he won a special election to retain the seat), Scott made history as the first Black US Senator from his native South Carolina.

Ahead of his entry into the presidential race, senior campaign officials briefed reporters on their view of the path forward, acknowledging he will need to win over support from Trump and DeSantis, but vowing – in a veiled dig at both – that his candidacy will strike a more optimistic tone and condemn the culture of victimhood and grievance that, as his aides described it, has taken over both parties.

“Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing,” Scott said. “Victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness? I choose freedom and hope and opportunity.”

Trump and his team will avoid going after Tim Scott for now, two sources close to the former president told CNN. The directive from Trump has been to stay away from attacks on the South Carolina senator at the moment.

Last week, the Trump-aligned super PAC, MAGA, Inc., weighed in on Scott’s looming announcement, but used it to level an attack on DeSantis, not Scott.

The former president used that approach on Monday as he wished Scott “good luck” while taking a shot at DeSantis.

“Good luck to Senator Tim Scott in entering the Republican Presidential Primary Race. It is rapidly loading up with lots of people, and Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable. I got Opportunity Zones done with Tim, a big deal that has been highly successful. Good luck Tim!,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The South Carolina senator received a boost on Sunday, less than 24 hours before his kick-off event, when news broke that his colleague Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, planned to endorse him.

“I think he’d be a great candidate. I’m excited about it. I’ve been encouraging him,” Thune previously told CNN. “I think he’s getting a lot of encouragement from his colleagues. He’s really well thought of and respected.”

Cory Gardner, the former Republican senator from Colorado and leader of Scott’s aligned super PAC, also argued that his old colleague posed a unique threat to liberal Democrats.

“I think they’re terrified of him, and he’s right to say that, because he defies every narrative they have,” Gardner said. “And this is exciting for conservatives who believe that they have a candidate who carries their values, can implement their values and do so in a way that will make all Americans proud.”

In pictures: Presidential candidate Tim Scott

A senior campaign official said Scott will continue to invest resources and time in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, as the campaign ramps up.

Though Scott hails from South Carolina, they won’t count on it as a firewall, according to one senior campaign official, who emphasized Scott will have to compete as a top-tier candidate in other early primary and caucus states like New Hampshire and Iowa.

Even before the official launch, Scott revealed plans to pluck from his deep campaign coffers – with millions now transferred over from his Senate account – through a series of big-dollar ad buys in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The initial $5.5 million TV ad buy – including broadcast, cable satellite and radio – will air statewide starting Wednesday and run through the first GOP debate in August.

During the same period, Scott will also launch a seven-figure digital ad campaign.

“The biggest thing going for Tim Scott right now is $22 million in the bank. He is getting ready to spend $6 million in Iowa and New Hampshire that will garner tremendous name ID, and it’s gonna be a key factor that many of the other candidates are not doing right now,” said Dave Wilson, a South Carolina conservative strategist and former president of the Palmetto Family Council.

Though he is only officially entering the race now, Scott has already gotten caught in the churn of the campaign season. Shortly after announcing an exploratory committee last month, he was tripped up by questions over his position on a potential national abortion ban.

After initially sidestepping the matter and refusing to say whether he would back a 15-week ban, Scott told WMUR he would support restrictions beginning at 20 weeks. Days later, though, Scott said in an interview with NBC News that he “would literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation that they can get through Congress.”

Pressed on what precisely that meant, given he had applauded DeSantis for signing a six-week ban in Florida, Scott demurred – saying it was a decision for the states to make.

“I’m not going to talk about six (weeks) or five or seven or 10,” Scott said.

Back at the senator’s home church near Charleston, there are hundreds of worshipers that see him most weekends.

“I’ve heard him talk about hope and opportunity for 25 years. It’s who he is. It’s a part of his story. And so I don’t think he’s going to change,” said Greg Suratt, founding pastor of Seacoast Church.

“I think a misconception that people might have about him is that his niceness, his humility, translates as weakness. And they don’t know the Tim Scott I know, I would like to kind of see it as an iron fist in a velvet glove,” Suratt added, noting that even people who disagree with his politics tend to like him as an individual.

Scott’s faith and his humble beginnings will be a central theme in his campaign, an aide said. Scott grew up in a single parent household in North Charleston, where his mother worked long hours to keep their family afloat.

“Think about the kid whose grandmother has to open the stove to heat the home in the middle of the winter. I think to myself, it kind of feels like that now,” Scott said at a town hall in New Hampshire this month. “So many people with our energy prices doubling in just the last couple years, are experiencing a crisis similar to the one that I had when I was just a kid.”

On his listening tour, Scott said that between the ages of 7 and 14, he “kind of drifted,” failing world geography, civics, English and Spanish in his freshman year of high school. But through the “tireless” encouragement of his mother and mentor, the late John Moniz, a Chick-fil-A manager, Scott says he was able to graduate from Charleston Southern University. He would eventually open his own insurance agency affiliated with Allstate.

Scott credits Moniz with teaching him that anyone can “succeed beyond their circumstances” if they take responsibility for themselves – a message he repeated in North Charleston.

“John taught me that anyone, from anywhere, at any time, can rise above their wildest expectations and imagination,” Scott said after giving roses to Moniz’s widow and his own mother at the beginning of his speech. “But first, I had to take responsibility for myself. He told me in the most loving way possible to look in the mirror and to blame myself.”

Scott’s political career began in 1995, when he ran in a special election to the Charleston City Council, winning a seat he would keep for nearly 15 years. After one term as a state lawmaker, Scott won a US House seat representing South Carolina’s 1st district.

Fellow presidential candidate and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley then appointed Scott to the US Senate in 2012 to fill a vacancy left by Sen. Jim DeMint’s retirement. He retained the seat in a 2014 special election, was re-elected to a full term in 2016 and later won for a third time last year.

“To every single mom who struggles to make ends meet, who wonders if her efforts are in vain, they are not,” Scott said after being appointed by Haley.

During his time in the Senate, Scott has amassed a strictly conservative voting record, but has also led bipartisan police reform talks alongside New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat.

Those talks have gone on for years now, beginning in the summer of 2020 with then-California Sen. Kamala Harris also involved, but hopes for a comprehensive deal were effectively abandoned in 2021. (The conversations reportedly continue, but there is no legislation currently in the offing.)

In 2017, his “Investing in Opportunity Act,” which had some Democratic support, was included in the controversial Republican tax cut bill. The provision called for the establishment of “Opportunity Zones,” which would create tax incentives for businesses that invested in parts of the country struggling with poverty and stalled economies.

“I was one of the lead authors of the Republican tax reform bill that slashed taxes for families, brought jobs and investment back from overseas, and created my signature legislation, the ‘Opportunity Zones,’ that’s brought billions of dollars into the poorest communities that have been left behind,” Scott said in his speech. “That was just one bill. Imagine what we could do with an entire agenda.”

Still, Democrats in South Carolina welcomed Scott to the race with harsh words about his political record – and an attempt to tie him to the GOP’s far right.

“We know how dangerous Tea Party extremist Tim Scott is,” South Carolina Democratic Party chair Christale Spain said in a statement. “From promising to sign the most conservative abortion ban possible as president, to doubling down on his role as ‘architect’ of the 2017 GOP tax scam that pushed tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy at the expense of working families, Scott has proven himself to be just as MAGA as the rest of the 2024 field.”

Though Scott has expressed more openness to working with Democrats than most Republicans in Washington, he also owns one of the most conservative voting records in Congress. He rarely broke with Trump during the latter’s presidency, though he did criticize Trump’s response to White supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

“What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority,” Scott told Vice News at the time. “And that moral authority is compromised.”

Scott largely backed off that line, though, after a meeting with Trump in the White House.

“(Trump) was certainly very clear that the perception that he received on his comments was not exactly what he intended with those comments,” Scott told CBS News.

This story has been updated with additional reporting and reaction.

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May 22, 2023
A Texas family fought for weeks to regain custody of their newborn. Experts say the case shows how Black parents are criminalized. | CNN

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A Black Texas couple has been reunited with their newborn daughter after authorities removed the baby and placed her in foster care last month citing a doctor’s concerns about how they were treating a jaundice diagnosis.

Rodney and Temecia Jackson of DeSoto, Texas, regained custody of their daughter, Mila, on April 20 following a nearly month-long battle with the state’s Child Protective Services, according to The Afiya Center, a reproductive justice advocacy group.

A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Family Protective Services, which includes CPS, confirmed to CNN that the office had recommended a dismissal of the case to an assistant district attorney. Mila’s release was granted on Thursday, according to a court filing.

The Jacksons had been pleading for Mila’s return in videos posted to social media, and news conferences as reproductive justice activists protested and rallied behind the family.

The removal, the Jacksons say, was sparked by their decision to let their midwife treat Mila’s jaundice instead of taking her to the hospital for care as their doctor had recommended. Temecia Jackson said during a news conference earlier this month that she gave birth to Mila at home on March 21 with the help of a midwife and wanted that same trusted midwife to provide medical care for her baby. But Mila’s pediatrician disagreed with this decision and ultimately contacted CPS, Temecia Jackson said.

“We’ve been treated like criminals,” Rodney Jackson said during the news conference. “This is a nightmare that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

Reproductive justice advocates say Mila’s removal is just the latest example of the criminalization of Black parents, who lose their children to the child welfare system at disproportionate rates. In the US in 2018, Black children made up 23% of youth in foster care, but only 14% of the nation’s child population, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Additionally, one study found that between 2003-2014, 53% of Black children were the subjects of child welfare investigations by the time they reached age 18.

Marsha Jones, executive director of The Afiya Center – a Dallas, Texas, based non-profit that advocates for Black women and girls – said there is a systemic problem with the child welfare system that unfairly targets Black parents. In many cases, Black families have their first experiences with the criminal justice system in family court, Jones said.

“It’s almost unspoken and unseen because there is just this thought that Black women are not good parents and that we are criminalized because of poverty,” Jones told CNN. “This is not new.”

Jones said the center stepped in last month to support the Jackson family and put pressure on public officials to return Mila home. She believes this played a role in reuniting the family last week.

“There’s no reason this baby should have been removed from her home,” Jones told CNN. “This family was not being heard. The Black midwife wasn’t being heard.”

Rodney and Temecia Jackson could not be reached for comment.

In a letter to CPS obtained by CNN affiliate WFAA, the family’s pediatrician, Dr. Anand Bhatt, who is with the Baylor Scott & White healthcare system, wrote that while the Jacksons “are very loving and they care dearly” about Mila, “their distrust for medical care and guidance has led them to make a decision for the baby to refuse a simple treatment that can prevent brain damage.”

“I authorized the support of CPS to help get this baby the care that was medically necessary and needed,” the letter continued.

CBS News, which obtained a copy of the affidavit filed by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, reported that Bhatt reached out to a DFPS investigator on March 25 and indicated that Mila’s bililrubin test showed levels of 21.7 milligrams.

A bilirubin test can screen for jaundice and other conditions. That level was “cause for a lot of concern,” Bhatt told the investigator, according to CBS News, and could lead to brain damage, he said, “because the bilirubin can cross the blood brain barrier.”

Bhatt said he reserved a bed for Mila at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas and asked the Jacksons to take her there or he would call police for a welfare check, according to court documents obtained by CBS News. WFAA reported that Bhatt wanted Mila to receive phototherapy – a common treatment for jaundice.

But court documents, according to CBS News, say Rodney Jackson told Bhatt he and Temecia Jackson planned to treat their baby “naturally” and didn’t believe in “modern medicine.”

The midwife, Cheryl Edinbyrd, told CBS News the family had ordered a blanket and goggles to provide light therapy to treat Mila’s jaundice.

When the Jacksons didn’t show up at the hospital, a CPS investigator and police went to the Jackson’s home at 4 a.m. on March 25 but Rodney Jackson declined to speak with them, according to court documents obtained by CBS News. An hour later, authorities returned with an ambulance and fire truck and Rodney Jackson still denied them entry.

Authorities returned to the home on March 30 with a warrant and arrested Rodney Jackson on charges of preventing the execution of a civil process, according to CBS News. Police entered the home and took Mila from Temecia Jackson. According to CBS News, the Jacksons’ other two children were not removed.

Temecia Jackson said in a press conference that when she asked to see the affidavit, she noticed it had the name of a different mother on it.

“Instantly I felt like they had stolen my baby as I had had a home birth and they were trying to say that my baby belonged to this other woman,” Temecia Jackson.

Marissa Gonzales, a spokesperson from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said in an email to CNN that her department was given an incorrect name for the initial affidavit. The mistake, she said, was corrected in the case filings.

Gonzales declined an interview with CNN to discuss the case further, citing “state confidentiality restrictions.”

“It is always the goal of DFPS to safely reunite children with their parents,” Gonzales also said. “The decision about when that happens rests with the judge who ordered the removal.”

CNN’s request to interview Bhatt was also denied by Baylor Scott & White.

“In respect of patient privacy, it is inappropriate to provide comment on this matter,” the health system said in an emailed statement. “We do abide by reporting requirements set forth in the Texas Family Code and any other applicable laws.”

Advocates say the racial bias of professionals such as teachers, doctors and social workers has created inequity in the child welfare system.

Dorothy Roberts, a law professor and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said decisions to report neglect and abuse are largely shaped by racist stereotypes of Black families.

The child welfare system, she said, needs to consider the trauma inflicted on children when they are separated from their families.

“We have to ask whether there is a better way of addressing children’s medical needs instead of the system we have now where doctors are reporting suspicions, which we know is highly biased, and investigating families, which we know is very traumatic,” said Roberts, author of “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” “Hospitals should not be places of fear for parents.”

Roberts said there is also a longstanding cultural conflict between the healthcare system and midwives who are often devalued. Black midwives provided care for mothers for hundreds of years, delivering the babies of enslaved women and even slave owners’ wives. But as medicine became more professionalized in the late 1800s, male doctors wanted to take control of childbirth, with some suggesting midwives were unfit, according to a report by Vox.

Monica Simpson, executive director of Sistersong, a reproductive justice organization advocating for women of color, said many Black women are choosing midwives because they have lost trust in doctors and hospitals.

Much of that is driven by the harrowing statistics: Black women are 2.6 times likelier to die of pregnancy-related complications than White women, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Black infants also die at more than twice the rate of White infants, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Simpson said the child welfare system is broken. She said racism has played a part in the continued criminalization and separation of Black families.

“There’s been this narrative that Black women can’t parent their children properly,” Simpson said. “We have been battling these narratives for decades. The way that Black women are criminalized around their motherhood, it’s horrible.”

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April 24, 2023
Opinion: Mifepristone saved my life | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD. The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
—

The ruling earlier this month by a Texas federal judge to suspend the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a drug that is used frequently for medication abortions, is very personal for me.

That’s because I took mifepristone years ago during a miscarriage, and it saved my life.

When I was prescribed mifepristone, it had not yet taken center stage in America’s abortion wars. I did not have to make a rushed road trip across state lines to get my medicine, unlike many women who need the drug but live in one of the many states that have restricted access to medication abortion or passed near-total bans on abortion.

I was not forced to set up a secret meet-up with a stranger in order to buy my medicine on the black market, as several women I spoke to recently said they planned to do. Nor did I have to order mifepristone online and find myself navigating the many scammers taking advantage of the current patchwork of state abortion laws in the US.

Mifepristone is one of two drugs used in a medication abortion and the other, misoprostol, was not subject to the ruling by the Texas judge. The two drugs can be administered to someone having a miscarriage, allowing them to terminate the pregnancy when the fetus is not viable.

It happened some years ago: After experiencing more than a day of hemorrhaging during the first trimester of my pregnancy, I visited my ob-gyn, who explained after examining me that my blood pressure was dropping rapidly and the heavy bleeding I was experiencing was an unmistakable sign of a miscarriage.

For many women, being prescribed mifepristone is part of their routine medical care. Not so in my case: As my doctor explained, I was facing a dire medical emergency. I was grateful for the medication that saved my life.

My miscarriage took me by surprise. I had loved being pregnant the first time around, about a decade earlier. And as a healthy woman, I had no reason for fear when I became pregnant again. By the time I was administered mifepristone, I was losing a life that I had already begun to love. And like many other women, despite my level of education or economic status, I could not outrun the statistics that put Black women at higher risk.

Up to one in four known pregnancies will end in a miscarriage. And for Black women, the numbers are alarmingly higher. According to an analysis of 4.6 million pregnancies in seven countries, the risk of a miscarriage for Black women is 43% higher than for White women.

In the Black community, women have traditionally been taught to bear their burdens silently — keep your business to yourself — even after something as devastating as pregnancy loss. We are conditioned to do as I did back then, and keep it moving as we try to outrun the long list of statistics that tell us our lives are in danger from every direction, whether it be from health care risks to societal injustices or other stressors.

During my miscarriage, I was a woman who was afraid, hemorrhaging and in excruciating pain, in desperate need of safe, emergency medical care. Thanks to the administration of mifepristone, I was allowed dignity during my miscarriage. It’s what every woman deserves — whether it be facing a potentially life-threatening miscarriage or seeking an abortion.

I learned from my experience that every miscarriage matters. Women must have access to whatever medicines and counseling we need to help us heal and that includes mifepristone. What we don’t need is to be criminalized by politicians and punitive reproductive laws that have long been out of step with public opinion. Despite the continuing political attacks on women’s reproductive rights, more than 61% of US adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Center.

After the US Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene, Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary order to preserve the status quo, ensuring access to the drug while giving the justices more time to study the issue.

I am hoping the justices can put politics aside and focus on the science surrounding the safety of mifepristone, a drug that, thankfully, I had access to when my life was in danger. Mifepristone, a synthetic steroid, is even safer than common prescription drugs including penicillin and Viagra.

Following the science demands that, regardless of where you stand on the issue of abortion, consideration must be made for cases like mine and the millions of other women who for years have safely used this medication for complications surrounding miscarriages.

We do not know how the legal fight over medication abortion will unfold. But women across the nation – in blue and red states alike – are watching. Punitive laws like the one signed last week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seek to criminalize reproductive care providers. And worse, they are stripping us of rights that men take for granted – it’s unlikely they will be prohibited by the law from making health care decisions about their own bodies.

It must end. And I’m betting that whether it be with our voice or our votes, women will have the last word.

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April 18, 2023
Silicon Valley Bank collapse renews calls to address disparities impacting entrepreneurs of color | CNN Business

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CNN
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When customers at Silicon Valley Bank rushed to withdraw billions of dollars last month, venture capitalist Arlan Hamilton stepped in to help some of the founders of color who panicked about losing access to payroll funds.

As a Black woman with nearly 10 years of business experience, Hamilton knew the options for those startup founders were limited.

SVB had a reputation for servicing people from underrepresented communities like hers. Its failure has reignited concerns from industry experts about lending discrimination in the banking industry and the resulting disparities in capital for people of color.

Hamilton, the 43-year-old founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital, said that when it comes to entrepreneurs of color, “we’re already in the smaller house. We already have the rickety door and the thinner walls. And so, when a tornado comes by, we’re going to get hit harder.”

Established in 1983, the midsize California tech lender was America’s 16th largest bank at the end of 2022 before it collapsed on March 10. SVB provided banking services to nearly half of all venture-backed technology and life-sciences companies in the United States.

Hamilton, industry experts and other investors told CNN the bank was committed to fostering a community of minority entrepreneurs and provided them with both social and financial capital.

SVB regularly sponsored conferences and networking events for minority entrepreneurs, said Hamilton, and it was well known for funding the annual State of Black Venture Report spearheaded by BLK VC, a nonprofit organization that connects and empowers Black investors.

“When other banks were saying no, SVB would say yes,” said Joynicole Martinez, a 25-year entrepreneur and chief advancement and innovation officer for Rising Tide Capital, a nonprofit organization founded in 2004 to connect entrepreneurs with investors and mentors.

Martinez is also an official member of the Forbes Coaches Council, an invitation-only organization for business and career coaches. She said SVB was an invaluable resource for entrepreneurs of color and offered their clients discounted tech tools and research funding.

Minority business owners have long faced challenges accessing capital due to discriminatory lending practices, experts say. Data from the Small Business Credit Survey, a collaboration of all 12 Federal Reserve banks, shows disparities on denial rates for bank and nonbank loans.

In 2021, about 16% of Black-led companies acquired the total amount of business financing they sought from banks, compared to 35% of White-owned companies, the survey shows.

“We know there’s historic, systemic, and just blatant racism that’s inherent in lending and banking. We have to start there and not tip-toe around it,” Martinez told CNN.

Asya Bradley is an immigrant founder of multiple tech companies like Kinley, a financial services business aiming to help Black Americans build generational wealth. Following SVB’s collapse, Bradley said she joined a WhatsApp group of more than 1,000 immigrant business founders. Members of the group quickly mobilized to support one another, she said.

Immigrant founders often don’t have Social Security numbers nor permanent addresses in the United States, Bradley said, and it was crucial to brainstorm different ways to find funding in a system that doesn’t recognize them.

“The community was really special because a lot of these folks then were sharing different things that they had done to achieve success in terms of getting accounts in different places. They also were able to share different regional banks that have stood up and been like, ‘Hey, if you have accounts at SVB, we can help you guys,’” Bradley said.

Many women, people of color and immigrants opt for community or regional banks like SVB, Bradley says, because they are often rejected from the “top four banks” — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.

In her case, Bradley said her gender might have been an issue when she could only open a business account at one of the “top four banks” when her brother co-signed for her.

“The top four don’t want our business. The top four are rejecting us consistently. The top four do not give us the service that we deserve. And that’s why we’ve gone to community banks and regional banks such as SVB,” Bradley said.

None of the top four banks provided a comment to CNN. The Financial Services Forum, an organization representing the eight largest financial institutions in the United States has said the banks have committed millions of dollars since 2020 to address economic and racial inequality.

Last week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told CNN’s Poppy Harlow that his bank has 30% of its branches in lower-income neighborhoods as part of a $30 billion commitment to Black and Brown communities across the country.

Wells Fargo specifically pointed to its 2022 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report, which discusses the bank’s recent initiatives to reach underserved communities.

The bank partnered last year with the Black Economic Alliance to initiate the Black Entrepreneur Fund — a $50 million seed, startup, and early-stage capital fund for businesses founded or led by Black and African American entrepreneurs. And since May 2021, Wells Fargo has invested in 13 Minority Depository Institutions, fulfilling its $50 million pledge to support Black-owned banks.

Black-owned banks work to close the lending gap and foster economic empowerment in these traditionally excluded communities, but their numbers have been dwindling over the years, and they have far fewer assets at their disposal than the top banks.

OneUnited Bank, the largest Black-owned bank in the United States, manages a little over $650 million in assets. By comparison, JPMorgan Chase manages $3.7 trillion in assets.

Because of these disparities, entrepreneurs also seek funding from venture capitalists. In the early 2010s, Hamilton intended to start her own tech company — but as she searched for investors, she saw that White men control nearly all venture capital dollars. That experience led her to establish Backstage Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in new companies led by underrepresented founders.

“I said, ‘Well, instead of trying to raise money for one company, let me try to raise for a venture fund that will invest in underrepresented — and now we call them underestimated — founders who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ specifically,’ because I am all three,” Hamilton told CNN.

Since then, Backstage Capital has amassed a portfolio of nearly 150 different companies and has made over 120 diversity investments, according to data from Crunchbase.

But Bradley, who is also an ‘angel investor’ of minority-owned businesses, said she remains “really hopeful” that community banks, regional banks and fintechs “will all stand up and say, ‘Hey, we are not going to let the good work of SVB go to waste.’”

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April 13, 2023
Opinion: The way to respect starts with raising your voice | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD. The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
—

“Use your voice.” That’s what Mom always said to do when I was confronted by an injustice or a bully, as was often the case for me growing up.

No easy lesson, especially for a scrapper like me who was used to righting all my worldly wrongs with my fists.

But then, you grow older, the bullies get bigger, and more stealthy at systemically devaluing your humanity. You discover that the injustices are entrenched in society — whether they come from teachers, coaches, the police or a political system that exploits communities like yours.

You get two choices: Give up and stay angry at the world or find the power in your voice to fight for what’s right.

That lesson played out last week as two big news stories unfolded, both involving voices confronting power and the question of race in America.

In Tennessee last week, three Democratic lawmakers used the power of their voices to protest for gun reforms after a shooting at a Nashville Christian school left six dead — three 9-year-olds and three adults. Citing rules against breaking House decorum, the legislators of the majority-Republican body shockingly voted to expel only the two Black politicians — Reps. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis, both in their 20s. The third lawmaker, Rep. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a 60-year-old White woman, was not expelled.

These are democratically elected voices who dared to challenge the status quo and were immediately shut down by the most draconian of measures. Two were kicked out of the legislature, one saved by only one vote.

Asked after the vote why she was not expelled, Johnson called it like she — and many others — saw it:

“It might have to do with the color of my skin,” she said.

Jones and Pearson have both vowed to continue to lift their voices against gun violence and lead the fight for swift action on substantive gun reform in their state. And Johnson, for her part, is asking for the community to stand by Jones and help to get him back in the House.

Then of course, there was the dust-up between 20-year-old LSU women’s basketball champion Angel Reese and first lady Jill Biden about a White House visit.

Reese initially had refused to visit the White House — a 150-year-old tradition that began with President Andrew Johnson — after she (and many others) felt insulted by the suggestion from the first lady (who attended the final in person) to invite the losing team, Iowa, as well “because they played such a good game.”

Reese spoke up for her own dignity and sparked a necessary conversation about the pervasive racial bias in both politics and sports media. The LSU star quickly found herself in the middle of a media storm about race in sports: LSU is a majority-Black squad. Iowa, which lost the championship, is a largely White team led by basketball phenom Clark.

After LSU defeated Iowa, controversy erupted over how Clark and Reese — both athletes at the top of their game who bring the swagger and trash talk to the court — earned very different treatment from media and fans. The idea floated by Biden — to invite the losing team too — was rightly interpreted in most corners of the sports universe, and by many Black women across the country as a staggering insult to the joy of victory LSU, led by Reese, had duly earned.

Even after the first lady’s press secretary attempted to clarify that only LSU would be invited, Reese held her ground, telling two podcast hosts, “I don’t accept the apology because you said what you said. … You can’t go back on certain things that you say. … They can have that spotlight. We’ll go to the Obamas. We’ll go see Michelle. We’ll see Barack.”

Not surprisingly, Reese, who never had her school’s support for her plan to skip out on the White House visit, was on ESPN on Friday morning using her powerful voice this time to de-escalate the White House controversy.

Reese, dubbed the “Bayou Barbie,” was uncharacteristically somber as she announced her about-face on the visit.

“I’m a team player,” Reese said. “I’m going to do what’s best for the team, and I’m the captain. I know the team would love it.”

Reese’s reasons for wanting to skip out on the White House visit resonated with many in the Black community, who also felt Biden’s idea was disrespectful to Reese. However, her critics were also vocal, and at times toxic. They objected loudly to her tone with the first lady.

So, no doubt many people believe that Reese’s gesture of concession for her team was the right move. But that shouldn’t be the end of the story.

That’s because nothing about what prompted Reese to speak out has been addressed. She tried to speak an authentic truth about how she and her teammates were treated, a truth that resonated with so many Black women whose feelings, experiences and priorities have been marginalized again and again.

And typically, those with power do what they do best — ignored her voice and her concerns. What matters is why Reese recoiled at the suggestion to include the runners-up. What matters is why she instead wanted to go to what she perceived to be a safer space and visit the Obamas.

Addressing her concerns would have meant acknowledging and validating her truth and engaging in a dialogue with a specific demographic, young Black women, about what matters to them.

My mother’s advice is a difficult path to follow, no matter your age. As the expelled representatives Jones and Pearson found last week, along with Reese, speaking truth to power often comes at a high price, especially if you are Black. How many times will we as a nation accept the status quo when those in power try to silence young voices, specifically Black or brown Americans who try to practice my mother’s sage advice and use their voice?

Too many Americans are hard-pressed, for instance, to see how their lives have improved when Democrats hold political power in this country. They are frustrated by the lack of progress they see on issues ranging from voting rights and police reform to school safety, gun reform, even the much talked about slavery reparations President Joe Biden spoke about while campaigning.

Pearson and Jones are continuing to speak. And no matter how Reese plays it — whether she visits the White House or not — she’s already won just by raising her voice to demand the respect she deserves.

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April 9, 2023
Opinion: Expulsion of the ‘Tennessee Three’ is a chilling echo of Jim Crow | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Jemar Tisby, a professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky, is the author of the books “The Color of Compromise” and “How to Fight Racism.” He writes frequently at JemarTisby.Substack.com. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
—

I teach African American history at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically Black college (HBCU) in Louisville. This week, we’ve been studying the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow period of US history.

In the late 19th century, White, Southern Democrats (then the party of White supremacy and segregation) dubbed themselves the “Redeemers,” a group whose goal was to “save” the South from Northern carpetbaggers and newly freed Black people.

The so-called Redeemers took over state legislatures with the primary goals of disenfranchising Black voters, barring Black people from holding political office, and establishing a politics that would render the White power structure impervious to disruption.

When Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives voted this week to expel two Black members — Justin Jones and Justin Pearson — they revealed their resemblance to the anti-democratic, authoritarian Redeemers of more than a century ago.

In 1868, White legislators in Georgia voted to expel the 33 Black men elected to state government.

Henry McNeal Turner, a well-known leader in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination, was one of the men expelled from his position by the Georgia politicians.

In remarks during the proceedings, he stated, “[White legislators] question my right to a seat in this body, to represent the people whose legal votes elected me. This objection, sir, is an unheard of monopoly of power. No analogy can be found for it, except it be the case of a man who should go into my house, take possession of my wife and children and then tell me to walk out.”

Even though the Black lawmakers were soon reinstated, the actions of the White lawmakers in Georgia were just a foretaste of the political machinations to come.

In 1890, the state of Mississippi called for a new convention to rewrite the state’s constitution. It had already adopted a new and relatively progressive constitution after the Civil War, but with the onset of Redemption, White lawmakers took control of the state government and began dismantling the rights Black people had only recently gained.

In the newer version of the constitution that was later ratified, White Mississippi lawmakers installed measures to prevent Black people from voting. But because of the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution that guaranteed equal protection under the law and the right of Black men to vote, White Redeemers had to find new ways to repress Black people without making laws explicitly about race.

So they used policies such as the poll tax, which most Black people could not afford to pay. They instituted the “understanding clause” — a selectively applied measure where potential voters had to interpret a passage from the state constitution to the satisfaction of a White registrar.

The “grandfather clause” stipulated that a person’s grandfather had to be eligible to vote in order for their descendants to exercise the franchise. Of course, this excluded most Black people whose grandparents had been enslaved and thus, ineligible to vote.

By the early 1900s, nearly all the former Confederate states had followed Mississippi’s example.

In class, my students listened with stunned incredulity as they learned about the cruel and ruthless politics of the Redeemers. Unfortunately, the historical parallels to present-day events are too obvious to ignore.

The actions of Republicans in the Tennessee legislature resemble the attempts of White Southern Redeemers to take back the South at the end of the 19th century.

These new Redeemers are using their power as a tool of intimidation. What other conclusion can be drawn from the inappropriate and disproportionate response to a decorum infraction?

Expulsion is the most severe consequence the legislature can enact against another member of that body. Since the Civil War, only three other members of the Tennessee state legislature have been expelled — and for much more serious offenses.

The new Redeemers are not confined to one state, either.

Attempts to strip local officials in the city of Jackson — where more than 80% of the population is Black — of their authority to monitor the city’s water system, police force and courts are underway in Mississippi.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act” into law, which was intended to prevent teachings or mandatory workplace activities that suggest a person is privileged or oppressed based necessarily on their race, color, sex or national origin. “In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida,” DeSantis said.

And, of course, the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021 by supporters of former President Donald Trump was the most egregious example of how far right-wing factions are willing to go to subvert the political process.

The era of Redemption cemented decades of Jim Crow segregation. More than 4,000 “racial terror” lynchings occurred throughout that period, the Equal Justice Initiative has documented.

Substantial change only came with the onset of the Civil Rights movement. Years of nonviolent direct action protest, constant lobbying in state and political governments and the martyrdom of many activists including Martin Luther King, Jr., finally interrupted traditions of segregation and White supremacy.

It could be that a similar movement is necessary to disempower the Redeemers of today.

When all the standard means of change — namely the democratic process itself — have been co-opted and subverted by authoritarians, then the people are only left with protest.

If the goal of the Tennessee GOP was to intimidate people into acquiescence with their expulsion of Pearson and Jones, their tactic backfired in a spectacular way.

Far from instilling fear, their expulsions and their stirring words in response have raised them to national prominence.

Instead of dissuading Tennesseans from their calls for gun control, Republican legislators seem to have energized the people and motivated them to resist even more vigorously.

With the rise of social media and other digital forms of information sharing, movements can be mobilized in moments.

Although there were constant attempts throughout the years, it took decades for people to mount the resistance necessary to topple Jim Crow. In today’s environment, action might occur more swiftly.

Those words, redemption and redeemer, are significant.

This is Holy Week in the Christian religion. Events such as Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday culminate in the observance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. These liturgies commemorate the redemption — Jesus paying the price for humanity’s sin.

In many Christian traditions, redemption is a sacred theological principle that undergirds the hope of salvation. It is likely that many of the Tennessee Republican lawmakers will attend church this Sunday to celebrate the redemption that Easter heralds.

Easter provides the perfect opportunity for these lawmakers to ponder the true meaning of redemption and which redeemer they are following.

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April 8, 2023
The Fed could easily drive Black unemployment much higher than the overall jobless rate | CNN Business

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CNN
—

Millions of jobs could be on the chopping block this year, as the Federal Reserve continues its rate-hiking campaign to tame inflation. But the effects of that action likely won’t reverberate evenly across the economy.

The Fed has seen some success: Inflation has cooled for eighth consecutive months, according to the February Consumer Price Index. The Producer Price Index shows a dramatic drop in wholesale prices in February. And the Fed’s favored inflation gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, has also started to moderate.

But the job market has proved to be a formidable force, humming steadily in the face of climbing rates meant to slow its growth. After adding more than half a million jobs in January, the US economy then added 311,000 jobs in February, with an unemployment rate of 3.6% — just above a half-century low — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

However, the jobless rate isn’t expected to be that low for long.

At its most recent policy-making meeting, the Fed released projections for the year ahead that showed unemployment could jump to 4.5%, representing another 1.5 million job losses, by the end of the year.

While that’s a small improvement from the central bank’s previous 4.6% jobless rate estimate, economists say it’s possible the unemployment rate could rise above the Fed’s expectations. Moreover, they say that historically disadvantaged groups could be disproportionately affected by the central bank’s stringent monetary policy.

While some groups often sidelined in the job market have seen benefits from this hot job market — women have seen a faster pace of job gains than men in recent months, for example — others, including Black women and Latino men, have seen slower recoveries in jobless rates since the onset of the Covid pandemic.

Recession fears gained traction last month when the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sent markets wobbling, raising concerns about the economy’s ability to handle more stress. Goldman Sachs revised its estimate of the United States entering a recession over the next 12 months to a 35% chance, up from its estimate of a 25% chance before the banking sector turmoil.

That’s of particular concern to certain demographic groups: Jobless rates for Black and Hispanic Americans often increase by more than those of their White counterparts during recessions, said Rakesh Kochhar, a senior researcher focusing on demographics and social trends at the Pew Research Center.

History makes that discrepancy clear.

A Pew Research Center report comparing two recessions in recent decades shows how Black and Hispanic Americans experience disproportionate effects on their jobless rates during periods of economic downturn. From the second quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2009, during the Great Recession, the unemployment rate rose 6.5 percentage points for Black Americans. The Hispanic unemployment rate climbed 6.3 percentage points. For White workers, it increased 4 percentage points.

And from the first quarter of 1990 to the first quarter of 1991, the unemployment rate climbed 1.4 percentage points for Black Americans and 2.1 percentage points for Hispanic Americans. The White unemployment rate rose 1.3 percentage points.

Economists say it’s hard to guess the trajectory of the unemployment rate this year, noting it could very well exceed the Fed’s estimate.

“There’s just tons of momentum, and once you slow the economy enough to get the unemployment rate moving up, it’s very hard to sort of turn that cruise ship back around,” said Josh Bivens, research director and chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

As such, the Fed’s tightening efforts could easily drive the Black unemployment rate much higher than the overall jobless rate, said William Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University and chief economist to the AFL-CIO.

“If the Fed continues to use unemployment as its measure of labor force slack, and thinks they want a 4.5% unemployment rate — to make that happen, the Fed would have to induce net job loss in the labor market,” Spriggs told CNN in an email. “If we go through two months of negative job growth, all bets are off. The Black unemployment rate will easily get to 9% in that scenario.”

One other likely consequence of growing unemployment is slowing wage growth, Bivens said.

Like rising unemployment, stunted wage growth tends to hit marginalized groups harder. A 2021 Economic Policy Institute report shows that a 1 percentage point increase in overall unemployment correlates with about 0.5% slower wage growth for White median hourly wages. Wage growth falls by roughly 0.8% for Black median hourly wages.

“A lot of people have this idea that in a recession, if unemployment rises by a couple of percentage points, as long as you’re not one of those unlucky people to lose the job, you’ve dodged the bullet,” Bivens said. “And that’s not true at all.”

Still, a robust labor market isn’t a permanent solution to bridging employment disparities, even if the Fed does keep rates lower, says Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

The job market’s recent strength is unsustainable, she said. The US economy needs about 75,000 net job gains a month to keep stable and is currently adding about 350,000 net job gains a month on average, according to Edelberg.

“[The Fed is] right to be confident that one of the things that’s going to have to happen to get inflation back down to a normal, stable level is to get job growth to a normal, sustainable level,” Edelberg said. “But if the Fed’s actions resulted in a slower labor market, then inflation stayed high — that would be a disaster.”

The March jobs report from the Department of Labor, due to be released Friday at 8:30 a.m., is expected to show the US economy gained 240,000 positions last month. ADP’s private-sector payroll report, generally seen by investors as a proxy for the trajectory of Friday’s number, fell short of expectations, with just 145,000 jobs added. Economists had expected private hiring would rise by 200,000 positions last month.

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April 5, 2023
Family of Black man killed in Memphis jail demands justice | CNN

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CNN
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The family of a Black man who died in a Memphis jail in October is making a public plea for justice and say they want answers from authorities and accountability from those responsible.

The family of Gershun Freeman, a 33-year-old who died in custody at the Shelby County Jail, spoke at a news conference Friday. They were joined by lawyers, including Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump and supporters that included the parents of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died three days after Memphis police officers repeatedly punched and kicked him after a traffic stop.

Video footage of Freeman’s encounter with corrections officers inside the jail was made public this month.

The video footage, released by the Nashville District Attorney, totals about 13 minutes and shows multiple angles of a violent incident between Freeman and multiple corrections officers that ended in Freeman’s death on October 5, 2022.

Freeman had been booked into jail a week before his death on charges of domestic violence related to aggravated kidnapping and aggravated assault, according to the arrest affidavit obtained by CNN affiliate WHBQ.

In the edited surveillance camera video, corrections officers are seen handing out meals to inmates and when they open the door of Freeman’s cell, a naked Freeman lunges at officers. The video shows multiple officers punching, kicking, and using what appears to be pepper spray on Freeman as as they attempt to subdue him.

His body appears to leave a trail of unknown fluid on the floor beneath him as he moves into a different hallway. During two separate instances, Freeman can be seen on the floor clinging to the leg of a guard, before getting up and running away.

After officers chase Freeman to another jail floor and try to restrain him, he appears to swing at an officer. Officers eventually subdue Freeman, including by placing a knee on his back, and put him in handcuffs as he was on his stomach.

A few minutes later, when officers try to lift him, he appears limp and unresponsive.

Kimberly Freeman, Gershun Freeman’s mother, said she wants justice for her son, for herself, and for her granddaughter.

“We have to see my son – her father – in a box. We didn’t plan this. My son had a lot of dreams, a lot of admiration, he cared for people in general,” she said. “We want answers.”

Freeman’s family and their attorneys are also calling on the Justice Department to investigate.

Freeman was naked in the video because he had been under mental health observation in the jail and was placed in a suicide watch cell, said attorney Brice Timmons, who is representing the family.

“I don’t know what is happening in America where law enforcement feels they can treat mental health issues like criminal issues. Especially if they are marginalized people of color. Especially if they are Black men,” Crump said during the news conference.

A 19-page autopsy report from the Shelby County Medical Examiner’s Office provided to CNN by affiliate WHBQ says the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation told their office Freeman was involved in a physical altercation with corrections officers before collapsing in cardiac arrest.

The autopsy details numerous contusions on Freeman’s body, lacerations to his scalp and multiple hemorrhages on his head and neck.

Medical examiners found the cause of death to be exacerbation of “cardiovascular disease due to physical altercation and subdual.”

The report also says “probable psychotic disorder” was likely a contributing condition to his cause of death. The report classifies the death as a homicide, but notes it is “not meant to definitively indicate criminal intent.”

The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said in a Friday statement that “immediate action was taken by the Sheriff the night of the incident in October 2022. Per protocol, DA (Steve) Mulroy and TBI were contacted that night to begin the investigation,” adding that the night of the incident “all officers who had contact with Mr. Freeman were relieved of duty and remain in that status today.”

“It’s unfortunate this case is being tried in the media before the review is complete,” Sheriff Floyd Bonner Jr. said in the statement.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating the incident and told CNN that probe “remains active and ongoing.”

The Shelby County District Attorney’s Office has asked the Nashville District Attorney’s Office to investigate the case.

The Nashville District Attorney’s office told CNN Friday they were “not commenting on the video at this time.”

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March 18, 2023
‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ prosecutor says of video showing death of a 28-year-old Black man at a mental health facility. Here’s what we know | CNN

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Three of the 10 people facing murder charges in the death last week of a 28-year-old Black man at a Virginia mental health facility were security guards at the hospital who watched and then participated in the fatal smothering, the prosecutor told CNN Friday.

The victim’s family wants answers as to how a promising musician having what they called a mental health crisis ended with him dying – and why no one stood up for him and kept him from being killed.

The county prosecutor said seven law enforcement deputies, joined by the hospital workers, “smothered him to death” while restraining him.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Ann Cabell Baskervill said, referring to unreleased video that shows the man’s death.

Baskervill said the hospital security guards passively watched the alleged smothering but eventually joined in and piled on top of the victim along with the deputies.

The local law enforcement officers’ union says they “stand behind” the deputies while an attorney for one of the deputies charged said he looked forward to the full truth being shared in court.

Here’s what we know about the deadly incident.

Irvo (pronounced EYE-voh) Otieno was 28. He had a passion for music, family attorney Mark Krudys said Thursday, and was working to become a hip-hop artist. Originally from Kenya, he came to the United States when he was 4.

His mother, Caroline Ouko, said he had “found his thing” with music and could write a song in less than five minutes. “He put his energy in that and he was happy with it,” she said at a news conference Thursday.

Irvo had a big heart, she said, and was the one his classmates came to when they had problems. He was a leader who brought his own perspective to the table, she added.

“If there was discussion, he was not afraid to go the other way when everybody else was following,” she said.

Her son had a mental illness that necessitated medicine, Ouko said. He had long stretches where “(you) wouldn’t even know something was wrong” and then there were times when “he would go into some kind of distress and then you know he needs to see a doctor,” she said.

On March 3, Otieno was arrested by Henrico County police who were responding to a report of a possible burglary, according to a police news release. The officers, accompanied by members of the county’s crisis intervention team, placed him under an emergency custody order.

The officers transported him to a hospital where authorities say he assaulted three officers. Police took him to county jail and he was booked.

On March 6, Otieno was taken to a state mental health facility in Dinwiddie County and died during the intake process, according to Baskervill.

“They smothered him to death,” the prosecutor said.

A preliminary report from the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond identified asphyxiation as a cause of death, the commonwealth attorney’s office said in a statement.

Otieno was held on the ground in handcuffs and leg irons for 12 minutes by seven deputies, Baskervill said.

Baskervill said Friday that video of the apparent smothering shows there were hands over Otieno’s mouth, hands on his head and hands holding his braids back.

At the Henrico County jail, just before Otieno’s transfer to Central State Hospital on March 6, he was naked in his cell, with feces all over, according to Baskervill.

She told CNN the video from his cell, which she viewed, shows Otieno was clearly agitated and in distress. CNN has not seen the video.

Otieno was pepper sprayed before five or six Henrico jail deputies entered the cell and tackled him, Baskervill said.

“He’s on the ground underneath them for several minutes there,” she said. “And blows are sustained at the Henrico county jail.”

Asked if Otieno appeared combative, Baskervill said, “I would really characterize his behavior as being distressed, rather than assaultive, combative.”

Later, at Central State Hospital, Otieno was on the ground at one point with at least 10 people on top of him, Baskervill said.

“They’re putting their back into it, leaning down. And this is from head to toe, from his braids at the top of his head, unfortunately, to his toes,” she said.

Baskervill said Otieno was eventually put on his stomach, with the pressure on him continuing, and he died in that position.

Baskervill believes Otieno was dead before a 911 call was even made. Paramedics left and State Police were not called until 7:28 pm, according to Baskervill.

“The delay in contacting proper authorities is inexplicable. Truly inexplicable,” she said.

The seven sheriff’s deputies and three hospital workers have been charged with second-degree murder.

The seven deputies who were charged were identified in Baskervill’s release Tuesday as Randy Joseph Boyer, 57, of Henrico; Dwayne Alan Bramble, 37, of Sandston; Jermaine Lavar Branch, 45, of Henrico; Bradley Thomas Disse, 43, of Henrico; Tabitha Renee Levere, 50, of Henrico; Brandon Edwards Rodgers, 48, of Henrico; and Kaiyell Dajour Sanders, 30, of North Chesterfield.

The Henrico Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 4, the local law enforcement officers’ union, issued a statement Tuesday saying they “stand behind” the deputies.

“Policing in America today is difficult, made even more so by the possibility of being criminally charged while performing their duty,” the group said. “The death of Mr. Otieno was tragic, and we express our condolences to his family. We also stand behind the seven accused deputies now charged with murder by the Dinwiddie County Commonwealth’s Attorney Ann Baskervill.”

The hospital workers arrested Thursday were identified as Darian M. Blackwell, 23, of Petersburg; Wavie L. Jones, 34, of Chesterfield; and Sadarius D. Williams, 27, of North Dinwiddie.

There is video footage but it will not be released to the public. CNN requested the footage but was told the material is not subject to mandatory disclosure because the investigation is ongoing.

“To maintain the integrity of the criminal justice process at this point, I am not able to publicly release the video,” said Baskervill, noting surveillance video from the mental health facility recorded the intake process.

Otieno’s family has viewed the video provided by prosecutors Thursday and his mother says Otieno was tortured.

“My son was treated like a dog, worse than a dog,” she screamed, angry that no one stopped what led to her son’s death. “We have to do better.”

His older brother, Leon Ochieng, said people should be confident in calling for help when their loved ones are in crisis. He did not believe the people he saw on the video cared about preserving a life.

“What I saw was a lifeless human being without any representation,” Ochieng said, adding that his family is now broken and is calling for more awareness on how to treat those with mental illnesses.

“Can someone explain to me why my brother is not here, right now?” Ochieng said.

CNN has sought comment from the deputies and received word from attorneys of three of the individuals charged.

Caleb Kershner, the attorney for Boyer, told CNN he has yet to see the video but said “nothing was outside the ordinary” in the process of transferring Otieno from jail to the mental health facility.

Kershner told CNN that Otieno refused to get out of the vehicle when arriving at the hospital and deputies had to use force to get him out.

Kershner also said hospital staff administered a sedative to Otieno when he was still alive and resisting. However, Baskervill on Wednesday said the shot was given after Otieno was already dead. CNN has reached out to the hospital for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

“My client was simply holding his leg throughout any ordeal in order to ensure that what we estimate to be a 350-pound man, who was having a severe mental health episode, as not let loose in a medical facility where he could severely injure other people,” Kershner said. “From my review of the case, nothing was outside the ordinary or outside the scope of their training for what they did.”

Peter B. Baruch, an attorney for Disse, issued a statement defending his client.

“Deputy Disse has had a 20-year career with the Sheriffs department, and has served honorably. He is looking forward to his opportunity to try this case and for the full truth to be shared in court and being vindicated,” he said.

Bramble’s attorney, Steven Hanna, said he was still gathering information and declined to comment further.

CNN has not heard from the other attorneys it has identified as representing the other defendants.

An attorney representing one of the deputies told CNN he and other defense attorneys have not yet been able to review the video of Otieno’s death.

The lawyer said he is “shocked” the video has not been released and believes “they are overcharging” the deputies in this case.

Family attorneys say Otieno posed no threat to the deputies.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is working on behalf of the family, said Otieno was not violent or aggressive with the deputies.

“You see in the video he is restrained with handcuffs, he has leg irons on, and you see in the majority of the video that he seems to be in between lifelessness and unconsciousness, but yet you see him being restrained so brutally with a knee on his neck,” Crump said Thursday.

Crump said the video is a “commentary on how inhumane law enforcement officials treat people who are having a mental health crisis as criminals rather than treating them as people who are in need of help.”

Much like the arrest and death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Otieno was face down and restrained, Crump said.

“Why would anybody not have enough common sense to say we’ve seen this movie before?” he said.

Family attorney Mark Krudys said the deputies had engaged in excessive force.

“His mother was basically crying out for help for her son in a mental health situation. Instead, he was thrust into the criminal justice system, and aggressively treated and treated poorly at the jail,” he said.

The video from the mental health facility shows the charges are appropriate, Krudys said.

“When you see that video … you’re just going to ask yourself, ‘Why?’” he said.

The 10 defendants will appear in court Tuesday before a grand jury, according to online court records. If the case goes to trial and any of them are convicted, the prison sentence for second-degree murder in Virginia is a minimum of five years with a maximum of 40 years.

Crump has called for the US Department of Justice to take part in the investigation.

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March 17, 2023
US military releases footage of Russian fighter jet forcing down American drone over Black Sea | CNN Politics

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CNN
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US European Command released footage of the Tuesday encounter between a US surveillance drone and the Russian fighter jets as it played out over the Black Sea.

The newly declassified video depicts critical moments in the mid-air encounter, which the Pentagon said lasted between 30 and 40 minutes.

The video shows the camera of the MQ-9 Reaper drone pointed backward toward its tail and the drone’s propeller, which is mounted on the rear, spinning. Then, a Russian Sukhoi SU-27 fighter jet is shown approaching. As it draws closer, the Russian fighter jet dumps fuel as it intercepts the US drone.

In another portion of the footage, the Russian jet makes another pass. As it approaches, it again dumps fuel. The video from the drone is then disrupted as the Russian fighter jet collides with the MQ-9 Reaper, damaging the propeller and ultimately forcing the US to bring down the drone in the Black Sea. Russia has denied that a collision occurred.

When the camera comes back online in the footage, the view is again pointed backward, and the propeller is shown damaged from the collision. With the propeller damaged, the drone operators effectively flew the aircraft as a glider as it descended over the Black Sea, bringing it down in international waters southwest of Crimea. On its way down, two US officials told CNN the operators remotely wiped the drone’s sensitive software, mitigating the risk of secret materials falling into enemy hands before it crashed into the water.

The downing of the drone marked the first time Russian and US military aircraft have come into direct physical contact since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine.

Despite the release of the dramatic footage, and the back-and-forth over who is to blame, the Biden administration has not said it will take action against Russia over the downing of the drone, perhaps indicating a desire to not further escalate tensions after the Kremlin said Wednesday that relations between Moscow and Washington are at their “lowest point.”

A senior Biden administration official said the footage “absolutely confirms” that there was a physical collision and dumping of fuel, but it does not confirm the pilot’s intent.

On Wednesday two US officials familiar with the intelligence told CNN that senior officials at the Russian Ministry of Defense gave the order for the Russian fighter jets to harass a US drone over the Black Sea this week.

The high-level military officials’ connection to the incident suggests that the fighter jet pilots were not taking rogue action when they interfered with the US drone.

But, at this time there is no indication that the highest of political leaders in Russia – particularly those in the Kremlin, including President Vladimir Putin – knew about the planned aggression in advance, one of the US officials said.

National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby said on “CNN This Morning” Wednesday that the drone had not been recovered and that he was “not sure” the US would be able to recover it.

Moscow had made clear it would attempt to retrieve the wreckage of the drone and the US believes Russia has recovered some debris, a US official familiar with the matter told CNN. The official described the recovered wreckage as pieces of fiberglass or small bits of the drone.

The Kremlin has said a decision on whether to retrieve the drone will come from Russia’s Ministry of Defense.

“This is the prerogative of the military. If they believe that it is necessary for our interests and our security in the Black Sea, they will do it,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call Thursday.

Peskov said he did not know what the ministry has decided.

Moscow and Washington have been in contact through military and diplomatic channels.

The US is conducting an assessment of its drone operations in the Black Sea area following the incident, four US officials tell CNN.

It has not stopped the flights entirely amid the assessment – the military sent the same model of drone, an MQ-9 Reaper, on a mission in approximately the same area over the Black Sea shortly after the collision occurred, US officials told CNN, in an effort to survey the crash site and monitor Russian efforts to look for the debris.

But the US military is “taking a close look” at the drone’s routes and assessing how to better deconflict with Russian forces, the officials said, who have been regularly flying their fighter jets in and out of Crimea. The Pentagon has asked European Command to justify surveillance flights in the area going forward in part to assess risk, a senior US military official said.

The US is considering conducting another drone flight over the Black Sea in the coming days, the officials said. That is generally consistent with the drones’ typical operating schedule, which can fluctuate, they added.

Officials also plan to analyze the overall costs and benefits of flying these missions, comparing the potential intelligence value of a particular route versus the risk of escalation with Russia.

Officials also plan to analyze the overall costs and benefits of flying these missions, comparing the potential intelligence value of a particular route versus the risk of escalation with Russia.

Russia accused the US of violating airspace they said they created for their “special military operation” in Ukraine – a designation the US does not accept and the officials told CNN that Russia has not communicated any such airspace restriction.

Asked on Thursday whether the US had flown any drone missions over the Black Sea since the collision on Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to comment on “specific missions, routes, and timelines of operations.”

“I think Secretary Austin was pretty clear that we’re going to continue to fly and operate in international airspace where international law allows and that includes the Black Sea region,” Ryder said.

The first official noted there is concern among some in the US military that limiting routes will impact intelligence gathering related to the Ukraine war. But the US also has other intelligence-gathering methods it utilizes when it is not conducting drone flights in the area, such as spy satellites.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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March 16, 2023