Attention to the Unseen

Joyce White Vance writes: On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered on his promise to use all his statutory authority to protect the right to vote: He announced he was suing the state of Georgia for enacting a law he said the legislature passed to deny Black people that right. The majority-Republican legislature adopted the law, S.B. 202, in the aftermath of historic Black turnout and the election of two Democratic senators in the last cycle. Originally just three pages…

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NBC News reports: Clarence Thomas, one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices, said Monday that because of the hodgepodge of federal policies on marijuana, federal laws against its use or cultivation may no longer make sense. “A prohibition on interstate use or cultivation of marijuana may no longer be necessary or proper to support the federal government’s piecemeal approach,” he wrote. His views came as the court declined to hear the appeal of a Colorado medical marijuana dispensary that…

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Peter S. Canellos writes: When Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation in early 2017, he offered a surprising choice of role model. Gorsuch — a conservative member of the Federalist Society, carrying the personal imprimatur of Mitch McConnell — named John Marshall Harlan, the progressive 19th-Century justice best known as the sole member of the Supreme Court to stand up for Black rights and economic protections. “Justice Harlan got the…

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Mother Jones reports: In its first major action to combat GOP voter suppression laws, the Biden Justice Department announced on Friday that it is suing the state of Georgia over its new voting restrictions. The lawsuit was first reported by Mother Jones. “Today the Department of Justice is suing the state of Georgia,” Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at a press conference at the Justice Department headquarters. Gov. Brian Kemp has said “there is nothing Jim Crow” about the Georgia…

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The Guardian reports: Top Democrats in the House are investigating whether Trump justice department officials ran an unlawful shadow operation to target political enemies of the former president to hunt down leaks of classified information, according to a source familiar with the matter. The House judiciary committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, is centering his investigation on the apparent violation of internal policies by the justice department, when it issued subpoenas against Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell in 2018. The use…

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Reuters reports: Former U.S. President Donald Trump may have an unlikely ally to defend him against lawsuits alleging he incited the U.S. Capitol insurrection: President Joe Biden’s Justice Department. The Biden administration paved the way for that possibility, say constitutional scholars and lawyers in the cases, by arguing in an unrelated defamation case against Trump that presidents enjoy sweeping immunity for their comments while in office – and the right to a defense by government lawyers. Biden’s Justice Department used…

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The Daily Beast reports: It was the middle of Donald Trump’s presidency, and he was—yet again—mad at Saturday Night Live. And he wanted the federal government to help him settle the score. In March 2019, the then-president of the United States had just watched an episode of the long-running, liberal-leaning NBC sketch comedy series (it wasn’t even a new episode, it was a rerun), and grew immediately incensed that the show was gently mocking him. “It’s truly incredible that shows…

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BuzzFeed News reports: Donald Trump and a cadre of current and former federal officials can’t be sued over the violent clearing of peaceful protesters from a park in Washington, DC, last summer shortly before the then-president passed through for a photo op, a federal judge ruled Monday. Black Lives Matter DC and individual protesters who were forcibly removed from Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, had sued Trump, former attorney general Bill Barr, and top officials from other federal agencies…

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Adam Serwer writes: In May 2020, Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old with a smartphone camera, documented the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Most Americans who watched the video of Floyd begging for his life, as Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, saw a human being. Robert Kroll did not. The head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis saw a “violent criminal” and viewed the protests that followed as a “terrorist movement.” In a letter to…

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Leonard Pitts Jr. writes: Conservatives have a special purgatory for uppity black women who dare question America’s founding myths. New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — her Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” centralized slavery in America’s origin story, a heresy that inspired laws banning her work from classrooms — now lives there. And she’s about to have company. In her new book, “The Second,” Emory University history professor Carol Anderson takes on an even more sacred cow: guns. She argues that…

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HuffPost reports: Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, earned at least $53 million from private companies while he was collecting a taxpayer salary and supposed to be looking out for the public instead of his own profits. Ross reported making somewhere between $53 million and $127 million during his four years as head of the Commerce Department. The federal government only requires officials to report broad ranges of outside income. It’s possible that Ross earned “significantly more” since he was…

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Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann write: What did the FBI know before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol? What did it do to make sure it had the necessary intelligence? And what did the bureau do with what it did know? After two days of recent hearings with FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, these questions remain frustratingly unanswered. Many law enforcement and intelligence agencies fell short in the run-up to Jan. 6; they failed to adequately prepare for the…

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Politico reports: A little-known GOP candidate in one of Florida’s most competitive congressional seats was secretly recorded threatening to send “a Russian and Ukrainian hit squad” to a fellow Republican opponent to make her “disappear.” During a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: The far-right group the Oath Keepers is splintering after board members accused the founder of spending its money on hair dye, steaks and guns. The leader of the Proud Boys, choked off from the financial system, is printing “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts to make money. The finances of the two most visible groups with members involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol are sputtering. Leaders are low on cash, struggling with defections…

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