It's going to be ugly to watch notions of postpartisanship die. What is going to be far worse is to watch it in the context of an economy losing 500,000 to 700,000 jobs a month until a stimulus kicks in. If Obama can't get Holder through, I hope he chooses an extremely liberal and aggressive Attorney General that will hold the GOP accountable for their crimes. It's obvious these guys are so far gone they won't even pretend to respect the popular will.
Written by DMI's Civil Justice Fellow, Kia Franklin.
He still has to undergo the formal vetting process, but Eric Holder looks to be Obama's AG pick. So, how will Holder hold up when it comes to civil justice? On TortDeform we've talked extensively about a Pro-Civil Justice Presidential Platform, but access to justice for every American requires leadership and hard work from more than just the President. "America's lawyer" and "top cop", the Attorney General, has perhaps the most important role in advancing policies that preserve Americans' cherished legal rights and strengthen their access to effective, fair civil courts.
We must pay close attention here. As former AGs John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales taught us so well, the AG has a critical role in protecting--or subverting--our cherished constitutional rights and protections. In the coming weeks as we learn more about his positions on various issues I'll do my best to keep you updated.
In the mean time, three quick things worth considering are: Holder's past efforts to advance equal access to justice; his ties to the progressive-leaning constitutional law group, American Constitution Society; and some insights from the balanced analysis of Glenn Greenwald at Salon. More below the fold.
Written by Kia Franklin, DMI's Civil Justice Fellow.
Even as we recover from the heavy blow of losing the legislative fight against FISA protections for spying telecoms, we should remember that the battle for what Obama (ironic, eh?) calls our "progressive future" is far from finished, and that blogging can be a powerful weapon of choice for those on the frontlines.
In his video-address to the Austin NN Convention, Barack Obama commended the progressive blogosphere for its ability to work effectively around the important issues. Observing the promise of using online platforms to build the progressive movement, he said:
"This is one of those moments in our history when we have a chance to create a real grassroots movement and lay the groundwork for a lasting progressive future."
In order to lay the groundwork effectively, progressives have to be able to articulate what we believe in and what our blueprint will be for change to achieve those ideals.
I organized a NN panel on tort "reform" and civil justice to talk about why our civil court system should be a top priority to progressive bloggers and blog readers, especially in the aftermath of the grueling FISA fight. I also wrote a companion memo for those interested in continuing this conversation beyond the convention.
UPDATE ON FAIR PAY ACT: Republican Senators just blocked a cloture vote on the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The cloture vote (56-42) was just 4 votes shy. You can go here to see who voted how.
This would have closed the debate and moved the bill forward for a vote on its passage. That means the debate on this bill continues and we've lost the opportunity to commemorate Equal Pay Day (yesterday, April 22) with passage of a law that restores our rights against discrimination and economic inequality. Why did this cloture motion fail? Why would anyone oppose equal pay for equal work? Read more about it here.
Check it out: my post on Open Left on behalf of the Drum Major Institute--you can visit it here. It's also cross-posted on TortDeform.Com. Would love your comments, please submit them on OpenLeft's main page. Thanks!
Today's post is by DMI's Kia Franklin ofTortDeform.com What's the Fair Pay Act? It's no big deal, really. It could only reshape the entire legal terrain of employment discrimination and determine whether employers should be rewarded for successfully hiding discriminatory pay from their employees for at least 180 days. Anyway, why should women gripe about employers paying some employees differently for doing the same job just as well as others?
Okay, so there's the issue of pensions, social security, and other benefits that affect the rest of a person's life, even after a person retires; the need to provide for one's family; principles of fairness, equity, and non-discrimination. Whatever, yada yada yada...
Okay, now that we've had our daily dose of sarcasm, let's be clear: today the Senate is considering a tremendously important bill. We would all do well to pay attention to what happens today with the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act .
The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would restore the spirit of those laws we often cite to as markers of America's progress, civil rights laws that prohibit employment discrimination.
This includes Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Americans wtih Disabilities Act, among others. The law would clarify that each time an employer issues a paycheck that undercompensates a person because of the person's race, gender, age, or disability status, the time window the employee has for filing a discrimination claim starts anew.
(by Kia Franklin of DMI's TortDeform.com, cross-posted from Keystone Politics) Progressive voters have been persistently challenging the Presidential candidates and other political leaders on the issues we care about most this election year. As just one example, we saw the power of mobilization when we organized our outrage over the FISA debacle and demanded that the candidates resist the Bush Administration's attempts to grant blind amnesty to corporations that violated our Constitutional rights. Our coordinated efforts around the FISA issue reminded Congress that progressives care about holding corporations accountable, and will hold representatives accountable too.
But the corporate lobby is busy sending out a message of its own. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue said the Chamber will "build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," to oppose "anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency." The corporate lobby wants progressive leadership "gone from power for at least 40 years," and are aggressively lobbying around a key set of issues, including so-called tort "reforms" to accomplish this.
Tort "reforms"-a misnomer since they actually deform our legal rights-are anti-populist policiesthat take away our Constitutional right to take big corporations to court when they've injured us through negligence or reckless business practices. These "reforms" include: setting arbitrary limits on how much malpractice victims can recover for their injuries; eliminating consumer state claims against companies that sell harmful pharmaceuticals, contaminated foods, and other dangerous products; and appointing judges with a pro-corporate bias to the bench. They are pointedly asking the candidates of all parties whether they are for or against this corporate agenda.
With the corporate right-wing working tirelessly on its agenda, mission critical for the progressive community is to engage all the candidates about the competing people-centered interests that affect our daily lives, economic security, health, and safety. Our economy's precarious condition is one of the highest and most obvious priorities right now. This is true for Americans who face foreclosure from the sub-prime lending mess. It is also true for those of us who will ever pump gas; who care about home property values in increasingly abandoned and neglected neighborhoods; who want healthy and affordable choices as consumers; who want legal protections regarding our employment and health care; and who generally feel that the government is more concerned with bailing out big corporations than with protecting hardworking Americans against victimization by corporate greed.
Now, that laundry list of frustrations seems like a lot to talk about. But it can pretty much be boiled down to one simple question to ask each and every candidate: What specific policies will you support to curb rampantly expanding corporate power, which has left regular Americans economically vulnerable, deprived of adequate legal protections, and wary about our government's ability to protect the public's health and welfare?
And if they need a little nudging, here are six more specific questions to ask the candidates, which are in part derived from a report we released about what isn't being talked about in Election '08:
2. Corporations can force individuals to take disputes against them to a private proceeding that is not a real court and does not provide the protections of real courts. Corporations sneak arbitration "agreements" into consumer and employment contracts because they know these private arbitrators are tied to corporate purse strings. Will you help Americans hold negligent or fraudulent corporations accountable by removing this loophole?
3. How will you crack down on federal agencies that, with courts' approval, protect corporations from strong state consumer protection laws through weak federal regulations? (For example our High Court's ruling in Riegel v. Medtronic allowed a defective device maker regulated by the FDA to avoid state claims).
Good leaders will follow, and Senators Clinton and Obama have both recognized that our country's leadership needs to be listening to regular Americans and not just the corporations that pour big money into lobbying Congress. So progressive voters have a special opportunity here to shape election dialogue around the agenda that we feel is most important to us. In this opportune moment we have the great responsibility to make sure that issues the candidates haven't been discussing, but which urgently require national attention, get discussed.
By asking our own questions and articulating our own vision for how we want our government to function, what we want to do about corporate power in our lives, and what sorts of legal protections we value for ourselves, we can also parse out just how well the candidates' populist sentiments translate into practical, common sense policies to fulfill that vision. I wish New Yorkers could have organized effectively to do this in time for our primary. But thankfully, Pennsylvanians still have the chance to do this service to the progressive voting public.
Remember in the news there was talk about big hefty political donations from telecom execs to Senator John D. Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who emerged last week as the most important supporter of retroactive immunity for telecom co's that spied on people? Well, organizations and individuals who believe in Americans' right not to be spied upon, and who believe that when we are illegally spied upon we should be able to take our snoopers to court, are not standing for it. All over the blogosphere you can see a growing movement against the retroactive immunity bill and what it stands for in terms of corporate privilege/accountability.
So if all these groups have something insightful to say about this, why should TortDeform add it's two cents? Good point--but here are the pennies anyway:
This issue is particularly important from a civil justice perspective, particularly when you think of the implications of giving a company legal immunity simply because it can:
a) say "the government told us to do it,"
b) say "we didn't know it was illegal," and/or
c) pay the decisionmakers enough to actually listen to arguments a) and b) and then actually grant them immunity for breaking the law and violating people's Constitutional rights.
The timing--amidst legal actions that are making promising ground for the privacy rights of American citizens--is a classic case of corporate privilege. Also classic is this quote by U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker defending access to the courts over this issue. He wrote:
"AT&T's alleged actions here violate the constitutional rights clearly established [by the U.S. Supreme Court]... AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal." (Quote provided by NoRetroactiveImmunity)
This retroactive immunity bill nonsense demonstrates why we can't prioritize business interests (in this case, an interest in not being forced to pay for breaking the law) over people. You would think that if their actions truly weren't illegal, their "we didn't know, the government made us do it" argument would hold up in court. But to go to their Congressional cronies and ask for "amnesty" is a disgracefully perfect example of why we need a strong civil justice system that is equally accessible to individual citizens and doesn't just work well for big corporations who can buy their way out of any wrondgoing. Or, as the No Retroactive Immunity group aptly puts it:
The rule of law is the basic guarantee in our society that all Americans are treated equally. Amnesty for big business is an assault on that principle. To grant retroactive amnesty would be to announce that our wealthiest corporations are free to break the laws we pass, and amnesty would be yet another huge step in eroding our core political principles.
I encourage readers to check out the other blogs and news stories on this issue. See, for example:
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