Louisiana seeks constitutional amendment to draw more juveniles into adult court

When Louisiana reversed its “Raise the Age” law in early 2024, moving all 17-year-olds back into the adult criminal system, it became the first and only state in the nation to enact such a reform, intended to shield youth from adult prisons, only to then repeal it. Since then, sheriffs of some of the biggest parishes in the state have struggled to accommodate the influx of minors into their jails. Now, Louisiana lawmakers are seeking to go a step further: They’ve proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would give themselves more leeway to decide what crimes can send children even younger than 17 into adult court—and potentially adult prison, reported Bolt. 

On March 29, Louisianans will vote on Amendment 3, a constitutional amendment that would hand legislators the power to add, with a two-thirds majority vote, any felony to the list of charges that would qualify a child to be treated like an adult in the eyes of the law. In Louisiana, this includes crimes like making a fake ID or stealing a phone. The state constitution currently restricts the crimes for which minors aged 14 and up can be charged as adults to a list of 16 serious felonies including murder, rape, and armed robbery. 

The amendment’s sponsor, Republican state senator Heather Cloud, says the limits on charging children as adults have “hamstringed” Louisiana from being able to address juvenile crime. Some of the bill’s supporters have expressed a deeply pessimistic view of Louisiana’s youth population; in a House committee hearing last fall, Republican lawmaker Tony Bacala told his colleagues, “Some of these kids are already lost when they’re two years old.” 

The move has alarmed advocates across the state, who are urging a no vote. “This is just casting the net wider to get young people inside the system,” Antonio Travis, the youth organizer for the group Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, told Bolts.

“These are grasps for more power,” said Sarah Omojola, the executive director of Vera Institute New Orleans. “We’re really trying to cage up and defund Louisiana’s future.”

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry sat in chambers during the House’s debate and vote on the amendment in November, a signal of his support. Its content is consistent with a broader effort by Landry and his allies in the legislature to establish more serious and lasting consequences for young people accused of crimes. In 2023, as attorney general, Landry campaigned for a bill that would have made young people’s criminal records public—but only for residents of the state’s three most populous parishes, which are all majority-Black. The bill was sponsored by state representative Debbie Villio, a former prosecutor and ally of Landry’s who brought the constitutional amendment alongside Cloud. 

Both Landry and Villio insisted at the time that this targeting was about crime rates, not race, but organizers were appalled. “How could a person not look at the evidence and see that this is an intentional attack on certain communities?” Travis asked. The bill died in the senate amidst widespread accusations of racism. But in 2024, during a special session on crime that Landry called as his first official act as governor, Bacala brought back a new version that applied equally to every parish, which passed. Landry promptly signed it into law. 

Before 2017, the year Louisiana’s “Raise the Age” law took effect, “the education system was definitely, definitely feeding our youth justice system,” Travis told Bolts. “Kids were getting incarcerated from truancy. Kids were getting incarcerated from being suspended too much.” 

The reform moved 17-year-olds into the juvenile justice system as a default, though those accused of serious crimes could still be transferred to adult court. “This narrative of these hard criminals … that narrative was slowly being done away with,” Travis said. “The general public was recognizing that these are kids and they deserve resources.”

But this new day in Louisiana wouldn’t last long. There were a few abortive efforts to overturn “Raise the Age”: one bill that Landry, then attorney general, supported died in 2022; another was vetoed by then-Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, in 2023. But this year, with Landry as governor, the legislation passed and became law last April. Landry feted the change on X, writing: “No more will 17-year-olds who commit home invasions, carjack, and rob the great people of our State be treated as children in court. These are criminals and today, they will finally be treated as such.”

The fallout was immediate: Any 17-year-olds already in custody were transferred to adult facilities, and all 17-year-olds arrested from then on were processed and treated as adults, meaning that their criminal history also becomes public record. The vast majority of these young people were not accused of home invasions, carjacking, or robbery, it turns out. Of the 203 17-year-olds arrested in the state’s three largest parishes during the first five months under the new law, ProPublica found that nearly 70 percent were charged with nonviolent crimes, like trespassing or marijuana possession. Only 13 percent were charged with serious felonies—and prosecutors already had the discretion to send young people accused of these crimes into adult court. 

Erika Jupiter, statewide organizing manager for Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children’s, told Bolts that the change has had the effect of separating young people from their families and communities. ”Parents are very worried about the experience their children are having, and also it’s harder for them to communicate with their children,” she told Bolts. “If your child is in that adult facility, you may go weeks without knowing a status on what’s happening with them.” 

Recognizing that minors are at increased risk of physical and sexual assault in prison, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act requires them to be “sight and sound” separated from adult prisoners. This has resulted in adult prisons placing young people in solitary confinement or in “pods,” which Jupiter described as “windowless shipping containers.” “It’s still inhumane,” she said. Officials have also shipped kids to prisons over 150 miles away from their original facility since the law took effect. “You have children going so far away from home, and their parents can’t visit,” Jupiter said.

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CREATORS: A Call to Vigilantly Protect and Enforce the 22nd Amendment

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
February 3, 2025

The 22nd Amendment provides, "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice ..." The 22nd Amendment is under attack. President Donald Trump has openly discussed the possibility of seeking a third term. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) recently introduced a House Joint Resolution to amend the Constitution of the United States to allow a president to be elected for up to but no more than three terms.

Ogles proudly announced in a press release that his proposal "[W]ould allow President Trump to serve three terms."

Why didn't the Founding Fathers put a limit on presidential terms? According to Bruce G. Peabody and Scott E. Gant in their 1999 Minnesota Law Review article "The Twice and Future President: Constitutional Interstices and the Twenty-Second Amendment," during the Constitutional Convention the question of how long the president should serve was discussed extensively. In debates on the question during the summer of 1787, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph called for an executive chosen by the national legislature and ineligible for more than one term of service.

Measures proposed by other Convention delegates left the question of eligibility open-ended and called for some form of presidential election, as opposed to selection by the legislature.

Obviously, the founders decided on election of the president, but put no limitations on terms. For more than 150 years it was not an issue, except for unsuccessful efforts by Ulysses S. Grant to seek the nomination of the GOP for a third term.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, he was serving his fourth term as president of the United States. Prior to Roosevelt, American presidents adhered to a tradition set by the nation's first president, George Washington, who served two terms and stepped aside. Every president before Roosevelt followed that tradition.

Roosevelt's decision to seek a third term was met with resistance. He won reelection as the world was being engulfed in a world war. Ironically, Roosevelt ran on the promise to keep America out of the war. That changed on Dec. 7, 1941.

Political leaders began to talk of presidential term limits when Roosevelt decided to seek a fourth term. Republican candidate Thomas Dewey said a potential 16-year term for Roosevelt was a threat to democracy. According to The Constitution Center, in a speech in Buffalo on Oct. 31, 1944, Dewey said, "four terms or sixteen years is the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed. That is one reason why I believe that two terms must be established as the limit by constitutional amendment."

The United States Constitution was written "to endure for ages to come," Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in the early 1800s. According to the Associated Press, to ensure the Constitution would last, the framers made amending the document a difficult task. A proposed amendment must be passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, then ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.

In 1947, two years after Roosevelt's death, the House of Representatives proposed Joint Resolution 27, calling for a set limit of two terms, each containing four years, for all future presidents.

The proposed amendment was approved and sent out to the states for ratification on March 21, 1947. After almost four years of deliberation, the proposed amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the nation's state legislatures and adopted as the 22nd Amendment in 1951.

The prospect of amending or rescinding the 22nd Amendment should be of great concern to most Americans. In 1947, the concern was not only that FDR was elected to four terms but that dictators like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin had installed themselves as leaders for life. Fortunately, the lifespan of Hitler and Mussolini was much shorter than expected.

In America, we don't need to count on longevity, or the lack there of, to stave off dictators — we have the 22nd Amendment.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Bluesky @matthewmangino.bsky.social.

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VOTE!

Today is Election Day, time to vote in the most consequential election of our lifetime!

Trump’s 'evidence-free rhetoric' on crime was intended to deceive voters

Her is an excerpt from Ashley Rubin, a social scientist at the University of Hawaii, recent article posted on Radley Balko’s The Watch: 

Donald Trump’s evidence-free rhetoric [on crime] has managed to convince his supporters that violent crime is a major problem. A recent Gallup poll found that three of the five most important issues according to Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters—crime, immigration, and terrorism and national security—are connected to the broader issue of crime. But it’s not just Trump’s supporters—voters in general now care more about crime, even as the crime rates are falling and remain low, historically speaking.

As sociologist Katherine Beckett has demonstrated, the more politicians talk about crime, the more the media talks about crime, and the more citizens become concerned about crime—even when actual crime rates show crime is not the problem citizens think it is.

Trump’s promise to “stop crime and restore safety” sounds good to those voters who believe the hype that violent crime is at historically high levels (it’s not) and that we are in the middle of a crime wave (we’re not), and who believe that Harris plans to gut police departments in order to let violent criminals run free (she doesn’t). The effect is that those who challenge Trump’s depiction of a dangerous America get characterized as being soft on crime or enabling criminality.

Ultimately, by convincing the public that crime is a real threat, Trump isn’t just trying to delegitimize his opponents. He’s also paving the way for the public to accept unnecessary and harmful policy changes that don’t meaningfully bring the crime rate down but help him purge society—whether through deportation or incarceration—of the people he believes shouldn’t be in it.

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U.S. in heightened threat environment heading into Election Day

 The United States is in a heightened threat environment heading into Election Day, with multiple extremist factions threatening to disrupt the electoral process, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Two prominent assassination attempts on former President Trump have occurred against a backdrop of myriad disrupted plots and a record high number of threats to public officials, as violent political rhetoric raises the stakes. Both foreign adversaries and Salafi-jihadist extremists have sought to take advantage of this fractious moment by inspiring or launching acts of violence in the United States.  

The days (or weeks) following the election could prove the most consequential, particularly if a clear winner has not emerged for the presidency. Such uncertainty gives conspiracy theories greater space to develop and circulate and can significantly increase political unrest or even violence within local communities. In 2020, for instance, vote-tallying centers in swing counties and cities—including Maricopa County in Arizona, Philadelphia, and Detroit—were targeted by extremist protests or terrorist plots. 

This year, violent far-right extremists likely pose the greatest threat, given the January 6, 2021, precedent of violence within a political transition, as well as violent rhetoric repeatedly issued by the Republican Party’s candidate. The Department of Homeland Security has even warned that the “heightened risk” of violence might include extremists attempting to sabotage ballots—a step that, if successful, could launch the country into a constitutional crisis. Recent arson attacks on ballot boxes in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, remain unsolved. Meanwhile, anti-government militia groups remain active on Facebook—the social media platform appears to have allowed its artificial intelligence (AI) systems to auto-generate pages for the groups—and continue to coordinate over the platform to conduct vigilante monitoring of ballot boxes to prevent “ballot stuffing,” a move better suited to intimidating voters than illuminating electoral irregularities.

The unrest could continue up to Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025, and even beyond.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson vows to repeal the Affordable Care Act stripping coverage from 45 million Americans

 Heather Cox Richardson reported on Halloween this frightening plan:

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has responded to news stories about his plan to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) by claiming his comments at the closed-door campaign event on Monday were taken out of context. But they weren’t. The tape is clear. Johnson said that Republicans want “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” When an attendee asked, “No Obamacare?” Johnson laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” 

45 million Americans are covered under the Affordable Car Act.

Go to the state capital and 'confront' lawmakers with 'evidence of the illegitimate steal'

In the weeks after the 2020 election, retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Donald J. Trump’s former national security adviser, was a key figure in efforts to subvert the election outcome. In recent interviews and speeches, he and an associate are warning that this year’s election will be stolen from Mr. Trump, advising supporters to take action to prevent a theft and vowing retribution once Mr. Trump is back in power, reported The New York Times.

At the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, a far-right event in Pennsylvania this month, Mr. Flynn told the crowd that after a Trump victory: “Katie, bar the door. Believe me, the gates of hell — my hell — will be unleashed.”

At the same event, Ivan Raiklin, a close associate of Mr. Flynn’s who serves on the board of directors of Mr. Flynn’s organization America’s Future, urged Trump supporters in Pennsylvania to go to the state capital, Harrisburg, and “confront” their state representatives with “evidence of the illegitimate steal” after the election if Mr. Trump loses.

Mr. Raiklin also called on Republican-held state legislatures to withhold their electors in the event of a Trump loss that Republicans consider illegitimate.

“We run the elections,” he said. “We try to play it fair. They steal it, our state legislatures are our final stop to guarantee a checkmate.”

The maneuver Mr. Raiklin laid out appears to defy the Electoral Count Reform Act, the bipartisan law passed in 2022. The law was meant to prevent a repeat of Mr. Trump’s attempt to exploit the Electoral College vote to overturn his defeat in 2020. It states that only state executives, not state legislatures, can certify the slates of electors that determine the winner.

But the notion of withholding electors has been circulating in some corners of the right. Mr. Raiklin laid out similar plans days later in North Carolina and at a county Republican Party event in Maryland. He argued that North Carolina’s legislature should preemptively allocate its electoral votes to Mr. Trump, even before the state’s ballots were counted, on account of hurricane-related disruptions.

Appearing at the Maryland event with Mr. Raiklin, Representative Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who chairs the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, said the plan “makes a lot of sense,” before backtracking on Friday and saying in a statement that “every legal vote should be counted.”

Mr. Flynn and Mr. Raiklin, neither of whom responded to requests for comment, have been prominent exponents of false claims and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election for years. But they have recently focused on specific tactics to avoid what they predict will be the theft of the 2024 election.

 In a September interview on a podcast dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, Mr. Flynn applauded right-wing activists who are surveilling election infrastructure as the “modern-day Minutemen of this cold civil war that we are currently facing,” a reference to the Revolutionary War militia.

The extent of Mr. Flynn’s current relationship with Mr. Trump is unclear. The former president fired him less than a month into his presidency for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and to federal agents about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. But in his last months in office, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Flynn a full federal pardon.

On Dec. 18, 2020, Mr. Flynn and several associates met with Mr. Trump at the White House and tried to persuade him to use federal law enforcement and military personnel to seize voting machines in an effort to hold onto power, a meeting that has been a focus of investigations into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

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Here is how U.S. Army defined the threat of 'Fascism' in 1945

 Here is how the U.S. Army defined the threat of Fascism to soldiers in 1945 according to writer Heather Cox Richardson:

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”

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Noncitizens are not voting in massive numbers, and our elections are secure

Suppose you were to believe the narrative from certain candidates, social media, high-profile lawsuits, and numerous ballot initiatives this year. In that case, you might think that noncitizen voting is a major problem. As with most issues these days, the facts are obscured in favor of false narratives aimed at stirring up a frenzy, reports The Washington Monthly.

But facts should matter: Noncitizens are not voting in massive numbers, and our elections are secure.

That reality has not stopped those who sow divisiveness and undermine people’s confidence in our elections. The false narrative can also create negative changes in the law that undermine the constitutional protection for the right to vote. We must disseminate the truth so that the American public can distinguish fact from myth.

Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Several state laws forbid it as well. From a practical perspective, it is unlikely that noncitizens will flout these laws purposefully and vote en masse, as they will probably be caught and face both criminal and immigration consequences.

It is true that sometimes, noncitizens mistakenly appear on voter registration lists, usually because they validly obtain a driver’s license, and the lists are copied over to the voter registration database. States routinely audit those lists to remove ineligible voters. And reports of noncitizens on the rolls are almost always inflated. For example, Texas officials likely embellished the number of noncitizens it purged from its voter rolls; news organizations found that the number Texas cited almost certainly included valid U.S. citizens. Alabama’s Secretary of State admitted that his initial allegation of 3,200 noncitizens on the voter rolls was massively wrong—at least 2,000 of the people he flagged were citizens. Of course, people often don’t hear the correction; they only focus on the initial claim.

In 2022, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced he was referring for investigation 1,634 cases of potential noncitizens attempting to register between 1997 and 2022—a paltry number given the millions of valid Georgia voters. None of those people voted because of the various safeguards in place. Raffensperger noted, “The audit proved that Georgia’s citizenship check procedures are working and are vital to ensuring secure elections.”

Moreover, state and local election officials routinely perform post-election audits to verify the results. They have also specifically looked for noncitizen voting and found hardly any instances of it. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation lists only 21 cases of ineligible voting in its entire “election fraud” database. Numerous other studies also show that noncitizen voting is minuscule.

But the claims persist. A recent survey found that 67 percent of respondents said they encountered information on social media about noncitizen voting, with 77 percent of Republicans reporting that they had seen this content, compared to 63 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of independents who saw it. These false claims will likely be part of any post-election attempt to sow seeds of doubt about the election’s outcome. Maybe that’s the whole point,

Some states have attempted aggressive purges of their voter rolls, only to end up in court. The Department of Justice, for example, was forced to sue Alabama and Virginia for trying to flag potential noncitizens in their rolls too close to the election. Florida sued the federal government, alleging that the Department of Homeland Security had not provided the requisite information for Florida to review its voter registration list. But creating this kind of dispute so close to the election—during the 90 days before Election Day when federal law prohibits voter purges—does little but sow doubt about the voting process. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida wants to add further uncertainty by introducing a bill that would let states remove noncitizens from the rolls at any time.

Meanwhile, eight states (Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin) will vote on ballot initiatives to amend their state constitutions to prohibit noncitizens from voting. These initiatives follow similar measures that passed in 2020 and 2022 in six states—Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Ohio. The Arizona Constitution also prohibits noncitizens from voting.

The ballot propositions will impose a very minor change in the constitutional language.

Virtually every state’s constitution before 2020 said that “every” citizen shall be entitled to vote. The amendments alter that language to “only a citizen” may vote. But the change is not mere semantics. State constitutions provide much stronger protection for the right to vote than does the U.S. Constitution, especially given the restrictive rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court. Changing the language of state constitutions will water down these vital sources of protection. Already, some state judges are reluctant to apply their state constitutions robustly, preferring instead to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s lead—even though state constitutions textually and explicitly confer broader rights. Narrowing the protection of state constitutions will give these judges even further reason not to construe their state constitutions as more protective of voters. Refusing to apply the state constitution properly leads to deference to state politicians, who often craft voting rules to help keep themselves in power.

If passed, these “noncitizen voting” ballot propositions will also forbid localities in these states from allowing noncitizens to vote in local or school board elections. A few cities in California, Maryland, and Vermont currently—and legally—let noncitizens vote in these municipal elections. New York City also passed a similar ordinance, but it has been held up in court.

A state constitution that says “every” citizen may vote does not necessarily preclude a locality from legally adding noncitizens to the voter rolls for local elections, as the state constitution is a floor, not a ceiling, of voter eligibility. A change in the state constitutional language to say that “only” a citizen may vote in any elections in the state would outlaw that practice by imposing a strict limitation for all elections. We can debate whether it’s a good idea to let noncitizens vote in local elections, though the idea of federalism would suggest that it really should be up to each city to decide for itself. Moreover, many states considering these ballot propositions already have state statutes that forbid noncitizens from voting in any election, so the constitutional change will have no legal effect. The propositions instead are a solution in search of a problem.

They also create their own problem: fostering the false claim that noncitizen voting is happening. It is not. Perhaps, instead of chasing the boogeyman of noncitizen voting, our elected leaders should focus on improving turnout among the U.S. citizens who routinely do not vote. After all, even in the best years, about one-third of eligible voters do not cast a ballot. If they participate, millions of nonvoters could fundamentally alter our elections. A few noncitizens who might mistakenly end up on the voter registration lists and almost never vote have little effect.

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Sullivan: American Crisis

 Margaret Sullivan writes:

With less than two weeks until the most consequential presidential election of the modern era, this is my evaluation of how the media has done — along with an 11th hour plea.

There are, after all, still a lot of undecided or at least uncommitted voters, hard as that may be to believe. And the media, while it won’t determine the outcome, can make a difference.

I’ll grant, up front, that the national news media — Big Journalism — has done some good work. The reporting on Project 2025, while not pervasive enough, has been excellent, and some of the best of that has been in the New York Times. Daniel Dale at CNN has done great, helpful fact-checking. ABC News did a good job with the single presidential debate. The Guardian has been publishing a fine series and a newsletter called The Stakes. (I contributed a piece about what would happen to press rights.) The New York Times just launched a link to its extensive coverage of what a Trump presidency would mean, tagged “What’s At Stake.”

Some columnists have made sense of the nightmare for us, like Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer, who consistently nails what’s happening, providing reporting and big-picture context; and Jill Lawrence at the Los Angeles Times, whose most recent column was terrifyingly headlined: “Get Ready for President Vance.” And I see improvement from the Washington Post, as Parker Molloy noted in a New Republic piece about Trump’s town-hall dance party titled “The Washington Post Covered that Bizarro Trump Rally the Right Way.”

But fundamentally, the media coverage writ large has fallen far short of what was needed to get the true stakes across to an entire nation of voters. And that’s been true not just recently, but for more than nine years, since Trump declared his candidacy in 2015. Too often, the coverage of Trump has been an embarrassing failure — sanewashing his lunacy, falsely equating him to his traditional rivals, or treating him as some sort of amusing sideshow.

The economist Dean Baker, posting on X the other day, expressed it perfectly: “It says everything you need to know about the U.S. media that Trump’s clown show at the McDonald’s gets more attention than his former defense secretary and chair of the Joint Chief of Staff warning that Trump is a dangerous fascist with no respect for democracy.”

Exactly. And that is true of the mainstream, supposedly independent media! Now add in Fox News, the beating heart of the right-wing propaganda monster.

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Creators: In 1933, Germany's Chancellor Began To Undermine Government Institutions. Thus Was Born a Dictator

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
October 21, 2024

Nearly 80 years ago, at the outset of the Battle of the Bulge, during the final months of World War II, the Nazi Waffen-SS massacred 84 U.S. Army prisoners of war. The massacre was committed in Belgium near the town of Malmedy. After the American POWs surrendered, they were corralled on to a farm field and gunned down by Nazi machine guns.

The Nazi officers at Malmedy were tried and convicted as part of a series of war crime trials after WWII.

Throughout the years following WWII, there have been Nazi apologists. For instance, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who in the 1950s infamously searched for communists on every street corner, expressed his concern about what he called the abuse of the "clearly innocent GI Joes of the German army."

McCarthy seized upon the Malmedy Massacre to castigate the American military for defaming the Nazis. Ironically, McCarthy accused the U.S. military of conducting a witch hunt.

In 2017, we watched as an American president defended white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying there are "some very fine people on both sides."

Recently, Tucker Carlson hosted a two-hour podcast with Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist. According to Jacob Heilbrunn writing in Politico, Cooper claims that "Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the 'chief villain of the Second World War' and that the Holocaust was essentially an accident."

It is difficult to grasp that a "mainstream" American political movement could embrace or defend Nazism. The Nazis started WWII, killed 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and were responsible for widespread looting, plunder and countless atrocities like Malmedy.

The Nazi party grew as an under-the-radar fringe party, often ignored or shrugged off as meaningless. The Nazi party grew into a mass movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s by promoting fanatical nationalism and antisemitism.

In 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and the Nazi party soon began to undermine rights of citizens and electoral politics. Soon, Hitler evolved from chancellor to dictator.

With the start of WWII, the Nazis ramped up the anti-Jewish rhetoric and increased the systematic slaughter of Jews. After invading and occupying Poland, the Nazis murdered thousands of Polish Jews. They confined many to ghettoes where they starved to death and began sending others to death camps where they were either murdered or forced into slave labor.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the killing continued. Nazi death squads murdered thousands of Jews in western Russia.

The indiscriminate murder of Jews became a burden for soldiers and Nazi sycophants. In an effort to streamline the killings, the Nazis convened a conference in the spring of 1942. The Wannsee Conference outside of Berlin came up with the "Final Solution," the systematic murder of all European Jews.

The Nazis created a series of concentration camps where Jews and other "undesirables" would be delivered by cattle cars to face extermination. Their bodies were incinerated in large ovens.

Throughout the remainder of the war, Jews in the countries occupied by Germany were deported by the thousands to the death camps. Places like Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz began to operate with ruthless Nazi efficiency.

The killing continued until the last months of WWII. The liberation of the camps, as the Nazis retreated, revealed the horrors that are still etched in the collective memory of the human race.

No, there are not "good people" on both sides of the growing neo-Nazi movement in the United States. When someone tells you over and over again that he intends to be a dictator on Day 1, you need to believe him. Germany slowly and silently slipped under the spell of a soulless and murderous authoritarian.

In a little more than two weeks, America has the power to chart a different course.

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Election Law Blog: Is Elon Musk's $1 million dollar prize violating election law?

According to the Election Law Blog: 

Hugo Lowell: “Elon Musk says on stage at a town hall that America PAC will be awarding $1 million every day until the election to a registered Pennsylvania voter who has signed his petition. Musk awarded the first $1 million this evening to someone at the town hall, bringing the guy onto the stage and handing him a jumbo check, lotto-style. Musk is essentially incentivizing likely Trump voters in PA to register to vote: Petition is to support for 1A and 2A, so basically R voters. But they also have to be registered to vote, so if they weren’t already, they would do it now.”

Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal. See 52 U.S.C. 10307(c): “Whoever knowingly or willfully gives false information as to his name, address or period of residence in the voting district for the purpose of establishing his eligibility to register or vote, or conspires with another individual for the purpose of encouraging his false registration to vote or illegal voting, or pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both…” (Emphasis added.)

See also the DOJ Election Crimes Manual at 44: “The bribe may be anything having monetary value, including cash, liquor, lottery chances, and welfare benefits such as food stamps. Garcia, 719 F.2d at 102. However, offering free rides to the polls or providing employees paid leave while they vote are not prohibited. United States v. Lewin, 467 F.2d 1132, 1136 (7th Cir.
1972). Such things are given to make it easier for people to vote, not to induce them to do so. This distinction is important. For an offer or a payment to violate Section 10307(c), it must have been intended to induce or reward the voter for engaging in one or more acts necessary to cast a ballot.… Moreover, payments made for some purpose other than to induce
or reward voting activity, such as remuneration for campaign work, do not violate this statute. See United States v. Canales 744 F.2d 413, 423 (5th Cir. 1984) (upholding conviction because jury justified in inferring that payments were for voting, not campaign work). Similarly, Section 10307(c) does not apply to payments made to signature-gatherers for voter registrations such individuals may obtain. However, such payments become actionable under Section 10307(c) if they are shared with the person being registered.” (Emphases added.)

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Four million people in 48 states are banned from voting because of a felony conviction

According to a recent report by The Sentencing Project "Locked Out 2024," laws in 48 U.S. states ban people with felony convictions from voting. In 2024, an estimated 4 million Americans, representing 1.7% of the voting-age population, will be ineligible to vote due to these laws, many of which date back to the post-Reconstruction era. 

In this historic election year, questions persist about the stability of democratic institutions, election fairness, and voter suppression in marginalized communities. The systematic exclusion of millions with felony convictions should be front and center in these debates.

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Former President Jimmy Carter turns 100, the first president to reach that milestone

When Jimmy Carter entered hospice care at his Georgia home last year, his family and friends thought he had only days to live. More than 19 months later, he is set to celebrate his 100th birthday on Tuesday, the first president in American history to hit the centennial mark, reported The New York Times.

The last chapter of Mr. Carter’s already remarkable life story is turning out to be one of astonishing resilience. The peanut farmer turned global statesman has over the years beaten brain cancer, bounced back from a broken hip and outlived his political adversaries. And now he is setting a record for presidential durability that may be hard to break.

Though frail and generally confined to his modest ranch house in Plains, Ga., Mr. Carter has not only refused to surrender to the inevitability of time, he has perked up in recent months, according to family members. He has become a little more engaged again, telling his children and grandchildren that he has a new milestone he wants to reach — not his birthday, which he professes not to care that much about, but Election Day, so that he can vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It’s a gift,” Josh Carter, one of his grandsons, said of the last few months. “It’s a gift that I didn’t know we were going to get.”

Mr. Carter had already surpassed all of his predecessors to become the longest-living president, but some of those who have experienced his stubborn irascibility over the decades said they were not surprised that he is approaching his second century.

“That’s Jimmy,” said Gerald Rafshoon, his White House communications director and longtime friend. “It’s almost like his whole life has been to go against the norm. Tell him he can’t do something, just tell him that, and you’re bound to see the determination.”

Mr. Carter’s hometown, Plains, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speck on the map in southwest Georgia with barely 500 residents, is celebrating his birthday with a flyover of military jets, a naturalization ceremony for 100 new citizens and a concert. Supporters already held a lively concert this month at Atlanta’s Fox Theater to be televised on Tuesday, including performances by the B-52s, BeBe Winans and others along with videotaped tributes from most of the other presidents.

Mr. Carter was not able to attend personally. He has become severely diminished physically. There are days when his grandchildren and great-grandchildren travel to Plains only to be told that he is not able to see them.

The death last year of his wife, the former first lady Rosalynn Carter, was crushing and disorienting, relatives said. After 77 years of marriage, many around him assumed he would follow her soon.

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Creators: Remember When the Trump Administration Started Executing Federal Inmates?

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
September 23, 2024

Imagine a candidate seeking reelection to the office of president of the United States who would systematically start executing condemned prisoners in the midst of an election. Using the death chamber to curry favor with a segment of the electorate is callous and unconscionable.

Are there no limits to what a political candidate will do to get elected? Let's look back at 2020. In the second half of that year, amid a pandemic and a reelection campaign, the Trump administration decided to start executing federal prisoners.

After 17 years without an execution, the federal government carried out 13 executions in a little more than six months. To put those numbers into context, there have been 14 executions in all death penalty states so far this year. In 2020, there were only seven executions in five states. In 2021, there were eight executions in the same number of states — all below the Mason-Dixon line.

The Trump administration conducted more executions in five months than any other presidency since the turn of the 20th century and carried out six executions during a presidential transition period, more than any other administration in the history of the United States. Prior to 2020, the federal government carried out only three executions in the modern era of the death penalty, most notably Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

Whether it was a ploy to bolster his tough-guy bona fides or a lowbrow pitch to his "law and order" constituency, then-President Donald Trump's bloodlust saw no boundary.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, those executed by the federal government included the first Native American ever executed by the federal government for the murder of a member of his own tribe on tribal lands.

The Trump administration oversaw the first federal execution in 68 years of an offender who was a teenager at the time the crime was committed.

The federal executions of 2020 included the first federal execution in 57 years for a crime committed in a state that had abolished the death penalty, as well as executions carried out against the wishes of the victims' families and the first lame-duck executions in more than a century.

As the president faced an unprecedented second impeachment trial, his machinery of death kept chugging along. After Trump incited his "law and order" supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, resulting in death and mayhem, Lisa Montgomery was executed. She was the first woman executed in the federal system in nearly seven decades.

Montgomery committed a very heinous crime. In 2004, she cut an unborn fetus from the womb of the mother. According to NBC News, Montgomery's lawyers did not argue that she didn't deserve to be punished, but rather that the jury never fully learned of her severe mental illnesses as diagnosed by doctors. One day after Montgomery's execution, Corey Johnson, with an IQ of 69, was executed.

With only days left in his "reign," Trump had one more execution to carry out. A U.S. circuit court overturned a stay from a lower court to allow Dustin Higgs to recover from COVID-19. He was executed on Jan. 16, 2021, only days before Trump "unwillingly" left office.

There has not been a federal execution since. Executions in this country are almost exclusively in the South, the number of annual executions has dramatically declined since the 1990s, and the number of death sentences are at an all-time low.

Yet, if a candidate wants to flex his "law and order" muscles, the death penalty is an easy choice, and nobody has demonstrated that in a more frightening manner than Donald Trump.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on X @MatthewTMangino.

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The Pride of Portage County: Elected Sheriff overtly intimidates Harris supporters

A sheriff in Ohio who made disparaging remarks about Vice President Kamala Harris and immigrants on social media suggested that residents compile a list of addresses where they see yard signs in support of the Democratic presidential nominee, reported NBC News.

In a public Facebook post, Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski used anti-immigrant rhetoric and denounced both Harris and her supporters.

"When people ask me...What’s gonna happen if the Flip — Flopping, Laughing Hyena Wins?? I say...write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo...when the Illegal human ‘Locust’ (which she supports!) Need places to live...We’ll already have the addresses of the their New families...who supported their arrival!" the post said.

Zuchowski, the sheriff’s office and the Harris campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday afternoon.

The post Zuchowski shared also included TV images mentioning Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio — towns that have become flashpoints in the immigration debate.

Springfield in particular has been subject to security threats amid baseless claims about Haitian immigrants living there. former President Donald Trump amplified the claims at Tuesday's presidential debate, which drew more than 67 million viewers, when he said, “They’re eating the pets.” 

Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has made similar remarks on social media, and he doubled down on them in an interview Sunday on NBC News' "Meet the Press."

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue has said "a lie" is tearing apart the city of nearly 59,000 residents. "We'd like that to stop," he said Saturday.

Springfield is a little less than 200 miles southeast of Portage County.

Zuchowski's Facebook page includes a photo of him with Vance and other pictures of him with Trump allies such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The photo with Vance is dated July 15. One of the photos with Flynn is dated June 13, and the other is dated March 30 and includes Ramaswamy.

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Hey Judge Merchan, Trump's criminal interference with the last election should influence the outcome of the next election

Judge  Juan M. Merchan overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan postponed his sentencing until after Election Day, a significant victory for the former president as he seeks to overturn his conviction and win back the White House, reported The New York Times. 

The irony of protecting the integrity of a candidate who has been convicted of trying overthrow an election should not lost in this decision. The last election, and Trump's criminal interference with that election are integral to the election coming up--Judge Merchan missed that point.

Judge Merchan rescheduled the sentencing for Nov. 26, citing the “unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in.” He had previously planned to hand down Mr. Trump’s punishment on Sept. 18, just seven weeks before Election Day, when Mr. Trump will face off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.

“This is not a decision this court makes lightly but it is the decision which in this court’s view, best advances the interests of justice,” Justice Merchan wrote in the four-page ruling, which noted that “this matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this nation’s history.”

Being convicted and sentenced for tampering with an election should be a relevant issue in the current campaign. Trump is not running for city council, he is running for President.  Merchan ducked the issue and a convicted felon running for president gets a break.

The judge appeared eager to skirt a swirl of partisan second-guessing in the campaign’s final stretch. Asserting that the court is a “fair, impartial and apolitical institution,” he said that “the integrity of our judicial system demands” that the sentencing be “free from distraction or distortion.”

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DOJ pursues websites linked to Russian disinformation

The US Department of Justice announced the seizure of 32 internet domains linked to an alleged Russian government-backed disinformation campaign aimed at influencing US and global audiences, reported Jurist.

According to the DOJ, the operation, known as “Doppelganger,” sought to sway public opinion in favor of Russian interests and interfere in the 2024 US presidential election. The campaign was allegedly orchestrated by several Russian organizations under the supervision of Sergei Kiriyenko, a senior official in the Russian Presidential Administration. These organizations utilized the domains to distribute pro-Russian propaganda and undermine international support for Ukraine.

Announcing the seizures, US Attorney General Merrick Garland said:

An internal planning document created by the Kremlin states that a goal of the campaign is to secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election. The sites we are seizing today were filled with Russian government propaganda that had been created by the Kremlin to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies and interests, and influence voters in the United States and other countries. Our actions today make clear that the Justice Department will be aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by the Russian government, or any other malign actor, to interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy.

In conjunction with the DOJ seizures, the US Treasury Department announced it had imposed new sanctions against 10 individuals and two organizations linked to Doppelganger. The individuals designated for sanctions included Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of Russian state news broadcaster RT.

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Crime rates are falling, data collection not improving

 Washington Post Editorial:

There’s encouraging news about crime rates in the United States. After a spike in both violent crime and property offenses after the pandemic-and-protest year of 2020, statistics show that crime is reverting to 2019 levels. That’s according to a newly released midyear report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, based on monthly offense rates for 12 violent, property and drug crimes in 39 cities that have consistently reported such data over the past six years.

Rates for 11 of the 12 offenses CCJ covered in its report were lower in the first half of 2024 than in the first half of 2023. One crime of any kind is too many, of course, and even five years ago the United States was unacceptably violence-prone. Still, those who are genuinely interested in eliminating crime, as opposed to exploiting the issue for political purposes, will take heart in the new trends and study them for hints about which anti-crime policies do and do not work.

Alas, many in politics are interested in exploiting the issue. Former president Donald Trump told a rally in March that “crime is rampant and out of control like never before,” and doubled down on that alarmist message by telling the Republican National Convention that “our crime rate is going up.” Political rhetoric interacts with the public’s long-standing tendency to believe the worst about crime, which is why Mr. Trump is not the only politician to play this game. Twenty-three out of 27 Gallup polls conducted since 1993 showed that at least three-fifths of American adults believed crime had risen over the previous year, though annual rates actually fell during most of that period.

It would be equally wrong to dismiss public concerns, however; they have a basis in reality. Even with the recent improvements, it is undeniable that crime, including the worst crime — homicide — spiked nationally in recent years. The trauma and insecurity that this caused lingers. In seven U.S. cities that provide data on carjacking, that offense remains 68 percent more frequent than it was in the first half of 2019, according to CCJ’s report. Shoplifting and car theft also remain at elevated levels.

Given the emotions that inevitably swirl around this subject, public opinion will probably never precisely reflect statistical reality. But at least the government could publish a sufficiently precise and up-to-date picture of statistical reality. Unfortunately, it does not, as another recent CCJ report explained. The lead federal source for national data, the FBI, issues annual reports each October based on numbers gathered up to 18 months previously and reported — voluntarily and with varying degrees of accuracy — to the bureau by some 18,000 police agencies. Crime rates are based on two different sources: The National Incident-Based Reporting System, which collects details on crimes reported to law enforcement, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which gathers data directly from individuals about their experiences with crime, whether these incidents were reported to police or not.

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Colorado voters to decide on increase length of sentences

Colorado voters will decide whether to force people convicted of certain so-called crimes of violence — like murder, assault and kidnapping — to serve out more of their prison sentences before they are eligible for parole, reported the Colorado Sun. 

Initiative 112, which qualified Thursday for the November ballot, would require anyone who commits those crimes after July 1, 2025, and is convicted, to serve 85% of their sentences before they are eligible for parole, up from 75%. It would also prevent them from being eligible for good-behavior or other reductions in their sentence until they have served 85% of their prison penalty. 

Other felony convictions that would be affected by the change are those for:

• Second-degree murder
• First-degree assault 
• First-degree kidnapping
• First- and second-degree sexual assault
• First-degree arson
• First-degree burglary
• Aggravated robbery

Initiative 112 would also make it so people convicted of those offenses committed after July 1, 2025, ineligible for parole if they have been twice-previously convicted of a crime of violence.

To make the ballot, supporters of the initiative had to collect signatures from roughly 125,000 Colorado voters.

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