Citizenship

Now is the time to be engaged as citizens. First, there is today's meeting at the White House on immigration reform. A majority of Americans support some form of path to citizenship despite the cries from the ultra right. It's up to us to put pressure on our legislators to move forward on this issue. But immediately, President Obama can change how immigration raids, arrests, detentions, and court proceedings are held. He can do that by executive order and by having Attorney General Eric Holder order a more dignified, constitutional, and humane way to treat the men, women, and children who come here for refuge.

Second, it's time to press for confirmation of both Dawn Johnsen and Sonia Sotomayor for their respective positions: Dawn Johnsen as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, demeaned by the Bush administration into rationalizing torture and Sonia Sotomayor as associate justice on the US Supreme Court.

Get out your pens and paper, my friends. It works better than an email.

Assumptions of Incompetence

What we have learned from the hateful talk radio chatter about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is that too many white people assume that people of color are not competent. The claims that despite her education, graduating with honors, and seventeen years on the federal bench, somehow she just hasn't got what she needs to be on the Supreme Court. Her years of judicial experience are greater at the moment of her nomination than any other seated justice.

It's about her being Puerto Rican. It's about her being a woman. Although I support her nomination, I wish Obama had chosen someone who was more leftist, not as centrist.

Now one of the stalwarts of conservatism of the US Senate, Tom Coburn (R-Ka.), has endorsed a bill that would require President Barack Obama to produce a birth certificate to prove that he is indeed a citizen.

As if Obama hasn't proven himself as probably the only qualified person to lead the United States through these treacherous times! There must be something wrong with him, according to the sponsors of this legislation that has support in the House and now has Senate sponsors. Let's undetermine his legitimacy.

I have lots of complaints about Obama, but qualifications are not part of my litany. I want him to be more radical, move this country to sustainable economics, regulate the shit out of the financial markets, make health care universal and provided with dignity, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, prosecute Bush and Cheney and the rest of the mob of the Bush administration.

There is a difference, a real difference, in critiquing how and wondering whether.

Smart People

What's so exciting about Washington DC now is that smart people come in all colors and genders again. I've been to a series of meetings with very smart people, and race and gender have nothing to do with their intelligence. They are smart, they are engaged, they want this great Obama experience to succeed. There are varying degrees of support for the man personally, interesting critiques of various proposals--financial regulation, health care reform, immigration, economic stimulus, wars, national security--but it is about more than Obama. He is personally likable. He is articulate. His intelligence is vast and determined, and shrewd. Michelle is uniformly admired. Obama speaks and everyone listens, even his enemies, but more importantly, men and women who might not have paid attention before. Hope and pride. Those words come up a lot.

Last night I heard Senator Sheldon Whitehouse speak. He was once a US attorney and later an attorney general for the state of Rhode Island. He's a telegenic, tall, handsome, white man with a head of silver hair. He's smart. He spoke about the role of the Supreme Court in American history, he debunked the current Chief Justice's disingenuous statement from his own confirmation hearings that the role of the judge is more like an umpire at a baseball game than someone who makes judgments based on principles, values, experience, and yes, wisdom. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hold hearings on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, wait until you hear him speak. There was such clarity, understanding of American history, and confidence that people, all of us, are smart enough to reject the false history that the Supreme Court is some sort of cognitive "Mr. Spock" and not actually reflections of the collective experiences of the men and women who serve.

The ACS (American Constitution Society) is holding its annual meeting. Unfortunately I was only able to attend the opening, because I'm at another set of meetings for the next two days, but watch the discussion about Sonia Sotomayor, and then call some friends.

Want to read the speech?

Hillary and Sonia Fall, But Not Really

Hillary Clinton fell and fractured her elbow today. Not a painless accident. She had to miss her public appearance with Angelina Jolie, who just so happens to be staying in a house with her family and stay-at-home dad Brad Pitt close to my home in Oyster Bay. There are "sightings" that people upload onto the local newspaper web blog. I missed them by five minutes at the local grocery store one Sunday, but the cashier showed me her cell phone photo of the family.

Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee, for the Souter vacancy on the Supreme Court, also tripped last week, breaking her ankle.

One of those bombastic assholes who makes a lot of money angering people on their radio and television shows--either Rush or Bill or Sean--claimed that Sotomayor fell to get sympathy, and her ankle probably wasn't even broken.

So what's happening to our women? I had dinner last night with a friend who was one of the first women I met when I started college. We've known each other for way over forty years. She was the most athletic of us all--a cheerleader, women's softball, an avid golfer now. She has disc problems that are causing radiating pain down her arms and legs. She's the one I figured would stay in the best shape of any of us. But alas.

Do women have to lose our grace as we age? I don't think so, although several years ago, I tripped in the NYC subway and broke my ankle. Is it that we are rushing too much? Is it that we can't believe that we can't do everything? Is it that we don't know how to slow down, because if we do, we are terrified that we might turn into our mother's?

The Meaning of Words

The constant assault of 24 hour news has created a world where words do not seem to have meaning anymore.

Rush Limbaugh's accusation that Sonia Sotomayor is somehow a racist turns this horrible word into nonsense. It takes the history away from the word, wrenching the hegemony that is implicit in racism apart from what racism does to make people feel inferior and less than human. Racism is about power, and making someone into an "other," with the power to enforce those assumptions.

Sonia Sotomayor is not a racist, Rush.

Rush Limbaugh should be worried, because the world of the white man is disappearing. Unfortunately for the rest of us there is nothing more dangerous than an insecure white man who believes that he is losing power and authority.

Next Steps on Gay Marriage

When the California Supreme Court issued its decision validating Proposition 8, the voter initiative, backed by the religious right, Mormons included, that ended same sex marriage in California after 18,000 same sex couples married there, the Court tried to compromise by saying that those 18,000 same sex couples had the right to remain married in the eyes of the State.

That was the blunder that made a federal law suit possible, although perhaps not strategic.

Yesterday under the banner of American Foundation for Equal Rights, the stars of the 2000 presidential battle before the Supreme Court, Ted Olsen, representing Bush, and David Boies, representing Gore, teamed up to challenge the legal reasoning of the California decision under federal equal protection and due process theories.

The American Foundation for Equal Rights was founded to bring this lawsuit. Some in the LGBT community are wary, because they perceive the fight back in the hands of California voters, hoping to convince people voter by voter that the time has come to promote measures that encourage people to commit to each other in stable relationships that carry economic benefits. They are wary because they are afraid of any Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage, even with the possible entry of Sonia Sotomayor as a new justice on the court. (The Times also reports that her views on abortion are not clear and shouldn't be assumed by the left as favorable.)

One has to ask whether celebrity lawyers from the left and the right are the folks who should be promoting a strategy to bring the issue of same sex marriage into the federal arena. Elaborate coalitions have been built among same sex advocates across state lines. As was illustrated in New Hampshire and Maine, where recognition of gay marriage is the result of legislation and not litigation, those alliances can effectively use the political system to change people's views.

Like the entire issue, the strategy might be falling across generational lines as well. Demographic analysis of Californians show one important factor: young people favor gay marriage across race and class lines. Older people do not. "First, the demographics favor marriage equality, with 18-to-29-year-olds strongly favoring gay marriage (59 percent to 37 percent). All other age groups oppose same-sex marriage, with opposition increasing the older one gets."

Older folks, lawyers included, are accustomed to using the courts to rectify wrongs. We will have to see whether these two celebrity lawyers are playing the Ann Coulter versus Bill Maher let's attract attention with our cleverness game or truly willing to spend the time and political capital necessary to bring the issue before the US Supreme Court and win.

Town Meeting

Ironically on the same day that President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the first Puerto Rican Supreme Court justice, the Town of Oyster Bay held hearings on whether to enact an ordinance that would make it a violation for anyone, meaning Latino day laborers, to solicit work on a public street.

Residents of nearby Locust Valley had been complaining that twenty, thirty, forty Latino men stood on the sidewalks, stopping traffic, loitering, and scaring the neighbors while they waited for landscapers, builders, and other contractors to pick them up for the day. These residents were afraid, because these men are unfamiliar to them. Just having large groups of anyone hanging around is an annoyance, they said. Everyone was trying to be polite at the meeting. It wasn't anti-Latino, it was anti-loitering, but those ordinances have all been declared unconstitutional.

The men who sat in the town meeting were young, quiet, respectful, and certainly didn't look dangerous.

The residents wondered why these men didn't use the shape up site located in the next town over. I left the meeting at 10:30 before I heard the reason why they didn't. Perhaps it is because they lived in Locust Valley?

We can't make Latinos go away by making it illegal to secure employment. Certainly the residents of the homes where the men congregate have legitimate concerns about the impact of these men standing around all morning. However, why not just move the men to a shape up site in Locust Valley?

I must admit that the Town Supervisor tried to articulate both sides of the controversy in a crude and patronizing way. He wanted the Latinos in Locust Valley to have an organization so that he had someone to negotiate with. He claimed to be willing to open a shape up site. Everyone acknowledged that local governments were being forced into solutions to a failed federal immigration policy.

These kinds of local ordinances merely escalate hostilities, criminalize Latinos, and push underground further their isolation. Communities that work out solutions based on understanding, well, isn't that the way to go?