Jonathan P. Baird

President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race obliterated the prevailing political narrative. Instead of old-age Biden versus old-age Trump, we had the emergence of not-old Kamala Harris. The reaction on the Republican side has been both panicked and telling.

About Harris, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman (the one who beat Liz Cheney) said:

“Intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel. I think she was a DEI hire.”

Hageman’s comment was echoed by Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett who suggested Biden picked Harris as Vice-President solely because she is Black. “One hundred percent she is a DEI hire,” Burchett said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. He went on. “When you go down that route, you take mediocrity and that’s what they have right now”.

Sebastian Gorka, a TV host on far right Newsmax, said Harris was going to be the nominee “because she’s female and her skin color is the correct DEI color”. He also said she “cackles like an insane woman”. Megyn Kelly accused Harris of sleeping her way to the top of California politics.

While House Speaker Mike Johnson has cautioned Republicans about criticizing her ethnicity or her gender, it is a certainty much of the critique of Harris will be around the DEI hire theme. Republicans can’t use the N-word now but the diversity hire theme is the same gist. Unless it is Candace Owens or her equivalent, for conservatives, no Black woman candidate would be considered qualified.

Republicans seem stuck in a time warp. For much of American history only white men could even be considered for high political office. Women and people of color were not part of the equation. They were, per se, ruled out. Republicans appear to long for the good old days of white and male supremacy. Normal for them is having, except for tokens, black women on the bottom rung of powerlessness. This is a party that entertains the great replacement theory.

Part of the racist and sexist attack on Harris is that she is mediocre, intellectually inferior, or somehow unqualified. By any objective standard that is a crazy assertion.

Harris has had a long record of accomplishment. For many years she worked as a prosecutor where she prosecuted homicide, burglary, robbery and sexual assault cases. She got elected twice to serve as District Attorney in San Francisco. She then got elected again two times to serve as Attorney General of California. In 2016 she won her race for the U.S. Senate and in 2020 she was elected Vice-President.

The accusations of mediocrity and intellectual inferiority are absurd. For someone who is so allegedly incompetent, she had a knack for consistently winning. Prosecuting is not exactly an easy job. You have to convince beyond a reasonable doubt. To be effective and persuasive requires strong writing and oral advocacy skills. Saying she is mediocre is essentially a meaningless ad hominem attack. There is no specificity in the allegation. They are trying to erase her impressive credentials.

Conservatives are using the diversity hire theme to discredit Harris. They think only straight white men are qualified. Last year, DEI got blamed for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, for Boeing’s safety crisis and for the Baltimore Bridge falling down. It is scapegoating.

There are many shallow critiques of racism and sexism. To appreciate what is most offensive about the critique of Harris as a diversity hire, it is necessary to situate the 2024 presidential election inside the broader context of U.S. history. Discrimination was historically baked into America from the beginning. With roots in slavery, black women faced occupational segregation as they were concentrated in jobs that paid lower wages and offered limited upward mobility.

In most of American history, the system quarantined black women in the lowest paying jobs. Legal restrictions kept all women out of high paying jobs that were reserved exclusively for men. The changes around that are relatively recent.

While some real progress has been made, America has never seriously grappled with our structural racism and sexism. Racist and sexist comments about a candidate reflect and reinforce prevailing power dynamics. Any woman or person of color who rises to higher office is still often a first. That is true with Kamala Harris who was the first black woman elected in her state to her various roles over the last couple decades. Being first is anything but mediocre.

Conservatives can’t say all black women should be domestic workers, agricultural workers, care-takers or service workers even if they think that because it is too explicitly racist. So they create the attacks on DEI and wokeness. The purpose is the same: to keep people of color and women in their place at the bottom of the hierarchy. They are creating a new rationale to justify the status quo.

Not surprisingly, racist and sexist attacks on Harris have skyrocketed online since she announced her candidacy. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has catalogued a spike in truly ugly racism and misogyny. Much of it is based on the slander that she used sex to advance her career.This has been showing up in far right sites like Truth Social, Gab, Telegram, 4Chan and Rumble.

In the last week or two, we have seen neo-nazis parading in Nashville Tennessee and Howell Michigan, wearing shirts that say “pro-white” while carrying swastika flags. When it comes to racism and sexism, denialism still rules in America. This is not a reassuring sight. One can only hope for a new national willingness to honestly look at and rectify our racial and sexual dark side.

Kamala Harris and Democrats have to contend with the perception that America would never elect a black woman president. Maybe that is one ultimate form racism and sexism take now.

In a term featuring multiple precedent-shattering decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a shocker in Snyder v. United States. The Court narrowed the definition of public corruption in a case that centered on the distinction between bribery and gratuities. The Court majority let a grifting public official off the hook.

Because there were so many big cases on the docket this term, this one slid by, escaping attention, even though it is consequential.

The facts in the case were straightforward. James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage Indiana steered business to a local truck dealership. The city purchased five trash trucks from the dealership for a cost of $1.1 million. After the deal, Snyder went to the dealership and told them, “I need money”. He asked for $15,000. The dealership gave him $13,000.

A federal statute prohibits state or local officials from “corruptly” accepting “anything of value from any person intending to be influenced or rewarded for an official act”. The business had to be for a value of at least $5,000. Snyder testified that the $13,000 payment he received was for consulting services although there was no evidence he did any consulting.

After a two week trial, the federal jury disagreed with Snyder and convicted him. They found he had been corruptly rewarded. The judge sentenced him to one year and nine months in prison.

Although it seemed like a Hail Mary pass, Snyder appealed and he argued that the law in question only made bribes illegal, not gratuities. Snyder argued that bribes were, by definition, payments made before an official act. Gratuities were payments made after an official act as a token of appreciation. So bribes influence a future decision and gratuities reward past ones.

Snyder lost at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals but it was a different story at the Supreme Court. In an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Court majority reversed Snyder’s conviction. Kavanaugh wrote that it was nearly impossible to figure out what constituted a corrupt gift or gratuity. He puzzled over a situation that was not ambiguous. He cited hypothetical scenarios that were vastly different than the facts of the case to make it seem like this was a difficult case to decide.

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissected the Kavanaugh opinion. To quote her:

“Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love.”

That sentence alone spoke volumes. The Court is watering down public corruption law in a way that says it is fine for people with vast money to use it to influence state and local government officials. By almost any standard, $13,000 is not small change but the conservatives on the Court wanted to green light such “gratuities”.

Rather than fighting corruption, the Court imposed a limit on the government’s ability to go after bad actors. It is a “spoils belong to the powerful” jurisprudence.

Snyder’s case has a resonance with the Supreme Court’s current ethical problems as exemplified by Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas too has taken “gratuities” although his are in the $4 million range. I think Justice Jackson had Thomas in mind when she wrote about the reading of the statute as one “only today’s Court could love”. That was her polite way of saying Thomas was bought off.

The Snyder case did not come out of nowhere. It needs to be seen as part of a historical pattern in which the Court has defined down what constitutes public corruption so more people can get away with unethical behavior. I would go back to Citizens United. For decades even before the Citizens United decision, a coterie of ultra-rich conservatives wanted to influence American politics by out-sized spending. Citizens United was the vehicle that allowed the ultra-rich to get around campaign finance law.

Other Supreme Court decisions in the last decade like McDonnell v. United States and the Bridgegate case from New Jersey followed the go-easy-on-corruption trend. The Court turned definitions of corruption into paper tigers.

The go-easy-on-crime doesn’t extend to blue collar criminal defendants, ever. But for white collar defendants, venality is in vogue. The implicit message is rewards are waiting for those unafraid to test the limits of public corruption law. Thomas is the Court’s own example and the Chief Justice says nothing.

In the past, a case like Snyder would have been taboo but with this Court both transparency and accountability are out. It is not surprising that a Court which won’t regulate its own ethics would have such a softened and cavalier attitude toward the ethics of public officials.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) calls the Supreme Court a captured court because dark money has re-made the Court, weakened democracy, and consistently favored the billionaire class. Decisions like Snyder are what you can expect from a captured court. “Gratuities” are there for the taking.

As people give the candidacy of convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter Donald Trump a closer look, more eyes have been drawn to Project 2025, a project launched by the Heritage Foundation, a well-endowed far right think tank. Authors affiliated with Heritage crafted the over 900 page volume which lays out the program for a second Trump term.

Because the Project started receiving critical feedback, Trump made a weak attempt to distance himself from its contents. Trump would like to pretend he has no connection but nothing could be more implausible. Trump and his associates plan to implement the plan immediately if he is again inaugurated President. Many of the authors of Project 2025 served in his administration and it is not a small number.

According to Judd Legum’s Popular Information, of the 38 people who wrote and edited Project 2025, 31 had been appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration. The distancing of Trump by himself from Project 2025 is hilarious. But this is a person with less than zero regard for the truth. If he sees any political advantage, he would be embracing it to the max.

Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, has acknowledged that there is “tremendous overlap” between the RNC platform Agenda 47 and Project 2025. So what is the big deal with Project 2025?

I would argue it is a reactionary blueprint, opposing all the positive changes made in America since the 1960’s. It is an effort to turn back the clock. The Project wants to return to white supremacist dominance like existed in the Jim Crow era. Instead of multi-racial democracy, Project 2025 envisions a Christian nationalist dictatorship run by wealthy white men.

Since there are many aspects to Project 2025, I will zero in on a few aspects I find most pernicious.

Project 2025 is anti-woman and the mentality behind it is misogynist. They believe life begins at conception, a view that absolutely prioritizes fetal personhood over the life of the mother. A major focus is further whittling away women’s reproductive rights.

The plan says,”Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children”. They want the FDA to withdraw approval from Mifepristone and Misopristol, two drugs safely used in abortions that have been approved for over 20 years. They want the DOJ to resuscitate the long-moribund 1873 Comstock Act as a vehicle for prosecuting anyone sending or receiving abortion pills.

They also want rules requiring confidentiality of medical records lifted so that states can pursue criminal investigation of women who cross state lines to get an abortion. Punishing women for exercising their rights is a Project 2025 theme

Project 2025 is also anti-immigrant. Even though we saw the horror that was family separation during the Trump years in office, the Project wants to create a new border patrol and immigration agency that would build camps to detain children and families at the border. They intend to enlist the military to round up and deport millions of people who are already in the country, including Dreamers.

The level of cruelty reflected in the immigration chapter is not surprising considering that Trump calls immigrants “vermin” who “poison the blood of America”. You have to ask if this project comes to fruition, who will perform the jobs in agriculture, construction and care-taking? Trump and Project 2025 fail to consider the economic fallout of this unprecedented deportation scheme. It will result in massive worker shortage in the harsh jobs most Americans will not do.

I would also mention the Project’s sexist position on T and U visas. The Project wants to eliminate T and U visas. These have been used to protect victims of human trafficking, domestic violence and female genital mutilation. The disregard for the lives of women could not be more apparent.

Project 2025 is anti-science and it is opposed to efforts to address climate change. These people actually want to double down on fossil fuel production. They plan to close the EPA’s climate change departments and they want to shut down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) , the government agency which forecasts weather and tracks climate change.

This is far right wing la-la land where if they close their eyes to reality, it won’t happen. It is not surprising that millions in dark money from the oil and gas industry (eg Koch Industries) are funding this effort. The fossil industry campaign to mystify the public about climate change is a continuing corporate crime. NOAA Chief Scientist Dr Sarak Kapnick just said,

“After seeing the 2023 climate analysis, I have to pause and say that the findings are astounding. Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record – it was the warmest by far…We will continue to see records broken and extreme events grow until emissions go to zero.”

I would be remiss if I did not mention the central authoritarian strand of Project 2025. It is about vastly increasing the power of the Executive Branch, including exerting political control over the Department of Justice. This would allow the President to use the DOJ to prosecute those Trump deems “enemies”. Project 2025 is welcoming a dictatorship.

They want to infuse Christian nationalism into every facet of government policy. If they prevail, there will be no more separation of church and state. Government will be promoting evangelical Christianity.

Stepping back, one point that gets lost is that while Donald Trump would like to appear as a rebel, Project 2025 shows he is just a spokesman for the interests of the billionaire class. The policies outlined in Project 2025 are detrimental to democracy and all working people.

Trump is a convicted criminal surrounded by other convicted criminals. His candidacy is fundamentally a vehicle for staying out of jail. Making money for himself remains his greatest obsession. Project 2025 is a combination of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell.

During years working at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, I represented many homeless individuals. The reasons for homelessness were varied: eviction, job loss, divorce, domestic violence and disability, among others. Lack of income always figured in. Circumstances were often beyond the control of the individual.

It was not unusual for the homelessness crisis to cause a mental health breakdown which compounded the depression and anxiety already being experienced. A shredded safety net often failed to provide needed assistance. Unless they could get counsel, a condition that many could not get because need outstripped capacity, people were on their own to sink or swim. Even with counsel, buying time might often be the best a lawyer could do.

Homelessness has been on the rise nationally. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, roughly 653,100 experience homelessness on any given night, with a 12% increase between 2022 and 2023. Nearly half of those homeless are sleeping outside.

So when the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in at the end of June on the matter of homelessness in the case of Grants Pass v Johnson it was a pivotal moment for homelessness advocates and all who care about homelessness in America. Unfortunately, as has been its pattern, the Supreme Court majority failed, by rendering a callous decision devoid of humanity.

By a 6-3 margin, the conservatives on the Court enforced a camping ban against involuntarily unsheltered residents. The city of Grants Pass, Oregon had passed two ordinances that prohibited camping on public property and camping in a car. “Camping” in the ordinances was defined to include remaining in a place where material used for bedding is placed to maintain a temporary place to live.

The ordinances made it a crime to be homeless. If you are homeless and sleeping within city limits and you use blankets, pillows and cardboard boxes for protection against the elements, you can be fined $295 for a first violation which escalates to $537 if it is not paid. After a second citation, you can get an order that is a ban from city property. You can also get 30 days in jail for criminal trespass and a $1250 fine.

Homeless plaintiffs in Grants Pass had argued that the camping ban violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The Ninth Circuit, which covers Western states, including Oregon and California, had previously ruled that cities cannot punish people for sleeping outside without providing shelter options.

Grants Pass, a city of just under 40,000 people, has no public shelter. It only had a Christian mission that imposed a number of restrictions and required people to attend two religious services a day, a condition problematic for those not subscribing to that religious belief.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the Court majority, found no cruel and unusual punishment in the Grants Pass ordinances. His decision focused on the needs of cities, not the homeless. The justices found state and local officials can clear and punish homeless people for camping on public spaces even if shelter beds are full.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that “criminalizing homelessness can cause a destabilizing cascade of harm”. She wrote “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. For some people, sleeping outside is their only option”. She goes on that punishing people for being homeless is “unconscionable” and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

The Court result makes it illegal for someone without a home to exist in a locale. No solution is offered. Overburdened cities and towns will be able to sweep people up and drop them elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind. Cities and town officials just want homeless people to go away and hide the visibility of poverty. They want a quick fix, using police. In this approach, the appearance of public order is the goal – not reducing the number of people without shelter.

As Peter Edelman has written, “the opposite of criminalizing poverty is ending homelessness”. Fines, arrests and jail time are costly and do nothing to solve homelessness. They have never helped one person out of homelessness.

In so many discussions I have had about homelessness, whether it is with liberals or conservatives, I have seen the tendency to blame the homeless for being in that situation, like they are guilty of some moral failing. Both liberals and conservatives maintain a Not in My Back Yard attitude.

The prevailing attitude is to make it so uncomfortable for the homeless that they will voluntarily vacate and move on down the road. I see no difference between liberals and conservatives on this. As a society we have normalized seeing thousands sleeping on the street. Too often our collective response is indifference to human suffering.

We need the political will to make safe and affordable housing a national priority. Two profound factors frame the current picture: a severe housing shortage and unaffordable rents. Any serious plan that tackles housing in America must address both.

The Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass moves things in the wrong direction. The Court demonstrates no sense of obligation to the neediest. We can expect more cities and towns will follow what Grants Pass did. In New Hampshire, Manchester just passed an encampment ban. Public order, not mercy and justice, define our High Court’s jurisprudence.