For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

13 April 17

Jeff Sessions rolls the clock back on civil rights enforcement

wo recent news stories crossed like ships in the night, without much public discussion of how they were related.

Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of all agreements between the Justice Department and local police departments around the country. Sessions wrote that "it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies," and said the DOJ might "pull back" on federal oversight responsibilities under Donald Trump.

The news came after the revelation by the New York Daily News that Daniel Pantaleo – the officer who used a chokehold in the killing of Eric Garner – had repeatedly been disciplined by the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) prior to the Garner case. New York City had fought like a tiger to keep this information out of the public eye, and when it finally was released, it was only through an anonymous leak.

The story about Pantaleo shows why the Sessions story is so unsettling.

People laughed when Donald Trump had to get Scott Baio to serve as an opening-day speaker at the Republican National Convention. But the Happy Days symbolism officially takes a darker turn with this Sessions news. What Sessions is suggesting means literally going back to a Fifties-era conception of the Justice Department's role in preventing local police abuse.

If Sessions has his way, he will holster the most powerful weapon the government has in addressing tragedies like the Garner incident: federal civil rights laws.

The key statute is 18 USC 242, which gives the federal government the right to intervene if a person has been harmed by a "deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution."

An example of when this law comes into play would be a police murder in which the officer is acquitted in a sham trial by an unabashedly corrupt local government. The federal government is supposed to then use its powers to step in and file charges for civil rights violations, correcting the local wrong.

It took decades of hard-fought legal battles to get the government to actually use this tool.

Back in 1959, during the days that Donald Trump once recalled fondly to Michele Bachmann as the time when "even my Jews would say Merry Christmas," a deputy attorney general named William Rogers wrote a memo very similar in tone to the one Sessions just wrote. He declared that the federal government should not intervene in local controversies and file civil rights charges absent "compelling circumstances."

In practice, the Rogers memo meant that, provided there had been some kind of local due process, no matter how flawed, the feds wouldn't step in and take a second whack at an offender in a race killing or a police brutality case.

This prohibition against "dual prosecutions" was the law of the land for nearly 20 years. It didn't change until after an egregious incident involving an unarmed African-American man named Carnell Russ. In 1971, Russ was shot in the head by a policeman named Charles Lee Ratliff at point-blank range in Star City, Arkansas, after being pulled over for speeding.

Ratliff was acquitted in a joke of a trial in which an all-white jury in Star City took less than 15 minutes to deliberate. Years later, the NAACP sued the federal government – specifically the attorney general under Gerald Ford, Edward Levi – for failing to use its civil rights authority to investigate the obvious problems in the Russ case.

The case went before a Nixon-appointed judge named Barrington Parker, who would later become famous as the judge in the trial of would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley. Parker was African-American. He ruled in the NAACP's favor. Although the federal government appealed, a deal was later struck between the NAACP and Jimmy Carter's attorney general, Griffin Bell, whereupon the federal government would look at "each and every allegation of a violation of the civil rights laws ... on its own merits."

The 1977 Bell memo gave birth to the modern civil rights investigation. That means it took until the late Seventies, over 110 years after the Civil War, for the government to finally accept its responsibility to police local police. That the federal government still needs to use those powers is self-evident. Just look at the Garner case and countless others like it, where local governments routinely fail to investigate and/or secure indictments against brutal cops.

After the Garner case, three out of four Americans believed there should be charges for Pantaleo. There were protests around the country, and the onslaught of high-profile brutality cases that followed – from Michael Brown in Ferguson to Tamir Rice in Cleveland to Walter Scott in North Charleston to Freddie Gray in Baltimore to Sandra Bland to Dajerria Becton, the 15 year-old girl in a bathing suit thrown to the ground by police in McKinney, Texas – led some people to hope that there would finally be some kind of national discussion on the issue that would result in positive changes.

With the Sessions news of last week, things have officially gone the other way. The Trump administration is pushing for steep cuts to the Justice Department budget, including the outright elimination of funding for the Legal Services Corporation and Violence Against Women grants, as well as slashing up to a third of the Civil Rights Division's budget.

Sessions has already hinted that he will stop investigating local police departments. Coupled with the budget cuts, we can probably expect the feds to get out of the business of policing cops entirely. Add cuts to legal services, and what we get is a clear message from the people who elected Trump: Their response to all of these awful films of local police beating or strangling or shooting unarmed black people is to worry that there's too much federal oversight of police, and too much advocacy for people who come in contact with police.

The facile conclusion to all of this is that white America wants to go back to the Fifties. But it's worse, and weirder, than that.

Seventy years ago, affluent white people could huddle in the suburbs, watch Leave It to Beaver, and pretend that cops weren't beating the crap out of people in East St. Louis or Watts or wherever the nearest black neighborhood was. But these days, the whole country regularly gawks at brutal cases of police violence on the Internet. Nobody can pretend it's not going on, but millions of people clearly don't want to do anything about it – just the opposite, in fact. They want more. Is this a twisted country, or what?

The President of Visuals

By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post

12 April 17

o it now appears that the president has deep feelings about the sufferings of infants, or, as he would say, “very, very deep feelings, believe me.” This was apparent when he talked about the gas attack on Syrian civilians last week. Scores of people were killed but it was the sight of dying babies on TV (“it doesn’t get any worse than that”) that particularly moved the man to reconsider his hands-off policy toward Syria and send the USS Ross and USS Porter to the eastern Mediterranean to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian air base. Presumably, no infants were housed at the base.

The White House denied, verbally, that his decision was an emotional response to the pictures of dead babies, but the video of an emotional president talking about innocent little babies and cupping his hands to emphasize their tininess is more persuasive to me.

It has been widely reported that the White House has asked the president’s intelligence briefers to make the briefings more visual, less wordy, simple graphics rather than blocks of print. This seems problematic: Much intelligence comes in written form, digests of interviews and reports from multiple sources, which would not be accurately depicted, say, by a cartoonist, but the news surprised approximately nobody. The man is a TV viewer, not known to be interested in books. So be it. A man of 70, having lived with TV on nearby, maybe two or three going simultaneously, is not going to suddenly pick up Robert Caro or Doris Kearns Goodwin and start learning about LBJ and FDR. Nobody expects DJT to do that.

But to single out babies as a separate category of humanity is interesting. King Herod slaughtered babies, hoping to do away with the Christ child, an atrocity, but it is not fundamental to our Christian faith. Babies died horribly at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but their deaths are not separate from the roughly 200,000 who were exterminated in those cities. When the story of the My Lai massacre came out in 1969, a year after it occurred, the outrage was that several hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians had been gunned down by Lt. William Calley Jr.’s company, not that a certain number of them were babes in arms.

The My Lai visuals that came to light were pictures taken by U.S. Army photographers, bodies on a roadway, terrified women huddled together, one young woman in a black blouse who had, according to witnesses, been raped by our soldiers, and who was holding a little boy. The public outcry did not lead President Richard Nixon to change course in Vietnam, nor even to make an emotional speech about the horror of war. Nixon was a reader, an ambitious reader, an intellectual. There are photographs of him at his desk, stacks of paper around, and he is poring over them studiously. The photograph of the little boy lying in a ditch, waiting for an American soldier to kill him, was not going to shake Nixon. He set out to minimize the impact of the scandal and he did a good job of it. More than two-dozen soldiers were recommended for court martial, only five were tried, one was convicted and his sentence was mostly set aside. So much for babies.

Many of the president’s supporters felt betrayed by his U-turn on Syria. Almost a half-million have died in that horrible war, many of them under the age of 1, and the thought that we would court direct conflict with Russia because a Syrian father was seen on TV carrying his two dead infants was dizzying to the America Firsters. On the other hand, many Democrats approved.

Clearly, the way to influence the man is not to write scholarly books about climate change or health care. If he brings back coal, the smoke will harm babies and the challenge is to get video of newborns gasping under their oxygen masks. If he eventually succeeds in removing Obamacare, some people will perish as a result, including infants. Our country may someday get a national health-insurance program for everybody, but only after there is a video of a father carrying two dead babies out of an ER where they arrived too late to be saved, the father unable to pay his doctor bills.

I have a friend who voted for Trump in the belief that, though he was sleazy and dishonest and inexperienced, he (unlike most Republicans) had no fixed principles whatsoever and so, under the pressure of presidency, might abandon his campaign malarkey and become a pragmatist and do the right thing. I’ve met more people who support Trump on the same grounds. If they’re right, it will have a very, very big impact on me, believe me, and my attitude on Trump will change very much. Very much.