Entering my AP U.S. Gov class in August of last year, I felt pretty good about my knowledge of how government works. As we covered topics ranging from political parties to the media to the office of the president, I had enough general knowlege that all I had to study were the smaller points and technical definitions.
There was one topic, however, that I found mystifying: our judicial system.
There is just something about the U.S. judicial system that I had a hard time wrapping my head around. It seemed cumbersome, frustrating, and problematic, and all my prior knowledge of it came from Law and Order: SVU. (which, apparently, is both good and bad) I thought everyone just went to court and got a verdict and that was the end of it. Civil vs. criminal? State vs. federal?? Original vs. appellate??? A bunch of Latin???? help???????????
I wish I could say here that I had some major breakthrough which made me understand everything and want to pursue law, but in reality I just read through the book a couple times and did my homework.
However, the most important thing I took away about the judicial system was written explicitly in the book. One day a judge came to our classroom to give a short talk and answer questions. This gave me the first inkling of what would become my realization when Sandra Day O’Connor admitted she felt some regret about how the Court handled Bush v. Gore: our court system is a bunch of people working together to try to make our country fair. Every step, from the initial arrest or filing of papers to the Supreme Court, involves very real, very fallible human beings.
I found it kind of reaffirming that millions of people have worked for centuries to make a system that will punish the guilty, reward the wronged, and settle disputes fairly. Obviously, it’s not without its problems: we focus more on punishment than prevention or rehabilitation, and our courts would not be able to handle it if every case went to trial. But we are very much in the middle of a process. And knowing that the entire system was set up by people, and that judges are people as much as criminals or lawyers or victims are people, makes me hopeful that we can find a solution.
On that note, this is my last blog post. I graduate high school in less that two weeks. Shoutout to TCrizzle, without whom none of this would have happened. It’s been real.
Congress is more unpopular that I was in middle school. It’s polarized, gridlocked, and uncompromising. Surely, there must be some way to fix it.
Gerrymandering, or manipulating district boundaries to create an advantage for a certain party, is surprisingly easy. There's even an app for it. But is it polarizing American politics? One reason to end gerrymandering, according to Sam Wang in the New York Times, is that the ratio of Republican to Democratic members of Congress would better represent that actual makeup of most states. According to Wonkblog, however, the representatives we elect would still be as uncompromising as ever. Members of Congress respond more to politics within their party than to their base. Ending gerrymandering is not a quick fix to polarization in Congress. However, that does not mean that gerrymandering should go on as it has been. We should give nonpartisan groups the power to divide congressional districts fairly. But to solve the problem of our unpopular Congress, we must look elsewhere.
Maybe straight-up establishing a party for more centrist candidates would be more successful. However, as The Economist points out, centerist movements have a track record of failure. True centrists who regularly vote on either side of an issue are rare. More often than not, members of centrist groups have a political affiliation or are apathetic. They lack candidates with clout and voters that are willing to put them into power. If centrists make any progress, it will be slow, steady, and through persuasion.
So what about term limits? The first thing to spring to my mind is that they would get rid of really good politicians along with the really bad ones. Also, the longer politicians hold their seats, the more influence and expertise they accumulate.
However, with less focus on reelection, maybe members of Congress would be less enthusiastic about towing the party line to gather votes. Maybe knowing that their political career has a limited lifespan would free them up to make compromises.
Term limits would also allow Congress’ views to change more in line with those of the people. More turnover means less isolation. In addition, they would give politicians less opportunity to gather financial support from special interest groups.
In my opinion, to create lasting results, we need to restructure American culture to be less competitive. Both a gift and a curse, competitive drive is a defining American trait that is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Although Americans see the need for more compromise in politics, we want the people that personally represent us to be winners. Compromise is fine so long as we get what we want.
In the meantime, we should try limiting terms, assign bipartisan lunch buddies, and hope our representatives can be civil.
One clear morning on May 3, 2009, residents of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, noticed an odd-looking man sitting in a parking lot in front of a local chiropractor’s clinic with what appeared to be a refrigerator box. Over the course of the morning, the man removed from the box one poster, a roll of twine, a roll of duct tape, and 35 large cottontail rabbits. He spent approximately one hour using twine to make harnesses for the rabbits. He then flattened the refrigerator box, and using more twine and duct tape, attached it the rabbits. According to witnesses, at this time the rabbits were in a calm, even “trance-like" state.
After attaching 34 rabbits and simply watching as one slowly hopped away, the man pulled a marker out of his kilt and wrote “SLEd RiDES - $5 PER PaSSaNGER [sic]” on the poster. He used duct tape to attach said poster onto a preexisting handicap parking sign, then sat on the curb and waited.
At 1:35 p.m., after approximately two hours, three teenaged boys approached the man. According to a secretary at the clinic who witnessed the scene through a window, the boys were polite and paid $15 for their sled rides. They were instructed by the man to go one at a time, as the rabbits were unable to pull the weight of three people at once. Once the youngest and lightest of the group was secure on the box, the man shouted something in a language that was not English. This caused the rabbits to enter a frenzy, and immediately they pulled the boy down the street at great speed and into highway traffic. Witnesses who were driving on the highway at the time recall that the rabbits weaved in and out of traffic with great skill. One driver rear-ended another car because he attempted to take cellphone video of the incident, but otherwise there were no collisions.
The two friends of the boy were by this time in a panic. At their behest, the man let out a loud whistle, which caused the rabbits to make a sharp turn and come back to their starting point.
After seeing the rabbits pull the boy into traffic, the chiropractic clinic secretary called 911. Officers reported to the scene seven minutes after the call was placed, but by that time the man had fled on his sled of rabbits. A handicapped parking sticker licensed to George Harvey of Newark, New Jersey, was found on the scene.
Early the next morning at 2:05 a.m., police received a call that a woman had woken to find a strange man sleeping in her one-room apartment. Once more officers arrived on the scene, and the man was not to be found. There was, however, a Clydesdale horse left in the woman’s apartment. Around 3 a.m., as the police were still questioning the witness, the man returned to ask for his horse. After confirming that he was the one sleeping on the couch an hour earlier and the man with the rabbit sled, he was immediately read his Miranda rights and taken into police custody. At the station, he consented to take a breathalyzer test, which showed a BAC of .11.
The man was charged with, among other things: child endangerment, public nuisance, breaking and entering, animal cruelty, stabling a horse in a one room apartment, parking a vehicle in a handicap parking space, using a stolen handicap parking permit, and operating a domesticated animal activity which causes damages, injury, or death to a spectator who is in a place where a reasonable person who is alert to inherent risks of domesticated animal activities would not expect a domesticated animal activity to occur, failure to post notice of liability. An additional charge of operating a domesticated animal activity which causes injury was added after it was discovered that the boy on the sled contracted Tularemia, a.k.a. Rabbit Fever, from a rabbit bite.
After revealing that his name was Glover Cleveland Jones, the man refused to answer any further questions without a lawyer present. At 11 a.m., he was brought to his initial hearing, where he was granted a court-appointed attorney.
When questioning could proceed, it was revealed that Jones had recently moved to Iowa from Missouri, where he said he would often provide rabbit sled rides with no interference from law enforcement.
After one hour of questioning, Jones became visibly anxious and could not concentrate. When asked why he was uncomfortable, Jones replied that he had hidden his rabbits in an open vehicle in downtown Cedar Rapids and was worried about their condition. From his description of the vehicle’s appearance and location, officers were able to find it, obtain a warrant, and retrieve 36 rabbits as evidence. Questioning was able to proceed.
Officers asked Jones how he had obtained his rabbits. Jones, at the advice of his lawyer, refused to answer the question. Officers then asked how he had trained the rabbits. Jones again pleaded the fifth.
At this point, prosecutors offered him a lesser punishment of community service, parole, and written apologies to the victims in exchange for a guilty plea. Jones then held a conference with his lawyer and decided to accept the deal. Jones waived his right to a trial by jury and appeared before a judge to plead guilty. He is currently serving his community service in Cedar Rapids, catching wild rabbits in traps and releasing them outside city limits.
Yesterday I watched Makers: Women Who Make America, a three-part program by PBS, and I cannot recommend it enough. Part one, The Awakening, is an energized, thoughtful look at the evolution of feminism and women in America from the 1950s housewife to 1970s radical women’s liberation groups. I found it interesting to see how the struggles of women 40 to 60 years ago are similar to what women are experiencing today.
What is unique about the type of feminism that began with The Feminine Mystique is that it is a very young movement. Almost all of the women mentioned in the film also appear on screen to give their view of what happened. Most of these feminists are still active today, spreading their message through books or on twitter. It’s not everyday that I read about an important figure in history and then watch her appearance on the Colbert Report.
It also means that today I see women like Judy Blume or Barbara Walters, successful and at the top of their fields, but I never considered the amount of resistance they had to go through to get there.
Another thing I need to praise about Making is that it makes special efforts to include what was happening to queer women and women of color during the feminist and women’s liberation movements. A lot of feminist history is skewed towards white women, and many of the challenges they went through in their day-to-day lives were different from those of black women. Previous to this documentary, I really had no idea that lesbians were rejected from the women’s liberation movement. I actually assumed the opposite, that they would be welcomed, since the lib movement focused so much on women’s sexuality.
Context: Grinnell-Newburg School District v. John Doe is a hypothetical Supreme Court case in which I am an extremely underqualified hypothetical Supreme Court justice.
The Grinnell-Newburg School District was acting in a way that was unconstitutional when it punished students for wearing bracelets from the Keep a Breast Foundation with the message “I ♥ boobies.”
The best thing the bracelets can persuade anyone to do is support a charity that promotes breast cancer prevention and research. The worst thing they can persuade anyone to do is think about breasts, which is not an uncommon event in a high school in any case.
Are breasts or the support of the fight against breast cancer illegal or a serious social problem, like the drugs promoted by the plaintiff in Morse v. Frederick? Is the idea of a breast explicit, lewd or indecent, like the content of the plaintiff’s speech in Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser? No. It is an important part of human anatomy and an idea that must be brought up in order to promote the cause of Keep a Breast Foundation.
The Grinnell High School student handbook states that a student wearing “clothing that displays language with sexual innuendoes” can be punished. Breasts are not by themselves sexual, and the are clearly not sexual in the context of breast cancer research and prevention.
Did the school censor these bracelets because they were uncomfortable with the use of the slang term boobies instead of breasts? Would a t-shirt that uses the term “breast” to support breast cancer research be censored? Obviously not, as the school sponsors an annual “Hoops for Hope” charity game and sells shirts with that very message.
The ruling on Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District stated that schools must find a reason to censor something based on the content of the message and not simply to avoid “discomfort and unpleasantness." Teachers and administrators may be uncomfortable with the use of slang on an “I ♥ boobies” bracelet, but its message is not inconsistent with the what the school promotes.
Or did they censor students for the other half of the bracelets’ very short message, which expresses the wearer’s opinion on boobies? This too is unconstitutional, as put in Justice Harlan’s dissent of Tinker: “Discrimination against speech because of its message is presumed to be unconstitutional… . When the government targets not subject matter, but particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant.” Although the first amendment is modified in a school environment, this reasoning still holds.
The wearing of “I ♥ boobies” bracelets is an example of the sort of “silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners,” that Tinker protects. It does not “interfere with the work of the school or the rights of other students."
Most Americans approve of the U.S. drone program, so long as its targets are in another country. According to Pew Research, “62% approve of the drone campaign, including most Republicans (74%), independents (60%) and Democrats (58%).”
Rasmussen polling gives a 76% approval rating of the drone program. That number drops to 30% if the drones are used for surveillance in the U.S.
Another success was Paul’s ability to get senators in the chamber and participating in the discussion. Many senators came even after midnight to hear him speak.
Usually the threat to filibuster is enough to get the Senate to move on to other business. Senator Paul’s old-fashioned talking filibuster was the first in about two or three years.
During the ordeal he ate Snickers for sustenance. Joining him were Marco Rubio, who quoted Jay-Z and Whiz Khalifa, and Ted Cruz, who read tweets supporting Rand Paul’s filibuster, quoted from William Travis's letter from the Alamo, and recited George C. Scott's monologue from the 1970 World War II film, "Patton.”
Other senators that spoke or asked questions during the filibuster included Mitch McConnell (who said he would oppose Brennen’s nomination, which makes me think he missed the pre-game meeting), Tim Scott, Saxby Chambliss (my new stripper name), Mike Lee, Dick Durbin, Jeff Flake, Jerry Moran, John Thune, and John Barrasso. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania asked a few questions, skipped the middle to dine with President Obama, then returned with Ron Johnson of Wisconsin in the 12th hour. Ron Wyden of Oregon was the only Democrat to participate in the filibuster.
Eventually Rand Paul had to excuse himself, saying that he would go for another 12 hours, “but I’ve discovered that there are some limits to filibustering, and I’m going to have to go take care of one of those in a minute here.”
Rand Paul raises a lot of questions in the context of bombing American citizens that can be applied to our use of drones overseas. His hypothetical situation in which innocent civilians are killed in a strike and posthumously labeled as combatants (“[...] they don't count you as a civilian if you're a male or if you're between the ages of 16 and 50, you're a potential and a probable combatant if that's your age range.”)
is a legitimate concern that many people have about what is currently happening in Pakistan.
“If we think you are a terrorist in America we should arrest you. But here's the question: You who is a terrorist?”
You can find the full transcript here or posted proudly on Senator Paul’s official website.
I don’t remember any of you fellow Republicans coming down here and saying President Bush was going to kill anyone with a drone. But we had a drone program back then … so what is it that’s got you so spun up now?
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in response to Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) twelve hour talking filibuster regarding the use of drones to kill American citizens in the U.S. (via kileyrae)
At some point, early Wednesday morning, when Gov. Mitt Romney and family were tucked into bed, a quiet call went out on the radio channel used by his Secret Service agents: “Javelin, Jockey details, all posts, discontinue.”
How the Secret Service Said Goodbye to Mitt Romney.
In Iowa, the 2008 gender gap was 5 points. This year it was 15. Ohio swung from a 2-point gender gap in 2008 to 10 points in 2012. Virginia saw a 5-point swing, from 2 points in ’08 to 7 this year. Florida went from a 1-point gender gap to a 7-point gap in 2012. The only swing state that didn’t see a significant gender gap this time around was Colorado.
The media treated the “War on Women” as being primarily about reproductive issues, but not so the Obama campaign. Team Obama knew that the issue that women cared about the most was the economy, and reminded women constantly that the hostility the GOP shows toward the government could leave single women in a perilous situation. Republicans ridiculed “The Life of Julia,” but it was a brilliant campaign outreach tactic that showed how a Romney administration would affect women in a way that left nothing to the imagination.
Adding to the alienation of women voters this year were deeply troubling comments from GOP Senate candidates about rape, a tirade by Rush Limbaugh calling a woman a slut for testifying about the availability of birth control, and so on. Yes, Bill Maher is a pig and says terrible things about women too, but voters don’t view him as a leader in the Democratic Party in the same way Limbaugh is viewed in the GOP. Also unhelpful to the GOP cause is the constant insistence that there is no wage discrimination against women—a stance that led to the mocking of the Lily Ledbetter Act, a milquetoast measure protecting women from salary discrimination that any decent person should support.
As Leslie Knope once told us, “Joe Biden is on my celebrity sex list — well, he is my celebrity sex list.” So she must be pretty pumped that the once and future vice president is going to guest star on Parks and Recreation.
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