Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Opinion

Donald Trump's Christian-nationalist radical has big plans for America

Heather Digby Parton
SALON
Mon, June 10, 2024 

Russ Vought Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Over the weekend, the Washington Post's Beth Reinhard published an excellent article about one of Donald Trump's most visionary advisers, an obscure figure named Russ Vought. He was a boring Republican bureaucrat who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 until Trump left office. He previously served as deputy director and acting director at OMB and prior to his stint in the White House worked at Heritage Action, the activist arm of the Heritage Foundation, where he was budget director for the Republican Study Group in Congress. In other words, for years Vought was a numbers cruncher providing far-right Republicans with their specious arguments about the government going broke and the need to drastically cut the safety net.

Who knew that such a person also had big ideas about how to destroy the U.S. government from the inside?

Vought is a self-described Christian nationalist who is spearheading plans for a rapid expansion of executive power under a theory he calls “radical constitutionalism" (an oxymoron, but it sure sounds snappy.) He has been working for a right-wing network called the Center for Renewing America, which is full of Trump acolytes, many of whom would likely become high-ranking officials in a future Trump administration. That includes Vought, often discussed as a potential White House chief of staff.

Reinhard writes:
“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”

Vought aims to harness what he calls the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy that stymied the former president by stocking federal agencies with hardcore disciples who would wage culture wars on abortion and immigration. The proposals championed by Vought and other Trump allies to fundamentally reset the balance of power would represent a historic shift — one they see as a needed corrective.

Vought has been named by the Republican National Committee as the policy director for the 2024 platform committee. He wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025. And he is said to be in charge of planning for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.

Vought is an evangelical Christian who has adopted the Trump credo that the ends justify the means. While in the White House, he saw people who balked at illegal and unethical activity as squishes and whenever he could do so, his office helped Trump do end-runs around the law and regulations, from reappropriating funds for his border wall to helping him pressure Volodymyr Zelenskyy to slander Joe Biden, the scandal that got Trump impeached the first time around. Vought also came up with the notorious Schedule F, a plan to eliminate many civil service posts and replace long-serving government employees with Trump lackeys. They ran out of time to fully implement that strategy in Trump's first term, but you can bet they'll get it done ASAP if he wins in November.

Trump's only agenda is to prove he's not a loser, keep himself out of jail and wreak revenge on his enemies. Whatever else his underlings and enablers have planned for his second term is fine with him. Well, Vought has plans, and they're big ones. His "radical constitutionalism" is an extreme reinterpretation of what the American system and the rule of law stand for.

As Reinhard reports, Vought seeks to redefine immigration as an "invasion," which would allow the president to invoke wartime powers. He's on the same page as Trump with respect to mass deportation because he doesn't believe that most immigrants can understand America's supposed Judeo-Christian worldview. He calls this "rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution."

Vought is one of the primary influences in right-wing circles pushing to eliminate any independence of agencies in the executive branch, starting of course with the Justice Department. On a recent podcast, he backed Trump's call to prosecute Trump's enemies saying, "It can’t just be hearings, it has to be investigations, an army of investigators that lead to firm convictions.” He supports invoking the Insurrection Act, banning medical abortions and implementing policies to boost the birth rate. (Yes, he's one of those guys too.) In other words, he is an authoritarian nightmare.

Whenever I read about extremists like Vought and others who are plotting to overturn the Constitution, like so many others, I can't help but think about 1930s Germany. The parallels aren't perfect but they are way too close for comfort. The Nazi Big Lie was about the supposed "stab in the back" — the notion that the Germans hadn't actually lost World War I but were instead betrayed by Jews, Marxists, democrats and internationalists. Trump's Big Lie is that he didn't lose the 2020 election (typically, it's all about him) but it's had a similar motivating effect on his followers.

In both cases, there is a fairly pathetic attempt to overthrow the government and the political establishment subsequently fails to take the legal steps available to prevent them from making a comeback. This facilitates the growth of an authoritarian movement, infused with racism and grievance. Although this movement never achieves a majority in the country over time its leaders learn that there are better ways of achieving its goals by exploiting weaknesses in the system that had previously gone undiscovered.

This form of revolution doesn't rely on violent overthrow but it does require intimidation and threats of violence against political enemies. It cannot succeed without the enabling and cooperation of establishment politicians and officials who either believe they can control the extremists in their midst or simply sign on for their own ambition uncaring of the consequences. Vought is in the latter category, an opportunist who sees Donald Trump as the ticket to a Christian-nationalist America. Whether Vought is a MAGA true believer is immaterial. He's an efficient bureaucrat, trained in the right-wing fever swamps, who knows how to get things done. And what he wants to do is horrifying.

Opinion | Russ Vought is the most dangerous MAGA diehard you've never heard of

Hayes Brown
MSNBC
Tue, June 11, 2024 


At the beginning of former President Donald Trump’s term, chaos oozed from of every corner of the West Wing, well beyond the norm for presidential transitions. Inexperienced sycophants and would-be petty tyrants clashed daily with the supposed “adults in the room” in a battle for the new president’s limited attention span. Russ Vought is working to ensure that should Trump win a second term, things will be different.

As a former head of the Office of Management and Budget, Vought isn’t a household name like former White House adviser Steve Bannon or even as known among the political set as Trump’s immigration ghoul, Stephen Miller. But as a recent profile of him in The Washington Post suggests, he’s set to be a major player if Trump returns to the White House. Even more concerning, Vought displays a combination of MAGA zealotry and familiarity with Washington’s workings that makes him a uniquely dangerous figure for the future of the country.

Longtime readers of this column might remember previous coverage of Vought in his current role leading the Center for Renewing America, a think tank that has been advising congressional Republicans and acting as a jobs program for former Trump administration B-listers. It was Vought who encouraged congressional Republicans to hold the debt ceiling hostage, a failed strategy that ended with the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. His organization also pushed the GOP to focus on cutting funding to the “woke and weaponized government.” Vought himself personally circulated an alternative budget on Capitol Hill that included “$2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, the health program for the poor; more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act; more than $400 billion in cuts to food stamps; hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to educational subsidies; and a halving of the State Department and the Labor Department, among other federal agencies,” as the Post documented last year.

It’s a testament to Vought’s growing policy influence that the Heritage Foundation tapped him to write the chapter on the Executive Office of the President in “Project 2025,” a massive blueprint for the next GOP president to follow. He is also putting together the initiative’s “playbook for the first 180 days” of a second Trump term, the Post reported. Though the Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from Project 2025, there’s little chance that an incoming administration wouldn’t draw heavily on the work being done.

It may be even more concerning that Vought has been tapped to be policy director for the GOP’s 2024 platform committee. He’ll be joined by a deputy who, like him, was a fierce advocate of the false claims that Joe Biden stole the election from Trump. Unlike in 2020, when the Republican National Committee forwent drafting a platform, the plank Vought will develop will be the policies that Republicans up and down the ballot will be campaigning on ahead of Election Day.

Vought is particularly vocal about empowering OMB’s director to enforce the president’s will throughout the executive branch — an unsurprising interest given how much damage he did from that perch in the Trump administration. In 2019, he helped craft a doomed effort to kill Obamacare. The following year he signed off on redirecting funds from the Defense Department to construct Trump’s border wall in 2020. He also was responsible for withholding crucial military aid to Ukraine as part of the scheme that led to Trump’s first impeachment. The Government Accountability Office found the latter move to be a violation of the law against “impoundment” that Congress passed in 1974.

Vought has argued that the anti-impoundment law and other post-Watergate restraints on the presidency need to be overturned. Accordingly, he’s one of the loudest voices for transforming the Justice Department from an independent agency into a tool for Trump’s vendettas. If anything, the radical shifts he has proposed for a second Trump term would make the executive branch both more powerful than at any time since the Nixon administration and more openly partisan, with authority stripped from career officials and consolidated in political appointees’ hands.

It’s not surprising that, given how extreme Vought’s proposals are, they’ve found little success with Biden sitting in the White House and Democrats controlling the Senate. But the ideas that he and his team are cranking out are set to shape the future of the Republican Party in the same way the Heritage Foundation shaped the Reagan administration and helped develop three decades of GOP orthodoxy. Given his unabashed defense of Christian nationalism, those ideas are set to be massively harmful to LGBTQ Americans and immigrants should he be given a chance to enact them.

He may well get that chance, given that the Post names Vought as a potential White House chief of staff if Trump reclaims the Oval Office. If this comes to pass, he’d be from a different mold than any of the chiefs of staff in the first Trump administration. Because while Vought is as committed to enabling Trump as even the most subservient lackeys who held the position, he’s no stranger to the gears that keep Washington’s policy machinery turning. This is a person who has spent the last 30 years working his way up from a congressional aide to becoming a conservative lobbyist to landing in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Given the extent of the plans he has made, Vought would have a frightening level of understanding of how to execute his vision from the top down with the full weight of the presidency behind him as an unofficial prime minister. And, most worrying, it would most likely be a road map to authoritarianism for future candidates to follow even long after Trump’s name is no longer on the ballot.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com



The 'Chilling' Trump Plan That Could Pave The Way For Authoritarianism

Matt Shuham
HUFFPOST
Tue, June 11, 2024

 

The 'Chilling' Trump Plan That Could Pave The Way For Authoritarianism
Matt Shuham
Tue, June 11, 2024 at 3:41 PM MDT·14 min read
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<span class="copyright">Illustration:Jianan Liu/HuffPost; Photo:Getty Images</span>
Illustration:Jianan Liu/HuffPost; Photo:Getty Images

Donald Trump has no greater enemy than the United States’ federal bureaucracy — what he calls the “deep state.” And he has a plan to bend it to his will if he’s elected in November.

The plan, to create something called “Schedule F,” would make tens of thousands of civil servants easier to fire, fundamentally changing the nature of the federal government — and, some worry, paving the way for authoritarianism.

Schedule F is a new category, or schedule, of federal workers who are exempt from codified job protections, like being hired and fired based on merit and having the ability to appeal disciplinary action.

The majority of federal civil service employees, from climate scientists to bank examiners to IT specialists, are covered by these protections; some positions, like postal workers and intelligence officers, are currently exempt. That system ensures that experience and skill, rather than political favoritism or personal connections, guide hiring and firing decisions within the federal government.

But conservatives have long complained that the president should exercise more control over the federal bureaucracy, and Trump in particular has said it needs to be “brought to heel.”

Trump created Schedule F in an October 2020 executive order. Under that order, federal workers involved in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making and policy-advocating positions” — a vague description that would include at least tens of thousands of people — would be stripped of their civil service protections and reclassified as “at-will” appointees, meaning they could be hired or fired for any reason, or none at all.

Because the order came so late in Trump’s presidency, only a handful of agencies created lists of specific jobs that would be eligible for conversion to Schedule F. And President Joe Biden reversed the order before any jobs could actually be converted.

But Trump has explicitly said he’ll pursue Schedule F again if he’s elected. In a campaign video last year, Trump referred to Schedule F as an effort to “remove rogue bureaucrats.”

“I will wield that power very aggressively,” he said.

Federal employees, political scientists, union leaders and watchdog groups told HuffPost that Schedule F could lead to a “chilling” effect. At-will employment, they said, would make it harder for government workers to raise concerns that go against their bosses’ political loyalties. That could lead to a degradation of public services like disaster relief, financial regulation and the administration of government benefits.

“You can see where it can grind work to a halt, because even people who are trying to do the right thing [would] be afraid that if they do something wrong, they’ll be out of a job,” said Joe Spielberger, a policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight who has raised alarms over how the implementation of Schedule F would harm key welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Schedule F would be the “fundamental element of an authoritarian agenda,” he said, allowing Trump to take control of the vast federal bureaucracy and reverse generations of reforms.

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, signed on to an open letter in April arguing Schedule F would open the door to “politicization and patronage throughout the federal workforce.” Hetold HuffPost, “This feels like the biggest problem that the fewest people understand about a potential second Trump administration.”

“In the hands of a president who is not committed to democratic norms, taking control of the bureaucracy is a tried and tested way to work toward authoritarian government.”

In the hands of a president who is not committed to democratic norms, taking control of the bureaucracy is a tried and tested way to work toward authoritarian government.Donald Moynihan, professor of public policy, Georgetown University

The ‘Lightbulb Moment’

The push for Schedule F started with what one Trump staffer called a “lightbulb moment.” In 2019, James Sherk, a top White House adviser on civil service and labor policy, was frustrated by reports of federal workers pushing back against the Trump policy agenda. He started reading through existing U.S. law on federal labor rights, and realized that the language about exceptions from civil service protections could actually be interpreted quite broadly.

Such a change in interpretation would be a break from decades of precedent. Presidents only bring around 4,000 political appointees with them at the start of a new term, and many additionallyrequire Senate confirmation. These appointees are generally classified as “excepted” — theyaren’t required to complete standardized competitive civil service exams, butthey also aren’t afforded standard civil service protections. (The “excepted” portion of the federal workforce includes more than a million federal workers under various schedules, though the vast majority of them come from the United States Postal Service, the military, and Department of Veterans affairs.)

But Sherk argued that the “excepted” service should grow much larger, to include “the most important” federal workers — “the people who are telling all the rest of the bureaucracy what to do,” he said in a 2022 interview. In his view, the change would make the federal government more accountable to the White House, and therefore, the American people. 

“Nothing in [federal law]says that you can only take away the civil service protections of political appointees,” Sherk said.

Sherk estimated that Schedule F would have applied to 1% to 3% of the federal workforce, or about 50,000 workers, had Biden not unwound it. But the number actually affected if Trump pursues Schedule F again could be much larger. A Government Accountability Office review of the few agencies that did start making Schedule F conversion lists found that agencies thought anywhere from 2% to 68% of their employees were eligible to be “rescheduled.”

The agency that found over two-thirds of its workers could be reclassified was the very policy-focused Office of Management and Budget. The Office of Personnel Management — the executive branch’s human resource’s office, and the office that would be responsible for actually overseeing the reclassification of workers under Schedule F — had approved the reclassification of OMB jobs ranging from IT specialists and office managers to attorneys, policy analysts and economists, according to government records obtained by the National Treasury Employees Union and the watchdog group American Oversight.

But the documents provide just a glimpse at the changes Schedule F could bring.

“We don’t know yet what we don’t know, which is why we’re going to court,” said Ron Fein, chief counsel for American Oversight, which has sued the Biden administration to release more records related to Schedule F. The group shared records it obtained with HuffPost, and NTEU has released similar documents publicly.

Last year,Republicans in both the House and Senate introduced legislation to make every executive branch employee “at-will.” And multiple former Republican presidential candidates expressed support for Schedule F, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantiswho as a presidential candidate said of the so-called deep state, “We’re going to start slitting throats on day one.” 

Project 2025, the 900-page right-wing agenda-in-waiting for Trump cooked up by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other arch-conservative organizations, refers to plans to reintroduce Schedule F in several sections. And one member of the project’s three-person leadership team is Paul Dans, the former chief of staff at the OPM during the Trump administration.

The Project 2025 team has signaled that potential staffers in a second Trump White House would need to be on board: A questionnaire for potential new hires in a Trump administration asks applicants if they agree that “the President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.” 

Neither Sherk nor representatives for Project 2025 responded to HuffPost’s requests for comment. And Trump’s campaign said in an all-purpose statement to HuffPost, “unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.” 

Wearing The Wrong Hat

For civil servants, the prospect of being “rescheduled” to Schedule F raises concerns about political pressure and interference — and frustration at yet another distraction keeping them from their work. 

“The only person I’m loyal to is the American public, the American depositor, and the safety of our system,” said Vivian Hwa, a senior economist at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, where she helps ensure banks’ complex financial models comply with the law. Hwa is also the union president for Washington, D.C.-based FDIC employees.

“We shouldn’t have to worry about other things, like, ‘I might be fired if I say the wrong thing to the wrong person,’ or, ‘I now have to compete with that guy for my job because that guy happens to wear a red hat or a blue hat,’” Hwa said.  

Hwa doesn’t “touch” policy, she told HuffPost, but her team does “a lot of analytical work that could inform policy.” 

Hwa said being rescheduled could make her colleagues feel pressure to politicize their work, or else fear being replaced by someone more politicallyaligned with higher-ups. Had Schedule F been in place in 2007, she said, she may have reconsidered her decision to enter the civil service.

“If I had known that signing up for a government job meant that you have to lean left or lean right depending on who’s in the office, I think that would change the calculus a little bit, knowing that you don’t have that job security,” she said. 

The only person I’m loyal to is the American public, the American depositor, and the safety of our system.Vivian Hwa, union leader and FDIC senior economist

As a risk analyst at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Malcolm Alexander-Neal assesses clearinghouses to make sure they comply with financial regulations. Like Hwa, his job isn’t political, but he sees that it could be considered related to policy-making — and that the prospect of being stripped of civil service protections felt “dangerous” and “counterproductive.”

“Taxpayers should understand, that would be disruptive to the work I do,” he said.

Alexander-Neal, who is president of the union for CFTC employees, stressed that there already are safeguards in place to make sure federal workers keep taxpayers’ best interests in mind and report up the chain of command to political appointees. Injecting politics at the level of financial examiners could lead to a “huge increase in turnover” and a loss of institutional knowledge, he said, as well as deal a severe blow to morale and recruitment.

“There would be a huge perception of more politicization, and an erosion of public trust,” Alexander-Neal said. If Schedule F had been around at the start of his government career, he added, “I wouldn’t have been as interested.”

The Civil Service Atom Bomb

Sherk has answered criticisms about Schedule F politicizing the civil service by saying political discrimination is forbidden under the executive order.

“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” he told The New York Times last year.

The Trump-era executive order noted that existing law forbidding disciplinary action on the basis of various factors, like race or “political affiliation,” would still be applicable under Schedule F.

Moynihan, the public policy professor, is skeptical. He compared Sherk to Robert Oppenheimer, and Schedule F to a civil service atom bomb.

“Sherk is not going to determine how the tool will be used,” Moynihan said. “And the people in Trump world who will actually be in charge, the chief of staff and Cabinet-type positions, now have that tool, and they’re going to use it for their purposes.”

As Dans, likely a key player in the implementation of any Trump agenda, told Spectrum News last month: “There is a league of folks within the government that is highly partisan and really working against democracy, and they need to be excised from the government properly.”

Trump has repeatedly voiced even more politically charged rhetoric. He recently reposted a speech excerpt in which he promised to “demolish the deep state,” “drive out the globalists,” and “liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

As Steven Wasserman, a veteran federal prosecutor, told HuffPost, rhetoric about the “deep state” raises concerns that Trump could attempt to undermine the civil service protections that prevent the government from being used for “political revenge.”

Wasserman spoke to HuffPost in his capacity as president of the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, a role in which he represents about 1,000 dues-paying federal prosecutors on issues they care about — which have recently come to include civil service protections. He said he worries that Schedule F could be used to exert political pressure on civil servants’ decision-making, including at the Justice Department.

“That’s the concern, when taken to its logical extreme — that the government is used to favor certain people and disfavor other people,” he told HuffPost last week.

“That’s kind of classic authoritarianism, and not something you see in a representative democracy,” Wasserman added. “There’s a number of steps that need to occur before you slide in that direction — but once you strip away those protections, and you allow political pressure and influence to permeate and impact decision-making, it becomes a slippery slope.”

The first Trump administration had a record of targeting the civil service over its perceived politics.

In 2019, the Department of Agriculture announced that two of its research and grant-writing offices — the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — would be moved from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City. Hundreds of researchers, economists and other experts were given just days to decide whether they wanted to pick up their families’ lives and cross the country or lose their jobs. Many went with the latter option. The workforce at the new locations was less experienced, and NIFA in particular lost a significant number of Black employees, the GAO found.

In a speech to a Republican fundraiser during the upheaval, then-White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney bragged that although it’s “nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” more than half of the affected workers had decided to quit or retire as a result of the relocation.

“By simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out into the real part of the country,’ and they quit,” Mulvaney said. “What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time!”

That same year, the headquarters and D.C.-based staff for the Bureau of Land Management were similarly ordered to move to Grand Junction, Colorado. In that case, nearly 90% of affected workers decided not to move and instead resigned or retired. The move cut the number of Black employees at the agency headquarters by more than half, a GAO investigation found.

Within a couple of years, after Biden had taken office, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the BLM would move back to D.C., and acknowledged that the relocation under Trump had led to a “significant loss of institutional memory and talent.”

Biden signaled in the first days of his presidency that he recognized federal workers’ concerns about Schedule F.

In his first week in office, he issued his own executive order rescinding the Trump order establishingSchedule F, and in April of this year, OPM finished a lengthy rule-making project putting up roadblocks against future efforts to gut the bureaucracy. OPM’s rule stated that civil service protections “cannot be taken away by an involuntary move” and specified that existing law about civil service protections for civil servants engaged in policy-making apply to “noncareer, political appointments.”

Still, bothsides have acknowledged that thisnew OPM rule could just as easily be undone by another rule, should any president decide to pursue Schedule F in the future. There have been various congressional efforts to codify civil service protections against Schedule F, but they haven’t made it to Biden’s desk.

Hwa, the FDIC senior economist, saidthe prospect of Schedule F returning is “scary” — not just for her and her colleagues, but for the proper functioning of her agency and the American regulatory state. It’s one thing to lose a job, she said, but it’s another altogether for whole agencies to slide downhill.

“Agencies that have a mission that’s broader than the political whim of the day — protecting the environment, or our financial system, or consumers, or the Census — should be disconnected and independent of any political influence,” she said. “It’s not some weird deep state conspiracy. These are people just doing their jobs, doing them neutrally and serving the public.”

Related...




Trump accused of demanding special treatment for his New York probation interview


Kelly Rissman
THE INDEPENDENT 
Tue, June 11, 2024

Questions are being asked over whether Donald Trump received preferential treatment during his pretrial probation interview.

Trump attended an interview with his New York probation officer on Monday after being found guilty last month of 34 federal counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to women he allegedly had affairs with.

The probation officer will prepare a sentencing recommendation for the judge ahead of Trump’s sentencing, scheduled for July 11.


Although this step is required and routine, how Trump went about it was not. He called in virtually, reportedly from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and had his attorney, Todd Blanche, join him on the call.

The interview was “less than a half-hour of routine and uneventful questions and answers,” a source told the Associated Press. Trump reportedly answered questions about his personal history and current physical and mental health.

Blanche had written a letter to trial Judge Juan Merchan requesting to be present during the interview. In response, Judge Merchan ordered on June 7 that Blanche was permitted to attend the interview, an atypical move. But Manhattan prosecutors didn’t object to it.

A coalition of public defense organizations criticized a system that allowed the former president preferential treatment over other convicted felons.

“All people convicted of crimes should be allowed counsel in their probation interview, not just billionaires,” wrote The Legal Aid Society, The Bronx Defenders, and Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem in a joint statement on Monday.

“Pre-sentencing interviews with probation officers influence sentencing, and public defenders are deprived of joining their clients for these meetings.”

The groups called on the Department of Probation “to ensure that all New Yorkers, regardless of income, status, or class, receive the same pre-sentencing opportunities.”

The Independent has contacted the probation department for comment.

However a spokesperson for New York mayor Eric Adams told Business Insider that “no exceptions are being made because it’s President Trump.”

But others said that Trump’s treatment was different to what other felons received.

Former department of corrections and probation commissioner Martin Horn told NBC News that allowing the call to be conducted virtually was “highly unusual”. However he also noted that an in-person sit-down interview with Trump would likely be “very disruptive,” due to the Secret Service and press in tow.

Legal Aid attorney Sam Roberts told Business Insider that he had “never been present at a probation interview” with any of his 3,000 clients.

Defense lawyers say Trump got special treatment from NYC probation and are crying foul

Laura Italiano
Updated Tue, June 11, 2024


Donald Trump was allowed to do his NYC presentencing interview virtually, with his lawyer present.

A mayoral rep called the arrangement common, but critics said it showed a "two-tiered" justice system.

Lawyers said low-income defendants are made to do similar interviews in person and without a lawyer.


Donald Trump was allowed to do his presentencing interview on Monday via video and with his lawyer at his side — and New York City defense attorneys with clients who are neither billionaires nor former presidents are crying foul.

Defendants who aren't in jail while awaiting sentencing are told to attend in person — and alone — when they sit for an interview with the city Department of Probation, multiple city defense attorneys told Business Insider.

Trump's 30-minute interview was conducted virtually, not in person, from Mar-a-Lago, and he had his attorney Todd Blanche at his side, the Associated Press reported.

In New York, probation officers talk to the defendant and the prosecutor in separate presentencing interviews in preparation for what's known as a presentencing report.

These reports are important because they recommend to the judge what punishment would be appropriate.

Trump is due to be sentenced on July 11 for last month's conviction in Manhattan on 34 counts of falsifying business records in his so-called hush-money case.

"All people convicted of crimes should be allowed counsel in their probation interview, not just billionaires," four New York City public-defender organizations said in a joint statement Monday.

"This is just another example of our two-tiered system of justice," said the statement, issued by The Legal Aid Society, The Bronx Defenders, New York County Defender Services, and Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.

A city spokeswoman told BI that Trump wasn't getting preferential treatment by being allowed to do his interview via video and with his lawyer.

"It's common — it's not unusual, and it's been an option from even before COVID," Ivette Dávila-Richards, a deputy press secretary for the mayor's office, said of Trump's virtual interview. "No exceptions are being made because it's President Trump," she added.

It's true that defendants who are locked up while awaiting sentencing typically do presentencing interviews via video, defense lawyers told BI.

But defendants such as Trump, who are at liberty, are almost always required to appear alone and in person for their probation interviews, the lawyers said.

They also complained that Trump was able to have Blanche at his side only through the most uncommon of circumstances.

The trial judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, ordered probation on Friday to allow Blanche to attend Trump's interview after prosecutors didn't fight the request, court filings show.

"I've never been present at a probation interview," Sam Roberts, a veteran Legal Aid attorney, said. He estimated he'd had well over 3,000 clients do these interviews.

"In fairness, at least when clients are detained pending sentence, it will be a procedural nightmare to permit attorneys to attend," said Thomas Eddy, an attorney from Rochester, New York, who's fighting the no-counsel rule on the appellate level.

He shared with BI emails from last year in which probation and court officials said it was policy for defendants to be interviewed without their lawyers unless there was an exceptional need for counsel to be present.

"Defendants are prejudiced daily by damaging statements they make without counsel present," Eddy said.

A negative probation report could hurt an inmate seeking a lower security level, work release, and parole, he said.

"How much trouble do you think Trump would get into today if Blanche wasn't there to muzzle him?" Eddy asked.


Donald Trump completes mandatory presentencing interview after less than 30 minutes of questioning

MICHELLE L. PRICE and MICHAEL R. SISAK
Updated Mon, June 10, 2024 

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at Trump Tower, Friday, May 31, 2024, in New York. A day after a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee addressed the conviction and likely attempt to cast his campaign in a new light. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)


NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump completed his mandatory presentencing interview Monday after less than 30 minutes of routine, uneventful questions and answers, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.

The former president was quizzed by a New York City probation officer for a report, required by law, that trial judge Juan M. Merchan can use to help determine Trump's punishment when he is sentenced July 11 in his hush money criminal case.

Monday's interview was conducted privately by video conferencing. Under state law, the resulting report — which may also include information about Trump's conviction, his social, family and employment history, and his education and economic status — will remain confidential unless the judge authorizes its public release.

Trump's lawyers and prosecutors will be provided copies, but that doesn't typically happen until just before sentencing. Both sides can also submit their own paperwork to Merchan making the case for how they feel Trump should be punished.

Merchan has discretion to impose a wide range of punishments following Trump’s May 30 conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a potential sex scandal, ranging from probation and fines to up to four years in prison.

After declining to testify at the trial, Trump was required by law to participate in Monday's presentencing interview — doing so by video from his residence at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, with his lawyer Todd Blanche by his side.

The arrangement garnered complaints of special treatment for a famous defendant, but city officials contended that was not the case and said such accommodations are available to anyone subject to a presentencing interview.

Typically, people convicted of crimes in New York meet with probation officials face-to-face for their required presentence interviews and aren’t allowed to have lawyers with them. After Blanche balked about Trump being made to answer questions alone, Merchan granted the defense lawyer permission to sit in on Trump’s interview.

The city’s public defenders on Monday criticized what they said were “special arrangements” for Trump and urged the probation department to “ensure that all New Yorkers, regardless of income, status, or class, receive the same pre-sentencing opportunities.”

“All people convicted of crimes should be allowed counsel in their probation interview, not just billionaires,” four of the city’s public defender organizations said in a statement. “This is just another example of our two-tiered system of justice.”

“Pre-sentencing interviews with probation officers influence sentencing, and public defenders are deprived of joining their clients for these meetings. The option of joining these interviews virtually is typically not extended to the people we represent either,” said the statement from the Legal Aid Society, Bronx Defenders, New York County Defender Services and Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.

A spokesperson for the city, which runs the probation department, said defendants have had the option of conducting their presentencing interviews by video since before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Ivette Dávila-Richards, a deputy press secretary for Mayor Eric Adams, said all defendants can also request to have their lawyers present for the interviews, as long as the judge in their case signs off.

“Trump has not been given any special treatment,” Dávila-Richards said. “He is being treated as any defendant convicted of a crime. It's just since he's so high-profile, everyone is making it bigger than what it is.”

A message seeking comment was left with a spokesperson for the state court system.

Presentence reports are designed to assist a trial judge in determining an appropriate sentence for a person convicted of a crime. Such reports are typically prepared by a probation officer, a social worker or a psychologist working for the probation department who interviews the defendant and possibly that person’s family and friends, as well as people affected by the crime.

Along with a defendant’s personal history and criminal record, they often contain a sentencing recommendation. The interview is also a chance for a defendant to say why they think they deserve a lighter punishment, and the city's probation department encourages defendants to provide documentation that they believe would assist in the process.

A jury convicted Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records arising from what prosecutors said was an attempt to hide a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. She claims she had a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier, which he denies.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to appeal his conviction — though by law he must wait until after he is sentenced to do so. He says he is innocent of any crime and says the case was brought to hurt his chances to regain the White House.


Former President Donald Trump is expected to appear, virtually, before a probation officer.

"Highly unusual": Legal experts say Trump got special treatment at probation interview

Nandika Chatterjee
Tue, June 11, 2024 

Donald Trump Brandon Bell/Getty Image

Former President Donald Trump was allowed to attend his pre-sentencing interview Monday under “highly unusual” circumstances, appearing virtually from his residence in Mar-a-Lago with his counsel Todd Blanche present by his side, the Associated Press reported.

Defendants such as Trump, who are out not jailed, are usually required to appear alone and in person for a probation interview, lawyers told Business Insider. However, authorities insist the same accommodations are potentially available for anyone.

In New York, the pre-sentencing interviews that probation officers have with defendants and prosecutors, respectively, are conducted so that the officer can write up a report with their sentencing recommendation. Although he may use it to inform his decision, Judge Juan Merchan can ultimately use his discretion to determine the nature of Trump’s punishment.

The preemptive Republican nominee is due to be sentenced July 11 after being convicted of 34 felonies related to his falsifying business records to cover up a hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. He could be sentenced to anything from probation to up to four years in prison.

Martin Horn, a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections and Probation who now lectures at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Daily Beast Monday that the cushy conditions of Trump’s meeting were “highly unusual.” Having a counsel present during such a meeting can influence the way the interview goes, what the defendant says and ultimately how the report is written, he said.

Others who represent people convicted of crimes agree.

“Pre-sentencing interviews with probation officers influence sentencing, and public defenders are deprived of joining their clients for these meetings. The option of joining these interviews virtually is typically not extended to the people we represent either,” said a statement from the Legal Aid Society, Bronx Defenders, New York County Defender Services, and Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. “All people convicted of crimes should be allowed counsel in their probation interview, not just billionaires. This is just another example of our two-tiered system of justice."

The interview is also a chance for the defendant to express remorse for their crimes so they can earn a lighter punishment. However, Trump has vehemently denied his attempt to hide his hush money payment to Daniels right before the 2016 presidential election. In fact, his campaign exploited his lack of remorse in a fundraiser email on Monday.

“Can you believe this, Friend?” the email read. “I’m actually about to speak to a probation officer after my RIGGED CONVICTION! My only crime? Putting the AMERICAN PEOPLE, ahead of the COMMUNISTS, MARXISTS, AND FASCISTS that want to see our country DESTROYED,” The Daily Beast reported.

"I've never been present at a probation interview," said Legal Aid attorney Sam Roberts, who estimated he's had over 3,000 clients do these interviews.

"Defendants are prejudiced daily by damaging statements they make without counsel present," Thomas Eddy, an attorney from Rochester, New York, told Business Insider. "How much trouble do you think Trump would get into today if Blanche wasn't there to muzzle him?"

A spokesperson for the city said that defendants have had the option to conduct their pre-sentencing interview virtually since before the pandemic began in 2020. Ivette Dávila-Richards, a deputy press secretary for Mayor Eric Adams, added that defendants have also always had the provision to have their lawyer present, provided that the judge signs off.

She said claims that Trump was receiving special treatment were “ridiculous.”

“Trump has not been given any special treatment,” Dávila-Richards said. “He is being treated as any defendant convicted of a crime. It’s just since he’s so high-profile, everyone is making it bigger than what it is.”

Federal judge blocks Florida’s ban on gender transition therapies for minors, DeSantis vows appeal




Major portions of Florida’s ban on gender transition care for minors and limits for adults are now blocked in the Sunshine State. A federal judge in Florida’s Northern District ruled Tuesday that much of the law was unconstitutional. Judge Robert Hinkle’s decision comes after months of review following a three-day trial in December of last year.

Federal judge strikes down Florida's ban on transgender health care for children

Ana Goñi-Lessan, Tallahassee Democrat
Tue, June 11, 2024 

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Florida's ban on health care for transgender children and restrictions for transgender adults.

"Florida has adopted a statute and rules that ban gender-affirming care for minors even when medically appropriate. The ban is unconstitutional," Tallahassee-based Senior U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle wrote in his order.

Hinkle named the following measures in state law (SB 254) and subsequent rules unconstitutional: prohibiting gender-affirming care, prohibiting licensed medical personnel from providing gender-affirming care and requiring unnecessary medical tests, appointments and forms, among others.

The order does not address surgeries; the plaintiffs did not challenge the ban on surgery for minors, according to the ruling.

Department of Health Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo leads a discussion with doctors and researchers while talking about the Cancer Connect Collaborative, an initiative spearheaded by Casey DeSantis to improve cancer research and treatment Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2024.

The plaintiffs, four transgender adults and seven parents of transgender minors, prevailed against Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, the Florida Board of Medicine, the Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine and other state leaders, according to the ruling.

The ruling by Hinkle, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, comes as a blow to Gov. Ron DeSantis' anti-woke agenda, which has included anti-LGBTQ legislation in health care, saying gender-affirming care is experimental and lacks evidence.

"The defendants say gender dysphoria is difficult to diagnose accurately — that gender identity can be fluid, that there is no objective test to confirm gender identity or gender dysphoria, and that patients treated with GnRH agonists or cross-sex hormones have sometimes come to regret it. But the defendants ignore facts that do not support their narrative," Hinkle wrote.

Judge: Governor, lawmakers 'overtly biased against transgenders'

The governor's comments, and those of some legislators, during the legislative process behind the law were quoted in Hinkle's ruling and cited as being "overtly biased against transgenders."

Senior U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle of Tallahassee.

"This is a politically fraught area. There has long been, and still is, substantial bigotry directed at transgender individuals. Common experience confirms this, as do some of the comments of legislators recounted above. And even when not based on bigotry, there are those who incorrectly but sincerely believe that gender identity is not real but instead just a choice. This is, as noted above, the elephant in the room," Hinkle wrote.

In a statement, the governor's press secretary said the state will appeal.

"Through their elected representatives, the people of Florida acted to protect children in this state, and the court was wrong to override their wishes," Jeremy Redfern said in a text message to the USA TODAY Network-Florida.

"We disagree with the Court's erroneous rulings on the law, on the facts, and on the science. As we've seen here in Florida, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, there is no quality evidence to support the chemical and physical mutilation of children. These procedures do permanent, life-altering damage to children, and history will look back on this fad in horror."

He went on, "Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida will continue to fight to ensure children are not chemically or physically mutilated in the name of radical, New Age 'gender ideology.' "
Same judge had issued preliminary injunction last year

In the ruling, Hinkle called out the state for continuously referring to Europe as supportive evidence for the anti-trans health care legislation.

"The assertion is false. And no matter how many times the defendants say it, it will still be false. No country in Europe — or so far as shown by this record, anywhere in the world — entirely bans these treatments," Hinkle wrote, adding that the treatments are available in appropriate circumstances in all the countries cited by the defendants, including Finland, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand.

Last year, almost to the day, Hinkle issued a preliminary injunction for the parents of the transgender children to administer drugs that can delay the onset or continuation of puberty, and cross-sex hormones — testosterone for transgender males, and estrogen for transgender females — which promote the development of characteristics that align with a patient's gender identity.

That decision paused the prohibition on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for three plaintiffs in the case: Jane Doe on behalf of Susan Doe, Gloria Goe on behalf of Gavin Goe, and Linda Loe on behalf of Lisa Loe. The plaintiffs were represented by the Southern Legal Counsel, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Lowenstein Sandler LLP.

“This ruling means I won’t have to watch my daughter needlessly suffer because I can’t get her the care she needs," said Jane Doe, on behalf of herself and her daughter Susan Doe.

"Seeing Susan’s fear about this ban has been one of the hardest experiences we’ve endured as parents. All we’ve wanted is to take that fear away and help her continue to be the happy, confident child she is now,” she added.

Opinion


Ron DeSantis’s Signature Law Gets Brutally Shut Down in Court

Talia Jane
Tue, June 11, 2024 



Federal Judge Robert Hinkle ruled Tuesday that Florida’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans children is unconstitutional—taking down one of Governor Ron DeSantis’s signature “anti-woke” laws, which the judge described as “divorced from reality.”

In his ruling, Hinkle found that a “significant number of legislators” were motivated by animus to enact the trans health care ban. In legalese, a motivation of animus is an illegitimate basis to pursue legislation. Hinkle’s ruling provided numerous instances of legislators acting in prejudice against trans people, saying lawmakers “single-mindedly pursued the predetermined outcome sought by the Governor and Surgeon General” to ban gender-affirming care.

“Had there been no animus,” Hinkle wrote in his ruling, “gender-affirming care probably would not have come before the Legislature at all.”


Hinkle’s ruling also nuked every single part of the state’s requirements to severely restrict access to gender-affirming care—including requiring annual hand X-rays, in-person consent forms, restrictions on who can provide gender-affirming care and therapy, as well as excessive appointments and lab tests intended to make access to gender-affirming care cost-prohibitive to discourage people from pursuing care.

“If ever a pot called a kettle black, it is here. The statute and the rules were an exercise in politics, not good medicine,” Hinkle wrote.

“Where there is bigotry, there are usually—one hopes, always—opponents of bigotry,” Hinkle added, noting that medical professionals who treat people with gender dysphoria are frequently advocates for gender-affirming health care.

In Hinkle’s ruling, as with the preceding injunction leading to Tuesday’s ruling, Hinkle asserted “gender identity is real” and noted during arguments that even the defense—representing Florida’s surgeon general and Board of Medicine—acknowledged it as such. Hinkle also noted that the defense, which sought to uphold the trans health care ban, “explicitly admitted that prohibiting or impeding individuals from pursuing their transgender identities is not a legitimate state interest.”

Hinkle’s ruling further assessed that “gender-affirming care causes no harm to others—no harm to individuals who do not receive the care. Those who are not involved are not involved.” The court decision nukes any potential claim that access to gender-affirming care is somehow harmful to public health, a favored talking point of transphobes who simply can’t leave other people alone.


Federal judge strikes down Florida ban on medical treatments for transgender kids

Romy Ellenbogen
Tue, June 11, 2024 



Florida’s restrictions on medical care for transgender children are unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Tuesday as he struck down a signature priority of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle’s decision invalidates much of a 2023 law and rules approved by state boards prohibiting children from accessing medical treatments for gender dysphoria, such as puberty blockers and hormones.

“Florida has adopted a statute and rules that ban gender-affirming care for minors even when medically appropriate,” Hinkle wrote in his 105-page order. “The ban is unconstitutional.”

Attorneys that represented the transgender plaintiffs argued that the law signed by DeSantis was an act of discrimination and “animus” against transgender people. The state said it was targeting the treatments, not transgender people themselves.

In his ruling, Hinkle, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, said that it was “clear that anti-transgender animus” motivated bill sponsors and some legislators who approved the law.

“Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs,” Hinkle wrote. “But they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender. In time, discrimination against transgender individuals will diminish, just as racism and misogyny have diminished. To paraphrase a civil-rights advocate from an earlier time, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Hinkle pointed to comments from DeSantis and House representatives about young children being castrated or sterilized because of medical treatments for gender dysphoria. Hinkle said that the state admitted during the trial that there was no factual basis for those remarks, and that the record showed no evidence any Florida child had been “castrated or mutilated.”

“Perhaps all this talk about castration and mutilation is just political hyperbole,” Hinkle wrote. “But it casts at least some doubt on the assertion that these decisionmakers’ motivation was sound regulation of medical care in the best interest of transgender patients rather than outright disapproval of transgender identity.”

Along with striking down the rules banning kids with gender dysphoria from accessing medical treatment, Hinkle also struck down rules that required transgender adults to only get medical treatment from physicians, instead of from other kinds of health providers.

Hinkle last year also struck down Florida’s ban on Medicaid covering treatments for gender dysphoria. The state is appealing that ruling, and opponents have argued that the state has been defying Hinkle’s order and still denying Medicaid coverage.

DeSantis’ press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, said that the state would appeal Hinkle’s new ruling, as well.

“Through their elected representatives, the people of Florida acted to protect children in this state, and the Court was wrong to override their wishes,” Redfern said in an emailed statement. “We disagree with the Court’s erroneous rulings on the law, on the facts, and on the science. As we’ve seen here in Florida, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, there is no quality evidence to support the chemical and physical mutilation of children. These procedures do permanent, life-altering damage to children, and history will look back on this fad in horror.”

Major medical organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics support children using treatments like puberty blockers for gender dysphoria. Hinkle said in his ruling that “not a single reputable medical association” has flatly opposed using puberty blockers and hormone therapy in appropriate circumstances.

If the state truly believed that gender dysphoria was being improperly treated in Florida, “despite the absence of complaints and despite the state’s inability, even now, to find a single adversely affected Florida patient,” they could have restricted or regulated care without banning it, Hinkle wrote in his order.

Simone Chriss, an attorney on the case and the director of the transgender rights initiative at the Southern Legal Counsel, said that Hinkle’s ruling “restores some balance in terms of, like, respect and dignity and decency in a state that has never been more in need of those things than right now.”

Chriss said that the ruling returns Florida to where it was just a few years ago, where decisions about transgender medical care are in the hands of patients, their families and their doctors.

The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a similar Alabama ban on medical treatment for transgender kids to take effect. But Chriss said the Florida case is different because the case out of Alabama didn’t argue that the laws were based on anti-transgender bias.

Jane Doe, one of the anonymous plaintiffs representing her transgender daughter, Susan Doe, said in a statement that the ruling means she won’t need to watch her daughter needlessly suffer.

“Seeing Susan’s fear about this ban has been one of the hardest experiences we’ve endured as parents,” Doe said in a statement. “All we’ve wanted is to take that fear away and help her continue to be the happy, confident child she is now.”


Federal judge strikes down Florida’s gender-affirming care restrictions


Tue, June 11, 2024 



June 11 (UPI) -- Florida's ban on gender-affirming care for adults is discriminatory and has no legitimate state interest, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. District Court for Northern Florida Judge Robert Hinkle ruled a 2023 Florida law is unconstitutional and violates the equal protection rights of transgender people.

"Florida can regulate as needed but cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment," Hinkle said in his decision.

Hinkle said the state allows the use of similar "treatment with medications routinely provided to others with the state's full approval so long as the purpose is not to support the patient's transgender identity."

Florida's Republican leaders intend to appeal the ruling.

"We disagree with the court's erroneous rulings on the law, on the facts and on the science, said Jeremy Redfern, spokesman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, said in a prepared statement.

Hinkle said the law and relevant rules for respective boards of medicine are based on opposition to transgender people.

Parents of transgender children and others in May 2023 filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn the law.

Hinkle said many American medical institutions and medical professionals accept the standards of care for transgender people and those diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

"I'm so relieved the court saw there is no medical basis for this law," Lucien Hamel, a transgender man who testified before the court, told Axios.

The law "was passed just to target transgender people like me and try to push us out of Florida," Hamel said.


Judge Strikes Down Florida Gender-Affirming Care Restrictions for Minors and Adults

Orion Rummler, the 19th
Tue, June 11, 2024 
2


Daniel Knighton/Getty Images

This article originally appeared at The 19th.

Florida can no longer enforce its ban against transgender youth receiving gender-affirming care, or its restrictions against adults accessing gender-affirming care, after a federal district court ruling on Tuesday found those rules to be unconstitutional and fueled by animus against trans people. The ruling is effective immediately.

Although federal courts have blocked many state anti-LGBTQ+ laws, this ruling carries extra significance because Florida was the first state to push for gender-affirming care restrictions for transgender adults. The ruling is also unique because it blocks restrictions enacted through multiple channels: through laws passed in the statehouse as well as restrictions passed through the state’s medical boards.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle’s order is also significant for its admonishment of the state for trying to regulate gender-affirming care based on “anti-transgender animus” instead of medical standards. Florida “cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment — treatment with medications routinely provided to others with the state’s full approval so long as the purpose is not to support the patient’s transgender identity,” Hinkle wrote.

The Florida Surgeon General and the Florida boards of medicine have admitted that impeding transgender people from pursuing their identities is not a legitimate state interest, he wrote — but state legislators and others involved in the state’s gender-affirming care restrictions have still pursued this goal.

“Gender identity is real. Those whose gender identity does not match their natal sex often suffer gender dysphoria. The widely accepted standard of care calls for appropriate evaluation and treatment,” Hinkle wrote, noting that for minors, such care begins with mental health therapy and is followed, when appropriate, with hormone replacement therapy. “Florida has adopted a statute and rules that ban gender-affirming care for minors even when medically appropriate. The ban is unconstitutional.”

Hinkle also found that the state’s rule preventing nurse practitioners from providing gender-affirming care to adults is unconstitutional, as is requiring trans adults to jump through multiple hoops to access care — like signing consent forms that include false information and requiring follow-ups more frequently than medically necessary. These rules led to physicians and pharmacies turning away patients, preventing trans adults across the state from being able to access gender-affirming care.

The lawsuit, involving four transgender adults and seven parents of transgender minors representing broader plaintiff classes across the state, was brought against the Florida Surgeon General and the Florida boards of medicine in March 2023 by the Southern Legal Counsel, GLAD (GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders), the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and Lowenstein Sandler LLP.

Simone Chriss, an attorney with the Southern Legal Counsel in Florida and director of the organization’s transgender rights initiative, said in a statement that Hinkle’s order restores access to gender-affirming care for all transgender Floridians, since the lawsuit is a class action. Transgender adults can resume receiving care from their medical providers, including nurse practitioners, who had been prohibited from providing gender-affirming care under state law last year, she said.

Under Ron DeSantis, Florida Teacher Trainings Included Christian Nationalist Propaganda

A new report shows that training materials from a three-day course are full of Christian nationalist propaganda and anti-cancel culture rhetoric.

The lawsuit was initially filed to challenge the state’s board of medicine rules, and later amended to include a challenge to the gender-affirming care ban for trans minors that became law in May last year.

“I’m so relieved the court saw there is no medical basis for this law — it was passed just to target transgender people like me and try to push us out of Florida. This is my home. I’ve lived here my entire life,” said Lucien Hamel, a 27-year-old transgender man and one of the plaintiffs in the case, in a statement on Tuesday. “This is my son’s home. I can’t just uproot my family and move across the country. The state has no place interfering in people’s private medical decisions, and I’m relieved that I can once again get the healthcare that I need here in Florida.”

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Originally Appeared on them.

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Federal judge strikes Florida ban on gender-affirming care for children

Arek Sarkissian
Tue, June 11, 2024 


TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A federal judge has ruled that Florida’s new restrictions on gender-affirming treatment for children are unconstitutional, and that Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers who supported them were not acting in the interest of public health.

By refusing to allow children to access treatments, Tallahassee-based district court Judge Robert L. Hinkle wrote in a ruling handed down Tuesday that DeSantis and Republicans who voted for the measure responded in a way that was similar to racism and misogyny.

“Enforcing this moral view is not, however, a legitimate state interest that can sustain this statute,” Hinkle — an appointee of President Bill Clinton — wrote, partly borrowing from arguments that lawyers for the plaintiffs gave during trial in December.

The ruling is a major win for a coalition of human rights groups that filed the federal lawsuit arguing the ban violated equal protection rights. "Today’s ruling affirms the principle that individuals should be able to make informed decisions about their own personal medical treatments without discrimination by the State,” Thomas Redburn, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

In response to Hinkle's ruling, Jeremy Redfern, a spokesperson for DeSantis, said the court was wrong to override the wishes of the people, which were conveyed through their elected representatives, and the state of Florida will appeal.

"We disagree with the Court’s erroneous rulings on the law, on the facts, and on the science," Redfern wrote in a text. "As we’ve seen here in Florida, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, there is no quality evidence to support the chemical and physical mutilation of children. These procedures do permanent, life-altering damage to children, and history will look back on this fad in horror."

Hinkle’s ruling also struck down restrictions for adults that were included in FL SB254 (23R), which DeSantis signed into law just over a year ago. They include requiring that only doctors, as opposed to other medical professionals, prescribe medicine for gender-affirming treatment and requiring annual x-rays without regard for circumstance.

The law was the result of a presentation that Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo gave to the state boards of Medicine and Osteopathic medicine in 2022 that compelled the two boards to approve similar restrictions by making new rules. DeSantis then asked the Legislature to codify the board rules, saying that gender-affirming care includes castrating and sterilizing children, and mastectomies for girls. Hinkle noted in the ruling that surgeries on minors are extremely rare.

In the ruling, Hinkle wrote DeSantis’ comments about castration were false, and they proved that the governor’s intent of the measure was not to protect the public.

“Whether based on morals, religion, unmoored hatred, or anything else, prohibiting or impeding a person from conforming to the person’s gender identity rather than to the person’s natal sex is not a legitimate state interest,” Hinkle wrote.

The plaintiffs in the case were four transgender adults and seven parents who appeared on behalf of transgender children, and it was the second major lawsuit filed against efforts by Florida to block transgender care. Hinkle in June of last year issued a separate ruling striking down rules made by the state Agency for Health Care Administration that banned Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care.

Hinkle in June 2023 had also issued a preliminary injunction in the case he decided Tuesday that blocked part of the ban on transgender treatments for children for the plaintiffs. The state appealed that ruling and that decision is pending, although Hinkle's more expansive ruling could make that appeal moot.


Judge rules against Florida law banning transgender medical care for young people

Marin Scotten
SALON
Tue, June 11, 2024

Disney Employees Stage Walkout Over Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' Bill Octavio Jones/Getty Images

Parts of a Florida law banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors have been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle’s wrote in an order released Tuesday that “gender identity is real” and invalidated much of a 2023 law that prohibited children from accessing puberty blockers and hormones.

“The state of Florida can regulate as needed but cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment — treatment with medications routinely provided to others with the state’s full approval so long as the purpose is not to support the patient’s transgender identity,” Judge Hinkle wrote in his 105-page decision.

The measure was signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. It prevented minors from accessing transition-related medications and required that transition-seeking adult patients meet with a doctor in person and not via telemedicine. Hinkle struck down both rules.

The plaintiffs in the case were three families whose attorneys argued the law restricted their rights as parents to make medical decisions for their transgender children and that the law was enacted out of “discrimination and animus”, Forbes reported.

Hinkle agreed.

“Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs. But they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender,” he wrote.

DeSantis has signed a number of other laws restricting trans rights, including bathroom usage bans and limits on which pronouns can be used in schools.

The Tampa Bay Times reported it’s likely the state will appeal Hinkle’s ruling.
Vintage polaroids of female prisoners paint an intimate picture of womanhood and identity

Zoe Whitfield, CNN
Wed, June 12, 2024 


What is perhaps most striking about the 32 photographs that make up Jack Lueders-Booth’s new book, “Women Prisoner Polaroids,” is the intimacy that occupies each frame. Inmates wear their own clothes and pose in cells embellished with personal effects, much like any regular college dorm room; one woman clasps a biography of Mick Jagger, others are pictured with their arms wrapped around friends. A warm sensibility, typically foreign to portraits of incarceration, is notable throughout.

“Miriam Van Waters, the first superintendent at Massachusetts Correctional Institute Framingham (in 1932), was insistent that they not use this unfortunate period in their lives to form their identity,” the photographer told CNN in a video interview, relaying the Massachusetts’ prison’s early objectives. “To foster that, she tried to make it look like home. For that reason, (when I was there) the inmates wore domestic clothes and prison guards were also un-uniformed. Often the same age as the prisoners, many of them were studying criminal justice at Northeastern University, a co-operative college.”


While initially expected to be a year-long assignment, photographer Jack Lueders-Booth worked at the prison teaching photography to inmates from 1977 to 1984, and taking photos along the way. - Jack Lueders-Booth

Established in 1878 as a reformatory confining women for the crime of having children out of wedlock, by the 1970s much of the prison’s population were being held on counts of shoplifting and sex work, or as accomplices to crimes of male companions. As per Van Waters’ previous intentions, the facility was at that time the site of many experiments in rehabilitation, an effort intended to reduce the psychological toll of being incarcerated.
‘We came to trust each other’

Lueders-Booth arrived in 1977, initially to spend just a year running a photography course as part of his master’s thesis for Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (though already lecturing at the college, he didn’t have a teaching degree). “I had specific ideas about what I wanted to do,” he recalled. “Teach photography to people in institutions of confinement, as a way of increasing morale and teaching them a skill.” The invitation to MCI-Framingham was serendipitous: another Harvard professor headed up a prison arts project and happened to be looking for someone to initiate a photography course.


Many of the inmates had dependent children who were placed with relatives or court-appointed foster parents - Jack Lueders-Booth



Alongside imagery, Lueders-Booth's book also features prisoners' oral histories of the time. - Jack Lueders-Booth

Accompanied by his 18-year-old daughter, Laura — “she gave me a level of credibility, that this old guy knew something about youth” — Lueders-Booth was given a corridor of old cells to run his program, which the pair transformed into studios and darkrooms. With classes of about 10 women at a time, the groups began by creating photograms (photographic prints made by laying objects onto photographic paper before exposing it to light), eventually moving into portraiture. “I was apprehensive about them and they about me. I didn’t know anything (about the prison system) except for what I’d seen in the media,” the photographer noted of those early sessions. “But we came to trust each other in a matter of months. They had confidence in me that I was there to help them.”

The Polaroid pictures, which the photographer shot alongside a wider black and white series, weren’t intentional, he suggested. In 1980 however, having been awarded two consecutive fellowships with the instant camera company, Lueders-Booth had access to infinite film and began making, “probably the most important project I did in my life. It was rewarding and wonderful, the comfort and trust with which the women came to the experience of being photographed.”


"I felt like I was contributing something, and that was important," recalled Lueders-Booth. - Jack Lueders-Booth

He would end up staying on at Framingham for seven years, only concluding his workshops in the mid-80s, in which time he had become an accepted feature amongst staff and inmates alike. “I had increasing access and became quite trusted by the administration. I was doing photography for them, making portraits for their annual reports, and sometimes processing family photographs,” said Lueders-Booth. “Over the years, my photographs were appearing on their walls as part of their photo collections, which was very rewarding. I felt I was contributing something, and that was important.”

“The women and the unusual character of their lives kept drawing me back,” he continued. “It became an education, about this prison but also the unfairness of the system and how much depends on the womb factor — where you come from, how you were nurtured. Many of the incarcerations were economically determined. So I came to appreciate the humanity of it, really, that was the largest thing. That these women were very much the victim of circumstances.”

Much depended on "the womb factor"- the circumstances someone is born into, said the photographer. - Jack Lueders-Booth

"These women were very much the victims of circumstances," he recalled. - Jack Lueders-Booth

A collection of anonymous testimonies closes the book, largely highlighting vehement accounts of the women’s experiences of arriving and returning to the prison. Their fervent words, recorded objectively by Lueders-Booth, initially appear contrary to the relaxed composure exhibited in the images which precede them; ultimately however, this speaks to the work’s broader function. “Very often, the most obvious characteristic of a person is not the most significant,” observed the photographer. “I may have identified them as a prisoner, but that’s dismissive and superficial. While it is true, other things are true, and many other things are perhaps more true.”





American slavery wasn’t just a white man’s business − new research shows how white women profited, too

Trevon Logan, The Ohio State University
Mon, June 10, 2024 

As the United States continues to confront the realities and legacy of slavery, Americans continue to challenge myths about the country’s history. One enduring myth is that slavery was a largely male endeavor — that, for the most part, the buying, selling, trading and profiting from enslavement were carried out by white men alone.

While white women certainly interacted with enslaved people in household management and day-to-day tasks, historians once argued that they weren’t active owners and had very limited involvement in transactions. This was once widely believed to be a reason why Southern white women supported the institution – they were assumed to be blind to its darker side.

As an expert in the economic history of slavery, I know the story is far more complex. In fact, slavery was unique in economically empowering women. It was, in essence, an early feminist institution – but exclusively for white women.

A lasting myth


The myth that women didn’t profit from slavery has endured for several reasons. First, before the American Civil War, married women generally owned nothing of their own. The legal institution of coverture made the property a woman brought into her marriage into the property of her husband. This also meant that if a husband was in debt, a creditor could claim the wife’s property for payment.

In addition, there are very few surviving records that show Southern white women discussing the business of slavery. And finally, in cases where women were owners of enslaved people – say, through the death of a husband – they often used agents or male relatives to handle their affairs. Added together, there’s very little to suggest that white women were deeply involved in the slavery business.

Researchers have started to challenge this view by moving beyond the traditional archival sources. The innovative historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers has documented how regularly white women were seen in all aspects of American enslavement. Her most compelling evidence comes from interviews with the formerly enslaved people themselves, who noted who they were owned by and explained how belonging to the “misses” affected every aspect of their life.


The ‘white feminism’ of American slavery

Historians have also started grappling with the ways American slavery was uniquely gender-egalitarian – at least for white women. While Northern women were trapped in coverture, Southern states were bypassing coverture specifically for the purpose of giving married women rights to own enslaved people.

The earliest such act passed in the United States was the Mississippi Married Women’s Property Law of 1839. This law explicitly awarded married white women ownership status over enslaved individuals. Slavery was the driver of this change: Four of the five sections of the act refer only to property in enslaved people.

Similar acts were passed by other Southern states in the antebellum era to shield married women from responsibility of their husband’s debts and also to allow women to independently accumulate wealth during marriage.

Of course, laws on the books may not reflect how people actually behaved. But new research shows that white women were very involved in the business of slavery. In states where enslaved people were titled property – like a house or car today – sales were recorded with names of buyers, sellers and the names of the enslaved people in the transaction. White women in states where legislation formally protected their property rights to enslaved property were much more likely to be active in the market.


An antebellum print advertisement announces the sale of ‘valuable slaves.’ Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Further analysis of these records shows that white women were involved in nearly a third of all transactions, buying and selling in equal proportion. White women were especially likely to buy and sell enslaved women, making up nearly 40% of the people doing the buying and selling.

Enslaved women were especially economically valuable because if someone owned an enslaved women, they automatically became the owner of all of her children. For slave owners, owning an enslaved woman was an intergenerational wealth-building activity.

A historical irony


We are left to confront a deep irony in American history. Slavery gave white women in the South significantly more economic independence than those in the North, and they used this freedom with remarkable regularity. Women in slave states had legal rights to property that was half of the wealth in the southern United States at the time. Women in the North could only dream of such economic independence.

While historians once claimed that white women supported the Confederacy because they were blind to the reality of slavery, researchers now know that they could have been motivated by the same economic impulses as their husbands. Slavery was actually a more gender-egalitarian institution than other forms of property or wealth accumulation, so it’s not surprising that white women would have a vested interest in it.

Slavery was white men’s and women’s business.


This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Trevon Logan, The Ohio State University

Read more:

The warming ocean is leaving coastal economies in hot water

What a bath, taken 1,000 years ago, can tell us about the conflicted English kingdom of the 11th century

Records of Pompeii’s survivors have been found – and archaeologists are starting to understand how they rebuilt their lives

Trevon Logan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

 

Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth

Victor Tangermann
Tue, June 11, 2024 



What if — stick with us here — an unknown technological civilization is hiding right here on Earth, sheltering in bases deep underground and possibly even emerging with UFOs or disguised as everyday humans?

In a new paper that's bound to raise eyebrows in the scientific community, a team of researchers from Harvard and Montana Technological University speculates that sightings of "Unidentified Anomalous Phemonemona" (UAP) — bureaucracy-speak for UFOs, basically — "may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the Moon), and/or even 'walking among us' (e.g., passing as humans)."

Yes, that's a direct quote from the paper. Needless to say, the researchers admit, this idea of hidden "crypoterrestrials" is a highly exotic hypothesis that's "likely to be regarded skeptically by most scientists." Nonetheless, they argue, the theory "deserves genuine consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness."

The interest in unexplained sightings of UFOs by military personnel has grown considerably over the past decade or so. This attention grew to a peak last summer, when former Air Force intelligence officer and whistleblower David Grusch testified in front of Congress, claiming that the US had already recovered alien spacecraft as part of a decades-long UFO retrieval program.

Even NASA has opened its doors for researchers to explore mysterious, high-speed objects that have been spotted by military pilots over the years.

But several Pentagon reports later, we have yet to find any evidence of extraterrestrial life.

That hasn't dissuaded these Harvard researchers, though. In the paper, they suggest a range of possibilities, each more outlandish than the next.

First is that a "remnant form" of an ancient, highly advanced human civilization is still hanging around, observing us. Second is that an intelligent species evolved independently of humans in the distant past, possibly from "intelligent dinosaurs," and is now hiding their presence from us. Third is that these hidden occupants of Earth traveled here from another planet or time period. And fourth — please keep a straight face, everybody — is that these unknown inhabitants of Earth are "less technological than magical," which the researchers liken to "earthbound angels."

UFO sightings of "craft and other phenomena (e.g., 'orbs') appearing to enter/exit potential underground access points, like volcanoes," they write, could be evidence that these cryptoterrestrials may not be drawn to these spots, but actually reside in underground or underwater bases.

The paper quotes former House Representative Mike Gallagher, who suggested last year that one explanation for the UFO sightings might be "an ancient civilization that’s just been hiding here, for all this time, and is suddenly showing itself right now," following Grusch's testimony.

The researchers didn't stop there, even suggesting that these cryptoterrestrials may take on different, non-human primate or even reptile forms.

Beyond residing deep underground, they even speculate that this mysterious species could even be concealing themselves on the Moon or have mastered the art of blending in as human beings, a folk theory that has inspired countless works of science fiction.

Another explanation, as put forward by controversial Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, suggests that other ancient civilizations may have lived on "planets like Mars or Earth" but a "billion years apart and hence were not aware of each other."

Of course, these are all "far-fetched" hypotheses, as the scientists admit, and deserve to be regarded with plenty of skepticism.

"We entertain them here because some aspects of UAP are strange enough that they seem to call for unconventional explanations," the paper reads.

"It may be exceedingly improbable, but hopefully this paper has shown it should nevertheless be kept on the table as we seek to understand the ongoing empirical mystery of UAP," the researchers conclude.

More on UFOs: New Law Would Force Government to Declassify Every UFO Document
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