Citizen Cartwright

Trump’s Justice Department on school integration

Last week, the Justice Department lifted a school desegregation order in Louisiana, calling its continued existence a “historical wrong” and suggesting that others dating to the Civil Rights Movement should be reconsidered.

Civil rights activists say many orders have been only loosely enforced in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean problems are solved, says Johnathan Smith, who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration.

“It probably means the opposite — that the school district remains segregated. And in fact, most of these districts are now more segregated today than they were in 1954,” says Smith, who is now chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law.

Last year was the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. “It signaled the end legalized racial segregation in the schools of the United States,” says the National Archives in its summary of the ruling. 

The ruling was so important in American history and progress that the Archives includes its summary among its Milestone Documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the $7.2 million check for the purchase of Alaska from Russia, Thomas Edison’s patent application for the light bulb, the surrender agreement signed by the German Army 80 years ago today.

Last year, an Associated Press analysis found that while schools in recent decades have grown far more diverse, they are, by some measures, more segregated.

On one hand, the number of African American and white students who go to school almost exclusively with students of the same race is at an all-time low, AP said.

On the other hand, “huge shares of students of color still go to schools with almost no white students. Hispanic segregation is worse now than in the 1960s. The nation’s largest school districts, in particular, have seen a surge in segregation since the 1990s, according to research from Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project,” AP said.

More than 130 school systems are under Justice Department desegregation orders, AP says, citing records in a court filing this year. The vast majority are in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, with smaller numbers in states including Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. Some other districts continue to be under separate desegregation agreements with the Education Department.

Last week’s Justice Department dismissal has raised alarms among some people who fear it could undo decades of progress. Research on districts that have been released from orders has found that many experienced greater increases in racial segregation than those under court orders, AP says.

“In very many cases, schools quite rapidly resegregate, and there are new civil rights concerns for students,” says Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation who studies educational inequity.

Good news on clean energy, wildlife conservation, AI

There’s lots of global good news in this week’s Fix the News that’s free to read. 

Among the items behind the paywall: 

— Clean energy sources generated more than half of all U.S. electricity supplies for the first time in March, Reuters reports.

— The world’s largest six-lane wildlife crossing is being constructed across California’s Highway 101 in Los Angeles County, to enable local wildlife to access their natural habitat. The crossing is expected to become a global model for urban wildlife conservation, says Interesting Engineering.

— Artificial intelligence is helping to develop more resilient crops. It typically takes 15 years to develop a new crop, but AI-aided breeding can complete the same task within three years at an 80 percent lower cost, according to The Economic Times. A faster-growing broccoli is expected to be sold in U.S. supermarkets this year. And work is being done to develop cotton and sugarcane that use less water. 

Good news on coal, solar, innovation

There are about 20 free-to-read items in this week’s Fix the News. Among the items behind the paywall:

— Twenty-three countries have reduced their plans for building coal-fired power plants and 35 nations have eliminated coal from their plans entirely in the decade since the Paris Agreement on climate change, reports CarbonBrief. And China and India, the world’s largest coal consumers, have reduced their planned coal capacity by more than 60 percent.

 

As the fossil fuel that emits the most carbon dioxide when burned, coal long has been viewed by many as requiring a rapid phaseout, Carbon Brief says.

— “Despite state leadership opposed to climate action,” Florida passed California last year in new utility-scale solar capacity plugged into its grid, says Canary Media. 

— By twisting stainless steel like a towel, Chinese researchers have doubled its strength, making it as much as 10,000 times more resistant to metal fatigue and strong enough for aerospace uses, reports the website Interesting Engineering. The study is published in the journal Science.

Being on this list can make a condo harder to sell

Mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae has a list of condo associations it thinks don’t have adequate property insurance or need to make critical building repairs, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

 

Being on the list can make it harder for buyers to get a mortgage.

 

Fannie Mae greatly expanded the list after the Surfside condo collapse in Florida in 2021 killed 98 people, according to lenders and real estate agents. On top of that, it’s becoming more expensive for condo associations to afford adequate insurance coverage, the WSJ says.

 

The number of properties that fail to meet Fannie Mae’s standards has increased to 5,175 this month from a few hundred before Surfside, according to Stephen Marcus, a condo lawyer at the Boston law firm Allcock & Marcus. Like other industry legal and finance executives, Marcus has access to the list of properties that don’t meet the criteria.

 

Fannie Mae and its sister organization Freddie Mac don’t make loans, but they buy about half of the country’s home loans from lenders and package them to sell to investors, then guarantee payments on them. Loans that meet Fannie or Freddie’s underwriting standards, known as conforming loans, can be less expensive and require lower down payments than other mortgages. 

 

Florida has more than 1,400 developments on the list, in part because of a strict condo safety law enacted following the Surfside disaster. 

 

The next four states at the top of the list — California, Colorado, Hawaii and Texas — are prone to natural disasters and restrictive insurance policies, the WSJ says.

Trump’s funding freeze, federal employee resignation offer

Let’s start this morning with deep breathing to calm our nervous systems. Here is a guide to 4-7-8 breathing from the Cleveland Clinic. (I personally find this very helpful.)

 

On Tuesday, “Democratic and Republican leaders alike voiced concern about the pause in federal dollars ‘creating chaos’ and ‘jeopardizing the financial stability’ of their states, says The New York Times.

 

For example, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a conservative Republican and Trump ally, asked the Trump administration in a joint statement with top state officials, “to develop a responsible runway to untangle us from any unnecessary and egregious policies without jeopardizing the financial stability of the state.”

 

Then U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan blocked the funding freeze minutes before it was scheduled to take effect, says The Associated Press. The administrative stay was prompted by a lawsuit brought by nonprofit groups that receive federal money.

 

And minutes after that, Democratic attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia filed their own lawsuit seeking to block and permanently prevent the administration from cutting off federal funding, AP says.

 

The freeze “appears to plant the seeds of a potential Supreme Court fight over how much power a president has to refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated, a tactic that lawmakers sharply curtailed under President Richard Nixon,” says a separate Times article.

 

Meanwhile, federal employees received an email Tuesday offering them a “deferred resignation program.” The details don’t seem very clear, and employees only have until Feb. 6 to accept the offer. 

 

American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley said in a statement: “The number of civil servants hasn’t meaningfully changed since 1970, but there are more Americans than ever who rely on government services. Purging the federal government of dedicated career federal employees will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government. This offer should not be viewed as voluntary. Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”

Some of the thousands of state laws that took effect Jan. 1

At least 20 states increased the statewide minimum wage — the highest in Washington state at $16.66 an hour, followed by California at $16.50, says NPR.

 

And gun safety activists have been touting the wave of newly passed laws to educate consumers on the risks of gun ownership and how to securely store firearms, says USA Today.

 

Iowa and Louisiana are joining 12 other states that charge a flat individual income tax.

 

Kentucky is the latest state to legalize medical marijuana.

 

Minnesota is the latest state to increase transparency when purchasing tickets to concerts, sporting events and other big events.

 

Other new laws:

 

— New York is the first state to offer all private-sector pregnant workers 20 hours of paid leave a year for prenatal care

 

— California says schools can no longer require teachers to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents

 

— Illinois police are required to undergo autism awareness training

 

— Florida is banning children under 14 from having social media accounts

 

— California is imposing harsher sentences for large-scale "smash-and-grab" retail theft

 

— Texas no longer requires car safety inspections

 

— Colorado says all eggs sold in the state must come from a cage-free facility

GOP takes control of federal government; states move to protect democracy

Republicans secured enough seats on Wednesday to retain their majority in the House, giving the GOP control of Congress after Republicans earlier took the Senate majority from Democrats.

 

"With hard-fought yet thin majorities, Republican leaders are envisioning a mandate to upend the federal government and swiftly implement Trump’s vision for the country,” says The Associated Press.

 

“When he returns to the White House, Trump will be working with a Republican Party that has been completely transformed by his 'Make America Great Again' movement and a Supreme Court dominated by conservative justices, including three that he appointed,” AP says.

 

However, “a highly functioning House is also far from guaranteed,” AP notes. “The past two years of Republican House control were defined by infighting as hardline conservative factions sought to gain influence and power by openly defying their party leadership.” 

 

And “the right wing of the party is ascendant and ambitious on the heels of Trump’s election victory,” AP says.

 

At the same time, the Republican majority depends on a small group of lawmakers who won tough elections by running as moderates, and it remains to be seen whether they'll be onboard with some of the most extreme proposals championed by Trump and his allies, says AP.

 

Meanwhile, as frequently happens, some states are gearing up to be a counterweight to federal action.

 

For example, the Democratic governors of Illinois and Colorado will co-chair a new “non-partisan” coalition of the nation's governors committed to protecting the “state-level institutions of democracy.” 

 

Governors Safeguarding Democracy will be supported by a network of senior staff designated by each leader and by GovAct, an organization “championing fundamental freedoms.”

 

GovAct is advised by a bipartisan board that includes former GOP Gov. Arne Carlson of Minnesota, former Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and former GOP Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts.

Protecting mobile home owners from private equity, others

Manufactured homes are one of the most affordable options for home ownership in the United States. But typically, homeowners don’t own the land under their home.

 

And as you and I have discussed before, investors have increasingly been buying up mobile home parks, driving rents up and residents out.

 

Between 2015 and 2022, about 800,000 manufactured housing sites were sold to private equity investors and real estate investment trusts, more than a quarter of the total estimated number of sites across the country, according to an analysis by George McCarthy, president of the nonprofit Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

 

Now states including Maine, Connecticut and New York have passed laws to require mobile home park owners to provide advance notice to residents if they intend to sell, giving the community members a chance to buy it themselves, says The New York Times.

 

A bipartisan Senate bill would offer a tax credit to manufactured home park owners who sell the land to residents rather than to outside investors.

 

Housing advocates say that across the nation, government intervention increasingly is necessary to create and sustain affordable housing. 

 

“The government needs to do more to correct the power imbalance between property owners and tenants, especially in manufactured housing communities where residents are particularly vulnerable to predatory and abusive practices,” says Lisa Sitkin, a supervising attorney at the nonprofit National Housing Law Project. 

 

Some owners of mobile home parks question the fairness of a law that can complicate the selling process, and some industry groups say institutional investors can be helpful to the communities by providing resources and expertise.

Supreme Court allows Virginia purge of voter registrations

The court’s conservative majority left in place on Wednesday Virginia’s purge of voter registrations that the state says is intended to stop people who aren't U.S. citizens from voting, The Associated Press and other media report.

 

Over the dissents of the three liberal justices, the court granted an emergency appeal from Virginia’s Republican administration led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. 

 

The court’s one-paragraph order gave no reasoning for the justices’ decision, as is often the case with emergency appeals, Scotusblog says.

 

Virginia isn't a swing state, but the case underscores a baseless theory of former President Trump and his allies, who've cast voting by undocumented immigrants as a threat in an effort to stoke doubt about the election outcome, says The New York Times.

 

It's illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and studies have found that instances of it happening are extremely rare, the Times notes.

 

The court acted on Virginia’s appeal after a federal judge found that the state illegally purged more than 1,600 voter registrations in the past two months. A federal appeals court previously had allowed the judge’s order to remain in effect.

 

Youngkin says voters who believe they were improperly removed from the voting rolls still can vote in the election because Virginia has same-day registration.

 

Civil rights groups, backed by the Biden administration, had challenged the plan, saying it had led to some legal voters being removed from the rolls. 

 

The state's plan flagged people for removal if they checked a box on a Department of Motor Vehicles form declaring they aren't citizens or if they left it blank, says NBC News.

 

Rina Shaw, 22, of Chesterfield, Va., says she was born in Virginia, has lived in the state her entire life and has never left the United States. She says she may have forgotten to check a citizenship box on a form when she was updating her voter registration at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles while getting her learner’s permit.

 

The National Voter Registration Act requires a 90-day “quiet period” before elections for the maintenance of voter rolls so legitimate voters aren't removed from the rolls by bureaucratic errors or last-minute mistakes that can't be quickly corrected.

 

Virginia maintained that the NVRA’s “quiet period” provision doesn't apply because the law doesn't bar the removal of noncitizens who weren't eligible to vote in the first place, Scotusblog says.

 

Wendy Weiser, vice president for Democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, says, “For any eligible voter in Virginia who may be impacted by the purge, please use same-day registration to cast a vote in this election. Or call 866-OUR-VOTE if you need assistance.”

 

In a similar lawsuit in Alabama, a federal judge this month ordered the state to restore eligibility for more than 3,200 voters who'd been deemed ineligible noncitizens. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that about 2,000 of the 3,251 voters who were made inactive actually were legally registered citizens, AP says.

A citizen’s guide to defending democracy

“We can be absolutely certain that an attempt will be made to steal the 2024 election if Kamala Harris wins,” says Anne Applebaum, a longtime reporter, Pulitizer Prize-winning author and expert on authoritarianism, in The Atlantic. (The italics are hers.)

 

"This prospect can feel overwhelming: Many people are not just upset about the possibility of a lost or stolen election, but oppressed by a sensation of helplessness,” she says. "This feeling — I can’t do anything; my actions don’t matter — is precisely the feeling that autocratic movements seek to instill in citizens, as Peter Pomerantsev and I explain in our recent podcast, Autocracy in America. But you can always do something. If you need advice about what that might be, here is an updated citizen’s guide to defending democracy.”

 

Organizations and websites:

 

— Register to vote, and make sure everyone you know has done so. Vote.gov has a list of the rules in all 50 states.

 

— Vote early and in person if you can. Here is a list of the early-voting rules for every state.

 

— If you or anybody you know has trouble voting, for any reason, call 866-OUR-VOTE, a hotline set up by Election Protection, a nonpartisan national coalition led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

 

If you have time to do more, the coalition is looking for lawyers, law students, and paralegals to help out if multiple, simultaneous challenges to the election occur at the county level. People are needed to serve as poll monitors and to staff the hotline.

 

— If you live in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, you can volunteer to help All Voting Is Local. It's recruiting legal professionals and poll monitors. If you don’t live in one of these states, you can make a financial contribution.

 

— Wherever you live, you can contact Power the Polls about helping to staff your local polling place.

 

— You can volunteer to give people a ride to vote. A website for Democrats offering or needing rides is Rideshare2Vote.

 

And Lyft is offering discounts on rides to the polls on Election Day.

 

— If you see a long voting line or if you find yourself in one, report it to Pizza to the Polls, and the group will send over free pizza.

 

— Organizations to get information from and donate to include Protect Democracy, the States United Democracy Center, the Brennan Center for Justice, Democracy Docket (for Democrats) and Republicans for the Rule of Law.

 

By the way, Applebaum urged continued support for Ukraine as she accepted a German peace prize on Sunday, saying pacifism in the face of aggression can be appeasement.