Trump made Harmeet Dhillon, an ultra-conservative opponent of accepted civil rights law, the head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and she swiftly withdrew the DOJ from numerous consent decrees with law enforcement agencies across the country. These consent decrees were the result of investigations — and, in some cases, litigation — that the Department of Justice bought on behalf of individuals whose rights were violated by police.
Dhillon’s withdraw from those agreements wasn’t just a disregard for DOJ staff and the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect federally guaranteed rights. It also was a dog whistle to police to expect wide latitude and little oversight from a president who signed an executive order this year that he said would “unleash” the country’s police.
Trump, who has continued to push the bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, signed a March executive order called “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which, among other things, demands that states implement voting procedures that require an ID proving American citizenship to vote. Voting rights advocates have long resisted that idea because many people have difficulty obtaining the type of identification the executive order requires.
That same order directs federal agencies to share private voter data with states and ties the receipt of federal funds to compliance. Not only do the provisions of this order threaten to disenfranchise millions of American voters — particularly Black people and other people of color, women, low-income voters and naturalized citizens — the measure itself is an unprecedented, and arguably unconstitutional, siphoning of power to the executive branch. More
Anthony L. Fisher, MS NOW - The first words in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights are “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Many social conservatives — who otherwise consider themselves “originalists” when it comes to reading the text of the Constitution — have long argued that the Founders didn’t really mean those words and that they actually intended for America to be a Christian nation.
That’s nonsense, of course. No less an authority than Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “wall of separation between the church and state,” and he made the argument in practical, not philosophical terms. Jefferson and James Madison both argued that forcing anyone to pay taxes to a government that was allied with a church or faith they didn’t belong to would deprive them of their religious liberty.
So the separation of church and state actually protects religious liberty and protects us from being compelled by the government to finance someone else’s religion. Sounds pretty American to me!
That’s not how the Trump administration appears to see it, though. Apparently still fighting the fictitious “War on Christmas” and continuing its tradition of trampling on the Constitution, the administration broke with the long-standing American government tradition of sticking with secular Santa-and-reindeer or jingle bells imagery in its official Christmas messaging. Instead, several administration figures and agencies posted overtly religious Christian messages from their official government accounts on Christmas Day. More
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