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Post by Warrigal on Jan 31, 2018 20:33:56 GMT -5
Should this non compliance result if court ordered contempt of court charges?
www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/joseph-scarnati-gerrymandering-pennsylvania_us_5a723db6e4b05253b27550c2
The top Republican in the Pennsylvania Senate told the state’s Supreme Court on Wednesday that he is refusing to follow a court order asking lawmakers to turn over data to help correct a gerrymandered congressional map.
The letter from Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati was the latest move Republicans have made to slow down the process of redrawing the congressional map, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled was in violation of the state constitution earlier this month.
The court is giving lawmakers and Gov. Tom Wolf (D) until Feb. 15 to come up with a new map. If they can’t agree on one by then, the court has appointed a special master to get one in place so that the state’s scheduled election primaries can run smoothly. To help the special master draw a map, the court asked lawmakers to provide data on Pennsylvania municipalities and precincts by noon on Wednesday.
But Scarnati said he would refuse to comply. He said the court was not giving lawmakers a realistic time frame or guidance to redraw the map and was trying to “usurp” the right the U.S. Constitution gave them to draw congressional lines.
“In light of the unconstitutionality of the Court’s Orders and the Court’s plain intent to usurp the General Assembly’s constitutionally delegated role of drafting Pennsylvania’s congressional district plan, Senator Scarnati will not be turning over any data identified in the Court’s Orders,” Brian Paszamant, Scarnati’s attorney, wrote in a letter to the court.
Paszamant also said Scarnati did not have some of the data the court was asking for.Scarnati and House Speaker Michael Turzai (R) argue that the U.S. Constitution only grants lawmakers, not state courts, the ability to draw congressional districts. They’re appealing the ruling to the United States Supreme Court. Experts say the appeal is a long shot, and lawyers for the Democratic voters who challenged the map say there’s no basis for the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case because it only involves a challenge under state law.
Benjamin Geffen, an attorney at the Public Interest Law Center, a Philadelphia-based group that represented the plaintiffs in the case, said the court had clearly invited Scarnati and other lawmakers to participate in drawing a new map.
“It appears he’s not willing to participate in the court-ordered process of replacing the unconstitutional congressional plan with a constitutional one,” he told HuffPost. “We will certainly be prepared to submit a proposal on Feb. 15 if the legislature and governor don’t reach an agreement before then, consistent with the court’s order. If Senator Scarnati chooses not to participate in that process, well the court’s still gonna have plenty of maps to consider.”
Geffen said it wasn’t clear if Scarnati had any data that the court couldn’t get from other parties.
Something has to be done about the gerrymander if 15 out of 18 seats go to one party when the number of voters in the other party are actually in the majority. Surely that is unconstitutional. It is certainly unfair.
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Post by QuickSilver on Feb 1, 2018 8:49:42 GMT -5
I think the events of this last year have demonstrated that Republicans value the "rule of law" ONLY when it suits them and does not impinge on their relentless push for power and advancing their agenda.. No longer the "law and order" party.. but rather the "lawless" party..
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Post by robusta on Feb 1, 2018 9:00:49 GMT -5
Seems to me that close of business February 15 this Scarnati should be going to jail for contempt. But then again Politicians are not subject to the same rules us mere mortals are.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 1, 2018 9:47:07 GMT -5
The Republicans know they are going to win this fight in the end. Because they control the US Supreme court by a 5-4 margin. All they have to do is stall until the Supreme court rules in their favor, which it will.
www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-essential-washington-updates-supreme-court-signals-it-might-block-1517265413-htmlstory.html
What really disgusts me about this is that the Obummer and the Democrats should have been able to change the balance of the court when Scalia died. But they allowed the Republicans to cheat them out of that appointment.
Seriously if you are waiting for the Democrats to make a comeback in 2018 and 2020, and save the day, you are in for a big disappointment. The Republicans win because they play hardball, and when they do, the Democrats fold up like a cheap suit.
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Post by QuickSilver on Feb 1, 2018 9:55:15 GMT -5
"Obummer" should have called in the Military.. (he is the CiC after all) and had a special forces team storm the Senate floor.. capture Mitch McConnell and tortured him until he allowed Merrick Garland to be interviewed and a vote brought to the floor. THEN if the majority Republican Senate did not confirm him.. have them all lined up and shot in front of the Capital... or at least enough of them so that the Democrats would have had the majority in order to confirm Garland... We all know that Bernie certainly would have done this... gimme a break...
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Post by rebecca2013 on Feb 1, 2018 10:23:55 GMT -5
It really is beginning to feel like the Götterdämmerung of American Democracy
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Post by nkat on Feb 1, 2018 10:26:40 GMT -5
Shame they could not of done this! Dems got robbed!
NKat
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Post by smitty45 on Feb 1, 2018 10:34:53 GMT -5
If it makes it to the US Supreme Court I hope one thing happens that never has. Rule according to the Constitution as it was written leaving all personal bias's on the coat rack.
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Post by QuickSilver on Feb 1, 2018 10:41:29 GMT -5
Shame they could not of done this! Dems got robbed! NKat Perhaps some of this is our fault..
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Post by Deleted on Feb 1, 2018 11:59:14 GMT -5
Shame they could not of done this! Dems got robbed! NKat Perhaps some of this is our fault..
That brings up another point. It is my opinion that we will not see any substantive change in the status quo until the ruling class fears for their lives. In the case of the supreme court fight Obama should have been using the bully pulpit to rally the public to action. McConnell should not have been allowed to feel safe in his world until he allowed a vote. Everywhere he went he should have been met with angry mobs clamoring for his head.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 1, 2018 12:21:17 GMT -5
If it makes it to the US Supreme Court I hope one thing happens that never has. Rule according to the Constitution as it was written leaving all personal bias's on the coat rack. You mean that document written by those rich racist white guys over 250 years ago? Where they say everybody is equal while at the same time they were slaughtering the Indians for their land, enslaving black people, and only allowing white male property owners to vote?
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Post by nkat on Feb 1, 2018 12:47:05 GMT -5
I guess those men had to start somewhere! Was not right but it was a start.
NKat
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Post by nkat on Feb 1, 2018 12:54:12 GMT -5
Fact Check History 9 Facts About Slavery They Don't Want You to Know A widely circulated list of historical "facts" about slavery dwells on the participation of non-whites as owners and traders of slaves in America.
19K
CLAIM A circulating list of nine historical "facts" about slavery accurately details the participation of non-whites in slave ownership and trade in America.
RATING MIXTURE ORIGIN One of the less well known aspects of the history of slavery is how many and how often non-whites owned and traded slaves in early America. Free black slave holders could be found at one time or another “in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery,” historian R. Halliburton Jr. observed. That black people bought and sold other black people raises “vexing questions” for 21st-century Americans like African-American writer Henry Louis Gates Jr., who writes that it betrays class divisions that have always existed within the black community. For others, it’s an excuse to deflect the shared blame for the institution of slavery in America away from white people.
In the latter vein, a “9 Facts About Slavery They Don’t Want You to Know” meme lays out a mixture of true, false and misleading historical claims. We’ll address each one in turn below:
9 Facts About Slavery The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson.
Possibly true. The wording of the statement is important. Anthony Johnson was not the first slave owner in American history, but he was, according to historians, among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a servant legally sanctioned by a court.
A former indentured servant himself, Anthony Johnson was a “free negro” who owned a 250-acre farm in Virginia during the 1650s, with five indentured servants under contract to him. One of them, a black man named John Casor, claimed that his term of service had expired years earlier and Johnson was holding him illegally. In 1654, a civil court found that Johnson in fact owned Casor’s services for life, an outcome historian R Halliburton Jr. calls “one of the first known legal sanctions of slavery — other than as a punishment for crime.”
North Carolina’s largest slave holder in 1860 was a black plantation owner named William Ellison.
False. William Ellison was a very wealthy black plantation owner and cotton gin manufacturer who lived in South Carolina (not North Carolina). According to the 1860 census (in which his surname was listed as “Ellerson”), he owned 63 black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina, but far from the largest overall slave holder in the state.
American Indians owned thousands of black slaves.
True. Historian Tiya Miles provided this snapshot of the Native American ownership of black slaves at the turn of the 19th century for Slate magazine in January 2016:
Miles places the number of enslaved people held by Cherokees at around 600 at the start of the 19th century and around 1,500 at the time of westward removal in 1838-9. (Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, she said, held around 3,500 slaves, across the three nations, as the 19th century began.) “Slavery inched its way slowly into Cherokee life,” Miles told me. “When a white man moved into a Native location, usually to work as a trader or as an Indian agent, he would own [African] slaves.” If such a person also had a child with a Native woman, as was not uncommon, the half-European, half-Native child would inherit the enslaved people (and their children) under white law, as well as the right to use tribal lands under tribal law. This combination put such people in a position to expand their wealth, eventually operating large farms and plantations. In 1830 there were 3,775 free black people who owned 12,740 black slaves.
Approximately true, according to historian R. Halliburton Jr.:
There were approximately 319,599 free blacks in the United States in 1830. Approximately 13.7 per cent of the total black population was free. A significant number of these free blacks were the owners of slaves. The census of 1830 lists 3,775 free Negroes who owned a total of 12,760 slaves. Many black slaves were allowed to hold jobs, own businesses, and own real estate.
Somewhat true. There were exceptions, but generally speaking — especially after 1750, by which time slave codes had been entered into the law books in most of the American colonies — black slaves were not legally permitted to own property or businesses. From the Oxford Companion to American Law (2002):
Under these early codes, slaves had virtually no legal rights IN most areas they could be executed for crimes that were not capital offenses for whites. Their testimony was restricted in legal cases and could not be used either for or against whites. Trials of slaves were usually by special courts. Slaves could not own property, move about without consent of their owners, or legally marry. Brutal black-on-black slavery was common in Africa for thousands of years.
True, in the sense that the phenomenon of human beings enslaving other human beings goes back thousands of years, but not just among blacks, and not just in Africa.
Most slaves brought to America from Africa were purchased from black slave owners.
Sort of true. Historian Steven Mintz describes the situation more accurately in the introduction to his book African-American Voices: A Documentary Reader, 1619-1877:
Apologists for the African slave trade long argued that European traders did not enslave anyone: they simply purchased Africans who had already been enslaved and who otherwise would have been put to death. Thus, apologists claimed, the slave trade actually saved lives. Such claims represent a gross distortion of the facts. Some independent slave merchants did in fact stage raids on unprotected African villages and kidnap and enslave Africans. Most professional slave traders, however, set up bases along the west African coast where they purchased slaves from Africans in exchange for firearms and other goods. Before the end of the seventeenth century, England, France, Denmark, Holland, and Portugal had all established slave trading posts on the west African coast.
Yet to simply say that Europeans purchased people who had already been enslaved seriously distorts historical reality. While there had been a slave trade within Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, the massive European demand for slaves and the introduction of firearms radically transformed west and central African society. A growing number of Africans were enslaved for petty debts or minor criminal or religious offenses or following unprovoked raids on unprotected villages. An increasing number of religious wars broke out with the goal of capturing slaves. European weapons made it easier to capture slaves. Slavery was common for thousands of years.
True, as noted above — though how “common” slavery has been and what the specific nature of that slavery was has varied according to time and place.
White people ended legal chattel slavery.
It’s rather self-serving to claim that “white people” ended legal chattel slavery in the United States (much less ended chattel slavery, period), given that the overwhelming majority of blacks in the U.S. could not vote, could not run for political office, and, in every other way conceivable, were excluded from institutional power. Moreover, even as some white people were laboring to put an end to slavery, many others were fighting to preserve it.
Slavery was eliminated in America via the efforts of people of various ethnicities, including Caucasians, who took up the banner of the abolitionist movement. The names of the white leaders of that movement tend to be better known than those of the black leaders, among whom were David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, and many others. When Congress passed (and the states ratified) the 13th Amendment in 1865, it was the culmination of many years of work by that multi-racial movement.
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