Obama on Skip Gates and Racial Profiling

At an otherwise snooze fest of a presser devoid of….well news, President Barack Obama offered a few candid remarks about racial profiling that may wind up overshadowing anything having to do with the debate over a public option or how to contain the rising cost of health care premiums. In responding to a question from Lyn Sweet of the Chicago Tribune about what the arrest of Harvard University scholar Henry Louis “Skip” Gates says about race relations in American society, the president was surprisingly pointed in his criticism of the Cambridge police.

The former civil rights lawyer said he thought “the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home” and that “we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

President Obama also sought to disabuse people of the notion that his win in November 2008 or even that of Governor Deval Patrick in Massachuettes in 2006 means we now live in a so-called “post-racial” society where racism is dead when he asserted that there is “indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately. And that is a sign, an example of how, you know, race remains a factor in the society.”

He also said, “I am standing here as testimony to the progress that’s been made. And yet the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, this still haunts us.”

Watch his response:

Not Quite Post-Racial

From the New York Times:

Few groups conducted public polls on the issue as it faded in recent years, and the results from those that did reveal a consistent ambivalence, said Michael Dimock, a pollster with the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

When asked a question about “affirmative action or preferential treatment for minorities,” the public has consistently opposed the idea by a margin of two to one. But when asked about “affirmative action programs designed to help women and minorities,” an even bigger majority has supported them.

….. the election of Mr. Obama does not appear to have changed either result.

So I guess we are not quite the post racial society that so many people thought we were after the November election.

I bet once conservatives find their voice in opposing Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court its likely that they will attempt to portray her as a quotas obsessed affirmative action baby not worthy of seat on the high court even as they admit that “at least on paper, she has professional qualifications” to serve.

Judging Words and Personal Experience

Yesterday White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s remarks in a 2001 speech – that the right has dishonestly pounced on – a “poor choice words. ” Of course, its a predictable turn of events considering how much of the media does not do well with context and nuance. Plus, the White House probably wants her speech to be less of and less of an issue heading into the confirmation hearings. At any event, CNN.com has a great piece by Sherrilyn A. Ifill, a civil rights lawyer and law professor, explaining how the experiences of judges affect their approach to judicial decision-making.

Money quote:

Justice Thomas is the perfect example of how hard it can be for a judge to lay aside the personal experiences that shape his worldview. His views about the affirmative action cases that come before him are shaped quite clearly by what he regards as the self-sufficient dignity of his hard-working grandfather and the humiliation he says he felt when others believed his scholarly accomplishments were the result of affirmative action.

White judges are also shaped by their background and experiences. They needn’t ever speak of it, simply because their whiteness and gender insulates them from the presumption of partiality and bias that is regularly attached to women judges and judges of color when it comes to matters of race and gender.

Only a judge who is conscious and fully engaged with the reality of how her experiences may bear on her approach to the facts of a case, or sense of social justice, or vision of constitutional interpretation, should be entrusted to sit on the most influential and powerful court in our nation.

Too often we have allowed ourselves to be placated and charmed by fantasies about umpire judges calling “balls and strikes,” without ever asking which league the game is being played in or whether the umpire was standing in the best position to see the play. We forget that when deciding whether a batter checked his swing, the homeplate umpire will routinely ask for the alternative perspective from the first or third base umpire before calling a “swing and a miss” a strike.

Justice Ginsberg on Foreign Law

From Jefferey Toobin at the New Yorker:

It looks like Harold Koh, President Obama’s nominee for legal adviser at the State Department, may turn out to be the first real confirmation fight in the new Administration. The controversy has been mentioned in a handful of newspapers, but there’s plenty of Internet fire on the anti-Koh, and pro-Koh, side.

The heart of the attack on Koh, who is now the dean of Yale Law School, is that he believes in “transnationalism,” which purportedly is the notion that American courts should honor and apply the laws of other nations in our courts.

I wonder if the so-called controversy over Koh’s transnationalism can be explained away by simply saying that if citing international law is good enough for the Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, then it should be good enough for a legal adviser to the U.S. State Department. The Court has cited international law, which is not the same as being bound by it, in cases involving gay rights and the death penalty and the sky did not fall, though it did anger the right.

Adam Liptak reported in the NYT on Saturday that Justice Ruth Ginsberg thinks the debate concerning international is sorta ridiculous.

In her remarks, Justice Ginsburg discussed a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court concerning the use of torture to obtain information from people suspected of terrorism.

“The police think that a suspect they have apprehended knows where and when a bomb is going to go off,” she said, describing the question presented in the case. “Can the police use torture to extract that information? And in an eloquent decision by Aharon Barak, then the chief justice of Israel, the court said: ‘Torture? Never.’ ”

The message of the decision, Justice Ginsburg said, was “that we could hand our enemies no greater victory than to come to look like that enemy in our disregard for human dignity.” Then she asked, “Now why should I not read that opinion and be affected by its tremendous persuasive value?”

My sentiments exactly.

Side note: Toobin, apparently has not been following the battles over President Obama’s other executive nominees fight that closely, since he seems to think that Koh would be the first real confirmation fight.
Dawn Johnsen, Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, has come under attack from the far right for being a lawyer for NARAL at one point and her unsparing criticism of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and use of torture to extract intelligence information from detainees. Republicans are threatening to filibuster her nomination.

Another nominee, Thomas Saenz, was in the pipeline, though never formally announced, to be Obama’s top civil rights enforcer at the Justice Department until the anti-immigrant right sunk his nomination for his work on successfully challenging local ordinances banning day laborers from city streets and of California’s Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot measure that prevented undocumented immigrants from taking advantage of certain social services.

NYT: Obama to Push Immigration Reform This Year

This could be risky if it is not done right since the anti-immigrant right has been waiting for this. The last time comprehensive immigration reform came up in the Senate in June 2007 we got clobbered on cloture by the score of 46 yeas to 53 nays. Of course, you cannot discount the fact that the bill was being pushed by an deeply unpopular president on a reluctant Congress in different political environment. But still its something to think about.

At any rate, Julia Preston at the NYT says once the CIR bill drops it will feature many of the familiar elements that Obama campaign on:

In broad outlines, officials said, the Obama administration favors legislation that would bring illegal immigrants into the legal system by recognizing that they violated the law, and imposing fines and other penalties to fit the offense. The legislation would seek to prevent future illegal immigration by strengthening border enforcement and cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, while creating a national system for verifying the legal immigration status of new workers.

I really hope that does not mean reviving E-Verify or the no-match stuff. Those policies just don’t work. But I do like the fact that the administration is at least signaling they will push some version of CIR this year. It’ll be interesting to see if certain members of Congress will embrace their inner Tom Tancredo on this one or get on the right side of history.

Unemployed and Uninsured

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in March, the economy had a net loss of 663,000 jobs and unemployment rose from 8.1 to 8.5 percent. The number of unemployed persons swelled from 12.5 million in February to 13.2 million in March 2009, that’s more than the combined population of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

By contrast, at the beginning of the recession in December of 2007, the unemployment rate was at 5 percent representing a somewhat tolerable 7.7 million people out of work.

Of course, while its true that almost everyone is feeling the crunch, the unemployment situation has not affected everyone equally.

• African Americans had the highest rate of unemployment in March 2009 with 13.3 percent, which is not much different from the 13.4 percent in February 2009, but still representing a sharp increase from the 9 percent in December of 2007.
• Latinos had the second highest unemployment rate in March 2009 with 11.4 percent up from the 10.9 percent in February. In December 2007, the unemployment rate for Latinos was 6.3 percent.
• White unemployment in March 2009 was 7.9 percent up from 7.3 percent the previous month and a sharp increase from the 4.4 percent in December 2007.
• Asians were the only racial group that saw an improvement in their unemployment numbers for March which was at 6.4 percent down from 6.9 percent in February, but still higher than the 3.7 percent (not seasonally adjusted) in December 2007

Given the prevalence of job-based health care, more unemployed people almost certainly means more uninsured people. The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured found that nationally, a 1 percentage point rise in unemployment results in 1.1 million more uninsured and 1 million more enrollees in Medicaid and SCHIP.

So, its likely that the number of uninsured people has climbed to 50 million, since a 2008 U.S. Census Bureau report found that number of uninsured people has grown from 45 million in 2005 to 47 million in 2006 with nearly 11 percent of all whites uninsured compared to more than 20 percent of all African Americans and 34 percent of all Hispanics.

What about Immigration?

From Feet in Two Worlds:

While Obama’s voter registration drive will target Americans all of backgrounds, the Obama campaign has previously pledged 20 million dollars on Latino outreach efforts including voter registration and paid media. The campaign has 400 Latino organizers and is training hundreds of volunteers to increase turnout among Latinos in key battleground states. In New Mexico alone, where an estimated 40,000 registered Latino voters didn’t got to the polls in 2004, Figueroa said the campaign has 29 field offices staffed by Latinos.

As interesting as that is, we are still left with the question why very few at the convention have said anything about immigration and hope to win over Latino voters. According to a December 2007 Pew Hispanic Center poll, 53 percent of all Latinos worry about being deported mainly because of harsher immigration enforcement measures, 75 percent of all Latinos disapprove of workplace raids, and 64 percent of all Latinos said the debate over immigration policy and the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill have made life more difficult for them to live in the U.S.

And ever since mid-2005 more than 60 percent of all Americans have consistently said immigration is a good thing for the country.

Yet even with this summer’s newspapers filled with news about raids across the nation causing people to flee into the shadows and disrupting families, factory workers being exploited at meat packing plants, detainees dying in ICE custody, so little has been said about immigration at the Democratic Convention in Denver.

Its as if Democrats feel as if they can stay mum on the topic and still win over Latino voters simply because so many Republicans and other conservatives are willing to race bait the immigration issue. I realize that Barack Obama has been polling well among Latino voters lately, and thereby creating less of an incentive to be as forceful in his support for comprehensive immigration reform, and path to citizenship in particular, but the Dems cannot afford to maintain this silence and still energize Latino voters. That’s just not going to do it in November against McCain.

Hispanics Moving to Obama’s Camp

The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.
-Hillary Clinton campaign pollster Sergio Bendixen, New Yorker, Jan 21, 2008

As Hova once said allow me to point out the bounce.

I suppose not everyone’s crystal ball works in the same way.

Check out the polling data and analysis from Gallup by clicking here.