Latest news with #LeadershipConferenceonCivilandHumanRights
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Sen. Cory Booker host a sit-in on Capitol steps over the GOP budget plan
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., hosted hundreds of supporters at the Capitol on Sunday, sitting on the steps in protest of Republicans' upcoming push to pass a budget reconciliation bill they hope will cut $1.5 trillion in federal spending. 'That bill, we believe, presents one of the greatest moral threats to our country that we've seen in terms of what it will do to providing food for the hungry, care for the elderly, services for the disabled, health care, health care for the sick and more,' Booker said at the beginning of the sit-in. Democrats have for months warned that House Republicans' budget blueprint would lead to over $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, a federal program that provides health insurance for low-income families. Booker and Jeffries spoke at the beginning of the sit-in, which began around 6 a.m., about their religious upbringings, saying they would usually be attending services on Sunday morning but instead were hosting the conversation on the Capitol steps. 'Martin Luther King said, 'Budgets are moral documents,' and that's the spirit we come here with this morning,' Booker said before he urged supporters to join the two men online or in person. The New Jersey senator called on supporters to 'give your own testimony to your moral urgency that you feel, to maybe your faith traditions or moral traditions that ... motivate you at this moment to speak out, maybe share your story of what the threat of this bill does to you and your lives.' Early in the day, Jeffries also pointed out that they were hosting the sit-in on Booker's birthday. After wishing the senator a happy birthday, the minority leader told him, 'I'm sure you didn't expect last year, when thinking about this birthday, that I would be your birthday date in this location, but this of course is the moment that we find ourselves in.' Jeffries also brought a message for House Republicans, saying, 'Enough. This is not America. We will continue to show up, speak up and stand up until we end this national nightmare.' Ahead of Monday, when congressional lawmakers will return from a two-week recess, Jeffries said Democrats were preparing to face 'an existential struggle to defeat Republican efforts to try to jam a very reckless budget down the throats of the American people.' Dozens joined Jeffries and Booker on the Capitol steps, where they sat in the sunshine for over nine hours speaking about their faith traditions and the upcoming budget fight. Some were rank-and-file supporters of congressional Democrats, while others were higher-profile progressive leaders, like Maya Wiley, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 'The [budget] cuts, when we're talking about cuts, people bleed and we should put names behind them,' Wiley told the crowd. 'You know, Sarah in South Dakota had a son who has seizures one to five times a day, had to quit her job to try to save her son. It is Medicaid that helps pay for her health care to do that. Or Jasmine in Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, with two kids, who was taking care of other people's children when she fell and became disabled, and it's Medicaid that was taking care of her.' Several faith leaders and fellow Democratic lawmakers, like Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., also spoke over the course of the sit-in, which was still ongoing Sunday afternoon. Booker is no stranger to speaking for hours in opposition to Republicans and the Trump administration. Earlier this month, he stood on the Senate floor and spoke for over 25 hours against the Trump administration, breaking the record for the longest speech in Senate history. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Court ruling further complicates Trump's anti-DEI push
President Trump's plans to rid the country's education system of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were thrown further into chaos this week when a judge ruled against the Education Department's directives. States, fiercely divided on the issue, were already dealing with a delayed certification deadline and murky enforcement mechanisms before federal Judge Landya McCafferty issued her preliminary injunction on Trump's anti-DEI measures. 'Thankfully, many schools and districts and colleges and universities have been waiting to see what would happen because they knew and understood that what they were being asked to do was blatantly unlawful and nonsensical,' said Liz King, senior director of education equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 'And so, hopefully this gives the assurance that schools need that they should not be bending to the whims of this administration,' King added. On Feb. 14, the Department of Education sent a 'Dear Colleague' letter to universities, saying they could risk losing federal funding if they do not get rid of DEI efforts. Weeks later, state education and K-12 district leaders were told they needed to certify their schools had no DEI programs or also risk losing federal funding. The Education Department also created a 'DEI portal' to allow parents and others to report programs or initiatives they feel are in violation of Trump's executive orders. All these efforts resulted in lawsuits and were blocked by three judges on Thursday, including two that were appointed by Trump. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, called the efforts unconstitutionally vague and said the letter did not 'delineate between a lawful DEI practice and an unlawful one.' The Education Department is likely to appeal the decision, with supporters encouraging it to get more specific when it does. 'As part of the appeal, my guess is that they are going to point […] at the actual practices that result in racial discrimination,' said Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman senior research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation. 'From teacher trainings to types of programs that compel or ask someone to state that they are oppressive based on their skin color or otherwise […] some sort of racial favoritism,' Butcher added. 'Frankly, it's a step in the process.' The Hill has reached out to the Department of Education for comment. The lack of clarity on DEI in schools has been an issue since Education Secretary Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing, where she was unable to say if classes focusing on Black history would be allowed under her leadership. In the case of the 'Dear Colleague' letter, the department had to send out a follow-up memo after some universities were unclear if the guidance meant student groups based on race or ethnicity were still allowed. Meanwhile, multiple blue states were openly refusing to certify that their schools were DEI-free. 'As noted at the outset, MDE [Minnesota Department of Education] has already provided the requisite guarantee that it has and will comply with Title VI and its implementing regulation, and that includes our assurance that we do and will comply with Supreme Court cases interpreting the same. We submit this letter to serve as our response to this specific request,' Minnesota wrote to the federal government. The Department of Education is seeking to expand on the 2023 affirmative action Supreme Court ruling that said universities could not take race into account in admissions, holding that the decision reaches beyond the student application process. 'Unfortunately, we have seen too many schools flout or outright violate these obligations, including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI,' Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, wrote in the K-12 certification letter. Federal funding only makes up around 10 percent of money that goes to K-12 schools, although lower-income districts get a bit more help. At universities, the Trump administration has shown it is not afraid to pull millions or even billions of dollars in federal funding from schools it alleges have committed civil rights violations, even before any investigation takes place. One of those schools, Harvard University, is suing the administration over funding cuts that were announced after it refused to bow to a list of demands from Trump, including eliminating DEI policies. The day after the suit was filed, the leaders of more than 100 colleges and universities, including Cornell, Tufts and Princeton, issued a joint letter condemning Trump's 'political interference' and 'coercive use of public research funding.' But as some colleges have lost funding, others have preemptively began dismantling some of their DEI efforts. The University of Michigan said last month it would be closing its DEI offices. 'I understand the fear […] They've basically been blackmailing institutions with federal funds. They've created deliberate chaos with the [executive orders] and vague instructions so that people are preemptively complying with things,' said Andrea Abrams, executive director of the Defending American Values Coalition. 'The reasons [they] are afraid are sound, but the reasons to be brave are also sound,' she added. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
26-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Court ruling further complicates Trump's anti-DEI push
President Trump's plans to rid the country's education system of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were thrown further into chaos this week when a judge ruled against the Education Department's directives. States, fiercely divided on the issue, were already dealing with a delayed certification deadline and murky enforcement mechanisms before federal Judge Landya McCafferty issued her preliminary injunction on Trump's anti-DEI measures. 'Thankfully, many schools and districts and colleges and universities have been waiting to see what would happen because they knew and understood that what they were being asked to do was blatantly unlawful and nonsensical,' said Liz King, senior director of education equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 'And so, hopefully this gives the assurance that schools need that they should not be bending to the whims of this administration,' King added. On Feb. 14, the Department of Education sent a 'Dear Colleague' letter to universities, saying they could risk losing federal funding if they do not get rid of DEI efforts. Weeks later, state education and K-12 district leaders were told they needed to certify their schools had no DEI programs or also risk losing federal funding. The Education Department also created a 'DEI portal' to allow parents and others to report programs or initiatives they feel are in violation of Trump's executive orders. All these efforts resulted in lawsuits and were blocked by three judges on Thursday, including two that were appointed by Trump. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, called the efforts unconstitutionally vague and said the letter did not 'delineate between a lawful DEI practice and an unlawful one.' The Education Department is likely to appeal the decision, with supporters encouraging it to get more specific when it does. 'As part of the appeal, my guess is that they are going to point […] at the actual practices that result in racial discrimination,' said Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman senior research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation. 'From teacher trainings to types of programs that compel or ask someone to state that they are oppressive based on their skin color or otherwise […] some sort of racial favoritism,' Butcher added. 'Frankly, it's a step in the process.' The Hill has reached out to the Department of Education for comment. The lack of clarity on DEI in schools has been an issue since Education Secretary Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing, where she was unable to say if classes focusing on Black history would be allowed under her leadership. In the case of the 'Dear Colleague' letter, the department had to send out a follow-up memo after some universities were unclear if the guidance meant student groups based on race or ethnicity were still allowed. Meanwhile, multiple blue states were openly refusing to certify that their schools were DEI-free. 'As noted at the outset, MDE [Minnesota Department of Education] has already provided the requisite guarantee that it has and will comply with Title VI and its implementing regulation, and that includes our assurance that we do and will comply with Supreme Court cases interpreting the same. We submit this letter to serve as our response to this specific request,' Minnesota wrote to the federal government. The Department of Education is seeking to expand on the 2023 affirmative action Supreme Court ruling that said universities could not take race into account in admissions, holding that the decision reaches beyond the student application process. 'Unfortunately, we have seen too many schools flout or outright violate these obligations, including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI,' Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, wrote in the K-12 certification letter. Federal funding only makes up around 10 percent of money that goes to K-12 schools, although lower-income districts get a bit more help. At universities, the Trump administration has shown it is not afraid to pull millions or even billions of dollars in federal funding from schools it alleges have committed civil rights violations, even before any investigation takes place. One of those schools, Harvard University, is suing the administration over funding cuts that were announced after it refused to bow to a list of demands from Trump, including eliminating DEI policies. The day after the suit was filed, the leaders of more than 100 colleges and universities, including Cornell, Tufts and Princeton, issued a joint letter condemning Trump's 'political interference' and 'coercive use of public research funding.' But as some colleges have lost funding, others have preemptively began dismantling some of their DEI efforts. The University of Michigan said last month it would be closing its DEI offices. 'I understand the fear […] They've basically been blackmailing institutions with federal funds. They've created deliberate chaos with the [executive orders] and vague instructions so that people are preemptively complying with things,' said Andrea Abrams, executive director of the Defending American Values Coalition. 'The reasons [they] are afraid are sound, but the reasons to be brave are also sound,' she added.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
US Senate confirms Trump loyalist to lead Justice Department civil rights unit
By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed conservative lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, President Donald Trump's choice to lead the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, in a 52-45 vote. One Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, voted no along with Democrats. Dhillon will oversee criminal and civil work ranging from hate crime prosecutions and voting rights litigation, to investigating law enforcement agencies for engaging in patterns of discrimination. Trump's appointees have already made sweeping changes to the Civil Rights Division's personnel and priorities. Several of its top officials were reassigned to work in a new office focused on immigration investigations into "sanctuary cities." The department put the brakes on securing court-approved settlements with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments to resolve civil rights investigations that were sparked by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Last week, it announced an unprecedented civil rights investigation into whether the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department is violating people's Second Amendment gun rights. Dhillon, a staunch Trump supporter, is the founder of the far-right Center for American Liberty. At her confirmation hearing, she said she supports the Trump administration's efforts to ban the use of diversity, equity and inclusion policies by government and private corporations, calling such programs "illegal and unconstitutional." Her nonprofit group says it advocates for the rights of Americans "left behind" by more traditional civil rights groups such as the NAACP LDF and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform when he announced her nomination. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights criticized Dhillon's nomination in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Her work supporting President Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, her vitriolic crusade against the transgender community, her staunch opposition to reproductive freedom, and her work protecting men accused of sexual harassment paint a disturbing picture of the kind of work we can expect from the Civil Rights Division if Ms. Dhillon is confirmed," it wrote. Earlier on Thursday, the Senate also confirmed Trump's former attorney Dean John Sauer in a 52-45 party line vote to be Solicitor General, the Justice Department's top lawyer in charge of defending the federal government in cases before the Supreme Court.
The Guardian
14-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Creating art under Trump will become harder but it will remain vital
One of the most pernicious effects of a bully's intimidation is making victims afraid of being true to themselves, because it's the essential and authentic parts of them that incite the bully's contempt. During his first week in office Donald Trump issued a blitzkrieg of executive orders. Among them, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity and Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.' According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, among the things these orders direct the administration's agencies and staff to do are: Terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, positions, and programs in the federal government; terminate equity-related grants and contracts; and repeal prior executive orders designed to ensure equal opportunity in the workplace, including a decades-old executive order from the Johnson Administration ... ' In the art scene these moratoriums had almost immediate consequence. Cheryl Edwards, a visual artist and curator based in Washington DC, had been working on an exhibition titled Before the Americas which was to be mounted at the Art Museum of the Americas, a cultural venue managed by the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization established in 1948 that includes all 35 independent nations of the western hemisphere. In 2021 Edwards was approached by the current museum director, Adriana Ospina, and the previous director, Pablo Zúñiga, to, in her words, curate an exhibition to include African American artists in the DC area. They agreed on a framework engaging the question 'Because we are people in a society that existed before slavery, how does that manifest itself in the work of artists in this area and the work of artists in their collection?' She was given a budget of $20,000 (with a $5,000 curator's fee), the money being allocated by the previous US ambassador to the OAS under Joe Biden, Francisco O Mora. Edwards's show was scheduled to open on 21 March, but she was informed by Ospina on 6 February that her show was 'terminated'. Edwards attests this happened 'because it is DEI'. Similarly, Andil Gosine, a Canadian artist and curator, who is also a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University in Toronto, invested several years into an exhibition at the same museum. His show, titled Nature's Wild with Andil Gosine, was essentially a collaborative project with 50 artists, writers and technicians exploring the themes he had examined in his book of the same title. It was to include artwork by a dozen artists from across the Americas, many of them LGBTQ+ people of color. He received a phone call from Ospina on 5 February informing him that the show had been canceled, despite none of the funding for it coming from OAS (that came from Canada Council). For him that that was 'heartbreaking news'. He says: 'This is the most time, money and heart I've put into anything. This was going to be the pinnacle of my last 15 years of work in the arts.' With his background in international relations (working at the World Bank after graduate school) Gosine understood that the museum's response had to do with fear of losing their budget by showcasing queer artists in the wake of yet another executive order, this one promising a process of 'Reviewing United States Support to all International Organizations'. He explains: 'This is a content question, a gamble on how to deal with a shifting political tide: to conform enough, sacrifice some people, sacrifice your values to survive, and then maybe not get the budget.' According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2023 OAS had a budget of $145.2m, with the US contributing 57% of that. Having the United States rescind their support would clearly lacerate the organization's operations. Nevertheless, Gosine thinks that their anticipatory acquiescence may be for nought. He asks how an organization that is fundamentally concerned with human rights and social justice can reinvent itself enough to mollify this vengeful and disdainful regime. The cancelation of art exhibitions negatively impacts the lives of curators, but these executive orders have an even more corrosive effect on the lives of artists – particularly those whose immigration status is in flux. Erika Hirugami, a formerly undocumented Mexican-Japanese immigrant, doctoral candidate at UCLA, and Los Angeles-based curator who has been working in the arts for 10 years, told me that the pressures placed on immigrants impel them to erase themselves, anticipating law enforcement officials incarcerating and deporting them. She attests that she knows more than 80 artists who 'are terrified because having an exhibition at a museum that says that this artist is undocumented signals a reality that generates a kind of violence'. To better understand this, it helps to think of the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who extensively studied European art museum visitors in the 1960s, concerned with why most art museum visitor profiles seemed to be correlated with a certain socio-economic class. What he found was that given the proliferation of middle-class aesthetics throughout the museum, the majority of working-class people self-selected to not attend, feeling that the museum was not the place for them. He called this de facto rejection of the poor and working class 'symbolic violence', meaning a non-physical violence expressed through the imposition of social norms by a group with greater social power. Worse still, these norms are internalized by all social groups who come to believe that social hierarchy and inequality are natural and inevitable. Hirugami explains that for artists who are undocumented, this administration has sought to normalize living in fear. Practically this means that some artists now forgo being paid for their work for fear of having their means of remuneration traced. Thus, their labor goes unrecognized and unpaid. To protect themselves some artists, according to Hirugami, go 'zero social', making themselves digitally invisible by taking down their websites and social media pages. Arleene Correa Valencia, a formerly undocumented artist living in Napa, California, understands this dread. 'There's no handbook to how to lose that fear,' she says. Valencia was an enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, and a college student during the previous Trump administration, when she was under almost constant threat of losing her scholarship and means of staying in the country legally. Even now, having achieved permanent resident status, she still worries. 'I still feel like I'm very much a target, especially having come to my residency as a Dreamer. There is this feeling that I did it the wrong way.' Less than two months after taking charge of the federal government, Trump and his agents have devised ways to not only erase certain artists and certain types of art; but also to compel these artists to erase themselves, in the name of self-protection. This is exactly the opposite of their most essential work: to engage the public to experience their work and to move them toward transformation. What is a possible solution? Valencia turns toward her art. She says: My practice has changed in that now I'm more grounded in knowing that my people have this beautiful language of painting. And with that I also, tattooed my head to recognize, my Indigenous background and my connection to Mexico. This is the time where we have to make our markings known, not just on our bodies, but in our work, marks that are true to ourselves.' Indeed, it's crucial to refuse the option of doing violence to oneself by denying those very aspects of the self targeted in the culture war being waged by this administration. To maintain who you are can be its own kind of victory.
