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MoJo Wire

Quick hits from the Mother Jones newsroom

  • Jill Biden Is Spending Mother’s Day in Ukraine

    May 8, 2022

    First Lady Jill Biden meets with Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska in Ukraine.Susan Walsh/AP

    On Sunday, First Lady Jill Biden made an official visit to Ukraine, becoming the latest in a series of high-ranking US officials and political figures to travel to the war-torn country. Biden, who had been on a swing through Eastern Europe, entered Ukraine via Slovakia, which is host to almost 400,000 displaced Ukrainians. The first lady heard several of their stories, according to the Washington Post:

    Victoria Kutocha, a mother of three whose husband remained in Ukraine to fight in the military, told Biden of her journey to Slovakia and her outrage at Russia’s explanation for its invasion.

    “They come to our land,” she told Biden. “They kill us, but they say we protect you.”

    Hugging her 7-year-old daughter, Yulie, Kutocha described the difficulty of explaining to her children why they had to leave their home. “It’s impossible,” she said. “I try to keep them safe. It’s my mission.”

    “It’s senseless,” Biden said.

    The first lady’s show of support follows visits last week by top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress. In Ukraine, she had a private chat with Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, telling her Ukrainian counterpart that she “wanted to come on Mother’s Day” to “show the Ukrainian people that this war has to stop.” Zelenska thanked her for the visit and the risks that came with it: “We understand what it takes for the US First Lady to come here during a war when military actions are taking place every day, where the air sirens are happening every day—even today.”

    President Biden has yet to visit Ukraine, citing security concerns, but he has worked to shepherd an unprecedented series of multibillion-dollar aid packages to Ukraine in recent weeks. After Congress approved an initial $14 billion delivery of military and humanitarian support, Biden requested an additional $33 billion to back Ukraine’s continued resistance to Russia’s invasion.

    “We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom,” Biden said at the White House. “It’s not cheap. But caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen.”

  • SNL Just Got Medieval on Justice Alito’s Abortion Views

    May 8, 2022

    "I was outside watching the sheriff throw left-handed children into the river and I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about a new law."Will Heath/NBC/Getty

    The big topic on last night’s Saturday Night Live, surprising absolutely no one, was the Supreme Court. For its cold open, the show took aim at Justice Samuel Alito’s now-infamous leaked draft opinion, which would overturn the abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. 

    Alito’s extremely dubious reasoning is based on an ahistorical rendering of abortion as fundamentally inconsistent with American “history and tradition.” As my colleague Becca Andrews smartly pointed out, that simplistic formulation ignores the history of abortion and reproductive care among indigenous American women, let alone enslaved Black women and other women in the colonial era.

    The SNL cast, noting that Alito’s opinion relied on a “treatise from 13th-century England,” turned back the clock to “that profound moment of moral clarity, almost a thousand years ago, which laid such a clear foundation for what our laws should be in 2022.” In a vaguely medieval setting, three men (Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Dismukes, and actually-good Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson) debate the appropriate punishment for abortion—until a woman played by Cecily Strong intercedes. Although she still hasn’t hit “the child-bearing age of 12,” she insists that women deserve “the right to choose.”

    The three dudes are less than receptive to that incredibly popular idea. Instead, says Cumberbatch’s character, expectant mothers should simply receive maternity leave—”when you’re done with 20 years of continuous maternity, you can leave!”

    Watch the rest of the sketch here: 

  • The Unbearable Futility of Rehashing the Trump Years at Every Turn

    May 6, 2022

    Sipa/AP

    Who could the pussy hats possibly be for this time? Who’s left to convince that we matter?

    Alright, maybe I should have expected the return of “Nasty Woman” shirts and warnings of the Republic of Gilead. But in the wake of the Supreme Court’s draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, I couldn’t help but frown at the instinct by some to dig out their Future Is Female’s best. Don’t these outdated protest aesthetics feel like relics now, reminders that we had naively miscalculated what it would take to take down an alarmingly well-organized, decades-long mission? For me, spotting these worn tactics at the protests this week rendered the renewed fight limp on arrival. 

    Protests are critical. The fiercer the better when facing a decision dripping in nostalgia for a brutally unequal past. Still, it’s worth examining the curious compulsion to dust off yesterday’s tactics in order to protest what those tactics failed to stop. 

    An effort to recall the urgency with which hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in the 2017 women’s march to counter Donald Trump’s inauguration is an understandable one. But these reflexive urges feel at once out of step with the cruel reality that’s been laid bare this week. Despite years of resistance, from the aesthetic to the ballot box, the right to legal abortion is about to get destroyed. Despite voting—as we were relentlessly instructed to do—and ultimately winning—we still lost.

    Of course, the reemergence of resistance gear is a small embarrassment when measured up against the predictable cast of characters rising like zombies this week in order to wag fingers at those who declined to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. That crowd reliably pushed back with equally dated defenses. Frequently slipping to the margins of these squabbles is what happens to the countless women on the verge of losing access to health care. But who cares when the same Twitter fights of the Trump years refuse to die? 

    Not to be outdone, arguably the most egregious bout of deja-vu came from Democratic leaders, who in their scramble to respond to this week’s SCOTUS bombshell, effectively copied and pasted language ripped straight from the Trump era in order to try and rally the base from despair.

    “The elections this November will have consequences because the rights of a hundred million women are now on the ballot,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told a crowd one day after the SCOTUS leak. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Meanwhile, most Dems still can’t come out and say the word “abortion.” Sure, President Biden, in his first statement on this week’s leak, did manage to squeak out the word. But as Rebecca Traister points out, it’s no accident that it got buried four paragraphs deep in a statement otherwise cloaked in the safe language of a woman’s choice.

    With leadership like that, who can blame people for reaching for their RBG pearls right now? 

    One would think that after years of warnings from repro rights groups, we’d be better equipped for this moment. Instead, Democrats have resurrected tired themes for an exhausted crowd. That same fatigue is what makes the instinct to rehash the Trump years at every turn, down to the literal same hats, simply unbearable. 

    When people donate, they want to see the federal government opening its fat wallet to fund abortion pills. When they protest, they want to see more lawmakers reacting with the same fury Senator Elizabeth Warren had marching alongside demonstrators. When they vote—and deliver control of Congress and the White House—they expect leaders to start acting with all the authority they earned at the ballot. As my colleague Madison Pauly noted at one Oakland protest this week, “the 2017 vibes are strong.” That’s just not going to cut it anymore.

  • I Counted All the Scholars Cited in the Leaked Roe Opinion. Can You Guess How Many Were Women?

    May 5, 2022

    Getty

    If you read the leaked draft of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, and especially if you have a uterus, you may notice several factual errors about women and pregnancy made by its author, Justice Samuel Alito. (My colleague Pema Levy, in fact, chronicles a few here.) Those errors, it turns out, may have something to do with whom Alito is citing: In all its 98 pages, the draft cites very few women.

    I know because I counted. Or, at least, I tried. The opinion includes more than 75 citations from legal experts, historians, and scholars of philosophy. By my tally, just four are women. I also counted the number of times Alito cited a judge, either on the Supreme Court or lower courts. In all, he cites a judge or justice more than 90 times. Of those, just five were women. 

    I’d also like to point out that Alito cites himself at least six times. I repeat: The man who authored the opinion to effectively end the right to abortion in the United States has cited himself more times than he cited female scholars combined.

    Before anyone blows a gasket, allow me to list a few caveats: First, this was by no means a scientific endeavor. I am not going to submit this analysis for any awards. It has not been peer-reviewed. It was simply a good faith effort to read Alito’s draft closely and record every reference, both in the text and footnotes, made by name. In every case, I tried my best to identify each individual with a simple Google search.

    Mind you, I counted every citation that mentions a scholar, regardless of why they were cited. Several of the female citations did little to support Alito’s argument for overturning Roe. In fact, of the five times he cites a female judge, three of those citations reference the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an advocate for abortion rights. And in another case, Alito cites a female scholar only to characterize her work’s inclusion in Roe as “irrelevant.”

    Here’s a section in which Alito lists some scholarly criticisms of Roe’s “reasoning.” He exclusively cites men: 

    All in all, Roe‘s reasoning was exceedingly weak, and academic commentators, including those who agreed with the decision as a matter of policy, were unsparing in their criticism. John Hart Ely famously wrote that Roe was “not constitutional law and g[ave] almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Ely 947. Archibald Cox, who served as Solicitor General under President Kennedy, commented that Roe “read[s] like a set of hospital rules and regulations” that “[n]either historian, layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded …. are part of… the Constitution.” Archibald Cox, The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government 113-114 (1976). Laurence Tribe wrote that “even if there is a need to divide pregnancy into several segments with lines that clearly identify the limits of governmental power, ‘interest-balancing of the form the Court pursues fails to justify any of the lines actually drawn.” Tribe 5. Mark Tushnet termed Roe a “totally unreasoned judicial opinion.” M. Tushnet, Red, White, and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law 54 (1988). See also [Philip] Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate 157 (1982); [Akhil Reed] Amar, Foreword: The Document and the Doctrine, 114 Harv. L. Rev. 26, 110 (2000). 

    The asymmetry in Alito’s draft is, to put it mildly, disappointing. But it also reflects who held—and often continues to hold—power in this country. After all, this is a document that may effectively govern the bodies of millions of uterus-owners. Shouldn’t we have more of a say in it?

  • Christian Smalls to Congress: It’s Time to Stop Helping Corporations

    May 5, 2022

    Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, testifies before the Senate Budget Committee.Tom Williams/AP

    At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Christian Smalls, the interim president of the Amazon Labor Union, delivered a message to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham: “You forgot that the people are the ones who make these companies operate.”

    The hearing comes a month after the workers Smalls represents at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voted to form the company’s first union.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the head of the Senate budget committee, organized the hearing to look at whether the federal government should be awarding contracts to companies that have broken federal labor laws. The focus was on Amazon, which has racked up more than $75 million in fines for violating federal discrimination and wage laws, according to a committee press release.

    “I think [Graham] suggested that a hearing like this is radical,” Sanders said after Smalls and other witnesses delivered their opening remarks. “You know what, I think he’s right. In a Congress dominated by corporate lobbyists and wealthy campaign contributors, the idea that we would actually hear from the working class of this country is in fact radical.” Sanders continued: “I make no apologies for that.”

    Smalls also responded to Graham by saying that the hearing was necessary because the process for holding companies accountable has not been working. “It’s not a left or a right thing. It’s not a Democrat or Republican thing,” Smalls said. “It’s a workers issue. And we are the ones that are suffering in the corporations that you’re talking about.”

    The criticism of Amazon was, at times, bipartisan. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), citing his own business experience, argued that companies that are conscientious, pay high wages, and treat workers like family hang on to their employees.

    “When somebody does get out of line, when wealth gets too concentrated, when you got 150 percent turnover rates, high accident rates,” Braun said referring to Amazon, “you’re gonna have to have a medium to vent your grievance and unions vis-a-vis largely companies, [are] probably the only way you can do it.”

    Earlier this week, workers at a neighboring Amazon facility voted against joining the Amazon Labor Union. The company is also trying to throw out the results of the April election won by the union. Smalls and fellow Amazon Labor Union members are focused on getting a strong contract for the more than 8,000 workers at that warehouse. 

  • Report: Kevin McCarthy Suggested Invoking the 25th Amendment to Oust Trump

    May 4, 2022

    Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Zuma

    New leaked audio reveals just how close Republican leadership came to supporting the movement to oust former President Donald Trump in the days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The audio was obtained by two New York Times reporters who detailed the conversation in their new book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.

    Publicly, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has toed the party line, but behind closed doors, he brainstormed ways to remove Trump from office. “What the president did is atrocious and totally wrong,” McCarthy said in a call on January 8, 2021.

    McCarthy didn’t stop there. He also reportedly discussed the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office before he demurred because, “That takes too long.”

    McCarthy had long publicly denied ever threatening Trump’s power, but last month, audio clips revealed that he had in fact told Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) that he intended to call President Trump and tell him that he should resign. The new audio reveals just how deep McCarthy’s private opposition to Trump went, no matter how loudly or repeatedly he attempts to deny it.

    “I do think the impeachment divides the nation further and continues the fight even greater,” he said. “I want to see about us meeting with Biden, sitting down, make a smooth transition.”

  • Protesters Rally to Support Abortion Rights as Roe v. Wade Hangs in the Balance

    May 4, 2022

    Isabela Dias

    Pro-choice supporters across the country sprang into action on Tuesday, a powerful show of solidarity for abortion rights in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. 

    “Where’s Joe?” demonstrators outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, demanded. 

    “For context, this sign is from 2018,” said a 26-year-old law student carrying the sign “Mr. President: How long must women wait for liberty.” Another from the same protest read “The people have lost all confidence in SCOTUS.”

    In Baltimore, one protester held the sign “Remove the rapist in the court.”

    Mother Jones reporters Isabela Dias, Mark Helenowski, Emily Hofstaedter, and Madison Pauly were on the ground in DC, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland, respectively, where palpable anger over the Supreme Court’s likely intent to overturn the landmark ruling that protected the right to an abortion flowed among the crowds. Scenes from the protests below:

    Emily Hofstaedter

    Isabela Dias

  • “Back to the Dark Ages of Women’s Health”: Protesters Gather in DC to Rally Behind Roe

    May 4, 2022

    Protesters decry leaked draft of Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. WadeIsabela Dias

    For the second day in a row, demonstrators gathered in Washington, DC,  on Tuesday to protest a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade the landmark decision that established the constitutional right to abortion.

    Over chants of “pro-life is a lie, they don’t care if people die” and “where’s Joe?,” the large crowd stood in front of the steps of the Supreme Court building holding signs that read “keep your politics out of my uterus” and “bans off our bodies.”

    “I am here because I am angry and I am here because the United States Congress can change all of this,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of several lawmakers who attended the protest, told the crowd. “I have seen the world where abortion is illegal and we’re not going back. Not ever!” Warren continued, warning that the Supreme Court’s draft opinion would overwhelmingly burden the poor, working mothers, and young victims of abuse and rape—not wealthy women. 

    Teal Quinn, who works at an animation study, drove with their 11-year-old child from Maryland after they insisted on taking part in their first protest. “I just want them to have the same rights I have,” Quinn said. “I trust women to make their own decisions and they ought to have the freedom to do that.”

    At 69, Mickey Goldberg also came from Maryland with her husband to attend the rally. 

    A second-year medical student at Howard University said he felt angry after reading the news about the draft decision.

    Several protesters stressed that overturning Roe would not lead to a total ban on abortions, only on safe abortions. Others expressed their discontent towards the justices with signs saying “abort the Court” and “the people have lost all confidence in SCOTUS.”

    Constanza Guarino, 27, stopped by the rally in DC on her way back to New York after a workday. “I think this is a pretty monumental moment,” she said. “I am a strong believer that people should be able to decide what is best for themselves and no one should be forced into carrying a pregnancy.”

    For Kathy Doan, a 59-year-old Christian, abortion is an issue of justice. “I think the assumption is that Christians don’t support women’s right to choose, but many like myself do,” she said. “If you care about women and children, abortion should be legal and safe.” Outlawing abortion, she added, “basically turns a woman’s uterus into a crime scene. Is that what we want?”  

    Pro-choice rally outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday, May 3. 

    Constanza Guarino, 27, stopped by the rally in DC on her way back to New York.

    Teal Quinn drove with their 11-year-old child from Maryland. 

     
    Photos: Isabela Dias

  • Abortion Advocates in Baltimore Protest the Supreme Court’s Leaked Roe Opinion

    May 3, 2022

    Emily Hofstaedter/Mother Jones

    Late on Tuesday afternoon, a quiet but determined crowd began to gather outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore in a show of support for abortion rights. Like many others around the country, the protesters had organized after a draft opinion, published in Politico last night, showed that the Supreme Court is on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade. They held signs saying, “Abortion is healthcare,” “Bans off our bodies,” and “We will not go back.” 

    “This fundamental right that has been in place for decades is at the precipice of being rolled back,” Maryland state Sen. Shelly Hettleman told the crowd as it grew. “What we have also learned is that elections have consequences…It matters who is setting those laws in each state. It matters who is in Congress. Tomorrow, if the Senate of the United States decided to protect our right to choice, it could do so.” Other speakers described the latest developments as “shocking” and “heartbreaking.” 

    “It is devastating to potentially lose Roe, but this is something that we have been seeing and preparing for for a long time,” said Lynn McCann, co-director of the Baltimore Abortion Fund. “So while it hurts, we are also here to acknowledge that Roe has never been enough for thousands of people.” Maryland has already been taking steps to anticipate a post-Roe world: Last month, the state legislature voted to allow more health professionals to perform abortions and to ensure that abortion care will be permanently covered by the state’s Medicaid program. McCann said that if Roe were overturned, Maryland could be a hub for people seeking abortions from neighboring states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where Republicans are working to restrict the procedure. 

    One protester, Brian Appel, brought his two daughters, eight-year-old Sophia and four-year-old Beatrix. The girls held signs in front of their sunscreen-smeared faces that read, “Abortion is Normal.” Appel said he worries about what the future will look like for his daughters. “They might one day choose to get an abortion, and we don’t want that to be mixed up with any political debate,” he said. “My wife and I are expecting a baby, and we were really proud when my oldest daughter said, ‘I just want to make sure it’s your choice to have it.’” 

  • It’s Official: Trump-Endorsed J.D. Vance Has Won the Ohio Senate Primary

    May 3, 2022

    Joe Maiorana/AP

    J.D. Vance, the Peter Thiel-ally and Hillbilly Elegy author, has won the highly contested Republican Senate primary in Ohio. Vance’s victory over a group of Ohio politicians, including former State Treasurer Josh Mandel and state Sen. Matt Dolan, is more evidence that Donald Trump’s towering influence over the Republican Party has yet to abate. 

    At the start of his campaign, Vance shocked the media by adopting an explicitly Trumpian persona and an agenda that mirrored the former president’s policy positions. Vance initially struggled in the polls, hampered, in part, by his reputation as an erstwhile anti-Trumper. However, he became the frontrunner virtually overnight after beating out his opponents to receive Trump’s coveted endorsement and maintained that status through the election. If you’re curious to read more about his transformation, here’s a non-comprehensive list I pulled together of his craziest statements. 

    Vance will now advance to the general election, where he’ll take on moderate Democrat Tim Ryan. Although Ryan remains broadly popular among Ohioans, he faces a steep uphill battle in the increasingly red state. 

  • Outraged Protesters Descend on Lower Manhattan to Rally for Abortion Rights

    and May 3, 2022

    Mark Helenowski/Mother Jones

    A noisy crowd of many hundreds converged on downtown Manhattan’s Foley Square Tuesday evening, one day after a Politico bombshell revealed the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

    “Abortion is a human right, not just for the rich and white!” they chanted, banging drums and brandishing brightly colored signs, one that read, “My arms are tired from holding this sign since the 1960s.”

    The rally, outside the barricaded steps of the federal courthouse near City Hall, was just one of a number of snap demonstrations called from coast to coast, channeling an eruption of outrage after the draft decision became public. Hannah Jacobs, a 29-year-old lawyer from Jersey City, told our Senior Digital Producer Mark Helenowski that this was her first-ever protest: “A group of men that are 70, 80-years-old—who have lifetime appointments, that have not been voted into office—should not have a say over whether I choose to have a baby or not.”

    “They’re not ‘pro-life,’ they’re ‘pro-birth’,” she said. “As soon as the baby comes out, they don’t give a damn who that baby is, they don’t give a damn about the mom, they don’t give a damn about health care… they just want to exert control over our bodies.”

    Mark is on the ground talking to attendees. Here’s what he is seeing and hearing:

  • Elizabeth Warren on Codifying Roe: “They Just Need to Do It.”

    May 3, 2022

    Rod Lamkey/CNP/Zuma

    “The United States Congress can keep Roe v. Wade the law of the land,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a brief but heated interview recorded in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday by Willy Lowry of the National. “They just need to do it.”

    Warren joined the growing chorus of pro-choice politicians who support codifying Roe as national law. But doing so with an evenly divided Senate would likely require a vote to reform the filibuster, which Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) seem unwilling to do.

    “Republicans have been working toward this day for decades,” Warren said. “They have been out there plotting, carefully cultivating these Supreme Court justices so they could have a majority on the bench who would accomplish something that the majority of Americans do not want.”

    According to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, 59 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

  • Susan Collins Is Surprised That Conservative Justices Are Doing What Everyone Knew They Would

    May 3, 2022

    Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Zuma

    Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine who purports to support abortion, is surprised that the hard-right conservatives she voted onto the Supreme Court are willing to overturn Roe v. Wade.

    “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” she said in a statement.

    Let me put it another way: It sounds like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied to Collins to win her vote, and Collins was gullible enough to believe them.

    The nominees used vague language concerning Roe during their confirmation hearings. Gorsuch called it “settled law”—“in the sense that it is a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.” (Tell me something I didn’t already know.) Kavanaugh was even vaguer, calling it “settled as precedent.” Collins implied today that both justices made clear to her in meetings that they would not end Roe. Well, wrong. Now, the justices’ willingness to overturn settled law is all but confirmed.

    For years, Collins, like many of us following the news at home, seems to have been clinging to the hope that maybe the Supreme Court would respect precedent, despite the conservative legal movement’s long and obvious battle to someday overturn Roe. “So I think that a lot of people on the left and pundits have been wrong about how the court has respected precedent,” she said last year on CNN. “I think they will look at precedent and reach their decision.”

    Precedent looks to have flown out the window when Samuel Alito wrote in his leaked draft opinion, “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled…Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

    Forgive us for holding out faith in our judicial overlords—after all, we didn’t vote to confirm them, and those of us who don’t happen to live in a handful of swing states are next to powerless in deciding the makeup of the Supreme Court. But no one who has been paying attention to conservative attacks on reproductive rights over the last, say, five years, is at all surprised about this outcome. Collins has been representing Maine in the Senate since 1997. This was always conservatives’ endgame. Collins was always too willfully ignorant to see it.

    At least Collins did more than Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the other stalwart Republican senator who claims to stick up for abortion rights. All she could muster up was anger about The Leak.

  • Workers at Second Staten Island Amazon Location Reject Union Bid

    May 2, 2022

    John Nacion/Action Press/Zuma

    To cap off a disappointing day for Amazon labor organizers, workers at a second Staten Island Amazon warehouse have overwhelmingly voted not to form a union.

    Following an aggressive union-busting campaign from Amazon that included mandatory anti-union presentations, the workers voted 380–618 against the union on Monday. The election was disheartening for labor activists in light of last month’s union victory at another Staten Island warehouse. (Amazon is now challenging the results of that election with the National Labor Relations Board.)

    The union effort had garnered the support of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who attended a rally at the warehouse last week. The union’s demands included a $30 minimum hourly wage, longer breaks, and an end to the company’s productivity quotas.

    Last year, workers tried and failed to unionize at an Amazon location in Bessemer, Alabama. The National Labor Relations Board called for a do-over of that election, arguing that Amazon had interfered with the vote. The results of the March vote remain too close to call.

  • After a Week on Strike, Stanford Nurses Just Approved a New Contract

    May 2, 2022

    Photo courtesy of Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement

    After a week-long strike, the union representing nearly 5,000 nurses at Stanford Health Care and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital has voted to approve a new, three-year contract with the hospitals. The nurses plan to return to work on Tuesday.

    Both the hospitals and the nurses union, the Committee for the Recognition of Nursing Achievement, hailed the agreement as a success. “CRONA’s new contracts represent an enormous victory for nurses at Stanford and Packard, who have been fighting tirelessly for improved work and patient care conditions,” union president Colleen Borges, said in a statement. “We have won improvements across all the priorities nurses identified at the beginning of our contract campaign.” Eighty-three percent of the union voted in favor of the contract.

    The nurses began striking on April 25 after weeks of negotiating with the hospitals. As my colleague Emily Hofstaedter wrote last month:

    To avoid burnout and to continue to offer care during the chaos of the pandemic, the nurses say they need more staff, better mental health resources, better pay, and more paid time-off. More than ninety percent of the 5,000 nurses who belong to the Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement (CRONA) union at the two hospitals voted for the strike. 

    According to the union statement, the new contract includes greater access to mental health care and wage increases of seven percent in 2022, five percent in 2023, and an additional five percent in 2024. Under the agreement, nurses in the union will be able to pre-schedule an additional week of vacation, among other benefits.

    Late last month, just a day before the action started, I spoke with one of the nurses who voted to authorize the strike. She told me:

    It’s very disappointing to be called health care heroes, and have all of this verbal praise lavished on us for the last two years, and then when it comes time to actually follow up those lovely sentiments with actions, it’s not there. And people are fed up with it. It’s time to put your money where your mouth is.

    When I followed up with the nurse via text on Monday, she said she is “very pleased” with the contract and is excited to go back to caring for patients. “I think both sides made substantial compromises and as a result we got a contract that works for nurses and the hospital. Change happens incrementally and we gained significant improvements with this new contract.”

    According to the union, the new contracts are a symbolic action as much as a tangible one, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. As union vice president Kathy Stormberg said in a statement, the agreements “acknowledge our immense value” as health care workers. “Hospitals across the country must step up their support for nurses, and we stand together with nurses nationwide to fight for a healthcare system that truly values nurses and our expertise.” 

    This piece has been updated to include a comment from a nurse.

  • Report: Amazon Hearing Could Overturn Staten Island Union Vote

    May 2, 2022

    Workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse celebrate their union win.Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto/Zuma

    Amazon’s efforts to quash the Amazon Labor Union at its Staten Island warehouse appear to be gaining steam.

    After the union won a historic election last month, Amazon outlined 25 objections to the results. The company requested a do-over. Today, Reuters reported that the National Labor Relations Board is set to hold a hearing that could overturn the win.

    The victory, a first for a union at an Amazon facility in the United States, was monumental. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote, it upended “basic assumptions about what’s usually needed to win a union election.” But, as he also reported, the aftermath of a first contract negotiation and the bureaucracy of legal challenges will be daunting. Amazon’s pushback will continue.

    Among other complaints, Amazon argued that the NLRB’s Brooklyn office intimidated workers to vote for the union. Reuters notes that this is why the case has been transferred to the Phoenix region, away from the Brooklyn office. The Phoenix office’s director, Cornele Overstreet, said in a filing that Amazon’s evidence “could be ground for overturning the election.”

    The two parties can begin presenting evidence on May 23.

    “We want our employees to have their voices heard, and in this case, that didn’t happen—fewer than a third of the employees at the site voted for the union,” an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters. The union won with 55 percent of the vote; turnout was 58 percent.

    “While the ALU is disappointed in any delay by Amazon in its bargaining obligations we remain confident that all of Amazon’s objections will ultimately be overruled,” ALU attorney Eric Milner said.

    Meanwhile, workers at another Staten Island warehouse are awaiting the results of their union vote.

  • Trump Warns of “Dangerous Fruit” in Sworn Deposition

    April 28, 2022

    Brian Cahn/ZUMA

    A looming recession, rising Covid cases, war in Ukraine.

    It can certainly feel as though anxiety is baked into every bit of life these days. But our collective uneasiness seems to have missed a more mundane source of true danger: evil fruit. The stuff is downright lethal, according to Donald J. Trump, particularly when hurled at you. 

    “You can get killed with those things,” Trump said in a sworn deposition responding to protesters who allege that Trump’s security team had assaulted them outside of Trump Tower in 2015.

    When a lawyer representing the protesters asked if Trump recalled once instructing his supporters to “knock the crap” out of anyone they spotted “getting ready to throw a tomato,” the former president said that yes he did, but was only partially serious. (You can  imagine the relief from Trump’s lawyers here.) But when it came down to it, Trump insisted that a flying tomato does indeed justify the use of physical force: “To stop somebody from throwing pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that, yeah,” he said.

    More from Trump on killer fruit from the deposition’s transcript, which was made public on Tuesday:

    “It’s very dangerous stuff. You can get killed with those things… I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit. And some fruit is a lot worse than—tomatoes are bad by the way. But it’s very dangerous… they were going to hit—they were going to hit very hard.

    A fear of fruit isn’t exactly a surprise from a man who identifies germs, sharks, windmills, and stairs as sources of trouble. It’s the stuff he isn’t worried about—climate change, hydroxychloroquine, Vladimir Putin, the future of democracy itself—that give me real pause.

  • Oklahoma’s Governor Signs Six-Week Abortion Ban Into Law

    April 28, 2022

    Sean Murphy/AP

    Update, May 4: Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt has signed the Texas-style abortion ban prohibiting people from obtaining the procedure after six weeks. The law, which went into effect immediately, will also allow private citizens to sue individuals who “perform or induce an abortion.”

    On Thursday, the Oklahoma House passed a bill that would ban abortions after six weeks. The bill, which was already approved by the state Senate, would take effect immediately after being signed by the governor. 

    The legislation is just the latest attack on abortion rights in Oklahoma, which also recently passed a bill that would make it a felony to perform an abortion starting in August. But abortion providers in the state say they’re even more concerned about this new legislation—both because it would take effect immediately and because it will be more likely to survive a legal challenge. In an interview before the bill passed, Dr. Christina Bourne, the medical director of Trust Women, which operates abortion clinics in Oklahoma and Kansas, described it as “truly terrifying.” 

    The Oklahoma Heartbeat Act is a copycat version of the Texas Heartbeat Act, which allows private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion after six weeks. Like the Texas Heartbeat Act, the Oklahoma version allows anyone to bring a suit against any person who “performs or induces an abortion” or “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” The Texas bill, which went into effect last September, has so far stood up to legal challenges and drastically curtailed abortion access in the state. (At the six-week mark, many patients aren’t even aware that they are pregnant.) 

    Since last fall, as many as 45 percent of the patients who have been unable to seek abortions in Texas have been coming to Oklahoma, according to the University of Texas at Austin. Trust Women, one of only four abortion clinics in the state, has been fielding more than 100 calls an hour since September. 

    That surge has caused wait times at Trust Women to go up from a few days to four weeks, and the clinic has even had to turn away some patients. Trust Women has also had to eliminate services like STI testing and gender-affirming care due to the high demand. But Bourne emphasized that, just as abortion providers have adapted to the influx of patients from Texas, they will do their best to adapt to the Oklahoma bill. Trust Women’s Kansas clinic is already doing construction to expand its capacity for an anticipated influx of patients from Oklahoma and other states in the region that may continue to restrict access. The clinics are “not letting these restrictions win,” Bourne said. “I feel like that’s what makes folks in abortion so unique, is our deep flexibility and creativity, and we’re in this to keep doing this work.”

    The Oklahoma Heartbeat Act is part of a wave of new anti-abortion legislation that has passed this year in anticipation of a major Supreme Court decision that could gut or overturn Roe v. Wade. But even with Roe still in place, the Oklahoma Heartbeat Act will be devastating to access in Oklahoma—and, because Oklahoma has been a hub for people from Texas seeking abortions, the entire region. “In these areas, Roe is no longer offering us protection,” Bourne said. “We’re essentially working in a post-Roe era here.”

  • Here’s How DeSantis and Florida Republicans Just Violated Disney’s Civil Rights

    April 22, 2022

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks moments before signing the Parental Rights in Education bill on March 28, 2022, in Shady Hills, Florida. Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times/TNS/ZUMA

    On Friday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Republican allies revoked Disney’s longstanding tax privileges in the state in retaliation for the company’s opposition to the right’s anti-LGBTQ culture war. In doing so, Florida Republicans have violated Disney’s civil rights.

    This collision of conservative policies—anti-LGBTQ panic and tax breaks—came after Disney criticized Florida’s new anti-LGBTQ education law. Its critics know it as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

    The law prohibits teaching about sexual identity and sexual orientation in some Florida classrooms. In response, Disney called for the law’s repeal and paused its political donations in Florida. Next, DeSantis rushed through a measure to deprive Disney World of its designation as special tax district, which has allowed Disney to self-govern its massive Florida theme park for 55 years. DeSantis said Disney’s opposition to the bill “crossed a line.” 

    “Once upon a time Disney was a great partner with the state of Florida,” Republican state Rep. Jackie Toledo said. “Shamefully, Disney betrayed us.”

    But retaliating against someone for exercising their First Amendment rights is a violation of that person’s civil rights. Even if that “person” is Disney.

    “It is a violation of the First Amendment for the government to punish a corporation because of the company’s expressed viewpoints on political issues,” says Adam Winkler, a constitutional law specialist at UCLA School of Law and the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. “I think that we will see legal challenges to this. And I think there will be constitutional challenges to it.”

    Florida might argue that Disney doesn’t have a right to a special tax privilege that other companies don’t receive. But under Supreme Court precedent from 1972, the government cannot rescind a privilege once granted for improper reasons such as retaliation for political speech. And Disney’s actions—both its statements and its decision to pause its donations—are protected First Amendment activity.

    Over the last century, the Supreme Court has extended civil rights to corporations, insulating them from government reprisal for exercising those rights. It wasn’t long ago that Republicans were cheering this trend. “Corporations are people,” Mitt Romney famously said as a presidential candidate in 2012. The party also helped usher in the era of massive corporate political giving with the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which secured corporations’ rights as political donors under the First Amendment, and backed the Hobby Lobby decision, which recognized some corporations’ religious beliefs. These rulings had significant downsides for American democracy. 

    “There is the irony that conservatives for the last 20 years have been emphasizing that corporations have rights too and should be able to spend money to influence electoral politics,” notes Winkler. “And yet, now they’re trying to punish a company for trying to influence politics.”

    Interestingly, it shows something progressives have often not discussed, too. Other Supreme Court rulings on corporate rights, including the landmark press freedom case New York Times Company v. Sullivan, have helped maintain democratic norms. Autocrats use their control over the private sector to wield power, erode democracy, and stifle protest. But because of rulings like Citizens United Disney at least has the option to fight back on constitutional grounds.

    “This whole situation highlights one of the hidden benefits of recognizing corporations to have rights, that corporate rights also serve as a check on government tyranny,” says Winkler. “If corporations did not have rights, then the government could run roughshod over corporations, and restrict their freedom of speech and profoundly hurt and harm democracy.” 

    Disney may have crossed DeSantis. But it’s DeSantis who crossed the line.

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