Constitutional Crisis: April 28th-May 14th

Hey Teen Resisters:
This has, again, been a super heavy few weeks. Hopefully taking action will be a good way to help express your emotions, but remember it's okay to take time to process them as well!
Before you dive in, here's a quick piece of better news: House Democrats will vote on the biggest health care bill of the year--which will lower drug prices and shore up Obamacare--next week. Since parts of the bill are bipartisan, it (cleverly) forces Republican legislators to choose between their constituents' priorities regarding prescription drug prices and their own partisan opposition to Obamacare.
Happy reading/action-taking!
xx
TR

what went down

Abortion Laws in Georgia and Alabama
This week, Georgia’s governor signed a “heartbeat bill” into law, which would ban any abortions from taking place after a doctor is able to detect “a fetal heartbeat in the womb,” at roughly 6 weeks — before most women even know that they are pregnant. Other states, including Mississippi and Ohio, have also recently passed similar heartbeat bills, which will soon become enforceable under the law. Georgia’s bill explicitly states that doctors would be punished for performing unlawful abortions, and is more vague about the penalties for women who receive them. It also includes that women who have miscarriages could be pulled into investigations determining whether or not they received an illegal abortion. Women who try to receive out-of-state abortions could also be punished under Georgia law.

In the same week, Alabama proposed an even more severe bill, which has yet to be signed into law (the vote was postponed until next week after a shouting match broke out on the Senate floor, when some Republicans attempted to propose a version of the bill that did not include exemptions in cases of rape and incest). The proposed bill would prevent doctors from performing abortions once a fetus is “in utero.” Translated: the proposed bill is, essentially, an all-out ban on abortion. As written and argued, the bill would not criminalize women for receiving abortions, and rather would punish doctors who perform them with up to 99 years in prison. The same Alabama bill would also make false rape allegations a felony, punishable with up to 10 years in prison. Although false rape allegations are wrong, many individuals’ allegations are considered false without actual evidence — this bill could lead to the abuse of these cases.

​So why does this all matter, in the grand scheme of things? Roe v. Wade set a precedent for a woman’s right to choose, and the Alabama bill clearly infringes upon that right (a variety of organizations, including the A.C.L.U., have said that they will challenge the bill in court if it gets passed). That, in fact, is the point of the bill. These lawmakers know that this law is unconstitutional and know that it will most likely get overturned in a lower court when it is challenged. However, they hope that by continuing to appeal the case, they can eventually bring it to the Supreme Court, where they are hoping that the justices will uphold the law, reversing Roe v. Wade. For them, that outcome is the ultimate end goal.

What can you do?

• Be careful about the facts of this issue. Following the emergence of the bills in the news this week, a variety of false information was spread through social media, misrepresenting the Georgia/Alabama bills and their implications. Make sure that the facts you read and share online are backed by reliable news outlets and sources!
• Donate to and support the ACLU, which has pledged to counteract the Georgia and Alabama bills in any way possible before they become enforceable under the law.
• Call representatives in Alabama and ask them to vote no on the bill when the Senate re-convenes to vote on it next week. Use the script below:
  • Hi! My name is _____ and I’m calling to demand that [representative’s name] oppose Alabama’s anti-abortion bill that would effectively ban abortion and overturn Roe v. Wade on a state basis. [INSERT PERSONAL STORY- especially effective for highly socially conservative Alabama legislators.] Bills like this one deny women any and all reproductive agency over their bodies, and are destructive to the basic rights guaranteed by the U.S. constitution. Please vote no on this bill, and oppose it in any way you can. Thank you.
• Call representatives in Florida and South Carolina, where similar heartbeat bills are under consideration, to demand that they vote against the heartbeat bills when they hit the state Senate floor. Use the script below:
  • Hi! My name is _____ and I’m calling to demand that [representative’s name] oppose a “heartbeat bill” that would deny pregnant women abortions any point after 6 weeks — before most women even know they are pregnant. Bills like this one deny women any reproductive agency over their bodies, and are destructive to the basic rights guaranteed by the U.S. constitution. Please oppose the “heartbeat bill” in any way you can. Thank you.
• In every way you can, support Planned Parenthood!

Shootings This Week
Over the last two weeks, the US experienced three school shootings: one in at Savannah State University, in Georgia, one at the University of South Carolina, and one in Colorado. One student was injured in the Savannah shooting, which is the most recent, on April 7th. That same day, one student (pictured to the right) was killed and eight more were injured by two gunmen, suspected to be fellow students, who attacked an English class at STEM School Highlands Ranch, in Colorado. At the University of South Carolina, a gunman killed two students and injured four others on April 30th.

​The violence didn’t stop on campus this week. On Sunday, a Sikh family of four were murdered in their home in Ohio while preparing dinner. The killer has not been caught and we don’t know why the family was killed, although it is possible that it was a hate crime. 

It’s a lot, for just two weeks. It’s too much, for a week or a month or a year. With such a volume of bad news it is easy - no, hard not to - become desentized to this violence. You may have noticed circulating on social media tributes to two young men who sacrificed their lives to stop the massacres at USC and Highlands Ranch - Riley Howell and Kendrick Castillo. They deserve every bit of that recognition and praise. But we don’t want to live in a time when we treat shootings as inevitable - and take the small miracles and instances of heroism within a constant cycle. We have to change that cycle. ​

At the same time, though: all of this is hard to hear and hard to handle. When we say we can’t become numb, we don’t mean you should dive into news cycles like this week’s without the resources to take care of yourself. Give yourself time and space to process, reach out to people, indulge in our weekly puppy videos. And then - let’s channel our anger; let’s all take action to change what’s going on out there. That means… 

What you can do?
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES. Demand that they make common-sense gun control legislation a priority. Make it clear that this is a matter of life and death, very literally, and that you are beyond tired of these cycles of hatred, fear, and violence. Some concrete reforms that you can demand: 

• Universal background checks. The House passed a bill in February that would have guaranteed universal background checks and lengthened the wait time before buying a gun, but it didn’t pass the Senate; this is one for the Senators, then. 
• A ban on assault rifles. 
• A ban on high-capacity magazines. 
• The passage of red-flag laws. 

If you have the means, donate to gun-control organizations like Everytown/Moms Demand Action. See our Index by Issue for a more comprehensive list of organizations that could use your funds. ​

Migrant Boy Dies in U.S. Custody
On April 30th, an unaccompanied 16-year-old migrant boy died in U.S. Custody after days of intensive care at a children's hospital in Texas. The unnamed boy was transferred from ICE custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Dept. of HHS that houses migrant children, on April 20th. The cause of death is currently being investigated.

This comes after the deaths of 8-year-old Felipe Alonso Gomez and 7-year-old Jakelin Caal in U.S. Border Patrol custody in December, as well as a stillbirth in ICE custody in February. There very much is a still an unprecedented humanitarian crisis going on at the border, and our representatives need to make addressing it a priority. 

What can you do?

• Read this article by the Washington Office on Latin America, a leading research and advocacy organization on advancing human rights in the Americas, about how we should move to fix the crisis at the border. It has info, short-term and long-term solutions, and plenty of material for creating a script for legislators!
• On that note...CALL YOUR LEGISLATORS, and demand that they move addressing the situation at the border and holding all of those involved accountable up their list of priorities. 
• Check out this list of organizations working to address the crisis, along with opportunities to support and involve yourself in them.
• Support immigrant communities in every way you can, whether that means volunteering at a free legal aid clinic or spreading info about what to do upon an encounter with ICE.

Comprehensive Timeline on the Mueller Report
Attorney General William Barr has come under fire in recent weeks surrounding his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report (The Mueller Report) on his investigation, and the crazy amount of things that have happened can get confusing.

So, here’s a timeline of key events:
On March 22, Barr received the 448-page report of Mueller’s findings.
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​Two days later, Barr sent a 4-page letter to Congress outlining the report. Barr stated that Mueller had found the Trump campaign not guilty of colluding with Russia and had had left it to Barr’s discretion to decide whether or not Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice (according to Barr, the answer was no).

On March 27th, Mueller wrote a letter to Barr expressing concern for the way his report had been construed: he felt his findings had been misrepresented, and that the American public would do better to have read the summaries his own team had prepared. He wrote that Barr’s summary letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the probe.​

On April 18th, following demands by activists and Democrats in Congress that the full report be released, Barr released a redacted version of the full report to the public.

On April 19th, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler issued a subpoena to the Department of Justice demanding an unredacted version of the report, in addition to the underlying grand jury evidence and testimony, with a deadline of May 1st.

On May 1st, Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Many felt that his testimony showed his allegiance to Trump and not to the country. Senate Democrats grilled Barr with questions which exposed what many believed to be hypocrisy and foul play—he seemed to be protecting Trump, not the integrity of America. 

On May 8th, in response to a pending vote in the House Judiciary Committee to hold Barr in contempt over his refusal to respond to Nadler’s subpoena, Trump invoked executive privilege over the entirety of the report.

Later that day, the Committee voted to hold Barr in contempt of Congress (concretely, it didn’t do much, but it escalated tensions even further and exemplified Democrats’ intense frustration).​
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Most important takeaway: both sides are angry, and neither one is backing down—Nadler and House Speaker Pelosi have declared a “constitutional crisis” and impeachment buzz is on the rise, while Barr struck back just today, appointing a prosecutor to examine the origins of the Russia probe. 

puppy vid :))