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In the jury pool room, we were shown the obligatory orientation video. It featured fluttering flags, a swelling soundtrack (subtitled dramatic music), and a pep talk from Kimberly S. Budd, chief justice of the states Supreme Judicial Court. Those who have an opportunity to serve as jurors by and large feel very good about the important work they have done, she said. Then we waited. In most instances, thats what jury service is: a seemingly interminable wait to be dismissed. Trials are relatively rare, because most cases end in plea deals or other settlements.

Eventually, we were paraded down the hall to Superior Court, filing into our seats like reluctant churchgoers. Judge Diane C. Freniere estimated it would take up to seven days to work through the witness list. Muted groans followed. She posed a series of questions aimed at red-flagging prospective jurors with issues that might hinder their ability to render a fair verdict. Among them: Do you agree that under the Constitution, a person is innocent until proven guilty? About a half dozen people indicated no. Even more had a problem with the right of a defendant to not take the stand. Were these objections calculated attempts to get booted or a symptom of a democracy so poisoned by lies and divisions that even its basic tenets have become optional? Either way, it seemed that winnowing this crowd to 12 impartial people would be a challenge. My initial reluctance to participate turned to alarm. Now, I wanted to be one of the chosen dozen. Better me than some of them, I thought.

Next, another wait while we were led off one-by-one to be interviewed by the judge and attorneys. Minutes piled into hours. Grumbling and speculation broke out.

If theres a positive alcohol test, I dont need to hear anything else.

Why wouldnt he testify?

I dont have time for this.

Dear God, some people are wearing sandals.

I stared at the back of the middle-aged man in front me. What made him decide to wear a Laid back and living salty T-shirt to court? Another man lapsed into gale-force snoring. These are not the peers I would want deciding my fate, I thought. Almost everybody appeared to be white. So was the defendant, but what if he wasnt? Jury pools are assembled at random, which sounds fair in theory, but can play out like a bad hand of cards for someone facing punishment.

There are, of course, legitimate hardships that might prevent someone from being able to serve. For starters, employers are only required to pay an employee for the first three days of jury duty. After that, the state doles out a measly $50 per day. But most of the people mouthing off simply sounded inconvenienced.

When my time came to be quizzed, Freniere asked whether I had read about the accident. (I had, but couldnt recall the details.) She said I would need to resist my journalists urge to research the case. A few minutes later, I was Juror #6. By the next morning, there were 14 of us, with two to later be designated as alternates. We sat around a conference table, an even split of men and women ranging in age from early 20s to late 60s. None of the democracy doubters had made it past Freniere. There was jittery small talk as we lined up to return to the courtroom, this time to sit in the jury box. I felt the heaviness of the moment. A life had been extinguished, others permanently reconfigured. We had to get this right. Testimony came from state troopers, a firefighter, the ER doctor, a blood lab technician, an accident reconstruction specialist, witnesses at the scene, and the daughter whose mother had died beside her.

During recesses, we shared snippets about our lives, capsule reviews of TV series, and, on one morning, a home-baked loaf of chocolate banana bread. We steered clear of the case, which became harder with each day as our heads filled with more details and questions. Following closing arguments, the judge announced that Juror #6 would be the foreperson. Me. Mostly, that meant making sure everyone had a say, and that we adhered to the evidence, not our gut instincts.

After six hours of deliberations, we reached a decision: Guilty on three counts, including manslaughter, and not guilty on three others related to being under the influence of narcotics. As the foreperson, it was my job to announce each verdict as the clerk read the charges aloud. With the first not guilty, I heard gasps from the gallery.

For the 12 of us, it was five minutes of acute tension followed by near instant relief. A group of strangers, collectively unenthusiastic at the start, had put their summer routines on hold to mete out justice as best we could. Despite the awful circumstances that brought us together, it felt gratifying. Chief Justice Budd was on to something.

Since 2016, trust in the nations judicial system has eroded, undermined by political agendas and nutty conspiracy theories. That makes shoring up the foundation more critical than ever. Yes, the system is flawed stained by a history of ingrained disparities but jurors can make a difference, one case at a time. If youre called to serve, go with a better attitude than I did. Bring an open mind and maybe a strong cup of coffee. No flimsy excuses, no whining, and no sandals. Democracy depends on it.

Mark Pothier is a Globe editor. He can be reached at mark.pothier@globe.com.

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Waiting, grumbling, and . . . sandals? Jury duty is a drag. But its also vital to democracy. - The Boston Globe

Office of Rep. Derek Kilmer announcement.

U.S. Representative Derek Kilmer (WA-06) has been recognized with a perfect score on Common Causes 2022Democracy Scorecard a nonpartisan accounting of actions of all Members of Congress on a range of democracy-related legislation, including campaign finance reform, the protection and expansion of voting rights, and putting an end to partisan gerrymandering.

Theres too much money, too many special interests, and too little accountability in our government. Americans deserve to have their voices heard and votes counted. Thats why since day one as our regions representative Ive been working to reduce the role of money in politics, combat voter suppression, fix the broken political system, and get Congress back on track and back to getting things done,said Rep. Kilmer. Our government should work for the American people. Thats why its important for Congress to root out corruption, strengthen our systems of checks and balances, and protect the right to vote. Ill keep pushing to get pro-democracy legislation signed into law and to make government work better for folks.

Nearly two years after the January 6thinsurrection and at a time when some power-hungry state legislatures have made it significantly harder for certain Americans to vote, we need more leaders like Congressman Kilmer to stand up for the rule of law and for the freedom to vote,said Aaron Scherb,Senior Director of Legislative Affairs at Common Cause. Our Democracy Scorecard can serve as a resource to help citizens understand which members of Congress are protecting our voices and who is trying to make it harder to vote; we commend Congressman Kilmer for getting a perfect score on the 2022 Democracy Scorecard.

In Congress, Rep. Kilmer has been recognized as a leader on campaign finance reform and continues to push for legislation that would improve transparency, reduce the role of big money in campaigns, and fix the commission charged with enforcing federal election laws. As the Chair of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, Rep. Kilmer has led the charge to make Congress more effective and efficient passing over 170 bipartisan recommendations that aim to make the federal government work better for the American people.

Rep. Kilmer co-sponsored and voted to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2022, a sweeping package of reform bills aimed at strengthening the voice of the American people in their democracy by making it easier to vote, reducing the role of big money in the political process, and ensuring public officials work for the public interest. This comprehensive reform package includes two bipartisan bills led by Representative Kilmer, the Honest Ads Act and the Resorting Integrity to Americas Election Act, which aim to increase transparency in our campaign finance and election laws.

This Congress, Common Cause recognized Kilmer for holding a pro-democracy stance on 14 bills that were voted on by the House including H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act legislation he helpedintroducethat aims to strengthen Americas democratic institutions against future presidents, regardless of political party, who seek to abuse the power of their office. He also sponsored H.R. 5746, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act apackageof reform bills aimed at strengthening the voice of the American people in their democracy. In addition, he was recognized for co-sponsoring 4 pieces of pro-democracy legislation including H.R. 5008, the Frank Harrison, Elizabeth Peratrovich and Miguel Trujillo Native American Voting Rights Act which aims to protect the sacred right to vote and ensure equal access to the electoral process for Native Americans.

Kilmer has been recognized previously for his efforts to fight to fix the broken political system and secure American elections. This year, he received an A rating on the 2022legislative scorecardby End Citizens United // Let America Vote Action Fund which tracks Members support for legislation to reduce the role of big money and special interests in politics, restore ethics in Washington, and protect and expand the right to vote. In 2019, Kilmerreceivedthe inaugural Teddy Roosevelt Courage Award by Issue One, a leading cross-partisan political reform organization. The Award was given in the spirit of the 26th President of the United States, who was a staunch defender of good, ethical government and the U.S. political system.

Common Cause is a nonpartisan, national grassroots organization of more than 1 million members and supporters dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy. The annual Democracy Scorecard aims to offer a factual, nonpartisan record of actions by each member of Congress on a variety of democracy-related legislation.

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Kilmer Receives National Recognition for Efforts to Protect & Strengthen Democracy The Suburban Times - The Suburban Times

As Banned Books Week began Monday in the United States, a leading advocacy group published an updated report warning of a surge in right-wing efforts to censor and ban titlesmany of them related to the struggles of marginalized peoplesin American schools.

"More books banned. More districts. More states. More students losing access to literature. 'More' is the operative word for this report on school book bans," begins the update to PEN America's Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students' First Amendment Rights, which was published in April and covered the first nine months of the 2021-22 scholastic year.

"This is a concerted, organized, well-resourced push at censorship," PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel told The New York Times, adding that the effort "is ideologically motivated and politically expedient, and it needs to be understood as such in order to be confronted and addressed properly."

The revised reportwhich shares the Banned in the USA title with the first music album to ever carry a parental advisory stickernotes that PEN America's Index of School Book Bans now lists at least 2,532 instances of 1,648 titles being banned. That's up from 1,586 banning incidents involving 1,145 books reported in the April publication.

The bans occurred in 138 school districts across 32 states. In 96% of cases, bans were enacted without following the best practice guidelines for challenging controversial titles outlined by the American Library Association and the National Coalition Against Censorship.

More than 40% of the banned books in the report deal with LGBTQ+ themes, while 21% "directly address issues of race and racism," 22% "contain sexual content," and 10% are "related to rights and activism," according to PEN America.

PEN America identified at least 50 national, state, and local groups pushing to ban or restrict books in U.S. schools.

The largest of these groups, the right-wing Moms for Liberty, has over 200 local chapters and has gained notoriety for its anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy, for vehemently opposing Covid-19 mask mandates in schools, and for spreading the baseless claim that one local school district was placing litter boxes in bathrooms for students who identify as cats.

Another right-wing group named in the report, MassResistance, is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that claims the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was "clearly a setup" and that there is a "Black Lives Matter and LGBT assault" on American schools.

The group also called parents who opposed its book-banning efforts "groomers," a slur conflating the LGBTQ+ community with pedophilia.

"Book challenges impede free expression rights, which must be the bedrock of public schools in an open, inclusive, and democratic society," PEN America said in the updated report. "These bans pose a dangerous precedent to those in and out of schools, intersecting with other movements to block or curtail the advances in civil rights for historically marginalized people."

"Against the backdrop of other efforts to roll back civil liberties and erode democratic norms," the group added, "the dynamics surrounding school book bans are a canary in the coal mine for the future of American democracy, public education, and free expression. We should heed this warning."

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'Heed This Warning': 2,500+ Book Bans Threaten US Schools and Democracy - Common Dreams

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPMs home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published atThe Conversation.

The United States may regard itself as a leader of the free world, but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list.

In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under this methodology an expansive model of 17 categories, or goals, many of them focused on the environment and equity the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries.

The U.S. is also now considered a flawed democracy, according to The Economists democracy index.

As a political historian who studies U.S. institutional development, I recognize these dismal ratings as the inevitable result of two problems. Racism has cheated many Americans out of the health care, education, economic security and environment they deserve. At the same time, as threats to democracy become more serious, a devotion to American exceptionalism keeps the country from candid appraisals and course corrections.

The Office of Sustainable Developments rankings differ from more traditional development measures in that they are more focused on the experiences of ordinary people, including their ability to enjoy clean air and water, than the creation of wealth.

So while the gigantic size of the American economy counts in its scoring, so too does unequal access to the wealth it produces. When judged by accepted measures like the Gini coefficient, income inequality in the U.S. has risen markedly over the past 30 years. By the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developments measurement, the U.S. has the biggest wealth gap among G-7 nations.

These results reflect structural disparities in the United States, which are most pronounced for African Americans. Such differences have persisted well beyond the demise of chattel slavery and the repeal of Jim Crow laws.

Scholar W.E.B. Du Bois first exposed this kind of structural inequality in his 1899 analysis of Black life in the urban north, The Philadelphia Negro. Though he noted distinctions of affluence and status within Black society, Du Bois found the lives of African Americans to be a world apart from white residents: a city within a city. Du Bois traced the high rates of poverty, crime and illiteracy prevalent in Philadelphias Black community to discrimination, divestment and residential segregation not to Black peoples degree of ambition or talent.

More than a half-century later, with characteristic eloquence, Martin Luther King Jr. similarly decried the persistence of the other America, one where the buoyancy of hope was transformed into the fatigue of despair.

To illustrate his point, King referred to many of the same factors studied by Du Bois: the condition of housing and household wealth, education, social mobility and literacy rates, health outcomes and employment. On all of these metrics, Black Americans fared worse than whites. But as King noted, Many people of various backgrounds live in this other America.

The benchmarks of development invoked by these men also featured prominently in the 1962 book The Other America, by political scientist Michael Harrington, founder of a group that eventually became the Democratic Socialists of America. Harringtons work so unsettled President John F. Kennedy that it reportedly galvanized him into formulating a war on poverty.

Kennedys successor, Lyndon Johnson, waged this metaphorical war. But poverty bound to discrete places. Rural areas and segregated neighborhoods stayed poor well beyond mid-20th-century federal efforts.

In large part that is because federal efforts during that critical time accommodated rather than confronted the forces of racism, according to my research.

Across a number of policy domains, the sustained efforts of segregationist Democrats in Congress resulted in an incomplete and patchwork system of social policy. Democrats from the South cooperated with Republicans to doom to failure efforts to achieve universal health care or unionized workforces. Rejecting proposals for strong federal intervention, they left a checkered legacy of local funding for education and public health.

Today, many years later, the effects of a welfare state tailored to racism is evident though perhaps less visibly so in the inadequate health policies driving a shocking decline in average American life expectancy.

There are other ways to measure a countrys level of development, and on some of them the U.S. fares better.

The U.S. currently ranks 21st on the United Nations Development Programs index, which measures fewer factors than the sustainable development index. Good results in average income per person $64,765 and an average 13.7 years of schooling situate the United States squarely in the developed world.

Its ranking suffers, however, on appraisals that place greater weight on political systems.

The Economists democracy index now groups the U.S. among flawed democracies, with an overall score that ranks between Estonia and Chile. It falls short of being a top-rated full democracy in large part because of a fractured political culture. This growing divide is most apparent in the divergent paths between red and blue states.

Although the analysts from The Economist applaud the peaceful transfer of power in the face of an insurrection intended to disrupt it, their report laments that, according to a January 2022 poll, only 55% of Americans believe that Mr. Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Election denialism carries with it the threat that election officials in Republican-controlled jurisdictions will reject or alter vote tallies that do not favor the Republican Party in upcoming elections, further jeopardizing the score of the U.S. on the democracy index.

Red and blue America also differ on access to modern reproductive care for women. This hurts the U.S. gender equality rating, one aspect of the United Nations sustainable development index.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican-controlled states have enacted or proposed grossly restrictive abortion laws, to the point of endangering a womans health.

I believe that, when paired with structural inequalities and fractured social policy, the dwindling Republican commitment to democracy lends weight to the classification of the U.S. as a developing country.

To address the poor showing of the United States on a variety of global surveys, one must also contend with the idea of American exceptionalism, a belief in American superiority over the rest of the world.

Both political parties have long promoted this belief, at home and abroad, but exceptionalism receives a more formal treatment from Republicans. It was the first line of the Republican Partys national platform of 2016 and 2020 (we believe in American exceptionalism). And it served as the organizing principle behind Donald Trumps vow to restore patriotic education to Americas schools.

In Florida, after lobbying by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state board of education in July 2022 approved standards rooted in American exceptionalism while barring instruction in critical race theory, an academic framework teaching the kind of structural racism Du Bois exposed long ago.

With a tendency to proclaim excellence rather than pursue it, the peddling of American exceptionalism encourages Americans to maintain a robust sense of national achievement despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

Kathleen Frydl is a Sachs lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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US Is Becoming A 'Developing Country' On Global Rankings That Measure Democracy, Inequality - TPM

Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar on Tuesday described the functioning of the legislature as the key to a vibrant and healthy democracy as they authentically represent the will and aspirations of the people.

He was addressing the felicitation function in the state assembly here.

Dhankhar also expressed deep concern over the inhuman conduct of the members in Parliament and legislative assemblies, saying that it is a tough challenge to the democratic system.

He called decency and discipline, the soul of democracy. ''The functioning of Parliament and legislature is the key to a vibrant and healthy democracy. These institutions authentically represent the will as well as the aspirations of the people,'' the vice president said.

He said people's representatives are required to perform important constitutional duties in these temples of democracy and held them as a powerful medium to enlighten the governments.

It is a meaningful and effective means of realising the aspirations of the people and it is the fundamental duty of these institutions to hold the executive accountable and establish transparency and accountability, Dhankhar added.

He described discipline and healthy brainstorming as the soul of democracy, highlighting their importance in the Parliamentary system.

Debate, discussion, and deliberation in the parliamentary system are the elixir of democracy. As the largest democracy in the world, the conduct of our elected representatives should be exemplary, he said.

The vice president said, ''Today's situation is very serious and worrying Parliament and legislative assemblies are no less than a wrestling arena. The present situation is a very worrying sign about democracy and it is a cause of the great challenge and deep concern to the democratic system.'' He said decency and discipline are the souls of democracy and added that elected people's representatives should set high standards by their actions and words. The prestige of the people's representatives and the working capacity of the legislative bodies are absolutely necessary for the healthy development of democracy, said the VP. Any lapse on these issues will affect our other public institutions as well, he added.

Traditionally our Parliament and legislative assemblies have been functioning peacefully, and decently, he said, urging political parties to come together and resolve their differences in the spirit of consensus. Dhankhar said the administration gets guidance only from the dignified legislative bodies. In this context, he urged members to take inspiration from the debates of the constituent assembly.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Functioning of legislature, key to vibrant and healthy democracy: VP - Devdiscourse