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Republican legislative leaders announced last night that they have agreed to a final agreement on a new state budget that would commence July 1. As usual, neither Governor Cooper nor Democratic members of the legislature were invited to participate in the negotiations, though ,of, course, the Governor can veto the bill. Not surprisingly, given the disastrous track record of the past six years, the proposal comes up woefully short.

Fiscal policy expert Alexandra Sirota of the N.C. Budget and Tax Center put it this way last night:

The final budget that state lawmakers will vote on in the coming days reflects missed opportunities for North Carolina. By pursuing more tax cuts, even as states like Kansas have reversed course and abandoned their own failed tax-cut experiment, leaders of the NC General Assembly have chosen to stay the course and continue to do less for more North Carolinians.

North Carolinas leaders should put forward a budget that truly reflects the priorities of our growing state, including healthy and safe communities, quality educational opportunities and skills training, thriving communities, and broadly shared economic prosperity. They should make a sustained commitment to rebuilding Eastern North Carolina after Hurricane Matthew rather than offering just a fraction of what is needed. Instead, lawmakers have chosen to give even more benefits to the wealthy and profitable corporations. As state leaders continue to dig their heels in on their failed tax cut experiment, it is time for leaders across the state to emerge and demonstrate the harm of another budget that is not worthy of North Carolinians.

And this is from the good folks at Progress NC:

Once again, Republican lawmakers would rather give tax handouts to big corporations and millionaires instead of investing in North Carolinas future, said Gerrick Brenner, executive director of Progress NC Action. This budget provides absolutely no plan to raise teacher salaries to the national average, and short-changes rural communities across the state compared to Gov. Coopers budget. Working families deserve better.

And this is from Governor Cooper himself:

While we wait for details, the budget outlined by legislative leaders continues to shortchange education, economic development, and middle class families in favor of more tax giveaways that help the wealthy and large corporations. Those are the wrong priorities.

Poisoned water and poisonous healthcare policy were featured ...

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Progressives: GOP Budget deal represents another missed opportunity - The Progressive Pulse

Democratic Party leaders are up to their old tricks. They have lost at every level of government across the country because they fail to give voters reasons to support them.

This seemingly inexplicable behavior is quite deliberate. Giving the people what they want endangers their relations with wealthy individuals, corporations and big banks. Because they can no longer fool all of the people all of the time, they have returned to a more open and obvious move to the right.

Cast aside They are already planning to throw Black voters and political progressives under the bus. The people who have been relied upon to give them the margin of victory are cast aside in favor of people who either wont vote for them at all or who will pull the party to the right.

Democrats cry out that Trump voters arent all racists and will still vote for Democrats. So says Senator Al Franken among others. He recommends, You have to go and talk to them. And you have to listen. Bernie Sanders joins in and says that Trump voters arent sexist, racist, homophobes even though many of them fall into those categories by their own admission.

Words like these ought to set off alarm bells. While even Sanders talks about winning over people who are quite happy with their political choices, they say little or nothing about meeting the needs of Democrats who have left the party in frustration.

Nothing in return Black Americas rewards for putting Bill Clinton in the White House were the crime bill and the end of public assistance as a right. Black people got nothing for their Clinton love except higher poverty rates and prisons bursting at the seams.

Black voters have been slowly neutered over time and are still recovering from the Obama lovefest.

There isnt even a peep about being so openly taken for granted. In years past, even the most callow Black politician would manage to mutter some complaint about being ignored and disrespected.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor her $1 billion team of campaign consultants knew that she was in danger of losing several key states that traditionally voted Democratic in presidential elections. A mere 80,000 votes would have given her an Electoral College victory.

Own Hillarys defeat The Democrats wont own that this debacle is of their making, a result of making vapid appeals to people who wanted to see real change. Instead, they declare that making overt appeals to Trump voters is a new political goal.

Bill Clinton won the nomination and presidency by making the case for his conservatism. Barack Obama was even more slippery than Slick Willie. He raised more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, while simultaneously marketing himself as a progressive.

So great is Democratic trauma regarding the Trump victory that they may successfully use these or new ruses to pull off another presidential win.

But the Democratic rank and file always end up being the losers, whether their party wins or doesnt. The banks always get a bailout and so does the military-industrial complex. Even Obamacare was a Republican plan promoted by right-wing thank tanks. Election outcomes never give banksters, defense contractors or Big Pharma cause for alarm.

Wont go away Former presidents usually disappear from view and write their memoirs. But Obama is openly making election endorsements in France and Germany, and hanging out with royalty in the United Kingdom. His activities are not accidental, they are an extension of what the Democrats do at home. The ruling classes need to be mollified and that apparently is a permanent job for Mr. Hope and Change.

The Democratic Party is proving itself to be treacherous yet again. There must be a movement away from them, a debate about how to achieve true political success. If not, there will be more repeats of the past with a party emerging victorious while its voters remain the losers.

Margaret Kimberleys column appears weekly in BlackAgendaReport.com. Contact her at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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Blacks, progressives under the Democrats' bus - Florida Courier

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Amid calls for accepting pro-life liberals, the Democratic Party faces a summer of soul-searching that will determine what room the party has, if any, for progressives who value unborn human life and set the table for the 2018 midterms.

Beginning shortly after President Trumps surprise victory, pro-life progressives began calling on the party to moderate its tone on social issues, in particular abortion. This spring, pro-choice progressives drew swords to demand ideological conformity on abortion, arguing that abortion is necessary so women can escape poverty. In response, Democratic leaders have at least stated publicly there was room in the party for pro-lifers.

Time will tell if Democrats in Congress will provide anything more than lip service to pro-lifers. But initial results are not promising, as anything that hints of a pro-life perspective is labeled as anti-choice and vilified.

Consider my colleague, Lori Szala, who recently wrote about her experience growing up in a working-class, single-parent family and finding herself pregnant in high school. Szala scheduled an abortion, but cancelled the appointment at the last minute. Despite leaving college, she ultimately succeeded without an abortion, and holds that society should engage in the difficult but critical task of supporting women like her rather than leaving them to feel they must abort.

Despite its moderate tone and focus on the needs of serving women in crisis, Szalas piece generated outrage on the political Left. Her crime? She works for Human Coalition, a pro-life organization. The New York Observer complains the organization is far from impartial when it comes to abortion. Media Matters dismisses Szalas arguments as denouncing abortion access and Human Coalitions work as misleading people.

One of the most substantive responses, and representative of the prevailing critique of pro-life work, comes from the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU agrees that support should exist for women who want to keep their children, but it dismissively states it would be easier to take her argument seriously if Ms. Szala didnt work for an organization whose mission is to outlaw abortion.

To belittle Szalas argument because she is pro-life completely misses the point. Cataloging a parade of horribles that might result from an unplanned pregnancy, the ACLU fails to consider the unborn child who will be aborted. Central to the ACLUs position is the belief that a pregnant woman has an absolute right to end the life of her preborn child if thats what she wants to do.

This is a position for which there can be no common political ground, because a worldview that values the life of the unborn cannot subordinate that childs right to life to the mothers economic interest, no matter how important. The argument treats other humans distinct, living persons, just like us as an economic commodity whose life depends on a cost-benefit analysis. Many Americans agree that childrens lives cannot and should not be measured in dollars and cents though perhaps not the ACLU.

The argument also places an unreasonable and unjustified degree of hope in abortion as a benefit to humanity. At Human Coalition, where we work with hundreds of abortion-seeking women every month, we find that nearly four out of five of the clients we have seen this year state they would prefer to keep their children if their circumstances would allow it. But abortion clinics make no pretense of addressing these underlying issues.

The ACLUs argument reinforces the false narrative that a woman facing a crisis pregnancy must choose between poverty and childbearing. Even beyond choosing adoption, economic challenges amplified by pregnancy can be mitigated albeit with great effort. Conversely, every abortion takes a life that will never return.

It is unsurprising that efforts like Human Coalitions, to provide women with material help and the practical ability to choose life, are met with scorn by the pro-abortion political class. The abortion movement has to trivialize abortion and ensure that abortion is both legal and common in its attempt to silence opposition to the practice.

This mindset is fundamentally at odds with helping women find solutions other than abortion. Because of the abortion lobbys intimate ties with the Democratic Party, progressive support for life-affirming policies is virtually nonexistent. That is why Hillary Clinton notably dropped rare from her slogan that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. Acknowledging that abortion should be rare admits that abortion is not a good thing and raises unsettling questions that suggest progressive politicians should try to reduce abortion.

The tragic irony of the abortion movement is that free abortion access facilitates rather than limits systemic injustice. By proposing a quick and cheap solution to unplanned pregnancy, abortion implicitly pressures women to bear the entire burden themselves and allows partners, families, and communities to sidestep their obligations to these mothers.

The data counterintuitively suggest abortion may limit economic mobility. It has long been noted that the rise in abortion produced a rise in out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families. The changing mores surrounding childbirth and marriage mean that women who refuse to abort are left to go it alone. But as University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox explains, children are more likely to escape poverty if they live with two married parents, and theyre even more likely to escape poverty if they live in a community with a higher percentage of married parents.

How to best help women with unplanned pregnancies overcome the economic challenges they face is a complex issue with no easy answers. Because unborn children are innately valuable, pro-lifers cannot overlook the need to rescue children. But programs explicitly designed to help women avoid abortions they do not want is an effort on which progressives and conservatives can and should find some common ground. Abortion is usually the last resort of women who believe that they have no choice. We must work together to give them better options.

Colin LeCroy is associate general counsel at Human Coalition, one of the nations largest pro-life nonprofits, which utilizes a metrics-focused, technology-driven method to serve families and save children from abortion.

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Pro-life progressives? Why not | The American Conservative - The American Conservative

President Trump hadnt even had a chance to officially release his new list of judicial nominees this month before a progressive advocacy group issued a statement blasting one of the picks for having ties to The Federalist Society.

A national network of conservative and libertarian-leaning lawyers and scholars, the society has become the new bogeyman for the left, which sees it as the main source of shock troops in a Republican strategy to deploy an army of Antonin Scalia-like judges to invade the federal courts and the Justice Department.

Democrats already tried to derail the nominations of Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and Judge Amul Thapar in part because they were on the list of 21 potential nominees released during the campaign by Mr. Trump a list The Federalist Society helped to craft.

Judge Thapar had to overcome universal Democratic opposition to win his seat on a federal appeals court, while Democratic antipathy to Justice Gorsuch forced Republicans to alter the Senates rules by curtailing the power of the filibuster to get him installed.

We probably cant support any nominee vetted by The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist Society, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said during the debate over Justice Gorsuch.

For liberals, the society has replaced the billionaire Koch brothers as the dark force operating behind the scenes, working to foil Democrats agenda. But that dark portrait is laughable to Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of The Federalist Society, who says its goals are no secret.

The institution is not embarrassed by the fact that we want a judiciary that will say what the law is and not what it should be, so this idea that somehow we are in the dark shadows of Washington trying to pack the courts is really utter nonsense, Mr. Leo said. Some senators just dont really understand who we are and what we do.

Mr. Leo took a leave of absence from the society to help Mr. Trump fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Scalia last year. He rejoined the society after Justice Gorsuchs confirmation.

So far Mr. Trump has selected three of the 21 names on his list for advancement: Justice Gorsuch, Judge Thapar and Colorado Supreme Court Justice Allison Eid, whom the president tapped June 7 to fill the seat Justice Gorsuch vacated on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. She was the nominee who immediately faced pushback from the Alliance for Justice, which said she must have passed The Federalist Societys litmus test regarding opposition to gun safety and abortion rights.

Yet another of Mr. Trumps June 7 picks, Stephanos Bibas, has been a regular panelist at Federalist Society conferences. Others with society ties include Noel Francisco, Mr. Trumps pick for solicitor general; Rachel Brand, the newly confirmed associate attorney general; and Steven Engel, Mr. Trumps pick to be head of the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel.

Democrats tried to filibuster Ms. Brand, and appear ready to attempt to block Mr. Francisco and Mr. Engel when their nominations reach the floor.

Mr. Leo said his organization is a natural pipeline for talent, so its not surprising for Mr. Trump to select from its members, who are committed to an originalist, textualist form of judicial interpretation.

Open debate group

Founded more than three decades ago to counter the liberal orthodoxy that flows through law schools and the American Bar Association, The Federalist Society has included Scalia, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

The society operates chapters at major law schools and hosts gatherings where legal issues both hot topics and arcane points of law are debated. Liberal legal stars often appear at the conferences as part of the debate.

The Federalist Society also analyzes high-profile court cases, making its experts available for reporters.

But Democrats say the organizations troubling activity comes in the judicial selection process, where the society has been influential in shaping the picks for Republican presidents.

During Justice Gorsuchs confirmation hearing, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy told him its a problem that the president outsourced your selection for the far-right, big money, special interest groups.

They have an agenda. Theyre confident you share their agenda. In fact, the first person who interviewed you for this nomination said they sought a nominee who understands things like we do, said Mr. Leahy, Vermont Democrat.

Mr. Leahy similarly criticized Judge Thapar, who during his confirmation hearing described the organization as an open debate society.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin said its more nefarious than that.

Aside from the three or four families or groups that are major contributors to the Republican Party, theres a whole group of dark money contributors who are not disclosed, so this argument that this is just a debating society, which is what Judge Thapar called it, I think really doesnt pass the laugh test, the Illinois Democrat told The Washington Times.

Mr. Leo says theres nothing private or secretive about his group, who is a member and what it stands for: Our statement of purpose is right there for everybody to see. Its basic constitutional law and civics from high school. Our funders are disclosed in the annual report.

Because The Federalist Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group, its donors can remain anonymous. But it does publish its financial reports on its website each year.

From 2013 to 2015 the Koch brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were among the most notable names that routinely donated more than $100,000 to the organization. Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trumps senior adviser, and her husband routinely donated more than $50,000 during each of those three years, as did the Anschutz Family Foundation, headed by Philip Anschutz, a billionaire Justice Gorsuch represented as a lawyer in the early 2000s.

Chevron Corp., Delta Air Lines, BP America Inc., Google, Pfizer Inc. and Microsoft were among several corporations that have donated to the society since 2013.

During those same years, more than 30 donors giving more than $100,000 chose to remain anonymous.

Society of influence

Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law who often speaks at Federalist Society events, said the network of the groups lawyers is so large that some inside the Trump administration are even members.

If you are a prominent respective lawyer who is on the conservative side of the spectrum, the odds are you will be a member of the society, Mr. Blackman said. This is not some sort of vast right-wing conspiracy, as some are trying to paint it.

Elizabeth B. Wydra, president of the left-of-center Constitutional Accountability Center, said shes enjoyed appearing on panels at Federalist Society events. But she questioned the value of the organizations judicial recommendations such as society member Damien M. Schiff, a May 8 pick to serve on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

On one hand, the confirmation of Justice Gorsuch is strong evidence of The Federalist Societys influence on the judicial nomination process, but on the other hand, some Trump judicial nominees for example, Damien Schiff, who called Justice Anthony M. Kennedy a judicial prostitute indicate a real lack of judgment on the part of this president and the people advising him, Ms. Wydra said.

Marge Baker, vice president at People For the American Way, said The Federalist Society has long had influence in shaping Republican judicial picks, but said that influence has grown under Mr. Trump.

This administration more so than [any] I [have] ever seen is outsourcing that almost sacred responsibility, she said.

Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice and an attorney for FreedomWorks, equated the influence that the ABA has had on the courts to that of The Federalist Society.

Most Democratic judicial nominees belong to the ABA, and the ABA rates judicial nominees something The Federalist Society does not do yet it would be inaccurate to say that the ABA selects nominees, said Mr. Levey. Instead, the ABA and Federalist Society are one source of information for an administration trying to fill many dozens of judicial vacancies across the country.

Liberals have their own legal organization, the American Constitution Society, which held its national conference in Washington last week and attracted Democratic senators and Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

But it has not gained the sort of influence or the stigma among political opponents as that of The Federalist Society.

Whats really unusual is to outsource the process, said Caroline Fredrickson, president of the American Constitution Society. Certainly we were consulted by the Obama administration as to people who would be good choices, but they consulted many different sources, and they didnt give outside organizations the role.

Federalist Society member Steven R. Klein said Democrats attacks dont discredit the organization.

It was stupid when they tried to do this during Justice Roberts and Justice Alito during those confirmation hearings. Its twice as stupid now, said Mr. Klein.

Link:
Federalist Society becomes progressives' new bogeyman - Washington Times