Marijuana is a legitimate industry. And a legitimate industry should have legitimate access to banking services to start successful businesses. Especially for people of color who have been disproportionately incarcerated from marijuana criminalization.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 30, 2019
Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
California Demands Trump's Taxes
The Presidential Tax Transparency and Accountability Act... passed both houses of the state legislature by large margins, and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed it into law [yesterday]. The bill requires that any candidate for president or governor who wants to appear on the state's primary ballot must submit the last five years' of tax returns at least 98 days ahead of the primary election. Donald Trump's lawyer, Jay Sekulow, has already announced plans to file suit. So has the California GOP... A fairly sizable majority of legal scholars think that the law should pass muster, since states have pretty wide latitude in establishing qualifications for candidates who want to appear on ballots. Further, there are exactly 118 days left until the deadline. Even if Team Trump gets a favorable outcome, they might not be able to work their way through the process (including appeals) in time. Assuming that the law stays on the books as of November 25 (the deadline for submitting the returns), then things could get interesting. Presumably, Trump will not bow to the demands of a blue state that he hates. The GOP could summarily award all of the state's delegates to him, but that would probably trigger lawsuits from Bill Weld and any other GOP challengers. [This seems a thin reed to me, but okay.--d] Alternatively, the Party could try to arrange a write-in campaign (which is legal in California primaries, even though it's not in the general)... [T]he GOP could just decide that Trump will be fine without California's delegates, and will leave them on the table for Weld, et al., to collect. Of course, that won't work so well if many other blue states follow California's lead. [Pay attention to Trump's own New York, I guess? Fingers crossed.--d] ... There are so many lawsuits related to Trump's taxes in which the President's position is none-too-strong, and in which early rulings have gone against him, that his taxes will likely be public before Californians ever head to the polls. [Such optimism! I don't share it, having lived through the last fifty years in this country.--d]I've been waiting for a State to do this. Glad it's California first through the gate. Pretty sure Trump and the GOP in its present utter debasement will just brazen it out and fall in line as they have done for every Trump violation. Still, one never knows just which legal or legislative maneuver might bring the stupid vile racist rapist crook down, which exposure of his lies and crimes and outrages might finally bring enough people to their senses to care enough vote him out.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
My heart is with the people of #Gilroy and the victims of last night's shooting.
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 29, 2019
No one should live in fear of being shot for going to school, church, or festivals. I'll keep fighting for real gun reform. #NotOneMore #EnoughIsEnough https://t.co/hus9qnZKWq
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Sunday Brunch and Walk
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
There are millions of people just one emergency away from living in poverty. The first step to tackling poverty is addressing the systemic barriers that keep low-income families, especially those of color, trapped at the bottom.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 27, 2019
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Here Trump goes again with another racist attack against an African American. @RepCummings is a true patriot who serves his district and this country with honor and distinction. Denigrating Baltimore is a new low. These attacks won't stop him - or any of us - serving in Congress. https://t.co/UX92IUZJBS
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 27, 2019
Friday, July 26, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Let me be clear: the US' continued arm sales to Saudi Arabia make us complicit to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Trump's veto is shameful and flies in the face of bicameral & bipartisan agreement on this issue. https://t.co/daK2tT79O8
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 25, 2019
Trump's License To Kill
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
The death penalty is a racist and error-prone practice that doesn't deter crime. I have long opposed this barbaric practice. The US hasn’t executed a federal inmate in nearly 20 years and we shouldn’t start now. https://t.co/mANivWqsre
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 25, 2019
Staycationing
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Two things Mueller has made clear this morning:
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 24, 2019
✔️ He did not find “no collusion” with Russia
✔️ He did not “totally exonerate” the President
No matter how many times Trump repeats those lies it doesn’t make them true.#MuellerReport #MuellerHearings
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Trump is now instituting a rule that encourages racial profiling and opens the door for widespread rights violations. He is doubling down on his search for every possible way to terrorize immigrant families. We will fight this. https://t.co/gNZ8O4Eq7H
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 23, 2019
Monday, July 22, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
I voted against the 2001 AUMF because I knew it was a blank check for war. More than 17 years later, many of my colleagues in Congress are finally coming around. Check out this @SFChronicle profile on the incredible progress we’ve made to #StopEndlessWar. https://t.co/vdzWzJJByR
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 21, 2019
Today's Random Wilde
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
If we are going to uplift families out of poverty, Wall Street has got to pay its fair share in taxes. Let’s pass the #InclusiveProsperityTax to give everyday families a fair shot at the American Dream.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 19, 2019
From Wendy Brown's "In the Ruins of Neoliberalism"
The white male supremacism in contemporary traditional values politics becomes explicit, then, not only because nihilism pulls the moral drapery off those values and makes them contractual or instrumentalizable, but also because this supremacy is wounded without being destroyed. Its subject abhors the democracy it holds responsible for its wounds and seeks to pull democracy down as it goes down. Perhaps we are also witnessing how nihilism goes when futurity itself is in doubt... If white men cannot own democracy, there will be no democracy. If while men cannot rule the planet, there will be no planet. Nietzsche was immensely curious about what would come after the two centuries of the intensifying nihilism he expected. But what if there is no "after"?
...[Those] for whom attachments to nation, family, property, and whiteness are mobilized as a political reactionary formation... the toxic mix of nihilism, fatalism, and ressentiment with neoliberal assaults on the social and the political and valorization of markets and morals... this population rages against secular cosmopolitans oriented toward use in place of ownership and embracing racial indeterminacy, gender fluidity, "families we choose," godlessness, open borders, speculation, virtual sociality, and the rootlessness of everyday life. [They] cling to the soil, even if it is planted in suburban lawn devastated by droughts and floods from global warming, littered with the paraphernalia of addictive painkillers, and adjacent to crumbling schools, abandoned factories, terminal futures. Families become shells, ownership and savings vanish, marriages teeter and break, depression, anxiety, and other forms of illness are ubiquitous, religion is commercialized and weaponized, and patriotism is reduced to xenophobic support for troops in aimless, endless wars and useless, but spectacular border barricades. Nation, family, property, and the traditions reproducing racial and gender privilege, mortally wounded by deindustrialization, neoliberal reason, globalization, digital technologies, and nihilism... have been activated mostly by the Right. What kinds of Left political critique and vision might reach and transform them?
Friday, July 19, 2019
Where I'm At When It Comes To The Transhumanists
If you really want to feed a deluded sociopath with your attention, might I suggest you scratch a cat's chin instead? Far less boring.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 19, 2019
Today's Random Wilde
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Trump’s comments were racist, un-American, and hateful. Come 2020, we’ll have a new leader in the White House. And whoever she is will unite our country and lead with dignity and respect.https://t.co/4e08Z5Xo3o
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 18, 2019
"The Fragile Project"
White nationalism was a formal or informal governing doctrine of the United States until 1965, or for most of its existence as a country. Racist demagogues, from Andrew Johnson to Woodrow Wilson, have occupied the White House. Trump has predecessors, like Calvin Coolidge, who imposed racist immigration restrictions designed to preserve a white demographic majority. Prior presidents, like Richard Nixon, have exploited racial division for political gain. But we have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits. Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail... [M]ost of Trump’s predecessors had something he does not yet have: the support of a majority of the electorate. Ilhan Omar’s prominence as a Republican target comes not, as conservatives might argue, simply because her policy views are left-wing... She has emerged as an Emmanuel Goldstein for the Trumpist right because as a black woman, a Muslim, an immigrant, and a progressive member of Congress, she represents in vivid terms a threat to the nation Trumpists fear they are losing. To attack Omar is to attack a symbol of the demographic change that is eroding white cultural and political hegemony, the defense of which is Trumpism’s only sincere political purpose. Many of the president’s most outrageous comments have been delivered extemporaneously, when he departs from his prepared remarks. Last night, though, his attacks on Omar were carefully scripted, written out by his staff and then read off a teleprompter. To defend the remarks as politically shrewd is to confess that the president is deliberately campaigning on the claim that only white people can truly, irrevocably be American. Still, a plurality of Americans in 2016 and 2018 voted against defining American citizenship in racial terms, something that has perhaps never happened before in the history of the United States. There was no anti-racist majority at the dawn of Reconstruction, during the heydey of immigration restriction, or in the twilight of the civil-rights movement. The voters of this coalition may yet defeat Trumpism, if they can find leaders who are willing and able to confront it. That is not a given... The electoral coalition that gave Democrats the House represents perhaps the strongest resistance to the rising tide of right-wing ethnonationalism in the West, yet observe what the party has done with that mandate. The great victory of the House Democrats has been to halt the Republican legislative effort to deprive millions of health care coverage, a feat they accomplished simply by being elected [and even this is a premature declaration of victory given ongoing sabotage and the court cases still pending --d]. But over the past seven months, Democrats have proved unable to complete a single significant investigation, hold many memorable hearings, or pass a single piece of meaningful legislation that curtails Trump’s abuses of authority. Instead, they held their breath waiting for Robert Mueller to save them, and when he did not they, like their Republican predecessors, took to issuing sternly worded statements, tepid pleas for civility, and concerned tweets as their primary methods of imposing accountability.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Just met with some of my constituents about the need for a #DomesticWorkersBillofRights! It’s past time for the 2.5 million nannies, housecleaners, and homecare workers in the US have access to basic workplace protections. #Dignity4AllWorkers pic.twitter.com/1PPhzDvXbb
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 16, 2019
Happy belated birthday to my righteous Representative, by the way, I forgot to mention it yesterday!
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
I proudly support the House resolution condemning Trump’s xenophobic tweets. We have the most diverse Congress in our nation’s history and I won’t let Trump diminish the accomplishments of women of color with the vile, disgusting, and racist things that come out of his mouth.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 16, 2019
Monday, July 15, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Let’s call this what it is — racism. To all my sisters in Congress, I support you and stand behind you. To Trump, you’re right — we’ll see you at the ballot box. pic.twitter.com/hoc4Xcg3E9
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 15, 2019
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Sunday Walk And Brunch
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Trump’s new bogus Commission on Unalienable Rights is filled with people who have turned their backs on the LGBTQ community. Their task? To re-examine human rights. Unbelievable. https://t.co/7FfvmxCZV0
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 13, 2019
Friday, July 12, 2019
Vacation
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
BREAKING: The House just passed my amendment to repeal the outdated 2002 AUMF & restore Congressional authority in matters of war and peace. This AUMF has been on the books for 17 years, long after the end of the Iraq war. It's past time for it to go! #StopEndlessWars pic.twitter.com/JamaAKaf86
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 12, 2019
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Possible ICE raids are happening this weekend. #KnowYourRights – no matter your immigration status, you have legal rights. #KeepFamiliesTogether #DontLookAway https://t.co/6VKzY63fkp https://t.co/IbFUZ76VIl
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 11, 2019
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Tuesday, July 09, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily (Big Picture Edition)
Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It could force 120 million people into poverty as early as 2030 and create scenarios where the wealthy few pay to escape heat, hunger, and conflict while everyone else is forced to suffer.https://t.co/y5n5yqtRwD
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 9, 2019
Monday, July 08, 2019
Sunday, July 07, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Cities refuse to build homeless shelters because they believe they’re a burden or unsightly. Our current housing system sets people up to fail and then refuses to help them once they do. This is not how we take care of our most vulnerable Americans.https://t.co/EjycQD6yO7
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 6, 2019
Saturday, July 06, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour will help — not hurt — America’s families. It’s past time we give workers the raise they deserve. https://t.co/Cvm5HODSLO
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 6, 2019
Friday, July 05, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
These are humanitarian crimes sanctioned by Trump and his administration. We cannot be silent in the face of such grave injustice. https://t.co/bDj7cOim5M
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 3, 2019
Today's Random Wilde
Thursday, July 04, 2019
When Bigots Get Bored
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
The #FourthofJuly celebration has always been nonpartisan — not a military parade with tanks and flyovers focused around the President. This is what dictators do. https://t.co/8n9rJdj9UK
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 4, 2019
Our nation was founded on the spirit of resistance and it’s up to us to carry on that legacy today. #IndependenceDay reminds us that our work towards freedom and equality is never done. Happy 4th of July. pic.twitter.com/8Qtrx9pB5W
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 4, 2019
Happy July 4th (Nazis With Guns And Tanks in the Street Edition)
Wednesday, July 03, 2019
Last Teaching Day
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
I can’t believe this still needs to be said in 2019, but every woman deserves access to safe, affordable, and comprehensive reproductive health care — and that includes abortion.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 2, 2019
Tuesday, July 02, 2019
Teaching Day
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Trump’s proposed rollback of the Health Care Rights Law would allow doctors to pick and choose who they treat – endangering the lives of people who’ve had an abortion, trans folks, and so many others. #PutPatientsFirst https://t.co/hYv7nznnvR
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) July 1, 2019
Monday, July 01, 2019
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin should be ashamed of himself. Harriet Tubman deserves to take her rightful place on the $20 bill — anything else is pure discrimination. #TubmanTwenty pic.twitter.com/s9JqF6xhga
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) July 1, 2019
Promote Supreme Court Justices to "Emeritus" Status at 70
QUESTION: Can you think of any reason why Congress could not legislatively define a "senior status" for Supreme Court justices? For example, after age 70, justices could advise, research, write, and give speeches, but would no longer select cases or participate in hearings, case conferences, or decisions. The president would then fill the senior vacancies with additional, active justices. Old justices would not be forcibly retired (possibly in violation of the Constitution), and no Constitutional amendment would be necessary. G.A., Berkeley, CA
REPLY: This is, of course, an alternate way of solving the two problems Bernie Sanders was trying to solve with his "court rotation" scheme, namely: (1) that the composition of the Court has become problematic and highly politicized, and (2) judges can't be terminated unless they are impeached. We think your approach is probably more likely to fly than Sanders' is. As we've pointed out before, there is already precedent for Congress to set a mandatory retirement age: federal law enforcement officers and firefighters must retire at 57, unless given special dispensation. Though it is not well known, there is also precedent for Congress to establish a "you're still active, but with reduced duties" status. Namely, five-star officers are not legally able to retire, and remain on active duty for the remainder of their lives, even if they have no command. We haven't had a five-star officer in a long time, of course, but the precedent is still there. (Note: Dwight D. Eisenhower's commission was suspended while he was president, and then restored the moment he left office). Sanders' proposal would, in the end, result in a demotion for SCOTUS justices. On the other hand, the "senior status" proposal would result in a promotion (albeit a symbolic one) to something like "Justice Emeritus" status. Hard to say how it would play out in court, when the inevitable lawsuits were filed, but this does not seem to automatically run afoul of the terms set by the Constitution or the various Judiciary Acts.