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11 Years After Mandated By US Supreme Court, Alabama Court Strikes Down Anti-Sodomy Law

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On Friday an Alabama appeals court ruled the state’s ban on consensual same-sex intercourse unconstitutional. Prompted by the conviction of a man in 2010 and his subsequent yearlong incarceration, this decision (Dewayne Williams v. State of Alabama) comes 11 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled all anti-sodomy laws in the United States unconstitutional in the case Lawrence v. Texas.

By the time of Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, all but 14 states had removed their bans through legislative or judicial action. Yet, despite the Supreme Court ruling, Alabama is only the third state whose statute was overturned with the case to actually remove the anti-sodomy law from the books, along with Montana and Virginia.

LOOK: What Did Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal Say About Baton Rouge Illegal Arrests Of Gay Men?

Last year, the arrest of 12 men in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, attracted national attention. The incident substantiated claims that police were using the existing statute to target gay men for persecution, despite it being a clear violation of federal law. The district attorney refused to prosecute the man, saying the law was unenforceable, and the case was dropped. Nonetheless, moves to formally repeal the ban have since beendefeated.

States that still retain their anti-sodomy laws are Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.

James McDonald is a Brooklyn-native currently based in Scotland. When not pouring through the letters of Mary, Queen of Scots in pursuit of an MLitt Scottish History degree at the University of Glasgow, you’ll find him typing away. To date, his writing has been featured in Haaretz, the Huffington Post, the Lambda Literary Review, Gayletter, Thought Catalog and The Outmost, with more (hopefully) on the way. Follow him@jamesian7 

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Republicans Moving to Give Trump Something He’s Wanted Since 2019

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Claiming President Donald Trump was “wrongfully accused” when he was impeached, twice, based on “withheld” and “false” information, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is leading a move to have both impeachments expunged.

“The fact is that the Constitution doesn’t spell out what to do when you’ve wrongfully indicted somebody,” Issa told Fox News. “An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously where do you go to get your reputation back, is the question.”

Not only does Rep. Issa want to alter the historical record of Trump’s impeachments, it appears he wants to allege “misconduct” on the part of those who were part of the process of impeaching him. Issa added, “the very people who brought it knew was wrong.”

“More importantly,” Issa said, the process of expunging the record will “make sure that the facts and the reality that there was misconduct in the process gets a hearing.”

READ MORE: Ex-National Security Official Is Already Warning About the Next ‘Trump Pandemic’

Issa is sponsoring a resolution to expunge the record of the impeachments, and he already has more than 20 co-sponsors.

Fox News reports that Issa’s resolution “argues that the 2021 impeachment was rushed and procedurally flawed, noting that the House moved from introduction to passage in two days and did not conduct a full evidentiary process.”

“They impeached him for essentially an insurrection, a true high crime, and it’s false,” Issa said. Many have called the events surrounding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol an “insurrection.”

In January, the Trump White House launched a website claiming, “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power.”

Fox News notes that some legal scholars say impeachments cannot be expunged. The House can pass a resolution expressing disapproval with the impeachments, it can “annotate its records,” but “it cannot erase the historical fact of an impeachment or undo the constitutional process once it has occurred.”

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

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Ex-National Security Official Is Already Warning About the Next ‘Trump Pandemic’

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By many accounts, during his first term, President Donald Trump botched the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the latest hantavirus outbreak has some worrying the same thing could happen again if there is another Trump pandemic.

Miles Taylor, the Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff during the first Trump administration is out with a stern warning, offering three reasons why Americans “won’t survive another Trump pandemic.”

Under President Trump, the U.S. response to COVID resulted in far higher infection rates and rates of death than many other high-income nations. The Guardian in 2021 reported that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of COVID deaths.

“Trump won’t just mishandle the next global health crisis,” he’s “prepared to weaponize it,” Taylor warns.

The “worst thing” about Trump’s “first turn at pandemic management isn’t just that Trump failed. Rather, it’s that he failed so spectacularly that he learned all the wrong lessons.”

“Trump broke the pandemic response system,” says Taylor. “And it remains broken.”

Trump threw out existing pandemic response plans, and instead convened “a hastily assembled White House ‘task force,’ made the HHS secretary chair it, then handed it to the vice president, then handed shadow control to his son-in-law.”

READ MORE: Taxpayers to Pick Up Massive Cost Overrun of Another Trump Project

Congressional investigations “found that the result was chaos and structural collapse, as agencies scrambled to reinvent pandemic response on the fly,” says Taylor, who relays one example from his time at DHS.

“I remember the phone calls at the time. My friend Olivia Troye, who was helping Vice President Mike Pence run the task force from the inside, would call with a tone of contained terror,” he writes.

“It’s so broken, Miles. You have no idea. He’s getting people killed,” she told him.

The interagency structure remains broken to this day, and the people who were “supposed to save our lives” have been purged from the government workforce.

Calling the situation “dire,” Taylor explains the bodycount.

“Last year, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced cuts of 10,000 employees on top of probationary firings that hit pandemic preparedness offices directly,” he writes. “The CDC lost roughly 2,400 staff — about 18 percent of its workforce. The FDA lost 3,500. The NIH lost 1,200. Entire offices that investigate disease outbreaks, manage infectious disease response, and collect surveillance data were then eliminated in a Friday-night massacre during the government shutdown.”

Going forward, those who are being replaced are political hires with less experience.

“So when the next pathogen emerges and the president asks for advice,” Taylor says, “the room probably won’t contain Tony Faucis and Deb Birxs, however imperfect they were. More likely, it will contain podcasters and quacks and vaccine skeptics — and maybe a few terrified careerists.”

It gets worse.

During the next pandemic, “Trump will be motivated by ‘revenge’ rather than ‘response,'” Taylor writes, noting that FEMA has become part of Trump’s “revenge machine.”

If you live in a blue state, you are three times less likely to receive federal disaster assistance than if you live in a red state. Citing analysis, Taylor says that out of 106 federal disaster relief requests, Republican-leaning states received 101 approvals, Democratic-leaning states only five.

Taylor warns that Trump “is always hunting for leverage. What better leverage to hold over a Democratic governor than the lives of his or her constituents?”

“Vaccines, antivirals, ventilators, federal medical teams, surge capacity — all of it can be released quickly… or held back indefinitely,” he writes. “You want help for your people? Play ball, he might say. Agree to join my mass-deportation plan or hand over your voter rolls.”

“The cost would be mass graves. And that would give Trump a lot of leverage, indeed.”

Which brings Taylor to his very specific warning to blue states: prepare for the next pandemic now, and prepare as if there will be no help from the federal government.

“Plan for it like the feds will be a foe,” he warns.

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

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Taxpayers to Pick Up Massive Cost Overrun of Another Trump Project

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President Donald Trump promised work to resurface the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, painting it American flag blue, would cost taxpayers $1.8 million in a no-bid contract to a company that hadn’t worked on a pool at one of the president’s golf courses.

That figure has ballooned more than seven times, to $13.1 million, The New York Times reports. The Interior Department, which awarded the contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, said $6.2 million of that was from doubling the size of the contract.

According to the Trump administration, the work is being done as a no-bid contract because not doing the work would cause “serious injury” to the federal government. The Times notes that the federal government has not specified what that injury would be, but President Trump reportedly wants the pool ready for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration on July 4.

The Times adds that Interior Department spokesperson Katie Martin said the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”

The Reflecting Pool cost increase mirrors another Trump project, his White House ballroom. Originally slated to cost $200 million, the price tag now appears to be over $400 million in donated funds plus one billion in taxpayer funds for security enhancements.

Critics blasted the Reflecting Pool cost increases.

“Trump is robbing American taxpayers blind,” wrote political commentator Tara Setmayer, the CEO of the Seneca Project.

Journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote: “No money for Medicaid.”

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

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