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'He did nothing!': Video shows Minneapolis cop throwing 64-year-old Black man to the ground
December 03, 2021
A Minneapolis police officer is under investigation after he was caught on video throwing a 64-year-old Black man to the ground inside a grocery store for unknown reasons.
"In the almost five-minute video, officer Christopher Lange is seen aggressively grabbing Troy Lee Billups and pushing him onto the ground in an attempt to arrest him" inside an Aldi store on Wednesday, according to a report from Fox Channel 9.
"The person recording the video is heard telling officer Lange that it was 'two people having a conversation together, and you decided to escalate the situation by shoving him,'" the station reported.
"You’re supposed to de-escalate. How is this de-escalating?" the person recording can be heard saying. "What are you doing? Why is he under arrest?"
After Lange says "You're under arrest," Billups can be heard responding "For what?" and yelling "Let me go."
"When Lange did let go, Billups rebuked him for apparently shoving a young man in the store earlier," the Star Tribune reported.
"You gotta keep your hands off him," Billups told Lange. "You don't put your hands on no young kid."
Lange eventually escorted Billups outside before handcuffing him.
"All I did was tell him, 'Don't touch the kid,'" Billups told another nearby officer as Lange emptied his groceries on the hood of a squad car.
Billups was charged with obstructing legal process with force, and later released without bail. Minneapolis police said the matter is being evaluated by the Office of Police Conduct Review.
"Department policy and training continues to emphasize the importance of de-escalation efforts to stabilize and resolve situations when safe and feasible," MPD spokesperson Garrett Parten said.
Watch below.
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Judge grills Trump lawyer over rape allegation: How is saying 'she's not my type' part of presidential duties?
December 03, 2021
On Friday, a federal appeals court in New York heard arguments over whether the Justice Department should take over the defense of former President Donald Trump in the defamation suit by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a department store in the late 1990s.
One of the pivotal moments of the arguments, according to BuzzFeed News, came when one judge asked Trump's legal counsel how the former president's statements against Carroll were part of his official duties.
"In one interview responding to Carroll’s accusation, he was quoted as saying, 'I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened,'" reported Zoe Tillman. "That comment jumped out to Second Circuit Judge Denny Chin, who pressed Trump’s personal attorney Alina Habba to explain why the court should find that making that kind of comment was within Trump’s 'scope of employment' as president. 'Who is he serving when he says something like, ‘she’s not my type?’ Is he serving the United States of America when he makes that statement?' Chin, who was confirmed under former president Barack Obama, asked."
READ MORE: A former Trump aide is trying to build a violent right-wing Christian takeover of the US
According to the report, "Habba replied that it was part of his job as president because he had to respond to Carroll’s allegation to the extent it affected his ability to serve."
The Justice Department announced in June that it is continuing to try to take over the case. In September, they asked the court to stay all proceedings, but this request was denied.
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The Supreme Court threatens to undermine the core of protection for American civil liberties
December 03, 2021
If Roe goes down, there will be more at stake than access to abortion. In the absence of federal protections, state governments would be free to regulate trans rights, “sodomy” and even condoms. “Once you pull on the loose thread of Roe,” Editorial Board contributor Anthony Michael Kreis said on Thursday, “the rest of the stitches holding the right to privacy and sexual liberty together are easier to unravel.”
The threat to individual rights doesn’t end there. All civil liberties are in danger. Roe’s death would signal a high court prepared to restore the power of states to discriminate against their residents, wrote historian Heather Cox Richardson. “Make no mistake,” she said this week, “it is not just reproductive rights that are under siege. If the Supreme Court returns power to the states to legislate as they wish, any right currently protected by the federal government is at risk.”
Such threats should goad us into being clear about the language we use to describe what’s going on in the United States. Our democracy is not “backsliding.” What’s backsliding is a full, fair and free democracy. What’s backsliding is a multiracial democracy. What we are witnessing is the erosion of political gains made in the years after World War II when America finally made good on the Declaration of Independence. The United States will be a democracy. Just not one for all of us.
A little history. Once upon a time, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. The Supreme Court applied it only to the federal government. That left state governments to discriminate in various and sundry ways against their residents, according to the will of their white Protestant majorities. The Jim Crow regime in the south is the most notorious example, but any private conduct was fair game, including who got to marry whom, what people read, how they worshipped and so on.
The process began in the 1920s, but after World War II, the Supreme Court accelerated a pattern that later became known as incorporation. That’s when the court read the Bill of Rights through the lens of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. The text: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The consequence of the incorporation doctrine was radical change, as it privileged equality under law and gave the federal government the power to overrule state statutes for the purpose of protecting individual liberties. “It was on these grounds that the court protected Black and Brown rights, interracial marriage, access to birth control, religious freedom, gay rights, and so on,” Richardson said. (Not all the amendments are incorporated, the Third and Seventh, for instance.)
The expansion of legal equality coincided with the rapid expansion of the economy such that the United States looked like one country in which individuals could live anywhere and in any way they wanted to with the theoretical expectation of federal protection against local attempts to infringe their constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties.
All of that is cast in doubt by the current makeup of the Supreme Court. As I said Thursday, if Roe is overturned, or whipped within an inch of its life, the result will be a patchwork of abortion laws in which some women will have the right to control their own bodies in some parts of America while in other parts, they will have no such thing.
Apply this same pattern to any right currently protected by the federal government and it’s not hard to imagine the return of state laws against pornography, “sodomy,” interracial marriage, birth control as well as state laws regulating religion, speech, assembly and so forth. Without protection and enforcement of legal equality, individual liberty will be defined by the bigotries of local political cultures.
For many of us, our attention is on elections and the suppression of voting in Republican-controlled states. For this reason, many of us fear, or already lament, the “erosion of democracy” -- the backsliding of America into authoritarianism. But let’s be clear about what that means. After World War II, legal equality was presumed in the word “democracy.” We may not be able to presume that much longer.
The United States will be a democracy, only it may end up being like it used to be, before the mid-20th century’s social movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights, before the Supreme Court placed equality under law in the form of the 14th Amendment at the center of its interpretation of law, and before the United States really tried making good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
Instead of being a democracy dedicated to the proposition that all human beings are created equal, it may end up being a democracy dedicated to “equality among equals” within states and regions, not between states and regions. It will be a democracy. Just a bad one.
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