All posts tagged "Slavery"

A law professor flagged a legal theory from a Trump amicus brief that he says would let foreigners bring enslaved people into the U.S.

During an interview on the Legal AF podcast, legal expert Paul Gowder talked about American legal scholar Richard Epstein and an argument he made in an amicus brief filed in Trump's birthright citizenship case. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump's bid to end birthright citizenship, and Epstein filed the brief on Trump's side.

Gowder explained that Epstein argued that the phrases "subject to the jurisdiction" and "within the jurisdiction" have different meanings in the Constitution. Epstein observed that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction" is used in the 14th Amendment, which guarantees birthright citizenship, and the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery....

Judges signaled skepticism of the Department of Justice's defense for scrubbing references to slavery at a historic site, according to reporting by the New York Times.

In January, the Trump administration removed placards and videos commemorating the history of slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. After a lawsuit by the city of Philadelphia, the National Park Service had to restore the displays, but the DOJ's appeal of the ruling isn't going well, the Times reported.

Two of the three judges on the appeals court panel "appeared skeptical" of the administration's position during a Tuesday hearing. Judge L. Felipe Restrepo, an Obama appointee, questioned whether the government was seeking "unfettered discretion" over the site. The third judge, Peter J. Phipps, a Trump appointee, appeared more sympathetic to the government's arguments....

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who spearheaded Donald Trump's anti-DEI initiatives at the Pentagon, urged staffers not to make a fuss around Juneteenth celebrations, according to reporting in Rolling Stone.

Politics editor Andrew Perez obtained an email from Hegseth's office that "requested 'a passive approach to Juneteenth messaging' for the holiday on Thursday commemorating the end of slavery."

The email was sent by "the Pentagon’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs, which said it wasn’t planning to publish Juneteenth-related content online," Perez wrote.
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Donald Trump and Nikki Haley are both GOP presidential contenders who made similarly controversial Civil War comments, but only one is paying for it, and that's because Trump has the advantage, a new report says.

Haley left slavery out of her answer when asked what caused the Civil War, and Trump suggested the Civil War should have been "negotiated," ignoring that doing so would have continued the establishment of slavery in America. These issues were essentially the same, according to a writer for The Atlantic.

"Though he mocked Haley’s answer as 'three paragraphs of bullsh-t,' a refusal to acknowledge slavery’s role in the war is at the core of Trump’s gaffe too: A negotiated settlement was unlikely, because the southern states were determined to continue enslaving Black people, and any negotiation that allowed that to continue would have been barbaric," the article states. "As Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in The Atlantic in 2011, arguing that the Civil War was 'tragic' misses the point of its triumph in ending slavery."...

Donald Trump on Saturday was fact-checked live by a NBC News reporter who was attending the former president's Iowa rally.

Trump said at his rally that the Civil War, and therefore the existence of slavery as an institution, should have been "negotiated," instead of erupting in bloodshed. He also said that no one would have ever heard of Abraham Lincoln had he simply negotiated the conflict between slave states and non-slave states.

Trump's comments were mocked by fellow conservatives, lawyers, and historians....

Donald Trump at an Iowa rally on Saturday suggested that the existence of slavery, instead of culminating in the Civil War, should have been "negotiated."

Trump recently hit Nikki Haley with a new insult, saying that he thought “slavery is sort of the obvious answer" to the question about the purpose of the Civil War that tripped Haley up at an event. Now, at a rally, Trump had his own controversial take on the Civil War and how it could've been stopped.

He started off by saying he found the Civil War "fascinating," and added that he's "so attracted to seeing it." ...