NAACP sues Mississippi over ‘separate and unequal policing’

JACKSON, Miss. — The NAACP warns that “separate and unequal policing” will return to Mississippi’s majority-Black capital under a state-run police department, and the civil rights organization is suing the governor and other officials over it.

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves says violent crime in Jackson has made it necessary to expand where the Capitol Police can patrol and to authorize some appointed rather than elected judges.

But the NAACP said in its lawsuit filed late Friday that these are serious violations of the principle of self-government because they take control of the police and some courts out of the hands of residents.

“In certain areas of Jackson, a citizen can be arrested by a police department led by a State-appointed official, be charged by a State-appointed prosecutor, be tried before a State-appointed judge, and be sentenced to imprisonment in a State penitentiary regardless of the severity of the act,” the lawsuit says.

Derrick Johnson, the national president of the NAACP, is himself a resident of Jackson. At a community meeting earlier this month, he said the policing law would treat Black people as “second-class citizens.”

The legislation was passed by a majority-white and Republican-controlled state House and Senate. Jackson is governed by Democrats and about 83% of residents are Black, the largest percentage of any major U.S. city.

The governor said this week that the Jackson Police Department is severely understaffed and he believes the state-run Capitol Police can provide stability. The city of 150,000 residents has had more than 100 homicides in each of the past three years.

“We’re working to address it,” Reeves said in a statement Friday. “And when we do, we’re met with overwhelming false cries of racism and mainstream media who falsely call our actions ‘Jim Crow.’”

According to one of the bills Reeves signed into law Friday, Capitol Police will have “concurrent” jurisdiction with Jackson Police Department in the city. The expanded jurisdiction for the Capitol Police would begin July 1.

Another law will create a temporary court within a Capitol Complex Improvement District covering a portion of Jackson. The court will have the same power as municipal courts, which handle misdemeanor cases, traffic violations and initial appearances for some criminal charges. The new law says people convicted in the Capitol Complex Improvement District Court may be put in a state prison rather than in a city or county jail.

The judge of the new court is not required to live in Jackson and will be appointed by the Mississippi Supreme Court chief justice. The current chief justice is a conservative white man.

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Opinion | The Supreme Court Stopped Short of a Radical Act

The Supreme Court pulled back from the edge. In suspending the district court’s nationwide bar on the abortion pill mifepristone, the high court’s conservative majority (with two exceptions) declined to embrace the radicalism of its ideological allies. The move not only ensures access to a drug long deemed safe by the FDA but may help bolster the court’s increasingly tenuous public credibility.

The Supreme Court has recently experienced a sharp decline in popular support. That should not be surprising amid evidence suggesting that people view courts as being impartial if judicial decisions match their policy preferences. The series of high-profile rulings advancing policy interests aligned with the Republican Party’s right flank — on reproductive choice, on guns, on climate change — are shaping public opinion. They are likely driving Democratic voters to see the federal courts as instruments for the delivery of far-right policy preferences.

The decision to maintain the status quo on mifepristone by the same court that struck down Roe v Wade may be a quiet nod to the waning legitimacy of the court, and a concern about further backlash.

But what if the politics of judicial reform are already shifting under the justices’ feet?

The high-profile state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin — and the potential fallout — suggests that may be the case. During the midterms, that quintessential purple state delivered slim victories to a Democratic governor and a Republican senator. Less than five months later, though, a left-leaning candidate, Judge Janet Protasiewicz, ran up a double-digit advantage over her right-of-center opponent.

The Protasiewicz win fits awkwardly with a well-hallowed chestnut of political wisdom — that the politics of judicial power aren’t symmetrical across the party line. Simply put, Republican voters tend to have stronger feelings than Democrats about judicial appointments, and cast their votes in primaries to punish or reward candidates on that basis. In contrast, there’s some evidence that Democratic voters punish candidates who center campaigns on the courts. Republicans, indeed, have kept their eyes on the prize by prioritizing ideological consistency. Democrats such as President Joe Biden have instead aimed for representativeness across gender, ethnicity and professional grounds. The result is a less ideologically consistent and less coherent bench of Biden and Obama appointees.

In addition to his own centrist, institutionally minded temperament, it is likely this uneven pattern of voter attention to the courts that shaped the way in which the Biden White House has so far approached the politics of court reform. Rather than embracing calls on the left to expand the Supreme Court, the newly inaugurated president created a sprawling, bipartisan commission to study the question of reform. The body was largely staffed with legal academics of diverse views and partisan orientations. It was entirely predictable that such a group would not reach a consensus on reform. The commission was plainly designed to delay, and hence deflate, the push for structural change to the federal courts. And so it did — producing an extensive and academic report that elicited precisely nothing of political or practical significance.

But Wisconsin’s judicial election earlier this month suggests that the White House’s assessment of how judicial politics plays among Democratic voters no longer holds water. That election may signal a broader shift in the tectonics of voter mobilization in respect to courts and judges more generally.

The most obvious reason for thinking something has changed is that it was Democrats, and not Republicans, who were galvanized by the judicial election. These voters, moreover, were moved by the issue of judicial power but were not motivated as much by the goal of electing Democrats. In a state Senate race held that same day, the Republican candidate eked out a win. That too was a highly consequential election, giving Republicans a Senate supermajority and the votes to oust officials through impeachment.

Nor can it be said that the issue of abortion made all the difference: The question of reproductive choice plainly loomed large in November 2022. And yet GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, always a reliable voice for the anti-abortion position, retained his seat. Plainly, abortion politics explains in part why Protasiewicz won — but it can’t be the whole story.

In the wake of her election, we may also see more realignment in the politics of court reform. Until now, it has been Democrats on the left of their party who had pressed hardest for changing the courts through structural reform or other measures.

But in Wisconsin, Republicans were talking of impeaching Protasiewicz… before she had even won the election, let alone taken office. This is all the more remarkable because — unless she’s committed a crime — Protasiewicz can be impeached only for “conduct in office,” according to the state constitution, i.e. for things she presumably may do in the future.

Some state GOP lawmakers have since backed away from such talk, and in any event, the Democratic governor would be empowered to appoint a replacement. But the legislature could respond to rulings they dislike with the kinds of other tools that progressives have been advocating at the national level: measures such as jurisdiction-stripping and changes to the size of the court.

If the political script on judicial power gets flipped in Wisconsin — if GOP legislators act to rein in a liberal-leaning court — what could this bode for a broader change nationally? Or what happens if conservative federal judges or Supreme Court justices advance a far-right agenda reviled by progressives and even many centrists?

Surely, the next time Democrats have full control of Washington, the push to overhaul the judiciary will be a top priority, if they have the votes.

Even apart from its precedent-shattering opinions, some justices are doing little to build trust in the court. ProPublica’s revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas both received expensive gifts and engaged in six-figure real-estate transactions with a conservative billionaire will add fuel to the fire of public suspicion. Democratic calls for Thomas’ impeachment are, of course, unlikely to lead to any legislative action. But in striking contrast to the impeachment calls targeting Protasiewicz, they draw public attention to judicial behavior that plainly raises serious ethical questions, even if it doesn’t in the end cross a line into rank illegality.

All this means that the political dynamics of court reform are on the verge of a momentous shift: Democratic voters are likely to be more energized, and more likely to stomach what might have once seemed explosive measures. And for once, they may even be willing to reward candidates for public office who promise to follow through.

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Russia ‘will not forgive’ U.S. denial of journalist visas

MOSCOW — Russia said Sunday that the United States has denied visas to journalists who wanted to cover Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s trip to New York, and Lavrov suggested that Moscow would take strong retaliatory measures.

There was no immediate comment from the U.S. State Department about the claim of refused visas. The journalists aimed to cover Lavrov’s appearance at the United Nations to mark Russia’s chairmanship of the Security Council.

“A country that calls itself the strongest, smartest, free and fair country has chickened out and done something stupid by showing what its sworn assurances about protecting freedom of speech and access to information are really worth,” Lavrov said before leaving Moscow on Sunday.

“Be sure that we will not forget and will not forgive,” he said.

“I emphasize that we will find ways to respond to this, so that the Americans will remember for a long time not to do this,” deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said.

The dispute comes in the wake of high tensions with Washington over the arrest last month of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, whom Russia accuses of espionage. The United States has declared him to be “wrongfully detained.”

Many Western journalists stationed in Moscow left the country after Russia sent troops into Ukraine. Russia currently requires foreign journalists to renew their visas and accreditation every three months, compared to once a year before the fighting began.

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Death threats, doxxing and panic buttons: Docs who treat trans youth are under attack

Boston Children’s Hospital has received several bomb threats.

The gender clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital has installed panic buttons and hired a full-time security guard.

Doctors who treat transgender children are receiving death threats, debating whether to buy guns, scouring the internet to see if they’ve been doxxed and trying to get their addresses removed from property records.

The impact of gender-affirming care bans — inflamed by the rhetoric on the right about “child grooming” — is rippling beyond Republican-controlled states, making it harder everywhere for transgender youth to receive care and physicians to provide it, eight doctors who provide gender-affirming care to transgender youth told POLITICO. The Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which have been tracking attacks against doctors, report similar findings.

Even in states without bans, providers said death threats, harassment, fears of litigation and, in some cases, a lack of support from institutions have created a chilling effect that undermines their ability to provide care.

“I got an email telling me that I’m evil, I’m foolish, my work is opposing God, that I harm children, that I’m going to hell, and that I should die,” said Meredithe McNamara, an assistant professor of pediatrics who specializes in adolescent medicine at Yale University. “The threats, the harassment, the constant fear of, ‘Did I say that right? Is that OK? Should I have said that differently? Did I present my position in a public space as effectively as possible, and also did I say anything that is going to get my family targeted in some way?’”

Physicians in states where gender-affirming care remains legal said they now spend significant chunks of patient visits either batting down misinformation from parents or talking through kids’ mental health concerns related to the new laws. The bans outlawing therapies in nearly a third of the country threaten to overwhelm clinics in blue states, like Minnesota, that already have waiting lists of anywhere from several months to more than a year and have left red-state providers grappling with how to care for their young transgender patients under the bans.

“We think about this affecting kids who live in [ban] states, but it’s affecting kids everywhere and it’s affecting care everywhere,” said Angela Kade Goepferd, medical director of the Gender Health Program at Children’s Minnesota. “It affects the families in the states where care is banned, and it affects the families in the states where the care is not.”’

And the bans keep coming: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum on Wednesday signed a law banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Nebraska lawmakers are poised to enact a similar ban after legislation passed a second round of debate earlier this month. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s emergency regulation requiring transgender youth and adults complete a long checklist before receiving gender-affirming care is scheduled to take effect this week. And Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte is expected to soon sign a ban after legislators adopted his proposed amendments last week over the pleas of their transgender colleague.

“I’ve sat down and met with transgender youth and adults. I understand their struggles are real, and my heart goes out to them. I firmly believe that, as with all of God’s children, Montanans who struggle with their gender identity deserve love, compassion, and respect,” Gianforte wrote in a letter to Montana’s Republican legislative leadership last week. But, he argued, it is “right and appropriate” to restrict access to hormones and surgery to adults.

Gianforte and other conservatives argue that kids aren’t mature enough to make serious, life-altering medical decisions, even with parental consent, and have expressed concerns about the long-term outcomes of such interventions.

While some doctors, especially those early in their careers, said the bans have inspired them to work harder and continue providing this kind of care, others who are older said they have considered quitting or retiring early — though they acknowledge doing so would make it even harder for their patients to receive care. There are an estimated 300,000 transgender youth in the U.S. and about 60 comprehensive gender clinics for children and adolescents, though care can also be provided outside of those settings, according to the Human Rights Campaign and the Williams Institute, a think tank that researches sexual orientation and gender identity law at the UCLA School of Law.

The pediatricians told POLITICO that part of their ethos is being an advocate for children, but the threats have left them worried about their personal safety, and the safety of their families, patients and hospitals. Four of the doctors interviewed were granted anonymity because of fears about threats to their safety, their clinic, their patients or their own family, or because they were not authorized to speak by their institution, in some cases because of the threats.

But some of the doctors said they feel that by staying quiet they are protecting their institution’s safety but letting down their patients.

“I know many of my colleagues feel like when we’re doing what they need us to do for our protection and our institution’s protection, many of us also feel like we’re letting the community who needs us the most down,” a blue state pediatrician said.

Those willing to speak on the record said they were doing so either because they had no family, had talked through the possible risks with their spouses and children, or because they felt protected and supported to speak publicly by their hospital or clinic.

“As our legislature also votes to advance constitutional carry, and as AR-15s are incredibly easy to get, there’s a non-zero chance somebody might kill me, and I know that. I don’t like it. At least I would die standing up for my values, but I’ve had to make peace with that,” said Alex Dworak, associate medical director of family medicine at OneWorld and assistant professor of family medicine at University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Targeting physicians is not new: The ’70s and ’80s saw a wave of attacks against abortion clinics, including 110 cases of arson, firebombing or bombing. Three people were killed inside a Colorado Planned Parenthood in 2015. And just last year, an under-construction abortion clinic in Casper, Wyo. was set on fire.

While Arkansas was the first state to enact a gender-affirming care ban in 2021 — after the legislature overrode then-Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s veto — doctors told POLITICO that the threats didn’t begin in earnest until the following year when Boston Children’s was targeted on social media and received several bomb threats over the summer and fall.

In 2023, those threats have continued as more red states approve bans as part of a broader agenda that includes preventing transgender people from participating in sports or using bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity and restricting access to drag shows.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate speech, 24 hospitals and clinics that provide gender-affirming care to transgender youth have been targeted on social media over the last year, resulting in bomb threats, death threats to medical staff and temporary suspensions of services. And the Human Rights Campaign said the attacks have steadily increased.

“We launched our gender health program at Children’s Minnesota in 2019 — the front page of our Star Tribune here in Minneapolis — and barely a peep,” Goepferd said. “We have really been, up until recently, able to provide good, high-quality care in a way that we would all want to, regardless of what speciality in pediatrics we were in.”

Every major medical association, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, supports the use of gender-affirming care to treat transgender people with gender dysphoria, or the feelings of discomfort or distress some transgender people experience when their bodies don’t align with their gender identity. For transgender youth, that typically includes social support, mental health help, puberty blockers, hormone therapy and, very rarely, gender-affirming surgery.

Those who oppose gender-affirming care argue that kids should wait until they are adults to make the decision to take hormones or undergo surgery, and that the science around such treatments is unsettled.

“Children suffering discomfort with their sex are best served by compassionate mental health care that enables them to live comfortably in their bodies and with their true identities as male or female,” Matt Sharp, senior counsel and director of the Center for Legislative Advocacy at the conservative legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, which has helped conservative lawmakers draft trans-focused bills, said in a statement. He added that the organization will “continue to protect children from harmful, irreversible, and unnecessary medical procedures.”

The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association have released statements, published op-eds and documents in support of gender-affirming care and provided coaching and technical assistance to state-level affiliates that they say are closer to the legislative process and better suited to testifying at hearings. But several providers said they need more support.

“Right now, individual providers show up in public spaces and we feel like we get seen as lone actors, and that we don’t have the backing of large credible institutions, and that’s a really scary reality,” McNamara said. “It’s no longer like, so-and-so who speaks for the American Medical Association says this. It’s this person who you’ve never heard of is here — and it makes us much easier to target.”

Jack Resneck Jr., president of the American Medical Association, said that the association “stands in vehement opposition to governmental attempts to criminalize or otherwise impede on clinical decision-making.” Resneck added that the AMA has worked with state medical associations to oppose gender-affirming care bans since legislation first emerged in 2020 and has also been involved in legal challenges.

Mark Del Monte, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ chief executive officer and executive vice president, called gender-affirming care “vital to the health and wellbeing of our gender-diverse patients.”

Doctors in blue states also said they are happy to see legislatures enact so-called shield laws protecting access to gender-affirming care — as California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Washington have done — but some worry those policies will not hold up in court.

These doctors said they’re also worried about whether they will have the capacity to provide care to out-of-state patients given that most have waitlists that are several months long.

“It makes me worried about how we can adequately meet the needs of patients and families both here in Washington who have been on our waiting list for many months, but also so many patients and families that are uprooting their lives to be able to continue care,” said Gina Sequeira, co-director of Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic.

Broadly, the doctors worry about the future practice of gender-affirming care. They say that not only is the chilling effect from the bans stymieing research and collaboration, but also they fear that it will dissuade future doctors from going into an already small field and prevent doctors from receiving training.

“I am hopeful that I can be a quiet country doc and not have this be a part of my life. That is my hope, that this is not forever,” a red state pediatrician said. “But it’s hard to see that. It’s hard to see that future.”

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Baltics blast China diplomat for questioning independence of ex-Soviet states

Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, said that former Soviet countries have no "effective status" in international law.

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U.S. evacuating diplomats in Sudan amid fierce fighting

WASHINGTON — U.S. troops are carrying out a precarious evacuation of American embassy staffers in the African nation of Sudan, shuttering the U.S. embassy there as fighting rages for a ninth day, according to a senior Biden administration official.

U.S. troops that airlifted embassy staff out of Khartoum have safely left Sudanese airspace, a second American official confirmed.

President Joe Biden ordered American troops to evacuate embassy personnel after receiving a recommendation earlier Saturday from his national security team with no end in sight to the fighting, according to the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the mission.

The evacuation order was believed to apply to about 70 Americans. U.S. forces were flying them from a landing zone at the embassy to an unspecified location.

The State Department has suspended operations at the embassy due to the dire security situation. It was not clear when the embassy might resume functioning.

According to the World Health Organization, fighting has killed more than 400 people since erupting April 15 between two factions whose leaders are vying for control over the country. The violence has included an unprovoked attack on an American diplomatic convoy and numerous incidents in which foreign diplomats and aid workers were killed, injured or assaulted.

The White House has said it has no plans for a government-coordinated evacuation of American citizens trapped in Sudan. An estimated 16,000 private U.S. citizens are registered with the embassy as being in Sudan. The State Department has cautioned that that figure probably is inaccurate because there is no requirement for Americans to register nor is there a requirement to notify the embassy when they leave.

The embassy issued an alert earlier Saturday cautioning that “due to the uncertain security situation in Khartoum and closure of the airport, it is not currently safe to undertake a U.S. government-coordinated evacuation of private U.S. citizens.” The U.S. evacuation planning got underway in earnest on Monday after the embassy convoy was attacked in Khartoum.

The Pentagon confirmed on Friday that U.S. troops were being moved to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti ahead of a possible evacuation. Saudi Arabia announced the successful repatriation of some of its citizens on Saturday, sharing footage of Saudi nationals and other foreigners welcomed with chocolate and flowers as they stepped off an apparent evacuation ship at the Saudi port of Jeddah.

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Pence: If I decide to run, you'll know soon

Former Vice President Mike Pence said that he would expect to announce his 2024 presidential decision “well before” late June.

"I think if we have an announcement to make, it'll be well before late June,” the Indiana Republican told Robert Costa in an interview that will air Sunday morning on CBS’ “Face the Nation."

Pence stopped short of confirming that he’s “leaning in” toward a presidential campaign, but told Costa, “Well, I'm here in Iowa, Robert.”

It’s not Pence’s first time in Iowa, home to the season-opening 2024 GOP caucuses, in recent months. He traveled there at the beginning of March for a foreign policy forum.

He’s also made recent appearances in New Hampshire, the first primary state, and he’s taken other steps that indicate he's preparing for a run, like building out his political staff.

Pence’s implying that he might be planning to make a bid for president is not new: He said late November that he was giving “prayerful consideration” to a run.

Pence told Costa there was a clear rationale behind his timing.

“Anyone that would be serious about seeking the Republican nomination would need to be in this contest by June,” Pence said during the CBS interview.

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