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Brett Kavanaugh: Not a Public School Advocate!

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Kavanaugh’s Views on Public Education

  • Upholds the belief that school vouchers are a constitutional right and could be the deciding vote on the Supreme court to divert public school funds to private and religious schools.
  • He headed the Federalist Society’s “Religious Liberties Practice Group” which supports school prayer.
  • He argued against the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has aggressively assisted students victimized by for-profit colleges and predatory lenders.
  • Supports Trump and Devos’ agenda where public schools lose public funding to private, religious, and for-profit schools, and educators lose their ability to advocate for themselves and their students.
  • Advocates against unions and workers rights.

Source: NEA Today – Kavanaugh is a poor choice for students

 

Take Action:  NEA Legislative Action Center

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Ten Reasons to Oppose Kavanaugh (3 minute read)

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Brett Kavanaugh and Critical Issues that Depend on the New Supreme Court Nominee

Justice Kennedy’s replacement on the Supreme Court will likely be the swing vote on a number of key issues.

  1. Allow states to outlaw abortion

Kavanaugh has a track record supporting significant obstacles to a woman’s terminating a pregnancy and is very likely to vote with the conservative majority that wants to return to the states the issue of whether the government can force women to carry pregnancies to full term.

  1. Restrict the Environmental Protection Agency from fighting climate change

Kennedy was the swing vote in the Court’s decision that the U.S. government was legally obliged to fight climate change—Kavanaugh’s record suggests he is unlikely to vote the same way.

  1. Ban race-based affirmative action

It is unlikely that  Kavanaugh will support race-based affirmative action in admissions to public educational institutions—as Kennedy did—given his record of supporting the Center for Equal Opportunity, which supports the current lawsuit against Harvard’s admissions policy.

  1. Uphold capital punishment and solitary confinement

Kennedy’s replacement is unlikely to have the same skepticism of capital punishment and strong opposition to solitary confinement.

  1. Limit consumers’ digital privacy rights

Kennedy brought a nuanced understanding privacy and first amendment rights to the Court.   It’s likely the Court will face be many high-tech cases in the near future.  Kavanaugh made a “truly expansive” ruling in the case of the NSA’a collection of call data placing national security well above individual’s privacy and first amendment rights.

  1. Aggravate partisan gerrymandering

Kennedy was viewed as a potential 5th vote in challenges to partisan gerrymandering—his replacement will likely vote the other way.

  1. Allow states to outlaw same-sex marriage

Obergefell was a 5-4 decision and already states such as Texas are passing laws limiting protections for same sex marriage.  If Kavanaugh rules against Roe, Obergefell would likely be next since it is based on the same constitutional grounds.

  1. Kavanaugh will vote to destroy the separation between  church and state.

There are several on-the-record indications from Kavanaugh that he favors lowering the wall that separates church and state.

  1. Kavanaugh is a vote to repeal Obamacare/coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The Supreme Court will soon be ruling on the ACA’s requirements of pre-existing conditions.  Kavanaugh has argued that the president could decline to enforce a statute such as Obamacare.

  1. Potential criminal investigation of Trump
Trump’s new appointee could be the deciding vote on a criminal investigation of Trump himself.  Kavanaugh has written that sitting presidents should not be subject to criminal or civil actions.

Click for full article.

Five More Facts To Know About Trump’s Collusion With Russian Organized Criminals

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From our friends at Avaaz

Here are 5 more top facts everyone should know about Trump’s long collusion with Russian organised criminals — forward this link and share it on Facebook — we all deserve to know the truth:

It’s now shockingly clear that Donald Trump is Putin’s poodle.

But we need the world to understand why, before it’s too late…

Trump’s businesses went bankrupt so many times in the 1990s that many legitimate banks wouldn’t lend to him anymore. He turned to Russian oligarchs –– Putin’s ruling clique — to bankroll his projects, and launder their dirty money for them. This was, and continues to be, a huge part of his business. He’s a Russian money launderer.

“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Donald Trump JR, 2014

This isn’t speculation or hyperbole. There’s mountains of evidence. Trump’s former election campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort, has deep ties to Russian oligarchs, and is currently in jail awaiting trial on, among other charges, money laundering!

  1. Trump’s main financial backer for the Trump Tower Toronto was a Russian-Canadian billionaire who got the money by selling a massive steel mill in Ukraine for nearly a billion dollars. $100 million of that money was paid to a Kremlin-backed fixer, likely as a bribe to VERY high Russian officials. The Chairman of the Bank who financed the deal? Vladimir Putin.
  2. Trump bought his home in Palm Beach, Florida for $41 million. A few years later, with no real increase in the value — he sold it for $95 million — the most expensive home in America at the time! Why?A major Russian oligarch bought it — we don’t know yet why he effectively ‘gave’ Trump $54 million. But it’s classic money laundering practice.
  3. Trump’s real estate deals were often fuelled by Russian money, typically passed through shady shell companies. 77% of Trump Soho apartments were bought with cash by such mysterious companies. At least 13 people with links to Russian oligarchs or mobsters lived in Trump properties, including one of Russia’s top mobsters. One even ran a high-stakes illegal gambling ring in the apartment right below Trump’s!   “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets”
    Donald Trump JR, 2008
  4. Trump’s financial broker and “Senior Advisor” was a Russian convicted felon named Felix Sater, widely known as a mafia figure who once stabbed someone in the face with a broken margarita glass, requiring over 100 stitches. Sater helped set up shell companies, and arranged funding for Trump’s projects, including plans for Trump Tower Moscow. He’s also part of Putin’s inner circle. Here’s one email he wrote to Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen in November, 2015: “Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will.” New York Times, August 27, 2017
  5. Trump’s other main business is casinos — which are classic money laundering vehicles. One of his casinos was 100 times found in violation of federal rules protecting against money laundering, and paid the largest fine ever levied against a casino for having “willfully violated” anti-money laundering rules. Trump has a legal obligation to do “due diligence” for all his businesses to prevent laundering. His senior executive’s comment on this was “Donald doesn’t do diligence”. 

The Big Picture

Putin is a former KGB officer who has used chemical weapons, assassinated people in other countries, invaded the Ukraine, occupied Crimea, shot down the MH17 airliner with almost 300 passengers on board, aided a murderous regime in Syria, condoned the beating and torture of gays, stolen up to $200 billion from his own people, hacked foreign elections and launched what NATO calls the largest hybrid warfare campaign in history to undermine western liberal democracies. He is also widely believed to have ordered the murder of Russian journalists and critics, and bombed hundreds of Russian civilians to fake a terrorist attack and justify a war in Chechnya.

Yet when asked at their press conference if Trump had any criticism of Putin, he had none, and ridiculed US law enforcement for investigating Russian attacks on US democracy!

Why? Trump has been working for Putin’s corrupt inner circle for almost 20 years. And it’s that corrupt circle that promises to make him rich for the next 20 (he’s refused, in violation of all ethics, to divest from his businesses as President).

Trump *may* be a Russian intelligence asset, he *may* have colluded with Putin to sabotage the US election. But what is clear is that he is a corrupt Russian money launderer, in the pocket of a KGB dictator. The whole world needs to know this, and rally together to prevent the damage this corrupt alliance threatens. Share this email with everyone…

With hope,

Ricken, Emma, Rewan, Joseph, Morgan, Spyro, Flora and the whole Avaaz team

PS — scroll down for a TON of credible, trustworthy, fact-checked sources for everything in this email. Avaaz isn’t one of those absurd troll publications that slings lies for profit — we’re a nonprofit, and every time we make an error anywhere, we publish the correction on our accuracy page, linked from the front of our website.

PPS — if Trump the ‘organized criminal money launderer’ sounds like a stretch to you, consider it just the tip of the iceberg of Trump’s known corruption:

  • His ‘charitable foundation’ is likely to be shut down for multiple examples of fraud. 
  • Trump ‘University‘ scammed legions of vulnerable people out of their money.
  • He had an affair with a pornstar and paid her to keep quiet — she says she was also threatened with physical violence.
  • His ex-wife attested in court documents that he brutally raped her while tearing out her hair after he didn’t like the hair replacement doctor she recommended.
  • He bragged, on tape, about sexually assaulting multiple women.
  • Hundreds of people hired by Trump say he simply decided not to pay them for their work — including dishwashers, painters and waiters, some of whom were making minimum wage.
  • He has been sued, and forced to pay out settlements, over a hundred times.

Trump is not a devil — he’s a human being, and like all people he has positive qualities and legitimate views. But anyone who denies that he is deeply corrupt, isn’t looking at the facts. To understand Trump, and protect our world from him, we need to understand his corruption.

 

MORE INFORMATION 

Trump’s Russian Laundromat (The New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate

Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump (Committee to Investigate Russia)
https://investigaterussia.org/timelines/everything-we-know-about-russia-and-president-trump 

Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers (Buzzfeed News)
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/thomasfrank/secret-money-how-trump-made-millions-selling-condos-to

Trump’s Russian connections (Financial Times)
https://ig.ft.com/sites/trumps-russian-connections/ 

Dirty money: Trump and the Kazakh connection (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/33285dfa-9231-11e6-8df8-d3778b55a923 

Trump’s oldest son said a decade ago that a lot of the family’s assets came from Russia (Business Insider)
http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-jr-said-money-pouring-in-from-russia-2018-2 
Sales of Trump properties suggestive of money-laundering – researcher (Reuters)
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-trump-russia-fusion/sales-of-trump-properties-suggestive-of-money-laundering-researcher-idUKKBN1F8058

Tower of secrets: the Russian money behind a Donald Trump skyscraper (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/trumptoronto

Trump Tower Toronto Was ‘Investment Scheme And Conspiracy’: Lawsuit (Huffington Post)
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/11/07/trump-tower-toronto-lawsuit_n_12849150.html?guccounter=1

If Trump Is Laundering Russian Money, Here’s How It Works (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/if-trump-is-laundering-russian-money-heres-how-it-works/ 

Trump’s casino was a money laundering concern shortly after it opened (CNN)
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/22/politics/trump-taj-mahal/index.html 

Donald Trump and the mansion that no one wanted. Then came a Russian fertilizer king (Miami Herald)
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article135187364.html 

Everything you want to know about Donald Trump’s bankruptcies (CNN)
https://money.cnn.com/2015/08/31/news/companies/donald-trump-bankruptcy/

Canada’s highest court upholds ruling that Donald Trump did mislead investors (The Independent)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-lawsuit-canada-court-approves-legal-case-against-us-president-a7623566.html

Russian elite invested nearly $100 million in Trump buildings (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/

Why did a Russian pay $95M to buy Trump’s Palm Beach mansion? (The Seattle Times)
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/why-did-a-russian-pay-95m-to-buy-trumps-palm-beach-mansion/

The Russia investigation and Donald Trump: a timeline from on-the-record sources (updated) (Politifact)
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/jul/16/russia-investigation-donald-trump-timeline-updated/ 

Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/23/here-are-ten-critics-of-vladimir-putin-who-died-violently-or-in-suspicious-ways/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8507f77dfcb1 

A Brief History of Attempted Russian Assassinations by Poison (Foreign Policy)
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/09/a-brief-history-of-attempted-russian-assassinations-by-poison/ 

International Criminal Court: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine Is A ‘Crime,’ Not A Civil War (Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2016/11/20/international-criminal-court-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-is-a-crime-not-a-civil-war/#1cf1ce247ddb

Donald Trump’s Worst Deal: The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (The New Yorker)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal

Trump’s Business of Corruption (The New Yorker)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business-of-corruption 

Trump lawyer ‘paid by Ukraine’ to arrange White House talks (BBC)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44215656 

After becoming President, Trump has sold millions in real estate in secret deals (Newsweek)
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-real-estate-secret-buyers-777276

Just What Were Donald Trump’s Ties to the Mob? (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910

Russian lawyer from infamous Trump Tower meeting admits to being an informant for the Kremlin: Report (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/27/emails-show-new-ties-between-trump-tower-russian-and-kremlin-nbc.html

Activist To-Dos for the Week of July 23rd to 29th

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Next weekend marks 100 days out from the 2018 midterm elections.

It also marks the one year anniversary of stopping Republicans from passing TrumpCare, which would have stripped 16 million people of health care. Now, we have the chance to use that same power to flip the House (and maybe the Senate!) by electing progressive leaders who represent our movement’s values.

For the next 100 days, Indivisible groups (including Lower Cape Indivisible) will #DoTheWork necessary build the big blue wave across the country. And we’re kicking off that work, coast to coast, in a weekend of action from July 27 to July 29.

Call to Action

Here’s this week’s list of actions from National Indivisible. Please share this list far and wide with your friends and fellow activists:

  1. Find a #100DaysOut event near you on our events map here!
    1. From July 27 to 29, Indivisibles everywhere will knock on doors, make calls to voters, and #DoTheWork to start mobilizing around the 2018 elections. On the map, you can filter by issue and select the 2018 elections tab.
  2. Join the national weekend of action phonebank! Sign up for the phonebank here or you can set up a phonebank party with your Indivisible group.
  3. Check out National Indivisible’s  brand new blog post up on the #100DaysOut weekend of action! Make sure to share with your friends, IndivisiFam, and more to inform them about our huge weekend coming up!

This week’s policy rundown

A generation of progress could be undone with Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Immigrant families are still waiting to be reunited. Trump continues to put us all at risk by attacking our allies on the world stage, and siding with authoritarians. Now, more than ever, we need to come together and let the country know that we’re ready to #DoTheWork to elect leaders that stop the Trump administration’s agenda once and for all.

Republicans are trying to fit in as much funding for terrorizing immigrant communities as they can before the blue wave sweeps them out of office.

  • House Republicans want to increase funding for Trump’s cruel immigration policies. The House Appropriations Committee plans to mark up a package to fund the Department of Homeland Security next week. The bill could be amended before the committee votes on it, but we already know it includes nearly $4 billion in additional funding for CBP, over $300 million in additional funding for ICE, and $5 billion for Trump’s wall.
  • The deadline for the Trump administration to reunify children separated from their parents at the border through its zero tolerance policy is July 26. Check out our resource on the current status of family separation.

And this week’s #TrumpThreatLevel:

  • Trump kowtowed to Putin in Helsinki. Trump refused to confront the Russian president over Russia’s interference in our elections, seizure of Crimea, or human rights abuses — days after he blasted our closest allies. As our Associate Policy Director Elizabeth Beavers said in an op-ed for CNN, “Trump’s choice to spend his time overseas harassing and insulting our closest friends while cozying up to our adversaries Putin and Russia is just the latest in his year-and-a-half-long campaign to actively harm US interests by exporting Trumpism abroad.”

Source: National Indivisible

 

 

Call To Action: Save SCOTUS

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The fight to #SaveSCOTUS from Trump’s next Supreme Court Justice nominee is no longer speculative. Last night, Trump announced his nomination to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court: Brett Kavanaugh.

Indivisible has teamed up with with MoveOn, Demand Justice, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Ultraviolet, National Center for Transgender Equality, United We Dream, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, CREDO, and other national progressive organizations to call for a week of action to #SaveSCOTUS.

Yesterday, we kicked off our week of action with in-district visits across the country. As outlined in Indivisible’s 2-Step Strategy to Win the Supreme Court Fight, the only way we can defeat Trump’s nominee is to make sure every single senate Democrat (and likely two Republicans) commits to a ‘no’ vote. Show up at your senator’s office and let them know that you’re paying attention.View Post

Call-to-Action

How you can help to #SaveSCOTUS.

  1. Find a #SaveSCOTUS Senate District Office event near you on our event map. 
  2. If you don’t see one, register your own. There’s still time.
  3. Can’t make it to a district office in-person? You can still call Senators Warren and Markey to make your voice heard:
  • Senator Edward J. Markey: 202-224-2742 or 617-565-8519
  • Senator Elizabeth A. Warren: 202-224-4543 or 617- 565-3170

Background

  • Kavanaugh is one of the most cravenly partisan choices Trump could have made. He’s been called the “Forrest Gump of Republican politics,” as he seems to always show up in high-stakes, far-right political battles and conspiracy theories. In fact, his “excessive partisanship” delayed his confirmation to the DC Circuit in 2003 by not one, not two, but three years, and only then passed by a 57 to 43 vote. His long, partisan history even had Mitch McConnell scrambling to encourage Trump to make another pick just three days ago. We. can. win. this.
  • This is a pick that will shift the court’s balance and reshape our country for generations to come. And only through intense pressure from constituents will senators understand what’s at stake and what they need to do. McConnell has said he’d like to vote on Trump’s Supreme Court pick by the fall. But first, it has to go through the Judiciary Committee, a confirmation vote in the full Senate… and you.
  • All eyes will be on this nominee — and the response from grassroots activists like you. No senator will be able to lay low on their position. That makes this — today, tomorrow, all week long — the perfect moment to begin pressuring our senators to make the right decision and commit to opposing Kavanaugh.
  • This is just the beginning. There are will be many flashpoints in the weeks ahead where we’ll need to be all hands on deck. We’ll be fighting tooth and nail to keep this extreme nominee from being seated on the court. Using the same grassroots opposition that stopped TrumpCare in spite of impossible odds, we will make it clear to both Democrats and Republicans that a ‘yes’ vote for Brett Kavanaugh is a vote to gut our rights and undermine our democratic institutions.

Resources

Why We Must Stop Kavanaugh From Becoming Trump’s Next Supreme Court Justice

2-Step Strategy to Win the Supreme Court Fight

Senate District Office Visit Toolkit

Source: Indivisible