cnsnews--2019-08-22--IVF and Frozen Embryos What Should We Do with These Little Abandoned Lives

IVF and Frozen Embryos: What Should We Do with These Little Abandoned Lives?

I’m unapologetically Protestant but, as I’ve said for a while now, our Catholic friends have long led the way on many bioethical issues like abortion and assisted reproductive technologies. For example, back in 2008, the Vatican released a document called “Dignitatis personae,” which said that “The desire for a child, while good, cannot justify the ‘production’ of offspring, just as the desire to not have a child cannot justify the abandonment or destruction of a child once he or she has been conceived.”  Now, I recognize that Christians disagree about whether it’s intrinsically wrong to conceive children outside of the sexual union of husband and wife, including in vitro fertilization. Because God ordered the pleasure and intimacy of married sex toward procreation, I find the Catholic ethical teaching against IVF to be compelling.  Still, like I said, not all Christians agree. For example, several months ago, I had a robust discussion on this issue on the BreakPoint Podcast with my friend Dr. David Stevens. David has long led the Christian Medical and Dental Society and has been one of the great medical missionaries of our lifetime.  What David and I did agree on, and what everyone should agree on (especially Christians), is that any fertility process that knowingly destroys or abandons human lives—including embryos—is immoral. And that’s what the debate over IVF must confront right now.  Recently, NBC reported that frozen and abandoned embryos in U.S. fertility clinics may now number in the millions. Because of how IVF has been done for so long, we are facing a human rights crisis—namely, what should we do with these little abandoned lives?  Throughout most of the history if the practice, in vitro fertilization has involved creating more embryos than any couple could ever bring to term. Standard practice is to retrieve scores of eggs per cycle from women and to fertilize all of them. A few of the resulting embryos are transferred one at a time to the gestational mother. Some may not implant. Some others may even be intentionally killed in reductive abortions. In other words, all-too-often this process involves destruction in the name of reproduction, justified because of efficiency.  And, what happens to the embryos not transferred? These human individuals are suspended in the earliest stage of development within tanks of super-cooled nitrogen. With modern techniques, they can survive this way for a long time. But for many of their parents, life moves on while storage fees add up. Once they have the children they want, their embryos are abandoned, to either sit indefinitely in the freezer or to die.  At one fertility clinic in Florida, a third of stored embryos face this fate. Because the CDC doesn’t require clinics to report the number of abandoned embryos, we have good reason to believe this is the case at clinics across the country.  Now, let’s be clear. By every scientific standard, embryos are living, genetically-distinct human individuals that just need the right environment, nourishment, and time to develop.  Given the scale of this overwhelming human rights crisis, the near silence about IVF in evangelical churches is inexcusable. How many pastors ever address this issue from the pulpit, or approach it in premarital counseling? How many uninformed Christian couples, in their laudable desire to have children, are using methods to create life that also destroy life?  There are clinics that use IVF methods that only involve fertilizing and implanting one embryo at a time. This type of IVF doesn’t result in excess embryos, and so it doesn’t destroy life. But how many Christian couples even understand the difference in these procedures?  Protestant pastors, this is a softball: It’s objectively wrong to bring human beings into existence knowing they’ll languish in a freezer or be discarded. In many cases, these embryos can be adopted. Google the Snowflakes Adoption Program to learn more.  Christians will have different answers to questions about the ethics of IVF. But in order to answer them, we first have to ask them. If we really believe that all human life is sacred, the technology behind this excess can’t remain a taboo subject, especially for the church.  John Stonestreet is President of The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview and BreakPoint co-host.  G. Shane Morris is a senior writer at BreakPoint, a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s also written for Summit Ministries and The Christian Post, and blogs regularly at Patheos. Shane lives with his wife and three children.  : This piece was originally published by BreakPoint.


sottnet--2019-10-09--Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei: Use of nuclear bomb is absolutely anti-sharia

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution said in remarks on Wednesday that although Iran was able to build nuclear weapons it did not do so because according to Islamic sharia it is absolutely banned and there is no reason to waste money for production and stockpile of such weapons."Though we were able to take such a step, based on the decree of the dear Islam we declared it completely haram (religiously banned), therefore there is no reason to incur cost for production and stockpiling of a weapon that its use is absolutely haram," the Leader said in a meeting with a large number of highly-talented youth.Ayatollah Khamenei said that"In the case of the key and very beneficial nuclear science... when it was paired with a thirst for more power, it resulted in the creation of the nuclear weapon and turned into a major threat to the world and humanity," he said, according to Press TV.Ayatollah Khamenei said that while Iran sees no shame in learning new sciences from others, it does not want its universities to replicate the American education system and copy the "wrong Western culture.""Imitating others will kill innovation and the real vigor that comes with science," the Leader noted.Elsewhere in the meeting, Ayatollah Khamenei stressed the need for an acceleration in the pace of scientific progress.Although the Islamic Republic has gloriously gained top world positions in a number of new sciences such as nanotechnology and biotechnology in recent years, such advances are "by no means adequate" and should not satisfy Iran, and the scientific progress must be accelerated, the Leader said, according to Tasnim.The Leader also referring to his visit to an exhibition of knowledge-based companies on Tuesday, saying, "Yesterday (Tuesday) there was an exhibition here; I witnessed the enthusiasm, confidence and self-esteem. Out of the several thousand knowledge enterprises, there were only 30 companies present. We have 4000 knowledge enterprises now; that should reach 400,000.""Of course," he added, "the legal infrastructure of these companies must be provided first; and the barriers should be removed."Ayatollah Khamenei also advised officials to protect the talented generation from becoming subjected to the phenomenon of brain drain that is being encouraged by certain groups.The Iranian prodigies are the valuable assets of their own country and must be protected against attempts to lure them out of the country by using financial incentives and other false promises.The Leader hailed the Iranian scientists' achievements in defense industry, medical sciences, engineering, nanotechnology and peaceful nuclear energy despite the increasing foreign pressure."We live in a different situation than others," Ayatollah Khamenei said. "We need to think Iranian, act Iranian and live Iranian and this trend can be accelerated by adopting the Islamic-Iranian blueprint for progress."He said Iranians need to attain such high scientific standards that "in 50 years' time, all talented people wishing to acquire the latest scientific findings should learn the language of Farsi. This is something that can be achieved through reliance on Iranian genius, intellect and persistence."Ayatollah Khamenei further called on the society of the talented Iranians to play a role in public diplomacy, saying, "Our approach is neither socialist nor based on liberal democracy. Thanks to Islam, we offered a third way to nations, as we should further attract the hearts to this beneficial approach for humanity with our logical words and deeds, and to save nations from the increasing influence of the decadent Western culture."


sottnet--2019-10-11--Nina Teicholz: The latest flip-flop on red meat uses best science in place of best guesses

Eggs are bad; eggs are good. Fat is bad; fat is good. Meat is bad; meat is... OK?That last food flip-flop made big headlines last week. It was a " remarkable turnabout ," " jarring ," " stunning ." How, it was asked, could seemingly bedrock nutrition advice turn on a dime?Red meat is a particularly contentious topic because people have such strong objections to eating meat for a variety of reasons: the environment, animal rights and even religion (Seventh-day Adventists advise against it).Remember that the original reason we've distrusted red meat is that starting in 1961, the American Heart Assn. told us to limit our consumption of saturated fat to prevent heart disease. However, recent decades have seen a reconsideration of this topic.The key phrase is "strong body of evidence." Unfortunately, our nutrition guidelines are primarily based on epidemiological studies, which generally follow a large group of people over time, asking them to self-report what they've eaten and then observing eventual health outcomes. These studies can demonstrate association — which has its uses — but they rarely establish causation.The odd exception has occurred when epidemiology tips the scales in a big way, as it did with tobacco. Heavy smokers were found to have a nine to 25-fold increased risk for cancer compared with never-smokers, a difference so big that causation could be implied. Yet in nutrition epidemiology, the differing rates rarely exceed 1.5-fold, which most epidemiologists outside of nutrition consider to be non-findings.Only clinical trials can demonstrate cause and effect because these are actual experiments. At their simplest, a group fed a diet is compared to another group of non-dieting controls. Such experiments aren't always easy, but they're nevertheless considered the gold standard by international systems for reviewing scientific evidence.The red meat studies used one such review system, known as GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluations).With so much research dependent on donors, the appearance of conflicts, or worse, isn't uncommon. After publication of the red-meat review, it was quickly pointed out that while its primary author had no apparent conflicts related to the meat study, he had earlier accepted funding from an industry group with members like Mars and PepsiCo for a 2017 review of sugar research.On the other side, the True Health Initiative letter signers included five epidemiologists from Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which in 2017-18 received hundreds of thousands of dollars from walnut and peanut industry groups; the walnut group is cited as a donor for the previous five years. At least nine Harvard papers in five years have supported the health benefits of nuts.Whatever their possible incentives, the critics of the Annals review principally objected to its methodology. GRADE, they said, was an "ill-fitting measuring tool," designed to evaluate drugs but not "lifestyle studies." However, no less than the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends GRADE as one of only a few viable method s for evaluating nutrition studies for the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Evaluating nutrition findings using the highest possible scientific standard is clearly a painful process, but it's essential.Nina Teicholz is the executive director of the not-for-profit Nutrition Coalition, which accepts no funds from any food industry, company or interested party. She does accept fees when she speaks to groups about diet and health. She is the author of "The Big Fat Surprise."


sputnik--2019-01-09--How Integrity Initiatives German Cluster Aims to End Berlins Ties with Moscow

How Integrity Initiative's German Cluster Aims to End Berlin's Ties with Moscow

The Initiative's overseas clusters are networks of politicians, businesspeople, military officials, academics and journalists who "understand the threat posed to Western nations" by Russian "disinformation", and work in support of the "Anglo-Saxon worldview", and a "tougher stance" towards the Russian state.  Its German operation is no different — in fact, its target membership is among the most influential and sizeable of any cluster I've yet come across, perhaps a reflection of the vital significance of Germany to the Initiative's objectives, and the vast scale of the organization's plans for the country.  Its chief, political scientist Hannes Adomeit — who on January 4 menaced me with promises of "criminal charges" — produced an ‘interim report' on the cluster on October 3 2018.  In his opening remarks, Adomeit commits to "full engagement" with the Initiative, having been hitherto obliged to withhold his full, undivided attention from the organization in order to meet "prior commitments" connected to his role as Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University (IPSK).  This primarily concerned a paper — Nach dem Helsinki Gipfel: Trübe Aussichten für eine Verbesserung der russischamerikanischen Beziehungen (After the Helsinki Summit: Dim Prospects for an Improvement of Russian-American Relations) — published under the auspices of the ISPK. Adomeit goes on to note "affiliation to ISPK and access to the journal is important" — as remarks elsewhere make clear, he intends to write and commission articles for the resource moving forward, so he continues to be involved with both "without taking on significant new commitments" for either.  A review of the 'paper' reveals the work to be far from academic in tone or content — it's pure polemic, with a perhaps predictably extremely negative stance towards Russia. Adomeit strongly condemns the country's "intransigence" while bemoaning the "absence of a coherent Washington approach to Moscow", and in conclusion fulminates that Trump missed a golden opportunity to "reject the Kremlin's narrative", "address [Russia's] malicious behavior", and try to secure "fundamental change in Russian politics".  "The effectiveness of this could have been enhanced if he'd sought strong European backing at the NATO summit in Brussels…[instead] Trump has further devalued the transatlantic relationship…he placates Putin's Russia. American policy [must] set boundaries for Russia…it's not clear the Kremlin wants improved relations with Washington," he writes.  As of October 3 2018, the only confirmed members of the Initiative's German cluster 2018 are Harold Elletson — a long-time MI6 operative, who conducted espionage operations in the former Soviet Union — and Joachim Krause, Adomeit's "close friend" and former Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Institute for International and Security Affairs) colleague, currently Director of the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel.  Krause is chief editor of Germany's "only journal on strategies studies" — Zeitschrift fur Strategische Analysen, where Adomeit's Helsinki summit attack appeared — and the cluster chief stresses the "importance of this connection", as articles will appear in the periodical expressly "for the benefit of the Initiative".  At time of writing though, Adomeit had met with three others, scheduled rendezvous with three more, and intended to secure meetings with 12 further prospective members "after London and Vilnius" (it's unclear when these trips occurred).  The three individuals Adomeit met prior to authoring the document were Marieluise Beck (German Green MP 1994 — 2017 and founder of think tank Zentrum Liberale Moderne), Claudia von Salzen (journalist at Der Tagesspiegel), and Susanne Spahn (academic). Each was provided of an outline of "what the Initiative is all about" and "what [their] role in it might conceivably be".  Despite the Initiative's handbook indicating cluster members are compelled to sign non-disclosure agreements, I reached out to the trio, asking whether they joined and if so, what their responsibilities within it will be — as of January 8, Beck and Spahn haven't responded, while von Salzen replied in the negative.  Nonetheless, it's abundantly clear why she was a person of interest for Adomeit — her journalistic output output is rife with articles highly critical of Russia, which directly and indirectly advocate a harsh government line on Moscow not merely in Germany but throughout Europe. One article published November 26 2018 — Europe must set clear boundaries for the Kremlin — even has direct echoes of Adomeit's writing on the Helsinki summit.  Had von Salzen become part of the German cluster, the Initiative would've secured an intimate relationship with a prominent journalist writing for Berlin's "most serious and biggest daily newspaper" — which boasts a daily circulation of 148,000 — through which the organization could "pass on information by way of research papers, articles, presentations, individual conversations and personal contacts", without Initiative input being publicly disclosed.  Moreover, as the activities of the Initiative's Spanish cluster make clear, cluster members have been mobilized to influence government policy in concerted operations — and an individual with a significant national media platform and sizeable social media following could be particularly influential in this regard.  A review of the professional and political history of Beck likewise amply demonstrates why she made such an attractive candidate for cluster recruitment. While in the Bundestag she was a consistent and voluble critic of Vladimir Putin and modern Russia, and via Zentrum Liberale Moderne (LibMod) she's continued her crusade. The organization convened its first event in March 2018, The Putin System and the Kremlin's Influence in Europe, at which participants apparently agreed Russia was an "authoritarian kleptocracy" attempting to destroy liberal democracy in Europe, and influencing and manipulating the continent with ease due to "Western weakness" — all points of view resonating closely with the Initiative's own.  Intriguingly, as an MP Beck was an outspoken supporter of controversial US financier Bill Browder — named as being part of the Initiative's UK cluster. Browder has long-claimed the Moscow wing of his firm Hermitage Capital Management was stolen by Russian authorities in service of a vast tax fraud and his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was jailed for trying to expose the crime, where he later died.  However, when documentarian Andrei Nekrasov, himself a long-time Putin critic, presented Beck with strong evidence to suggest Browder was himself in fact behind the fraud, and Magnitsky — in reality an accountant — had potentially facilitated it, she was left lost for words. Nekrasov subsequently made a film about the affair — The Magnitsky Act Behind the Scenes — and Beck played a significant role in the cancellation of its scheduled April 2016 premiere at the European parliament, and subsequent shelving of its broadcast on French and German TV.  Of the 15 remaining cluster candidates Adomeit had scheduled meetings with or intended to in future, it's likewise unclear who was receptive to his advances, as few have deigned to respond to my enquiries. Alice Bota, Editor of Der Zeit, said nobody had asked her to join, she was "not involved in any initiative", and had "no intention to do so in the future". Stefan Meister, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, said Adomeit "only wrote" to him about the Initiative, and he wasn't interested as there "[wasn't] enough information on the project [and] partners".  Still, again it's clear why Adomeit was interested in Meister — as the Council's Head of the Robert Bosch Center for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia, he contributed to a virulently anti-Russian November 2016 report published by the NATO-funded Atlantic Council, The Kremlin's Trojan Horses.  The document claimed a number of individuals the world over — including former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder — are used by Russia to "destabilize European politics", in exactly same manner as German cluster coordinator and MI6 operative Harold Elletson's ‘report' on Russian information warfare in Germany claimed ‘Russlandvesteher' (including Schroeder) had been "cultivated" to propagandize for Kremlin interests, with similarly absent supporting evidence.  However, perhaps the most high-profile names included in the document are Barbara and Arndt Freytag-Loringhofen — Barbara previously worked for the German government's coordinator for Russia policy, Andreas Schockenhoff, and her husband is NATO's first Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security, having previously been Germany's ambassador to the Czech Republic and worked as a diplomat at the German Embassy in Moscow.  Adomeit notes — possibly with some relish — Arndt is "responsible for providing intelligence support to the North Atlantic Council and the Military Committee as well as for advising the Secretary General on intelligence and security matters". He planned to "travel to Brussels at some time", and brief and interview both, "preferably simultaneously and privately".  The nature of the targets further underlines the degree to which the Initiative is a military intelligence operation in all but name — but while it's unclear whether the pair did eventually meet with Adomeit, their inclusion in his plans for the cluster is also a palpable demonstration of how high up the organization intends to, and potentially could, spread its international network.  Furthermore, in his bullying email to me, Adomeit made clear I'd been contacting both "actual" and "potential" members of the German cluster, in the process revealing at least some of the "well-informed people from the political, military, academic, journalistic and think-tank spheres" he approached did join the cluster.  While it's unclear who he's referring to, there are some clues sprinkled throughout the interim report. For instance, he writes of a ‘tentative project' involving "commissioning, updating and translation" of a paper by academic Susanne Spahn — who he met September 28 2018 — on Russian media in Germany.  Spahn is said to be "prepared to make the paper available" to the Initiative, for the sum of US$1,280 (£1,000), and Adomeit offers to translate it "also for a fee" — he adds "a decision is needed on this" from "Chris", presumably referring to Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly. It's uncertain whether Donnelly acquiesced, but an English-language version was certainly published in December.  Even more significantly, in a section marked ‘examples of networking in progress', Adomeit refers to another project by Spahn on the "political orientation of the more than three million Germans with a post-Soviet migration background", including "the 2.3 million Russlanddeutsche and their family members, i.e. persons with German ethnic roots deported in 1944 to Siberia and Kazakhstan".  These comments offer much cause for alarm. Evidently, despite state backing, Spahn couldn't find a single research outlet willing to verify, support or publish her ‘research', seemingly suggesting it fell far short of scholarly and/or scientific standards — yet Adomeit enthusiastically secured the superficial "stamp of approval" and publication for the paper from an academic institution closely connected to another cluster member, despite being acutely aware of its potentially dubious probity.  It's not hard to see why he did so though, for it's highly probable — if not certain — the paper would very much "benefit the Initiative". While Spahn's work is seemingly yet to appear in Krause's specialist journal, in May 2018 Berlin's Institut für Strategie, Politik, Sicherheits und Wirtschaftsberatung (Institute for Strategic, Political, Security and Economic Consultancy) published a brief paper she wrote, Russischsprachige im Fokus: Wie Russland und die AfD Einfluss nehmen (Russian Speakers in Focus: How Russia and the AfD Influence).  The document has very, very close parallels with Harold Elletson's aforementioned ‘report' on Russian information warfare in Germany — just as he claimed ‘Russlandvesteher' were a core part of Russian ‘information warfare' operations in Germany, so too does Spahn allege Russia "[exploits Germany's] Russian speakers for its political goals", using them to "spread a negative image of Germany and its western allies."  Evidence for her incendiary assertions is either absent or extremely suspect indeed, the only citations offered typically mainstream media articles, or papers she herself has written. For instance, the alleged "socialization in authoritarian systems" of Russlanddeutsche is claimed to account for the group's high receptivity to populist parties such as the AfD — but the only supporting basis for this notion is polling data suggesting 30 percent of such individuals think Germany needs a "strong leader", versus 18 percent of the wider population.  "These results suggest a positive attitude towards President Putin and his foreign policy," she concludes, declining to elaborate on how and why any of the data she's presented could possibly support such a conclusion.  Laughable as her findings may appear to some, what's not remotely amusing is the prospect of such venomously anti-Russian propaganda being given a legitimizing "stamp of approval" by a questionable academic institution "for the benefit" of a secretive British state and NATO-funded organization, passed to high-ranking journalists, politicians and military figures — both connected and unconnected to the Initiative — and disseminated publicly under the guise of ‘independent' and/or ‘expert' research.  It's even more sobering that such papers are just one way in which the Integrity Initiative is seeking to worsen relations between Germany and Russia — and indeed Germany is just one country in which the Initiative has constructed or is seeking to construct a network to impact domestic and international government policy in its own interests, and the political, financial and military interests of those who fund it.


talkingpointsmemo--2019-01-11--Experts Predict New SCOTUS Majority Will Take On Extreme Gerrymandering

The Supreme Court is slated to hear two blockbuster cases involving extreme partisan gerrymandering this spring—the last best chance for the nation’s highest court to take action on this pivotal issue before the 2020 census and once-a-decade redistricting process the following year.  With swing vote Anthony Kennedy retired from the bench and Justice Brett Kavanaugh cementing the court’s 5-4 conservative majority, there’s a legitimate fear that their ruling may not institute a fairer system.  After all, the Supreme Court has ruled that racial gerrymandering can violate the Constitution, but never before struck down a voting map as unconstitutionally gerrymandered on partisan lines. Last year, the Supreme Court kicked two related cases back to the lower courts.  But legal redistricting experts surveyed by TPM see cause for hope. The pending cases — Lamone v. Benisek out of Maryland and Rucho v. Common Cause out of North Carolina — involve such egregious, intentional partisan power grabs, committed by Democratic and Republican lawmakers, respectively, that the constitutional questions at hand are clear-cut. Experts also predict that the justices will want to impose some limits to stem the flow of cases to their docket involving this highly sensitive political issue.  “The extreme fact patterns in these cases simplify the legal issues significantly,” Thomas Wolf, an attorney with the Brennan Center specializing in redistricting, told TPM.  Both cases involve “bald, flagrant seat maximization, and that’s unconstitutional many times over,” Wolf said. “In both cases you have key movers making crystal-clear what their intent was in their own words.”  Dan Vicuña, national redistricting director for Common Cause, said that the facts in his organization’s case against North Carolina “are about as egregious as the court will ever see.”  “If that doesn’t offend the Constitution, I don’t know what does,” Vicuña told TPM. “So we feel good about where things stand. I think we’ll put together a strong amicus campaign that will have a lot of bipartisan academics, current and former elected officials, folks who can make a strong case that this is clearly a constitutional problem—to allow elected officials to manipulate districts.”  In the North Carolina case, a three-judge panel of a federal district court found that GOP lawmakers intentionally drew districts to protect their members and hurt Democratic opponents. Under this map, Republicans managed to hold on to 10 of the state’s 13 congressional seats in the 2018 midterms, even though Democrats won over 50 percent of the vote.  This was no accident, by the GOP’s own admission. As Rep. David Lewis (R) put it: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”  The Maryland case, which the Supreme Court declined to decide last June on procedural grounds, involves an overzealous Democratic gerrymander. Republican voters alleged that Democratic state lawmakers intentionally and successfully drew a map in 2011 that would oust a longtime Republican incumbent, giving Democrats a 7-1 advantage in congressional seats. Former Gov. Martin O’Malley acknowledged that he hoped to create “a district where the people would be more likely to elect a Democrat.”  In both cases, there are stark statements of intent by the architects of the plan. The plaintiffs also have strong standing to bring them. Common Cause’s Vicuña said they intentionally built their case to avoid standing issues after the Supreme Court ruled last year that Wisconsin Democratic voters failed to prove that a GOP-orchestrated redistricting plan caused them personal harm.  “That was something we anticipated, and that was the reason why we brought on the state Democratic Party as well as individual plaintiffs from every district,” he said.  Lawyers representing plaintiffs in both cases acknowledge that the departure of Kennedy makes their job more difficult. Kavanaugh’s vote is uncertain, as his tenure on the D.C. Circuit Court did not involve any gerrymandering cases.  “It’s a bit more of a cloudy crystal ball right now,” Michael Kimberly, an attorney at Mayer Brown who represents the plaintiffs in the Maryland case, told TPM.  But Kimberly said he feels “cautious optimism” about his prospects. For one thing, the court slightly accelerated the scheduling of the Maryland case so that oral arguments in both cases would be held on the same day in March.  “I do think it’s a good thing to have a broader array of legal theories before the court,” Kimberly said. “The more options that we put in front of the justices, and the more opportunity that they have to compare and contrast them, the more likely it is that they’ll land on a good answer.”  Paul Smith of the Campaign Legal Center, which is representing other plaintiffs in the North Carolina case, agreed that the scheduling maneuvering was an “optimistic sign.”  Moving up the schedule allows the justices additional time to write their opinions, Smith said, suggesting, to him, “that there is at least some interest in doing something substantive here rather than just batting their hand at us.”  Legal experts noted there are some self-interested reasons for the Supreme Court to institute rules to stop the most extreme examples of gerrymandering. All these pending redistricting cases are burdening their overcrowded caseload, and Chief Justice John Roberts is keen to maintain the court’s perceived independence in this hyper-partisan political moment.  “We have the Chief Justice in a very different posture in the Kavanaugh world, where he’s looking for ways to make the court look less partisan and trying to show that the court is a court of law, not a court of politics,” the Campaign Legal Center’s Smith said.  Jeff Wice, a redistricting expert at the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government, agreed that Roberts doesn’t want to “see the Supreme Court as a parking lot for every political case that parties want to bring” and is keen to “balance the court’s caseload.”  As Wice pointed out, there are still more than a dozen states fighting in court over plans enacted after the last round of redistricting in 2011—an “unprecedented” figure.  If the court doesn’t take some action before the 2020 census sets the terms for the next map-drawing cycle in 2021, “There could be no end to this.”  The Supreme Court has never delineated clear standards for what constitutes an impermissibly partisan gerrymander, but intent is key. They have defined the practice as “the drawing of legislative district lines to subordinate adherents of one political party and entrench a rival party in power”—a standard that presumably applies to congressional maps as well.  Some legal scholars have argued that the Supreme Court can rely on scientific standards developed to determine examples of gerrymandering—comparing the share of the popular vote to the share of congressional seats, for example. Using these scientific measures to account for partisan asymmetry in how districts are drawn would allow the court to try to satisfy individual voters’ right to equal treatment under the 14th Amendment.  Even a formula that only applies to the most extreme examples of partisan gerrymandering would represent a huge step forward for a court that has taken no action on this issue, the Brennan Center’s Wolf said.  “The court doesn’t need to step in and solve everything that’s wrong with our redistricting processes,” Wolf said. “If it comes in and knocks out the limit cases, we will have made substantial advances.”  Despite the causes for optimism, there is no guarantee that the court will do so. A ruling that the Constitution imposes no limits on the practice is possible, and worth losing sleep over, as some experts and good-government groups are cautioning. Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California Irvine who runs the Election Law Blog, laid out the nightmare scenario in an Atlantic piece this week, anticipating that the court will reverse lower courts rulings finding the Maryland and North Carolina cases unconstitutional.  If that happens, experts predict, legislatures will have free rein to engage in extreme partisan gerrymandering come 2021.  Just look at North Carolina, where the GOP’s gerrymander-protected supermajority control of the legislature empowered them to pass jurisdiction-stripping statutes and attempt to reduce the governor’s authority. Or Pennsylvania, where Republican lawmakers threatened to impeach state Supreme Court justices who stepped in to declare their congressional map an unconstitutional gerrymander.  “We’re not just talking about threats to voter rights,” Wolf said. “We’re talking about threats to the structure of our democracy.”


thedailybeast--2019-02-13--Nonprofit Trump Administration Aims to House Detained Kids on Toxic Site

Nonprofit: Trump Administration Aims to House Detained Kids on Toxic Site

A proposed detention center for unaccompanied immigrant children sits on top of land that could pose serious health risks, a report released on Tuesday alleges, including multiple toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and contaminated groundwater.  As part of the Trump administration’s plan to jail undocumented immigrants on military bases, the site at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, is slated to hold up to 7,5000 unaccompanied children. Attorneys with Earthjustice, the nation’s largest nonprofit environmental law organization, say that the proposed location’s status as a former landfill and Superfund site should preclude it from ever being used for housing—particularly for children, who are especially vulnerable to environmental contaminants.  “Public records show the migrant children’s housing site proposed for Goodfellow will be built atop a former landfill, in an area riddled with lead, benzene and other chemicals particularly hazardous to children,” said Lisa Evans, Earthjustice attorney. “This is outrageous.”  In the report, compiled from documents developed by the U.S. Air Force during the Superfund cleanup process and inspections, Earthjustice found that serious potential health risks remain for future residents of the Goodfellow detention center. The contaminants include arsenic, benzene, lead, and PFAS, a pollutant that has been found to affect neurodevelopment and increase risk of learning delays and autism.  Volatile organic compounds, also known as VOCs, have been detected at Goodfellow as well, and have been found to cause damage to human nervous systems, kidneys, and liver—risks that are compounded when the person exposed to the compounds is a child.  Most of the contaminants date back to the site’s use as a landfill, which has since been covered but remains uncapped. Lead-contaminated soil from one section’s former use as a firing range, however, sits directly beneath land the Defense Department hopes to use for detainee housing. Pollution at many of those sites, Earthjustice alleges, has never been fully remediated—and was likely never sufficient to support housing for children.  The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement that cares for unaccompanied immigrant children, did not respond to a request for comment on the planned site.  “The Trump administration clearly cannot be trusted with the health and safety of vulnerable migrant children,” said Laura M. Esquivel, director of National Advocacy for Hispanic Federation. “Make no mistake; if plans go forward for these centers, the Trump administration is responsible for yet another cruel, misguided, and intentional action that will compound the irreparable damage to the physical and mental well-being of thousands of migrant children being separated from their parents at the border.”  Esquivel is a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by Earthjustice last August that seeks to compel the government to turn over records relating to the construction of detention facilities on U.S. military bases, including any documents identifying all hazardous waste sites that could harm detainees. Evans said that the suit, filed after the Department of Defense declined to release the documents in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act, is necessary to accurately determine the potential risk to migrant children.  “We urge the government to immediately turn over all documents related to this immoral plan so the public can get to the bottom of this,” Evans said.  Among the people who have opposed plans to house undocumented children on military bases are U.S. military officers and enlisted personnel, one of whom told The Daily Beast in June 2018 that the plan “smacks of totalitarianism.”  In an Aug. 2018 letter addressed to then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, nearly two dozen retired senior officers urged the Defense Department to rethink the plan, which they wrote would “divert critical defense resources from core military functions, reduce service member readiness, and detract from their ability to protect our homeland and defend our interests abroad.”  In addition to concern that housing children atop a legacy waste site could potentially poison them, advocates for migrant kids have warned that attorneys may not be able to securely represent their clients from inside a military base that serves as an intelligence hub for the U.S. Air Force.  “Even the unrealized risk that communications could be intercepted will likely cause people to self-censor and prevent them from receiving the full benefit of legal counsel,” Amie Stepanovich, a lawyer with the digital-rights group Access, told The Daily Beast last summer.  But without comprehensive investigations and analyses of the current conditions at Goodfellow, using modern scientific standards, advocates said that it is impossible to say for sure what risks the child detainees may face there.  “The Trump administration chooses secrecy, despite the public’s right to know,” said Mark Magaña, president and CEO of GreenLatinos. “Now we must compel the government to respond to our queries and be accountable for the sake of our communities and migrant families.”