Pain defines my life, but medical marijuana could change that

Chicago Sun Times – Opinion

Pain defines my life, but medical marijuana could change that

Ann Mednick February 8, 2018

AP file photo

Pain defines my life. It starts in my hip and flows from there like from a leaking faucet. The pain dominates my thoughts and my time, as I think about how to lessen it. It forces me to sit on and sleep with ice packs. It keeps me from doing things I love.

But if pain is the thief that stole my quality of life, the state of Illinois is its accomplice. A remedy exists that would significantly lessen my pain — and do so without damaging side effects. It works but the state won’t let me have it.

I’m talking about medical cannabis. Currently, Illinois allows doctors to certify medical cannabis for 41 medical conditions. But sacroiliac joint dysfunction and osteoarthritis — the conditions from which I suffer — are not among them. More importantly, neither is intractable pain — the medico-legal term for the chronic suffering that governs my life. I have lived with this pain for more than 20 years.

In 2015, I asked the state to put intractable pain on the treatment access list. My doctor supported my petition. The Illinois Medical Cannabis Advisory Board did too, voting 10-0 to add intractable pain to the approved list of conditions. Then, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health Dr. Nirav Shah said, “No.”

Illinois made medical cannabis legal in 2014, following 19 other states. At that time, the General Assembly wrote, “Cannabis as a medicine goes back nearly 5,000 years. Modern medical research has confirmed the beneficial uses of cannabis in treating or alleviating the pain, nausea and other symptoms associated with a variety of medical conditions.”

Since my pain became acute, I have seen numerous doctors and received countless prescriptions and shots. Doctors have given me fentanyl patches without hesitation. Fentanyl, of course, is an opioid — a class of drugs that is killing people in record numbers. In 2016, some 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, the overwhelming majority from opioids.

Opioids have wreaked havoc on my life and I want nothing to do with them. On fentanyl, I became a prisoner — even more of one than I am now. I could not leave my house for fear of being more than a few steps from a bathroom. I lost 80 pounds. The drug made me horribly sick and worse, it clouded my mind. There were days where I didn’t know if I could get out of bed.

Cannabis can ease pain without any of those side effects; it is not addictive. Two respected medical journals reviewing 45 clinical studies establish that it is an effective treatment of chronic pain.

Earlier this month, Cook County Judge Raymond Mitchell ruled that Shah’s decision was “clearly erroneous.” He ordered the state to allow medical cannabis use for intractable pain. This is the third time that the state of Illinois has appealed this case. They are wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.

“The record shows that individuals with intractable pain would benefit from the medical use of cannabis,” Mitchell wrote. Yet the Illinois Department of Public Health said it plans to appeal.

Yet Dr. Shah seems to think that if I want to reduce my pain, I should use opioids. I don’t know what else to conclude. I feel the state of Illinois is forcing me toward opioid use when a better alternative exists. For my sake, and for the sake of chronic pain sufferers across Illinois, I hope Dr. Shah will reconsider.

Ann Mednick, 58, lives with her husband in Rolling Meadows.

‘Serial stowaways’ like Marilyn Hartman are all around us

Chicago Sun Times – Opinion

Editorial: ‘Serial stowaways’ like Marilyn Hartman are all around us

Sun-Times Editorial Board February 8, 2018

Marilyn Hartman was arrested at O’Hare Airport, most recently, last Sunday. | Chicago Police Department via AP

There is nobody like Marilyn Hartman. Her constant attempts to sneak aboard airplanes have drawn media attention around the world.

We are fascinated by her persistence, her grandmotherly appearance and her obvious mental health problems. We’re not sure what’s to be done about her, as she sits in jail again, but she certainly doesn’t fit our idea of a dangerous criminal. What’s a little old lady doing behind bars?

In truth, of course, we are surrounded by people like Marilyn Hartman, even when we fail to notice. There’s the loud man who makes a little scene every morning at the corner Starbucks. There’s the woman who harasses riders on the L because “people” are chasing her. There’s the young guy who steals candy bars because, he says, God told him to.

They are no less harmless than Hartman, if less benign in their appearance — in our stereotypical and even racist perception. As Hartman herself has said, “I’m an old white lady. Nobody stops me.”

If we don’t know what to do about Hartman, that’s because we don’t know what to do about any of these people. Or we do know but don’t do it. Instead of seriously treating their mental illness, in the words of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, we put Hartman and the others on “the conveyor belt” of our criminal justice system.

It should surprise nobody, though it should offend us all, that one in every four detainees in Cook County Jail — 1,500 men and women — has been diagnosed with a mental illness.

Last week, Hartman again was arrested at O’Hare Airport, just days after she was released from custody for allegedly sneaking aboard a British Airways flight to London. On Wednesday, a judge declined a request to move her from Cook County Jail to a community-based counseling center, making the perfectly valid point that Hartman might slip out and head right back to O’Hare.

Now Hartman will undergo an exam to determine whether she is fit to stand trial, as she has undergone before, and she likely will pass the test, as she has before. She is said to be intelligent and not unaware, and her ability to comprehend what’s going on in a criminal proceeding would seem to be fine.

What Hartman really needs, though, is to get off that conveyor belt of arrests, courtrooms and jails altogether, says the sheriff’s office. She should, instead, be provided with a highly individualized mental health treatment plan that finally gets to the source of her compulsion to stow away on planes.

The aim, says Cara Smith, chief policy officer for the sheriff’s office, should be to “connect Marilyn with someone who really cares about her” and can help her work her way to better mental health. In return for Hartman’s willing participation, the criminal charges against her could be held in abeyance.

Would this work? We don’t share Smith’s “cautious optimism” — Hartman has walked out of treatment facilities before — but the sheriff’s plan is a far sight more humane than the criminalizing of mental illness. And given the high expense of locking people up, it’s arguably cheaper.

There is nobody like Marilyn Hartman, true enough. But there are some 2 million people a lot like her. That’s roughly the number of people with mental illness in the United States who are jailed each year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Health.

The vast majority of these people, like Hartman, are not violent; but once incarcerated, their mental health generally grows worse.

Then, once released from jail or prison, they typically have little access to the health care they need, and their criminal records make it hard to find a job or housing. They wind up homeless. They fill our emergency rooms. They are arrested again. They put a strain on law enforcement — and law enforcement budgets — and, for all of that, none of us is any more or less safe.

“We need to hit the pause button,” Smith said. Hartman and other “super users” of our criminal justice system, she said, should be treated “as individuals with individualized issues, instead of items on an assembly line.”

And those “individual issues” should include not only mental illness, but also such scourges as drug addiction and poverty.

Any sensible person can see that Marilyn Hartman needs help, not punishment.

If only we, as a society, would extend that compassion to all the others among us who are broken by mental illness or drug addiction or poverty or worse, even when they don’t look like Beaver Cleaver’s grandmother.

Send letters to: letters@suntimes.com.

Corporations announcing small pay increases for workers under the GOP tax plan is “a hype” and an “attempt to fool people.”

Democracy Now!

February 9, 2018

Watch: Economist Richard D. Wolff explains why corporations announcing small pay increases for workers under the GOP tax plan is “a hype” and an “attempt to fool people.” http://ow.ly/j9jP30ijf5y

Richard Wolff on Democracy Now!

Watch: Economist Richard D. Wolff explains why corporations announcing small pay increases for workers under the GOP tax plan is "a hype" and an "attempt to fool people." http://ow.ly/j9jP30ijf5y

Posted by Democracy Now! on Saturday, February 10, 2018

Republican Rule, Week 55: There Is No Bottom to This Bottom

The Daily Beast – Worse and Worse

Republican Rule, Week 55: There Is No Bottom to This Bottom

Joy-Ann Reid February 9, 2018

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast

Democracy? That’s for losers. For the Republicans, the name of the game is winning—and rigging the system the better to ensure perpetual winning.

One year and a month into the Donald Trump presidency, it’s increasingly clear that the Republican Party, drunk on the power of unified government under a man it once despised, has given up on the idea of democracy and decided instead to stand firmly at his side, and to maintain control by any means necessary. They have decided to not to govern, but to rule.

Democracy works only if all of the parties to it agree to its ground rules. We now have entered an era when only one party does so, often to its detriment, while the other continually blows through the guard rails of democratic normalcy in pursuit of perpetual power and monetary gain. The result: the most ostentatiously corrupt administration since Richard Nixon’s is completely off its tether, while his political party’s soul vanishes a little more each day.

The tax cut rammed through the Senate on a party-line basis, which promises to suck $1.5 trillion out of the treasury and which could yet set up draconian cuts to social services for the poor, children and the elderly was but one example of the rot. Holding hostage a Supreme Court seat, which Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell made clear he would allow to be filled only by a Republican president, was another. There are the serial attacks on voting rights in state after state under GOP control that, combined with likely continued Russian meddling, threaten the very democratic character of our elections. And the current determination of House Republicans to burn it all—including the intelligence community and the FBI—to protect Trump, and by extension the Kremlin, is the most outrageous of all.

Trump’s elevation to the White House, thanks to the anachronistic Electoral College, combined with the gerrymandered control of state and federal legislatures made possible by the Obama backlash and the short-sightedness of Democratic voters in 2010, gave Republicans a rare gift. The party has controlled all three branches of the federal government only three times since its founding as the anti-slavery party in 1854.

Since rebranding itself as the party of big business during the Gilded Age and losing Teddy Roosevelt in the process, the Grand Old Party controlled the presidency and Congress four times: during the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover from 1925 to 1933, to disastrous results for the global economy; then again under Dwight Eisenhower, due to the deaths of nine Democratic senators and the resignation of another; and finally during parts of George W. Bush’s tenure. (It’s worth noting that Eisenhower, who presided over a period of rare economic stability under a Republican, was so non-ideological, he was offered the Democratic nomination by party bosses in 1948. With Bush, the GOP returned to deficit-busting, tax-cutting, recession-inducing form.)

Even without the White House, Republican control of the federal legislature has been disastrous for anyone but the super rich.

After the “Republican revolution” of 1994, Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole and Trent Lott used their power to force through a wholesale rewrite of welfare and criminal justice law; changes that resulted in the mass incarceration of millions of people, disproportionately black or Latino. During the Obama years, Republican control of Congress resulted in a veritable halt to legislative activity, as Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, followed by Paul Ryan, effected a virtual congressional work stoppage to thwart the Democratic president.

Now, with unified control of government again in their hands, including a Republican majority on the Supreme Court, plus control of 67 state legislative chambers to Democrats’ 32 (with Virginia up in the air), and 34 governor’s mansions to Democrats’ 15 (plus total control in 26 states), Republicans are galloping through their agenda of returning America to the 1920s.

Anywhere Republicans wield control, a familiar pattern emerges: aggressive deregulation and tax cuts for big business, attacks on unionized work, Medicaid, and public education, and the savaging of voting rights for people of color and any other group suspected of potential alignment with Democrats. On a federal level, throw in a wholesale handover of pristine lands, from Alaska to Bears Ears in Utah to the extractive industries, coupled with relaxed rules on how much those oil, gas, and coal companies can pollute the air and water with impunity.

Donald Trump supports this agenda, but he isn’t implementing it on his own. He has an entire party apparatus behind him, which is why Mitch McConnell declared 2017 to be, in his view, the greatest single year in the history of the Republican Party.

Apparently the feeling is so good to Republicans both in Washington and in the states, they have decided that they will never relinquish this unprecedented power.

In Wisconsin, the Republican governor, Scott Walker, has for nearly a full year refused to call special elections, leaving legislative seats vacant rather than risk their being filled by Democrats. This after his administration pulled off the most widespread voter disenfranchisement in the country in 2016 and dismantled his state’s Government Accountability Board, which was supposed to insure fair and ethical elections. That’s banana republic dictator behavior.

In Pennsylvania, having lost appeals going all the way up to the Republican majority Supreme Court, Republicans are now threatening to impeach state Supreme Court justices who ruled against them in a gerrymandering case that could finally break their stranglehold over state and federal legislative seats.

And of course there is the autocrat in training in Washington, who this week declared that not standing and applauding his speeches is tantamount to treason, and who with his party having emptied the coffers on their billionaire tax cuts, has ordered the Pentagon to throw him a grand military parade to “showcase America’s might,” in the style of Kim Jong Un. One shudders at the thought of tanks and troops filing down Pennsylvania Avenue, while the man who ducked out of Vietnam and has denigrated the service of braver men and Gold Star families does his best Mussolini pucker as he and his kleptocratic clan preen in the reviewing stand.

And rather than use the power the Constitution grants the Congress to rein in the would-be American Louis XVI, the speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader, and a cadre of lickspittle Republican marionettes have put the United States Congress wholly in the president’s service. Ryan is too busy urging the peasants to dance in the streets for the dollar-fifty he and his fellow top hatters flung from the Bastille in Washington while handing Exxon Mobil billions, the Koch brothers millions to care. McConnell can only rouse himself to threaten Democrats and take children’s health care and military payrolls hostage while allowing community health center funding benefitting 26 million Americans to languish for months while dawdling on immigration reform (which Ryan insists will only proceed in the House on the Dear Leader’s terms). In short, we now have zero checks on the executive branch in Washington, and an almost frenzied money grab by the wealthiest Americans under the benighted gaze of the once revered Grand Old Party. Abe Lincoln must be spinning in his grave.

Ryan and McConnell are destined to go down in history as twin handmaidens of America’s surprisingly swift descent toward authoritarianism, along with present-day Joe McCarthy Devin Nunes. Their morally decrepit political party has turned its back on every principle of democracy in favor of the naked pursuit of profit and power. Trump will be remembered as a wanna-be autocrat surrounded by beaters, cheaters, grifters, miscreants, and incompetents, and depending on what Mueller finds, maybe a criminal, too.

And he can be assured no one will ever throw him a memorial parade.

Wisconsin Supreme Court primary will leave just 2

Miami Herald – National Politics

Wisconsin Supreme Court primary will leave just 2

By Scott Bauer, Associated Press February 11, 2018

FILE – This 2016 file photo shows Sauk County Circuit Court Judge Michael Screnock, a candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Screnock is one of three candidates in the race for the court. One of the three will be eliminated in the Feb. 20, 2018, primary. Baraboo News Republic via AP, File Tim Damos

Madison, Wis. The latest battle over the ideological balance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court plays out in the Feb. 20 primary, where one of three candidates will be eliminated ahead of a spring election.

Partisan politics have weighed heavy over weeks of campaigning. Madison attorney Tim Burns has most embraced his liberal beliefs, while Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Rebecca Dallet sought to appear as a moderate. Sauk County Circuit Judge Michael Screnock, an appointee of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, has the backing of conservatives.

The primary is the first statewide race this year, and while officially nonpartisan, it could be a bellwether for how Republicans and Democrats stand heading into the fall. Turnout is expected to be low, likely less than 10 percent.

The top two vote-getters advance to the April 3 general election, with the winner replacing outgoing conservative Justice Michael Gableman. He decided against seeking another 10-year term.

The court is currently controlled 5-2 by conservatives, so no matter who wins the ideological control will not change.

Burns is the most vocal about his Democratic beliefs and political leanings, saying that the nonpartisan race is a charade and candidates should be honest about who they are. He introduces himself as an “unshakable champion for progressive values” and has called President Donald Trump an “unhinged billionaire.”

Burns, who represents clients nationwide in lawsuits against insurance companies, is the only non-judge in the race. He also has little experience litigating in Wisconsin courtrooms, having argued only one case in state court and six in federal court in Wisconsin.

Burns argues his experience outside of Wisconsin is a strength that will help him fix what he views as a broken system. And, he argues a victory for him will energize liberals across the state headed into the fall.

Dallet argues that Burns has gotten too political. But she’s walking a fine line trying to win over many of the same liberal voters Burns is appealing to. She ran a commercial attacking Trump and has criticized the current Supreme Court for voting in 2015 to end an investigation into Walker and conservatives.

“We have a Supreme Court that has lost the confidence our state needs, our public needs, in its ability to do justice for all of us,” she said at a forum earlier this month.

Although not as strident as Burns, she advocates for clean air and water, empowering women, and fighting opioid abuse. She describes the current Supreme Court as “broken.”

Dallet spent 11 years as an assistant district attorney in Milwaukee County before being elected a judge in 2008.

Screnock, who was appointed as a judge by Walker in 2015, is the choice of conservatives. He argues that all he cares about is the rule of law, but he’s also embraced his past, saying it was a “privilege” as an attorney to defend Walker’s Act 10 law taking away collective bargaining rights from public unions. Screnock has also said he has no regrets about being twice arrested as a college student in 1989 for taking part in anti-abortion protests.

“Both of my opponents are actively campaigning on the political issues they hold dear,” Screnock told the Wisconsin Counties Association earlier this month. He called that “deeply troubling” and said he won’t let his personal beliefs affect his rulings.

Burns’ unusual approach has won him the endorsement of Our Revolution, the political arm of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Burns is also endorsed by liberal U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, who represents the Madison area in Congress, as well as former U.S. Reps. David Obey and Steve Kagen.

Dallet has endorsements from more than 200 judges and 150 other elected officials from across the state.

Screnock has been endorsed by anti-abortion groups Wisconsin Family Action and Wisconsin Right to Life and uses the hashtag #wiright on his Twitter posts. The state chamber of commerce, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, has run nearly half a million dollars in ads supporting Screnock.

FILE – In this May 1, 2017, file photo, Madison attorney Tim Burns announces his run for Wisconsin Supreme Court in Madison, Wis. Burns is one of three candidates in the race for the court. One of the three will be eliminated in the Feb. 20, 2018, primary. Scott Bauer, File AP Photo

FILE – In this June. 1, 2017 file photo, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Rebecca Dallet announces she is running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in Madison, Wis. Dallet is one of three candidates in the race for the court. One of the three will be eliminated in the Feb. 20, 2018, primary. Scott Bauer File AP Photo

Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sbauerAP

Supreme Court on the verge of reversing some of its old decisions

USA Today

Supreme Court on the verge of reversing some of its old decisions

Richard Wolf, USA Today February 9, 2018

(Photo: Michael Owens, USAT)

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court precedents that have stood the test of time for generations are in danger of falling like dominoes in the next few months.

First on the chopping block is a 1977 ruling that allowed public employee unions to collect fees from non-members for collective bargaining. The court’s conservative justices have been itching to overrule that unanimous decision for decades.

Next up is a 1992 case in which the court refused to require that mail-order retailers collect sales taxes from buyers in other states. For a quarter century, that has given online retailers a competitive advantage over brick-and-mortar stores.

The court also will consider second-guessing one of its least popular chestnuts — a 20-year-old ruling, based on one from 1945, that gives federal agencies broad discretion to interpret their own regulations.

Since Chief Justice John Roberts took the center seat on the court in 2005, the justices have been reticent to second-guess the decisions of their predecessors. They have done so at a pace just above once a year, considerably less often than in the past.

“That’s not an accident,” says Jonathan Adler, director of the Center for Business Law & Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. “The chief justice, in particular, doesn’t like the court to be a disruptive force. He prefers to maintain stability and predictability where possible.”

It’s not always possible. Roberts could not prevent the court’s conservatives from overturning two of their precedents in 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which eliminated limits on independent political spending by corporations.

And five years later, the court’s decision in favor of same-sex marriage overruled a 1972 decision that found no federal basis to block states from prohibiting the practice.

The court usually adheres to the principle of stare decisis, or adhering to its earlier decisions. But occasionally those earlier rulings cry out for change, and the court waits too long to correct them. Perhaps the top example is Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld separate public facilities on the basis of race and stood for 60 years before being overruled by Brown v. Board of Education.

The court in recent years has had scores of opportunities to overrule earlier decisions and has taken a pass, according to the Supreme Court Database, a research facility housed at Washington University School of Law. The Roberts Court has done so less than any of its predecessors dating to the 1950s.

Few rulings have been up for grabs as often as Auer v. Robbins, the 1997 decision that upheld federal agencies’ right to interpret their own regulations without court interference.

When the court last refused to hear a case that would have toppled Auer, dissenting Justice Clarence Thomas warned that “the doctrine is on its last gasp.” Now the justices have another chance to extinguish it in a case they will consider at next week’s private conference.

“You wrote it.”

Thomas is fond of recounting a conversation on the bench with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who complained that “Auer is one of the worst opinions in the history of this country.”

“Nino,” Thomas responded, “you wrote it.”

The court later this month will hear a challenge to the fees paid by non-members to public employee labor unions that would overrule Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, a 1977 decision. The justices stopped short of that extreme step in 2012, 2014 and 2016.

Many of the court’s conservative justices believe Abood was wrongly decided to begin with, since it forces workers to contribute to a group they may disagree with. Opponents argue that as a constitutional case based on First Amendment rights, it is less sacred than rulings based on statutes that Congress can amend.

“Although this court reconsiders its precedents with caution, stare decisis does not warrant preserving Abood’s error,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco argues in the government’s court papers.

But Abood has its defenders, including Michael Kimberly, co-director of the Yale Law School Supreme Court Clinic.

If it’s scuttled, Kimberly warns, “Contracts entered into based on unions’ ability to provide specified services, funded through agency fees, would have to be renegotiated. And government employees’ existing reliance on unions’ abilities to negotiate effectively and to provide contractually required services would be eliminated.”

Precedents don’t last forever

The high court’s consideration in April of a case that would level the playing field between online and brick-and-mortar retailers when it comes to collecting sales taxes presents a clear case of technological change influencing legal rulings.

The justices ruled 8-1 in Quill v. North Dakota (1992) that companies selling wares by catalog across state lines were exempt from collecting sales taxes. Now that North Dakota case is being challenged by one from South Dakota.

“As this court has long recognized, stare decisis is not an inexorable command,” former Solicitor General Donald Verrilli wrote in a brief for the Retail Litigation Center. “When the world changes, it is appropriate to consider whether the law should change as well.”

Anti-union challengers are on the verge of victory at Supreme Court

USA Today

Anti-union challengers are on the verge of victory at Supreme Court

Richard Wolf, USA Today February 8, 2018

(Photo: Jacquelyn Martin, AP)

WASHINGTON — Dianne Knox describes herself as “a child of the ’60’s.” Pam Harris grew up a butcher’s daughter in a proud union household. Rebecca Friedrichs was secretary of her local teachers’ union. Mark Janus supports the rights of workers to organize.

But as the lead plaintiffs in four successive Supreme Court cases challenging the power of public employee unions, Knox, Harris, Friedrichs and Janus take pride in helping conservative groups reach a tipping point in their decade-long, anti-union campaign.

What Knox in 2012, Harris in 2014, Friedrichs in 2016 and Janus in 2018 have done is put the justices within one vote of overruling a 40-year-old precedent that allows the unions to collect fees from non-members for the cost of representation. In a case that will be heard this month, the court appears to have that additional vote in the form of Justice Neil Gorsuch.

A 5-4 decision against the unions would free about 5 million government workers, teachers, police and firefighters, and others in 22 states from being forced to pay “fair share” fees — a potentially staggering blow to public employee unions.

The challengers’ battles against the Service Employees International Union, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers are based on disagreements with the political and policy priorities of the national leadership.

“This is not my father’s or my grandfather’s union,” says Harris, recalling the Amalgamated Meat Cutters to which they belonged. “This is a money-making scheme. It is a way to advance political agendas.”

Union leaders see the opposite — a power grab by what they call corporate billionaires and right-wing special interests to cripple the unions standing in their way.

“It is a defunding strategy,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said at a press conference with other union leaders Wednesday. “They want the economy to be further rigged in their favor.”

More: Supreme Court may deal major blow to labor unions

More: Trump’s impact felt in Supreme Court labor rights cases

More: Supreme Court faces blockbuster term — and Trump

It’s no coincidence that the four cases have emerged from California and Illinois, states with strong public employee unions and strained state budgets. They are among 22 states without so-called “right-to-work” laws, which make union membership and contributions voluntary.

Already in the 22 states, workers do not have to contribute to the unions’ political activities. A ruling by the Supreme Court that they do not have to contribute anything at all could save objecting workers $1,000 or more annually — at a huge cost to unions.

“The point is, who decides whether the union is worthy of their support — the workers themselves or the state on their behalf?” says Jacob Huebert, director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing Janus. “The First Amendment should be a non-partisan issue.”

From Knox’s relatively lonely effort in 2012 to Janus’ potentially landmark case this year, the legal fight has gained adherents on both sides. Only three friend-of-the-court briefs were filed at the Supreme Court in 2012. The number grew to 17 in 2014, 48 in 2016 and 67 this year.

Two early victories

Knox’s beef with the unions dates to 2005, when the SEIU established a “Political Fight-Back Fund” to oppose an effort by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to reduce the clout of California’s public employee unions. Even non-members were expected to contribute.

“I’m sure in a lot of places, they do good,” Knox says. “But I don’t think we should be required as a condition of employment to pay for a union.”

Seven workers, with Knox in the leading role, sought help from the National Right to Work Foundation. They eventually won a 7-2 verdict from the Supreme Court in 2012; Justice Samuel Alito said the union didn’t inform workers of their right to refuse payment.

“My little case,” says Knox, now 70 and retired in Sacramento, “opened the door for these other cases.”

Harris — not your typical union-buster — was next. She met her husband at a Democratic fundraiser for former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. But she registered as a Republican during her legal fight against Illinois’ effort to unionize home-care workers.

At 59, Harris spends her days caring for her 29-year-old son Josh, who has a rare physical and cognitive disability called Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. She is paid out of her son’s Medicaid waiver, which is slightly more than $2,000 a month.

“My employer is not the state. My employer is Josh,” Harris says. “The union had no business taking our sons’ and daughters’ Medicaid dollars.”

The Supreme Court sided with her in 2014, ruling 5-4 that home care workers paid by Medicaid rather than the state should not have to contribute to the local union. But the justices limited their ruling to Harris and other home care workers, leaving intact the unions’ right to collect fees from most non-members.

In his majority opinion, Alito cited the “bedrock principle that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.” His words signaled that the court’s majority might be willing to go further in a subsequent case.

A tie vote’s aftermath

That case came two years later, courtesy of Friedrichs, an elementary school teacher in Anaheim, Calif. She says she grew disenchanted with the California Teachers Association when it refused to let teachers in her school district consider a pay cut to avoid layoffs.

“I actually love unions. I love the local association,” says Friedrichs, 52. On the other hand, she says, “the state and national level are completely tone-deaf. They’re out of touch with us. They could care less what we really want.”

Her challenge looked like a sure winner during oral arguments in January 2016. “Everything that is collectively bargained with the government is within the political sphere, almost by definition,” Justice Antonin Scalia said.

But a month later, Scalia died, leaving the court deadlocked and only able to let a lower court verdict against Friedrichs stand. The unions had dodged a third bullet.

The current case grew out of that near-miss and returned the dispute from California to Illinois, where Janus works as a child support specialist.

Like his predecessors, the 65-year-old claims no malice toward unions. But he says their pay and benefit demands have helped put Illinois in dire financial straits, with the lowest credit rating in the nation.

“I don’t oppose the right of workers to organize,” Janus says. “But it ought to be up to the workers to make that decision. … All I’m trying to do is level the playing field and let the worker decide whether they want to join.”

Two years ago, Janus waited in freezing weather outside the Supreme Court to hear the oral argument in Friedrichs’ case. Now Friedrichs plans to return the favor.

“If we do win, I’m going to help restore workers’ rights in this country,” Janus says. “I’m very proud to be a part of that.”

Rust Belt no more: Chicago should be capital of the Water Belt

Chicago Tribune – Commentary

Rust Belt no more: Chicago should be capital of the Water Belt

Rachel Havrelock February 9, 2018

A low fog skims over Lake Michigan at Montrose where a fisherman, surrounded in the swirling fog, tries to catch Coho salmon Thursday Jan. 11, 2018. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

The Rust Belt: The words evoke decaying factories, segregated cities and swing states with harsh winters. Places where jobs have dried up, population has dwindled and deep legacies of industrial pollution may be left to fester by an Environmental Protection Agency uninterested in the protection of anything.

We’ve got the place all wrong. We should focus on what actually causes things to rust — water.

The Great Lakes — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior — hold 20 percent of the world’s fresh water and the key to survival in the era of climate change. With crippling drought and overwhelming floods occurring in so many corners of America combined with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s mounting attack on wetlands, streams and other small bodies of water, there is a need to transform our much-maligned Rust Belt into a Water Belt, a freshwater oasis for the world. As the region’s biggest city, with shuttered factories that could hum again and a skilled workforce ready to spring into action, Chicago can lead the way.

How does the Rust Belt become the Water Belt? Through three steps that need to begin now, before this precious resource slips through our fingers and leaves us standing in the rust.

Keep water public. President Donald Trump’s infrastructure plan opens the door to the rapid privatization of public waters. By reducing the federal money available to upgrade treatment, pipes and sewage while subsidizing corporate investment, the plan allows multinationals that have no interest in the health of water or local communities to abscond with our most valuable public resource. Water privatization in Chicago would cause particular damage, distancing residents from a public asset whose value will soon skyrocket. Illinois cities where corporations such as Illinois American Water and Aqua Illinois have privatized water service have seen ballooning water rates and increased wait times for repairs. Perched on the shore of Lake Michigan and set within the Great Lakes watershed, Chicago should own the pipelines and set the rates for water to its neighboring towns and suburbs.
Keep corporations out. Multinational corporations understand just how valuable clean, fresh water is becoming and look to enter the market through any available gate. We need to keep our eyes on Veolia, a global water management company. The city of Flint, Mich., brought Veolia on board as a consultant right before residents were poisoned by corrosive water running through lead pipes. At present, Veolia only has a hand in Chicago’s wastewater, processing biosolids at the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, but we should not cede more control even if federal funding decreases.
Stop the dismantling of the Great Lakes EPA office. The region’s economy and the health of our bodies depend upon smart limits on how much drinking water is extracted from the Great Lakes and what gets pumped into them. Cathy Stepp, who has scrubbed websites of scientific data and facilitated the rapid deterioration of public waters in Wisconsin, was recently appointed head of the Midwest region’s EPA. Her record indicates that she may accelerate dumping and toxic runoff into our lakes, endangering public health, food production and real estate values.

Some will claim that allowing multinational corporations to privatize water maximizes efficiency and provides struggling municipalities with needed revenue, but this is short-term thinking. Great Lakes water not only sustains us now, but ensures that shrinking cities become livable, vibrant places in the future. To get there, we’re going to need to make sure that polluters pay and that corporations reimburse taxpayers the true cost of withdrawing our water. With this revenue, we can explore the replacement of dangerous lead pipes and the implementation of cutting-edge technologies for water filtration and reuse.

The water of the Great Lakes belongs to us. This collective ownership can ensure a future of social stability and economic revival, but Trump administration cuts to federal funding combined with the unleashing of water profiteers could dash these dreams. Nowhere do we have more to lose than in the Great Lakes region.

Rachel Havrelock is director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Freshwater Lab.

Is Trump’s EPA chief bluffing? Or will he go after California’s tough standards on greenhouse gases?

Miami Herald

Is Trump’s EPA chief bluffing? Or will he go after California’s tough standards on greenhouse gases?

By Stuart Leavenworth February 9, 2018

Exhaust wafts from a car tailpipe in this 2009 photo from Olympia, Washington. California, Washington and other states have adopted tailpipe emission rules stronger than the federal standard. Recent rhetoric from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has heightened fears the Trump administration may seek to block those states from implementing their standards. Steve Bloom The Olympian

Washington: California officials and clean air advocates are increasingly concerned the Trump administration may attempt to unravel a key program to drive down greenhouse gas emissions from automobile fleets while also jeopardizing the ability of California and other states to set pollution standards stronger than federal rules.

Backed by automakers, Trump officials are in talks with their California counterparts to weaken tough vehicle tailpipe standards approved by the Obama administration. The standards are aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, but could also help reduce emissions that cause smog and particulate pollution, and 13 other states have adopted them, including Washington, Pennsylvania and New York.

California has long enjoyed the authority to set pollution standards stronger than the federal government’s, a legacy of the state’s early battles against urban smog, which predated the 1970 Clean Air Act. But in testimony to a Senate committee last week, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt left open the possibilty he might seek to revoke California’s authority.

“Federalism doesn’t mean that one state can dictate to the rest of the country,” Pruitt told the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee. He then added that “we recognize California’s special status in the statute and we are working with them to find consensus around these issues.”

Three days after Pruitt’s comments, the chair of the California Air Resources Board issued her own warning shot against possible EPA intervention.

“I think there would be a war with many states lining up with California,” said CARB Chairwoman Mary Nichols, speaking at a Palo Alto conference sponsored by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Nichols and other state officials note that the EPA, under the Obama administration, granted California a 2013 waiver to implement its own, tougher tailpipe standards. Never before has an EPA administrator attempted to revoke a waiver previously granted to the state.

“The EPA would have to take unprecedented legal action to try to revoke that waiver,” Nichols said during the Feb. 2 conference. “Our best legal judgment is that that can’t be done.”

I THINK THERE WOULD BE A WAR WITH MANY STATES LINING UP WITH CALIFORNIA

Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board

Trump’s latest spat with California and other states comes as the president works to shore up his support among the auto industry in Detroit and Michigan, a state he won, to the surprise of Democrats, in 2016. Since then, Trump has kept his focus on Michigan, pledging in his State of the Union address to cut government mandates and “get the Motor City revving its engines.”

The U.S. auto industry has long opposed conflicting state and federal standards for tailpipe emissions and fuel economy. Auto manufacturers say such conflicts force them to design and make different versions of the same vehicle, driving up prices.

When the Obama administration was in office, it struck a grand bargain with California and automakers to raise the average fuel economy of new cars and light trucks to more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025, as a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The deal, however, included a “midterm review” in 2018 to determine if the final requirements were feasible.

Before leaving office, the Obama administration kept the final requirements in place, over protests of the auto industry. In August, Pruitt and the Transportation Department officially announced they were reviewing and possibly rewriting those standards, which would affect the 2022-2025 model years.

The Trump administration’s plans will be known soon. The EPA plans to decide on future tailpipe emission standards by April 1, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will reveal its new federal fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks by March 30.

Even if Trump revises the Obama-era rules, California and other states could still implement its tougher restrictions, a prospect that concerns many automakers.

“For us, one national program is very important,” said Gloria Bergquist, Vice President for Communication at the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers in Washington, D.C. “It’s good for consumers, and it avoids duplicative programs with duplicative costs.”

In December, several federal officials met with the California Air Resources Board in Sacramento to discuss a possible national standard. The meeting, first reported by Reuters, included William Wehrum, who leads the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration deputy chief Heidi King, and Mike Catanzaro, a senior White House aide.

Asked about the status of talks, an EPA spokesman directed McClatchy to Wehrum’s recent comments to reporters, saying he had held “productive discussions” with CARB. Wehrum added he “had no interest whatsoever in withdrawing California’s ability to regulate,” a comment that provoked some laughs back in California.

When Wehrum served in the EPA during the George W. Bush administration, he was a key figure in rejecting California’s original request for a waiver to reduce greenhouse gases from automobiles. California sued over that decision, which was ultimately reversed when Obama came to office.

The potential for California to strike a deal with the Trump administration concerns some environmentalists, but they doubt it will happen. “I’m not sure that there is any room for compromise on California’s part,” said Irene Gutierrez, a San Francisco-based lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group. CARB officials did not respond to an inquiry.

Gutierrez said California has spent years documenting how its standards are feasible and crucial to the state’s goals of reducing greenhouse gases. California law requires it to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

A big part of that program is transitioning to electric and other zero-emission vehicles. At his recent State of the State speech, Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled plans to have 5 million zero-emission vehicles in California by 2030, up from a planned 1.5 million in 2025.

California showed further defiance toward the Trump EPA on Thursday. The California Air Resource Board voted to retain two Obama-era rules on greenhouse gas emissions from medium-and-heavy duty trucks, after the EPA claimed it lacked the authority to enact the rules.

If EPA’s Pruitt sought to revoke California’s tailpipe emissions waiver, he would likely unravel the peace treaty struck under Obama, which halted years of litigation involving California, the auto industry and other players. EPA would have to go through a rulemaking process to revoke the waiver, which could take years, and then prevail in expected litigation.

As Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt filed numerous lawsuits against EPA, often claiming the agency was stomping on state sovereignty.

That makes his current position somewhat ironic, said Gutierrez. “He was all about states rights when he was attorney general,” she said.

Scientists rebuff EPA chief’s claim that global warming may be good

USA Today

Scientists rebuff EPA chief’s claim that global warming may be good

John Bacon, USA Today February 8, 2018

(Photo: Pete Marovich)

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s assertion that global warming might be beneficial because “humans have most flourished” during warming trends is drawing heavy skepticism from many climate-change experts.

Pruitt, in an interview with KSNV-TV in Las Vegas this week, acknowledged that “human activity” contributes to global warming, thus walking back his previous statements questioning whether carbon dioxide levels driven higher by human pollution play a role in climate change.

“No one disputes the climate changes,” Pruitt said. “We obviously contribute to it … our activity contributes to it.”

But Pruitt questioned whether climate change is an “existential threat.”

“We know humans have most flourished during times of what? Warming trends,” Pruitt said. “I think there are assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That is fairly arrogant, for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Penn State and co-author of The Madhouse Effect, said Pruitt’s claims are a “wonderful example of what we call the ‘stages of denial.'”

The only consistency in the various arguments of climate change deniers is that we should continue to burn fossil fuels, Mann said.

“As the evidence becomes ever more compelling that climate change is real and human caused, the forces of denial turn to other specious argument, like ‘it will be good for us,'” Mann said.

Stanford environment professor Chris Field, who oversaw a United Nations and World Meteorological Organization scientific report on climate change, echoed Mann’s sentiments. Field said “thousands” of studies document that a warming planet causes a host of problems, not just from high temperatures but also from heat waves, higher seas, heavier downpours, and more frequent destructive hurricanes and wildfires.

“With all these impacts, you can imagine the occasional business that benefits,” he said. “For example, homebuilders after a fire or flood. But the vast majority of the people experience losses, sometimes catastrophic losses.”

Speculation “isn’t helpful,” Field said. “The evidence based on real observations of real events is overwhelming.”

Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University, said the impact of global warming on health and the sustainability of the food supply are “not good.”

“Because of local variability there are locations where warming has had some benefit,” Goldman acknowledged, adding that “things are worse, overall.”

Pruitt said he wants an “honest, open, transparent debate about what do we know, what don’t we know, so the American people can be informed and they can make decisions on their own with respect to these issues.”

Pruitt also questioned what role his agency should have in curbing the carbon dioxide footprint. He said EPA efforts to do so during the Obama administration were mostly rejected by the courts, and that his job is to “execute, not legislate” pollution laws.

Before taking over the EPA, Pruitt served as Oklahoma’s attorney general. In that roll the Republican sued 14 times to block clean air and water safeguards established by the EPA, the agency he now leads.

The Trump administration has worked to roll back the Clean Power Plan that the Obama White House pushed out in 2015 to combat climate change. And Trump’s decision to bow out of the Paris Agreement, an international accord to reduce carbon emissions, has drawn outrage from Democrats and environmental groups.