John Cole for NC Newsline (formerly The Progressive Pulse)

Dark Brandon

 

“I’m gonna be fine with your jokes,” President Biden said; then added, while putting on aviator sunglasses: “But I’m not sure about Dark Brandon.”

Google it and catch up, if you're lost.

That's a photo from Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner. After making his own remarks -- full of some good stuff -- funny zingers, jokes about his age, and clear declarations of support for traditional American values, especially a respect for a free press and a fierce defiance directed at Russia -- "Surrender the Hostages!" -- Biden was just turning the evening over to comedian Roy Woods Jr. when he whipped out the glasses and made the comment quoted above.

An Illegitimate US Supreme Ct Will Bend Everything To the Benefit of Billionaires

 

BREAKING NEWS: Weather

WASHINGTON, May 1, 2023 -- The Supreme Court announced it will hear a case that could significantly scale back federal agencies’ authority, with major implications for the future of environmental and other regulations.

The justices next term will consider whether to overturn a decades-old precedent that grants agencies deference when Congress left ambiguity in a statute.

Named for the court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Chevron deference has become one of the most frequently cited precedents in administrative law since the decision was first handed down in 1984.

It involves a two-step test: first, judges decide if Congress has in the statute directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If it is ambiguous, courts defer to agencies as long as their actions are based on a “permissible construction.”

Some of the high court’s conservatives have raised concern about the precedent and how it has expanded the reach of agencies’ authority....

Zack Schonfeld, in The Hill

 

Meanwhile, In DeSantisVille: The TearDown of a Public College

 

New College of Florida, situated on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, a few miles north of downtown Sarasota, has a number of standout features. Its curriculum is unusually self-directed: it gives out no letter grades, and has an academic research project built around independent study in partnership with professors. Two-thirds of its seven hundred students are women, and there is a prominent queer community; in the past, New College ranked among the most “gay-friendly” campuses in the country. Those attributes make it seem like a progressive northern liberal-arts college, to which alumni often compare it, but New College is a public school, which means that in-state tuition costs under seven thousand dollars annually—a bargain—and also that it is subject to the influence of Florida’s state politics.

--Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

So you might remember that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in his crusade to make himself over as The Second Coming of Trump, "has sought to suspend the Walt Disney Corporation’s tax breaks because the company opposed his Don’t Say Gay bill; has moved to limit what teachers can say in public school classrooms about race and gender, and what books can be available in libraries; has encouraged state police to arrest and prosecute ex-felons for voting; and has flown migrants to Martha’s Vineyard as a political stunt."

As part of his makeover, he also declared war on New College and took over the Board of Trustees with a phalanx of activist conservatives, which included Chris Rufo, "the ideological entrepreneur who made critical race theory a Republican boogeyman," and who said publicly that he wanted to turn New College into a Southern version of Hillsdale, the notorious conservative Christian school in Michigan.

When they got to campus, those new DeSantis trustees met with some outright hostility from both faculty and students, but Matthew Lepinski, a computer science professor and the faculty representative on the board of trustees, made nice in the classic naive hope of middle-of-the-road citizens everywhere that the faculty and the trustees could "find a way to work together," and as president of the faculty assembly, he urged the school community to give the new guys a chance.

The new guys bent only toward teardown: "The new trustees fired the school’s president, replacing her with Richard Corcoran, the Republican former speaker of the Florida House. They fired its chief diversity officer and dismantled the diversity, equity and inclusion office. They ordered the gender-neutral signage on school bathrooms scraped off."

Matthew Lepinski walks out of trustees
meeting and resigns

The last straw for Lepinski came when the new trustees overrode the normal process and denied tenure to seven new faculty members, who after five years on the job were eligible for tenure. At the most recent trustee meeting... 

Fifty-four people registered to speak. All but one of them either implored the trustees to grant the professors tenure or lambasted them for their designs on the school. Parents were particularly impassioned; many of them had been profoundly relieved to find an affordable school where their eccentric kids could thrive. Some tried to speak the language of conservatism: “You’re violating my parental rights regarding our school choice,” said Pam Pare, the mother of a biology major. One student, a second-year wrapped in a pink and blue trans flag, was escorted out of the meeting after cursing at Corcoran [the new college president], but most tried to earnestly and calmly convey how much the professors up for tenure had taught them. [NYTimes]

When the trustees defiantly voted "no" on all the applicants, Matthew Lepinski walked out of the meeting, which drew attention since he's the president of the faculty, and he immediately resigned both his position and his faculty salary as well. “Some faculty members have started to leave already, and obviously some students are thinking about what their future looks like,” Lepinski said right after quitting. A few days later, we spoke again. “There’s a grieving process for the New College that was, which is passing away,” he said. “I really loved the New College that was, but I am at peace that it’s gone now.”

What's happening to higher education in Florida is a warning, especially for North Carolina, where the Berger/Moore troops show every indication of DeSantis envy.

Braxton Winston Running for Labor Commissioner

 

The offices the wolfish Republicans can't gerrymander in North Carolina are the Council of State seats, including the Commissioner of Labor. The various commissioners with their own constitutional kingdoms run statewide, along with the governor and the lieutenant governor. Every four years the voting power of Charlotte and Raleigh and Fayetteville and Greensboro isn't sliced into strips and sauteed for the benefit of conservatives too extreme to win a fair race.

So Braxton Winston has a shot. He announced he's running for Labor, and he could energize whole new swaths of infrequent voters who'll follow his banner.

Winston has served for the last six years on the Charlotte City Council and is currently mayor pro tem. He is also a labor activist -- a professional videographer but also, as a stagehand and grip, a union member, in "our region’s robust sports television and entertainment production community" (Winston website). He was born at Camp Lejeune where his father was serving in the Marine Corps, but Braxton was educated up north at the super-prestigious Phillips Academy Andover, "where he excelled in academics, arts, sports, and student government." After high school, Braxton came back to North Carolina for a bachelor's degree in anthropology at Davidson College.

But the real measure of the man came in 2016 when Keith Scott was shot dead after police say he failed to drop a gun upon their order. The officer who shot him was not charged. On the evening of September 20, 2016, at the south Charlotte address on Old Concord Rd. where Keith Scott lived and where he was shot dead, a crowd gathered and grew angrier.  Braxton was in that crowd and he live-streamed Keith Scott's daughter pleading with the police -- "Why did you just kill my father? He didn’t have to die." Something shifted in the videographer, who had after all led a pretty privileged life: "And it was just like, a chill came over me and everything changed. And I took the people’s side ... you know, we gotta get these questions answered and when the police tried to get out of there, the people demanded the conversation to keep going and that turned into a protest. We were met with riot police and tear gas after that and, you know, the rest is kind of history.” [WBTV]

That history contains a famous, viral photo of Braxton Winston, shirtless, with a clinched fist confronting a phalanx of riot cops. AP photographer Jeff Siner took the shot. Braxton said his shirt was off to serve as a gas mask. He had not been prominent before as a civil rights activist "but found himself taking on a leading role after the demonstrations, which eventually turned into a run for office. Charges against him after his arrest were dropped, as was a lawsuit he filed against the city. [Guardian]

That photo was September 2016. By 2017, Winston was running for an at-large seat on the Charlotte City Council. He was one of four Democrats elected and was reelected just last fall.

He puts his money were his mouth is. In 2020, during building fury over the killing of George Floyd, he was arrested a second time. He had joined protesters outside of Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department's metro division "in an attempt to de-escalate the tensions between the police and the citizens of Charlotte," an official Winston statement said. "During the time he was out there, he was in communication with CMPD, press, community leaders, and protesters." [WCNC]

Winston is part of a whole wave of young talent now emerging in North Carolina, and none too soon. It won't be instant, a winning wave, but it will come. Statewide campaigns will be the point of the spear.

Now Acting as Partisan Hit-Men, the Supremes of NC

 

This news broke yesterday afternoon:

Chief Justice Paul Newby.
"You are feeling very sleepy."

RALEIGH -- The newly Republican-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday reversed two decisions made by the same court last year when it had a Democratic majority -- on redistricting and voter ID -- and issued a third ruling denying voting rights for some felons. 

The court under Democratic control had struck down districts drawn by the Republican-led General Assembly on the grounds that they were illegally gerrymandered for partisan reasons. 

The justices had also struck down a 2018 voter ID law, saying it was racially discriminatory. 

A lower court had restored voting rights to people convicted of felonies who were out of prison but remained under state supervision....

NOTE: The majority opinion in the redistricting (gerrymandering) case, Harper v. Hall, runs to 146 pages. The opinion in Holmes v. Moore (the voter ID case) runs to 54 pages. "Among several other decisions, the N.C. Supreme Court also ruled on Community Success Initiative v. Moore, deciding that people with felony convictions who are on parole, probation or post-release supervision are not allowed to vote under the state constitution" (Daily Tar Heel).

Justice Anita Earls' dissent in Harper v. Hall (the gerrymandering case):

Justice Earls

Today, the majority strips the people of this right [their “fundamental right to vote on equal terms”]; it tells North Carolinians that the state constitution and the courts cannot protect their basic human right to self-governance and self-determination. In so doing, the majority ignores the uncontested truths about the intentions behind partisan gerrymandering and erects an unconvincing façade that only parrots democratic values in an attempt to defend its decision. Despite its lofty prose about the need for principled adherence to the state constitution, the majority follows none of these principles today. Nor does the majority even pay passing reference to the anti-democratic nature of extreme partisan gerrymandering. These efforts to downplay the practice do not erase its consequences and the public will not be gaslighted. Our constitution provides that“[a]ll political power is vested in and derived from the people; all government of rightoriginates from the people, is founded upon their will only.” N.C. Const. art. I, § 2.But when Republican lawmakers are free to gerrymander redistricting plans withoutconstitutional guardrails to ensure their party’s indefinite political domination, thisconstitutional requirement is abandoned.

More Gen Z Progressive Fighters for North Carolina

 

Drew Kromer, when he received
his law degree at UNC

All we senile Democrats dance a little jig -- holding onto a table for balance, because we may be old but we're not prone to suicide -- that the Mecklenburg County Democratic Convention on Saturday elected 26-year-old Drew Kromer as its new chair, and he's already getting the star treatment with a major profile article by Josh Bergeron that appeared in this morning's News and Observer -- "Drew Kromer wants to 'severely cripple' GOP's chances in NC. Here's how he'll do it." 

Who wouldn't click that link?

Short how-to: "...he’s on a mission to build community connections and Democratic Party enthusiasm in areas with few competitive races."

Kromer's clearly a self-starter. While still a student at Davidson College, he became the Democratic chair of Precinct 206 on the Mecklenburg-Iredell County border. He began organizing "a crew that grew to more than 500 members" and raised an eye-popping $150,000 for the precinct (out-raising the entire Mecklenburg Co. party). His newly energized volunteers "cut their teeth" in Davidson town elections and helped Democrat Christy Clark knock off Republican incumbent John Bradford in House District 98 in 2018. (I covered Christy Clark's campaign extensively that year. But I didn't know about Drew Kromer.) Among other things Kromer is planning, he intends to raise the money to hire an executive director for the county party and "professionalize" the operation. (Drew, can we get lunch? Watauga County might have some tips. We've been "professional" for a dozen years.)

Kromer realized that the great Democratic failure in the 2022 elections was complacency in the most progressive counties like Mecklenburg (and incidentally, Watauga), where Democratic candidates have come to dominate most elections and where local government is controlled by a lopsided Democratic majority. Kromer diagnosed the problem in an email during his campaign for chair: “Democrats easily win the vast majority of our local races. Unfortunately, the more races that Democrats are easily able to win, the fewer local campaigns we need, the less excitement that is generated, and the more complacent we become."

Kromer joins 25-year-old Anderson Clayton, the new chair of the NCDP, in the youth movement to regroup and rearm a Democratic Party that's been drifting into senescence. Josh Bergeron mentions other rising Gen Z and Millennials who took over other county parties at this year's conventions: Mackenzie Reedybacon, Cabarrus; Daniel Quick, Stanly; Michael McLamb, Catawba; Travis Lewis, Jackson; and Parron Baxter, Union.

A Stuffed Shirt Visits UNC-Chapel Hill

 

Photo Ira Wilder, Daily Tar Heel

Mike Pence spoke at the UNC-Chapel Hill student union yesterday on the topic "Saving America From the Woke Left." He was certainly comfortably asleep during the four years he served as Trump's lickspittle, so that topic was very much on-brand.

Pence, who is notoriously wary of being one-on-one in a room with any woman, favors a national abortion ban -- an exceedingly popular position on college campuses like UNC -- and he owned it in Chapel Hill: “I couldn’t be more proud to have been a small part of the administration that appointed three of the justices that sent Roe vs. Wade to the ash heap of history where it belongs and give America a new beginning,” he said.

A new beginning? Like, beginning again in 1950?

A counter-protest to Pence's speech formed outside the student union.

Ira Wilder, Daily Tar Heel

Age Is More Than a Number. It's an Advantage

 

Joe Biden and I are the same age. Pretty much. Joe was born on November 20, 1942. I was born 16 months later in March 1944. War babies. Joe's age is being held against him. People who don't know anything outside the Fox News bubble -- which means they're ignorant, honey -- like to throw around the word senile, as though that's a game-stopper. I don't know if anyone is accusing me of that, but they probably should. I'm in worse shape than Joe.

Yes, I see the slippage. We all live in our bodies like houses that are constantly falling down around us. I watch the foundation crumbling, the plaster cracking, the paint peeling, the wiring go fritz. I still have my words. I just can't always find them when I want them. And the names of people I've known for decades are suddenly just disappeared. It's frustrating. It's maddening. But I still know a hawk from a handsaw and have a pretty good grip on reality, which is more than we can say for those intellects who call Joe senile because he has the same problem I have, losing his words sometimes. Doesn't matter. He's good at playing poker. Also chess, where he's often three steps ahead of Kevin McCarthy, who seems to be playing checkers.

By any metric -- say, the accomplishments of the Obama admin at this same point in his first term -- Biden's first two years have been stunningly consequential. I'm not going to do the tedious work here of listing all the stuff he's initiated and signed into law (because I need to get out in my garden), but it's extensive, starting with the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure and Jobs Act and includes the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. And the way he laughed at the Republican peanut gallery at the last State of the Union, and out-maneuvered them into a cul-de-sac, denying angrily that they want to cut Medicare and Social Security. If that's senile, I'm a new admirer of senility.