Major voting rights victory: Federal court rejects extremists’ attempt to defeat voter intimidation lawsuit
Voter intimidation lawsuit filed against leaders of US Election Integrity Plan to go to trial.
A federal judge in Colorado has rejected efforts by individuals involved with the United States Election Integrity Plan (USEIP), an extremist organization with ties to QAnon and the January 6 insurrection, to defeat a lawsuit seeking to stop their illegal voter intimidation campaign in Colorado.
Background
The lawsuit—filed by Free Speech For People and the law firm of Lathrop GPM on behalf of three voting rights organizations, the Colorado Montana Wyoming State Conference of the NAACP, League of Women Voters of Colorado, and Mi Familia Vota—alleges that USEIP and three of its key organizers (Shawn Smith, Ashley Epp, and Holly Kasun) are violating the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act through their campaign of visiting voters’ homes and intimidating voters on their own doorsteps for having voted in the 2020 election.
The defendants filed a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, which the court denied in April 2022. Then the defendants filed counterclaims against the voting rights organizations, accusing them of defamation and abuse of process and demanding that the voting rights organizations be ordered to pay money damages.
Next, the defendants filed a motion for judgment on the pleadings and then a separate motion for summary judgment, arguing that voting rights organizations can’t sue under the Voting Rights Act or the Ku Klux Klan Act; that the defendants couldn’t be liable under the Ku Klux Klan Act without specific proof of racial animus; that the defendants couldn’t be liable under the Ku Klux Klan Act because they’re not government agents; that there was insufficient evidence of voter intimidation to justify a trial; and that USEIP, an unincorporated association, can’t be sued under the Voting Rights Act or the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Court denies defendants’ attempts to defeat lawsuit before trial
On January 23, 2023, the court dismissed the defamation and abuse of process counterclaims. Then on January 31, the court denied the defendants’ motion for judgment on the pleadings and, with one exception, the defendants’ motion for summary judgment.
The defendants only prevailed on one small point: that unincorporated associations are not amenable to suit in the Tenth Circuit under the Voting Rights Act or Ku Klux Klan Act. The judge reluctantly agreed, finding that Tenth Circuit precedent (with which she disagreed in a detailed footnote) required that result, but she would have ruled the other way if not bound by Tenth Circuit precedent. (Federal courts in other parts of the country do allow such lawsuits against unincorporated associations.)
With the counterclaims dismissed and the court agreeing that the core voter intimidation claims may proceed, the case may now proceed to trial.
Free Speech For People is a national non-partisan non-profit organization founded on the day of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC that works to defend our democracy and our Constitution.
'Go Forth and Win!' Labor Movement Celebrates Life of Jane McAlevey (1964-2024)
"No individual did more in the 21st century to spread the ideas and practice of a fighting, community-rooted, member-driven labor movement than Jane McAlevey."
Members of the global labor movement expressed an outpouring of love, sadness, and gratitude for the life and work of Jane F. McAlevey after news of the union organizer's death on Sunday at the age of 59.
Born on Oct. 12, 1964, McAlevey was the author of numerous books on worker organizing, including "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age" and "A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy." Despite a series of battles with cancer since 2008, she continued to organize, teach, and write nearly to the end.
In early April, McAlevey announced she would stop working to enter in-home hospice care for the remainder of her days. "No matter how much I love the challenge of a good fight, this was never one I could win," she wrote at the time. On Sunday, a message posted to her website said she died "surrounded by family and her dedicated care team" and her stepbrother Mitchell Rotbert subsequently confirmed her passing to the New York Times, citing the cause as multiple myeloma.
"No individual did more in the 21st century to spread the ideas and practice of a fighting, community-rooted, member-driven labor movement than Jane McAlevey," wroteJacobin's editor Micah Uetricht. "The United States and the world need her more than ever at this exact moment. It's incredibly cruel that she's gone."
According to the Times:
Ms. McAlevey (pronounced MACK-a-leevee) dedicated her life to increasing working class power. She believed that worker-driven unions—led from the bottom up rather from the top down—were the most effective enginesto combat economic inequality.
In her writings, including for The Nation, as what the magazine described as its "strikes correspondent," and in frequent media interviews and podcasts, Ms. McAlevey became a vocal critic of what she saw as the complacency, ineptitude and corporate collusion of many U.S. labor leaders.
"What almost no union does is actually organize their members as members in their own communities to build community power," she said in an interview for this obituary last November. "I teach workers to take over their unions and change them."
Upon word of her death, longtime colleagues and friends expressed their sorrow as they championed McAlevey's approach to working-class politics and union organizing.
"Incredibly sad to learn that my friend, and one woman powerhouse, Jane McAlevey has passed away," said Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union. "Literally everything she did—from organising workers, fighting right wingers, to hustling touts for tickets to sold out football matches—she did with effervescence and joy."
"Tonight," said Ethan Earle, a colleague of McAlevey's at Organizing for Power, on Sunday evening, "my heart is at once broken and full with the challenge she has left to us: to both mourn for our dead and fight like hell for our living."
In a heartfelt tribute to his colleague and friend posted on the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation website, Earle writes:
She knew she was going to die, had known it for months, and raced against the clock to complete as much work as she could towards the organizing future that she knew she would not see. That, ultimately, is Jane's legacy — a gift to all of us. The work output itself, but also her commitment to that work, and the belief that we can in fact win, but only through real discipline and real struggle.
Her track record was formidable — to her opponents but also perhaps to young organizers seeking to follow in her footsteps. For foes and friends alike, Jane had something of a magical aura about her. That said, she always sought to shed that perception. Everything she did was the result of hard work and practice — and all of it can be reproduced by those willing to put in the time that she did.
So, read her books and take her trainings, but not to deify her — nothing could be further from her mission. Take them so that you can put into practice the same methods that Jane McAlevey spent a lifetime practicing, modelling, and instilling in others. And then, as she would so often say at the end of a session: Go forth and win!
The Nation's John Nichols said "union activists worldwide will mark" the passing of McAlevey, who he described as "a brilliant labor organizer and an even more brilliant human being."
Writing of the far-reaching nature of her career, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan Robinson wrote in April how her "work should be carefully studied, because she has done as much as anyone else to clearly explain the problem with the distribution of power in this country, and show practically how that distribution can be changed."
With a clear-eyed view of how the world works and no-nonsense style of communicating, McAlevey was a sharp critic of capital but also self-reflective about the weaknesses of the left and shortcomings of labor, especially leadership failures within union structures.
In Uetricht's mind, there are two big ideas central to McAlevey's lifetime of work that people who want to understand her thinking and appreciate her legacy should understand. The first is "a seriousness with which she approached questions of strategy and tactics for organizers, rooted in her obsession with actually winning." And the second was her "unwavering belief that you can't change the world without the labor movement."
Asked last year in an interview with Jacobin why she decided to focus on the labor movement as opposed to some other vehicle for achieving a better world, McAlevey answered: "Oh my god, because there is no other way."
"All of the work we do matters in the progressive movement, but we live in something called capitalism," she said. "It took me ten years of being in the environmental justice movement, the student movement, the peace movement, to realize that in a country without real democracy, the one thing that the employer class will respond to is when all the workers walk off the job and create a crisis. That, at the end of the day, is the most effective way to challenge unfettered corporate power."
With Sunday's news of McAlevey's passing dovetailing with a historic win by the left coalition in snap elections in France which organized to prevent further gains by the nation's far-right, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union Sara Nelson, a longtime friend and ally, posted this message:
Borrowing from the famous labor song, Joe Hill, labor activist and organizer Mark Cunningham offered this tribute to McAlevey on social media:
I dreamed I saw Jane McAlevey last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "but Jane, you passed away".
"I never died" says she
And standing there as big as life
And smiling with her eyes
Says Jane, "What cancer cannot kill"
"Went on to organize"
"Went on to organize"
And as Grady put it, "Her passing is a huge loss for the labour movement, but the legacy she leaves is a blessing. She will be so deeply missed."
As she was famous for saying, there are "no shortcuts" toward progressive victories, but by commitment, intelligence, and harnessing the intrinsic power of workers, there is a way.
In her 2020 book, "A Collective Bargain," McAlevey argues that "power for ordinary people can be built only by ordinary people standing up for themselves, with their own resources, in campaigns where they turn the prevailing dogma of individualism on its head."
She concludes the book by writing, "Good unions points us in the direction we need to go and produce the solidarity and unity desperately needed to win." In her career as an organizer and labor educator and training, winning for the working class was always at the center for Jane McAlevey.
"We can fight," she declared, "and we can win."
'Incredible': Leftists Poised to Win Most Seats in France as Voters Reject Fascists
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the leftist La France Insoumise party, called the election results an "immense relief for a majority of people in our country."
This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates...
Preliminary results from France's parliamentary election on Sunday show that strategic collaboration between the left and allies of President Emmanuel Macron has succeeded in preventing Marine Le Pen's fascist National Rally from winning an absolute majority.
According to projections released shortly after polls closed, Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP)—a coalition of left-of-center parties formed ahead of the snap elections to counter the far-right—is on track to secure the largest number of seats in parliament. The Financial Timesreported that NFP is expected to win "anywhere from 170 to 215 seats," while Macron's centrist alliance was "running close behind, with pollsters predicting ranges of 140 to 180 seats, a big drop from the roughly 250 they held in the outgoing National Assembly."
Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) is expected to finish third with between 120 and 150 seats.
Following the first round of voting last weekend, hundreds of candidates from Macron's alliance and parties within the NFP dropped out of three-way runoff races in a strategic bid to defeat RN candidates—an effort that appears to have paid off in a major way. RN won the first round of voting and, at the time, appeared to have a chance at an absolute majority.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the leftist La France Insoumise party, called the early election results an "immense relief for a majority of people in our country" and urged Macron to resign and allow the left to govern.
"The united left saved the republic," said Mélenchon. "It can begin the ecological and social work that our people, our time, our world, [and] our Europe so badly need."
The Associated Pressnoted that the leftist leader's speech "is an indication of what's ahead" as coalitions prepare to jockey over who will lead the government.
"He says he will not negotiate with Macron, and Macron has refused to negotiate with him," AP added.
Israeli Newspaper Confirms IDF Employed 'Hannibal Directive' on October 7
IDF soldiers were reportedly ordered to "turn the area around the border fence into a killing zone."
The Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported Sunday that Israel's military repeatedly employed a protocol known as the "Hannibal Directive" during the October 7 Hamas-led attack in an attempt to prevent the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers—even if it meant putting the lives of army captives and civilians at risk.
Haaretz found based on documents and interviews with soldiers and senior Israeli officers that Hannibal—an operational order developed in 1986 that "directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity" by enemy militants—was used "at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well."
During the first hours of the Hamas-led attack, according to Haaretz, Israeli soldiers were given an order: "Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza."
"At this point, the IDF was not aware of the extent of kidnapping along the Gaza border, but it did know that many people were involved," the newspaper continued. "Thus, it was entirely clear what that message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be."
The full text of the Hannibal Directive has never been published. But according to a Haaretz story about the directive from more than two decades ago, part of it states that "during an abduction, the major mission is to rescue our soldiers from the abductors even at the price of harming or wounding our soldiers."
"Light-arms fire is to be used in order to bring the abductors to the ground or to stop them," it adds. "If the vehicle or the abductors do not stop, single-shot (sniper) fire should be aimed at them, deliberately, in order to hit the abductors, even if this means hitting our soldiers. In any event, everything will be done to stop the vehicle and not allow it to escape."
Israeli authorities have acknowledged "multiple incidents of our forces firing on our forces" on October 7. In April, Israel's military said that one of the hostages taken by Hamas militants during the October attack was likely killed by Israeli helicopter fire.
But the IDF, which has killed more than 38,000 people in Gaza since October 7, has declined to say whether Hannibal was used during the Hamas-led attack.
Haaretz stressed Sunday that it "does not know whether or how many civilians and soldiers were hit due to these procedures, but the cumulative data indicates that many of the kidnapped people were at risk, exposed to Israeli gunfire, even if they were not the target."
The first of the known uses of the Hannibal Directive on October 7 came "when an observation post at the Yiftah outpost reported that someone had been kidnapped at the Erez border crossing, adjacent to the IDF's liaison office," Haaretz reported.
"'Hannibal at Erez' came the command from divisional headquarters, 'dispatch a Zik.' The Zik is an unmanned assault drone, and the meaning of this command was clear," the newspaper found.
The directive was employed at least two additional times during the attack, according to Haaretz, which cited one unnamed source in Israel's Southern Command as saying that the country's forces were instructed to "turn the area around the border fence into a killing zone, closing it off toward the west."
The newspaper continued:
One case in which it is known that civilians were hit, a case that received wide coverage, took place in the house of Pessi Cohen at Kibbutz Be'eri. Fourteen hostages were held in the house as the IDF attacked it, with 13 of them killed. In the coming weeks, the IDF is expected to publish the results of its investigation of the incident, which will answer the question of whether Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram, the commander of Division 99 who was in charge of operations in Be'eri on October 7, was employing the Hannibal procedure. Did he order the tank to move ahead even at the cost of civilian casualties, as he stated in an interview he gave later to The New York Times?
Haaretz's reporting comes weeks after a United Nations investigation concluded that the IDF "had likely applied the Hannibal Directive" on October 7, killing more than a dozen Israeli civilians.