By Ben Jealous People around East Palestine, Ohio, have been warned not to run their vacuum cleaners. That was the reality two weeks after a train derailment in the village of about 4,700 people near the border with Pennsylvania that damaged public health and the environment in ways that still aren’t fully known. Pennsylvania’s health department has told residents that data from its air quality monitoring “do not indicate a potential for long-term health effects,” but if people choose to vacuum after their evacuation they should do so “small amounts at a time and take frequent breaks by walking outdoors.”…
Author: Ben Jealous
By Ben Jealous Back in August, I wrote that getting “back-to-school” this year would also mean getting back to fighting far-right attacks on education. The threats included a rising number of efforts to ban books, and the Right’s efforts to take over local school boards. So how did the Right do in this fall’s school board elections? Well, as in Congress, there was no conservative “Red Wave.” However, the Right did score just enough wins to keep coming back. And the groups behind those wins are promising to do just that. According to news reports, about half the candidates endorsed…
By Ben Jealous When Charles Diggs, Jr., won election to Congress in Michigan’s 13th District in 1954, he launched nearly seven decades in which the city of Detroit had at least one Black member of Congress. That’s likely to change this year. Because of redistricting, Detroit no longer has majority-Black congressional districts. And in the first primary election with newly drawn district lines, a Black candidate did not win the Democratic contest in the heavily Democratic 13th. That means the city is likely to lack Black representation in Congress for the first time in decades. Redistricting is robbing Black candidates and…
By Ben Jealous Did you ever wonder whether elections really matter? Well, the Trump Supreme Court majority has answered that question for good. Or, more accurately, they have answered it for bad. In the term that has just ended, the new far right-wing majority on the Supreme Court went on a rampage. They have torn up decades of legal precedent to diminish Americans’ rights and legal protections. To justify the results they wanted, they lied in their rulings the way some of them lied to get on the court. It has been a shameful display of power politics disguised as judging.…
By Ben Jealous June is Pride month in the United States. In big cities and small communities, LGBTQ+ people and their friends, families, and allies will celebrate freedom and progress toward full equality. All fair-minded Americans can celebrate that progress. But there is a growing shadow over this year’s celebrations. The far-right political movement is aggressively trying to turn back the clock to a time when LGBTQ+ people were not treated equally under the law. Anti-equality legal groups and anti-equality politicians are pushing legal and political attacks on our most vulnerable young people. MAGA movement political operatives are trying to…
By Ben Jealous The mass killings at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 10 days after the white supremacist killings in Buffalo, New York, are further evidence of how deeply our society is broken, and how urgently we need to figure out how to begin fixing it. The slaughter of so many young children and two of their teachers is shocking at a human level. It is absolutely gutting to me as a parent of school-aged children. Millions of us send our kids off to school every day, trying to set aside the knowledge gnawing at our insides that our school…
It is with profound joy that I write these words today: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has been nominated to become our nation’s first Black woman Supreme Court Justice. From a pool of outstanding Black women attorneys, jurists and legal scholars, President Biden has chosen Judge Jackson for her stellar credentials and brilliant legal mind. We are overjoyed by this nomination; now the Senate needs to move quickly to confirm her. In the coming weeks we will all get the opportunity to learn more about Judge Jackson’s story and her record. Her legal credentials are outstanding: a double-Harvard alumna, earning both…
By Ben Jealous President Joe Biden could have delivered his recent voting rights message to U.S. senators from the White House just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. Instead, he and Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Atlanta a few days before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It was the perfect place for the president’s powerful message urging senators to be on the right side of history by doing whatever it takes to get voting rights legislation passed and put on the president’s desk. The president and vice president visited King’s church before traveling to Morehouse College, King’s alma mater. They spoke in a place represented long and…
By Ben Jealous It’s been a year since a mob of Trumpists violently attacked the U.S. Capitol. They wanted to stop Congress from affirming President Joe Biden’s victory. Some of them were out for blood. All of them were motivated by the former president’s Big Lie that he won the election but that his victory was stolen from him and his supporters. That lie has been debunked by journalists and election officials—both Republicans and Democrats. It has been rejected by courts. But it has never been abandoned by Trump or his right-wing allies. And so one year after it fueled…
By Ben Jealous One of the most important reasons to vote Donald Trump out of the White House was to stop him from packing our federal courts with even more anti-voting-rights, anti-equality, pro-corporate judges. Stopping the flood of bad Trump judges was a huge accomplishment for every organizer and voter who helped elect Joe Biden as president. And that’s only part of the good news. President Biden is making history with the most diverse set of judicial nominees ever. President Trump’s judicial nominees were overwhelmingly white men, often young and unqualified. They were almost always picked for their commitment to a right-wing judicial…