The House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday filed its long-expected lawsuit over the Trump administration's refusal to turn over the president's tax returns, kicking off what could be a lengthy legal battle.
The committee, chaired by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), filed a complaint against the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service in federal court in Washington, asking the court to order the defendants to comply with Neal's subpoenas and a section of the federal tax code.
While the president has sued to prevent lawmakers from getting their hands on documents detailing his personal finances, this is the first time House Democrats have gone to court themselves to obtain such records.
Democrats have viewed obtaining President Trump’s tax returns as one of their top oversight priorities. Trump is the first president in decades who hasn’t made any of his tax returns public, citing a years-long audit. However, the IRS has said that nothing prevents people from releasing their own tax information.
In April, Neal sent a request to the IRS seeking Trump’s personal and business tax returns from 2013 to 2018, saying that the Ways and Means Committee is conducting oversight and is interested in legislative proposals relating to how the IRS audits presidents. Neal made the request under section 6103(f) of the federal tax code, which states that the Treasury secretary “shall furnish” tax returns requested by the chairmen of Congress’s tax committees.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rejected Neal’s request in May, saying that it lacked a legitimate legislative purpose. Neal then issued subpoenas to Treasury and the IRS for Trump’s tax returns, which Mnuchin also rejected.
“Due to that noncompliance, the Committee is now pursuing this matter in the federal courts,” Neal said in a statement.
The complaint asks the court to declare that Treasury and the IRS are legally obligated to produce the documents subpoenaed. It also asks the court to declare that the administration’s failure to comply with section 6103(f) violates the Administrative Procedure Act.
The lawmakers argue in the lawsuit that the administration, “for what the committee believes is the first time ever” is denying their request “in order to shield President Trump’s tax return information from congressional scrutiny.”
“In refusing to comply with the statute, Defendants have mounted an extraordinary attack on the authority of Congress to obtain information needed to conduct oversight of Treasury, the IRS, and the tax laws on behalf of the American people who participate in the nation’s voluntary tax system,” the lawsuit states.
And they point to the administration’s refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas issued for the tax returns as effectively forcing the committee to go to court.
The House Democrats further argue that they need the returns to determine whether Trump has been compliant with federal tax law, and whether “the IRS’s self-imposed policy of annually auditing the returns of sitting presidents is working properly, even though it has not been updated in decades.”
“The Committee has been unable to evaluate President Trump’s claims about the audit program or investigate its other concerns because the President has declined to follow the practice of every elected President since Richard Nixon of voluntarily disclosing their tax returns,” the court filing reads.
“Without reviewing the requested return materials, the committee cannot ensure that the IRS’s audit process is functioning fairly and effectively, understand how provisions of the tax code are implicated by President Trump’s returns, or exercise its legislative judgment to determine whether changes to the code may be warranted.”
The Trump administration is expected to fight the lawsuit.
The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel last month issued a memo backing up Treasury’s decision to reject Neal’s request for Trump’s tax returns. In the memo, DOJ said that Neal’s stated purpose for wanting Trump’s tax returns is pretextual and that his real reason for seeking the documents is to make them public.
Democrats’ lawsuit said that DOJ, Treasury and the IRS “gravely misunderstand the operative law.”
“The Committee’s power to conduct oversight and investigations is firmly rooted in Congress’s Article I legislative authority,” the complaint stated. “And courts have long recognized that Congress’s ‘power of inquiry — with process to enforce it — is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function.’”
The top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Kevin Brady (Texas), criticized the fact that the lawsuit was authorized by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, a majority-Democratic group of senior House leaders, rather than by a vote of the House.
“This is a dangerous course of action,” Brady said. “For this reason, I am introducing a resolution to preserve the integrity of the People’s House from the attacks of the elite few and restore the voice of every American.”
Neal had long expected that the tax-return matter would end up in court, which prompted him to take a careful approach in issuing his request and filing the complaint.
The lawsuit details actions that the Ways and Means Committee took after Treasury and the IRS rejected Neal’s subpoenas and before the complaint was filed, which had not previously been reported. These included that a bipartisan group of committee staff members met with Treasury and IRS officials to discuss the presidential audit program, and that committee staff then sent Treasury and the IRS a list of nearly 300 follow-up questions.
Last Friday, Neal sent Mnuchin and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig a letter notifying them that the briefing reinforced the Ways and Means Committee’s need to see Trump’s tax returns as part of its oversight responsibilities.
Some progressive groups have been frustrated at times with the pace at which Neal was moving, and many praised the filing of the complaint on Tuesday.
“We commend Chairman Neal for taking this necessary action to finally get answers on behalf of the American people about what Donald Trump is hiding—and who he may be beholden to,” Stand Up America spokesman Ryan Thomas said in a statement.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) called the lawsuit “long overdue.”
“It should not take a court order to affirm that ‘shall’ means ‘shall,’” he said. “But Trump will do what it takes to delay the inevitable, hiding his tax returns as long as he can.”
The lawsuit cites other instances where the committee has invoked the statute on obtaining tax return information in the course of their investigations, including that of non-profits who were allegedly facing higher levels of scrutiny in their pursuit of a tax-exempt status allegedly due to their political affiliations.
And it points to past statements made by Trump, first as a candidate and then as president, in which he claimed he was being “unfairly” audited, as further reason to see the tax returns and review the audit process.
It also alleges that by not handing over the documents, the administration is committing a “grave” injury on the committee and “undermines the House’s unique role in the separation of powers structure that is fundamental to our system of constitutional governance.”
“Courts have recognized that the House’s power to obtain the production of papers and testimony from witnesses through compulsory process is integral to its constitutional mandate to legislate and to oversee the Executive,” the lawsuit reads.
“Permitting Defendants to impede the House’s subpoena power would imperil the separation of powers essential to the Constitution’s structure of lawful governance.”
Democrats have repeatedly pointed their court-backed right to conduct oversight in other lawsuits involving the president, including Trump’s attempts to block banks and other financial institutions to comply with congressional subpoenas for his records.
That argument has held up so far, with judges in D.C. and New York both siding with lawmakers in those lawsuits. Both of those cases are now working their way through the appeals process.
The subpoenas for Trump’s records have been issued as part of House Democrats’ exhaustive investigations into the president, his family, private businesses and administration.
Trump has promised to fight “all” the subpoenas, ensuring this attempt to get his tax returns will result in a lengthy court battle.
This is about the 2020 Census question of citizenship.
So, riddle me this:
If a child is a citizen of Country A, and enters the County B "illegally", where the child from Country A, is placed in the legal custody of a state, privately contracted, foreign corporation, state licensed Child Placing Agency, through an ex-parte legal proceeding, under exigent circumstances, where parental rights are terminated and transferred to the new, foreign corporate parent, being Country C, what is the citizenship of that child?
No one wants to speak upon the industry of trafficking tiny humans.
Now, riddle me this:
If a U.S. child is legally kidnapped by Child Protective Services, functioning as foreign Public Private Partnerships, like Bethany Christian, through the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, placed under aegis of the Guardian Ad Litem of the corporation, is the citizenship of the child Israeli?
Ok, now let us just bifurcate the body and the spirit, or the legal personae, the identity, and the deposit of the chattel of the child, or rather the identity, into a trust, where there are insurance policies, what is the citizenship of the soul?
This is about residuals of the peculiar institution and those databases and intellectual property, which are all part of the children's trusts that these people, who refuse to speak upon this, are in this Committee.
The Census counts body and souls because there is so much fraud, it would completely unravel society as we know it.
Oversight committee Chairman Elijah Cummings can now, with the assent of the House leadership, file suit and ask a judge to order William Barr and Wilbur Ross to provide the census materials he wants.
The separation-of-powers standoff between Congress and the executive branch deepened on Wednesday over a dispute about access to materials involving the controversial citizenship question planned for the 2020 census.
The Justice Department notified the House oversight committee that it's withholding documents sought by the panel's chairman because it says they're shielded by executive privilege — the doctrine that permits an administration to conceal some of its internal workings.
House Votes To Let Its Leaders Pursue Contempt Lawsuits In Trump Inquiries
The letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd arrived electronically at the Capitol at the same time Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., had convened a hearing at which the committee debated whether to find Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress.
After a day's worth of discussion and amendments, it did, voting 24 to 15 by the late afternoon on contempt for the Cabinet officials.
Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., who has lately stepped up his criticism of Trump, broke with Republicans to support the measure.
The dispute over documents
Boyd's letter blamed Cummings for the administration's invocation of privilege.
The Justice Department has already provided tens of thousands of documents and access to witnesses but nothing is ever enough, officials say — and Democrats' threats of contempt meant these talks can't continue.
Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said after the Oversight Committee contempt vote made no sense.
"The committee's attempt to define the Department of Justice's good-faith cooperation as 'contempt' defies logic," she said. "Today's action by Chairman Cummings and his committee undermines Congress's credibility with the American people."
The Justice Department has provided Congress with tens of thousands of documents and access to witnesses on the census matter, Kupec said, over months of prior negotiations.
Cummings and the Democrats blame Barr, Ross and the administration for what they've called an effort to "stonewall" their investigation.
Critics argue that Trump's administration wants to use a question about citizenship on the 2020 census to suppress some responses, including those of Latinos, and Democrats say they want unredacted communications to see how the question was discussed inside the government.
"The census is critical to our democracy and our constituents," Cummings said. "We must protect the integrity of the Census, and we must stand up for Congress' authority under the Constitution to conduct meaningful oversight.
The action in the committee on Wednesday followed a vote by the full House on Tuesday authorizing chairmen such as Cummings to file civil contempt lawsuits in order to try to obtain testimony or evidence.
That's what may happen now following the oversight committee session on Wednesday: Cummings, with the assent of the House leadership, could file suit and ask a judge to order Barr and Ross to provide the census materials he wants.
Republicans have criticized Democrats' litigation strategy as a waste of taxpayer dollars given the court costs involved and also as a dangerous road for the House. If members of Congress file suit but lose, Republicans warn, they could harm the oversight powers of the House over the long term.
There are people who do not want a citizenship question, because it could be used as evidence in false claims to Medicaid fraud in child welfare, because that is how the industry of trafficking tiny humans likes to maximize revenues in the best interests of the child, because it is how our great country was built, because no one cares.
I do not post this video to watch people exercise peaceful assembly to engage in free speech in front of SCOTUS, I post this video to teach people that it is no longer acceptable to traffic tiny humans, because, before you are a man, you are a child.
This is about the humans who are more than willing to snatch and sell a child in the name of god.
If the States cannot even keep track of the children in its foster care systems, how does the Census claim to remedy the outstanding questions, floating around about adoption, international adoption, the children's trust funds?
For example, if a foreign corporate parent has privately contracted with a state foster care system and has over 700 children in its legal custody, then what is the citizenship of the child?
That is a question for Bethany Christian and its glorious leader, Betsy DeVos.
Watch them.
All of them.
Even the Justices, because this is about chattel law, the residuals of the peculiar institution, because slavery was never abolished, because it is legal to snatch and sell tiny humans, even the personae, or rather identities and dirty data.
This is about Voting Rights and all its Acts.
This is about the Sarcane shipping labels of the hierarchal classificaation of one's status in society based upon property ownership, more intuitively known as race labeling.
You can manipulate data to make it say what you want, which is how the 2016 election was rigged, and failed.....oh, just stay tuned.
Back in 2018, SCOTUS told the Trump Administration, DOJ, to go through the lower courts to deal with DACA/DAPA, but no one considered that the entire case, including legal strategy, was mapped out under the Obama Administration, Department of Justice, when DACA/DAPA was signed as an Executive Order.
Obama clearly states that DACA/DAPA was a Janet Napolitano, DHS action, and not a congressional law, because only congress makes law, yet refuses to touch child welfare law or anything dealing with parental rights in SCOTUS 2016.
If you take the time to listen to the oral arguments of this SCOTUS case, you will understand why I do what I do because these people.....the Justices....the Attorneys.....the parties.....these "Legal Geniuses" (trademark pending) have no freakin' clue about child welfare law, which is chattel, law, or the fact that we have three branches of government and this case was doing nothing but furthering case precedent of privatization for foreign entities, which are the residuals of the peculiar institution.
In June 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, along with criteria for determining when prosecutors can choose not to enforce immigration laws under DACA. People who qualify for DACA may apply for work authorization. In 2014, DHS established a similar process for parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents as well as expanding DACA by making more people eligible. The new program was known as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program. Texas and other states sued to prevent the implementation of DAPA and argued that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act because it had not gone through the notice-and-comment process, and because it was arbitrary and capricious. The states also argued that DAPA violated the Take Care Clause of the Constitution, which clarifies the President's power. The district court held that the states had standing to file the suit and temporarily enjoined the implementation of DAPA because the states had established a substantial likelihood of success on the notice-and-comment claim. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed and held that the states had standing as well as a substantial likelihood of success on their substantive and procedural claims.
Question:
Do states that provide subsidies to persons who are granted deferred action have standing to sue because the new guidelines will lead to more persons being eligible for deferred action?
Is the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program arbitrary and capricious?
Did DAPA violate the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to go through the notice-and-comment procedure?
Does DAPA violate the Take Care Clause of the Constitution?
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 15–674
_________________
UNITED STATES, et al., PETITIONERS v. TEXAS, et al.
on writ of certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the fifth circuit
Yes, this was all SCOTUS put out, but the media took it in a different direction, not speaking upon the trafficking of tiny humans, not just in physical body, per se, but through the chattels in child welfare Social Impact Bonds, through the operations of foster care, adoption, and all the other privatized refugee child welfare services programs, through the States.
Dems are no longer talking DACA! “Out of sight, out of mind,” they say. DACA beneficiaries should not be happy. Nancy Pelosi truly doesn’t care about them. Republicans stand ready to make a deal!
No one is identifying that these children landing on our shores from all over the world, not just from Central America, are coming under the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA), through DACA/DAPA policies, that are not law, because only congress makes law.
These "alien children" are then assigned through the policies of DACA/DAPA to the Trustees of the States Children's Trusts, who then, I guess you can call it a quiet title of parental rights, and transfer, well, I guess you could just call it an issuance of an amended, corrected, oh, heck, let us call it what it is, a new birth certificate.
No one wants to talk about parental rights or child welfare, but me, and I have all intentions of doing it until the world stops trafficking tiny humans.
Secondly, these children's trusts are registered as foreign entitites, UCCs, that have engaged in the treacherous activities of privatization, Medicaid fraud in child welfare, stealin' the children, the land and the votes, which makes this a war crime, furthering my position that ICJ is the proper jurisdiction.
Lastly, the Trump Administration just exhausted its administrative remedies, which could put the U.S. in a position to enjoin in other actions in ICJ.
Then again, we could be at the threshold of a constitutional crisis, but, hey, what do I know?
I know we have a Chief Justice who has a few trafficking tiny humans issues that may not allow him to touch any of these cases.
John G. Roberts, Jr.
Well, how is that different? If I -- if I own, say, a parcel of land and it's subject to some government regulatory program that I think is a taking under -- under existing law, why isn't the answer, well, you should go buy some other land that's not subject to it.
If the justices don't take up the issue during the court's current term, the government will be required to keep the program going for at least ten more months.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court took no action on Friday on the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. It now appears likely that the court will not take up the issue during its current term, which would require the government to keep the program going for at least ten more months.
The Trump administration urged the justices to hear appeals of lower court rulings that prevent the government from shutting DACA down, but Friday was the last day for adding cases to the current term's docket, barring unusual circumstances. Any cases accepted in subsequent weeks won't be heard until the next term, which begins October 1, and it would take a few months more for the court to issue a decision.
DACA allows children of illegal immigrants to remain here if they were under 16 when their parents brought them to the US, provided they arrived by 2007. The Obama-era initiative has allowed 700,000 young people, commonly referred to as "Dreamers," to avoid deportation. The nickname comes from the DREAM Act, which would have offered many of the same protections as DACA but was never approved by Congress.
The Trump administration moved to end the program in late 2017, but federal courts in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C., blocked that attempt. Following a brief hiatus, the government began accepting renewal applications from DACA participants, which must be filed every two years.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that, far from being illegal, deferred action has been a feature of the immigration system for decades. "In a world where the government can remove only a small percentage of the undocumented non-citizens present in this country in any year, deferred action programs like DACA enable DHS to devote much-needed resources to enforcement priorities such as threats to national security, rather than blameless and economically productive young people with clean criminal records."
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to overturn up those lower court judgments. The Department of Homeland Security and the attorney general concluded that it is unlawful, said Solicitor General Noel Francisco, finding that it "sanctions the ongoing violation of federal law by more than half a million people."
He said that by agreeing to hear the appeals, the court could "provide much-needed clarity to the government and DACA recipients alike." Francisco also said that as long as the question is pending in the courts, Congress has less incentive to come up with a permanent solution.
But supporters of the DACA program said nothing in the lower court rulings would prevent the government from undertaking deportation proceedings against any individual DACA recipient if the need arose. They also noted that President Trump himself has taken conflicting positions on the program, saying at one point, "I love the 'Dreamers.'"
In short, the U.S. is petitioning to take the issue of putting the citizenship question on the next 2020 Census as a mandamus to stop violations of the Voting Rights Act & Administrative Procedures Act.
It seems, Steve Bannon may have assisted Kris Kobach and Wilbur Ross, under the financial direction of private political interests, through propaganda, to have citizenship on the census, for the purposes of securing electioneering data and, dare I say, the implementation of a national absentee voting ballots scheme. involving real estate.
But hey, what do I know?
I know there are many more SCOTUS Petitions for Certiorari in the pipeline and they are all legally symbiotic.
I also know to put the citizenship question on the census is an act of privatization because policymakers, the Executive Branch, cannot make law, only the Congress makes law.
QUESTION PRESENTED
Whether, in an action seeking to set aside agency action
under the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C.
701 et seq., a district court may order discovery outside
the administrative record to probe the mental processes
of the agency decisionmaker—including by compelling
the testimony of high-ranking Executive Branch officials
—when there is not a strong threshold showing that the
decisionmaker disbelieved the objective reasons in the
administrative record, irreversibly prejudged the issue,
or acted on a legally forbidden basis.
SERRANO: Should political parties and campaign
politics ever factor into what is asked of every household
in the country on the census?
ROSS: No political party has asked us to do anything
on the census. We have had a request, as everyone is
aware, from the Department of Justice, to add a citizenship
question to the 2020 census.
SERRANO: * * * I was very disappointed to see
yesterday that the Republican Party campaign to
reelect the president put out an appalling e-mail specifically
noting that the president wants a new citizenship
question added to the census * * * .
Do you disavow this campaign e-mail? * * *
ROSS: I’m not familiar with the e-mail. I’m not part
of the Republican campaign committee. So, I have
not seen it. I have heard about it, this morning.
We are responding solely to the Department of Justice’s
request, not to any campaign request, not to
any other political party request. We are listening
to stakeholders. Many have written to us. Some
have come in to talk with me.
Besides, what the heck is a third party administrator going to do with all that data?
I thought it only fair to report what Tom Perez, DNC Chair is up to when it comes to his activities of securing voter data profiles, strictly for the purposes of monetization, of course.
Hey, at least Tom was open and obvious in the DNC's intentions of selling voter data profiles to private, foreign, third parties.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez launched an attack on his own party’s state organizations Saturday with a long and angry email over the future of the party’s most valuable asset — its voter data file.
Just days before an important Tuesday meeting in D.C. on the future of the data operation, Perez sharply criticized a new proposal from state party leaders and singled out prominent state officials by name.
“For some inexplicable reason, this proposal would tear down just about everything about our current data structure, reversing so much of the progress we made over the past decade,” Perez wrote.
The national chairman, describing his own reaction to the state proposal as “disappointed” and “dumbfounded,” accused the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, Minnesota’s Ken Martin, of undermining the DNC by not keeping other state party officials “in the loop,” prompting withering criticism of Perez from state party leaders.
It‘s the latest fight in a quickly escalating war over the trove of Democratic voter information — a conflict that broke into the open at a gathering of the state parties and the DNC in Puerto Rico late last month. The party’s data are largely owned by the state parties, but a considerable amount of other data being collected by outside groups like labor unions and super PACs could be leveraged to benefit Democratic candidates and the eventual 2020 nominee.
The race for 2020 starts now. Stay in the know. Follow our presidential election coverage.
The DNC wants to gather all the data points on voters into a new, massive for-profit database but needs to convince state parties on the idea. The state parties have been wary, accusing the DNC of conducting a power grab that could financially benefit a few elite party figures.
In response to the DNC plan, Martin on Friday circulated a counterproposal designed to better integrate data from outside groups within the existing infrastructure. It was this proposal that prompted Perez’s email.
Perez’s email — with the seemingly innocuous subject line “UPDATE on data” — immediately triggered an uproar Saturday among state party leaders, who held conference calls and communicated with a flurry of emails and texts.The DNC chairman was referred to in a call as “a bull in a china shop,” according to one state party official. Another state party official called him “petulant,” via text message.
The backlash threatens to splinter the state parties and the national committee — technically separate entities — just as Democratic contenders are preparing to launch presidential campaigns.
Perez argued in his Saturday email that “Ken’s new entity...amounts to having State Parties effectively going alone on technology and data.” He threatened to cut off access to campaign tech tools like VoteBuilder, an online organizing platform, if state parties go forward with their plan.
“You would have to find a replacement for VoteBuilder — either building or buying — as the DNC has sole rights to the platform,” he wrote.
“The reality is the state parties own the voter file. At the end of the day, we hope to move forward with the DNC, but if the DNC continues down this path, we’re just not interested in that,” Martin told POLITICO. “It’s clear that the DNC is not interested in any other proposals or in negotiating.”
Of the email, Martin said that “it’s highly disappointing that Tom would make it so personal.”
Party chairs in the early 2020 presidential primary states also criticized Perez for personalizing the dispute.
“I was very disappointed, and I felt we could have continued to have conversations at a better level than the tone of that email, and I find it very unfortunate,” said Ray Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. “I think that’s how negotiations are, and for [Perez] to be surprised that there would be alternative suggestions is disappointing.”
Trav Robertson, the South Carolina Democratic Party chairman, said Saturday’s email prompted him to “spit out my sweet tea.”
“His email was wholly inappropriate and wholly in the wrong spirit of our conversation,” he said. “For them to say that Ken Martin and Brad Martin [president of the state party executive directors group] have misled us and have not operated in good faith is just not true. In fact, it’s a lie.”
The fight is likely to deepen the intraparty gridlock on how best to prepare a data operation for the eventual 2020 nominee — a goal both sides share but over which they are in deep disagreement on the means.
Ken Martin added that Perez’s email could imperil future negotiations: “I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle at this point after Tom’s email.”
DNC officials see a chance to update their tech and pool their data quickly with cash from liberal donors and Silicon Valley tycoons. Republicans have this capability already — although in practice the Koch brothers-backed outside groups and the Republican National Committee have feuded over sharing their data — which has many Democratic leaders worried about being at a competitive disadvantage in 2020.
“It is also time to take critical steps to modernize our data infrastructure. The other side has already done this, so time is of the essence,” Perez wrote to the state parties. With several state parties staunchlyopposed, DNC officials have discussed potentially integrating just some states at first, with the hope of eventually persuading all of them to sign on.
The counterproposal offered by Martin and additional state party officials — most state parties received copies on Friday, with a briefing scheduled for Monday — would largely build on the existing infrastructure utilized by the state parties and data vendor TargetSmart. Proponents argue that the goal of integrating all the progressive world’s data is achievable without creating an entirely new organization.
“TargetSmart has provided key data services to the DNC for more than a decade,” Tom Bonier, TargetSmart’s CEO, told POLITICO. “The fact is that there are no shortcuts in this work. Handing over our data to an outside entity could hurt our candidates in 2020 and put our party at a disadvantage for years to come.”
Although most state parties hadn’t publicly weighed in on the new state party-centricproposal by Saturday morning — many hadn’t even read it yet — Perez’s email caused officials to rally behind Martin, the veteran Minnesota chairman.
The executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party, Jay Parmley, emailed a response directly to Perez telling him he was being “petty.”
“To insinuate that that these individuals haven’t been completely transparent and open with the ASDC membership simply because much of the ASDC membership doesn’t trust what the DNC is ‘peddling’ when it comes to a Data Trust is just wrong,” he wrote in an email obtained by POLITICO.
Parmley, who has served in state party leadership in numerous states, confirmed he authored the email.
“I like Tom, but I think this was really poor judgment. It read like a letter from an 8th grader,” Parmley told POLITICO.
Other state party chairs also supported Martin.
“I think Ken’s doing a good job,” said Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. “It’s disappointing for a fight like this to become so public. Obviously, our [2020 presidential] caucus is coming up here in 14 months, and that data conversation is very important.”
As the story goes over a few hundred years, of course Elizabeth could never tell you, many of the West African slaves when they first arrived, ran away and went down south to Florida.
Since the cultures were basically the same, they ended up procreating.
The armies came in to reclaim chattel resulting in many deaths and lots of children being sold for the purposes of christian assimilation and other nasty things.
Many left the area through force migration called the Trail of Tears but before they left, they were called out the mountains to register on the rolls.
Many did not and ran over the hills up north for fear of losing their children and being sold into Traite des Blanchesdue to the new chattel law.
The Virginia Racial Integrity Act, some of the anti-amalgamation laws being generated post-Emancipation Proclamation, began to change the chattel registration terms of mullato, quadroon, octroon, into blood quantum, where most of the tribes cut off at one-sixteenth, meaning a great-grandparent has to have been on the registration rolls and many Native Americans were registered into one of these chattel categories as "Negro", being of amalgamated decent.
1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia, That the State Registrar of Vital Statistics may as soon as practicable after the taking effect of this act, prepare a form whereon the racial composition of any individual, as Caucasian, negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other non-Caucasic strains, and if there be any mixture, then the racial composition of the parents and other ancestors, in so far as ascertainable, so as to show in what generation such mixture occurred, may be certified by such individual, which form shall be known as a registration certificate. The State Registrar may supply to each local registrar a sufficient number of such forms for the purpose of this act; each local registrar may personally or by deputy, as soon as possible after receiving said forms, have made thereon in duplicate a certificate of the racial composition as aforesaid, of each person resident in his district, who so desires, born before June fourteenth, nineteen hundred and twelve, which certificate shall be made over the signature of said person, or in the case of children under fourteen years of age, over the signature of a parent, guardian, or other person standing in loco parentis. One of said certificates for each person thus registering in every district shall be forwarded to the State Registrar for his files; the other shall be kept on file by the local registrar.
Every local registrar may, as soon as practicable, have such registration certificate made by or for each person in his district who so desires, born before June fourteen, nineteen hundred and twelve, for whom he has not on file a registration certificate, or a birth certificate.
2. It shall be a felony for any person wilfully or knowingly to make a registration certificate false as to color or race. The wilful making of a false registration or birth certificate shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for one year.
3. For each registration certificate properly made and returned to the State Registrar, the local registrar returning the same shall be entitled to a fee of twenty-five cents, to be paid by the registrant. Application for registration and for transcript may be made direct to the State Registrar, who may retain the fee for expenses of his office.
4. No marriage license shall be granted until the clerk or deputy clerk has reasonable assurance that the statements as to color of both man and woman are correct.
If there is reasonable cause to disbelieve that applicants are of pure white race, when that fact is stated, the clerk or deputy clerk shall withhold the granting of the license until satisfactory proof is produced that both applicants are "white persons" as provided for in this act.
The clerk or deputy clerk shall use the same care to assure himself that both applicants are colored, when that fact is claimed.
5. It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term "white person" shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by this act.
6. For carrying out the purposes of this act and to provide the necessary clerical assistance, postage and other expenses of the State Registrar of Vital Statistics, twenty per cent of the fees received by local registrars under this act shall be paid to the State Bureau of Vital Statistics, which may be expended by the said bureau for the purposes of this act.
7. All acts or parts of acts inconsistent with this act are, to the extent of such inconsistency, hereby repealed.
Appendix (excerpt)
Alexander Francis Chamberlain, A.M., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Clark University...says: "In some regions considerable intermixture between negroes and Indians (Science, New York, Vol. XVII, 1891 pp. 85-90), has occurred, e.g., among the Pamunkeys, Mattoponies, and some other small Virginia and Carolinian tribes." "It is also thought probable that many of the negroes of the whole lower Atlantic coast and Gulf region may have strains of Indian blood." This probably accounts for the increasing number of negroes who are now writing to our Bureau demanding that the color on their birth certificates and marriage licenses be given as "Indian."
"Damn that science & technology!"
Assuming that Elizabeth was aware of all these arcane laws, perhaps, this was her way of calling for the enforcement of the One-Drop Rule, but in this day in age, applied to genotypes and DNA testing.
In essence, if you have one drop of "non-white blood", or, in this instance, one tiny chromosome marker that shows you in the 1/1000th range, you are automatically, by default of that one, contaminated drop of blood, forever associated with that group, or race, or whatever pseudo-scientific labeling system they use for data registration for predictive modeling crap.
Yes, by this same logic, racial purity classification applies to anyone who has one-drop of the Negro blood which is why it is impossible to implement any type of reparations because everyone has had someone in their cookie jar at some point in their U.S. genealogy.
In short, this chattel classification of the one-drop racial purity laws are a joke and begs the question as to why we continue to teach this out dated method of human asset management when we are filing patents left and right on human genomes and protein strands.
That racial horse and buggy is being traumatized by those fandangled motor cars!
And that is why Elizabeth Warren will never be legally recognized, under U.S. Laws as being a registered, card carrying member of any North American Native Tribe, because if she did have a tribal card, she could cross any North American border without a passport.
I bet she cannot even tell one personal story of children being ripped from their parents to be put into Indian boarding schools or of family members living in abject poverty on reservations that have yet to get a casino to launder money for political campaigns or access to sovereign land for special projects.
All I can say is that everyone should keep having babies and check whatever race box you wish for the birth certificate, just to skew the data for their crappy predictive modeling because it is really fun to screw up and invalidate their fake theories and methodologies, based upon horse and buggy methodologies.
WASHINGTON — Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides “strong evidence’’ she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations, an unprecedented move by one of the top possible contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.
Warren, whose claims to Native American blood have been mocked by President Trump and other Republicans, provided the test results to the Globe on Sunday in an effort to defuse questions about her ancestry that have persisted for years. She planned an elaborate rollout Monday of the results as she aimed for widespread attention.
The analysis of Warren’s DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a , for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.He concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
Bustamante calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” That timing fits Warren’s family lore, passed down during her Oklahoma upbringing, that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American.
Smith was born in the late 1700s. She identified as white in historical documents, though at the time Indians faced discrimination, and Smith would have had strong incentives to call herself white if possible.
The inherent imprecision of the six-page DNA analysis could provide fodder for Warren’s critics. If O.C. Sarah Smith were fully Native American, that would make Warren up to 1/32nd native. But the generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. The report notes there could be missed ancestors.
Undergoing the test and releasing the results reveal how seriously Warren is taking the attacks from Trump, who has been able to effectively caricature and diminish his national foes via nicknames and conspiracy theories. Trump pushed then President Barack Obama into releasing the long form of his birth certificate to prove what most knew was already true: He was born in America.
The move is also another indication of how seriously Warren is considering running for president. And while it’s unclear whether the test will convince Trump and his die-hard supporters, Warren will be able to point to it with other, more open-minded voters. Once Obama produced his birth certificate in 2011, the racist “birther’’ movement, which thrived on the Internet and was stoked by Trump, largely evaporated.
Warren is seeking reelection in Massachusetts and is expected to easily win a second term. She has said that she will take a “hard look” at running for the Democratic nomination for president once the midterm elections are over. She’s already released 10 years worth of her tax returns and made her personnel files available to The Boston Globe, showing that ethnicity was not a factor in her rise in law.
By taking a DNA test, Warren is showing that if she runs for president, she plans to be a very different candidate than Hillary Clinton was. The 2016 Democratic nominee for president chafed at releasing personal information and was dogged throughout her campaign by her use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
Warren provided a sample of her DNA to a private lab in Georgia in August, according to one of the senator’s aides. The data from that test was sent to Bustamante and his team for analysis. Warren received the report last week.
Warren didn’t use a commercial service, but Bustamante is on the scientific advisory board for Ancestry, which provides commercial DNA tests. He’s also consulted on a project for 23andMe, another major DNA testing company.
Warren said she was committed to releasing the report regardless of the results. However, Warren’s aides would not say whether she or any of her three siblings had previously done a commercial DNA test that would have provided them with some assurance about Bustamante’s analysis.
There were five parts of Warren’s DNA that signaled she had a Native American ancestor, according to the report. The largest piece of Native American DNA was found on her 10th chromosome, according to the report. Each human has 23 pairs of chromosomes.
“It really stood out,” said Bustamante in an interview. “We found five segments, and that long segment was pretty significant. It tells us about one ancestor, and we can’t rule out more ancestors.”
He added: “We are confident it is not an error.”
Detecting DNA for Native Americans is particularly tricky because there is an absence of Native American DNA available for comparison. This is in part because Native American leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases.
“The tribes have felt they have been exploited,” explained Lawrence Brody, a senior investigator with the Medical Genomics and Metabolic Genetics Branch at the National Institutes of Health. “The amount of genetic data that is available from Native Americans is sparse.”
To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American. That’s because scientists believe that the groups Americans refer to as Native American came to this land via the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago and settled in what’s now America but also migrated further south. His report explained that the use of reference populations whose genetic material has been fully sequenced was designed “for maximal accuracy.”
Bustamante said he can tease out the markers that these South Americans would have in common with Native Americans on the North American continent.
Bustamante also compared Warren’s DNA to white populations in Utah and Great Britain to determine if the amounts of Native American markers in Warren’s sample were significant or just background noise.
Warren has 12 times more Native American blood than a white person from Great Britain and 10 times more than a white person from Utah, the report found.
Warren has come under blistering attacks from Trump for making claims of Native American heritage. His taunts of her as “Pocahontas” have become part of his standard rally monologue.
Earlier this month at rally in Iowa, Trump said he hoped Warren would run for president because it would allow him to find out “whether or not she has Indian blood.”
In July, during a rally in Montana, Trump imagined debating Warren during the 2020 presidential election and said that he’d try to make her take a DNA test by throwing it at her onstage. “We have to do it gently, because we’re in the #MeToo generation, so we have to be very gentle,” Trump said.
He also offered to provide $1 million to her charity of choice if she takes the test.
Warren’s Senate campaign has used clips from Trump and his spokeswoman Sarah Sanders attacking her for making the Native American claims in a slickly.
There’s even footage of Warren calling Bustamante to get the results of her DNA test.
“The president likes to call my mom a liar. What do the facts say?” asks Warren, sitting at a desk by behind a Macintosh laptop.
“The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree,” replies Bustamante, who was also captured on film by Warren’s team.
Bustamante is considered one of the leading DNA analysts in the world. When several DNA experts were asked by the Globe, earlier this year, how they’d recommend Warren go about taking a DNA test, his name came up repeatedly.
He has never donated to Warren’s campaigns. (A different California professor with the same name donated $200 to Obama in 2008, federal records show.)
Questions over Warren’s ethnicity have dogged her since her 2012 Senate campaign. That’s when GOP operatives found archival stories in the Harvard Crimson of a Harvard Law School spokesman referring to her as a Native American as a way to show the school had a diverse faculty.
During her academic career as a law professor, she had her ethnicity changed from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught from 1987 to 1995, and at Harvard University Law School, where she was a tenured faculty member starting in 1995. (She was a visiting professor at Harvard during the 1992-1993 academic year.)
In an interview with the Globe published last month, Warren explained that she identified herself as Native American in the late 1980s and early 1990s as many of the matriarchs of her family were dying and she began to feel that her family stories and history were becoming lost.
Ivy League universities, like the ones where Warren taught, were under great pressure to show they had diverse staffs.
The University of Pennsylvania filled out a document explaining why it hired a white woman over minority candidates — clear evidence it didn’t view her as a Native American addition. And the Globe interviewed 31 Harvard Law School faculty members who voted on her appointment there, and all said her heritage was not a factor.
Correction:
Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 6th to 10th generation relative. The generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.
