Missing the people's business
Providence Journal (RI)
Author/Byline: PHILIP TERZIAN
January 10, 1999
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EVERYBODY'S focused on the Senate trial of President Clinton, which makes sense. The last time anything like this took place in the nation's capital it was 1868, before satellite technology and the invention of cable television.
But lost in the shuffle, and media excitement, is a troubling fact: While the Senate trial drags on - for days, weeks, fortnights, even months - the people's business will have to wait. Precious legislative time will be consumed, momentum lost, and bipartisan comity erased while the Senate ponders Monica Lewinsky's thong underwear, or mulls the meaning of the word "is." This has not escaped the notice of staffers on Capitol Hill, some of whom have shared their concerns with me, and warned about the dangers of neglecting the people's business. The result is a short list of legislative initiatives that, sad to say, may well be swept aside by scandal fever.
The one thing everyone mentioned was an administration proposal, which enjoys broad bipartisan support, to extend a supplementary annual cash payment to all senior citizens, regardless of need. This is, after all, the "greatest generation," which not only endured the Depression, defeated Hitler and built Levittown, but produced the Baby Boom generation as well: Two generations of greatness in a row. Moderate Republicans had been expected to attach riders providing an extra $100 for Notch Babies and women who lost jobs in the defense industry when male workers returned from World War II.
Senate Democrats think that they have a winning formula in reminding voters that the Republican leadership scuttled HMO regulation and campaign-finance reform in the last Congress. Their bill, which President Clinton was expected to highlight in his State of the Union address, would have neatly joined the issues together by banning private political contributions, and mandating federal financing of elections, by imposing a surcharge on all insurance-driven medical procedures. Every time a needless X-ray was taken, say proponents, American democracy would have been strengthened.
Then there was the 1999 Violence Against Women Act, which would have established a bipartisan commission to assess the adverse impact of wolf whistles, remote-control devices, cigars, action movies, NASCAR, household rodents, the Miss America scholarship pageant, high heels and the National Football League on the lives of American women, with an eye to broad regulatory reform. Or the Omnibus Children's Safety Act, which would have put 100,000 new monitors on America's playgrounds. Or a renewed federal commitment for crash research programs to conquer classic migraines, male pattern baldness and irritable bowel syndrome. Or a creative fiscal measure to mandate automatic annual cost-of-living increases in the minimum wage. Or a landmark bill, long sought by environmentalists, to extend the Endangered Species Act to certain classes of humans: Test pilots, nonagenarians, Shakers, professors of Greek.
Saddest of all, perhaps, are those public servants whose tenure might well be blighted by needless delay. First in line is the nomination of Richard Holbrooke as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Concerns about possible conflicts of interest had put the nomination on hold during the last legislative session until it was discovered that, while the White House had announced the appointment, it had neglected to send it to the Senate. Now, President Clinton may be fatally distracted from ever dispatching Ambassador Holbrooke's name down Pennsylania Avenue, and our U.N. delegation will have to content itself with a career Foreign Service officer in his place. As one discouraged Senate aide put it, "There are only 42 months until the next International Conference on Women - and the clock is ticking."
Next, by common consent, was the administration's plan to extend the temporary appointment of William Lann Lee as acting assistant attorney general for civil rights for an indefinite trial period. There had been some talk of offering General Lee a continuing recess appointment during the period between the end of the 105th Congress and the opening of the 106th, but once again the White House was distracted by scandal politics. Now, until the end of the President's term, the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department will be headed by a permanent provisional official with full impromptu powers to exercise stopgap oversight and makeshift enforcement of the law. As one heartbroken House staffer told me, "This will have a temporarily chilling effect on civil rights."
Staffers also mentioned Social Security reform, and a drastic overhaul of Medicare financing. But compared to the urgency of the Holbrooke nomination, they agreed, these two perennials would just have to wait - like the people's business.
* * *
Philip Terzian, the Journal's associate editor, writes a column from Washington.
Law's Demise Puts Immigrant Wives at Risk
Non-citizen victims of spousal abuse may lose sources of help
Salt Lake Tribune, The (UT)
January 25, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Olga was visiting relatives in Utah when she met her future husband at a convenience store where her sister worked. He was always nice, buying her flowers and candy and telling her he loved her.
As she was about to return home to Russia, "he begged me to stay," said Olga, which is not her real name. "He said, `Don't go. I love you. I want to marry you.' "
Olga married her boyfriend and moved into her mother-in-law's basement.
That was three years ago -- three years of her husband's jealous rages, his knife-wielding threats and violent brawls that left Olga scraped and bruised. When she told her husband she wanted a divorce, he said that she would be deported to Russia even though most of her family lived in Utah.
Then she found out about a law, the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, which includes a provision that improves undocumented immigrant women's chances of escaping their abusers.
Under the law, undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens or legal residents can petition for permanent residency without the sponsorship of their spouses. Within a few months, her paperwork was being processed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Before Congress passed the law in 1994, abused immigrants were virtual hostages to spouses who were citizens or legal residents. Legal immigrants to the United States can sponsor family members -- parents, children, spouses and others -- by filing petitions with the INS.
If an abused immigrant woman were to say she was leaving, typically her husband would threaten to withdraw the immigration paperwork, report her to the INS so that she could be deported. The children would stay with the husband in the United States.
After the 1994 law, if immigrants could prove they were in a valid marriage, that they were being abused, that they were "persons of good moral character" and that deportation would cause extreme hardship to themselves or their children, they could apply on their own for a green card. They were free to leave their abusers without the threat of being deported or losing their children.
"In a period of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, this legislation is a bright spot," said Salt Lake City immigration attorney Teresa Hensley. "This law has freed many women from their abusive husbands."
Yet, some provisions of VAWA have expired, and once again many immigrant women who are being abused by their spouses are in jeopardy.
The changes, in effect since January 1998, require some battered women to return to their home countries to apply for a green card at a U.S. consulate -- even when returning could be difficult or dangerous for them.
When VAWA was originally passed, there was a provision that allowed abused immigrants who came into the country illegally to pay a $1,000 fine and obtain a green card without leaving the United States.
"When women come from countries where they are considered property, they have no chance of ever gaining freedom from their abusers," said Leslye Orloff of Ayuda, an immigrant women's advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. "Their restraining orders from the courts are not valid outside the United States and the women are basically without any legal protection in their native countries."
Marcela Montemurro, an advocate for immigrants at the YWCA Battered Women's Shelter in Salt Lake City, has worked with victims of domestic violence who come from countries where it is illegal for women to leave their husbands.
"Many women in the world don't have the choice of divorce," Montemurro said. "If they leave their husbands, once they are home they can be put in jail."
And in many cultures, Montemurro added, there is a belief that spouse abuse is a domestic problem that should be dealt with in private, behind closed doors.
"And even if there were not a social stigma," Montemurro said, "in many countries there just is not a system to deal with domestic violence. You call the police and they say, `It's none of our business.' "
Last year, a provision of Congress' appropriations bill that would have extended the right of battered immigrants to apply for green cards without leaving the United States was removed by a House conference committee.
This month, Congress is expected to debate a measure that would restore some of the expired terms of the Violence Against Women Act, including the one that allows abused women to stay in the United States while they apply for a green card. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, one of the bipartisan sponsors of the original bill, is a supporter of the reauthorization legislation.
The system for abused immigrants, Montemurro says, already is difficult enough, even with a law that is sympathetic.
Advocates say that collecting evidence -- taking pictures of victims' injuries, gathering written statements from neighbors who witnessed the abuse and filing police reports -- to support claims under VAWA is a painstaking process that can take more than a year. And immigrant women, Montemurro contends, face more barriers than those born in this country.
"A lot of immigrant women are in a place where the language is different, the culture is different and the system is different," Montemurro said. "The only person they know is their abuser."
Montemurro does not know what the breaking point is for victims of domestic violence. But of the 20 women that Montemurro worked with last year, all of them "gave up the hope that their husbands were going to change."
"I know anyone is capable of achieving the assertiveness necessary to leave an abuser," Montemurro said. "But society has so many unwritten rules about roles for men and women, that it is difficult even for someone who grew up with the idea of women's independence."
If the legislation does not pass, said Ayuda's Orloff, it will send a message to abusers that immigrant women are fair game.
"I've personally seen several cases of serial sponsors of immigrant wives," Orloff said. "We got one woman away from [an abuser] and a couple of years later he was abusing another immigrant wife, and we were going after him again. Abusers will continue to abuse until there is a consequence."
Orloff cites research that shows a strong criminal justice response stops the abuse. Most abusers, she said, have not had run-ins with the law and they do not want to be branded as criminals.
When they are taken to court, Orloff said, it forces men to sit up and take notice that abuse is a crime.
But without the safety net of a law that allows women to stay in the United States while they wait for their green cards, women's advocates say, the abuse will continue.
"As it stands now, women are forced to remain in an abusive situation, kids continue to witness domestic violence, and it is more difficult for prosecutors across the country to prosecute men who abuse their immigrant wives."
For Olga, who was in the United States on an expired tourist visa after she left her husband, the law worked. But it was an arduous journey.
For months, she stayed in cramped apartments with friends and family in an attempt to hide from her husband, who refused to obey a court-mandated protective order. Olga cleaned houses for $2.50 an hour because she could not get a better job without proof that she was in the country legally.
Finally, in November, Olga got her life back. The INS granted her a temporary work permit while her application for a green card is being processed.
"I am so happy," she said, "that you cannot believe it."
JUDGE ASKS HIGH COURT FOR SPOUSE ABUSE RULINGS
WOMAN'S FEDERAL SUIT PROMPTS QUESTIONS ABOUT STATE LAW
Spokesman-Review, The (Spokane, WA)
February 6, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
A federal judge in Spokane is asking the state Supreme Court to decide if civil damages can be sought for ongoing domestic violence.
In a rarely used legal procedure, the state's highest court also is being asked if deadlines for filing civil suits in Washington should be extended for long-term victims of domestic violence.
U.S. District Court Judge Frem Nielsen formally forwarded the two legal questions to the Supreme Court in an order he signed on Monday.
The Supreme Court may accept or reject the federal judge's ``certification order'' and its two questions about interpretations of state law.
``The questions are properly framed to obtain answers on issues where no controlling state law precedent exists,'' Nielsen said in his order forwarded to the Supreme Court.
The questions are the latest legal developments in a 1997 lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Spokane against an executive of a Spokane based chain of lumber stores.
Reid T. Ziegler, former president of Ziegler Lumber, is accused by his former wife, Michele, of 10 years of domestic violence. She now lives in Boise.
She didn't bring the suit until two years after their relationship ended in December 1995.
The suit against Ziegler was brought by Spokane attorneys Dick Eymann and John Allison under the 1994 Gender-Motivated Violence Act.
Ziegler and his attorney, Mary Schultz, initially attacked the constitutionality of the law.
The National Organization for Women and the U.S. Department of Justice then moved to get involved to defend the law, initially called the Violence Against Women Act.
Normally, a person seeking damages has a limited amount of time after an incident - called the statute of limitations - to bring a suit.
But Michele Ziegler's attorneys argued that she was the victim of an on-going pattern of physical and psychological abuse.
They also say she didn't recognize herself as a victim and couldn't seek redress until long after she had left the relationship.
Last September, Nielsen upheld the constitutionality of the 4-year-old federal law.
He ruled that it can be used by men or women, and therefore doesn't violate equal treatment provisions of the Constitution.
Immediately after that ruling, Schultz filed a counterclaim, alleging that Reid Ziegler was the victim of ongoing spousal abuse.
State law doesn't address whether civil damages can be claimed for ongoing domestic violence, or a ``continuing tort.''
``It's an issue that needs to be decided for both parties,'' said Schultz.
Schultz said it's not certain that the Supreme Court will agree to review the questions, but other legal experts say rejection is unlikely.
Allison said he's optimistic that the Supreme Court will review the federal judge's questions.
``This same Supreme Court has allowed expert testimony on the `battered woman's syndrome' in cases where victims finally kill their abuser in self-defense,'' Allison said.
``It's time for the civil justice system to recognize as well that domestic violence often lasts longer than just two years,'' Allison said.
``When victims can muster the courage and ability to escape, they deserve the chance to hold their abuser fully accountable,'' he said.
In the past 10 years, only one other federal suit in the Eastern District of Washington resulted in the formulation of legal questions to the Supreme Court.
That case involved an armored car guard who was fired for leaving the driver's seat to come to the aid of a fellow guard.
NOW BOSS SKEPTICAL OF `NEWFOUND' SENTIMENTS
WHILE FRUSTRATED BY CLINTON SCANDALS, IRELAND HAS DOUBTS ABOUT RECENT DEFENDERS OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS
Peoria Journal Star, The (IL)
March 3, 1999
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PEORIA -- Feminist leader Patricia Ireland sees frustration and irony in the Clinton sex scandals, with allegations of rape and sexual harassment in the workplace.
"The same people who opposed employment discrimination laws and the women's movement also wanted to bring down Clinton with this newfound concern for women in the workplace," Ireland said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, speaks at 7 p.m. today in a free public lecture at Bradley University in the Student Center Ballroom. Her topic will be "What Women Want."
What Ireland wants is for Clinton's critics to join with leaders of the women's movement to strengthen laws that protect women.
"We urge all these folks horrified by rape and all the new-found women's rights supporters in the Congress so concerned about rape and harassment (to) pass legislation to help women," she said.
The Violence Against Women Act is a place to begin, she said. It would provide money for prevention and education programs.
Allegations that President Bill Clinton may have raped Juanita Broaddrick 21 years ago in a Little Rock, Ark. motel, are "frustrating," Ireland said.
The allegations have been presented to the public only in a television show, "filtered through reporter, editor, producer, writers, and that is not necessarily the way I want to have to judge the situation," she said.
At the same time, Clinton's lies about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky have harmed his credibility, she said. "Will he say `I did not have sex with her, much less rape her? ' " she asked.
"We urge the president and his supporters not to trash this woman the way they did Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky," she said.
"Now the impeachment vote is over, and there is not a forum for this 21-year-old accusation. You can't either prove it or defend against it," she said.
"Rape is clearly a high crime," but Kenneth Starr's investigators "deemed (the charge) inconclusive and not substantial enough to take to the Congress," Ireland said.
Yet 40 House members read Starr's secret files, and "it influenced their votes," she said.
The scandals actually have helped NOW, said Ireland, estimating that membership is up 20 percent.
"Our membership reflects the general public's take on this all year," she said. "They support (Clinton) as president, they support his performance even if they think as a person, as a husband and father he's a failure. They weren't about to jump in with opponents of women's rights to impeach him."
Clinton's opponents, such as Bob Barr, Dick Armey and Henry Hyde, also lack credibility, she said.
Barr said he didn't know about his ex-wife's abortion, and she said he knew about it and paid for it, she said.
Ireland laughed at Hyde's admission of a "youthful indiscretion," a long-term affair while he was in his 40s. "If that was a youthful indiscretion, at 53 I'm just coming into my prime," she said. @ART CAPTION:Patricia Ireland
Appeals court rules Violence Against Women Act unconstitutional
Associated Press Archive
March 5, 1999
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A federal law that gives civil rights protections to victims of gender-motivated violence is unconstitutional, a divided federal appeals court ruled today.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 7-4 to uphold a lower court's ruling against the Violence Against Women Act, which allows women to sue their sex attackers for damages in federal court for violating their civil rights. It has been the target of several legal challenges since it became law in 1994.
"Such a statute, we are constrained to conclude, simply cannot be reconciled with the principles of limited federal government upon which this nation is founded," said the ruling written by Judge J. Michael Luttig.
The act also included federal funding to help states curtail violence against women.
The full court overruled its own three-judge panel that in 1997 had voted 2-1 to throw out the lower court's ruling in the case of a college student who claimed her civil rights were violated by her school and two football players accused of raping her.
Christy Brzonkala, a student at Virginia Tech, said the attack occurred in a dormitory a few months after the federal law took effect.
She did not report the incident for several months and no criminal charges were ever filed against the two players, Antonio Morrison and James Crawford. She contends in her lawsuit that their acts violated her civil right to be free from gender-motivated crimes of violence.
She contended that Virginia Tech mishandled the campus judicial proceedings against the players and protected them because they were athletes. Her case never got to trial.
The appeals court ruled that Congress overstepped its bounds when it relied on its power to regulate interstate commerce to enact the law.
Ms. Brzonkala, who has allowed her name to be made public, argued that gender-motivated violence affects commerce by imposing medical and legal costs on victims, inhibiting travel by those who fear violence and lessening productivity. She was the first to sue under the law.
But the court described the law as "a sweeping intrusion" into matters traditionally handled by the states.
In dissent, Judge Diana G. Motz wrote that Congress had clear authority to enact the law.
"I recognize that people of good will -- including federal judges -- could believe that the statute challenged here does not constitute good public policy. But judges' policy choices provide no basis for finding a statute unconstitutional," she wrote.
"When federal courts undertake responsibility of this kind without specific constitutional support, the threat to our system of government is grave indeed," she wrote for the four dissenting judges.
The ruling means the federal law is no longer in effect in the 4th U.S. Circuit, which includes Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina.
Ms. Brzonkala's lawyer said the case would be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ruling bars civil rights lawsuits by rape victims
Opinion says federal law infringes on states' rights; Supreme Court likely to hear appeal
Dallas Morning News, The (TX)
March 6, 1999
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A federal law that gave victims of rape and domestic violence the right to sue their attackers for violating their civil rights is unconstitutional, an appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled Friday.
The court's 7-4 decision invalidates a key section of the Violence Against Women Act, a broad-based congressional response to domestic violence that also includes funding for battered women's programs and interstate enforcement of protective orders.
The ruling means that in states under the court's jurisdiction - Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia and the Carolinas - victims of rape and domestic violence will be able to sue their attackers only under state laws, which may have lower damage caps and shorter statutes of limitations and may bar some claims against spouses.
Legal analysts said the case is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where it could become a vehicle for putting more limits on Congress' ability to pass legislation in areas where states also have authority.
Women's groups had sharp criticism for Friday's decision of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of former Virginia Tech student Christy Brzonkala, who had filed a federal lawsuit against two football players she says raped her.
"This law is really important to women who are trying to seek redress for their harms," said Laura Goldscheid, senior staff attorney for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, which helped push Ms. Brzonkala's suit. "There's a lot of bias in state courts. . . . The federal judiciary is where we look for protection of our civil rights."
The court found that the Constitution does not give Congress the power to legislate in this area because the problem is not related to interstate commerce and does not involve state or local government violations of civil rights.
"Such a statute, we are constrained to conclude, simply cannot be reconciled with the principles of limited federal government upon which this nation is founded," Judge J. Michael Luttig wrote in the 214-page opinion.
The generally conservative 4th Circuit is the first appeals court to take up the Violence Against Women Act, legal analysts said, but nearly a dozen district court decisions across the country have taken a broader view of Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce and have upheld the law.
Attorneys for Ms. Brzonkala, now 22 and working in Washington, said she has not decided whether to appeal the decision, but her Richmond attorney, Eileen N. Wagner, said that one reason Ms. Brzonkala decided to sue in federal rather than state court was that she wanted to be a test case for the new law.
"The Supreme Court was our original goal and I have a hard time envisioning we would pass up the test," Ms. Wagner said. "Her idea was, "I'll make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else.' "
Attorneys for Antonio J. Morrison, one of the two football players, said they were pleased by the decision. "We know there may be struggles ahead, but we will continue to defend . . . [Mr. Morrison] against these scurrilous charges," said Michael Rosman, general counsel of the Center for Individual Rights.
Restored perspective
United States Court of Appeals restrains the excesses of Congress
Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC)
March 9, 1999
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It's been a long time since Congress paid attention to the constitutional limits of its power. A federal appeals court sent a reminder last week.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit declared a 1994 law unconstitutional. Congress had reached beyond its authority in creating the law, according to the court.
The law is called the Violence Against Women Act. It allows rape victims to sue their attackers for violating their civil rights.
Empowering rape victims to gain some retribution from their attackers is a worthy goal, but Congress intruded on the jurisdiction of state lawmakers in passing the law.
The Constitution does not authorize Congress to pass any and every law that federal lawmakers believe is needed. Many areas are reserved for state laws. Most criminal law should be left to states, and much civil law is up to state authorities.
Congress is authorized by the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce. And Congress has stretched that authority beyond reason.
In this instance, the court did not find a reason in regulating interstate commerce for passing the Violence Against Women Act.
The lawyers for the person who brought the suit argued that the law affected interstate commerce because rape imposed medical and legal costs on women and because women may be afraid to travel due to the possibility of rape.
The judges disagreed. "Such a statute, we are constrained to conclude, simply cannot be reconciled with the principles of limited federal government upon which this nation is founded," Judge J. Michael Luttig said.
The case is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, which should uphold the Appeals Court decision.
And Judge Luttig's lesson should be drummed into the mind of every member of Congress. It is desperately needed to control the growth of federal power.
Not only does Congress stretch the interstate commerce clause to pass laws that exceed congressional authority, it uses other measures to force its will upon the states.
Congress routinely passes measures that should be left to state legislatures and forces them on states by threatening to withhold federal funding if they don't comply. That's how Congress pushed national speed limits on the states. Currently, President Clinton is pushing to enforce new federal rules on school districts by tying federal funding to them.
Congress does not always violate the letter of the Constitution when it intrudes in matters that should be left to states, but it routinely violates the spirit of the Constitution.
The president and members of Congress should take this court decision as a reminder of their constitutional limits.
Just Our Bill?
The Left Reconsiders Its Relationship to Clinton and Comes Out Swinging, Especially at Christopher Hitchens
Village Voice, The (New York, NY)
Author/Byline: Richard Goldstein
March 16, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Ever since he signed an affidavit last February claiming that his friend Sidney Blumenthal told him Monica Lewinsky was 'a stalker' — thereby contradicting Blumethal's sworn testimony— Christopher Hitchens has been the scourge of the literary left. Hitch the Snitch is the mildest of the nicknames that have been pinned on him. 'A Judas,' Alexander Cockburn snarled. 'An informer,' Victor Navasky railed. 'I don't think anyone would call you a feminist,' Katha Pollitt wrote in a 'Dear Christopher' letter that ran in The Nation as a response to his own apologia. Lefties who lunch have hurled even harsher charges. The writer Edward Jay Epstein claims he once heard Hitchens deny the Holocaust. ('A demented liar,' is Hitchens's response.)
For his part, Hitchens is crying all the way to Meet the Press. Though he staunchly denies taking a fall for fame, notoriety is the best publicity for a brainy Brit who can't even say 'Yipee-kay-yie-yay.' As a result of his sins, Hitchens's forthcoming book about Clinton— which turns on the thesis that the president's sexual proclivities are an apt metaphor for his political corruption— is likely to be taken far more seriously than if he had confined his thoughts to The Nation and Vanity Fair.
Hitchens's book, No One Left To Lie To, will join a pack of tell-alls that seem destined to turn April into the cruelest month for Clinton. There's George Stephanopoulos's $2.75 million memoir, All Too Human, in which the author casts himself as John Doe 1, another victim of the Great Compartmentalizer; and Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton, in which the Newsweek sleuth inserts himself into the middle of Monicagate— as every insider journalist with a clothing budget seems compelled to do. 'Clintonism poisons everything it touches,' as Hitchens writes.
Whether or not you consider him a pinko self-promoter, Hitchens has accomplished something tangible with his telltale ways. He has thrown into high relief a roiling debate about whether progressives are soft on Clinton. There are no trends on the left— only tendencies— but an unofficial survey of writers and activists who call themselves radicals, socialists, or just plain progressives affirms that the Clinton Question has become the hottest topic of debate since, well, Israel.
Like most disputes on the left, this one has gone unnoticed by the mainstream media, which prefer to cast the battle of Bill in neatly dichotomous terms: liberals adore him, conservatives abhor him. In fact, on the left, Clinton inspires feelings that are ambivalent at best. 'I don't feel any attachment to him,' says Gloria Steinem, who is widely considered a feminist Friend of Bill. 'I feel an aversion to his adversaries.'
To many progs, the impeachment seemed like a clear and present danger— 'a peaceful attempt to assassinate the president,' in Steinem's words. Though Hitchens dismisses the idea that the campaign against Clinton was an attempted coup, it certainly seemed to many activists that his removal from office would have ushered in a period of right-wing dominance. Even a hardcore radical like Mary Lou Greenberg of the activist group Refuse & Resist speaks of 'the dire consequences for the people' in a takeover by the Christian right. That's why Greenberg, who is also a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, felt compelled to defend a president who declared that 'the age of big government is over.' She took her cue from 'the errors of the Communist forces in Weimar Germany. One error was not taking fascism seriously, and another was not uniting with a segment of the ruling class to defeat these fascist forces.'
While Clinton's appeal remains unwavering among minorities (he's the most popular figure in the black community except for Jesse Jackson, says Manning Marable, who recently completed a nationwide survey of black political attitudes), in activist circles he has long been regarded as a wolf in multiculti clothing. 'I don't really get it,' says Gwendolyn Mink, the author of Welfare's End. 'The president has added more death-penalty crimes than any of his predecessors, and you certainly know about the racial effect of the death penalty. He's enacted a welfare reform that not only cancels an entitlement but also takes away rights from a certain caste of women. He pushed through NAFTA, which undermines the position of American workers. If there's a right-wing conspiracy, it's Bill Clinton.'
Manning Marable has an explanation for the spell Clinton has cast on the African American community. 'I mean, he's one of the few white people who knows all three stanzas of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' ' says the director of Columbia University's Institute for Research in African American Studies. 'And when he works a black audience, everything in his behavior shows that he feels at home.' Then, too, notes Marable, 'black people are not surprised by the contradictions in Clinton's conduct. We understand the gross behavior of the white ruling class.' Finally, there's a certain realpolitik behind the song and dance: 'Clinton appears to many black people as the left of what's possible in national politics.'
A similar sense of Clinton as the lesser evil informs what many feminist and gay activists feel about him. 'I lived through Reagan and Bush on AIDS,' says Urvashi Vaid, director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. 'It was a nightmare. You had Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer throwing up all sorts of obstacles. To me, that's immoral— so I don't see a greater moral deficiency in this administration.'
Indeed, Clinton has been better on AIDS funding than his predecessors, just as he has staunchly defended abortion rights, two areas— along with education— in which his case can be made on substantial grounds. 'The first thing he did on entering the White House was to end the policy forbidding abortion in any country receiving foreign aid,' Steinem recalls.
Yet, even as the A-list of the women's movement took to the airwaves in Clinton's defense during the impeachment, a less celebrated group of feminists hammered away at both his behavior and his policies. 'I wish, at times, that Pat Ireland [of the National Organization for Women] would say we like him because he's prochoice, but we think he's a bastard,' says Barbara Ehrenreich, one of Clinton's sharpest critics. 'Sure he's been good on abortion, but the biggest setback for women in many years was welfare reform. Adults on welfare are mostly women.'
Steinem points out that she held a hunger strike in front of the White House when the welfare bill was passed, but she maintains that 'in an ultraright time, Clinton's policies are both a disappointment and a better alternative.' To which Ehrenreich replies: 'Looking at it from some remove, you can see that, on the one hand you have the Republican right, which is rooted in nationally based capital and which has its ferocious social campaign, and on the other hand you have the Democrats, who are rooted in international capital and who don't have that social agenda— but who are just as bent on savaging the working class. If that's my choice, I'd sooner go after them all.'
At first glance, this may seem like a clash between the 'hard' and 'soft' left, but as Ellen Willis notes, 'Anyone who uses that dichotomy gives themselves away. We all know who's hard and who's soft, don't we?' Yet these terms hearken back 150 years to the war between Marxists and Socialists. In the 1960s, the battle was joined by a new tendency: identity politics. This largely middle-class ideology has been rubbing up against the class-based left for 30 years now, and Clinton rides this conflict like a rhinestone cowboy. He has effectively supplanted the far left by fashioning his own coalition of labor, women, and minorities, combining it with Silicon Valleyites and soccer moms. It's triangulation with a vengeance, and it's undermined a more radical politics.
'Labor and liberals have become a safe wing of the Democratic Party,' says labor historian Stanley Aronowitz. 'They feel they have such a precarious hold on power that they can't afford to alienate him. John Sweeney [head of the AFL-CIO] has been so soft on Clinton that he doesn't know where his ass ends and his interests begin. Is there a payback? In a pig's ass— because they're so worried about the right that they're not about to make any noise.'
Combine the president's manipulation of the left's domestic agenda with his outrageous military strikes and you've got a leader every bit as martial as Lyndon Johnson and a good deal less activist. It's these foreign adventures that the anti-Clinton left is focusing on (in part because they're easier for radicals to deal with than the sex scandals are). Horrified by support for the bombings by Congressional progressives, a group of historians has been circulating a petition to'impeach Clinton for the right reasons.' So far, about 240 prominent scholars— including Noam Chomsky and Edward Said— have signed the petition. No one expects it to change history, but at least it's a manifesto of dissent. As Sam Husseini of the left-wing Institute for Public Accuracy puts it, 'Supporting Clinton is assuring that you will get the worst possible Clinton.'
'In a political sense, I'm an anti-Clintonite,' says cultural critic Ellen Willis. But she distinguishes between those who want Clinton removed because of Iraq and those who 'essentially agree with the right that he should be impeached because of his conduct with women. I think this latter group has the same fundamental motivations as the right. The bottom line is that Clinton represents someone whose sexual persona violates their sense of traditional masculinism. Someone like Clinton was never supposed to be elected. And that's the cultural unconscious of some people on the left.'
It's certainly true that Hitchens, like Nat Hentoff, is antichoice and frequently critical of identity politics— and the venom in their bite can match any fanged conservative's. Historian and gay activist Martin Duberman calls this crew 'the angry white men of the left. They say they understand our oppression, but the real issue for them is class. What they really want is for us to drop our group identities in order to come back under this central banner.'
Just because these guys are progs doesn't mean they feel less marginalized by the changes in American life, or less appalled by the varieties of sexual experience. Yet, this being the left, the factions don't quite fit the mold of sexual politics. Some men Duberman considers angry and white— such as Michael Tomasky and Todd Gitlin— have defended Clinton, if only because he echoes their consensus liberalism, while radical feminists with militant class politics are leaders of the disloyal opposition.
'I'm just as critical of Clinton for the so-called cultural issues,' says Barbara Ehrenreich. 'One of my favorite things about welfare reform is the provision of money for chastity training for low-income women, on the Republican theory that the source of female poverty is promiscuity. I don't see how he represents personal liberty, and when accused of being an adulterer he turned himself into a profamily politician. So I have no brief for him on either side of that great issue.'
Yet, as the Clinton Question demonstrates, the rift between the class-based left and its cultural cadres remains as profound as ever. A class-conscious scholar like Gwendolyn Mink worries about what the left has lost in capitulating to Clinton: 'We've always been consistent in our claims, and now we've entered into this realm of relativism in which we just sort of like the guy, or feel safer with him. This is going to have very negative consequences. For example, it's going to be very hard, the next time a woman comes forward in a sexual harassment case, to insist that her complaint be fairly heard.' To Mink, the Juanita Broaddrick rape charge proves the point about Clinton: 'This isn't about social conservatism, it's about civil rights law.'
But to a cultural radical like critic Greil Marcus, Clinton's sexual sins are less disturbing than the impact his impeachment would have had on the entire political structure. 'We're talking about preserving a weird and tricky system that has kept government relatively fluid and kept alive a spirit of self- invention over a long period of time. Somebody like Hitchens doesn't give a damn about all that. The world he operates in is one where people will continue to service each other, shall we say, no matter who is president.'
For his part, Hitchens gives as good as he gets. Earlier this month, he fended off a roundtable of angry Nation staffers, and by now his rap against Clinton is a well-honed saber aimed at everyone from Gabriel García Márquez ('the stupidest stuff ever written about Clinton') and Jesse Jackson ('There's some log rolling going on there') to the entire 'soft left'— that phrase again.
'It starts with lesser-evilism, which is the advertised willingness to be fooled. Then there's political correctness, the bogus surrogate for politics. Clinton is a genius at this. If you take the Chinese soft-money scandal, his reaction was to say it's Asian bashing. Then there's the strong woman by his side, who fucked up health care and seems to be the bodyguard of a serial rapist.' (Hitchens says he knows of three other women who are ready to make the same allegation as Broaddrick.)
Are Clinton's crimes greater than his predecessors'? 'I don't think we know yet. Suppose there's a crisis in North Korea, which would also be a crisis with China. Suppose, on that day, Kathleen Willey comes to trial and Clinton has to weigh whether a certain action would be precipitous. I don't want to be around for that. When I point this out, people say, 'Didn't Reagan invade Grenada?' Yes, but he didn't do it to distract attention from the fact that he couldn't get it up with Nancy.'
Hitchens does admit that the rage against Clinton is 'something of a male preserve. It's true, he's the sort of guy who irritates you if you're straight, because you can see that he has success with women that he doesn't deserve. There's a certain kind of woman most women dislike but many men like— girls thought to let down their side by being too easy— and there's a corollary: a certain kind of man most men don't like, a cold charmer.' Here one glimpses the personality Katha Pollitt described in her 'Dear Christopher' letter, when she wrote, 'the complexity and erudition that characterize your writing, even at its most polemical, go out the window when women are the subject.'
Hitchens's response to that charge was to invoke the S-word. Stalinism is the ultimate imprecation for a leftie, and Hitchens throws it like a sucker punch. It even comes up when he explains why liberals seem paralyzed when it comes to dealing with Clinton: 'I think a lot of people are mesmerized with fear by the extreme right. I describe it as Medusa's Head Syndrome: just produce it if you want to stop an argument. It's a Stalinist trick to say there is a crisis and anyone who can't get on board is a traitor.'
As for the clear and present danger of being banished from certain dinner parties, Hitchens professes to be 'delighted at being despised.' Besides, he's convinced that, as Clinton's crimes are fully revealed, 'people will be more open-minded about what I did, and maybe even understand it.' But sympathy is scant solace to an avenger: 'All of these extraordinary betrayals inflicted on masochists— I wouldn't be interested in them protesting now.'
It's tempting to see l'affaire Hitchens as the latest example of sectarianism run amok. After all, who really cares about the bad faith of social democrats or the opportunism of Marxists with a hard-on for prime time? But something much bigger than anyone's ideological dong is at stake. This dispute is not just about misplaced loyalties; it's about the future of progressive politics.
Already, the right is rubbing its hands over what The Weekly Standard calls 'the silence of the Dems.' As Noemie Emery declared in its latest issue, 'Every feminist Democrat . . . who ever backed the Violence Against Women Act and then either defended Bill Clinton or has said nothing about him, is now fair game.' This may be whistling in the wind, but the prospect of being saddled with Clinton's sins is something the left can't ignore.
'There's been a certain duplicity on the part of many progressives,' says Barbara Ehrenreich. 'It has to do with the feeling of being part of the majority. It's interesting that the right likes to feel it's a tiny beleaguered minority, whereas the left loves the opposite delusion, which is that it's part of some vast groundswell that's not getting through to the media. You have to get beyond that and live with being a minority, and make the best possible attempt to change that status by arguing your case, not muffling it.'
After all, what if we had put up with Vietnam to preserve the War on Poverty? What if we'd let Reagan's popularity push us into a permanent retreat from politics? And what if, after 20 years in the wilderness, we settle for coffee with Bill and Hill as a surrogate for speaking truth to power? Then we have met the enemy, and he is us.
JUANITA BROADDRICK
REST OF US WILL NOT `MOVE ON' WITH RAPIST IN WHITE HOUSE
Seattle Times, The (WA)
EDITORIAL
March 9, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Sen. Patty Murray and the rest of the president's defenders must now help us get through the public unveiling of Jane Doe No. 5, Juanita Broaddrick, and her allegation that she was raped by former Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton during his 1978 gubernatorial campaign.
While several mainstream journalists believe her account is credible and partially corroborated, Clinton's $500-an-hour attorney, David Kendall, has sought to assure us otherwise. Equally impressive was Clinton's forthright and powerful denial when he told the press, "Well, my counsel has made a statement on this issue, and I have nothing to add to it."
National Organization for Women President Patricia Ireland states that Broaddrick's allegations are "serious" and "compelling," although apparently not serious or compelling enough to call for Clinton's resignation.
This is the same organization that demanded the removal of former Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood and actively opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. Ireland does warn Clinton not to advance the usual "nuts and sluts" defense this time around. She also urges those "who are horrified by the reality of rape" to support the passage of the Violence Against Women Act.
The Violence Against Women Act was introduced on Jan. 19, by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. Those who followed the House impeachment hearings may recall that Conyers and other Democrats frequently complained that the impeachment case lacked merit because no direct witnesses were called to testify.
Given that his bill concerns violence against women but most members of the Judiciary Committee are men, shouldn't a woman be allowed to testify about the horrors of rape? Perhaps Broaddrick would be willing to explain what it's like to be brutalized by a powerful sexual predator.
Meanwhile, those who continue to bend over backwards defending this president are going to need more than a good spin doctor; they're going to need a good chiropractor.
Common sense and common decency will not let the rest of us "move on" with an alleged rapist in the White House.
Michael F. Parry, Mercer Island
Anti-Violence Law Appeal Denied
Associated Press News Service, The
March 22, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
WASHINGTON (AP) - The first woman convicted under the federal Violence Against Women Act, sentenced to life in prison in the 1996 murder of her husband, lost a Supreme Court appeal Monday.
The justices, without comment, turned away the New Jersey woman's argument that Congress exceeded its power to control interstate commerce when in 1994 it made it a crime to cross state lines to hurt, harass or intimidate a spouse or intimate partner.
A New York-based federal appeals court had upheld the law and Rita Gluzman's conviction under it.
Monday's denial of review did not mean the Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court, and did not preclude the possibility that the justices someday might choose another case to judge the federal law's constitutionality.
In fact, a Richmond-based federal appeals court ruled earlier this month that the Violence Against Women Act unconstitutionally gives victims of rape and domestic violence the right to sue their attackers in federal court. Legal experts expect that Virginia case to make its way to the nation's highest court.
Underlying both cases was the scope of a 1995 Supreme Court decision that struck down as unconstitutional the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act. The justices ruled then that the law, making it a federal crime to possess a gun within 1,000 feet of any school, was insufficiently linked to interstate commerce and usurped states' authority over such crimes.
Congress can enact laws under its commerce powers only to regulate activity that ''substantially'' affects commerce, the court said in a decision that was quickly hailed by states-rights advocates as a landmark victory.
In the case acted on Monday, Mrs. Gluzman, a resident of Upper Saddle River, N.J., was arrested by New York police in the murder of her husband, prominent biologist Yakov Gluzman. Six days later, federal prosecutors interceded and charged her with the crime of ''interstate domestic violence.''
Prosecutors said Mrs. Gluzman and an accomplice, Vladimir Zelenin, traveled from New Jersey to Pearl River, N.Y., where her estranged husband was living, to murder him.
Zelenin had been arrested while dumping parts of Gluzman's dismembered body into the Passaic River.
After a federal trial, Mrs. Gluzman was convicted and sentenced to life on the domestic-violence crime.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld her conviction, giving short shrift to her argument that the federal law is unconstitutional.
Her Supreme Court appeal told the justices they should use her case to halt ''a pronounced tendency in the lower courts ... to restrict (the 1995 decision) to its facts and relegate its guiding principles to a quaint footnote in this court's ... jurisprudence.''
WHEN ABUSERS CROSS STATE LINES, IT'S A VERIFIED FEDERAL CRIME
Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram (ME)
March 28, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
In the murky world of domestic violence, the U.S. Supreme Court reminded us last week, not all men are villains and not all women are heroines. Judgment depends upon facts.
The court rejected without comment an appeal from a New Jersey woman who, in pursuit of her personal freedom, sought to strike down a 5-year-old federal law that helps protect all Americans from violence.
The woman is 51-year-old Rita Gluzman, now serving life in prison. Gluzman is behind bars for good reason. She was convicted in 1996 for "interstate domestic violence" in the gory murder of her husband, Yakov Gluzman, a leading national cancer researcher and molecular biologist.
The law Rita Gluzman asked the court to obliterate is the federal Violence Against Women Act, adopted as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. She is the first woman convicted under the act --and no wonder.
Few laws can adequately address the heinous crime that earned Rita Gluzman comparison with New England's Lizzie Borden. The Violence Against Women Act is one, and it proved devastatingly effective.
The dismal end of her story, however, stands in sharp contrast to its beginning. Imprisoned now as a villain, 28 years ago Rita Gluzman had her 15 minutes of fame as a genuine heroine.
It was then that she and her parents, a Jewish family eager to leave the Soviet Union, realized their dream. After 15 years of effort, they won permission to emigrate to Israel.
The dream, however, was deeply shadowed. Soviet officials refused to allow Rita's young husband, Yakov, a coveted scientist, to leave.
Soviet apparatchiks underestimated their adversary. Tenacious and smart, Rita Gluzman appealed to world leaders to help win her husband's freedom.
Shrugging off the risk of Soviet retribution, she appeared at U.S. rallies and demonstrations, speaking tirelessly in a campaign to focus attention on Soviet discrimination against her family.
Her campaign paid off. Yakov Gluzman was allowed to leave Russia and join his family in Israel. There, this story under the best of circumstances would end. But it doesn't.
Fast-forward 24 years to the Gluzmans living by then in this country, he in New York and she in New Jersey. Yakov Gluzman filed for divorce, claiming his wife was abusive. She countered with a claim accusing him of adultery.
Violence rendered both claims moot. According to police, Rita Gluzman, together with an accomplice, traveled to New York, bludgeoned Yakov Gluzman to death with an ax and hacked his body to pieces. The accomplice was apprehended dumping the grisly remains in New Jersey's Passaic River.
From there this heated story moves into the cool language of the courts. Citing the still-new 1994 domestic violence act, federal prosecutors took over the multistate case and secured Rita Gluzman's conviction, punishable by life in prison.
Yet the tenacity that distinguished Rita Gluzman decades earlier would distinguish her again.
She and her lawyers fought the conviction, arguing that the 1994 law making it a crime to cross state lines to hurt, harass or intimidate a wife, husband or other intimate partner exceeded Congress' powers to control interstate commerce. State laws, they contended, would have to suffice.
On the court's answer --a silent rejection last week -- hinged not only Rita Gluzman's fate, but the life and safety of many whom the Violence Against Women Act was passed to protect.
Count among them a million females, ages 12 and older, who each year experience rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated and simple assault inflicted by people who profess to love them.
Count among them more than a quarter-million women who annually fall victim to violent crime in their workplace. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that homicide is this nation's leading cause of death for women at work.
Count among them, too, the 350,000 women admitted to hospital emergency rooms each year for treatment for domestic assault.
Count among them the high percentages of welfare mothers and homeless women who respond "yes" when questioned about abuse.
And count, too, the one in every 12 women -- and one in 45 men -- who report they have been stalked at some time in their lives.
It is a widespread commerce in violence, both overt and hidden, fully as deserving of federal protection as the transport of newsprint --the paper you hold in your hand -- from a mill in Maine to a printing plant in Florida.
When Rita Gluzman set in motion the acts that led from her New Jersey home to the death of her estranged husband in Pearl River, N.Y., she crossed more than a state border. She crossed from state into federal law.
It is a law that helps protect us all.
Montague professor's group gets $449,000 in grants to study sex trade
Recorder, The (Greenfield, MA)
April 19, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
University of Massachusetts women's studies professor Janice Raymond of Montague has received two prestigious grants totaling $449,000 to study the impact of sex trafficking in the United States and abroad.
The grants have been awarded to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, a nonprofit international human rights organization that Raymond co-directs.
One grant, for $189,000, comes from the U.S. Department of Justice and is funded under the Violence Against Women Act. It will finance a 20-month long study of sex trafficking in three U.S. cities: New York, Minneapolis and San Francisco. Through interviews with nonprofit organizations, refugee groups, social service workers, law enforcement officers and women who are current or former prostitutes, Raymond will explore the links in these cities between domestic sex industries and international trafficking networks.
''The project will attempt to describe the social consequences of sex trafficking at home by examining patterns of crime, health and violence against women in these cities,'' Raymond said. ''In addition, we will attempt to show that sex trafficking is a complex system dependent on international and domestic linkages.''
The second grant will fund a two-year study into female migration patterns in Asia, Latin America and North America and show how these are linked to sex tourism, mail-order-bride arrangements, and domestic labor. This grant, from the Ford Foundation, is worth $260,000.
''An unfortunate side of the evolving global marketplace is that it is being accompanied by a comparable globalization of the sex industry,'' Raymond said. ''Patterns of female sexual exploitation are being internationalized, so that prostitution rings are being run almost like large multinational corporations. As a result, women are being moved from one country to another for the express purpose of being used in the sex industry. Our study will explore this phenomenon while specifically documenting the health burden of migrant trafficking on women.''
According to Raymond, the United Nations estimates that 4 million people, mostly women and girls, are trafficked throughout the world each year. Among these are: girls as young as 13 who have been trafficked from Mexico into the United States; hundreds of Russian and Ukrainian women who have been trafficked into the U.S. since the collapse of the Soviet economy, and 5,000 women of Chinese descent who are reported to have been trafficked into prostitution in Los Angeles.
Raymond notes that there are both large- and small-scale networks of recruiters. While many are related to organized crime, some are made up of relatives and neighbors who gain the women's trust in their countries of origin. However, Raymond emphasizes that the supply of women trafficked from abroad into the U.S. could not function without ''buyer'' demand for so-called ''exotic'' women from other countries, and that U.S. sex clubs, massage parlors and brothels capitalize on this demand.
''Sex trafficking is a gross violation of human rights,'' said Raymond. ''The costs in health and human services number in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And, of course, the human costs are immeasurable.''
The helpless immigrants
Non-citizen victims can seek residency on their own
Arizona Daily Star, The (Tucson, AZ)
April 25, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Many immigrant victims of domestic violence fear they have no choice but to stick with their husbands to stay in the United States.
But that's not necessarily the case.
The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 - or VAWA - allows immigrants who are married to abusive U.S. citizens or residents to file for residency status on their own.
The act mandates funding and services for those domestic violence victims. And a local program, Proyecto VAWA, has been set up to help them with the legal process and immigration paperwork.
Started in 1996, it's the only project in the state with this specific mission. It is planning to expand to Nogales by June and later to Sierra Vista.
Currently, Proyecto VAWA has 72 active and 11 new files, said Ruben Rivera, its accredited representative. The project received $87,040 from the governor's office for a year and a half, ending in March 2000. But it also has other funding.
Each week, Rivera interviews two to six new people, many of whom come from local shelters. Some have basic immigration questions, while others are eligible for free assistance.
``I think it's gone a long way. And I think it's been a tremendous help for a segment of the population that had very little immigration benefits or opportunities to be independent from abusers,'' Rivera said.
Another program helping immigrant women with legal issues is Southern Arizona Legal Aid, which gives free legal advice to the poor. It receives the majority of its funding from the federal government.
Since January 1998, it has handled 65 cases related to domestic violence of immigrants, said Valerie Hink, staff immigration attorney. Most of those cases are VAWA-related.
Under VAWA, a person who is married to a U.S. citizen or legal resident and can prove abuse is eligible to file immigration petitions on their own and for their children. Normally, the U.S. citizen or resident is responsible for submitting the paperwork on the spouse's behalf.
While the act mainly addresses married victims, there are also some allowances for others. For example, unmarried partners may be able to stay in the United States if they can prove hardship by returning to their home countries. Some can file for political asylum based on gender persecution.
Although the spouses of U.S. citizens and residents are eligible for residency, abusive husbands often do not finish the paperwork. Sometimes, they will withdraw petitions or even tell immigration officials that the women are cheating.
In about one-third of Proyecto VAWA's cases, the husband has not filed anything, Rivera said.
``The problem is that the immigration process itself becomes a tool for abuse of the spouse,'' Rivera said.
``They're the U.S. citizen. They have access to the judicial process in the U.S. They can have the woman deported if they want to. They use this to threaten and control their wives.''
Helen Gonzalez, Proyecto VAWA's first attorney until November, said many clients fear the system. In addition to being deported themselves, they are afraid of separation from their children, who are often U.S. citizens.
Abusers often will warn the women not to call police to report abuse.
This sometimes becomes a problem because women must document abuse when they file immigration petitions. But the immigration service accepts other proof, such as interviews with victims, witness accounts and counselor evaluations, Rivera said.
Gonzalez encourages victims to report the abuse, but she cannot guarantee that they will avoid deportation.
One of the first Proyecto VAWA clients was deported, Gonzalez said.
While the woman was driving with her husband and children, the husband got angry and told her to pull over. Once on the side of the road, the husband flagged down a passing Border Patrol car to have his wife deported.
The agent realized something was wrong, but chose to deport the woman anyway. But he allowed the woman to take her children.
``It was always a shame to me that I could not guarantee (that they would not be deported),'' Gonzalez said.
The immigration process can take several months.
Hink said it usually takes about a month to prepare the first application, then about six to 10 weeks to get a response. Then it can take another three months for a work permit.
The first filing fee is $80, but subsequent fees can cost several hundred dollars depending on the situation. Both Legal Aid and Proyecto VAWA have funds, but they are limited in helping all who need it, Hink said.
Overall, Hink said the law has improved, but there are still gaps - such as those for unmarried women.
``Immigration law in general has become more restrictive,'' Hink said.
Immigrant victims of domestic violence can get help finding their way through the immigration process by calling Proyecto VAWA at 740-1210.
Biden pushes forward to stop violence on women
Delaware State News (Dover, DE)
May 4, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
NEWARK -- Saying once is not enough, Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. is vowing to bring about phase two of his Violence Against Women Act.
Sen. Biden said the new efforts at protecting women from the violence they suffered in the past will be pushed this year in Congress.
The Delaware Democrat wasted no time in bringing out the ''heavyweights'' to underscore his deep feeling on the issue, inviting Attorney General Janet Reno and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to speak with him Monday at the University of Delaware.
''I know of no other senator who could get two cabinet secretaries to attend a conference like this,'' quipped Secretary Shalala.
''When Joe Biden snaps his fingers, things seem to have a way of getting done.''
Their discussion was facilitated by University of Delaware president Dr. David Roselle.
In a forum, attended by about 400 in Mitchell Hall, Ms. Reno, Secretary Shalala and Sen. Biden made it clear that although the first Violence Against Women Act has worked, there is still much to be done. ''I can't think of a better way to build momentum than to bring Attorney General Reno and Secretary Shalala to Delaware to speak about this problem,'' Sen. Biden said.
''Our message is clear -- violence against women will not be tolerated in Delaware or anywhere else in this nation.''
''This issue is important to me, because, as a prosecutor in Dade County, Florida, I saw first-hand how victims, the courts and police interacted on this topic, with little effect,'' the attorney general said.
''We have learned that a child who watches family violence, where his father or male role model punches his mother, is more likely to end up an abuser too and that is intolerable.''
Sen. Biden said when he first introduced the Violence Against Women Act in 1990, few thought it was important for the federal government to step into the issue.
''In the end, Congress reached a consensus that the federal government both could and should provide significant resources and leadership in a national effort to end the violence women suffer at the hands of men,'' he said.
The legislation was signed into law in 1994.
''Even though many of our programs are working, more needs to be accomplished,'' Secretary Shalala said. ''From 'date rape' to family violence, right on through elder abuse, we should be vigilant to see that these problems are addressed.''
Secretary Shalala said violence is not simply a problem of the poor, nor of women, alone.
''It is a problem for men, too,'' she said. ''Our agency wants to make sure that from the time someone calls for help they have a place to go.''
$1.62 billion over six years, Sen. Biden said more needs to be done to continue the progress being made to thwart the violence often associated with relationships and to educate those who are abused about the need to seek help.
One local law enforcement official who attended the roundtable discussion said he knows first-hand about the problems associated with domestic abuse and the fear of those involved.
''I had occasion to know someone well who was a victim of domestic abuse and it took almost a year to convince her she was a victim,'' said Dover Police Chief Keith I. Faulkner.
''That is part of what makes the entire issue so difficult, convincing the victims that they are not the ones to blame. It's tragic.''
Chief Faulkner said training programs and follow-up for police officers has been helped tremendously through the Violence Against Women's Act.
''We have gained a great deal of support, both financially and in awareness programs through the courts and social service agencies,'' he said.
''Even though we have a long way to go, in combating domestic violence and abuse, it is well worth every penny we can put into these types of programs.'' ''Whether it takes place in a dorm room or at home, there is no place in society today for violence,'' Secretary Shalala said.
NOW chapter breaks silence, attacks Clinton
Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL)
Author/Byline: Tricia Lewis and Jennifer Koehler (board members of Chicago NOW) - Guest View
May 14, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Over the course of the last year, many critics have condemned feminists for being unresponsive to the multiplying allegations against President Clinton. While all across this diverse country, the president's approval rating climbed with every new poll, predictably, the president's opponents singled out feminists as targets for their disgust. Now that the right-wing, media-fed hysteria surrounding the saga has subsided, Chicago NOW has a final comment.
Some feminists hesitated to rush to judgment on the allegations against the president with good reason. There is no question that the president's political agenda has advanced women's causes more than that of any other president in recent history. He signed the Family Medical Leave Act and the Violence Against Women Act into law, vetoed the "partial-birth" abortion ban and advocated for minimum wage increases and meaningful child-care initiatives. In addition, he appointed numerous women to his Cabinet, nominated Justice Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court and approved the nomination of many women to the federal bench.
Despite these accomplishments, Clinton did not receive the NOW endorsement for his 1996 candidacy. However, many other American women aptly predicted these political successes when they chose to become the driving force behind his campaign in 1992. Despite the revelation of the Gennifer Flowers affair, women turned out in droves for the president in 1992. At that time, most women considered the Flowers situation a private, consensual matter and an isolated incident. After his victory in 1992, he delivered on a few of his campaign promises by signing the Family Medical Leave Act and the Violence Against Women Act. Welcoming these modest successes after the Reagan-Bush years, women appropriately believed the president would lead us into a new era while supporting our causes. This belief led many women to actively support his campaign in 1996.
The irony of the situation is that while the president publicly cultivated a woman-friendly political image, behind the scenes, he demonstrated exceedingly bad judgment in his personal contacts with women. The result of his poor judgment is a serious erosion of his credibility with both women in general, and feminists in particular. Not every woman's accusation has been substantiated. However, the spectrum of the allegations, ranging from consensual sex all the way to rape allegations has led Patricia Ireland to declare that, regarding the Juanita Broaddrick accusation, "There's no way Bill Clinton can look into the cameras and deny it and have anybody believe it."
While some women reserved judgment on the earlier allegations against the president, there comes a time when enough is enough. President Clinton duplicitously curried favor with female voters, while demonstrating an outrageous disrespect for the average woman on the street. He has proved himself to be a liar, a manipulator and a leader we cannot trust. When the chief executive of the most powerful country in the world sets a poor example, it sends a horrible message to corporate CEOs and other members of the work force. At the same time, most people probably realize that if the president were a CEO, he probably would have been fired long ago.
Despite the pundits' accusations to the contrary, feminists are not willing to sacrifice the individual lives of women for the sake of political gains. We now have to wonder when those in power will realize that in the political world, it is untenable to maintain one standard of conduct in one's public life and another in one's private life. We hope our next president will learn from Clinton's many mistakes and realize it is no longer enough to throw money and resources at women's issues. Insincere lip service to our causes is insufficient. We prefer that the money and the resources be allocated by a leader who demonstrates the respect and professionalism that feminists have always tried to achieve. Anything less is undeserving of our appreciation and our vote.
STATES GAIN IN THEIR AUTHORITY THROUGH U.S. SUPREME COURT
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
Author/Byline: Aaron Epstein, INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU
May 17, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
In the unceasing constitutional conflict between the federal government and the states, the states are on the offensive and gaining ground.
The trend seems clear enough already to characterize the 1990s at the Supreme Court as the decade of a resurgence of state authority and a consequent corralling of national power.
In a series of decisions, nearly all by one-vote margins, five conservative, Republican-appointed justices have retreated from the court's previous endorsements of the power of Congress to regulate a vast array of activities.
That retreat appears far from over.
The justices are preparing opinions in a case that appears likely to further expand states' rights. They also plan to rule in three other disputes pitting federal authority against state sovereignty.
All the while, more federal-state controversies arrive at the court.
The states, armed with the ammunition furnished by the Supreme Court precedents, are in federal courts challenging national power in many areas - including employment, the environment, crime, bankruptcy, patents and copyrights - and making significant inroads.
"Whether states are being more aggressive or the federal government is being more overreaching is hard to say," observed Jeffrey S. Sutton, a Columbus, Ohio, lawyer who represents states in several Supreme Court cases challenging the enforcement of federal laws.
"The great danger," Sutton said, "is to allow the federal government to exercise power unchecked, rather than to resolve problems locally, where people know what is going on and are more likely to influence power than in Washington, D.C. So the states are flexing their muscles and protecting their jurisdiction."
Opponents of states' rights stress the need for uniform remedies for national problems, the ineffectiveness of patchwork solutions, and the constitutional supremacy of federal legislation.
Just last month, at oral arguments in a seemingly mundane case from Maine, five court conservatives appeared ready to rein in the national government once again - this time by ruling that state and local governments can ignore a federal law requiring that employees be paid minimum-wage scales and time-and-a-half for overtime work.
Sixty-five Maine parole officers and juvenile caseworkers, finding federal courts closed to them by an earlier Supreme Court ruling, want the right to go to state court to force the state to pay them federally guaranteed overtime.
But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who often casts the pivotal vote on federal-state issues, said tellingly: "I can't conceive of the Constitution being ratified if it were perceived that states could be sued in their own courts."
U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman warned that if Maine were allowed to override the federal labor law, the constitutional authority of Congress to make the nation's laws might as well have been "written in invisible ink." At their private conferences this month, the justices were scheduled to decide whether to intervene in four other federal-state disputes.
The case most likely to be accepted for review asks whether the states must obey the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. With numerous exceptions, the act prohibits the disclosure without consent of personal information - names, addresses, telephone numbers, sometimes medical information - that the nation's motorists provide to obtain state driver's licenses.
Congress enacted the law after hearing evidence that stalkers, robbers and assailants used state motor-vehicle records to find, threaten and assault victims.
But sales of the records to corporations, individuals and compilers of databases produce revenues for the states. New York, for example, collected $17 million in one year by selling information about drivers.
South Carolina challenged the federal law as an unconstitutional invasion of its turf - and won in the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Now the Clinton administration wants the Supreme Court to resolve the dispute.
Another federal law in line for a possible Supreme Court test is a provision of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, enacted as a uniform national response to sexual assault. The disputed provision allows anyone injured by "a crime of violence motivated by gender" to obtain greater damages from the perpetrator in a federal suit than in most state courts.
The appellate court in Richmond struck down the provision as a "sweeping intrusion . . . into areas of traditional state concern." Gender-based violence has no rational connection to the economy and therefore went beyond the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce, the court said.
That ruling came in a suit filed under the federal law by Christy Brzonkala, who said two Virginia Polytechnic Institute football players raped her.
Increasingly, state governors and legislators are challenging the validity of federal laws and regulations, or disputing the right of individuals to enforce them against the states. In doing so, they rely on states' rights written into the 10th and 11th Amendments.
The 10th Amendment provides that powers not granted to the U.S. government nor forbidden to the states are "reserved" to the state governments. The Richmond appeals court, for example, cited the 10th Amendment in nullifying the Driver's Privacy Protection Act.
The 11th Amendment protects states against being sued in federal court against their will.
The Atlanta-based Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit cited the 11th Amendment to bar professors and other employees at two state universities from suing their bosses - the states of Florida and Alabama - for age discrimination under federal law.
Those age-discrimination cases will be argued in the Supreme Court in the fall. Similar claims by faculty members at state universities in Connecticut and New Mexico depend on the outcome.
In another petition to the Supreme Court, lawyers for Illinois State University seek a ruling that would bar enforcement of the Equal Pay Act against the states. Female faculty members say the university violated the act by failing to pay them what men received for the same work.
And states are seeking 11th Amendment protection from suits that railroads are filing against them to avoid state taxes. The railroads rely on a federal rail reform law that prohibits states and local governments from levying taxes harmful to interstate commerce.
The trend toward limiting federal power began in 1992, when the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had improperly required states to control lower-level radioactive waste or to assume ownership of the waste. The federal government cannot command state legislators and state officials to carry out federal policy, the court said.
In 1995 the justices concluded that a federal law improperly barred anyone from carrying a gun near a school. It was the first time in 60 years that the Supreme Court ruled Congress had exceeded its power to control interstate commerce.
In 1996 the court said Congress unconstitutionally gave Indian tribes a federal right to sue states for refusing to negotiate the development of gambling casinos on tribal lands. That decision limited the ability of individuals to force states to obey various federal laws.
In 1997 the court ruled that Congress, in enacting the Brady Act, had unconstitutionally required state and local officials to enforce a five-day waiting period for gun purchases.
In another decision that year, the court upset the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, making it easier to apply state and local laws to churches claiming exemptions under the federal law.
Still in effect, however, is the 1985 case of Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, in which the court overturned an earlier decision and ruled 5-4 that state and local government workers were covered by the minimum wages and hours requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In that case, Justice William H. Rehnquist, now the chief justice, accurately predicted that the principle of state sovereignty would "in time command the support of a majority of this court."
QUIT CODDLING
LET'S PUNISH, NOT 'MANAGE' SPOUSAL ABUSE
Columbus Dispatch, The (OH)
June 2, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
A 10-hour anger-management class is billed as a last-ditch effort to punish Scioto County domestic-assault offenders who otherwise escape conviction. But the Scioto County Violence Diversion Education Program is neither a last-ditch effort nor, especially, punishment.
A last-ditch effort means police, prosecutors and judges have used every means available to identify, prosecute and punish those who abuse the people with whom they live. A recent Dispatch story raised doubts as to whether Scioto County residents enjoy that level of protection.
Portsmouth Municipal Judge William Marshall partly blames this on the county's high unemployment rate, which translates into cash-poor courts that can't afford longer-term counseling, prosecutors who can't afford to prosecute and police who can't afford to investigate.
The judge said he has held down the cost of the 10-hour program by forcing those he assigns to attend it to pay the $100 fee. Scioto County residents no doubt suffer financially, but that shouldn't mean they likewise suffer a second-rate sense of security. Marshall admitted that the diversionary program falls short of what's needed.
But the issue of expense should be secondary to the program's effectiveness; otherwise it promotes an unsupported sense of security that such a diversion actually cures anything. The program has been around only three years, so the repeat-offense rate of 18.3 percent, which is nothing to crow about, is inconclusive. A comparable 26-week Franklin County program is reserved for convicted offenders, and experts in the domestic-violence-offender-treatment field still don't consider that effective.
What's more, because Scioto County's violence-diversion course eliminates criminal charges, offenders can be arrested three times before facing a felony charge. There are no excuses for handling these people with anything but clear-cut prosecution and punishment. Then give them treatment.
When Portsmouth Police Chief Greg Ratcliff asks, "How can we convict this individual without the accuser?" he might as well ask how crimes ever are prosecuted without the accuser -- such as murder cases with no witnesses, or child-molestation cases in which the victim (and probably sole witness) is deemed unreliable.
How do law enforcers confront such challenges? They collect evidence.
That job should begin the moment an officer observes an abuse situation and decides an assault has occurred. Every law- enforcement officer in the state is required to attend 15 hours of domestic violence- oriented training.
If more training is needed, Ratcliff's department should get it. He should demand it.
The Governor's Office of Criminal Justice Services administers Ohio's $4.8 million share of the funding from the federal Violence Against Women Act. So far, 55 programs are running in the state. Judges, police chiefs and sheriffs should apply for these funds, over and over, until they get their share to do the job of prosecuting and punishing these abusers.
Fortunately, the Violence Against Women Act money is reserved for victims' service, prosecution and law enforcement -- not offender treatment. The focus should be on conviction and punishment before treatment.
Both the police chief and the judge in Portsmouth unfortunately still in part blame the victim, a viewpoint whose time has passed. Marshall blames low conviction rates for batterers whose victims often are unwilling -- usually scared to death -- to testify against their attackers.
The issue of victim compliance in the prosecution of domestic-violence cases has been well- debated in Ohio courts. In 1996, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld a Franklin County Municipal judge's dismissal of a domestic- violence charge because the victim didn't want to prosecute. The court ruled the judge was acting within his discretion.
In March 1998, an Ohio law took effect that prohibits a judge from dismissing charges over the objections of a prosecutor when the reason for the dismissal is the request of the complaining witness. This law correctly recognizes that, too often, perpetrators of domestic violence intimidate their victims into dropping charges.
Before Marshall came along and helped develop the anger-management diversion program in Scioto County, there was nothing.
"It's about money. It's sad. It's really sad," he said.
Enough with the sadness.
How about someone in Scioto County getting mad for the right reasons?
In 1998, 594 charges of domestic violence were filed against men and women in the county. More than half -- 305 -- were dismissed, including 114 dropped because perpetrators completed the anger-management course. The remainder often were reduced to lesser charges in plea bargains or were dropped at victims' request.
Marshall said batterers often won't plead guilty because they hunt and want to keep their hunting guns, a privilege at stake in a felony domestic-violence conviction.
Police and prosecutors should keep the pressure on.
MAN WHO KIDNAPPED GIRLFRIEND WILL BE RESENTENCED
APPEALS PANEL RULES
CASE IS FIRST IN MISSOURI UNDER FEDERAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO)
June 15, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
A man convicted of kidnapping his girlfriend after beating up one of her co-workers will be resentenced, an appellate judge panel ruled Monday.
The case had been the first prosecution in Missouri under the federal Violence Against Women Act.
Michael Sickinger, 41, of north St. Louis County, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years for kidnapping Judith Walker, 28, from an office in Clayton where she was part of a cleaning crew. Before abducting Walker, Sickinger threw a crew member to the floor and kicked her twice in the face, shattering bones in her eye socket and breaking her nose and sinuses, the appeals court said.
Sickinger then took Walker to Columbia, Ill., where police arrested him the next day.
In May 1998, a jury found Sickinger guilty of the Jan. 24, 1998, kidnapping and domestic violence against Walker, 28, of Imperial.
Sickinger argued in his appeal that the trial judge was wrong to have increased his sentence to reflect injuries Walker's friend suffered. The appeals court agreed that the sentencing guideline used in Sickinger's case applies solely to the kidnapping victim, not her friend.
But a resentencing doesn't automatically mean a shorter sentence. The court said that in resentencing Sickinger, U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber can consider another guideline that allows him to weigh the assault on Walker's friend.
"Even though we have ruled that (the friend's) injuries were not the injuries to a kidnapping victim that are dealt with in the kidnapping guideline, we are satisfied that sound procedure under guideline sentencing would permit the resentencing judge to reconsider the injuries ... and to determine whether they should be taken into account in ... reimposing sentence," the court said.
SUPREME COURT SHEDDING WASHINGTON OF ITS POWER UNDER CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST
THE CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY ON THE COURT HAS BEEN GIVING STATES MORE MUSCLE TO IGNORE FEDERAL LAWS
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
Author/Byline: Aaron Epstein, INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU
June 27, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
The Supreme Court of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, now 13 years old, is assured of a prominent place in American legal history. It has emerged as a potent check on the power of the national government.
On Wednesday, just before slipping away early for a summer rest, Rehnquist and his four conservative allies on the court showed what they care most passionately about, what they want to be most remembered for.
Not so much for how they have changed the law on such hot-button issues as race or religion, which they certainly have done, but for their powerful, yet still incomplete, impact on the fundamental design of government itself.
They are forcing a dramatic shift in the balance of state and federal power - away from Washington and toward the capitals of the 50 states.
Walter Dellinger, a liberal constitutional law professor at Duke University and former acting solicitor general for the Clinton administration, described the Rehnquist Court as supremely confident now in its willingness to hurl its gavel at Congress.
"By my count, the court has invalidated 11 acts of Congress in the last three years. We've seen nothing like this since the 1930s," Dellinger said.
Still, the court's doctrinal realignment of the federal-state structure is of little interest to most Americans. It recalls memories of dreary high school civics classes and is a fascinating topic mostly to legal scholars, who regularly write impenetrable tomes on the subject, which they call federalism.
But the court's constitutional reconstruction has practical consequences for everyone, consequences that will have an even greater impact in the future unless a presidential appointment robs the conservatives of their pivotal fifth vote.
In three ideologically identical 5-4 votes announced at the end of a generally dull term, the court allowed the states to ignore provisions in labor, patent and unfair-competition laws enacted by Congress.
The conservative majority held that without the consent of the states, 4.7 million state employees cannot sue when they are underpaid in violation of federal minimum wage or overtime requirements. And without the consent of the states, businesses and patent holders cannot sue state universities or agencies that enter the marketplace and infringe on private patents or compete unfairly in violation of federal laws.
Why? The states have "sovereign immunity" from private lawsuits.
Those words cannot be found in the text of the Constitution.
But, the court's conservatives said, the concept is embedded in the design of the nation's governmental structure, making it an essential, inviolable element of the division of power between Washington and the state capitals.
* It is on this closely divided issue, and no other, that the Supreme Court's five conservative justices invariably stick together, leaving the four moderate-liberals feeling helpless and unreconciled, and hoping that this narrowest of majorities will end with the next presidential appointment, or the one after that.
On other close questions, the shifting votes of the two centrist justices, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, usually prove decisive.
But in the states' rights cases, there are no swing justices.
The majority consists of Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Kennedy and O'Connor.
All but Thomas and Rehnquist were appointed to the current lifetime positions by President Ronald Reagan, a champion of curbing national power. President George Bush nominated Thomas. President Richard Nixon appointed Rehnquist.
The consistent dissenters in the states' rights cases are John Paul Stevens and David Souter, and President Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer.
How long will the thin conservative majority endure? At least for the remainder of this administration. Republicans controlling the Senate would be unlikely to confirm another nominee of President Clinton, especially with only 18 months left in his term.
The conservative majority could end if another Democratic president fills a vacancy caused by the departure of a conservative justice - most likely Rehnquist, who turns 75 on Oct. 1, or O'Connor, 69. On the other hand, the election of a Republican president and the departure of the oldest liberal, Stevens, 79, could strengthen the court's conservative margin.
Meanwhile, more states' rights cases have arrived in the court's mail, each carrying repercussions for millions of Americans.
The justices already have agreed to decide whether state employees in Florida can sue the state for violating the federal law against age discrimination, and whether a federal privacy law can stop states from collecting millions of dollars in revenues on the sales of personal information on applications for state drivers' licenses.
Yet another case could stop sexually assaulted women from suing states under the Violence Against Women Act, and underpaid women from suing states under the Equal Pay Act.
* Certainly the Rehnquist Court's legacy must include its repeated condemnation of government policies that treated people based on their race.
In its apparent effort to move the nation toward a colorblind legal landscape, it has struck down black voting districts, restricted federal affirmative-action programs, limited school-desegregation programs, and permitted minority preferences to be barred in university admissions.
Its impact has been felt, too, on religious questions. It has altered earlier notions of church-state separation, drilling new holes in Thomas Jefferson's metaphorical wall preventing government and religion from intruding on each other.
But it would be wrong to conclude that the current court shortchanges personal liberties.
The court this term barred police from taking reporters and photographers into suspects' homes, struck down a federal law prohibiting casino advertising, knocked out a state law restricting solicitations of signatures on petitions, and nullified a city ordinance that gave the police broad leeway to arrest loiterers in gang-infested neighborhoods.
"It's widely perceived that this is a conservative Supreme Court, [but] I think this term suggested something to the contrary, that it is very much civil libertarian-oriented," said Theodore B. Olson, a former official in the Reagan administration's Justice Department who analyzes Supreme Court developments.
In earlier years, the Rehnquist Court invalidated state laws that crippled abortion rights, struck down a state referendum that denied legal protections to homosexuals, and forced Clinton to face a woman's sexual-harassment suit.
Struggling to find a unifying theme for the court's seemingly disparate impulses, Dellinger mused: "This is a court that doesn't defer to any government. That may be the heart of it."
* The 1990s trend toward limiting federal power began seven years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had improperly required the states either to control their lower-level radioactive waste or to assume ownership of the waste.
But Rehnquist foretold the direction in which he would later take the court in 1985, when it ruled, 5-4, in the case of Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority that state government workers are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, a federal law prescribing minimum wages and hours in the workplace.
Rehnquist, then an associate justice, dissented, predicting that in time the Garcia decision would no longer "command the support of a majority of this court."
That is true today. Rehnquist's majority did not overturn Garcia, but it shut state and federal courthouses to private suits for money owed, leaving state workers with a right they cannot enforce.
Lawyers tackle immigrant dilemma of abuse vs. deportation
Associated Press Archive
July 2, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Laura's husband beat her until her arms and legs were black and blue. He pointed a gun at her and threatened to kill her. Then he told her if she ever tried to leave him, he'd keep their twin babies and have her deported.
She let the attacks continue for four years.
"I didn't know the laws here," said the 31-year-old woman who moved from Veracruz, Mexico, to Texas' Rio Grande Valley as a teen-ager but speaks only Spanish.
Laura thought if she left her husband, a legal resident, she would be sent back to Mexico without her 4-year-old son and daughter, both U.S. citizens.
Her story is similar to those of hundreds of immigrant women in Texas and thousands of others elsewhere, women who stay with abusive husbands because they fear being deported and separated from their U.S.-born children. Many are not aware that spousal abuse is illegal in the United States or don't know how to get legal help.
A new legal project in Texas is designed to help battered immigrant women like Laura, who now has an application pending to become a legal resident and is living on her own with the children.
Project organizers are recruiting lawyers to take such cases pro bono and teaching them about federal laws designed to stop domestic abuse.
Only in the last few years have immigrant spouses been permitted to file their own petitions for legal-resident status. In the past, they had to rely on the spouse who was a U.S. citizen or legal resident to file on their behalf.
In Laura's case, her husband "used his legal permanent resident status to dominate this woman and to control her," said her lawyer, Ray Gill.
Gill is among about 400 lawyers who have participated in training workshops held in 10 Texas cities in the last year on how to use the federal Violence Against Women Act of 1994.
The law allows an abused wife to file a residency petition on her own, as long as she is still married to the U.S. citizen or permanent legal resident.
Julie Oliver, executive director of Texas Lawyers Care, said she wanted to jump on the opportunity the new law provided to immigrants facing a terrible dilemma.
"They were here because of being married to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and totally dependent upon that person for the right to stay," she said. "If they left the batterer, they probably would lose their legal status and also lose their kids, or have to return to their home country with kids who are U.S. citizens and don't have any knowledge of their home country."
Working with advocates at womens' shelters is crucial, she said, because abused women often have no money when they leave their husbands and wouldn't think to contact an attorney.
In order to win residency, a woman must be able to document the abuse -- with police records, hospital records, affidavits from friends. She also has to show that she is of good moral character and that she would suffer hardship if deported.
One Mexican woman in Dallas had no problem documenting abuse. When she showed up at Catholic Charities Immigration Counseling Services, a worker took pictures of the bruises on her face, neck and shoulders. She had affidavits from neighbors and a police report.
Susie Hoeller, a lawyer who volunteered to take the case, was able to win a green card for the woman, a mother of six who was working 60 hours a week for a landscape company.
Hoeller went through the training because she was sympathetic to the plight of such women: "I thought they had rights that needed to be protected."
Law lets battered immigrants escape abuse, stay in U.S.
Star-Ledger, The (Newark, NJ)
July 26, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Two years ago, when Pat confronted her new husband about the women's shorts she found in their apartment, he knocked her unconscious.
Two months later, they argued again about his cheating. That time, he punched, kicked and burned her with a steam iron, leaving scars that are still visible. Even after the second attack, Pat, a tall, sad-eyed immigrant from Jamaica who asked that her last name and her husband's name be withheld to protect her, hesitated to report him. She was afraid she'd get deported.
Pat, who is in her 30s, was here illegally and dependent on her husband, a permanent U.S. resident, to help her establish residency. "I was scared that maybe Immigration would take me away," she said. "I felt so ashamed. It's a bad thing. You just got married and you're being treated like this. I didn't want anybody to know."
When Pat finally summoned the courage to call the police, she was not deported. Instead, with the help of the American Friends Service Committee in Newark, late last year she successfully petitioned the INS for legal residency without the support of a sponsor, as usually required.
The self-petition process, a provision of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, has allowed hundreds of battered women to escape violent marriages and win legal residency in the United States.
Prior to passage of the legislation, someone who was in the country illegally or who had only temporary working papers had to depend on the support of a husband, wife or parent with legal standing to file for permanent residency.
"It has given women who are victims of domestic abuse the freedom to leave abusive relationships, the freedom to not have to rely on their abusers to file papers for them with Immigration," said Amy Gottlieb, a staff attorney with the American Friends Service Committee who filed Pat's self- petition.
Congress passed the legislation after a grassroots campaign by organizations such as Ayuda, a Washington, D.C., women's advocacy group that reported complaints from thousands of immigrants locked into violent marriages for as long as 20 years.
"These were women who, as a matter of law, technically had an avenue to obtain a green card but because their husbands controlled the process they weren't able to do so," said Leslye Orloff, a former Ayuda coordinator and attorney who represented about 800 Latina victims of spousal abuse. "Which meant they couldn't get protection, they couldn't call police, they couldn't cooperate with a prosecution because they would risk deportation."
Thousands of women have filed self-petitions since the regulations were put in place in March 1996, and the number has risen every year since, said Elaine Komis, a Washington-based spokeswoman for the INS.
Gottlieb said her office has handled at least 25 self-petition cases since the INS guidelines were established. In a recent week, six women came to her office for consultations on the self-petition requirements.
"We now have shelter workers reaching out to us, and I think that's been the reason for the increase," she said.
Still, many law enforcement, municipal and shelter workers do not know about the law and many victims are too afraid of being deported even to ask for help from lawyers or immigration authorities. Many are also daunted by the complexity of the process and the amount of paperwork required.
To win residency through a self-petition, a woman must be able to document domestic abuse using police and hospital records, along with personal affidavits and statements from friends. Copies of restraining orders, evaluations by psychiatrists, reports from professionals at shelters for battered women and photographs of injuries resulting from physical battery can also be used as evidence.
"The greatest difficulty in getting these cases through is gathering all of the documentation required by the INS," said Frank Holland, managing attorney for the Catholic Community Services Office of Migration in Newark.
Victims also must show they are of good moral character and would suffer hardship if deported, as Holland proved in the case of a Portuguese migr who gained permanent residency in Massachusetts in 1998.
"I was able to demonstrate that the husband could follow his wife to the home country and continue to batter his wife without the protections afforded by the United States legal system," Holland said. "There were no battered-women shelters in the home country, and the home country did not have restraining orders in the way that the United States does."
Women who have successfully filed self-petitions say that despite the difficulties of the process, it gave them a chance they thought they would never have.
Yugoslavian migr Jeffria Coma says that at one time she thought she'd never escape her husband, who beat her repeatedly, leaving her with a damaged left eye and other physical and psychological wounds.
Coma eventually found her way to the American Friends Service Committee and in 1996 became one of the first New Jersey women to file a self-petition. She is now a permanent resident, holds a job with a pension and a 401K plan and recently bought a house in Morris County for herself and her three children.
"If I had power, I'd like this law to help all women in this country," Coma said. "Because I am lucky to be alive."
Legal scholars debate Second Amendment case in Texas
Associated Press Archive
September 7, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
A judge's landmark ruling that the Second Amendment gives individuals, and not just militias, the right to bear arms has touched off a furious debate among constitutional scholars that could go all the way to the Supreme Court.
The debate began unfolding after Dr. Timothy Joe Emerson of San Angelo was arrested and accused of brandishing a handgun in front of his wife and her daughter. He was charged with violating a 1994 federal law that prohibits someone under a restraining order from owning a gun.
U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings dismissed the charges in April, declaring the law unconstitutional based on a "historical examination of the right to bear arms, from English antecedents to the drafting of the Second Amendment."
Cummings said the right to bear arms is a protected individual right -- and not just a right belonging to a militia, as federal prosecutors had argued.
It is believed to the first decision in which a judge specifically called a law unconstitutional because it infringed on an individual's Second Amendment rights. The law was part of the Violence Against Women Act.
Before the ruling came down, gun-control opponents inundated the judge with scholarly treatises encouraging him to strike down the law.
Last week, 52 legal scholars who support gun control filed a brief denouncing Cummings' interpretation of the Second Amendment, which reads: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
"That decision and the opinion were a major shot across the bow," said Bruce Hay, a Harvard law professor who signed the brief. "For the most part, federal courts have taken a hands-off approach to federal statutes regulating use of guns. This is the first decision to say the Second Amendment prohibits Congress from imposing special laws concerning gun ownership. That is why his decision is so worrisome."
Scholars say the decision sets the stage for the challenge of almost any law abridging an individual's right to possess a gun.
Prosecutors are appealing to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The judge "glossed over case law and relied primarily on historical analysis, and it's important for courts to follow the decisions made by courts before them," Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Mateja said.
The stakes are high.
"Growing public sentiment for a final decision on the issue is high because of school shootings and office shootings," said David Yassky, a Brooklyn Law School professor who wrote the brief. "The time is right for a serious decision to be made."
The brief accuses the judge of misinterpreting the Second Amendment, which Yassky writes was meant to "preserve organized, state-based militias," and not intended to "empower individuals or small groups of disaffected citizens to take up arms against the established order."
Yassky said the vast majority of legal scholars believe the Second Amendment was intended to protect states' militias from the new central government created by the Constitution.
Scott Powe, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, disputed Yassky's position, and charged that only three of the co-signers of the brief were "serious" constitutional law scholars.
"The brief is seeking to suck the meaning out of the words 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,'" Powe said. "The meaning is clear. It couldn't be more clear."
Jim Manown, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, said most Americans support the "traditional understanding" of the Second Amendment as guaranteeing the individual's right to bear arms.
"The road to the Supreme Court is a long one, but the interest this has generated and the fact that it is being appealed will only mean the importance of this case will be heightened," Manown said.
Nancy Hwa, a spokeswoman for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, denounced the judge's ruling as "a renegade decision that the gun lobby is trying to hide behind."
"But this time, the gun lobby won't be able to hide. Scholars are stepping forward to make sure the reality of the Second Amendment is clear," she said.
One expert who does not fit easily into either camp is Laurence Tribe, the liberal Harvard law professor.
Tribe's recently published text, "American Constitutional Law," concludes that the Second Amendment assures that "the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification." His position has provoked gun-control advocates, and he says he has received "an avalanche of angry mail from apparent liberals."
But he said he also does not agree with Cummings' ruling.
"Judge Cummings went too far with his decision, saying that Congress cannot define categories of people to whom it would be dangerous to allow to bear arms," he said. "The Second Amendment provides individual right, but not an unbounded right."
Christy and the Constitution
Tulsa World (OK)
Author/Byline: JAMES J. KILPATRICK
September 7, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
On Sept. 13, 1994, President Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act. A week later, on the 21st, two men raped Christy Brzonkala. In April 1995, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote the Supreme Court's landmark opinion in the case of Alfonso Lopez. Now it is all coming together.
Once again the high court will have to cope with Congress and the commerce clause. Are there no limits to the power of Congress "to regulate commerce among the several states"? If there are limits, do they apply in the Brzonkala case? The young woman was certainly the victim of violence: She was raped in her dormitory by two football players at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
The question before the high court may be phrased bluntly: How did gang-rape get to be the business of the U.S. Congress? Rape is a terrible crime. No one condones it. In this case the indifference of the university matched the brutality of the men. The punishment imposed by VPI (a pat on the wrist) was both shameless and shameful, but let that topic go.
The case now pending in the Supreme Court is Brzonkala's second attempt at compensation. An earlier suit against VPI, alleging violation of her civil rights by a state agency, foundered in the 4th U.S. Circuit two years ago. The pending case, alleging violation of VAWA, is a private civil action brought directly against her attackers.
The case is important. It asks the high court to re-examine its dramatic opinion in Lopez by exposing the flimsy constitutional foundation on which the Violence Against Women Act depends. The theory, adduced from four years of off-and-on hearings in both House and Senate, is that violence against women significantly affects interstate commerce.
Sponsors of VAWA cite evidence that 4 million women are battered every year, chiefly by their husbands or lovers. An estimated 2,000 rapes occur every week. The story is appalling, but an inescapable question remains: Do the figures add up to a constitutional violation? Yes, say VAWA's defenders. Gender-based crimes deter interstate travel. They narrow employment opportunities. They increase expenditures for health, and they reduce consumer spending. They deter women from full participationin the national economy. They diminish national productivity. And so on.
These congressional conclusions have impressed some federal judges. Janet Bond Arterton, a district judge in Connecticut, held in June 1996 that "a rational basis exists for concluding that gender-based violence is a national problem with substantial impact on interstate commerce."
One month later, Judge Jackson L. Kiser in Virginia came to precisely the opposite conclusion in the first Brzonkala case. Violence against women, he wrote, "involves intrastate activity which is not commercial or even economic in nature." He added:
"Any interstate nature of VAWA is insignificant. VAWA regulates local criminal activity. It does not regulate the growth of crops, the shipment of goods, or other similar economic activities. ... "Without a doubt violence against women is a pervasive and troublesome aspect of American life which needs thoughtful attention. But Congress is not invested with the authority to cure all of the ills of mankind. Its authority to act is limited by the Constitution, and the constitutional limits must be respected if our federal system is to survive."
Judge Kiser's opinion strikes me as sound doctrine. The elaborate congressional "findings" are a melange of inference, conjecture and surmise. The Violence Against Women Act, in Tennyson's phrase, is ice on summer seas.
In order to uphold VAWA the high court will have to reconsider Rehnquist's opinion in the Lopez case four years ago. There the court ruled 5-4 that the Gun-Free School Zone Act impermissibly stretched the boundaries of the commerce clause. Possession of a firearm near a school may affect education in some unknowable degree, but the act, said Rehnquist, "neither regulates a commercial activity nor contains a requirement that the possession be connected in any way to interstate commerce." The same objections may be voiced against the Violence Against Women Act.
Underlying the cases of both Alfonso Lopez and Christy Brzonkala is a fundamental principle of American government. The 10th Amendment spells it out. The powers not delegated to Congress by the Constitution, nor prohibited by the Constitution to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Congress has power to regulate commerce. It has no power to regulate rape.
TIME IS RUNNING OUT TO RENEW ACT AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Buffalo News, The (NY)
September 25, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
It is widely believed that about 4 million American women each year are targets of domestic violence.
That figure can be challenged easily because despite yeoman work by the U.S. Justice Department Bureau of Statistics and any number of medical and academic researchers, family violence remains largely hidden, and it is still hard for many women to admit that someone who "loves" them can treat them so badly.
Statistics show men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes, but when women are the target, the perpetrator often is a spouse, partner, close friend or relative.
So when the Commonwealth Fund reported in 1993 that nearly 4 million women are abused by their husbands or boyfriends every year and that 42 percent of female homicide victims are killed by their intimate male partners, the response was greater public awareness and tougher laws that moved spousal abuse into the criminal courts.
The Violence Against Women Act passed by Congress in 1994 has funded a range of local programs that assist and protect victims of domestic violence.
Ironically, as they prepare to mark Domestic Violence Month starting next week, activists fear many of these programs are endangered. Unless Congress renews the act before the end of October, they will run out of funds.
They are drumming up support for bills pending in Congress that would renew Violence Against Women Act programs for another five years and inaugurate new programs for the disabled, immigrant and Native American women, address hate crimes based on gender, sexual orientation or disability and combat violence in the workplace.
However, another proposed bill is being opposed by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
The "Unborn Victims of Violence Act" that cleared the House Judiciary Committee last week would make the fertilized egg in a woman's womb a potential victim of crime. The legislation makes it a separate offense if an individual either injures a fetus or causes a miscarriage, and the punishment for that offense would be the same as if the defendant's act resulted in death or injury to the woman.
The act is a response to incidents in which violent attacks on pregnant women have resulted in a woman's death and/or a miscarriage. But pro-choice feminists see the bill, written in part by the National Right to Life Committee and sponsored by anti-choice legislators, as a stealth attack on abortion rights as well as a "failure to address the very real need for strong federal legislation to prevent and punish violent crimes against women."
As the legislative battles continue, women's advocates seek ways to lessen the dangers in a society that seems to be growing increasingly violent. In the coming weeks events across the country will focus on the causes and cures of not just the epidemic of mass killings but of the everyday abuse that is taking a terrible toll on women and children.
Gloria Steinem thinks one place to begin is to look at how we are rearing boys.
Suggesting that the male model of superiority and dominance is contributing to violent behavior by white males, Steinem wrote in a recent issue of Ms.: "We have begun to raise our daughters more like our sons -- more like whole people -- we must begin to raise our sons more like our daughters -- that is, to value empathy as well as hierarchy; to measure success by other people's welfare as well as their own."
The local observance of the domestic violence month will begin Friday when the Erie County Coalition Against Family Violence will hold a march beginning at 11:30 a.m. at Lafayette Square. The event will conclude with a rally at City Hall. Call 858-7878 or 884-6002.
A Heal the Hurt Walk to benefit victims of family violence will be held by Expressly for Women at Sisters Hospital on Oct. 10. The walk begins at Kinch Auditorium, behind the hospital, at 9 a.m. and will continue for 21/2 miles to Delaware Park and back. A $10 registration fee covers a T-shirt, prizes and refreshments. Call 862-1947.
Sunanda Gandhi of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence will speak on "Confronting Violence Against Women" at a luncheon Oct. 20 in Fanny's Restaurant as part of the YWCA's Week Without Violence, opening Oct. 17 with a Day of Remembrance in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo. The $20 luncheon fee benefits the YWCA's violence prevention program. Other events that week include a concert featuring several local bands from 3 to 11 p.m. Oct. 23 at Spot Coffee. Preceding the concert, there will be a sports and recreation program at the Downtown Y. Call 852-6120 for a complete schedule.
COURT TO RULE ON VALIDITY OF VICTIMS' SUITS
Columbian, The (Vancouver, WA)
September 28, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
The Supreme Court today agreed to decide whether Congress exceeded its authority when it enacted a 1994 law allowing rape victims to sue their attackers.
The court, which has eroded Congress' power in a series of recent rulings, said it will use a Virginia Tech student's lawsuit against two football players to study a key provision of the Violence Against Women Act.
A federal appeals court threw out the student's lawsuit after ruling that Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce and assure all citizens of equal protection did not authorize it to give rape victims the right to sue their attackers for monetary damages.
The federal law also has criminal provisions, but those are not at issue in the Virginia case.
The case will be argued this winter. A decision is expected sometime in 2000.
Christy Brzonkala became the first person to sue under the federal law when, in late 1995, she sued Antonio Morrison and James Crawford, alleging that the two student athletes raped her in a dormitory room.
Brzonkala, who has allowed her name to be disclosed, did not report the alleged rape for several months. No charges were filed against the two men.
A federal judge in Virginia ruled that the law's provision allowing victims of gender-based violence to sue their attackers is invalid, but a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling and revived Brzonkala's lawsuit.
NOW's agenda now clear: If it involves men, it's wrong
Delaware County Daily Times (Primos - Upper Darby, PA)
October 27, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
You no longer have to read between the lines to divine the National Organization for Women's agenda. In a way, it seems refreshingly simple: No Men.
That's the only conclusion one can draw upon reviewing NOW's objections to proposed federal legislation, popularly known as the "Fathers Count" bill (HR 3073).
The bill isn't exactly a mainstream father's dream. Mostly, the bill creates programs to help unemployed fathers find jobs so they can produce child support for their welfare progeny. In fact, men's rights activists aren't wild about the bill, saying that it addresses only the financial responsibilities of fathers while ignoring more pressing (child access) concerns of fathers disenfranchised by courts that favor mothers.
Still, on Planet Deadbeat, it's better than nothing. But NOW really doesn't like the bill because, well, it seems helpful to men. The fact that helping men might result ultimately in helping women and children is irrelevant. Anything that purports to help men is suspect.
In the case of the "Fathers Count" bill, NOW claims that it's unconstitutional. Martha F. Davis, legal director for NOW's Legal Defense and Education Fund, recently wrote the following to Rep. Nancy L. Johnson, chair of the subcommittee on Human Resources: "Because they (the bill's authors) tie the federal benefits available under the Act to gender (i.e. "fatherhood"), these provisions violate the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution." At NOW's insistence, language has been added to the "Fathers Count" bill so that mothers, expectant mothers and married mothers are eligible for benefits and services on the same basis as fathers, expectant fathers and married fathers. Even so, NOW is challenging the bill on its gender-constitutionality. One could cast NOW's protest in a favorable light. They just want to advance equality, right? But one would be wrong. When it comes to legislation aimed only at helping women, NOW forgets everything it knows about the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. For example, NOW issued no such protest to the grant application kit for victim services under the Violence Against Women Act Fund, which specifically states: "A VAWA-funded project may not use VAWA funds or matching funds for projects that focus on children or men." Selective constitutionality at its shameless best. Then, last week -- in an astonishing show of its true colors -- NOW began protesting Vice President Gore's support of the "Fathers Count" bill, pointing out that the bill would funnel $150 million to "local and national organizations, many of them likely to be fathers' rights groups and right-wing (as opposed to left-wing) religious organizations." In an e-mail alert, NOW urged its members to lobby Gore to oppose the bill because, get this, the act would give money to organizations that: "promote marriage; enhance relationship skills; teach how to control aggressive behavior; promote successful parenting; train parents in money management; encourage regular visitation between fathers and children; help fathers and their families avoid or leave welfare; improve fathers' economic status" by providing work services and education. Well, hell's bells. Who'd want such a thing as that? Successful marriage, responsible parenting, financial independence? What we clearly need in this country are more bad marriages, more bad parenting, more welfare families. You have to wonder why anyone would find fault with a government program that promotes the concept of people looking after their own families, trying to get along.
You have to wonder, and then you remember what they say: Follow the money. NOW's livelihood depends on the perception of women as victims. Strengthening families and reinstating fatherhood threatens that status and the organizations that thrive on it .
Kathleen Parker is a syndicated columnist. Her column appears Wednesday and Saturday.
Testing limits of federal power
Washington Times, The (DC)
November 27, 1999
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
With President Clinton issuing a blizzard of executive orders and Congress federalizing hundreds of crimes that are properly in the jurisdiction of the states, we must depend on the Supreme Court to stand for the constitutional principles of federalism. The chief reason Americans have retained their liberties through two centuries of governance by power-seeking politicians is the separation of power between the states and the federal government, and then among the three branches.
The latest case that puts this to the test is Brzonkala vs. Morrison, which is before the court in the current session. It tests the constitutionality of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) passed in 1994 under feminist pressure in the wake of the much-ballyhooed Tailhook incident.
Ordinarily, the lack of actual and credible complaints, evidence or convictions would preclude million-dollar lawsuits over private conduct. But VAWA allows for attorneys' fees and punitive damages for alleged violence that was never reported to the police, let alone proven in criminal court.
VAWA's Section 13981 expressly states that "a prior criminal complaint, prosecution or conviction" is not required in order to recover "compensatory and punitive damages." Plaintiffs can go into federal court seeking millions of dollars by alleging violence without ever alerting the police that a crime may have taken place.
Real violence should be reported to the police to enable credible investigation and prevent recurrence of the violence. Federal law should not provide financial incentives to bypass police investigations.
Plaintiffs should not be allowed to sue in civil court on claims embellished by allegations of violence without independent and timely investigation by local law enforcement. VAWA's Section 13981 creates such incentives for new federal lawsuits alleging crimes long after the relevant state statute of limitations has expired.
In attempting to create a new federal cause of action for monetary damages, VAWA relies on the Commerce Clause and Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. If upheld, VAWA would be an extraordinary and unprecedented extension of federal power into the areas of domestic violence and family law.
The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce in order to ensure the free flow of goods and services. Domestic violence has absolutely nothing to do with commerce or the flow of goods.
Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to protect citizens against state violations of their rights. However, VAWA attempts to reach private conduct completely removed from any state action.
The federal government should not be undermining state criminal laws. No one is helped when violence against women is trivialized into allowing law firms to strategize over how to make the most money from an ugly situation.
The specific facts represented in the Brzonkala case were, indeed, ugly. But this case is about trying to recover a large judgment in federal court by accusations of a rape that was not promptly reported to the police.
When money, rather than criminal justice, is the name of the game, the courts and the public are unable to sift fact from fiction. Under VAWA's approach, real criminals will go free while the falsely accused will be subjected to financial and reputational ruin.
Congress has no constitutional basis for regulating marriage or domestic relations. It is neither constitutional nor prudent for Congress to impose its one-size-fits-all view of domestic relations on the states.
VAWA's attempt to federalize issues such as rape, spousal rape, spousal immunity and other aspects of domestic relations would open the door for Congress to federalize marriage itself. If VAWA's Section 13981 is upheld, there would be no logical basis to prevent Congress from regulating marriage, alimony, child custody and other aspects of family law.
Just as Congress should not impose a uniform federal remedy for murder, Congress should not impose a uniform federal remedy for domestic violence. It is foolish to pretend, as VAWA implicitly does, that a perpetrator of a violent rape will be deterred by the threat of a future lawsuit to recover money.
Real violence is restrained by law enforcement, not by civil lawsuits. VAWA is an unconstitutional infringement on state jurisdiction over marriage and domestic relations. A "War on Domestic Violence," like the "War on Drugs," does not justify suspension of the Constitution in the process.
Phyllis Schlafly is a nationally syndicated columnist.
