Via Pam's House Blend, we find efforts were being made to kill hate crimes legislation which would protect the LGBT community - not by objecting a proposed bill, but rather by adding a "poison pill" amendment which would revise it to the point of unsupportable. And they just passed last night.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) added amendments to the Matthew Shepard Act which will in effect kill the legislation; for example, one amendment will apply the death penalty in some hate crimes cases. His two other amendments are also seen as burdensome to the bill and a blatant Republican attempt to put the legislation to sleep.
This is especially bad considering the bill is already in danger being attached to the Defense Appropriations Bill. (Which may be vetoed by the president because of controversial funding requests for F-22 fighter planes.)
For those who don't know, Jeff Sessions was the asshole who grilled Sotomayor last week, accusing her of being a racist (while he was rejected to serve as a federal judge in '84 for making racist remarks). And he now serves as a force in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he himself has called "a great irony." At least that's one thing we can agree on.
Update: Just found out that the Senate voted to stop the production of F-22 planes, which takes away the threat of the president's veto.
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I knew I was celebrating too early when it passed the house. Sessions knows dirty politics, I just hoped he wouldn't use them on this bill. It's unfortunate for Matthews Shephard's mother, and for all of us. A huge number of our population are not protected against crime. Is there any hope?
OUch. Even with a filibuster-proof majority, we can't get shit done. Shows you the state of Congress today.
Well, what would you expect from a man like Sessions who believes that the KKK is "okay"?
seriously. He only denounced KKK when he found out that they smoked meth or something. What a racist, hateful, stupid, idiotic asshole.
It was smoking pot, actually, but yeah, he's a racist ass.
Also for absurd prosecutions of Civil Rights activists.
Is there anything we can do, in terms of contacting legislators, or is it pretty much screwed?
I'm going to copy-paste this opinion from The Economist's Lexington blog, because it talks about an apparent double-jeopardy aspect to the bill. Is this the same legislation?
"THE senate has voted to attach a hate-crimes bill to a must-pass defence spending package.
Like so many bad laws, this one is named after the victim of an appalling crime: Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was murdered in Wyoming in 1998.
Now I'm pro-gay and anti-murder. But hate-crimes laws strike me as pointless political posturing. The argument for them is that standard law doesn't do enough to deter crimes motivated by hatred of minorities. The tragic case of Matthew Shepard illustrates nothing of the sort. His murderers would have been given the death penalty if they had not copped a plea.
Murder is already punished more severely in America than in other rich countries. Whatever your views about the death penalty (personally, I'm against it), I don't see how you can argue that it is too lenient. Life in jail is no picnic, either. And lesser crimes such as assault and incitement to violence are also punished with long jail sentences.
So the main purpose of this bill is to allow lawmakers to make a statement about how intolerant of intolerance they are. There would be no harm in that, except that the bill also allows the federal government to re-prosecute hate criminals if they don't like the verdict of a state court.
The bill's proponents point out that this is not a new problem, and that there are safeguards. But do we really trust publicity-hungry prosecutors not to abuse their authority? I don't. And double jeopardy is not justice."
This is not true. The reason for federal hate crimes law is because in many, MANY places in this country, the police are still so homophobic and transphobic that they would give short shrift to investigating and prosecuting violence against LGBT people. It gives the feds the right to step in where the locals won't. Murder is to some extent harder for them to ignore completely, but they have no problem charging someone with manslaughter for a crime that anyone else would think qualified for first-degree. (see Lateisha Green.) But assaults and threats can and do go dismissed at the local level, especially in small towns, and so federal pressure is necessary.
I have philosophical issues with hate crimes laws (if someone kills me I don't really care if it's out of anti-semitism or road rage) but as bifemmefatale said the key point is allowing federal intervention when local authorities don't bother to prosecute.
Certain aspects of society and the criminal justice system seem, to me, to plainly illustrate just how necessary hate crime laws are to members of the LGBT community. For example, the fact that the "gay panic defense" is still used and still accepted by many.