7 Republicans vote to convict Donald Trump in impeachment trial
Seven Republicans voted Saturday to convict former President Donald Trump in his Senate trial, easily the largest number of lawmakers to ever vote to find a president of their own party guilty at impeachment proceedings. While lawmakers acquitted Trump of inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, they voted 57-43 to convict him — short of the two-thirds majority needed to find him guilty. Still, with seven Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in voting “guilty,” the Senate issued an unmistakable bipartisan chorus of condemnation of the former president that could have political implications for a GOP conflicted over its future. “If I can’t say what I believe that our president should stand for, then why should I ask Alaskans to stand with me?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters. Besides Murkowski, other Republican senators voting against Trump were Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania. Underscoring the perils of affronting Trump and his legions of GOP loyalists, by late evening top Republicans from at least two of the defecting senators’ states had blasted them. Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas issued a statement saying he shared “the disappointment of many of our grassroots leaders and volunteers” over Toomey’s vote. Louisiana’s Republican Party said, “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms” Cassidy’s vote and said its executive committee voted unanimously to censure him. Democrats holding out long-shot hopes of convicting Trump would have needed 17 Republicans to prevail, which as expected proved an unreachable goal. That hope died after the influential Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he would vote to acquit because he believed lawmakers had no jurisdiction over a former president. Even so, McConnell delivered searing words against Trump in a speech after the vote, saying the former president was “practically and morally responsible” for provoking the attack on lawmakers as they formally certified Trump’s Electoral College defeat by Joe Biden. Five people died, and the House impeached Trump for inciting insurrection. Most of the defecting Republicans had clashed with Trump over the years. Burr and Toomey have said they will retire and not seek reelection when their terms expire next year, and Murkowski and Collins have histories of clashing with Trump over health care and other policies. Perhaps the day’s most surprising GOP defector was Burr, a 16-year Senate veteran who keeps a low profile in Washington and after years as top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee is used to telegraphing little about his views. Burr, 65, will not seek reelection next year and will retire. In a written statement, he said Trump made unfounded claims about a fraud-riddled election “because he did not like the results.” He said Trump used the presidency to “inflame” the rioters rather than urging them to stand down. “The evidence is compelling that President Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection against a coequal branch of government,” Burr said. Also striking was the “guilty” vote by Cassidy, who was reelected in November from a deep-red state where GOP support is widespread. Cassidy, 63 and a physician, had initially sided with the vast majority of Senate Republicans who voted last month to block the trial from moving forward. But he blasted a shambolic performance by Trump’s legal team at the start of the trial while praising Democrats for presenting a compelling case. “Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty,” Cassidy said in a one-sentence statement issued after his vote to convict. Toomey, a traditional conservative, decried Trump’s efforts to overturn election results — Trump’s targets include Toomey’s Pennsylvania — and to encourage his supporters’ march on the Capitol. “All of this to hold on to power despite having legitimately lost,” Toomey said. He said that because of Trump’s actions, “for the first time in American history, the transfer of presidential power was not peaceful” and said Trump had “betrayed the confidence millions of us placed in him.” Sasse has long criticized Trump’s authoritarian streak. Last week he excoriated pro-Trump Republican Party officials in his home state, telling them in a video message that “politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.” “Tribalism is a hell of a drug, but our oath to the Constitution means we’re constrained to the facts,” Sasse said Saturday. He said he wouldn’t vote against his own conscience “simply because it is politically convenient.” Romney’s “guilty” vote at Trump’s initial impeachment trial last February made him the first senator to ever vote to convict a president of the same party. The trial that ended Saturday was Trump’s second — making him the first president to ever be tried twice for impeachment — and the fourth in presidential history. Presidents Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999 were acquitted and received unanimous support from their Democratic Party. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Amazon faces biggest union push in its history
The second Jennifer Bates walks away from her post at the Amazon warehouse where she works, the clock starts ticking. She has precisely 30 minutes to get to the cafeteria and back for her lunch break. That means traversing a warehouse the size of 14 football fields, which eats up precious time. She avoids bringing food from home because warming it up in the microwave would cost her even more minutes. Instead, she opts for $4 cold sandwiches from the vending machine and hurries back to her post. If she makes it, she’s lucky. If she doesn’t, Amazon could cut her pay, or worse, fire her. It’s that kind of pressure that has led some Amazon workers to organize the biggest unionization push at the company since it was founded in 1995. And it’s happening in the unlikeliest of places: Bessemer, Alabama, a state with laws that don’t favor unions. The stakes are high. If organizers succeed in Bessemer, it could set off a chain reaction across Amazon’s operations nationwide, with thousands more workers rising up and demanding better working conditions. But they face an uphill battle against the second-largest employer in the country with a history of crushing unionizing efforts at its warehouses and its Whole Foods grocery stores. Attempts by Amazon to delay the vote in Bessemer have failed. So too have the company’s efforts to require in-person voting, which organizers argue would be unsafe during the pandemic. Mail-in voting started this week and will go on until the end of March. A majority of the 6,000 employees have to vote “yes” in order to unionize. Amazon, whose profits and revenues have skyrocketed during the pandemic, has campaigned hard to convince workers that a union will only suck money from their paycheck with little benefit. Spokeswoman Rachael Lighty says the company already offers them what unions want: benefits, career growth, and pay that starts at $15 an hour. She adds that the organizers don’t represent the majority of Amazon employees’ views. Bates makes $15.30 an hour unpacking boxes of deodorant, clothing, and countless other items that are eventually shipped to Amazon shoppers. The job, which the 48-year-old started in May, has her on her feet for most of her 10-hour shifts. Besides lunch, Bates says trips to the bathroom are also closely monitored, as is getting a drink of water or fetching a fresh pair of work gloves. Amazon denies that, saying it offers two 30-minute breaks during each shift and extra time to use the bathroom or get water. Fed up, Bates and a group of workers reached out to the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union last summer. She hopes the union, which also represents poultry plant workers in Alabama, will mandate more breaks, prevent Amazon from firing workers for mundane reasons, and push for higher pay. “They will be a voice when we don’t have one,” Bates says. But according to Sylvia Allegretto, an economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, “history tells us not to be optimistic.” The last time Amazon workers voted on whether they wanted to unionize was in 2014, and it was a much smaller group: 30 employees at a Amazon warehouse in Delaware who ultimately turned it down. Amazon currently employs nearly 1.3 million people worldwide. Also working against the unionizing effort is that it’s happening in Republican-controlled Alabama, which generally isn’t friendly to organized labor. Alabama is one of 27 “right-to-work states” where workers don’t have to pay dues to unions that represent them. In fact, the state is home to the only Mercedes-Benz plant in the world that isn’t unionized. That the union push at the Bessemer warehouse has even gotten this far is likely due to who the organizers are, says Michael Innis-Jiménez, an associate professor at the University of Alabama. Companies typically villainize union organizers as out-of-staters who don’t know what workers want. But the retail union has an office in nearby Birmingham and many of the organizers are Black, like the workers in the Bessemer warehouse. “I think that really helps a lot,” Innis-Jiménez said. “They’re not seen as outsiders.” More than 70% of the population of Bessemer is Black. The retail union estimates that as many as 85% of the workers are Black, much higher than the 22% for overall warehouse workers nationwide, according to an Associated Press analysis of census data. Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, says the union’s success in Bessemer is partly due to the pandemic, with workers feeling betrayed by employers that didn’t do enough to protect them from the virus. And the Black Lives Matter movement, which has inspired people to demand to be treated with respect and dignity. Appelbaum says the union has heard from Amazon warehouse workers all over the country. “They want a voice in their workplace, too,” he says. Representatives of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union spend most days outside the entrance of the Bessemer warehouse holding signs and wearing neon vests, although a lot of the unionization effort is being conducted online or by phone because of the pandemic. At the end of a recent workday, some Amazon employees leaving the plant rolled down their car windows and chatted with organizers; others hurried past without acknowledgement. Some workers from poultry plants have helped. Among them is Michael Foster, a union representative who works at a north Alabama poultry plant but has been in town for more than a month helping with the organizing push. He says an Amazon employee tried to shoo them away, saying they better make sure they’re not on Amazon property. “I let them know that this is not my first rodeo,” says Foster, who has helped get two other poultry plants to unionize. Inside the warehouse, Bates says Amazon has been holding daily classes on why workers should vote against the union. Lighty, the Amazon spokeswoman, says
Religion and the death penalty collide at the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court is sending a message to states that want to continue to carry out the death penalty: Inmates must be allowed to have a spiritual adviser by their side as they are executed. The high court around midnight Thursday declined to let Alabama proceed with the lethal injection of Willie B. Smith III. Smith had objected to Alabama’s policy that his pastor would have had to observe his execution from an adjacent room rather than the death chamber itself. The order from the high court follows two years in which inmates saw some rare success in bringing challenges based on the issue of chaplains in the death chamber. This time, liberal and conservative members of the court normally in disagreement over death penalty issues found common ground not on the death penalty itself but on the issue of religious freedom and how the death penalty is carried out. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of three justices who said they would have let Smith’s execution go forward, said Alabama’s policy applies equally to all inmates and serves a state interest in ensuring safety and security. But he said it was apparent that his colleagues who disagreed were providing a path for states to follow. States that want to avoid months or years of litigation over the presence of spiritual advisers “should figure out a way to allow spiritual advisors into the execution room, as other States and the Federal Government have done,” he wrote in a dissent joined by Chief Justice John Roberts. Justice Clarence Thomas also would have allowed the execution of Smith, who was sentenced to die for the 1991 murder of 22-year-old Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham. Alabama had up until 2019 allowed a Christian prison chaplain employed by the state to be physically present in the execution chamber if requested by the inmate, but the state changed its policy in response to two earlier Supreme Court cases. Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, says the court’s order will most clearly affect states in the Deep South that have active execution chambers. Dunham said most state execution protocols, which set who is present in the death chamber, do not mention spiritual advisers. For most of the modern history of the U.S. death penalty since the 1970s, spiritual advisers have not been present in execution chambers, he said. The federal government, which under President Donald Trump resumed federal executions following a 17-year hiatus and carried out 13 executions, allowed a spiritual adviser to be present in the death chamber. The Biden administration is still weighing how it will proceed in death penalty cases. The court’s order in Smith’s case contained only statements from Kavanaugh and Justice Elena Kagan. “Willie Smith is sentenced to death, and his last wish is to have his pastor with him as he dies,” Kagan wrote for herself and liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, as well as conservative Amy Coney Barrett. Kagan added: “Alabama has not carried its burden of showing that the exclusion of all clergy members from the execution chamber is necessary to ensure prison security.” Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Samuel Alito did not make public their views, but at least one or perhaps both of them must have voted with their liberal colleagues to keep Smith’s execution on hold. The court’s yearslong wrestling with the issue of chaplains in the death chamber began in 2019, when the justices declined to halt the execution of Alabama inmate Domineque Ray. Ray had objected that a Christian chaplain employed by the prison typically remained in the execution chamber during a lethal injection, but the state would not let his imam be present. The next month, however, the justices halted the execution of a Texas inmate, Patrick Murphy, who objected after Texas officials wouldn’t allow his Buddhist spiritual adviser in the death chamber. Kavanaugh wrote at the time that states have two choices: Allow all inmates to have a religious adviser of their choice in the execution room or allow that person only in an adjacent viewing room. In response, the Texas prison system changed its policy, allowing only prison security staff into the execution chamber. But in June, the high court kept Texas from executing Ruben Gutierrez after he objected to the new policy. Diana Verm, a lawyer at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which had submitted briefs in two of the spiritual adviser cases, said it was unusual for the court with its conservative majority to halt executions. “You can tell from some of the opinions that the justices don’t like the last-minute nature of execution litigation, but this is an area where they are saying: ’Listen … religious liberty has to be a part of the process if it’s going to happen,” Verm said. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Fat Tuesday crowds in Mobile a threat for spreading virus
Health officials and leaders in Mobile are urging people to follow pandemic safety guidelines as a subdued Mardi Gras season comes to an end on the coast minus big parades but with crowds still possible. Parades that typically draw thousands and massive balls were canceled in Mobile because of the coronavirus threat this year. But officials there didn’t take the extra step of closing restaurants and bars, as was done in New Orleans to keep down crowds. With the end of the carnival season approaching on Fat Tuesday, Alabama’s top state health official, Dr. Scott Harris, said he was worried that what celebrations do occur would lead to further spread of the virus even without traditional activities. “There’s nothing magic about it being a parade format versus, you know, milling around in the street together without a parade format,” he said Friday. “I think both of those certainly have the potential for disease transmission, for sure.” Anticipating the possibility that people will still come out to celebrate, Mobile is shutting down streets in a large part of its downtown to allow people room to spread out on Tuesday. “We just hope people will do the right thing,” he said. “We are so close to being done with this.” The Mobile County Health Department said inspectors will be out through Fat Tuesday to make sure that health codes are being followed. A statewide order requires face masks inside buildings and even outdoors when people can’t stay away from each other, but enforcement is rare and many ignore the rules. In the tiny Baldwin County city of Elberta, officials decided to stage a Mardi Gras parade despite the pandemic. Vicky Norris, a member of the town council, told WALA-TV the event planned for Saturday was needed for the sake of mental health. “We’re a small town, we’re a community, but we call each other family, and we bond like a family, and family has been torn apart by this pandemic,” said Norris. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
