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Har Homa neighborhood in east Jerusalem.

State Democratic Party heavyweights are sounding a red alert against a provocative proposal for their state committee to declare opposition to Israeli settlements in the West Bank without specifically mentioning Palestinian violence, a step some top leaders fear would lead to an exodus of Democratic voters.

If approved, a resolution offered by Carol Coakley of Millis, an 18-year member of the Democratic State Committee, would put the state party on record that Israels settlements in the occupied West Bank are obstacles to peace.

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It would call on the states 11-member congressional delegation all Democrats to clearly express their opposition to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, in pursuit of a negotiated peace.

But former state treasurer Steve Grossman and other Democratic leaders are sounding the alarm, and hoping to derail it before the effort could go before the full Democratic State Committee next week.

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Grossman, the former chairman of both the state and national Democratic parties, as well the one-time head of the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said the resolution, if successful, could gravely damage Democrats politically.

He said it feeds a one-sided blame game, which is playing out across college campuses and in pockets of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and would send a disturbing message to many Democratic activists.

A lot of people would read about it and would read the language and say: Frankly, thats the last straw. This is not a place I feel comfortable any longer, Grossman said.

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Many would see it as an attempt to drive a rhetorical stake through Israels heart and lay the blame not part of the blame, but virtually the exclusive blame for the failure of the peace process at Israels door, to the exclusion of any responsibility by Palestinians, he said.

Coakley, in an interview with the Globe, said she was inspired to propose the resolution in part by the anti-Islamic sentiment stirred up by the 2016 presidential election.

Her resolution quotes from the State Department under former president Barack Obama, which at one point last year described settlement activity as corrosive to the cause of peace.

Theres a much better chance to get to some negotiations if they stop building settlements, Coakley said.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank have grown under every Israeli government over the past 50 years, despite international opposition, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently announced construction of 5,500 new houses.

In February President Trump told an Israeli newspaper that settlements dont help the process and that he didnt believe going forward with these settlements is a good thing for peace.

Coakley acknowledged there has been a fair amount of pushback from Democrats who think the resolution would alienate supporters.

Coakley proposed the resolution last August; party leaders sent the resolution to a new subcommittee of about a dozen members to study it.

The subcommittee held a hearing on the resolution Wednesday night in Boston. Several members of the public testified in favor of Coakleys resolution; fewer testified against it, according to a person who was in the room.

The subcommittee members will vote on the resolution over the weekend, according to its leaders, Alex Pratt and Marianne Rutter.

The subcommittee has several options. It can refer the document to the full state committee for a vote on April 29. It can table the resolution. It could amend it. Or members can farm it out to another subcommittee for more review.

Cole Harrison, the executive director of Massachusetts Peace Action and a Democratic activist, testified Wednesday in favor of Coakleys resolution, which he said has been repeatedly delayed by the party.

Grossmans warnings, he said, are just scare tactics.

This resolution targets a hypocrisy in the position of the national Democratic Party lets call it the Hillary-wing of the party which says it supports a two-state solution, but gives huge aid and backing to Israel and very little to Palestinians, Harrison said.

He denied the resolution is one-sided and pointed to language saying Massachusetts Democrats deplore all acts of violence against civilians including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation, incitement, and destruction; and we concede that these too are obstacles to peace committed by both sides.

Besides Grossman, other Democrats are also weighing in against the resolution.

James Segel, a former state representative and aide to Barney Frank, said in a letter that the very partisan and divisive resolution blames one party for the deadlock in the peace process, while ignoring the many contributions of the other to the conflict.

He submitted different wording that he said is more aligned with the national partys platform. The Democratic National Committee platform calls for a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiated directly by the parties.

The Democratic State Committee cannot afford such a divisive and ill-advised resolution at a time when our party needs to unite to protect the values and commitments we hold dear, Segel wrote.

If adopted it is almost certain to spark a bitter, very public and entirely unnecessary debate that would seriously undermine party unity and alienate many of our core supporters, he said.

Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim submitted written testimony, calling Coakleys effort unnecessarily divisive and pushing for Segels wording, which Zakim called a more balanced approach.

But Richard Colbath-Hess, a leader of the Cambridge-based Palestine Advocacy Project said his group backs the Coakley resolution.

Settlements are illegal under international law, he said. Were glad the Democratic Party is trying to step up to this. We dont want people in the Democratic Party to be apologists for the State of Israels human rights abuses.

Coakley, the resolutions author, disagrees that it would drive away supporters.

I think there will be some people upset, but I think its pretty obvious [settlements] are an obstacle to peace, Coakley said.

Its pretty obvious nobody in this country would put up with those living conditions, she said. I dont find many opponents of the resolution among people who are active on [the issue] because they just think [settlement policy] is an embarrassment.

Gus Bickford, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, did not respond to repeated requests for comment Thursday.

Read more here:
State Democrats roiled by resolution opposing Israeli settlements - The Boston Globe

President Donald Trump said Friday that Dreamers, illegal immigrants who have benefitted from former President Barack Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, should rest easy about his administrationsapproach to immigration reform.

In an interview with The Associated Press, the president said the White House is not after the dreamers, we are after the criminals.

That is our policy, Trump said.

The topic came up asthe Trumpadministration faces a lawsuit from a 23-year-old Dreamer who was recently deported to Mexico despite the fact that DACA granted him protected status until 2018.

While Trump has been telegraphing this shifting position on Dreamers since he assumed the presidency, he sang an entirely different tune when he was candidate Trump.

When he first announced his presidential campaign in June 2015, Trump promised to immediately terminate President [Barack] Obamas illegal executive order on immigration. One of those executive orders was the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which Obama signed in June 2012.

Trumpdoubled down on that during an August 2016 speech on immigration, telling supporters: We will immediately terminate President Obamas two illegal executive amnesties, in which he defied federal law and the Constitution to give amnesty to approximately 5million illegal immigrants.

But on Jan. 18, just two days beforebecoming president, Trump began softening his position. When asked by Fox News Fox and Friends host Ainsley Earhardt how he plans to address immigration issues, he told her his plan would have a lot of heart, adding that being a Dreamer is a very tough situation.

But I think theyre going to end up being very happy, he told Earhardt.Were going to have great people coming into our country, people that love our country.

Then in February, when he held an extremely contentious newsconference from the White House, Trump described DACA as a very, very difficult subject for me.

Heres what he told reporters at the time:

DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me. You have these incredible kids, in many cases not in all cases. In some of the cases theyre having DACA and theyre gang members and theyre drug dealers too. I have to deal with a lot of politicians dont forget and I have to convince them that what Im saying is right. And I appreciate your understanding on that. The DACA situation is a very difficult thing for me as I love these kids, I love kids, I have kids and grand kids and I find it very, very hard doing what the law says exactly to do and, you know, the law is rough. Its rough, very very rough.

And in March, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly tried to ease concerns some Democrats have aboutDACA. He reportedly told them, Im the best thing that happened to DACA. It is still on the books.

But asforthe situationregardingJuan Manuel Montes, the deported Dreamer, Trump said that case is a little different than the Dreamer case, the AP reported. The president didnt offer any explanation for that conclusion.

According to Politicos report, Montes lost his DACA status because he left the U.S. without seeking prior approval, which is a violation of the terms of the program.

Regardless of what happens with DACA, though, the president seems committed to his plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border another one of Trumps long-held promises. Kelly, standing alongside Attorney General Jeff Sessions, told Fox Newson Thursday that construction of the perimeter could begin as soon as this summer.

I think by late spring, early summer, well have some prototypes and then well be able to move forward by into the summer, he said. Were going to get at it as quick as we can.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the AP that Congress spending bill, which is facing an April 28 deadline in order to avert a government shutdown, must include funding for the border wall.

He said elections have consequences and that we want wall funding as part of the spending package. That hard-line position will surely cause headaches for lawmakers seeking to sidestep a shutdown at the end of the month.

We want wall funding. We want [immigration] agents. Those are our priorities, Mulvaney said. We know there are a lot of people on the Hill, especially in the Democratic Party, who dont like the wall, but they lost the election.

The president should, I think, at least have the opportunity to fund one of his highest priorities in the first funding bill under his administration, he continued.

On the campaign trail, it should be noted, Trump consistently and vehementlypromisedMexico would pay for the border wall.

Read the original post:
Trump: Dreamers can 'rest easy' under my immigration policies - TheBlaze.com

Immigration reform must not strand farmers

In a meeting April 8, farmers in the Pioneer Valley spoke about how hard it would be to operate their businesses without a skilled and reliable workforce, some of it made up of immigrant workers (Farmers bedrock shaken, April 10).

Their experience puts the lie to the conventional story of immigrant workers, which suggests that immigrants in tech fields are skilled and immigrants in the food system are unskilled. Instead, these farmers explained, workers arrive with important agricultural experience and a high level of skill.

Our immigration policy should reflect reality: we need workers to put food on our tables, and American-born workers generally opt out of farm work.

I will continue to prioritize local farms when shopping for food, and reach out to my legislators, urging them to push for immigration reform that doesnt leave farmers stranded and workers in fear.

Nicholas Jones

Whately

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Nicholas Jones: Immigration reform must not strand farmers - GazetteNET

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean writes:

This leads me to repeat what Ive said before: There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn, for instance, Islam or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal immigrants, or native-born citizens as one is to condemn capitalism or socialism or Democrats or Republicans. As the Supreme Court noted inChristian Legal Society v. Martinez(2010), the First Amendments tradition of protect[ing] the freedom to express the thought that we hate includes the right to express even discriminatory viewpoints. (The quote comes from the four liberal justices, plus Justice Anthony Kennedy, but the four more conservative justices would have entirely agreed with this, though also extended it to university-recognized student groups freedom to exclude members, and not just their freedom to express their thoughts.)

To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with hate speech in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for fighting words face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isnt limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible.

The same is true of the other narrow exceptions, such as for true threats of illegal conduct or incitement intended to and likely to produce imminent illegal conduct i.e., illegal conduct in the next few hours or maybe days, as opposed to some illegal conduct some time in the future. But these are very narrow exceptions. Deans post came in response to a Steven Greenhouse tweet saying, Free Speech Defenders Dont Forget: Ann Coulter once said: My only regret w/ Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building; but if Dean meant that such speech by Coulter is constitutionally unprotected, hes wrong. Indeed, even if Coulter was speaking seriously (which I doubt), such speech isnt unprotected incitement, because it isnt intended to promote imminent illegal conduct. Compare, e.g., Rankin v. McPherson (1987), which upheld the right to say, after President Ronald Reagan was wounded in an assassination attempt, If they go for him again, I hope they get him and that was in a case involving a government employee being fired for her speech; the First Amendment offers even stronger protection to ordinary citizens whose speech is more directly restricted by the government.

Returning to bigoted speech, which is what most people use hate speech to mean, threatening to kill someone because hes black (or white), or intentionally inciting someone to a likely and immediate attack on someone because hes Muslim (or Christian or Jewish), can be made a crime. But this isnt because its hate speech; its because its illegal to make true threats and incite imminent crimes against anyone and for any reason, for instance because they are police officers or capitalists or just someone who is sleeping with the speakers ex-girlfriend.

The Supreme Court did, in Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952), uphold a group libel law that outlawed statements that expose racial or religious groups to contempt or hatred, unless the speaker could show that the statements were true and were said with good motives and for justifiable ends. But this, too, was treated by the court as just a special case of a broader First Amendment exception the one for libel generally. And Beauharnais is widely understood to no longer be good law, given the courts restrictions on the libel exception. See New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) (rejecting the view that libel is categorically unprotected, and holding that the libel exception requires a showing that the libelous accusations be of and concerning a particular person); Garrison v. Louisiana (1964) (generally rejecting the view that a defense of truth can be limited to speech that is said for good motives and for justifiable ends); Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. v. Hepps (1986) (generally rejecting the view that the burden of proving truth can be placed on the defendant); R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) (holding that singling bigoted speech is unconstitutional, even when that speech fits within a First Amendment exception); Nuxoll ex rel. Nuxoll v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. # 204, 523 F.3d 668, 672 (7th Cir. 2008) (concluding that Beauharnais is no longer good law); Dworkin v. Hustler Magazine Inc., 867 F.2d 1188, 1200 (9th Cir. 1989) (likewise); Am. Booksellers Assn, Inc. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323, 331 n.3 (7th Cir. 1985) (likewise); Collin v. Smith, 578 F.2d 1197, 1205 (7th Cir. 1978) (likewise); Tollett v. United States, 485 F.2d 1087, 1094 n.14 (8th Cir. 1973) (likewise); Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies 1043-45 (4th ed. 2011); Laurence Tribe, Constitutional Law, 12-17, at 926; Toni M. Massaro, Equality and Freedom of Expression: The Hate Speech Dilemma, 32 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 211, 219 (1991); Robert C. Post, Cultural Heterogeneity and Law: Pornography, Blasphemy, and the First Amendment, 76 Calif. L. Rev. 297, 330-31 (1988).

Finally, hostile environment harassment law has sometimes been read as applying civil liability or administrative discipline by universities to allegedly bigoted speech in workplaces, universities and places of public accommodation. There is a hot debate on whether those restrictions are indeed constitutional; they have generally been held unconstitutional when applied to universities, but decisions are mixed as to civil liability based on speech that creates hostile environments in workplaces (see the pages linked to at this site for more information on the subject). But even when those restrictions have been upheld, they have been justified precisely on the rationale that they do not criminalize speech (or otherwise punish it) in society at large, but apply only to particular contexts, such as workplaces. None of them represent a hate speech exception, nor have they been defined in terms of hate speech.

For this very reason, hate speech also doesnt have any fixed legal meaning under U.S. law. U.S. law has just never had occasion to define hate speech any more than it has had occasion to define rudeness, evil ideas, unpatriotic speech or any other kind of speech that people might condemn but that does not constitute a legally relevant category.

Of course, one can certainly argue that First Amendment law should be changed to allow bans on hate speech (whether bigoted speech, blasphemy, blasphemy to which foreigners may respond with attacks on Americans, flag burning, or anything else). I think no such exception should be recognized, but of course, like all questions about what the law ought to be, this is a matter that can be debated. Indeed, people have a First Amendment right to call for speech restrictions, just as they have a First Amendment right to call for gun bans or bans on Islam or government-imposed race discrimination or anything else that current constitutional law forbids. Constitutional law is no more set in stone than any other law.

But those who want to make such arguments should acknowledge that they are calling for a change in First Amendment law and should explain just what that change would be, so people can thoughtfully evaluate it. Calls for a new First Amendment exception for hate speech shouldnt rely just on the undefined term hate speech they should explain just what viewpoints the government would be allowed to suppress, what viewpoints would remain protected and how judges, juries and prosecutors are supposed to distinguish the two. And claiming that hate speech is already not protected by the first amendment, as if one is just restating settled law, does not suffice.

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No, Gov. Dean, there is no 'hate speech' exception to the First Amendment - Washington Post

Former Democratic presidential candidate and Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean claimedThursday evening that speech from conservative author and commentator Ann Coulter isnot protected by the First Amendment.

Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment, Dean tweeted in reference to Coulters scheduled speech at Berkeley, whichcampus administrators cancelled due to the threat of leftist violence.

But Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA who writes the The Volokh Conspiracyblog, set things straight in a 1,300-word column for The Washington Post Friday, entitled"No, Governor Dean, There is No Hate-Speech Exception to the First Amendment."

"Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas," Volokh writes. "One is as free to condemn, for instance, Islam or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal immigrants, or native-born citizens as one is to condemn capitalism or socialism or Democrats or Republicans."

Volokh goes on to cite major Supreme Court decisions dealing with offensive speech and the First Amendment, and clarifying that legally speaking, there is no such thing as "hate speech."

"U.S. law has just never had occasion to define 'hate speech,'" Volokh writes, "any more than it has had occasion to define rudeness, evil ideas, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn, but that does not constitute a legally relevant category."

Dean, the former Democratic governor of Vermont, made hiscomment in reply to a tweet from someone who had written: "Free Speech Defenders Don't Forget: Ann Coulter once said: My only regret w/ Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."

But Volokh says Dean is wrong if he thinks this comment of Coulter's is not protected by the First Amendment. It is.

Best-selling author and conservative columnist Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, on April 27, but the university canceled the speech this week, saying it could not provide adequate security, given recent riots to shut down other conservative speakers,such asMilo Yiannopoulos.

Coulter subsequently told The Hollywood Reporter: "They can't stop me. I'm an American. I have constitutional rights."

The university announced it would reschedule the event for the afternoon of May 2, during final exam week, but attorneys for the groups that had invited Coulter, including Young Americans for Freedom, blasted university officials in a letter, saying it was attempting to impose "discriminatory" time and place restrictions and warned of "imminent litigation" if the university does not confirm by today, April 21, that it will cooperate with plans for the April 27 event.

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Howard Dean: Coulter's 'Hate Speech' Not Protected by First ... - LifeZette