Teachers Want A 12 Percent Raise In A California School District That Went Into A Financial Crisis In 2017

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An Oakland, California, teachers’ union announced Saturday that a strike will begin on Feb. 21 after failing to reach an agreement with the school district over increased pay and smaller class sizes.

Oakland Educators Association (OEA) said teachers were seeking a 12 percent raise over three years to help keep educators in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), according to a Saturday press statement.

“We agree that our teachers deserve to be paid more,” OUSD spokesman John Sasaki said, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday. “It’s just a matter of how much can we pay, given our financial reality.”

The district has suffered from financial woes for awhile, however. California loaned OUSD $100 million in emergency funds — the largest at the time — after gathering a $37 million deficit in 2003. The district managed to get into a $30 million deficit in 2017, according to the Chronicle.

Generous teacher pay raises, decreasing enrollment and hefty special education costs contributed to the financial crisis in the district.

The district has been caught for misusing funds like paying for parking and legal fees, the Chronicle reported.

The union said they have been negotiating for two years, according to OEA’s news release.

“The only option that Oakland teachers, parents and students have left to win the schools Oakland students truly deserve, and to take control of our school district back from the control of billionaire campaign donors, is for the 3,000 members of the Oakland Education Association to go on strike,” OEA President Keith Brown said in a statement.

An entry-level teacher with only a bachelor’s degree can earn around $47,000 a year. A teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 90 graduate level credits can start earning $55,000 and bring in as much as $84,000 annually after working for 31 years as a certified teacher, according to OUSD data.

Brown added that 18 percent of teachers left each year due to increasing housing costs, the Chronicle reported.

The median home value in Oakland is $735,000 and is expected to increase by nearly 8 percent over the next year, according to Zillow. The median monthly rent price was a little over $3,000.

OUSD does spend, however, $13,500 for full health care benefits for educators and their families, according to the Chronicle.

The district contacted OEA for renegotiation Saturday, but did not hear back, according to the district’s press release.

Up to 150 administrative and support employees could be laid off in order for the district to save $21.7 million, the newspaper reported.

OUSD is planning to hire substitute teachers in the event of a strike, which could affect 36,000 students.

The northern California city’s teacher strike follows after Los Angeles teachers walked out of classes in January. Their strike resulted in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) agreeing to a 6 percent raise for teachers and “meaningful” class size reductions.

The Los Angeles deal, however, could bankrupt the system already running on a $500 million deficit, according to The Associated Press.

OEA and OUSD did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

Pelosi Refuses To Acknowledge Northam’s Late-Term Abortion Comments

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi refused to acknowledge Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s comments on late-term abortion, claiming she does not know what he said Thursday.

“I just don’t know what he said yesterday,” Pelosi said in response to a reporter’s question about Northam’s comments.

This comes as Northam defended the “Repeal Act,” a proposed bill that would remove all restrictions on abortion in the Commonwealth of Virginia, saying controversial comments about late-term abortion.

“If a mother is in labor…the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable,” Northam said. “The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and mother.”

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The comments received massive pushback from Republican’s on Capitol Hill and across the country.

Pelosi’s office did not respond when contacted by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Congress’ Nonpartisan Research Arm Says Trump Could Have DOD Build A Wall Without State of Emergency or Congressional Approval

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a paper internally that suggests President Donald Trump may have the authority to use Department of Defense resources to build a wall without obtaining congressional approval or declaring a state of emergency.

CRS, Congress’s in-house research arm, internally published a paper Jan. 10 titled “Can the Department of Defense Build the Border Wall?,” which The Daily Caller News Foundation has obtained. It says (emphasis added):

Another statute that authorizes the Secretary of Defense to assist civilian law enforcement with counterdrug activities may provide some authority for the construction of barriers along the border. 10 U.S.C. § 284 (Section 284) provides that the Secretary of Defense “may provide support for the counterdrug activities or activities to counter transnational organized crime” of any law enforcement agency, including through the “[c]onstruction of roads and fences and installation of lighting to block drug smuggling corridors across international boundaries of the United States.” …

Use of Section 284 would not require a declaration of a national emergency under the NEA. However, the DOD’s Section 284 authority to construct fences appears to extend only to “drug smuggling corridors,” a condition that may limit where DOD could deploy fencing.

“Drug corridors” are not defined in law, according to a congressional aide.

The president has suggested using executive authority as a workaround to the stalemate that led to the partial government shutdown. House Democrats have refused to allocate $5.7 billion Trump requested to build part of a wall along the southern border, and the president has refused to support legislation opening the government that does not include border wall funding. Trump said Jan. 4 that he has considered using a “state of emergency” to build the wall. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley urged Trump not to declare a state of emergency, expressing concerns about overreach and setting a precedent that Democrats could also use when in power.

But the CRS report suggests that there is another option beyond negotiating with Congress or declaring a national emergency.

Arkansas National Guard building a wall (Department of Defense photo)

Ginsburg’s Health Raises Frightening History Of Incapacity And Disability On The Supreme Court

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Fervid speculation as to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s well-being was set off in December when the Supreme Court abruptly announced that she was being treated for lung cancer.

Though a positive prognosis has since allayed the worst fears of Ginsburg’s admirers, her continued struggles broach important but little discussed questions about judicial fitness in an era when unprecedented longevity often entails sudden declines in mental and physical faculties.

Those questions are hardly theoretical: the modern history of the Supreme Court is replete with examples of real or perceived incapacity among the justices, who alone decide when to leave active service.

Ginsburg had two cancerous nodules removed from her lungs at the Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in Dec. 2018. The procedure is called a pulmonary lobectomy. The cancerous growths were discovered when Ginsburg was hospitalized for rib fractures resulting from a fall in her chambers at the high court.

Doctors have since pronounced Ginsburg in excellent health, telling reporters there are no indications of remaining disease following her December surgery. The justice was seen for the first time since the procedure at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington on Feb. 4 for an event honoring her life and professional accomplishments. She may return to the bench as soon as Feb. 19, when the Court will hear a new round of cases.

Incapacity can take many forms which are not triggered by physical disease or advanced age, as has occurred with Ginsburg. Such was the case of Justice Charles Whittaker, the 56-year-old Kansan President Dwight Eisenhower elevated to the high court in 1957, whose travails were thoroughly documented in Professor David Garrow’s 2000 article in the University of Chicago Law Review “Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court”.

Whittaker suffered from intense bouts of depression and anxiety, and the attendant strain seriously impeded his professional abilities. The high court’s tremendous workload immediately triggered those complexes — his colleague Justice Harold Burton observed that Whittaker very nearly suffered a nervous breakdown just ten weeks after taking the bench.

Whittaker’s deterioration continued in fits and starts in the years that followed, according to Garrow’s research. A worsening crisis climaxed in February 1962 as the Court contemplated a landmark gerrymandering case, Baker v. Carr. Amid the mounting pressure of those deliberations, the justice retreated to the seclusion of a Wisconsin cabin.

Whittaker returned to the capital three weeks later distraught and considering suicide. He was admitted to Walter Reed Hospital on March 6. Chief Justice Earl Warren and a panel of doctors entreated Whittaker to retire, which he did on March 28, having served two months as a justice despite total psychiatric collapse.

He left judicial service a diminished figure, having managed just eight majority opinions in his five years as a justice, a trifling figure for a prodigious court.

A similar if less frightening incident arose in 1981, when Justice William Rehnquist appeared impaired during oral arguments throughout the fall and winter. The justice frequently slurred his speech and struggled to summon certain words, creating the impression of serious impairment.

Rehnquist’s condition was a function of his ongoing addiction to Placidyl, a powerful sleeping agent he took to alleviate acute back pain. Though Placidyl is usually proscribed over limited time spans, Rehnquist used the drug for a decade, often in significant excess of proscribed amounts. He was voluntarily admitted to George Washington University Hospital on Dec. 27, 1981 to undergo detoxification.

Though the hospitalization appeared in contemporary press accounts, the full extent of the experience was not fully understood until the FBI released its confidential files on Rehnquist after his death in 2005, which The Washington Post obtained and summarized in 2007.

Hospital personnel later told the FBI that Rehnquist suffered from hallucinations and paranoid delusions as withdrawal became acute. Among the fantasies the Post describes was Rehnquist’s unfounded fear that the CIA was plotting against him. On a separate occasion, he attempted an escape, appearing in a hospital lobby in pajamas.

Once the detoxification was complete, the attending physicians said the justice could return to the Court at full function. The issue was not broached when he was elevated to the chief justiceship in 1986. There is no evidence that the experience ever affected Rehnquist’s work on the high court.

A devastating account of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s fitness during the last years of his tenure appeared in 1998, when Edward Lazarus published his inside account of the Supreme Court’s internal operations called “Closed Chambers“. Lazarus clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun during the during the 1988-1989 term.

Lazarus’s assessment, which appears in Garrow’s article, suggests Marshall was somewhat addled in the twilight of his career. The charge is all the more alarming in that Marshall tended to delegate liberally to his law clerks. One particular report touches a deeply disturbing scenario: a death penalty case in which a compromised justice casts the decisive fifth vote.

The case, Lankford v. Idaho, asked whether a defendant’s due process rights were violated after his trial judge imposed the death penalty, despite the fact that prosecutors had previously informed the defense they would not seek execution. As such, defense lawyers had not entered mitigating evidence which could have helped the defendant evade capital punishment into the record.

For the first time in his career, Marshall — a committed death penalty abolitionist — voted against a capital defendant and joined his conservative colleagues to affirm the sentence. The Court broke 5 to 4 on the decision, making Marshall’s vote decisive. He later changed his vote after furious lobbying from one of his law clerks.

“Marshall’s health, deteriorating for many years, had continued to slip,” Lazarus wrote in his book. “His eyes were failing, his breathing ever more labored, and he had taken a nasty fall that put him in the hospital for several days. In truth, Marshall was no longer up to his responsibilities, or even the appearance of being up to them. Without [Justice William] Brennan’s lead to follow he made mistakes, some embarrassing.”

Scholars who assessed Marshall’s deliberating in the Lankford case are much less harsh in their judgments than Lazarus, though none believe the justice acquitted himself especially well.

Justice Elena Kagan clerked for Marshall the term before the Lankford decision. Marshall retired in 1991 and was succeeded by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Despite its periodic encounters with judicial disability, the Supreme Court has no official mechanism for assessing the mental or physical health of a justice. What’s more, short of impeachment, there is no process to remove a justice who is medically impaired, as with a coma or Alzheimer’s disease.

Fix the Court, a nonpartisan watchdog that advocates for increased transparency at the high court, said the judiciary should take steps to promote awareness and accountability among judges about mental degeneration.

“Removing a federal judge or Supreme Court justice is difficult, and it should remain that way,” Fix the Court executive director Gabe Roth told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Instead of focusing on removal, I think the judiciary should proactively establish programs that could help identify and mitigate cognitive decline in judges before we get to this point of public questioning.”

Roth noted that several federal appeals courts have established so-called wellness committees or advisory boards that encourage regular cognitive assessments for judges and host medical experts at judicial conferences. He also suggested that term limits for the justices would mitigate against mental or physical decline.

“Term limits would not eradicate the potential for cognitive decline completely, of course, but the public would rest easier knowing that a potentially impaired justice would have a duly established — and pending — retirement date,” Roth said.

Proposals for a mandatory retirement age usually fall somewhere near age 75. Justice John Paul Stevens served on the Supreme Court until age 90 — he left after fumbling his dissent in the 2010 Citizens United case as he read it from the bench. Doctors determined he had suffered a mini-stroke.

Paul Ingrassia contributed to this report.

A Massive Winter Storm Blankets Parts Of The US, Kills Five

A massive winter storm stretching from the Great Plains to the East Coast is dumping snow and causing hundreds of traffic accidents as thousands shelter under winter storm warnings.

Winter Storm Gia hit Missouri hard Friday evening, stranding motorists overnight and causing five deaths from traffic accidents in the icy conditions. Roughly 500 traffic accidents have been reported to authorities, The Weather Channel reports.

Thousands in Missouri remained stranded on highways Saturday morning with traffic stopped or barely inching forward. Parts of the state had received up to 15 inches of snow by that point.

Winter storm warnings stretch from areas in Kansas to Rhode Island as Gia continues to drop snow across hundreds of miles. Parts of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska all received more than 10 inches of snow. Parts of Illinois received over a foot.

In Columbia, Missouri, the icy conditions caused an airplane to slide off a runway at the city’s airport. No injuries were reported. The 80 passengers stranded on the runway were forced to evacuate the plane three at a time by emergency personnel because a bus could not reach them on the ice-covered tarmac, KOMU reports.

Meteorologists expect snow to come down over a wide area Saturday evening, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania and from Kansas to New Jersey. The storm is expected to lessen some on Sunday, but still drop freezing rain and some snow over hundreds of miles while moving slowly toward the direction of New England, The Weather Channel reports.

Ex-FBI Official: Fusion GPS Founder Tried To ‘Elevate’ Dossier By Spreading It All Around Washington

  • In congressional testimony last year, former FBI general counsel James Baker said that the bureau was aware that the founder of Fusion GPS was shopping the infamous dossier around Washington, D.C. prior to the 2016 election.
  • Baker also said that his friend, the liberal reporter David Corn, was ‘anxious’ to provide him with the dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC.
  • Baker’s testimony reveals new details about the full court press to put the unverified dossier onto the FBI’s radar.

James Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI, told Congress last October that the bureau was aware that  the founder of Fusion GPS was spreading the Steele dossier “to a lot of different” people in government and the media in an effort to “elevate” the document’s profile.

Baker also told lawmakers in his Oct. 3, 2018 testimony that his longtime friend, the liberal reporter David Corn, was “anxious” to provide him with the dossier.

Baker’s testimony, which was first detailed by The Wall Street Journal and has been confirmed by The Daily Caller News Foundation, sheds new light on what the FBI knew about efforts before the election to spread the dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

Republicans have criticized the FBI for failing to disclose those efforts in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser who is a major target of the Steele report. Some GOP lawmakers have asserted that the FBI should have been leery of Steele and Fusion’s opposition research of Trump.

Page has vehemently denied Steele’s allegations that he served as the Trump team’s backchannel to the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign.

As has been previously reported, Simpson served as a PR man of sorts for the dossier, setting up meetings with reporters from numerous news outlets in an effort to get Steele’s reporting into the media bloodstream.

Both Steele and Simpson were also in contact with U.S. government officials, including the Justice Department’s Bruce Ohr and the State Department’s Jonathan Winer. Steele shared some of his findings with both officials, as well as his FBI handler, Michael Gaeta.

In his testimony, Baker said that the FBI was aware of Simpson’s full court press on the Steele report.

“My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile,” said Baker.

He also said that the FBI was aware of “various copies of the dossier floating around Washington.”

Baker also addressed his interactions with David Corn, a reporter at Mother Jones who published a report on Oct. 31, 2016 that quoted Steele.

“I know that David was anxious to get this into the hands of FBI. And being the person at the FBI that he knew the best, he wanted to give it to me,” Baker testified.

The FBI severed ties with Steele after Corn’s report on the grounds that the former spy improperly revealed that he was a confidential source for the bureau.

Corn’s contact with Baker has been previously reported. The journalist has said that nothing improper occurred and that he shared the dossier with Baker after the election in hopes of authenticating the document.

“I tried the FBI again after the election. On my own accord, I shared a copy of the dossier with the FBI in order to see if the bureau would authenticate the documents and now comment on them. Once again, it would not,” Corn told The Hill in July 2018.

Corn also said it was “inaccurate” to describe him as a source for the FBI.

“I was merely doing what a journalist does: trying to get more information on a story I was pursuing.”

The effort to spread the dossier far and wide appears to have picked up steam after Trump’s election win.

David Kramer, an associate of late Arizona Sen. John McCain, said in a deposition in December 2017 that he provided the dossier to at dozen journalists, including one at BuzzFeed News, which published the report on Jan. 10, 2017.

According to Kramer, Steele asked him to meet with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger and CNN’s Carl Bernstein.

Kramer also met with Corn in early December 2016. He said that Corn was inquiring about a meeting that McCain planned to have with then-FBI Director James Comey. Kramer said that he was unsure how Corn found out about the meeting.

Klobuchar Takes A Swipe At O’Rourke: ‘I Wasn’t Born To Run’ For President In 2020

Minnesota Democratic Sen. and 2020 hopeful took a swipe at her Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke saying unlike him, she was not “born to run” for president.

“It was probably more when I got to college. When I was growing up, in high school, that’s not what girls thought they were going to do,” Klobuchar said in a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Politico reported.

“My parents, I think, thought it was a possibility. But I really didn’t. And so for me, it’s something that’s happened over time, as I’ve realized I can do things,” Klobuchar said. “I can get elected to the secretary-treasurer of my high school class. I can move on from there. And so I think it’s something that I didn’t have from birth.”

This comes as O’Rourke said he feels “born to be in” the 2020 presidential race in an interview with Vanity Fair released Wednesday before launching is official bid Thursday.

Klobuchar was one of the first Democratic senators to announce her candidacy for the 2020 presidential campaign. The Minnesota Democrat made the announcement on Feb. 10 in her home state. After her announcement, reports broke that she has a history of allegedly being rude to staff, making many of her employees cry, as well as reportedly hitting one of her staffers with a binder.

The Minnesota Democratic has since defended the reports about treating her staff poorly, saying she is tough enough to deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin if elected president.

Both Klobuchar and O’Rourke will have to fight through the crowded Democratic primary in order to take on President Donald Trump in the 2020 general election.

Democratic Congresswomen Want To Lower Federal Voting Age To 16

Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley on Tuesday evening introduced legislation to lower the federal voting age from 18 to 16.

Pressley cited teen activists pushing for gun control as a reason for giving 16-year-olds the right to vote, which the congresswoman compared to having a driver’s license.

“Young people are at the forefront of some of our most existential crises,” Pressley added. “The time has come. Our young people deserve to have the opportunity to exercise their right to vote.”

Two other Democratic congresswomen, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and New York Rep. Grace Meng, offered their support for Pressley’s legislation.

“I’m committed to making sure we empower young people to build our future together. Giving them the power to vote will help build a more equitable and just future,” Meng said in a statement posted to Twitter on Tuesday.

Tlaib tweeted her support for Pressley’s amendment on Wednesday.

Pressley proposed the change as an amendment to House Democrats’ “For The People Act,” which would amend campaign finance laws.

The left-wing American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has already come out against the bill, citing “provisions that unconstitutionally impinge on the free speech rights of American citizens and public interest organizations.”

“They will have the effect of harming our public discourse by silencing necessary voices that would otherwise speak out about the public issues of the day,” the ACLU said in a letter to the House Rules Committee.

John Brennan Relieved At Mueller Findings, Says Suspicions Were Wrong

Former CIA Director John Brennan said Monday morning that he was “relieved” by the Attorney General’s summary of the Mueller report, admitting the findings presented less than he anticipated in terms of criminal activity.

“Well, I don’t know if I received bad information but I suspected there was more than there actually was. I am relieved that it’s been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election. I think that’s good news for the country,” Brennan said when asked by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough if he was surprised by the lack of collusion evidence.

Brennan added “I still point to things that were done publicly, or efforts to try to have conversation with the Russians that were inappropriate, but I’m not all that surprised that the high bar of criminal conspiracy was not met.”

Brennan has been a sharp critic of President Trump throughout the Mueller investigation. Two weeks ago, he predicted that there would be indictments related to a “criminal conspiracy” involving Trump or his associates’ activities during the 2016 election.

On Sunday, Attorney General William Barr delivered his summary of the Mueller report to Congress, writing that Trump and his campaign team did not collude with any Russian entities during the election, and that there was no evidence to suggest Trump obstructed justice either.

Brennan questioned part of Barr’s conclusions. “I am surprised that that second part of obstruction of justice in terms of how it came out. I don’t know whether or not Robert Mueller wanted the attorney general to pronounce on that issue or whether or not Robert Mueller it was up to Congress and the American public to determine whether the weight of information indicates whether Donald Trump tried to obstruct justice.”

“There are some surprises there,” Brennan added. “I think that’s why getting to the full Mueller report is the best way to get some of these if not all of these questions answered.”

To date, there have been no charges of conspiracy between Trump associates and Russian government officials.

Trump Administration Will Ask The Supreme Court To Protect The Census Citizenship Question

The Trump administration will ask the Supreme Court to decide whether the government can append a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire, the Department of Justice said Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman forbade the government from incorporating the citizenship question on Jan. 15 in a sweeping decision that ran almost 300 pages.

At the administration’s bidding, the Court agreed to review a separate question arising from the citizenship case in December. After Furman issued his decision, the plaintiffs asked the justices to dismiss that case. The Department of Justice responded to that request in court filings on Tuesday, revealing they planned to appeal Furman’s decision in full directly to the high court.

“The government intends to file forthwith a petition…to review the district court’s January 15, 2019 opinion and order vacating and enjoining the reinstatement of the citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote.

Francisco emphasized the pressing time constraints at hand: the government must finalize the census questionnaire by June, which is not enough time for the ordinary appellate process to play out.

“It is exceedingly unlikely that there is sufficient time for review in both the court of appeals and in this Court by that deadline,” Francisco wrote. Therefore, he continued, granting the administration’s request to hear the case now “is likely the only way to protect this Court’s opportunity for review.”

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross issued orders providing for the addition of a citizenship question to the census survey in March 2018. The Department of Commerce oversees the Census Bureau.

Tuesday’s filing from the government is the latest in a succession of cases in which the Trump administration has short-circuited normal judicial process and asked the Supreme Court to review a district court decision before a federal appeals court does. Those requests, called petitions for certiorari before judgment, are rarely granted.

A sprawling coalition of civil rights groups, city governments, and blue states filed lawsuits challenging the citizenship question’s inclusion in April 2019. Those plaintiffs warn the citizenship question will reduce minority participation in the census. As such, the plaintiffs say they stand to lose federal funds and representation in Congress.

The Constitution mandates a census every 10 years to apportion seats in the House of Representatives among the states. Population is also used as a basis for rewarding federal aid. A citizenship question was included in the census until 1960.