Democrats argued that the GOP’s objections to individual candidates since Bill Clinton’s presidency are a proxy for the party’s true mission hobbling the core agenda of the Civil Rights Division.
WASHINGTON
Kristen Clarke was looking for a new athletic challenge during her junior year in high school. Girls’ basketball didn’t interest her because she couldn’t dribble. Girls’ ice hockey? She didn’t skate. Volleyball didn’t seem intense enough.
Then she recalled how hard the boys’ wrestling team worked out. They ran until they sweated off enough pounds to make a weight class. They lifted weights. They left practice exhausted. So, in an audacious move for the early 1990s, Clarke joined the boys’ team.
“They were giving it everything. If she was going to do a winter sport, she said, ‘might as well do the most difficult one,’” recalled Window Snyder, a friend and classmate of Clarke’s at the prestigious Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. “I don’t think she ever even thought about it being a boys’ sport. That is who she was. Whatever she was doing had to be challenging.”
Idaho Legislature hires own lawyers to defend new initiative
May 24, 2021
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BOISE, Idaho (AP) The Idaho Supreme Court has agreed to allow the state Legislature to intervene in two lawsuits that challenge the same restrictive voter initiative law, meaning taxpayers will pay for two separate legal teams in each case.
The state Legislature will be represented by the Idaho attorney general s office in one case and private attorneys, led by William G. Myers III of the firm Holland & Hart, in the other case, the Idaho Press reported.
State lawmakers approved an additional $4 million in taxpayer funding for the Legislative Legal Defense Fund, which is split between the House and Senate. The House portion this year had dropped to a zero balance. But the Idaho Press reported that public records show Myers is being paid $470 an hour. It is unclear how much the state has paid him so far.
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – The Senate on Tuesday narrowly confirmed Kristen Clarke to be the Justice Department s civil rights chief, making her the first Black woman to fill the high-profile role.
The Senate voted 51-48 to confirm Clarke, with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, as the lone Republican to support President Joe Biden s nominee to lead a powerful division of the Justice Department that s in charge of investigating police abuses and enforcing voting rights laws and federal statutes prohibiting discrimination based on race, sex, religion and other factors.
Clarke fills the post at a pivotal time for the Justice Department, as high-profile deaths of Black citizens during encounters with police have led to months of social justice protests and calls for reform. Clarke, a longtime civil rights attorney, is expected to play a pivotal role in reinvigorating the Justice Department s investigations of troubled police agencies, which languished during the Trump administration.