YouTube Transcription: What Can We Do?

Cristobal Joshua Alex: So, it’s not all that depressing though, there’s hope.  And let me just say that there’s a silver lining to all of this, in the very few minutes that we have left I’ll talk about what we can do.  But the silver lining here is that these cases are so cross-cutting… and they affect so many people.  A case in area of disability rights can affect somebody who’s doing work in racial justice or environmental law.  And so there’s a strong incentive for all of these groups to work together… and then that’s the silver lining there.  And I think the first step really here is to start talking about these issues and educate the public about it.  You know, these opinions are coming down and they’re talking about things like sovereign immunity and private right of action, well, most folks don’t care about what that it, it doesn’t make any sense, and so we’ve got to start breaking it down into real terms, talking about the real people that are affected by this rollback… and then we have to change the terms of the debate.  The right wing for so long has really controlled the terms of the debate, and let me show you want I mean…

Mix of multiple recordings: Support judicial restraint… put people on the bench who are strict constructionists… judicial restraint… interpreting the law, not writing it… will interpret the laws… won’t legislate from the bench… more strict constructionists… interpret the law… and not try to… legislate from the bench…

Cristobal Joshua Alex: … and they do it over and over and over again, and, you know the people who are activists judges and the ones that are legislating from the bench are the ones on the right wing that are rolling back all of these rights.  Those are the activists.  We don’t even call them conservatives anymore because they’re anything but conservative, and as progressive organizations we need to put more money and more emphasis on communications and messaging.  If you look at the right wing, the successful organizations of the right wing spend about 30% of their budget on media.  The left we spend about, we’re in the teens.  And so we need a more, we need to move into funding, we need to get into the 33% range, we’re great, if we get into the 50% range on messaging that’ll make a huge difference.  You’ll hear a little bit about immigration and what’s going on in the immigration world.  But that’s especially important now because, quite frankly, we’re not winning that debate in the public when it comes to immigration.  A good example of that, if you go to middle-America and ask a voter, using language like this, “do you think illegal aliens should get, or should we give illegal aliens free medical care?” they’ll say no.  Now if you ask that same person, “do you think that the government should deny equal access to emergency medical care for an unauthorized worker?” you’re going to get a different answer, more than likely.  So you have to frame messages and language very carefully and that’s what we need to focus on.  Creative legal strategies, I’m not going to get into that too much, but we have to start thinking outside of the box, using preemption and other doctrines to get around some of these barriers that the courts are erecting.  And then nominations, we’ve talked about how the right has controlled nominations; Bush has appointed something like 300 judges in the last 7 years.  We’ve got a lot of work to do on that, and we’ve got to remind our senators that they have a constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent when it comes to these nominees.  I put Leslie Southwick up here just as a recent example of another battle that we lost that’s going to hurt us for a while.  Just a, I think it was probably about a month and a half ago Leslie Southwick was appointed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, because Diane Feinstein in California switched her vote.  And I talked to some folks in Seattle a while back when this battle was brewing and they said “why should I care about what’s going to happen in the Fifth Circuit, I’m in the Ninth Circuit out here”  Well, as I mentioned earlier a lot of these key cases are coming out of the Southeast… I don’t know what it is there’s some kind of judicial superhighway from the Southeast straight to the Supreme Court and that’s where we’re getting these hits.  So something like Leslie Southwick, who is anti-worker, anti-gay, and some people think, pretty bad on race, is going to cause some problems across the country, even though he’s out in the Fifth Circuit.  And then last in the last minute here I’ll talk about legislation.  A lot of these really bad cases can be corrected through legislative fixes.  We’re calling this the 2008 “Window of Opportunity” and I’ve got here a bunch of materials for you.  But just two days ago Senator Kennedy introduced the Fairness Act of 2008, which will correct… it’s almost a kitchen sink bill, but its going to correct a lot of these terrible rollback cases that we talked about.  It’ll have a Sandoval fix, it’ll have a fix for the ADEA, the Age Discrimination and Employment Act that’s been hurt very badly by the courts, it’ll fix that attorney’s fees provision, among a host of other different fixes.  So it’s a step in the right direction.  It doesn’t move the ball forward in terms of where the court was, you know, 10 years ago, but it certainly will help out quite a bit and correct some of the missteps.  The ADA Restoration Act… you know politics make strange bedfellows, you know who Sensenbrenner is, the guy out of Wisconsin who is extremely anti-immigrant… he introduced the ADA Restoration Act.  I don’t understand it, but it’s a very good act… and will go a long way to protecting folks in the disability arena.  And the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act… you guys know about this case that came down last term… she, Lily Ledbetter is a wonderful woman in Alabama, of all places, who worked at Goodyear Tire for 20 years, just a wonderful fine person who did the same kind of work, actually more work, worked harder than her male counterparts, went up to manager, found out toward the end of her career that she was being paid significantly less just because she’s a woman.  She filed a lawsuit, was very successful at District Court, went up to the Supreme Court and the Court said you know, you should have filed that lawsuit a 180 days after the first action to discriminate against you, even though you had no way of knowing about it for 20 years until you got this anonymous note.  Just an absurd case, and that has been introduced and has a hearing next week.  So these are a couple of key pieces of legislation to watch, and I’ll get out of the way because I’m taking up too much time here, but thank you so much.