If Betsy Devos is appointed as our Secretary of Education she’ll be charged with protecting the most marginalized students in our country.

All children, even the poor Black, Latinx, and Native ones, have the right to a good public education.

She’ll create a system of for-profit schools which will filter our children into the prison system. School-to-prison pipeline targets poor kids, disabled kids, mentally ill kids, Black kids and Latino kids… some of the most vulnerable kids in our society.

We already have schools largely segregated by class and color. If she is allowed to created for-profit charter schools she will make that much worse. The school-to-prison pipeline is even worse in for-profit schools than public ones.

Devos is a billionaire who doesn’t understand what most Americans experience. She’s invested in many for-profit schools from early education to college. If she’s allowed to take over our education system she will destroy what little progress we have made toward creating a truly equitable school system.

Betsy Devos couldn’t even say during her confirmation that we shouldn’t have gun-free schools (in case of grizzlies lmao!) despite all who have lost their lives in schools due to gun violence.

We only need 3 VOTES to get her thrown out! Call your senators if you live in ME, TN, AK, GA, UT, NC, WY, LA, KS, SC, or KY!!! If you don’t know who your senator is check here https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/

via a friend of mine: Hey folks, I just called Mayor Libby Schaaf to demand her support of undocumented immigrants in the city of Oakland.

Yesterday, Mayor Murray of Seattle made a statement saying that the city will be a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, even if it means losing federal funding. Please call your Mayor’s office and demand similar actions of support. Deetz below.

OAKLAND Mayor Libby Schaaf phone: (510) 238-3141 message: http://www.oaklandnet.com/contactmayor.asp

PORTLAND Mayor Charlie Hales phone: (503) 823-4120 message: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/mayor/60975 (email in link) **hey guess what, there’s also a form ^^^ to request an appointment with the mayor

CHICAGO Mayor Rahm Emanuel (i know, just do it) phone: Chicago residents dial 311, or (312) 744-5000 message: https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/general/contact.html (click link for feedback form)

NEW YORK Mayor Bill de Blasio phone: 311 or 212-NEW-YORK if outside NYC message: http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/contact-the-mayor.page (link at bottom of page)

The incremental legal changes that folks have been fighting to make since the Civil Rights Act passed are about to get systematically undone. Trump has promised to undo every single one of President Obama’s executive orders. He’s going to attempt to stack the Supreme Court with alt-right Justices (potentially 3-4 new Justices), all of whom will be young and remain on the court for 30-50 years, shaping law for the rest of most of our lives. That’s the rest of my life as a lawyer now spent dealing with shitty precedent and being forced to craft even shittier legal arguments to appeal to the new alt-right Justices in a vain attempt to preserve our rights only for it to ultimately be ignored and shot down. The amicus brief on Fisher II isn’t even cold yet, but you can bet conservative impact litigators everywhere are readying anti-Affirmative Action cases at this very moment. Meanwhile, to mount a challenge to that, we’re going to have to toss all of the carefully crafted & tailored legal argumentation folks spent years on just to sway Justice Kennedy and go in essentially blind to what arguments might appeal to the new extremely conservative Justices. Honestly, all the folks who worked tirelessly to save Affirmative Action, bring us marriage equality, & are fighting to preserve our rights in less well-known cases, were royally fucked by this election result. We basically have to reinvent the wheel for progressive impact litigation lawyering. 

All of this dovetails into “organizing.” People keep saying that “we just need to come together” and “now is the time to organize” without defining what that is or what it looks like in Trump’s America. Whenever folks talked about organizing before it was mostly about changing policies, moving lawmakers & politicians, & changing laws. Well…how are we supposed to change policies, move lawmakers, or change laws, when all the power players are now extremely conservative Republicans with little to no politicalopposition & thus no incentive to listen to the concerns of “losers?” We just elected the people whom we knew didn’t care at all about our issues. These folks think BLM is a terrorist organization, they think trans folks should be banned from public bathrooms, they think we should electrocute the gay away, they think all Muslims & anyone who “looks like a Muslim” is a terrorist, they think all Brown folks are “foreign” and need to be deported. These are not reasonable people. They are not moved by our protests. And they have the power and the tools to make what they believe in policy and to make it legal & constitutional.