The 18 Seditious Republican AGs Who Tried to Overturn the Election ... & Police Reform
Research suggests state Attorneys General are the best chance at achieving real police accountability and reform - how's that going to happen in states like these?
Editors Riff
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Until the Supreme Court rejected them this past Friday, there were are a total of 18 Republican state Attorneys General - including the plaintiff from Texas - who were expending dwindling state taxpayer money to support a long-shot, last ditch, seditious effort to delay the Electoral College certification scheduled for Monday, December 14th. That accounts for 36 percent of all states. Those states are:
Texas (lead plaintiff)
Missouri (counsel for the amici curiae brief in support of Texas)
Alabama
Arkansas
Florida
Indiana
Kansas
Louisiana
Mississippi
Montana
Nebraska
North Dakota
Oklahoma
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Utah
West Virginia
It should be noted that 8 or 44 percent (nearly half) of these states are among the original 11 states of the Confederacy which seceded from the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War 160 years ago. Two of those states - South Carolina and Mississippi - were the first two states to call for secession. The residue from that event continues to this day, and ironically since it’s AGs from primarily Southern and formerly Confederate states fighting a seditious legal battle over the political fate of … an outgoing president from the Northern and formely Union state of New York (which, incidentally, now has a Black woman representing it as Attorney General).
What’s also notable is that nearly a quarter of these states those AGs “represent” are places with the highest percentages of Black residents (according to World Population Review) …
Over half (55 percent) of those seditious 18 states (10) are nearly half (44 percent) of the 24 states below with Black residential totals that are over 10 percent or more of a state population …
Where you find large concentrations of Black people you will also find high rates of police violence against those same Black people. Looking at the Mapping Police Violence project’s tabulation, half of these seditious states are places where a quarter or more of the people killed by police are Black (in most cases the percentage of Black people killed by police in these states exceeds their population percentage) …
Not only are these states with seditious, near-treasonous AGs attempting to incite some form of violence against the incoming federal government, but these are also states where Black residents are frequently (and, many times, fatally) confronted by police. According to Security.org, nearly 40 percent of those seditious states are where Black residents account for 1 or more people per 100,000 killed by police …
In a 2018 briefing entitled Expanding the Authority of State Attorneys General to Combat Police Misconduct, Center for American Progress’ Connor Maxwell and Danyelle Solomon argue that state Attorneys General are potentially the best tool or person equipped to investigate, prosecute and prevent police miscondut and violence …
With insufficient tools and resources—and an administration that has indicated that it opposes evidence-based police reform—the DOJ is incapable of eliminating systemic misconduct nationwide. But states are well-positioned to provide oversight and accountability in the absence of federal leadership. States possess the resources, relationships, and expertise necessary to begin leading reform efforts around the country during the current administration, as well as when the DOJ comes under new, more motivated leadership. For these reasons, states should empower their own attorneys general to investigate, litigate, and resolve the pattern or practice of law enforcement misconduct. By granting this authority, along with robust subpoena powers and significant financial resources, states can ensure every community has access to fair, evidence-based, and effective policing.
The states that supported the Texas AGs lawsuit to overturn the election clearly have a need to re-evaluate and mitigate their levels of police violence and explore how they can use AGs to do just that. The problem, however, is that it’s hard to achieve such a result if nearly half of current AGs are 1) preoccupied with resurrecting Confederate hostilities against an elected federal government and 2) supported by a political party apparatus that’s openly anti-Black … unless, of course, you have a plan to unseat every last one of them.
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