Sarah Deer

The Tribal Law and Order Act will be signed into law by President Obama Thursday afternoon at 4:45 pm Eastern, according to one Minnesotan who’ll be present for it. Sarah Deer, an assistant professor at William Mitchell College of Law, has been invited to attend. A member of the the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Deer coauthored Amnesty International’s 2007 report “Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Violence” (pdf).

“The federal government’s relationship with tribal governments, its obligations under treaty and law, and our values as a nation require that we do more to improve public safety in tribal communities,” Obama said in a statement after last Wednesday’s passage of the bill by the U.S. House. “And this Act will help us achieve that. It will strengthen the relationship between the federal government and tribal governments. It will improve our ability to work with tribal communities in the investigation and prosecution of crime, and it authorizes resources for tribes to fight crime more effectively.”

The Tribal Law and Order Act was passed as an amendment to HR 725 by a vote of 326-92. Minnesota’s entire congressional delegation voted for the measure, with one exception: Sixth Congressional District Republican Michele Bachmann. Bachmann’s office didn’t respond to the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment on her opposition.

Still from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota's new ad

As one of his former challengers for the Republican gubernatorial nomination predicted in April, Tom Emmer’s DWI record is now being used against the presumed GOP nominee. A new TV ad attacking Emmer for his DWI arrests was released Tuesday by Alliance for a Better Minnesota.

The commercial features Margaret Everson, a woman whose son was killed by a drunk driver. Everson discusses the pain of losing her child, and then turns to Emmer’s DWI record and votes in favor of reducing penalties against drunk drivers.

Though general election season won’t begin until after the primary in two weeks, there has been a recent influx of outside advertisements in the governor’s race. MN Forward cut an ad for Emmer that has drawn fire from progressive organizations, less for the content of the ad itself but for Target Corp.’s financial support for an ad backing the anti-LGBT rights candidate.

Watch the ad:

The app is essentially a distillation of Clark’s website, with positive press accounts, trivia about Rep. Michele Bachmann and weather (for some reason). Clark announced it over Twitter last night. As of this morning, it had received less than 50 downloads from the Android Market.

Already this week, Clark had one of the more visible operations at Netroots, which is considered to be a Democratic fundraising powerhouse after online networking helped push Barack Obama over the top in the 2008 election. Clark posted a page on her website targeted at Netroots attendees, calling for them to join her blogging corps:

“I left NN10 more energized than ever about our campaign and the grassroots network we have built – in the district and across the Internet. I hope you’ll continue to be a part of it.”

But while Clark is breaking state fundraising records, she still trails incumbent Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) in the money race by $2 million.

Data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (7/27/2010)

Not to mention that the latest polls show Clark still trailing Bachmann by nine points in the uber–conservative 6th district.

In a video interview with Talking Points Memo, Clark stays on message, but acknowledges that it’s become a national race because Bachmann has made it a national race, pointing out later that Bachmann’s sought out national media celebrity.

As Clark wrote to Netroots attendees in her Daily Kos blog about the event:

“You’re going to play a pivotal role in this election.  For the past few years, you’ve made sure that Michele Bachmann is held accountable for her words and deeds.  We’ve seen in just the past few days how critical your work is, when on Friday Congresswoman Bachmann said that, should the GOP take over the House in November, “all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.”

The high-profile Netroots appearance and Android app (and an upcoming Iphone app) could signal a move to raise Clark’s profile with her own national audience, which could help even the playing field for her as the election looms.

The relative of a young woman raped on tribal land. Photo: Adam Nadel for Amnesty International

A bill aimed at helping Native American law enforcement investigate rape and other crimes by non-Indians on tribal lands passed in the U.S. House of Representatives last week with overwhelming bipartisan support. Only one Minnesotan — Republican Michele Bachmann — voted against it.

The Tribal Law and Order Act passed last Wednesday as an amendment to HR 725 on a 326-92 vote, with votes from Minnesota Republicans Erik Paulsen and John Kline and Democrats Keith Ellison, James Oberstar, Betty McCollum, Collin Peterson and Tim Walz. It gives tribal police more authority in seeking prosecution of non-Natives who commit crimes on American Indian lands. There are more than 63,000 Minnesotans who identify exclusively as Native American, according to the U.S. Census.

In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that tribal governments have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Natives. So when a crime is committed, there’s something of a “jurisdictional vacuum,” says Sarah Deer, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma and an assistant professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, with tribal police and state or federal authorities having to hash out who’s responsible and how to proceed with an investigation.

“What we find is that, by and large, in most communities, nobody really takes action,” Deer said. “There’s not actually a legal loophole, but it’s a practical loophole.”

“The jurisdiction is just a huge mess,” she added. “It’s very confusing to determine who has ultimate authority to take on a felony level sex crime in Indian Country.”

Kirsten Carlson, director of the Safe Women Strong Nations program at the Indian Law Center in Helena, Mont., says that jurisdictional issues often slow — or halt — investigations into the “epidemic of violence against women” on tribal lands.

“If you call law enforcement, they’ll ask, ‘What was the identity of the perpetrator? What’s your identity? What’s the status of the land? And what kind of crime is it? Oftentimes tribal law enforcement says, ‘We can’t respond. Our hands our tied because it’s a non-Indian perpetrator.’”

This jurisdictional mess — or “maze of injustice,” as the title of a 2007 Amnesty International report coauthored by Deer puts it — ends up disproportionately hurting women. According to government statistics, one in three Native women will be raped in her lifetime. That figure is 2.5 times higher than the rate for non-Native women in the United States, says Deer.

“I’d venture to say that’s a conservative estimate,” Deer told the Minnesota Independent. “When I travel to Indian Country and talk to women, they tell me, ‘Gosh, I  don’t know anyone in my community who hasn’t been raped.’”

The bill enhances communication between tribal and state or federal law enforcement and expands the ability of tribal police to investigate crimes on Indian lands. It authorizes the deputization of tribal law enforcement to investigate crimes by non-Indians on Native lands: As Deer puts it, “a tribal cop investigating a white rapist is essentially putting on a state or federal hat.”

In addition to expanding tribal police authority to investigate crimes by non-Indians, the act increases the maximum sentence that tribal courts could impose from one year to three years. That’s “three times what we had,” says Deer, but it’s still well below the 7- to 10-year sentences she says she typically sees handed down by federal courts for convicted rapists.

Still, the sentence maximums are shockingly low.

“Prior to the Tribal Law and Order Act, there was a one-year maximum sentence for any crime prosecuted in tribal court,” says Carlson, who is a descendant of the Cherokee Nation. “You could murder someone and have a maximum one-year sentence.”

Carlson notes another key advancement in the act.

“While it doesn’t restore criminal jurisdiction to the tribes, it does increase the accountability of the federal government to tribal communities,” Carlson said. “For the first time, federal officials have to report back on declinations of these cases to Congress and tribal communities. Federal prosecutors need to maintain records…. That is a tremendous movement forward.”

Where the act falls short in the eyes of many American Indians, as Carlson’s comments suggest, is in tribal jurisdiction over non-Native offenders who commit crimes on tribal lands. Such cases will still be heard in state or federal — instead of tribal — courts.

“I should just be satisfied with celebrating this victory, but I’d really like to see Congress take on this issue of non-Indian perpetrators,” said Deer. She’s perplexed by the rationale behind the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe.

“I think there’s a fear that tribal governments will be harsher on non-Indians,” Deer said. “I think that’s a racist idea at its core… the idea that tribal people can’t be fair. If you take racism out of the picture, then what the rule is doesn’t make sense.”

Carlson sees it as an issue of local accountability.

“What’s shocking about it is that under our constitutional system we think of crime as a local problem dealt with by local authority. This is a system where the local community doesn’t have control over it,” she said. “The reason that crime is a local issue in the United States is that then you can hold local people accountable.”

She notes that in Montana, there are 12 Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) assigned to investigate rapes and violent crime on reservations, but they tend to live in bigger cities like Billings or Helena instead of on reservations. “It doesn’t impact them in the same way as it does in the local community.”

Still, Deer is “really, really pleased” that the Tribal Law and Order Act will soon be law.

“It doesn’t have everything that we would’ve wanted in an ideal world. You have to aim high and then accept the medium,” she said.

Bachmann’s communications director, Dave Dziock, didn’t return the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment on the Sixth District Republican’s no-vote.

Republicans elsewhere, however, have questioned the bill’s price tag, which some have estimated at $1.1 billion.

That’s a “myth,” Deer says. “There’s been some misunderstanding that it was going to be a high-dollar bill,” she told the Independent, noting that “there’s no mandatory spending” in the bill.

Deer wouldn’t speculate on why Bachmann opposes this important boost for Indian women, which President Obama is expected to sign into law soon, but she expressed some surprise.

“I’m not sure why she didn’t. It’s very much about prosecution. It’s a very law-and-order bill.”

Update: President Obama will sign the Tribal Law and Order Act into law Thursday afternoon.

On Thursday, July 29, Lucy Rain Simpson of the Indian Law Resource Center’s Safe Women, Strong Nations project will speak at Minneapolis’ Birchbark Books about violence against Native women.

Workers march to protest for jobs legislation. Photo: Rasdourian, Flickr

Sometime this spring, Republicans turned against unemployment. In Nevada, Sharron Angle (R), the candidate facing incumbent Sen. Harry Reid (D), told local reporters, “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job.” (Untrue.) Angle also called the unemployed “spoiled.”

Rand Paul, a candidate for a Kentucky Senate seat, made similar statements, and politicians in Washington followed suit. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said on C-SPAN that extending unemployment would discourage “individuals that are out there to actually go out and go through the interviews.”

But unlike most comments from politicians, these criticisms did not diffuse into the generic noise of political chatter. They began reverberating in what might be termed the unemployed netroots — a system of highly trafficked, influential blogs and sites connecting the jobless and updating them, often in minute detail, about ins and outs of Congress’ work on unemployment issues.

When Jordan, a former programmer living in Nevada, lost his position with a local university, he began sending out resumes, but he also found himself following the eight-month battle for an unemployment extension closely — each failed Senate vote, each new House proposal. (He requested I withhold his last name to avoid impeding his job search.) Online, he started surfing list-servs, posting on message boards and using resources from the unemployed. A few times, he has worked up the courage to call his legislators’ offices.

Jordan has searched hard for a job and is now considering moving away from his family for a few months, if it means he can send home a paycheck. “I have voted Republican my entire life,” he says. “I don’t want to vote for Harry Reid. But I don’t want to be told I’m lazy, and I’m dumb, and I’m living high on the hog, collecting [unemployment insurance] because I want to.”

There are more than 30 million people left without work at some point during the course of the recession; 14.6 million are currently unemployed. As many as 4 million people have exhausted the maximum weeks of federal and state unemployment benefits. In each case, Jordan is among these millions, and for an uncountable number of people like him, the experience with income insecurity has led to a political awakening.

Among the biggest sites in the unemployment netroots is LayoffList, managed by Michael Thornton, a native of Rochester, N.Y.  Thornton stared LayoffList in 2008; five months ago, he began writing articles and posting legislators’ information. He now receives hundreds of emails and has logged more than a million hits. Thornton is finding that, rather than losing interest in politics since the end of the fight for extended benefits, the unemployed are “energized and motivated” and have started looking forward to the fall.

“Even Republicans say they aren’t voting Republican anymore,” the soft-spoken former technical writer says. “You have millions of unemployed people out there. If even half of them voted, they could swing a nationwide election.”

Paladinette — the online “zealot for the unemployed” also known as LaDona King — has taken the battle over the unemployment extension as more of a call to arms. She routinely publishes phone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses of lawmakers to target, rallying her thousands of online supporters to the cause. King personally calls 25 or 30 legislators’ offices a day. Sometimes, when she posts lawmakers’ numbers or picks out a particularly egregious example of a legislator blocking a vote or putting down the unemployed, her followers flood a Senate or House office with phone calls. The same goes for LayoffList. At one point, Thornton published the name and number of a House staffer working on unemployment legislation. Soon after, the staffer called and begged him to take it down, he says.

“They’re all concerned about their re-election,” King says. “We’re making sure the Republicans get blasted for their obstructionist behavior. … We have tons of people calling, faxing, emailing.”

“We’re lobbyists in training,” she laughs. “Without all that money!”

During the eight month battle to extend unemployment insurance, with the unemployment rate peaking over 10 percent, huge online networks of the unemployed came into fruition. Now, coming into the fall and the midterms, King and other grassroots organizers for the unemployed are hooking up with formal organizing groups to add institutional oomph to the effort. They say they do not want to let the long battle for simple extensions go to waste.

Already, a number of unions and other organizations have created dedicated working groups or online organizations for the jobless. Last year, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, a labor union, founded the Ur Union of Unemployed, or U-Cubed, for jobless workers. Additionally, the AFL-CIO’s Working America affiliate has launched Unemployment Lifeline, an online site to rally and organize the unemployed.

Working America is “the biggest organization for the unemployed,” according to spokesman Robert Fox. By the union’s own count, 500,000 of its 3.2 million members are currently jobless, and the group is going door-to-door, recruiting more members from the ranks of the unemployed.

“We spend most of our time demanding the reform of banks, demanding good jobs, and trying to make sure that there’s investment being made in our communities,” says Fox. But come this fall, “We’re going to be engaging our members fully, making sure they’re aware of which candidates to support.”

“We have the ability to make sure a lot of unemployed folks know where politicians stand, who is voting against making investments in jobs, who needs to hear from unemployed workers and who needs to hear from them twice,” he says.

Likewise, U-Cubed is readying unemployed workers to call out politicians and candidates stumping in their home states during the August recess, planning to visit events in Wichita, Ks., and the west coast.

The push from the unemployment netroots has already started. Upon hearing that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) might attempt to move legislation for unemployed workers who have exhausted their benefits this week, Paladinette urged her followers to start calling possible swing votes — Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine), Scott Brown (Mass.) and Charles Grassley (Iowa).

And she says she is gearing up to push her followers to attend rallies starting next week. “We don’t want to be like the Tea Partiers,” she says, noting their small-government views, “Just sort of.”

The Democrats’ move to invoke cloture on the DISCLOSE Act this afternoon fell short of the necessary 60 votes. The official tally ended up at 57-41, with every Republican voting against the motion. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) was absent, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) ended up voting “no” as a procedural move in order to be able to call another vote on the bill in the future.

Immediately following the vote, Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization that works to reduce the influence of money in American politics, issued a statement that argued, “No one should be deluded by today’s vote into thinking this battle is over.” He vowed that efforts to pass the DISCLOSE Act would continue in September, at which point some of the objections raised by Republican Sens. Snowe and Collins of Maine and Sen. Brown of Massachusetts about the timing of the bill would no longer apply:

Senator Snowe, Collins and Brown all raised concerns about passing the DISCLOSE Act in a time frame that would allow the new law to be effective for the 2010 congressional elections.

That is no longer a practical possibility.

We again strongly urge Senators Snowe, Collins and Brown, and any other Republican Senator interested in government transparency, to work with Senate supporters of the DISCLOSE Act to reach an agreement that they can support and that will reflect the interests of the American people.

This is no time for any Senator who is serious about campaign finance disclosure laws and government transparency to abandon the effort to ensure that voters know who is spending money to influence their votes.

In other words, now that the bill will likely not be brought up for another vote until September, Democracy 21 is arguing that it will not become effective quickly enough to have a large impact on the 2010 congressional races. That said, the language in the bill currently states that the new disclosure requirements must go into effect 30 days after the law’s enactment, so a mid-September passage could have advertisers scrambling to comply during the last few weeks of the election cycle.

Best Buy, the Regis Corporation beauty salon business, and Securian insurance and financial planning each gave $100,000 in recent weeks, bringing the total contributions from business to $750,000. The fund, called MN Forward, has about $500,000 on hand to spend.

…

David Olson, president of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, said he hopes the fund will raise $2 million to $5 million from corporate revenues.

Target Corp. had previously contributed $150,000 to MN Forward, which was used to produce a pro-Tom Emmer ad; Emmer is the likely GOP gubernatorial nominee. Target has drawn fire from progressives for supporting Emmer, as Target had previously been viewed as a an ally to LGBT causes, while Emmer, running as a social conservative candidate, has been at odds with LGBT civil rights.

The increased flow of corporate money could bolster Emmer’s campaign as the general election season begins to ramp up. Emmer posted lackluster funding numbers Monday, trailing all of his potential Democratic opponents. His numbers were not far off from DFL-endorsed candidate Margaret Anderson Kelliher, but he would start the election in a large financial hole if either of the self-funded candidates Mark Dayton or Matt Entenza win the DFL primary on August 10.

The report’s online data center shows that the number of children living in poverty in Minnesota has decreased. In 2008, more than 141,000 children lived in poverty, or 11.4 percent of all state children; that’s down more than 7,000 children compared to the year before. But the same timespan saw a jump in the number of kids getting reduced-priced school lunch, food assistance and food-shelf service.

The study noted “regional overtones,” since Minnesota is joined by Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska in the top 10. But while the upper midwest scored well, the national trend is less heartening. Child welfare has “stagnated” between 2000 and 2008, and the survey results — which are drawn from the 2008 American Community Survey — don’t reflect the current economic recession.

Read the KIDS COUNT report:

2010DataBook

Matt Entenza, Mark Dayton

The two remaining Minnesota gubernatorial candidates released their campaign finance reports Tuesday, and, as expected, they lead the pack by a wide margin.

Mark Dayton and Matt Entenza, both running for the DFL gubernatorial nomination, have pumped millions of their own money into their campaigns. Since the first of the year, Entenza has spent $3.58 million of his own money campaigning, while Dayton has used $2.76 million of his wealth. Dayton raised $189,000 from outside sources with $334,000 cash left on hand, and Entenza raised $360,000 from other sources with $132,000 cash on hand.

The two millionaire candidates have vastly outspent the third DFL candidate, Margaret Anderson Kelliher, who had raised just under $1 million this year, and the Republican candidate Tom Emmer, who reported $785,000 raised. But both Kelliher and Emmer gained far more than Dayton and Entenza in independent contributions. Independence Party candidate Tom Horner is far behind the rest of the pack in fundraising.

All four major candidates reported relatively similar amounts of cash left in their campaign banks , but Entenza and Dayton’s numbers are misleading as both candidates will likely infuse more money into their own campaigns if they reach the general election.