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For Immediate Release
March, 14 2017, 11:45am EDT
Contact:
Demos: Rachel Palermo, rpalermo@skdknick.com
Every Voice: Laura Friedenbach, laura@everyvoice.org
120 Groups Ask: Will Gorsuch Defend The Rights of Everyday People to Be Heard Over Big Donors?
Letter Asks Whether Gorsuch Will Side With Ordinary Americans Over the Wealthy and Powerful
WASHINGTON
Senators must challenge President Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court to clarify his position on the power of big money in politics and whether he believes the wealthy and powerful should be heard above the voices of everyday people, according to a letter signed by 121 democracy, civil rights, environmental, labor, and other local, state, and national organizations representing tens of millions of Americans.
The letter, organized by Demos and Every Voice, asks members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to press Judge Neil Gorsuch about his troubling record on the power of money in politics at next week's hearing.
Adam Lioz, Counsel and Senior Advisor at Demos, said: "We need a justice who understands that in a true democracy the strength of our voices cannot depend upon the size of our wallets. Judge Gorsuch's troubling record on money in politics shows he would not be such a justice, and renders him unfit to a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court. We are proud to stand with this diverse array of groups that represent millions of Americans to ensure our next Supreme Court Justice does not side with big corporations and wealthy donors against everyday people."
Nick Nyhart, President and CEO at Every Voice Center, said: "Time after time, Judge Gorsuch has sided with the wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. If promoted to the Supreme Court, Judge Gorsuch could hand even more influence to big donors and corporations in our elections. Senators have a responsibility to press Judge Gorsuch at his hearing on whether he will side with everyday Americans and ensure the influence of money in politics is kept in check."
As the letter states:
"In future decisions, the Court might erase our few remaining protections against big-money influence in campaigns and policy making, or permit a balanced political system in which all voices are heard and currently marginalized communities have a full say in the decisions that affect their lives.
"Americans understand this, and 93% of voters think it's important that President Trump nominates a Supreme Court justice who is open to limiting the influence of big money in politics. Unfortunately, Judge Gorsuch's record on money in politics and corporate power is deeply troubling, and suggests he would support increasing the power of the wealthiest interests within the system.
"As the Senate Judiciary Committee considers whether Judge Gorsuch is fit to serve all Americans as a Supreme Court Justice, we ask that you vigorously pursue this essential question:
"Will Judge Gorsuch's legal philosophy lead him to strike down even more protections against the use of corporate or personal wealth to influence elections, such as candidate and party contribution limits, or will he permit sensible limits on political money in order to ensure the voices and will of all Americans are fully represented within the political process?"
As detailed in a factsheet by the Campaign Legal Center and Demos, Gorsuch believes corporations are people, has signaled openness to a legal standard that could lead to the end of campaign contribution limits, and opposed accountability for corporate bad actors as a private attorney--views that if acted upon, during a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, would further weaken our democracy and tilt it in favor of the wealthy and powerful.
In polling conducted before Gorsuch's nomination was announced, a majority of voters across political parties said it was "very important" to them that Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court would limit the influence of big money in politics. More than three-fourths of voters agreed the Senate should reject a nominee who would give the wealthy more influence in politics.
The full letter is available online and was delivered today to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, and Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein.
In addition to this letter, Congressman John Sarbanes (D-Md.) and more than 110 of his House colleagues sent a letter to the Senate today urging a thorough investigation of Gorsuch's views on money in politics.
Demos is a think tank that powers the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy. Through cutting-edge policy research, inspiring litigation, and deep relationships with grassroots organizations, Demos champions solutions that will create a democracy and economy rooted in racial equity.
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Trump-Appointed Judge Strikes Down CFPB Rule That Would Bar Medical Debt From Credit Reports
"This decision will hurt people's financial futures, including their ability to buy a home, care for their families, or even get a job," said the president and CEO of the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt.
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A Trump-appointed judge axed a Biden-era rule on Friday that would have removed medical debt from credit reports and barred lenders from using certain medical information in loan decisions.
The rule, enacted under the authority of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, would have removed an estimated $49 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of about 15 million people.
But after a lawsuit brought by two industry groups with the support of Republicans in Congress who attempted to block it, Judge Sean Jordan of the U.S. District Court of Texas' Eastern District ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) had exceeded its authority in introducing the rule.
According to the CFPB, those with medical debt on their credit reports would have received a 20-point boost to their credit scores on average as a result of the rule. It would have led to an estimated 22,000 more mortgages being approved for people struggling with medical debt.
According to a report by the Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF last year, roughly 1 in 12 adults has over $250 in unpaid medical debt.
"People who get sick shouldn't have their financial future upended," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra at the time of the rule's passage in January 2025. "The CFPB's final rule will close a special carveout that has allowed debt collectors to abuse the credit reporting system to coerce people into paying medical bills they may not even owe."
The consumer reports industry lobbied furiously against the measure. Two industry groups—the Consumer Data Industry Association and the Cornerstone Credit Union League—brought the lawsuit before Judge Jordan. Meanwhile, reporting from Accountable.US in March revealed that Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee accepted a combined $867,000 from trade groups opposed to the rule.
Using the same talking points as the industry, they then attempted to block the rule, arguing that it would "weaken the accuracy and completeness of consumer credit reports."
However, according to research by the CFPB, medical debt on credit reports often has no bearing on a person's ability to pay back other loans.
Medical bills also frequently contain mistakes. According to a survey by the Commonwealth Fund last year, more than 45% of respondents were billed for a service they thought was covered by insurance. The trade magazine Becker’s Hospital Review, meanwhile, has estimated that 80% of medical bills contain errors that inflate costs.
"Medical debt unjustly damages the credit scores of millions, limiting their ability to obtain affordable credit, rent safe housing, or even get a job," said the National Consumer Law Center after the rule was introduced.
Now, as a result of its being struck down, the 15 million Americans who have medical debt on their credit reports will see an average of $3,200 remaining on their reports that would have otherwise been erased.
"The facts are clear: Medical debt is not predictive of creditworthiness," said Allison Sesso, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt, on Monday. "This decision will hurt people’s financial futures, including their ability to buy a home, care for their families, or even get a job—all because they got sick, injured, or were born with a chronic condition through no fault of their own. It will also further decrease their willingness to get the care they need."
The ruling also marks the latest attack by Republicans on the CFPB. In February, the Trump administration attempted to unilaterally and illegally shut down the consumer watchdog agency. His effort to dismantle it was later blocked by a federal judge.
Since its creation in 2011, the CFPB has relieved $21 billion worth of debt for nearly 200 million Americans. It recouped that money from powerful financial institutions and credit card companies that had engaged in predatory practices and saddled Americans with junk fees.
But by cracking down on corporate abuses, it became the bane of Republican lawmakers and their corporate donors. Many top Trump donors sought to kill the CFPB because it was coming after the actions of their companies.
Elon Musk's company Tesla was facing scrutiny over its auto loan policies, which had received hundreds of complaints from customers. His social media company, X, was also being examined for its payment policies.
Another top Trump donor, investor Marc Andreesen, launched a broadside against the bureau when it ordered a payday lending company he'd invested in to pay tens of millions worth of fines for engaging in predatory lending.
"Judge Sean Jordan, a Trump-appointed judge, joined congressional Republicans in making it easier for the Trump administration to raise costs on millions of Americans," said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk.
"Not only are they dismantling healthcare for 17 million through their big, ugly betrayal, but they're dooming millions more with low credit scores due to illness and injury," he continued. "Republicans are holding a grudge against the CFPB, and it's costing Americans money."
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'More Corruption and Abuse' on the Way as Bondi Fires DOJ Ethics Chief
"The question this drastic firing raises is: Are there even worse ethics problems Bondi is trying to hide?" said one watchdog campaigner.
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Further escalating concerns over U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi's control of the Department of Justice, Joseph Tirrell announced Monday on a professional networking website that he was fired as director of the Departmental Ethics Office.
Tirrell shared Bondi's July 11 memo, which misspells his first name and provides no explanation for his dismissal from the DOJ. It states that "pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States, your employment with the Department of Justice is hereby terminated, and you are removed from federal service effective immediately."
Democracy Docket reporter Jacob Knutson noted that "Trump officials have repeatedly referenced Article II to make broad assertions of presidential authority and to justify dismissing federal workers who traditionally have been shielded by civil service protections."
Tirrell wrote in his LinkedIn post that "I led a small, dedicated team of professionals and coordinated the work of some 30 other full-time ethics officials, attorneys, paralegals, and other specialists across the Department of Justice, ensuring that the 117,000 department employees were properly advised on and supported in how to follow the federal employee ethics rules."
Bloomberg had reported on Tirrell's ouster Sunday, and both he and the DOJ had declined to comment. The outlet pointed out that "his portfolio included reviewing and approving financial disclosures, recusals, waivers to conflicts of interest, and advice on travel and gifts for Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other DOJ leaders."
Jon Golinger, democracy advocate at the government watchdog Public Citizen, said in a Monday statement that "Bondi's sudden firing of the DOJ ethics adviser shines a bright spotlight back on her own glaring ethical conflicts and how she's handled major DOJ decisions involving her former clients like Qatar and Pfizer."
According to Golinger, "The question this drastic firing raises is: Are there even worse ethics problems Bondi is trying to hide?"
As Bloomberg also detailed:
Tirrell's removal is separate—but potentially related—to the roughly 20 employees involved in Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigations, according to numerous media reports, were also fired July 11.
Tirrell advised Smith's office on ethics matters during his criminal prosecutions of President Donald Trump, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share a sensitive personnel matter. That includes Tirrell approving Smith's receipt of $140,000 in pro bono legal fees from Covington & Burling that he disclosed upon concluding his investigation.
The Not Above the Law coalition's co-chairs—Brett Edkins of Stand Up America, Praveen Fernandes of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen, and Kelsey Herbert of MoveOn—said in a Monday statement that "by firing her ethics chief, Pam Bondi is making it clear she answers to Trump and no one else."
"This is the latest move in an alarming pattern of dismantling oversight and erasing accountability from the Department of Justice. Bondi is purging anyone who dares act as a check on executive power to pave the way for more corruption and abuse," the co-chairs continued. "Bondi may be the one who made this latest call, but this administration's culture of corruption starts at the top."
They added that "whether it's using the presidential bully pulpit to raise allies' stock prices, giving special access to Trump meme coin investors, or firing 17 agency inspectors general to stymie government oversight, Trump seems to have perfected the art of using public office for personal profit, and he, Bondi, and everyone else are ensuring that nobody dares lift a finger to stop them."
Under Trump and Bondi, thousands of employees have left the DOJ. CBS News reported last month that the department lost 4,000 workers as part of the Trump administration's "fork in the road" deferred resignation program, and Reuters revealed Monday that 69 of the roughly 110 lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch—which defends the president's policies in court—have quit the unit or announced plans to resign since his November election.
Bondi has been accused of "serious professional misconduct that threatens the rule of law and the administration of justice," including with her day-one memo directing all DOJ employees to "zealously defend" Trump's policies, and has recently faced sharp criticism for the department's handling of documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a clear sign of congressional Republicans' unwillingness to hold the Trump administration accountable, GOP members of the U.S. House Rules Committee late Monday blocked an amendment that would have forced the DOJ to release the full Epstein files to the public.
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"My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people."
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A leading scholar of the Holocaust and genocide warned Tuesday the continued "silence" of many in his field of study regarding Israel's massacre of Palestinians in Gaza "has made a mockery of the slogan 'never again''" as he outlined in a New York Times opinion piece how he came to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in the besieged enclave.
"I'm a Genocide Scholar," reads the essay's headline. "I Know It When I See It."
Like a number of other experts who were at first reluctant to designate the assault on Gaza a genocide—the term coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944—Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Omer Bartov gradually came to recognize Israel's campaign of targeted starvation, bombings on civilian infrastructure, forced displacement, and other attacks as genocidal violence as he watched the early months of the war in late 2023 and early 2024.
By May 2024, he wrote at the Times, "it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of [Israel Defense Forces] operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack," including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's threat to turn Gaza into "rubble" and his call for Israeli citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you"—a reference to the biblical passage calling on the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" in their fight against an ancient enemy.
At that point, about 1 million Palestinians had been ordered to the so-called "safe zone" of al-Mawasi—which was then targeted in numerous attacks.
Months after one top Israeli official called for the "total annihilation" of Gaza—home to more than 2 million people—Bartov concluded that the government's "actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population."
He wrote that his interpretation of Israel's actions is now that Netanyahu's government wants "to force the population to leave the strip altogether" and "debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation, and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group."
"My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people," wrote Bartov, noting that his assessment is that of an expert who grew up in a Zionist home, spent the first half of his life in Israel, and served in the IDF as well as researching the Holocaust and other war crimes.
"This was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could," wrote Bartov. "But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one."
He added that his conclusion is supported by the destruction of an estimated 174,000 buildings, or 70% of those in Gaza; the killing of more than 58,000 people, nearly a third of whom have been children and nearly 900 of whom were under one year old; and the extermination of more than 2,000 families in their entirety.
CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour noted that Bartov spoke to her last December about his conclusion that Israel is committing genocide.
"If you look at the pattern of what the IDF has been doing, not only has it been moving the population around, every safe zone... tends to get also bombed and shelled," he said at the time. "But also systematically destroying universities, schools, mosques, museums, and hospitals, of course—anything that makes for the health and also the culture of a group, and therefore, by now we have a population that is being completely debilitated."
Bartov published his essay as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said it had recorded the deaths of 875 Palestinians who were killed while seeking aid, with the vast majority killed at or around aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S.- and Israel-backed privatized aid group that has been rejected by the U.N. due to its lack of neutrality.
"The latest deadly incident happened at around 9:00 am on Monday, July 14, when reports indicated that the Israeli military shelled and fired towards Palestinians seeking food at the GHF site in As Shakoush area, northwestern Rafah," said the OHCHR on Monday of an attack that killed at least two people and injured nine others—days after a hospital in Rafah received more than 130 patients, the majority of whom suffered gunshot wounds they'd sustained while trying to access food distribution sites.
Last May, former Human Rights Watch executive director Aryeh Neier—who was also reluctant to apply the term "genocide" to Israel's attack on Gaza—said Israel's "sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory" was what finally convinced him the assault is a genocide.
While backing the militarized GHF aid operation, Israel has continued to block humanitarian assistance from entering Gaza through crossings and has prevented experienced aid groups from distributing food to starving Palestinians.
Israel "has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz" and has portrayed its attack on Gaza—which it and its allies in the U.S. and other Western countries have persistently claimed it is targeting Hamas—as a fight against an enemy comparable to the Nazis.
"The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self-censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi-like enemy," wrote Bartov.
Progressive political strategist Waleed Shahid suggested Bartov's conclusions flew in the face of recent comments by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who in March said the term "genocide" as it related to Gaza should be rejected as antisemitism.
Bartov warned that the refusal of many Holocaust scholars and the political establishment in the U.S.—the largest international funder of the IDF—to confront the reality of Israel's attack on Gaza could ultimately make it impossible "to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before."
"Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism, and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural, and political endeavors of the 20th century," wrote Bartov.
He expressed hope that "a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name."
"Israel," he added, "will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity."
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