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  • Joyce Vance: Stand Up and Speak Out for the Rule of Law!

    Joyce Vance: Stand Up and Speak Out for the Rule of Law!


    Joyce Vance was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She writes a smart blog called Civil Discourse, in which she writes about court cases and the law, in language accessible to non-lawyers. In this post, she explains how massive protests can change the course of history.

    She writes:

    This coming Tuesday marks Donald Trump’s 100th day in office, a tenure that has led to a steady decline in the economy. If we use that measure, which many voters said led them to vote for Trump, these first 100 days have been a failure. Even as Trump has successfully seized power from Congress and some organizations have bent the knee to his every request, lawyers are winning in court, and some law firms, businesses, universities, and individuals are standing up to the president who would rather be a king. Trump may not have lost the first 100 days, but he hasn’t exactly won them either. Our democracy has been weakened, but it can still be saved.

    Thursday is May Day, May 1st. There will be renewed protest marches across the country, many of them focused on Americans’ increasing awareness that the fundamentals of democracy, which we’ve taken for granted for so long, are in danger. It’s not just due process concerns, although that is an enormous part of it, as the deportations continue. Last week we learned that included some involved American citizen children and children with cancer, with Secretary Rubio offering a sorry rejoinder on Meet the Press this morning, blaming the mothers who took young children back to their countries of origin with them, rather than being forced to abandon them. There are plenty of reasons to march.

    This will not be the first time Americans have engaged in mass protests on May Day. In 1971, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Washington, D.C., to protest the Vietnam War. They began on May 3 and continued for two more days. By the time the protest ended, more than 12,000 protestors had been arrested. The protesters’ goal was to cause a traffic jam that would keep government employees from getting to work; their slogan was “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”

    Mass protests that are large and sustained have an impact on even an entrenched presidency. They did with Nixon. The White House Historical Association’s official version of events concludes that “the enormity of the protest pushed Nixon to accelerate the nation’s exit from Vietnam.” 

    Even though it’s a different era, protests are bound to get to the thin-skinned president whose staffers, during his first term in office, had to prepare folders of positive stories about Trump for him to review twice each day. Imagine having thousands of people protesting within earshot of the White House. It must be even more galling because these protests are nonviolent and aim to support democracy through a legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights. They make a powerful statement, in contrast to a president who has abandoned the rule of law. 

    In 1970, two-thirds of Americans had come to believe U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was a mistake. We are not quite there yet when it comes to people’s view of the Trump administration. The most recent NBC News Stay Tuned Poll shows only 45% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing. But, when asked about how strongly they hold their beliefs about the president, “the vehemence of the opposition outweighs the intensity of support from the president’s MAGA base.” Twenty-three percent of Americans said they were “furious” about what Trump is doing.

    Thursday is also Law Day, an annual celebration of the rule of law. Although it has been in effect since 1958, it doesn’t usually receive much attention. This year, lawyers across the country have big plans for the day—make sure you look to see what’s going on in your area. President Dwight Eisenhower established Law Day as a day of national dedication to the principles of government under law. State Bar Associations hold essay competitions for school children, and there are state and national dinners most years. In 2025, Law Day takes on special significance as Americans’ concerns about due process come to the forefront. How fitting that the May Day protests sync with the Law Day commemoration. 

    I’ve been doing a lot of research and writing about the origins of Law Day for my book (Giving Up Is Unforgivable, due out October 21), so I’ll leave that for another time, but I want to make sure everyone knows about Law Day. This year, many lawyers across the country will retake their oath to show their support for the rule of law. There is no reason the rest of the country can’t participate too!

    The president issues a proclamation every year for Law Day. Trump did during his first term in office, too. In 2019, the proclamation began, “On Law Day, we renew our commitment to the rule of law and our Constitution. The rule of law requires that no one be above the obligations of the law or beneath its protections, and it stands as a bulwark against the arbitrary use of government power.” Unfortunately, he never lived up to those sentiments. On Thursday, we can look for the proclamation and point out the inconsistencies between what we expect from our presidents and how this one is behaving. The hypocrisy is always full force, and we shouldn’t shy away from pointing it out.

    Due process is the sleeper issue of the second Trump presidency. No one really expected democracy issues, let alone concepts like the rule of law and due process to animate a country’s protests. But it’s increasingly clear that Americans are smart, and when we are well-informed, we have no difficulty assessing what matters and what is true. We see more and more of that as Americans carry signs that say “No Kings” and “Due Process” at local rallies. All of us can be advocates for democracy, not just the lawyers among us.

    Here at Civil Discourse, we all understand the importance of this. We need to make sure the rest of the country does too. Until the Trump administration is over, it has to be Law Day every day. 

    In 2024, the Law Day theme was “Voices of Democracy,” recognizing that the people are the rulers in a democracy. Americans express their views without fear of retribution because of the First Amendment and vote in elections to select their leaders. It’s up to us to make sure it stays that way.

    This week will bring more briefings in the Abrego-Garcia case and others. There will be outrages, like the fact that Trump has a website hawking merchandise, literally selling the presidency. It’s not just the $50 price tag on the hat; there’s also the slogan, “Trump 2028,” a reference to Trump’s not-so-subtle hints that he’d like to serve a Constitution-busting third term in office. It’s not a joke. It never is with him.

    So, make sure you take some time this week to celebrate Law Day. Invite people over. Go for a walk with friends or neighbors and share your views. Talk with your kids. Democracy is not automatic; it’s a participatory sport we must all play in together, one with critically important outcomes. Democracy is important. Let’s make sure we play for keeps.

    We’re in this together,

    Joyce



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  • Author of federal mental health law has advice for California

    Author of federal mental health law has advice for California


    Seventh-graders work together on homework in their school library.

    Credit: Allison Shelley / EDUimages

    Mental health has been at the center of former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy’s personal journey to recovery from addiction as well as his public career as a policymaker, author and advocate. 

    In 2008, while representing Rhode Island in the U.S. House of Representatives, Kennedy was the lead author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a federal law that requires health insurance companies to provide equal coverage for mental health and addiction care and general physical health care, such as diabetes or cancer treatment.

    Forner U.S. Rep, Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I.

    Kennedy, who has long been vocal about pursuing treatment for his substance use and bipolar disorder, remains an advocate for greater access to mental health care.  Earlier this year, he published his book “Profiles in Mental Health Courage” — a reference to his late uncle and former President John F. Kennedy’s classic “Profiles in Courage” — detailing how people from diverse backgrounds across the country have taken on mental illness and addiction. In October, he was a keynote speaker at the annual student wellness conference Wellness Together in Anaheim, where he spoke about his advocacy as founder of the mental health policy nonprofit The Kennedy Forum.

    “As we turn the corner on stigma related to suicide and overdose, we need to finally focus a lot more on solutions early on in a person’s life,” Kennedy said in an interview with EdSource. Not only are young people less likely to seek help due to stigma, but are also less likely to be properly insured, incurring high out-of-pocket costs for treatment when they need it.

    For Kennedy, the key to addressing the youth mental health and addiction crisis is increasing and sustaining funding for care on the local, state and federal levels. He emphasized that schools desperately need the bulk of that funding, given that early intervention significantly reduces a child’s chance of developing a serious mental illness in adulthood.

    California has, in recent years, invested heavily in expanding mental health support for children and adolescents. The state’s next challenge, Kennedy said, is sustaining these crucial services. 

    In 2019, the state embarked on a $4.7 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, focused mainly on recruiting and training new mental health providers across the state’s school system. To help sustain these programs, the state Department of Health Care Services plans to make new public school-based mental health services billable to both Medi-Cal and commercial health insurance, making California’s multi-payer fee schedule one of the largest school reimbursement programs in the country. 

    EdSource interviewed Kennedy about expanding mental health care for students and families. His remarks have been edited for length and clarity. 

    How do we address the enduring impact of stigma on our health and education systems?

    We need greater literacy (regarding mental health) across the board. Many don’t know these mental illnesses as brain illnesses, and they don’t understand that they’re treatable. If we knew we could treat them successfully, which we can, especially if we go in early, how can we think about them differently? We don’t let cancer get to stage four to treat it. We screen it, screen it, screen it. It’s embedded in my medical chart. My doctor asks me 15 ways about my risk for stroke and cancer. We need to do that with mental health. 

    We could address so much of this if we just incorporated better mental health services within our community. So many families have their mental health symptoms exacerbated by lack of stable housing, no supportive employment and a lack of community to help. They become isolated, which is the worst thing for those struggling with their mental health.

    Why does the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act matter for young people today?

    It used to be the case where, if you had a mental illness, you had to pay higher co-pays, premiums and deductibles to get mental health treatment than you would to get diabetes treatment or asthma treatment. Unlike for physical illnesses, insurance companies would cap the total of dollars you could spend as a patient on mental health. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act established that insurance companies could not discriminate and treat the brain any differently than any other organ of the body. 

    Ultimately, we can’t treat everyone based upon bake sales. We have to change the metrics of what constitutes value in our mental health system. We have to get this embedded in regular insurance. 

    How can California ensure that new school-based coverage for mental health care is effective in the long term?

    We have to figure out how to reorient the insurance process so that there’s a way of capturing the return on investment from an earlier investment. The state is the one that has the most to say about overall state coverage for mental health early on, in order to reduce future obligations on the state’s part, which means picking up the pieces of a broken population that hasn’t properly been supported by coverage through early intervention services. 

    We need to get organized as voters. There’s not a family out there that doesn’t have these issues affecting a member of their family, who hasn’t lost a loved one to suicide or overdose. There’s a huge need for mental health treatment because we keep waiting till people are in a crisis. Why not make this a public health issue and really embed resources in elementary and secondary schools so students can take care of themselves? 

    What role should the federal government play in addressing youth mental health?

    We need to have Federally Qualified Health Centers in every public school in America. They could open satellites in each of the schools that can help treat kids where they are. A lot of kids, particularly from minority communities, are not going to get mental health care after school. You could bring tele-mental health into a school nurse’s office, so it’s not just where you get an aspirin, but a real clinic in the school where you could be meeting kids’ health needs writ large. You’d also need ongoing intensive care to connect them to the community health center outside. 

    We already fund Federally Qualified Health Centers. It’s supported on a bipartisan basis. It covers the uninsured as well as the insured. These centers and Certified Community Behavioral Health Centers cover a lot of rural areas and health deserts, and they can provide general counseling and support services. They have a board of directors, who are all people in the community who know the resources in the community and can pull together a more wraparound, holistic approach. 

    So many kids come to school from homes where there’s violence, addiction or mental illness. We need to reach the whole family. In many states where Republicans don’t have good benefits for their people, the centers provide a valuable safety valve for their constituents to get health care. We just need to take that model to scale in schools. The easiest thing is to run all of these through existing bureaucracies, so you’re not trying to create a new system from whole cloth.

    How can students help address mental health? 

    I would say to young people that there are two major ways they can really help the system. One, they can learn about how to prevent mental health challenges themselves through learning about their own brain and learning coping skills and problem-solving skills. We can focus on a lot more upstream, or proactive, mechanisms early in a student’s life, when they can start to build different coping skills and learn how to manage their emotions. 

    And second, if they’re interested in going into the mental health space, they can create a much better track to get into the mental health field. We just don’t have enough hands on deck to really meet the enormity of the need for those who desperately need treatment. Not only do we need to build that infrastructure and access, but also build a workforce pipeline for those trying to go into the field in greater numbers. 

    It’s got everything to do with young people. These are illnesses where 50% of them occur before the age of 14, and 75% occur before the age of 25. They’re illnesses of the young; they can take you hostage and take out whole parts of your life, when, ordinarily, you’d be in the most productive period in your life as a young person.





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  • The Arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan Undermines the Rule of Law

    The Arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan Undermines the Rule of Law


    Trump’s FBI and ICE agents arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Duggan in her courtroom and led her away in handcuffs because she sent a defendant out a back door. Trump officials said the judge was helping the defendant evade arrest, and they demonstrated that “no one is above the law” ( except Donald Trump). Critics said that Trump’s Department of Justice made a mockery of the law by arresting a judge.

    See the comments of this Wisconsin Appeals Court judge who told CNN the Trump administration was sending a message to judges everywhere to bend to the will of the Trump administration. He was “appalled” that Judge Dugan was publicly humiliated, and that the director of the FBI Kash Patel posted a tweet of her being led away.

    Judge Dugan told the agents that they should return with the correct warrant. One agent rode in the same elevator with the man sought by the Feds, but made no attempt to arrest him.

    The New York Daily News editorial board said:

    The FBI arrest of a Milwaukee local judge on felony counts related to immigration enforcement is an unwarranted and dangerous escalation by the Trump administration.

    For the FBI to arrest someone at their workplace, they usually have to have been charged with something especially dire. For Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, this offense was allegedly refusing to hand defendant Eduardo Flores Ruiz, who had just had a hearing before the judge, over to an ICE task force that showed up in her courtroom. Dugan was charged with two federal felonies and taken into custody, which FBI Director Kash Patel gloated about on social media.

    Attorney General Pam Bondi, for whom advancing the MAGA movement’s political agenda supersedes ensuring the equal and fair administration of justice, went on TV to say: “no one is above the law.” Aside from the dissonance of serving under a president who was only able to evade extremely serious federal charges by being elected to the White House, Bondi either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that Dugan was in fact attempting to ensure the integrity of the legal process.

    Flores may have been guilty of his misdemeanor charges, or he may not. The point of the proceedings before Dugan was to establish that and, if appropriate, what his punishment should be. Because of ICE’s detention, that won’t happen, which is bad for Flores, bad for any alleged victims — who won’t see justice — and bad for the larger community as immigrants and their families begin to see the courthouse as a dangerous place to be.

    Having ICE at the courthouse means immigrants won’t report crimes, assist law enforcement, or show up for their own court hearings, which makes everyone less safe, not to mention completely undercuts the baseline American ideal of due process, not something that Bondi and her cadre seem to hold in very high esteem.

    It’s ironic that Dugan was charged with “obstructing a proceeding” when the only people obstructing an official proceeding here were the task force that showed up to take Flores into custody. This task force, per the government’s own criminal complaint, consisted of just one ICE agent plus one Customs and Border Protection agent, two FBI agents and two DEA agents.

    We wonder if six federal agents, four of whom are not in immigration-focused agencies, could have found a better use of their time than detaining a single person at a courthouse. Now, more federal resources will be wasted on this fiasco as the government tries to move forward with a prosecution of a sitting judge whose alleged crime was simply letting a defendant walk through a different hallway.

    Patel, Bondi and Trump are overplaying their hand, especially as the president’s immigration policy approval keeps dropping amid public outrage over authoritarian assaults on due process and separation of powers. Going to war with the judiciary is not going to end well, especially given the volume of federal judges, including Trump-appointed and conservative judges and the Supreme Court’s own conservative majority, that are questioning the administration’s power grab.

    Federal judges aren’t likely to look favorably on this flagrant assertion of power in arresting a popular county-level counterpart just for not letting her courtroom become an ICE staging ground.



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  • New law could boost Social Security checks for thousands of retired California teachers

    New law could boost Social Security checks for thousands of retired California teachers


    Kindergarten students at George Washington Elementary in Lodi listen to teacher Kristen McDaniel read “Your Teachers Pet Creature” on the first day of school on July 30, 2024.

    Credit: Diana Lambert / EdSource

    The Social Security Fairness Act, signed by President Joe Biden on Sunday, will increase retirement benefits for many educators and other public sector workers, including nearly 290,000 in California.

    The act repeals both the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset laws, which reduced Social Security benefits for workers who are entitled to public pensions, such as firefighters, police officers and teachers, according to the Social Security Department.

    The change in the laws does not mean that California teachers, who do not pay into Social Security, will all get benefits. Instead, teachers who paid into Social Security while working in non-teaching jobs will be eligible for their full Social Security benefits, as will those eligible for spousal and survivor benefits.

    Teachers who had previous careers, or who worked second jobs or summer jobs, benefit from the repeal of the Windfall Elimination Provision, said Staci Maiers, spokesperson for the National Education Association.

    California is one of 15 states that does not enroll its teachers in Social Security. Instead, teachers receive pensions from the California Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS. 

    “This is about fairness. These unjust Social Security penalties have robbed public service workers of their hard-earned benefits for far too long,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association in a media release. “They have hurt educators and their families — and damaged the education profession, making it harder to attract and retain educators. And that means students are impacted, too.” 

    At a press conference Sunday, President Joe Biden said the Social Security Fairness Act would mean an increase on average of $360 a month for workers that have been impacted by the laws. There will also be a lump sum retroactive payment to make up for the benefits that workers should have received in 2024, Biden said. No date has been announced for those payments.

    “The bill I’m signing today is about a simple proposition,” Biden said. “Americans who have worked hard all their lives to earn an honest living should be able to retire with economic security and dignity.”

    “It’s a game-changer for a lot of educators,” said Kathy Wylie, a retired teacher who lives in Mendocino. Wylie, who is a few years away from drawing Social Security, worked for a technology company for 15 years before embarking on a 17-year career in education.

    She expects that the bump in retirement funds could encourage some veteran teachers to retire early.

    Biden signed the legislation following decades of advocacy from the National Education Association, the International Association of Fire Fighters and the California Retired Teachers Association. The bipartisan bill was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 12 and the U.S. Senate on Dec. 21.

    The amendments to the Social Security Act apply to monthly benefits after December 2023. The Social Security Department is evaluating how to implement the new law, according to its website.





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