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A Republican-backed voter ID bill, one of the most stringent in the nation, passed Wisconsin’s State Assembly last night. The bill now goes to the State Senate, where it seems assured of passage.
Wisconsin is one of a long list of states considering similar legislation this year. Though voter fraud in Wisconsin is minimal — sources say only twenty votes were cast illegally in the state’s most recent election — the law would impose new barriers to voting among students, the elderly, and the poor, all of which are traditionally Democratic constituencies. At a time of massive budget cutbacks, moreover, the legislation carries an estimated $7 million pricetag.
One last-minute change to the legislation makes its aims crystal clear — though it was originally drafted to be implemented next spring, supporters rewrote it to take effect immediately on passage … just in time, in other words, to be deployed in the upcoming special elections which will decide the fate of state legislators targeted for recall over their recent budget votes.
After more than a week of delays and disputes the votes from the just-ended UAW 2865 election have been completed, and AWDU, the insurgent slate allied with the recent University of California student uprising, have won a significant victory.
UAW 2865 represents the UC system’s student academic employees, this was both a student election and a union election. Both sides won some positions, and both sides are claiming a measure of vindication in the results, but incumbents USEJ were shut out in the most prominent officer races and took barely 40% of the seats on the local’s statewide council.
I’m still getting up to speed on this election’s long-term implications, but quite a few people in California who I’ve grown to like and trust over the last few years are very pleased by this news.
Here’s how AWDU is describing the road ahead:
Now it is time for us to bring this strength to our fight against the attacks on higher education. As a next step, we are calling on all graduate students and undergraduate tutors – no matter who they supported in the election – to come together for a statewide membership meeting of the union on May 21st to chart the way forward. We’ll get you more details soon. But high on the agenda is stepping up the fight against increasing class sizes, fee hikes, rising housing costs, new budget cuts, and UC management’s capping of funding for fee remissions and health benefits for graduate student employees.
We will stand together against the attacks on higher education, in real unity borne of fruitful discussion that includes disagreement. A grassroots, bottom-up union is strong when it provides space for open debate, and we hope that every member continues to express criticism when necessary. We also know that many members of the USEJ slate and many USEJ supporters never wanted to stop the vote count in the first place. We hope that the Elections Committee’s dismissal of the fabricated allegations by some of the outgoing union officers will help up us begin a more honest dialogue with each other.
The incredible diversity of our newly elected Joint Council and entire union is a vital strength that we must actively build upon. By working together, including with the new Joint Council members from USEJ, we will win historic advances for the rights of student-workers and the expansion of public education. We look forward to building a new kind of union together.
“The job of an actor is to play a role. The job of a cheerleader is to cheer.”
— Eugene Volokh on Doe v. Silsbee Independent School District
• • •
The Doe case, as most of my readers probably know, involves a high school cheerleader in Texas, identified in court papers as “HS,” who was kicked off her squad for refusing to cheer for her alleged rapist. She had accused the player a few months earlier, but he had remained on the school basketball team. It was school tradition for the cheerleading squad to cheer from the sidelines when players attempted foul shots, but HS refused in the case of this player — standing silently with her arms crossed. After a warning, she was removed from the squad. (The player in question pled guilty to an assault charge some time afterward.)
HS sued the school for taking her off the squad, and lost. She appealed, and lost again. Last week her final appeal was rejected.
Eugene Volokh, a constitutional lawyer I respect, thinks the courts got this one right. If this lawsuit had prevailed, he says, “cheerleaders would be free to refuse to cheer for any reason that they think sufficient.” They could refuse to cheer for teams with gay or undocumented immigrant players, or those who “belong to a reprehensible religion, or refuse to properly support our military.”
I think HS was right to refuse to cheer her attacker, and I think the school was deeply wrong in how it handled the case. (For one blogger’s assessment of just how wrong they were, read this.) Whether by dropping her assailant from the team or suspending the practice of sideline cheers or just letting her sit those particular cheers out, the school should have found a way to accommodate HS’s reasonable desire not to cheer the name of a person who had recently sexually assaulted her.
But they didn’t. And given that they didn’t, I think the courts did the only thing they could. I just don’t see a way to craft a rule that would allow HS to refuse to cheer that wouldn’t also protect a cheerleader who shouted “slut” at a single mother on an opposing team, or an actor who changed the lines of a school play to give it a particular religious message, or a football player who wrote “I HATE FAGS” on his jersey, big enough to be seen from the stands.
It’s possible, as some commenters at Volokh’s blog suggest, that HS might have had other legal remedies. It’s been suggested that she might have had — and might still have — grounds for a lawsuit on equal protection claim, or for infliction of emotional distress. I’m not in a position to evaluate those suggestions. But as a matter of First Amendment law, I think the courts got this one right.
By the way, one other element of this case is worth mentioning — that the appeals court ruled HS’s lawsuit “frivolous,” and ordered her family to pay $45,000 in legal fees to the school district. It’s my understanding that the district has the option of waiving the collection of that judgment, and I hope they do so.
Update | The ACS Blog reaches a different First Amendment conclusion than I did, and it does so by addressing a question Volokh took as a given — whether cheerleaders are “agents” of the school, and speaking on the school’s behalf when they perform as cheerleaders. Their position is that so long as a cheerleader’s symbolic protest doesn’t substantially disrupt the school’s functioning, it’s protected speech.
I’m going to have to chew on this one. It’s not obvious to me that students have a blanket First Amendment right to Sharpie messages onto their uniforms while cheering or playing sports, or to shout obnoxious comments at opposing teams while on the field. I’m attracted to the pro-speech side of the argument — as always — but I’m not sure where I come down on this particular issue.
What do y’all think?
Student sit-ins and occupations have become a common sight in California over the last couple of years, but this week has seen something new — a sit-in at a union office.
Two factions have been competing for leadership of UAW Local 2865, the local that represents academic student employees in the University of California system. Balloting in the union election ended eight days ago, but the vote count was suspended abruptly last weekend, and has yet to resume.
The incumbent United for Social and Economic Justice slate shut down the count last Saturday, claiming irregularities in the voting and alleging that the insurgents were using “scorched earth tactics” to disrupt the process.
The challengers, Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, countered that USEJ pulled the plug because of fears that AWDU might win an upset victory, and staged a sit-in in the union office to press for transparency in the process. Expressing concern that the disruption “contributes to the public perception that unions are corrupt and outmoded,” a group of labor scholars released a public letter calling for the count to resume.
The AWDU, which grew out of California’s student protest movement, says Local 2865 has operated undemocratically, has passed up opportunities to forge coalitions with activists in the state, and has rolled over in contract negotiations.
On Tuesday, the two sides agreed on protocols and mediators for a resumption of the count, but that resumption, slated for yesterday morning, hasn’t yet occurred. Meanwhile, the two sides continue to exchange accusations on their respective blogs (USEJ and AWDU).
Fingers crossed for a swift and just end to this stalemate.
I posted on Tuesday about three Canadian student activists who — to their surprise and everyone else’s — were elected to their nation’s parliament on Monday. Since then, reporting in the Canadian press have revealed that they are just three of six undergraduate students who won seats this week. At least half of the six are under twenty-one years old, and one, at nineteen, is the youngest Member of Parliament in Canada’s history.
All six of the students are members of Canada’s New Democratic Party, which until this year was a minor player in that country’s politics. But in polls leading up to this election the Liberals, Canada’s main center-left party, declined significantly, while the Quebec-nationalist Bloc Quebecois utterly collapsed. In the face of this party realignment many liberal Canadians, particularly in Quebec, unexpectedly cast their votes for the NDP. As a result, candidates who had been recruited as placeholders — many of whom did little or no campaigning — found themselves thrust into office.
Four of the six undergraduates who won election are students at Montreal’s McGill University:
Mylène Freeman is a past president of the McGill NDP club, graduating with a politics degree this spring. Freeman is from Ontario, but “fluently bilingual,” which is an important consideration in Quebec. She worked for the NDP in the country’s last national election in 2008, has run for Montreal city council in the past, and coordinates a program at McGill that is designed to encourage young women to volunteer in MPs offices.
Charmaine Borg, 20, is one of the co-presidents of the McGill NDP club this year, and has experience as a union organizer on campus. She was planning to study abroad in Mexico next semester, but will be moving to Ottawa instead.
Matthew Dubé, also 20, is Borg’s co-president at the McGill NDP club. He’s been keeping a low profile since the election.
Laurin Liu, who is 20 as well, is a second-year student, doing a joint degree in history and cultural studies. She spent election day volunteering in a district a few miles from her own, working to help re-elect one of the NDP’s few incumbent MPs. Liu is involved with student government and the campus radio station at McGill, and is now trying to figure out how to handle the logistics of legislating and constituent services — she doesn’t have a driver’s license or own a car.
Marie-Claude Morin is one of the two new students not enrolled at McGill, with one semester remaining until she graduates from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Like Dubé, she’s been mostly declining interviews this week.
The youngest of the six new student MPs is Pierre-Luc Dusseault, 19, who is doing a degree in applied political studies at the Université de Sherbrooke. Unlike many of his fellow winners, Dusseault stumped strenuously in his district, which is home to the university he attends. (He also reportedly made extensive use of Twitter in his campaign.) Desseault, a first-year student who co-founded the Université de Sherbrooke NDP club just months ago, calls himself a “political junkie” and had planned to spend the summer working at a local golf course if he didn’t win.
The six undergrads have been elected to four-year terms, with annual salaries of $157,000. I’m fascinated to see how their stories develop.
studentactivism.net 
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