Sen. Joe Manchin risks Earth to save 14,000 coal jobs

Paste BN

Good evening! We are leading the newsletter off with an editorial about Sen. Joe Manchin. Sen. Manchin is against the Clean Electricity Performance Program. Is he selling out our planet to save a few thousand jobs? Our Editorial Board says yes.

Our View: Manchin risks Earth to save 14,000 coal jobs

By The Editorial Board

It's no stretch to conclude that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is risking the planet's future to protect a dwindling pool of 14,000 coal mining jobs in his home state of West Virginia.

Whatever the motivations, Manchin is working hard to kill something called the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), a core element of the climate legislation embedded in Biden's massive "human infrastructure" or Build Back Better bill that Democrats are struggling to negotiate in Congress.

The legislation would be passed through a process called reconciliation that allows for simple majority approval in the Senate. That means every Democratic vote counts, and thus Manchin can play spoiler if he wants.

Today's Editorial Cartoon

October political cartoon gallery from the Paste BN Network

I knew my baby would die. But abortion was never an option for me.

By Monica Canetta

My son Matteo was born weighing just under 3 pounds and crying faintly. He was baptized with holy water from Lourdes, France, and anointed with chrism oil. A nurse bathed and dressed him. In 2015, for two of the most precious hours of my life, my husband and I cradled him. My children held his tiny fingers. We sang to him. And then he went peacefully to Heaven.

I was in the dark shadows of the ultrasound room when I first heard the words “incompatible with life.” I didn’t understand. He was already alive. I could see his tiny heart beating on the screen. What followed was a flurry of phone calls and doctor appointments and second opinions and more ultrasounds, all of which confirmed the news that my son had Trisomy 18, a life-threatening condition that is usually fatal before birth or within the first year of life.

I was devastated. But I also knew without even the slightest doubt that I wanted to give my baby every chance modern medicine could provide. I underestimated, however, how hard it would be to find a doctor who supported my choice.

How we reformed police accountability in Colorado

By Leslie Herod and Mari Newman

Colorado police killed two young Black men, Elijah McClain and De’Von Bailey in August 2019. Though Elijah and De’Von died at the hands of different police departments in distant parts of the state, their killings stemmed from the same horrifying reality of American law enforcement: widespread brutality against people of color.

To spur change, we brought together lawmakers and other stakeholders from across the political spectrum to create a wide-ranging police accountability law, Colorado Senate Bill 20-217, known as the Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act. Its most revolutionary part is the elimination of qualified immunity, a judge-created legal defense used by police to avoid accountability by arguing, essentially, that they should not be held responsible for violating people’s civil rights unless there has been a previous legal case in which police violated the law in exactly the same way.

In practice, the application of qualified immunity allows the civil justice system to perpetuate the culture of violence that has come to characterize American policing.

Colorado changed that, and it's working.

Columns on qualified immunity

Here's a new section we're adding to the newsletter. We're doing a series examining the issue of qualified immunity. For more on the series read here.

This newsletter was compiled by Jaden Amos.

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