Originally published in Bolts Magazine on March 22, 2022.
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Ketanji Brown Jackson’s past work as a public defender emerged as a focal point of her confirmation hearings this week as Joe Biden’s pick for the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, Jackson would be the first former public defender on the high court in more than three decades, and also the first Black woman to join the court, carrying on the legacy of Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first Black justice and the last with public defender experience. Biden has already tapped former public defenders for federal judgeships at a record rate. 

“You are standing up for the constitutional value of representation,” Jackson said during her hearings on Tuesday, defending her record from Republican attacks. Her supporters, meanwhile, have cheered Jackson’s experience as adding a much-needed perspective to the court. From the way this clash has unfolded, you’d think that judges with public defender backgrounds are part of the routine tit-for-tat of judicial nominations, a perspective that Democrats relish adding to the bench when they get the opportunity.

But in state supreme courts around the country, there is comparatively little momentum to install judges with public defense backgrounds, despite the great power those judges hold in interpreting criminal law. The vast majority of criminal cases are decided at the state level, and according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, as of 2021 only seven percent of state justices are former public defenders. More than a third are former prosecutors.

In the two most populous states with Democratic governors, California and New York, efforts by some advocates to convince recent governors to appoint public defenders have fallen short, and former prosecutors have been added to the bench instead.

“The high courts of every state and the U.S. Supreme Court are regularly confronted with novel questions about the interpretation of criminal statutes and procedure,” said Alan Lewis, the chair of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’s screening committee. “It is very much regrettable if the only kind of experience that all of the judges bring to the bench from their previous career as advocates is for one side—the prosecution—with no experience on the other, representing accused persons.”

“We’re all creatures of our own experience and it is profoundly important that the courts’ membership be diverse, including diversity in previous experience,” Lewis told Bolts. 

Some legal experts have stepped forward to articulate the value of having more public defenders in the judiciary. In a new study that analyzed millions of charges handled by federal district court judges, political scientists Allison Harris and Maya Sen found that former public defenders were less likely to issue sentences that involve incarceration, and when they do send people to prison, the sentences are shorter. The difference may stem from public defenders’ intimate understanding of how incarceration affects individuals and communities, the study’s authors wrote in The Washington Post last week.

Emily Hughes, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law who is on the board of the National Association for Public Defense, told Bolts that she’s optimistic about increasing opportunities for “similar and needed” conversations on the state level. She pointed to Continuing Legal Education Programs and law schools that are increasingly prioritizing diversity equity and inclusion (DEI).

“There are DEI conversations happening at both ends of the spectrum, at the front end, at law schools training people who want to become lawyers, and on the back end, once you are lawyers to maintain your bar license,” she said. “This sets the stage for these discussions about professional diversity to then happen.”

One state where there has been a more pronounced public conversation is New York—though so far with little material results to show for it.

Of the three vacancies that recently opened on the state’s high court, known as the New York Court of Appeals, advocates were unsuccessful in securing a new judge with a public defense background. After former Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed a district attorney with a punitive record to the bench last year, criminal justice reformers mounted an unsuccessful effort to stop the nomination. After Cuomo’s departure, dozens of advocacy groups and progressive lawmakers urged Governor Kathy Hochul to nominate someone who formerly worked in public defense, to no avail.

New York passed a series of major criminal justice reforms in 2019, including revisions to its bail and discovery rules that the state’s prosecutor association fought fiercely. Implementing those reforms will now fall on the New York Court of Appeals, where four of the bench’s seven judges have backgrounds in criminal prosecution. Advocates worry that this imbalance may skew the court’s jurisprudence on criminal justice issues. On Tuesday, the court ruled against a plaintiff who had challenged the state’s practice of detaining people beyond the end of their sentence over a sexual offense if they haven’t obtained suitable housing. The four prosecutors joined the majority in the 5-2 decision. The dissenters warned that the ruling forces incarcerated people into a “dystopic game” of securing “compliant and affordable housing before their release date.”

Sam Feldman, a New York public defender who was involved in the efforts to add public defenders to New York’s bench, said Biden’s commitment to greater professional diversity on federal courts helped motivate local advocates. “I think some people were pushing in that direction before, but [Biden] speaking of the importance of public defenders gave them something they could point to,” he said. More than a third of Biden’s judicial appointees over his first year in office were former public defenders.

Another factor driving the push in New York, Feldman said, was a greater recognition that, as the U.S. Supreme Court tilts further to the right, state courts must play a greater role in protecting civil rights. This has borne out in Washington State, where its state supreme court ruled last year to bar mandatory life sentences without parole for anyone under the age of 21, and struck down the state’s laws criminalizing drug possession. Washington is one of the few states to install a former public defender to its high court in recent years, via Democratic Governor Jay Inslee’s most recent nomination in 2020.

But in California, advocates have seen little success. The California Supreme Court hasn’t had a former public defender on the bench since 1986. Both of Governor Gavin Newsom’s appointees to the court so far have experience as prosecutors.

It’s fallen to a red state Democrat to go to bat for a judge with experience as a public defender. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s nominee for the state’s second-highest court was rejected by the GOP-run Senate last year, with some lawmakers expressing reservations about the appointee’s background as a public defender.

Geoff Burkhart, president of the National Association for Public Defense’s board of directors, told Bolts that there’s a strong belief among his colleagues that the judiciary would be better off with more judges trained in public defense.

“If you look at the bill of rights, four out of ten amendments are focused on protecting us if we’re charged with a crime, and that’s something that public defenders understand intimately,” he said. “I think public defense is one of the most important types of lawyering you can do. You’re serving as a counterweight to this awesome power of the government, and it really falls back to this concept—that while there may be a time when someone needs to go to jail or prison, in every case, we have to make sure they get a fair shake.”

Originally published in Bolts on February 28, 2020.
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On the heels of New York City authorizing more than 800,000 noncitizens with legal status to vote in its municipal elections, Boston activists see their own opportunity to achieve noncitizen voting.

Chetan Tiwari, who has lived in Boston since 2015, says he would like the chance to weigh in on the local education policies affecting his family. He and his wife are from Canada, recently had their green cards approved, and have two daughters who are American citizens. “The level of education, the quality of education that my daughters are getting, is a conversation my wife and I have every single day,” he told Bolts. “Voting on those issues would make us very happy, it would be very important to us.”

This push gained new allies in November. Bostonians elected a new mayor, Michelle Wu, and new city councilors who said they support the effort. Now in power, they may pave the way for Boston to revisit the issue, and join a growing movement across Massachusetts. 

In recent years, the cities of Amherst, Brookline, Cambridge, Newton, Wayland, and Somerville, have all passed ordinances to enable noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, though their efforts have stalled due to this state’s peculiar rules. In Massachusetts, unlike in New York State, cities must file a home-rule petition and the state lawmakers and governor must approve it. The Democratic legislature has for now ignored these cities’ petitions. Proponents hope that a breakthrough in Boston can give them further momentum.

The state’s 2022 elections, in which voters will select their lawmakers and a new governor to replace the retiring Republican incumbent, could also clear their path further.

More than a dozen communities across the U.S. already allow immigrants with legal status to vote in local elections, including 11 municipalities in Maryland and two in Vermont. Chicago has given noncitizens the right to vote in local school council elections since 1989, and noncitizens in San Francisco have cast ballots for the local school board since a citywide referendum succeeded in 2016. (Undocumented residents were also included in San Francisco’s measure.)  New York City brought many more eyes to the issue last winter when it enabled residents to vote in all municipal elections such as for mayor and city council if they hold a green card, are authorized to work in the United States, or are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. San Jose’s city council also voted last month to study the issue.

This practice was once common in local, state and even federal elections. For the first 150 years of American history, white, male property owners—regardless of citizenship status—were allowed to vote in many states, though the tide began to turn following nativist backlash after the War of 1812. Arkansas was the final state to end noncitizen voting in 1926. Efforts to shut the door to local reforms have also grown in recent years; Alabama, Colorado, Florida, and North Dakota all passed ballot amendments to embed in their state constitutions that only U.S. citizens can vote in local elections. 

Boston’s city council also has dealt with the debate in the past before. In 2007, Felix Arroyo, the first Latino councilor ever elected in the city, proposed a measure to allow legal residents to vote in local elections but it failed. The issue faded after Arroyo lost his re-election bid. In 2018, then-City Council president Andrea Campbell organized a hearing to discuss the idea. 

Campbell’s proposal would have granted the right to vote in local elections to immigrants who hold green cards and work visas, and to DACA recipients. The Boston Globe estimated that the proposal would enfranchise 48,000 Bostonians, which is about 7 percent of the city’s overall population. 

Campbell said at the time that the reform  could be a way to empower local immigrant communities who felt threatened and marginalized by the Trump administration. The idea was backed by Ayanna Pressley, who was then a Boston councilor and has since joined the U.S. Congress. “Our immigrant communities contribute to our economies, they contribute to our tax base, contribute to the vibrancy of our communities,” Pressley said. “I believe they deserve a say in who represents them at the municipal level.”

But not all councilors were on board. Ed Flynn maintained then that voting “is a privilege reserved for U.S. citizens.” Michael Flaherty also opposed the idea, saying enfranchising noncitizens to vote in local elections runs “watering down” the benefits of citizenship, “by either allowing folks to come in the back door or cut the line or expedite the process.” 

Still, much has changed in the last four years and activists say the conditions are more favorable now. It’s also not unusual for this type of issue to take a few tries politically. In San Francisco, voters rejected noncitizen voting for local school board elections in 2004 and 2010, before ultimately approving it in 2016. 

Beginning in 2019, Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group, began asking local candidates in Boston if they would support noncitizen voting if it came up at the council. Ricardo Arroyo, Kendra Hicks, Ruthzee Louijeune, and Julia Mejia have all newly joined Boston’s city council since 2020 after telling Progressive Massachusetts that they support it. Wu said the same during last year’s mayoral race.

“I think you could get 10 out of 13 votes on the Council [today],” said Jonathan Cohn, political director for Progressive Massachusetts, who helped run those questionnaires. His experience resembles that of Beth Huang, executive director of the Massachusetts Voter Table, a voting rights group that has asked candidates around the state in 2021 for their views on noncitizen voting. “Eighty out of 126 candidates who responded to our questionnaire said they supported it,” she said. 

Boston is currently experimenting with other measures meant to bolster local democracy. In November, more than two-thirds of Boston voters approved a ballot question to overhaul the city’s budget process, which contained a provision to  establish a new participatory budgeting process for a portion of the budget. Wu, the new mayor, also supported participatory budgeting.

On the same day, nearly four out of five Boston voters also backed a nonbinding referendum to switch their appointed school committee to one elected by city residents, adding new pressure on the government to democratize local school decisions. This change would require a home-rule petition, though.

Carolyn Chou, executive director of the Boston-based Asian American Resource Workshop, says the successful local organizing for an elected school committee and participatory budgeting is creating new opportunities to promote noncitizen voting. “Immigrant organizing groups and SEIU32BJ have been focusing on this, and I’m hopeful that with this new city council we may be able to move it along,” she said.

Kathy Henriquez Perlera, a community organizer with Neighbors United for a Better East Boston, also told Bolts her grassroots group would absolutely support noncitizen voting. Members of her organization have recently been exploring the idea of getting the city to grant municipal IDs for all city residents, similar to a program that exists in New York City.

Some immigrants’ rights activists have major reservations, however. 

During the 2018 debate in the Boston city council, Veronica Serrato, then executive director of Project Citizenship, said her group had worked with two immigrants in Massachusetts who had mistakenly voted in an election, disqualifying them from future citizenship. Allowing immigrants to vote in some elections may lead to errors—for instance, if poll workers give them the wrong ballot and they vote in an election they were barred from voting in—with potentially major consequences.

Mitra Shavarini, the current executive director of Project Citizenship, told Bolts this remains a worry for her organization, though she said they would abstain from taking a stance this time if a new bill came up in Boston. “We also aim to safeguard green card holders against possible issues that may jeopardize their ability to naturalize,” she said. “We therefore believe that it’s far more important to remove obstacles that impede immigrants from naturalizing than to solely push for voting rights.” 

Huang pushes back against this worry, noting that she heard a similar concern when voting rights proponents in Massachusetts were pushing automatic voter registration (AVR). “That was not a good reason not to do AVR, and it’s also not a good reason to oppose noncitizen voting,” she said. “Of course we also need to have crystal clear expectations and communications.”

To address these risks, cities that have enabled non-citizen voting often set up separate processes, including alternative local registration forms and voter rolls that are specific to voters who should only have ballots for local elections. They may also offer to provide residents a letter to submit alongside a naturalization application, as Takoma Park does. Local governments have also partnered with immigrant advocacy groups, to distribute non-citizen voting information in multiple languages.   

Damali Vidot, a city councilor in Chelsea, has championed the issue  in both her own city and statewide. “I tried to introduce a conversation on this on the city council a few years ago and people voted down a discussion, but at the beginning of last year, with Trump finally out of office, I decided to try again,” she told Bolts. She reached out to city councilors in Cambridge, Somerville, Brighton, Lawrence, and Boston to talk about the idea, and connected with a local immigrant rights group in her city, La Colaborativa. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get a consortium of resolutions or get different municipalities to pass it all at once?” she said.

Huang said noncitizen voting has not been a “front-burner priority” for local groups that are in coalition with the one she leads; groups are more focused right now on getting driver’s licenses for undocumented residents. But she says there is growing support for the idea in cities with high concentrations of immigrants and working-class people. “We’re talking about the post-industrial cities that have now been inhabited by a lot of refugees,” she said, naming Worcester, Springfield, Lowell, New Bedford and Chelsea as examples. 

Huang stresses that keeping noncitizens from voting significantly skews the electorate toward white residents, especially in cities where the population that is eligible to vote is majority white but not the overall population. “That was not quite clear to me until I looked at the data community by community,” she said, in reference to census estimates updated last year.

The city of Lynn, for instance, has an overall population of more than 90,000 residents that is barely a third white. But of the residents who are eligible to vote, the majority is white. Latinx residents make up more than 40 percent of the city’s population, but only about 25 percent of the electorate. 

This pattern is very prevalent in the dense stretch of municipalities between East Boston and the North Shore, Huang added. “I think that presents a really good case for why we absolutely need non-citizen voting,” she said.   

For proponents of expanding the franchise, the biggest barrier they cite is the state legislature. Its Democratic leaders have not brought the home-rule petitions of recent years to the floor. Advocates in the state have long complained that state lawmakers have shied away from strengthening immigrants’ rights.During the Trump years, advocacy organizations like Progressive Massachusetts kept pushing for the “Safe Communities Act,” which would have limited how local and state law enforcement could enforce imigration law, to no avail. Three of the chamber’s leaders, state Senate President Karen Spilka, House Majority Leader Claire Cronin or House Speaker Ronald Mariano, did not respond to a request for comment.

State lawmakers are all up for re-election in 2022, and so activists see new opportunities to apply pressure on them. Cohn, of Progressive Massachusetts, also noted that voting for immigrants with legal status was included in the state Democratic Party platform last year for the first time, thanks to the rising organizing around the issue.

But the upcoming governor’s race is what may give the issue the most impetus if an ally is elected and uses their pulpit to support the local ordinances. The wide-open race has drawn a crowded field, yet so far, few are willing to comment. Bolts did not hear back from Democratic candidates Danielle Allen, Orlando Silva, and Sonia Chang-Díaz. Maura Healey’s campaign declined to comment. 

Josh Caldwell, a socialist running for governor in the Democratic primary, told Bolts that he strongly supports enfranchising noncitizens. “The fact of the matter is, that not giving representation to those that participate in taxation seemed to be a core argument to a certain historical revolution,” he said. “Our systems have and will always find a group to otherize.”

Keeping up local pressure will be key, proponents say. Vidot, the Chelsea councilor, is confident the issue is moving forward. “Progressive politics basically means we’re ahead of ourselves,” she said. “It will happen and we just have to keep pushing.”

Originally published in The New Republic‘s March print issue
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In late March 2015, just one month after 15 graduates of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges announced the first-ever student debt strike, a group of those activists traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with federal regulators.

They’d been invited by Rohit Chopra, the student loan ombudsperson of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency that had opened its doors just four years prior. The strike was against the Department of Education, but the CFPB had been investigating Corinthian for its predatory lending, and Chopra wrote that he’d like to discuss ways to address the activists’ burden.

At the CFPB’s offices across the street from the White House, Astra Taylor, co-founder of the Debt Collective—a national debtors union founded in the wake of Occupy Wall Street—remembers watching Treasury and Education Department officials shift uncomfortably in their seats, while Chopra remained friendly and curious. It was unusual, she said, to have someone in his position treat pressure from the grassroots as “not a threat but as a legitimate force with essential leverage.”

Chopra ended up leaving the agency a few months later, spending the last year of the Obama administration at the Education Department, an agency he had publicly critiqued for belittling the harms of the student loan crisis, followed by a post under Donald Trump at the Federal Trade Commission. But with a Democrat back in the White House, the CFPB needs fixing after a ruinous four years, and President Joe Biden tasked Chopra to return to his old agency. He’s been leading the CFPB since the Senate confirmed him as director in late September.

Chopra, who turned 40 at the end of January, served as student body president while an undergraduate at Harvard, where he earned a reputation for taking on campus administrators. “Chopra is not afraid to be combative with those in power … [and] has made the often overlooked council a force to be reckoned with,” reported The Harvard Crimson in 2003. “There’s no advantage to being a pushover,” Chopra told the student paper back then. He followed his Wharton MBA with a Fulbright in South Korea and a stint working for McKinsey. But by his late twenties he had switched to government, working at the Treasury Department to help launch the CFPB before it was an official agency. And along the way, he became a close ally of Elizabeth Warren, whose views he’s expected to revive at a CFPB that became captured by the GOP’s pro-bank dogma under Trump.

Born out of a 2007 essay published in Democracy, the CFPB’s mission, conceived by then-professor Warren and later enshrined in the Dodd-Frank Act after the Great Recession, is to regulate tricks and traps in the credit industry and make finance safer for regular people. “Financial products should be subject to the same routine safety screening that now governs the sale of every toaster, washing machine, and child’s car seat sold on the American market,” Warren wrote at the time.

In its first decade of operation, the CFPB emerged as one of the most admired and hated divisions in government. In 2017, President Trump called it a “total disaster,” and a week later Politico dubbed it “the most powerful and consequential new federal agency since the Environmental Protection Agency opened its doors nearly half a century ago.” The EPA comparison is a bit overstated, but since its founding the consumer watchdog has gone after all sorts of predatory actors, from large financial institutions to debt collectors. Under its first director, Richard Cordray, the CFPB returned almost $12 billion to tens of millions of Americans, extracting from companies a combination of consumer refunds and canceled debts.

That changed after Cordray’s resignation. During the Trump years, employee attrition spiked—with nearly 11 percent of staff leaving in 2018—and there was also a marked decline in investigations into potential lawbreakers. The New York Times Magazine ran a feature in 2019 exploring how Trump’s picks to lead the CFPB—first Mick Mulvaney, followed by federal budget official Kathy Kraninger—had quietly crippled its operations. “Where Mulvaney or his successor have allowed cases to go forward, lenders have often settled with lowered fines or none at all,” the magazine reported. Instead of a watchdog, Trump’s CFPB became a welcoming home for bank lobbyists. In 2020, a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president could fire the CFPB’s director without cause, a victory for its conservative critics who claimed the director’s independent five-year term was too unaccountable. While initially a win for Republicans, that same decision allowed Biden to immediately oust Kraninger.

Chopra returned to his old employer last fall, just as Covid-19 relief programs were winding down. By the end of June 2021, Americans owed $15 trillion in debt—roughly $800 billion more than at the end of 2019. “In many parts of the country and in many individual neighborhoods, conditions remain fragile,” Chopra acknowledged before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee in late October.

Those are the conditions out in the world. Inside the agency itself, he is taking over a department that has been rocked by staff protest, including charges dating back to the Obama years of racial discrimination and promotions based on favoritism. The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, offered cautious support, saying his union is “pleased that CFPB’s new leadership is working with us to use this opportunity to close the pay gaps for employees of color.”

Three weeks after he was confirmed as director, Chopra ordered tech titans such as Apple, Amazon, and Google to disclose details of their proprietary payment systems, to better understand what kinds of data they collect and what protections consumers have. It was an extension of the Big Tech inquiries he was fond of in his last job as a Democratic representative at the FTC. He followed up shortly after by announcing that the CFPB would potentially seek consumer protections for the $131 billion stablecoin market, a largely unregulated cryptocurrency that’s grown quickly in the last year.

“We are focusing on large market actors that are causing the most widespread harm, especially companies that exploit their dominant market position to take advantage of consumers and their law-abiding competitors,” Chopra told The New Republic. “You can also expect a sharper focus on repeat offenders.… Stopping that is going to require real deterrents, not just fines that are absorbed as a cost of doing business.” Asked what is meant by “real deterrents,” an agency spokesperson pointed to a 2018 memo Chopra wrote at the FTC, recommending measures like holding individual executives accountable and issuing bans on adjacent business practices. “He’s not someone who is going to be content with tinkering around the edges, and he can look down the road to see where things are headed,” said Lauren Saunders, the associate director at the National Consumer Law Center.

Since its founding, the CFPB has faced pressure to crack down on the payday lending industry—the businesses that offer cash-strapped individuals small loans with high interest rates and fees. The CFPB started collecting borrower complaints in 2013, reporting by 2014 that 80 percent of payday loans get rolled over or renewed within two weeks, a clear signal of a debt trap. In the last year of the Obama administration, the CFPB proposed a rule requiring payday lenders to verify that borrowers were financially capable of paying back their loans on time. It was finalized in October 2017, before Cordray resigned.

But it was blocked by litigation and the Trump White House. His administration’s alternate version—issued in 2020—had no such requirement. In effect, little has yet changed for payday loans. Chopra will not only have to wade back into this debate but also have to contend with the ways these small loans have continued to evolve.

Over the past decade, a suite of new companies cropped up to allow workers to get advances on their paychecks, in exchange for a fee. Under Trump, officials recommended that these so-called earned wage access products not be regulated as credit, but consumer and labor groups have urged Chopra to revoke this guidance, which they say creates dangerous payday loan loopholes. Chopra told me the CFPB will “be looking closely” at it, and that more broadly he’s concerned about the rise of employer-driven debt, such as workers taking out loans for training, equipment, or leads. “This is a troubling trend,” he said, “and as the distinction between consumers and workers blurs, we are going to be increasingly active in this space.”

Thanks to his early days at the CFPB, Chopra has spent years as a close ally of Elizabeth Warren. “I have no doubt you are the right person to lead the bureau at this moment,” the senator said at his confirmation hearing last year. Thanks to that friendship, progressive advocates have been optimistic about the direction Chopra will take the agency. “He’s extraordinarily progressive, but was also one of the very few registered Democrats to get confirmed through the McConnell gauntlet in the Trump years,” noted Felicia Wong, president of the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank where Chopra worked briefly as a fellow.

Still, as the payday lending jockeying illustrates, enacting reforms that can actually last will not be easy, which may partly explain why Chopra’s early actions have been focused on shinier Big Tech issues like Apple Pay or cryptocurrency. National consumer groups have granted trust to the CFPB’s new director, thanks to his background, but that goodwill may have also led to muddled silence on the agency’s new debt collection rule, which was issued in the final stretch of the Trump administration and took effect in November.

Advocates blasted the rule, which clarifies how debt collectors can communicate with borrowers, when the Trump CFPB finalized it in late 2020. They noted that it could open the floodgates to more daily harassment and revive obligations for payments individuals were no longer on the hook for. Yet when it became clear the Biden administration would not withdraw or delay it, advocates went generally silent.

Chopra didn’t directly answer why the CFPB was moving forward with the rule, but told me he agreed that it “didn’t solve most problems in the debt collection market,” and that debt collection “continues to be one of the top topics for consumer complaints.” According to an agency spokesperson, the CFPB received an average 80,000 consumer complaints each month in 2021, up a stunning 75 percent from 2020.

How long the CFPB’s new grace period will last among its more sympathetic allies remains to be seen, especially with credit card debt going back up and foreclosures looming. The CFPB at least embarks on its next chapter with more aggressive regulators heading up other critical agencies, including Lina Khan at the FTC and Gary Gensler at the Securities and Exchange Commission. And thanks to his job at the CFPB, Chopra serves as a board member at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In December, Chopra and his fellow Democratic board members battled FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams, a Trump appointee who refused the board members’ decision to ask for public comment about bank mergers. “This approach to governance is unsafe and unsound. It is also an attack on the rule of law,” Chopra said in a statement at the time. On New Year’s Eve, McWilliams abruptly announced that she’d be resigning, giving Biden the opportunity to appoint yet another consumer-minded regulator.

Democrats in Congress are also leaning more aggressively into strengthening consumer protections, proposing to crack down on things like bank overdraft fees and exorbitant interest rates, which could give Chopra more room to act politically, even without new statutory powers. Not to mention the student loan landscape has changed dramatically since Chopra’s old days at the CFPB. The Education Department has canceled billions of dollars in loans since the Corinthian graduates first went on strike, and activists are ramping up pressure on Biden now to cancel student debt entirely. In late December, the White House announced it would push back the return of mandatory student loan repayments, originally to resume in February, until May.

The seeds at the CFPB, at least, are ripe. Maybe the agency’s next decade will leave a more lasting mark than its first.

Originally published in The Intercept on December 17, 2021.
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EIGHT YEARS AGO in New Orleans, an independent levee board created after Hurricane Katrina announced a lawsuit against 97 oil and gas companies, seeking damages for their part in destroying Louisiana’s coastline. By that point in 2013, the state had lost roughly a quarter of its wetlands, accounting for an area about the size of Delaware. Even scientists working for oil and gas conceded that at least 36 percent of the damage was due to their industries’ activities.

The case — which the New York Times would later call “the most ambitious environmental lawsuit ever” — was hailed as a monumental step in holding fossil fuel companies to account. Two parishes neighboring New Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines, followed with their own suits. The oil industry blasted the litigation, insisting that the levee board had gone rogue. One local leader seemed to have the industry’s back: Mitch Landrieu, then the mayor of New Orleans.

“Mitch Landrieu would never sue,” said Anne Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental justice group based in New Orleans. “During his tenure, there were all these calls for him to join the lawsuits, but he wouldn’t.” (The city’s current mayor, LaToya Cantrell, sued oil and gas companies over coastal erosion in 2019, in a case that’s still pending.) Landrieu had said that he preferred negotiation over litigation, but as Nola.com reported, “his proposals, including one for new oil and gas taxes, were quickly rejected by the industry.”

Climate activists like Rolfes were dismayed when President Joe Biden announced in November that Landrieu had been selected to oversee the dispersal of new funds for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill now signed into law. It’s a high-visibility role that will allow Landrieu to travel around the country and build his profile as he eyes even greater national political power. But more importantly, they warn, his new post could tilt the scales in favor of fossil fuel interests as companies gun for new billion-dollar contracts to build roads, bridges, and pipelines. Landrieu did not return The Intercept’s request for comment for this story.

Landrieu said recently that climate will be his No. 1 priority for infrastructure implementation, but activists say this rhetoric is not reflected in his record from eight years as mayor. They point to his family’s close ties to the oil and gas industry; his weak, nonbinding climate plan released in his final year in office; his silence over a new gas plant approved for construction in a predominately Black and Vietnamese neighborhood; and his full-throttled defense of drilling.

“I think oil and gas production is good,” he told MSNBC in 2015. “People are gonna keep driving, and we need fossil fuels, and we need to make sure that we keep drilling.” In 2010, he urged the Obama administration to lift its ban on offshore drilling. “It is not a zero-sum game,” he insisted. “We must drill and restore.”

LANDRIEU, WHO SERVED as New Orleans mayor from 2010 to 2018, comes from a powerful political family in Louisiana that is sometimes called the “Cajun Kennedys.” His father, Maurice Edwin “Moon” Landrieu, served as mayor of New Orleans from 1970 to 1978, followed by a three-year stint as secretary of housing and urban development under President Jimmy Carter. One of his sisters, Madeleine, is the dean of Loyola University Law School and formerly was a judge on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. His brother, Maurice, works as an assistant U.S. attorney, and his other sister, Mary, was the last Democrat to serve as a U.S. senator from Louisiana from 1997 to 2015.

While in the Senate, Mary Landrieu was a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. In a 2014 review of her record, the climate-focused news outlet Grist noted that she was more conservative than some congressional Republicans on environmental issues. She voted for an amendment that would reverse the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to label carbon dioxide a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, against a bill to end tax loopholes for big oil companies, and for an amendment that would have opened up large areas of coastline to offshore drilling. She was the primary sponsor on a bill to approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and received over $1.7 million in contributions from the oil and gas industry while a senator.

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Upon losing reelection, Mary Landrieu went straight to the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Van Ness Feldman, which advocates on behalf of oil, gas, and coal companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, Cheniere Energy, and the Coal Utilization Research Council. In her time there, she’s personally lobbied for fossil fuel interests, according to Senate lobby disclosures. She did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.

In a statement to The Intercept, a White House spokesperson said: “The Biden Administration is committed to maintaining the highest ethical standard, including Senior Advisor and Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator Mitch Landrieu. As a White House employee, he will comply with the Biden Administration’s Ethics Pledge and all White House ethics and conflict of interest rules. He has received rigorous counseling on his ethics obligations, including avoiding any potential conflicts of interest. He is also required to recuse from particular matters involving his sister Mary Landrieu and any clients of hers.”

One way Mitch Landrieu could exert his influence is by steering infrastructure contracts to fossil fuel companies. Activists point to the $5 billion Clean School Bus Act, a provision of the bipartisan infrastructure package, as one example of how this could play out. That program allocates $2.5 billion for new zero-emission school bus purchases and another $2.5 billion for “low-emissions” buses, a broad category that could include compressed natural gas and propane.

“On paper, a lot of these programs are being sold as clean energy projects, but when you get down to the details, things like compressed natural gas and enhanced oil recovery can qualify,” said Lukas Ross, a senior policy analyst at Friends of the Earth. “There are neutral programs that could be corrupted, and someone like Landrieu can co-opt funds, because a lot of this stuff is left up to administrative discretion.”

“For formula-funding grants and competitive grants, it can really come down to who he decides to email back, who he is taking calls from, who can get a meeting,” added Dorothy Slater, a senior climate researcher at the Revolving Door Project, which scrutinizes executive branch appointees. Throughout his political career, Landrieu took at least $134,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests, per campaign finance data from the Louisiana Ethics Administration Program.

Ross and Slater also point to New Democracy, an effort launched by centrist leaders in 2017 to expand Democratic appeal in red and purple areas, for which Landrieu served on an advisory board. “[New Democracy’s] mission is to expand the party’s appeal across Middle America and make Democrats competitive everywhere,” reads the group’s website. “These pragmatic Democratic leaders need room to maneuver, not purity tests and threats to ‘primary’ incumbents who deviate from left-wing orthodoxy.”

Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser for the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, published a New Democracy memo urging swing state candidates to “vocally support the shale natural gas boom that has been overwhelmingly good for American consumers, workers and the climate” and to point out that President Barack Obama “presided over America’s largest ever oil and gas boom.” A spokesperson for PPI said that Landrieu had nothing to do with its climate recommendations.

IN LIEU OF hard policy change, some of Landrieu’s more memorable political accomplishments have been symbolic, like ordering the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans and traveling to Paris in 2015 to talk about the role of U.S. mayors in stemming climate change.

Rolfes said that it was always hard for local climate groups to criticize Landrieu when his climate plans fell short, given the even more hostile political environment they were dealing with on the state level. “In a way, it was really politically shrewd of him to engage the groups who were worried about climate because he could also neutralize them,” she said. “Groups tried to walk that line and relationship diplomatically so they could maintain his ear.”

Elizabeth Gore, senior vice president of political affairs for the Environmental Defense Fund, a national organization, called Landrieu an “excellent choice” to lead on the infrastructure plan. “Environmental Defense Fund has had the privilege of working with Mayor Landrieu on community resilience, coastal protection and other climate smart projects, and we have seen firsthand his deep experience with disaster management after Hurricane Katrina at the state and local level, and his resilience planning response as Mayor,” she said in a statement.

Restore the Mississippi River Delta — a coalition of “Big Green” groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, and Pontchartrain Conservancy — also praised the selection.

“Louisiana desperately needs more investments in its coast, particularly through projects in the Coastal Master Plan,” said Kimberly Reyher, executive director at Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. “Mitch Landrieu understands this, so his appointment is great news for Louisiana. As Mitch said in his address at the 2018 State of the Coast conference, ‘South Louisiana is one of the most vulnerable places on the globe, making our work on long-term restoration even more important.’”

Landrieu’s elevation among national political commentators escalated in 2017 when he ordered the removal of four Confederate statues, something local activists had been organizing around for years. Leaning into the spotlight, Landrieu then published a bestselling book, “In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History,” and by 2019 went on to become a national political commentator himself, joining CNN.

New Orleans journalist Michael Stein observed that the national love for Landrieu seemed to arise overnight. “When I went to sleep, Mitch Landrieu was the mediocre mayor of New Orleans, facing lethargic public support and intense local disapproval,” he wrote in The New Republic in 2017. “When I woke up, he was a future leader of the Democratic Party and a 2020 presidential contender.” (Landrieu did not end up running for president.)

Mary Frances Berry, a professor of history and social thought at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized Landrieu for taking so much credit for the removal of the statutes. “Mitch is a nice guy. His father was a nice guy. They’re all good people,” she told NBC last year. “But he took advantage of all the work that activists in New Orleans did to demand that the city remove those statues. … Mitch was forced into the position he took. Then he hijacked the credit in a systematic way, wrote a book promoting the idea that he was brave.”

For now, Landrieu is leaning into his new gig, speaking with mayors, governors, and local media nationwide. Last week, Politico noted that sources inside and outside the administration have said that the former New Orleans mayor has been “building a power center in the West Wing” to potentially “positio[n] himself well for a future spot in the president’s inner circle and, perhaps, in a post-Biden Democratic Party.” As one administration official quipped, “Mitch Landrieu is a machine.”

Slater said the climate community was blindsided by Landrieu’s appointment. “Revolving Door Project follows all these sorts of things, we often get intel and whispers, and yet we did not hear anything about this before it was announced,” she said. “Now in hindsight it seems like the meetings may have been happening but that they were not leaked, so there really wasn’t an opportunity for climate groups to pressure the Biden administration, and it was really sprung on people right before Thanksgiving. I think that timing was intentional.”

Originally published in The American Prospect on December 7, 2021.
—–

As conservatives aim to capitalize on critical race theory backlash and their Virginia gubernatorial win from November, one longtime educator in Rhode Island has positioned herself at the center of the fray.

Ramona Bessinger, an English teacher of 23 years currently working in the Providence Public Schools, has been making the rounds on the conservative media circuit since this summer, ever since she first warned of CRT’s “infiltration” into the classroom.

Bessinger first appeared in July on Legal Insurrection, a blog affiliated with a Rhode Island–based conservative nonprofit. She alleged her predominantly nonwhite students had been “introduced to one of the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.” Bessinger outlined a shift in Providence school curriculum during the 2020–2021 school year, one overly focused on “identities” and “almost exclusively on an oppressor-oppressed narrative.”

Her arguments were immediately explosive. Among some of her most shocking statements were that “much of American history and literature was getting wiped out” and specifically that Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, essays by Martin Luther King Jr., poetry by Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, and books focused on the Holocaust like Elie Wiesel’s Night and The Diary of Anne Frank “were removed from our classroom and sent to recycling.” She also criticized professional development sessions where white educators were split up from nonwhite educators, and lamented that teachers were not allowed to question why some students did not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Bessinger’s blog was swiftly picked up by right-wing media, including Fox News and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. In October, she chatted with Tucker Carlson, who described her as “very insightful,” and last week she called on Rhode Island lawmakers to investigate how Providence Public Schools handles race and diversity lessons.

But virtually no outlet has deemed it necessary to verify any of her claims.

Debates over teaching critical race theory—an academic framework focused on the ways racism is embedded in policies and systems—have dominated school board meetings and state legislatures. Many Republican lawmakers were motivated by attacks from Donald Trump, who in September 2020 came out to blast The New York Times’ 1619 Project, calling it “a crusade against American history … ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” Shortly before Trump left office, he issued an executive order establishing a commission focused on countering the idea that “the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.” Lawmakers soon followed by introducing bills to crack down on teaching so-called “divisive” topics like race, gender, and oppression.

Some parents are using attacks on critical race theory as a vehicle to push back against the Black Lives Matter movement. Other parents say they believe the various equity initiatives being implemented in the name of anti-racism are going too far, in ways they feel either threaten academic rigor or undermine the sense of patriotism they hope their child feels. But do the claims of critical race theory critics also go too far in depicting a toxic environment in public schools?

On one level, Bessinger is right in identifying some changes that have taken place within her district. In 2020, Providence Public Schools installed its first chief equity and diversity officer, a woman named Dr. Barbara Mullen. It was also the first year leaders rolled out a new curriculum program for elementary and middle-school students. The district selected American Reading Company, or ARC, in part for its Spanish curriculum and its emphasis on “culturally-responsive” texts, featuring diverse characters and written by diverse authors.

But Bessinger’s claims about esteemed literary classics being discarded or barred hold much less water. After she insisted the “oppressor-oppressed” narrative is the only one students are now exposed to, and gone was “diversity, perspective, truth and rigor that previously were taught,” I asked Bessinger to see a list of books that were approved for instruction. “There is no list,” she said, adding that there are “hundreds and hundreds” of books so she couldn’t possibly run through them all with me.

I don’t need to run through them together, I explained, I just want to review some of the titles. Bessinger then emphasized that we shouldn’t get too hung up on books. “Critical race theory is an ideology that’s infiltrated every aspect, every grade, every assignment, every part of school culture,” she stressed. “It’s very insidious and I hope I’m doing a good job at explaining this because if we don’t get this out we will not recognize this country in a few years.”

But if there is no list, I asked, where do you find the “hundreds and hundreds” of titles and what does it mean then for a book to be “removed” from a class? She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say.

Fortunately, children and parents in Providence need not worry that lessons on the Holocaust, Shakespeare, or Martin Luther King Jr. are being scrapped from the public-school canon.

Shannon McLoud, who has worked for the district for the last eight years, two teaching English in middle school and the last six as an English department leader in high school, says that many of the texts and authors Bessinger claims are gone remain part of the high school curriculum, and some of those McLoud believes are better suited for older students anyway. “I’ll be honest, I’ve taught Night to eighth graders and it was probably not the best novel for that age cohort,” she said.

At the high school level, Providence schools use a curriculum program called StudySync, produced by McGraw-Hill. Core texts for this year, which were voted and approved collectively by high school English teachers across the district, include John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Sharon Draper’s Romiette and Julio for ninth grade, Elie Wiesel’s Night and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents for tenth grade, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for 11th grade, and George Orwell’s 1984 and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner for 12th. (Supplemental high school texts also still include Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” and Elie Wiesel’s “The Perils of Indifference.”)

“I feel the district is trying to put in more voices of color, but I don’t see how that’s a bad thing,” said McLoud. “So I think pedagogically she and I just disagree.”

Kira Leander, an English language arts teacher at the middle-school level in Providence, said it’s important to remember this is only the second year of using ARC in the district, and its first year was rolled out during the pandemic, amid a tumultuous state takeover of Providence’s schools. “I think what a new curriculum rollout looks like varies from school to school, and classroom to classroom, and there’s not just one story here,” she told the Prospect.

Still, Leander said, teachers lacked full discretion to choose their classroom literary texts, even before ARC. “I almost feel like what [Bessinger is] insinuating is that in the past teachers could just choose whatever they wanted and read that, but there’s always been curriculum programs and they come with attached texts, and ARC is no different in that way.” Teachers can still bring in some of their own supplemental texts, Leander added, though it can be challenging to find time in the busy school year to teach them.

That’s not to say ARC was met by all teachers with open arms. After the first year of the rollout, leaders from the English and social studies departments met to discuss which books students didn’t seem to connect with, and which ones educators didn’t love teaching. In some cases, core texts were swapped out based on feedback.

Leander says there is also truth to the observation that a lot of the ARC novels, like Full Cicada Moon by Marilyn Hilton, have some element of a young person facing oppression or discrimination based on an identity marker like race. “But to claim it’s an ‘oppressor-oppressed’ narrative oversimplifies the story and erases what I hope our students are really getting out of it,” she said. “Which is a sense of empowerment and exploring how young people can use their own voices to create the type of change that they want to see in the world. These books are used to engage with the question of what we do when we either see or ourselves face inequities.”

A spokesperson for ARC declined to comment on Bessinger’s critiques but said via email that “units are intentionally designed to give educators and schools the flexibility to include any relevant texts they believe will best meet the needs of their students.”

IN ADDITION TO CURRICULAR OBJECTIONS, Bessinger has also raised alarms about new “racialized” and “divisive” professional development opportunities. One in particular was the establishment of so-called affinity groups, where white and nonwhite educators could gather separately and talk about their experiences.

Barbara Mullen, the chief equity and diversity officer, encouraged the affinity groups and said she received pushback from just “two to three educators who were confused” because they thought it was based on segregation. “The reality is people need different things, so we create spaces for students to have the things they need and it’s the same for our educators,” she told the Prospect. Mullen is no longer working with Providence schools, and now serves as an administrator for Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools. Providence Public Schools has not yet installed another chief equity and diversity officer and did not return requests for comment.

According to Leander, more than a few teachers felt uncomfortable with the affinity groups when they were introduced. “We need a lot of education about why we need affinity spaces, and as a district we’re struggling so much as it is with systems and structures and overall functionality, like even figuring out who is in charge of what, which makes taking on these conversations around power and oppression and identity more challenging, though necessary.”

“I’ll be honest, when I first heard the idea I thought it seemed weird,” said McLoud. “But Barbara Mullen had open Zoom meetings and the reason for the groups was so people of color could feel they could speak freely, and so white people could speak freely. I see where people get weirded out by it, but I understand the reasoning now.”

In a statement provided to WLNE, an ABC-affiliated station that serves Providence, Victor Morente, a school district spokesperson noted that affinity group “participation is optional for staff.”

Last spring, the Rhode Island legislature proposed a bill to ban the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts” like critical race theory, but it was tabled for further study. More than 25 other states have introduced similar bills, nine of which have so far passed into law. (Arizona, one of the nine states, had its law overturned in November by its state Supreme Court, though lawmakers will likely reintroduce the bill and pass it again.)

For now, Bessinger is continuing to speak out, casting herself as a martyr for her country. On a near daily basis, she levels public criticisms against her school district or teachers union. (Providence Teachers Union president Maribeth Calabro did not return requests for comment.)

“I have everything to lose, my career is in jeopardy, but my core as a mother will not allow me to remain silent,” Bessinger insisted. “I have to expose this problematic curriculum that’s all over the country, and I’d probably extend that to the world.”