This article reports that legal leaders are discussing the challenges of the Trump presidency at the ongoing NAACP convention in Baltimore: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-naacp-sunday-20170723-story.html
July 23, 2017
President Trump's election integrity commission is what keeps Kristen Clarke up at night. For Thomas Saenz, the issue on the front-burner is immigration enforcement.
Fatima Goss Graves and Sarah Warbelow say it's impossible to pick just one issue from the first six months of the Trump administration that worries them most.
These four panelists, all leaders of various legal teams, discussed their strategies for dealing with Trump's presidency as part of the NAACP's Continuing Legal Education seminar Sunday. The nation's oldest civil rights organization is holding its national convention in Baltimore through Wednesday.
Breaking with tradition, Trump declined an invitation to speak at the 108th annual convention. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that though he declined the invitation, ”certainly the invitation for dialogue with that group would happily take place and we'd certainly like to continue to do that."
”But there is some good news," Berry said. ”Some of that good news is what happens when we stand and fight."
”This is an unprecedented effort to roll out and push voter suppression policies and laws on a national scale. It is one of the most dangerous threats to democracy that we've seen in modern times,"Clarke said. ”We're going to fight tooth and nail until we shut this commission down."
Graves, president of the National Women's Law Center, said her organization is pushing to educate people about the impact of Republican plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Once people know what the healthcare plan would actually do, Graves said, it is deeply unpopular.
”For black women in particular, this heathcare repeal plan is just devastating," she said.
Within the Latino community, Trump's rhetoric has sowed ”unprecedented levels of fear and confusion," said Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
And for those who identify at LGBT, there is concern about ”excessive amounts of discrimination," said Warbelow, the Human Rights Campaign's legal director.
After an hour of slamming Trump's policies, Berry challenged the panelists to name one bright spot from the administration's first six months.
”I hesitate to call it bright spot, but the bright spot in my mind is the incompetency of the administration, which has limited what bad things they've been able to accomplish," Saenz said to applause. ”There's a daily battle of which will get more attention: the inhumanity or the incompetence. ... I'm happy when the incompetence wins."