Jim Crow tactics reborn in Texas abortion law, deputizing citizens to enforce legally suspect provisions

  The new Texas law that bans most abortions uses a method employed by Texas and other states to enforce racist Jim Crow laws in the 19th and 20th centuries that aimed to disenfranchise African Americans.

  Rather than giving state officials, such as the police, the power to enforce the law, the Texas law instead allows enforcement by “any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity in this state.” This enforcement mechanism relies solely on citizens, rather than on government officials, to enforce the law.

Is hiring more black officers the key to reducing police violence?

  High-profile cases of officer brutality against black citizens in recent years have caused Americans to question the racial makeup of their police departments.

  Many advocates believe that diversifying these forces will help reduce police violence against people of color.

The ugly truth about President Trump's extreme anti-immigrant campaign

  President Trump may have backed down from his monstrous policy of separating children from parents who bring them across the border, but the executive order he signed this week was just another exercise in deception – a fig leaf that won’t conceal the ugly truth about the extreme anti-immigrant campaign he’s leading.

  As we all know, Trump didn’t need an executive order to change the policy, one that his homeland security chief initially denied even existed.

  And contrary to Trump’s scapegoating of Democrats – “that’s their law,” he earlier claimed – there was never any law that required him to rip terrified children away from their parents and cram them into kennel-like pens.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: Gearing up for Alabama politics in 2017

  While the presidential race played out this year, several things happened in Alabama politics that went under the radar.

  First, a federal appeals court upheld the Alabama Legislature’s measure that bans PAC to PAC transfers. The new Republican legislative majority that marched into the Statehouse in 2011 set out to destroy and bury the last bastion of Democratic power in the state – the once omnipotent Alabama Education Association. They succeeded.