Delaware House Passes John L. Lewis Voting Rights Act:
The Delaware House of Representatives has passed House Bill 444, known as the Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act, sending the measure to the state Senate for consideration.
The legislation would establish new state-level voting rights protections aimed at preventing voter suppression, vote dilution, voter intimidation and barriers to election access.
If enacted, the legislation would create a new framework in Delaware law that would allow election policies and practices to be challenged when they result in unlawful voter suppression or vote dilution affecting protected classes.
Under the bill, voter suppression would include election policies or practices that create significant disparities in voter participation, voting access or opportunities to participate in the political process. The legislation states that claims may be brought even without evidence of intentional discrimination if a policy’s effect creates prohibited disparities.
Lawmakers say the measure would also prohibit vote dilution, targeting election methods that impair the ability of protected class members to nominate or elect candidates of their choice. Courts would be authorized to order remedies if violations are found.
Following House passage, Rep. Larry Lambert, the bill’s prime House sponsor (and MY State Rep), said the legislation is intended to ensure Delaware maintains strong voting protections.
“As John Lewis once said: ‘Freedom is not a state; it is an act… Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society,’” Lambert said.
The bill now awaits consideration in the Delaware Senate.
I, Uh, Think I Oppose This Bill:
A bill that would require school districts to use unionized laborers on major construction projects has split Delaware’s construction industry as lawmakers near the finish line in the debate.
While leaders of the competing factions have framed the issue in dramatic terms, interviews with 18 construction workers at various sites in Delaware this month showed that rank-and-file workers largely were not as ideological. Many workers said they are indifferent to being in a union, saying instead that they support whatever arrangement would bring them the biggest paychecks.
Senate Bill 272 would mandate that a school district sign an agreement with the Delaware Building and Construction Trades Council – the umbrella organization for the state’s various unionized trades – to use union labor for construction projects that cost at least $5 million and have at least two bidders. Those deals are known as project labor agreements, or PLAs.
If merit shops – or non-unionized construction companies – win a project bid covered by the bill, they would be required to hire a percentage of unionized workers. That percentage would be negotiated with the Delaware Building and Construction Trades Council, whose president, Jim Maravelias, told Spotlight Delaware that they would seek half of the available jobs.
Since then, Sen. Jack Walsh (D-Stanton), a leader in the Delaware Building and Construction Trades Council, has continued to push for more requirements to support union labor.
Over the past year, he has filed and amended several versions of the current bill, settling on a proposed minimum of $5 million in aggregate project cost, limiting the requirement to school construction, and finally limiting PLAs to projects that have at least two bids.
Rep. Edward Osienski, the lead House cosponsor and a retired union tradesman, testified at a June 10 committee hearing that the bill aimed to resolve frequent claims of unpaid claims to construction workers.
Yeah, that’s it.
Mary DuPont, the executive director of La Plaza, a nonprofit advocacy organization for Delaware’s Latino community, opposed the bill, citing Delaware’s 2022 Disparity Report which found that less than 3% of state construction contracts went to minority-owned businesses.
She told Spotlight Delaware that in Sussex County, a large proportion of construction projects are done by small Latino-owned businesses that are not likely to be unionized. DuPont added that some minority-owned businesses have told her of unpleasant experiences in unions.
“They’re not exactly waiting with welcome signs for minorities to join the union,” she said.
Ayanna Khan, founder and CEO of the Black Chamber of Commerce, told Spotlight Delaware that because minority-owned businesses are more likely to operate in a deficit, they wouldn’t want to pay the additional expense of union dues, especially when the cost of living has significantly increased due to gas and utility prices.
She also said unions are historically composed of “middle-aged white men,” as unions discriminated against Black workers in the early 20th century.
Maravelias, the leader of the trade union organization, denied the assertion of minority groups and associations that because most Black and Latino workers are not part of unions, the bill would harm them.
“We don’t need a minority contractor to hire minority workers,” Maravelias told the committee. “Let’s not bring race into this.”
That reminds me–for the better part of a century, the rallying cry of the skilled construction trades was ‘Let’s not bring the Black race into this’.
I vote no.
Everything, I mean EVERYTHING, Falls Apart For Trump. Let’s start with the so-called peace deal with Iran:
The nascent U.S.-Iran deal faced fresh challenges on Friday after Switzerland said that the next phase of talks had been postponed and as Israel launched new strikes in Lebanon following a deadly attack on its soldiers there.
Israel said its military had struck more than 80 targets belonging to the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia, killing dozens, in response to an attack on an Israeli tank crew that left four soldiers dead in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Health Ministry reported that Israeli airstrikes overnight had killed at least 18 people and injured 33 others.
The upsurge of violence showed how Lebanon remained a major obstacle to the durability of the preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has indicated that he is not bound by the deal, which calls for a cease-fire on all fronts, including Lebanon. Iran has repeatedly warned that continued fighting in Lebanon could jeopardize the deal.
Mr. Netanyahu said on Friday that he had ordered the Israeli military to respond forcefully to the deaths of the tank crew, warning that Israel “will exact a very heavy price from Hezbollah for these attacks.” Lebanon’s president called the Israeli attacks a “dangerous and reprehensible escalation.”
I’m calling it–this ‘agreement’ will never take effect.
Upon Reflection, The Reflecting Pool Doesn’t Reflect Anything, Except Cheap Incompetence:
President Donald Trump gave a sweetheart, no-bid, $13 million contract to a vendor who handles the pools at his tacky Trump-branded properties to “renovate” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, painting the bottom of the massive basin of sitting water a dark “American flag blue” and allegedly fixing the filtration system so that it will have “clean, beautiful water.”
But, as pool experts and scientists alike predicted, the millions of gallons of water between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument are already filled with algae. The new, darker color of the basin absorbed more sunlight, heating up the water and leading the neon-green scum to return with a vengeance.
In fact, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that there is now more algae in the pool than “at any recorded point in the month of June for at least five years.”
Even worse: The countless gallons of hydrogen peroxide National Park Service workers are pouring into the water to try to rid it of this new algae bloom are now causing the new paint to peel away from the concrete.
You don’t think this will set Trump off?
Neo-Con Nightmare. They got the war they lusted for–and saw their dreams dashed:
For the past two decades, an influential band of foreign policy thinkers, politicians and activists in Washington clamored for regime change in Iran. These neoconservatives finally thought they were going to get what they always wanted when President Donald Trump, who ran for president on a false promise of avoiding regime change wars, joined Israel in launching a surprise war on Iran in February that began with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
These dreams were shattered on Wednesday when Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran’s new, more hardline leadership that looks like a total capitulation for the war’s initial aims. Trump, Israel and the neocons wanted to topple the Islamic Republic, permanently end its nuclear program, remove all enriched uranium from the country, end Iran’s ballistic missile program and debilitate Iran’s military capacities so that it could not threaten Israel. None of this was achieved, never mind Trump’s repeated bellicose insistence that he would only accept unconditional surrender.
Let’s just say that the neocons and Israelis who thought Trump was dedicated to their cause are in shambles right now.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a proud neocon and war backer, called the deal a “debacle.” Over at the Washington Post, columnist Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter and fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, labeled it a “complete disaster.”
“The Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran hands the terrorist regime the one victory it could never have achieved on the battlefield. Financial reprieve,” Mark Dubowitz, the head of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a leading advocate of Iran regime change, wrote in the New York Post.
In Israel, the memorandum has been greeted as a stab in the back, with one TV analyst calling it a “diplomatic Oct. 7,” a reference to the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1,200 people and sparked Israel’s expansionist wars in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
Sad.
What do you want to talk about?
Real in-depth story on the building trades. Explained all racial shenanigans that goes on inside the racist Building Trades before this new President took over. Court cases mostly in Philadelphia not somuch in Delaware. The labor department doesn’t enforce anything here oversight non existent with union men atop of committees.