Senator raskin bald spot trial#

Greenpeace made some mistakes, as it admitted, but it’s not something you should be able to cripple an organization over.ĭeepa Padmanhaba, Greenpeace’s general counsel said, “It’s hard to swallow that we have spent millions litigating two statements relating to a dispute over the boundaries of a Canadian mountain range.” Ebony Martin, Greenpeace’s new executive director, told me recently that the lawsuit had “injected turbulence” into the organization. Most of those claims have been thrown ou in the course of the caset just two of two hundred and ninety-six allegedly defamatory comments are still at issue.

Greenpeace’s current trials began almost a decade ago, when a Canadian logging giant filed a three-hundred-million-dollar lawsuit against it and several other NGOs for, among other things, defamation and racketeering, employing a novel version of the RICO statute designed to take down mobsters. And sometimes it’s been sued for its pains. Greenpeace, which was founded in 1971, is a global nonprofit network of campaigns devoted to “peaceful protest and creative communication.” Peaceful, but pugnacious and, at times, controversial, but it has fought some of the largest corporations on earth to keep forests intact and oil in the ground, and performed other useful tasks for the planet as a whole. The price is a multimillion-dollar lawsuit and the expenses, lost resources, and emotional stress such litigation brings.” As a judge wrote in a state court opinion a few years later, “Short of a gun to the head, a greater threat to First Amendment expression can scarcely be imagined.” Even Oprah’s been SLAPPed-by Texas cattlemen, for supposedly disparaging beef. They were, as he put it, a “new phenomenon” typically filed by commercial property developers, corporations, or fossil-fuel companies against citizens or N.G.O.s, and designed to “stop them from exercising their political rights or punish them for having done so.” Such suits, he wrote, “send a clear message: that there is a price for speaking out politically. Pring, a law professor at the University of Denver, in the nineteen-eighties. SLAPP-strategic lawsuits against public participation-suits were named by George P. In fact, there will be a demonstration day after tomorrow in Oakland, outside the courthouse where Greenpeace will be trying to defend itself against a lawsuit designed to crimp its vital work. But he’s among the most serious legislators on Capitol Hill, and one long-running project-putting an end to so-called SLAPP suits-is particularly noteworthy now, because one of the most egregious examples of that kind of legal abuse is coming to a head. Raskin could doubtless amuse himself full-time taking on his MAGA coworkers. As if every time we mentioned the other party, it just came out with a kind of political speech impediment like, ‘Oh, the Banana Republican Party.’ As if we were to say that every time we mentioned the ‘Banana Republican member,’” he added. When you use it as an adjective, you say the ‘Democratic’ member or the ‘Democratic ‘solution,’” and that “after people are corrected several times and they continue to say it, it seems like it’s an act of incivility. Perhaps under the influence of that headgear, Raskin has grown saltier-last month, after many years of listening to Republican colleagues talk about “Democrat” plans and “Democrat” policies, he went to the House floor to call Colorado’s Lauren Boebert on the “grammatical error.” He said, “I just wanted to educate our distinguished colleagues that ‘Democrat’ is the noun. Bruce Springsteen’s sideman Steven van Zandt sent Raskin five of his own bandanas to choose from they give the sixty-one-year-old congressman a distinctly piratical air. He’s even more easily distinguishable at the moment, because, undergoing chemo-immunotherapy for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, he’s taken to wearing bandanas to hide his balding dome. In both cases, a combination of historical gravity and lawyerly flair distinguished Raskin from many of his House colleagues.

Senator raskin bald spot trial#

Jamie Raskin has been a stalwart progressive politician for decades, but most of America only came to know the Democratic congressman from Maryland after January 6, 2021, when he led the prosecution in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and then sat on the bipartisan committee that investigated the insurrection.