REPORT: Consequences Of ‘Fiscal Showdown’ Could Be Disastrous For LGBT Americans

By Guest Blogger on Nov 20, 2012 at 3:30 pm

Our guest bloggers are Liz Neemann, intern with LGBT Progress, and Crosby Burns, Research Associate at LGBT Progress.

If Congress fails to act during the lame-duck session, a series of onerous automatic federal spending cuts and tax hikes will go into effect on January 2, 2013. Failure to reach a compromise in this budget battle would be a painful pill to swallow for all Americans. But for LGBT people, failure to reach an agreement on the fiscal showdown would have particularly dire consequences.

If Congress fails to act, automatic across-the-board spending cuts will take effect under a process known as “sequestration.” Today a report released today by the Center for American Progress, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a coalition of 23 national LGBT organizations highlights how across-the-board cuts under sequestration would reduce key federal programs and services that support the health, wellness, and livelihood of LGBT Americans and their families. For example,

Sequestration would hurt LGBT workers. Sequestration would threaten the employment security of LGBT workers (who continue to experience high rates of bias on the job) because federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would have fewer resources to investigate claims of employment discrimination.
Sequestration would compromise LGBT health. Cuts under sequestration would compromise the health of LGBT Americans by blocking LGBT seniors’ access to Medicare, reducing programmatic funding to health centers designed to serve the LGBT population, and impeding suicide prevention efforts aimed at helping LGBT Americans.
Sequestration would harm LGBT youth. Sequestration would threaten federal agencies with the removal of critical resources used to prevent bullying and school violence against LGBT youth.
Sequestration would exacerbate LGBT homelessness and housing discrimination. Across-the-board cuts under sequestration would limit the government’s capacity to address the high rates of homelessness among LGBT youth and to combat housing discrimination against LGBT renters, tenants, and potential homeowners.
Sequestration would threaten the basic safety of LGBT Americans. Sequestration would restrict available resources designed to address the disproportionate levels of abuse, harassment, and violent crime committed against LGBT individuals.

While the CAP/Task Force report only touches on how these wholesale cuts impact LGBT Americans, failure to reach a deal on the fiscal showdown also means that tax breaks for lower-income and middle class families will expire. This means most families would face a higher tax burden if Congress fails to act. This would be particularly devastating to LGBT families who on average report lower incomes than families headed by different-sex couples. These families cannot foot a higher tax bill, especially when so many of them are already on tenuous economic footing.

In the remaining days of the 112^th Congress, it is imperative that our lawmakers act swiftly to protect LGBT Americans from the severe sequestration consequences to federal programs that both directly and indirectly support them and their families. This means a combination of spending cuts that inflict minimal economic harm on American families along with modest tax increases on the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Only through this combination of cuts and revenue can we put our country back on stable financial footing.

To achieve this, however, congressional Republicans must abandon their quest to hold ordinary citizens hostage in order to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. For all Americans—gay or straight, transgender or not—preventing millionaires and billionaires from paying their fair share at the expense of the middle-class is not in the best interest of the country.

Congress has a little over one month to broker a compromise. For all Americans – including those that are LGBT – the clock is ticking.

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Justice

Churches Serving As Polling Places Posted Views On Same-Sex Marriage, Abortion During Election

By Nicole Flatow on Nov 20, 2012 at 2:40 pm

With several reported incidents this election cycle of churches that served as polling places touting their opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion, separation of church and state advocates are reviving calls to eliminate churches as polling sites. In Minnesota, where the Catholic Church has been the most vocal proponent of a ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage, the American Independent noted the following incidents:

In South Saint Paul, Minn., on Election Day, residents showed up at St. John Vianney Catholic Church to vote and were greeted with a banner outside the polling place entrance that read, “Strengthen Marriage, Don’t Redefine It.” [...]

Ivan Kowalenko … told Minnesota Public Radio, “I was shocked, I didn’t think that would be allowed. I was hearing that you’re not allowed to wear any political slogan of your own, so it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate that a voting venue would be allowed to express an opinion.”

At a separate polling place at St. Joseph’s Church in West St. Paul, Stephanie Weiss was waiting in line to vote, and she noticed a sign posted to the wall. It was a prayer, written by Twin Cities Archbishop John Nienstedt, that urged Catholics to defend God’s plan for marriage — between one man and one woman.

Similar incidents occurred in May when North Carolina voted on the ban on same-sex marriage and civil unions:

Open Door Baptist Church in Morehead City put the words “Vote for Marriage” on its marquee the day of the primary election, according to the Carteret County News-Times. Earlier this month, the church doubled down on its politicking with a sign that read, “Vote for life and marriage.”

In Raleigh, North Carolina, Devon Park United Methodist Church put up the words “A true marriage is male and female and God” during the May vote on the constitutional amendment. That church was serving as a polling place.

The church’s pastor, William H. Pearsall Sr., told the Wilmington Star-News that it was his idea and that his church council agreed to put the message up. “We agreed that we needed to stand up for Christian values,” Pearsall said. He also told the paper, “In our church, God’s word never changes and it’s the truth.”

In all three instances in North Carolina, the signs were outside of the buffer zone set by state statute and were, therefore, legal. However, the incidents prompted a call by some residents and advocacy groups to revamp the selection process for polling places.

Even where churches are not posting advocacy materials on Election Day, advocates worry that the polling place gives the impression of impropriety and threaten the neutrality of the site as a place for civic activity. Studies have shown that voting in a church “could activate norms of following church doctrine.” And the Humanist Legal Center has pointed out that the selection of a church building for voting could “amount to an endorsement of religion that marks non-Christian voters as outsiders” and perhaps even more disturbingly, actually skews the results of the voting toward religious views, which amounts to an unconstitutional advancing of religion.” The Center also warns that the selection of churches may burden the right to vote, where “voters are forced to vote in a hostile location that skews the results.”

Churches are no doubt useful public spaces, particularly in small communities that lack other options. But organizations like Americans United for Church and State say if elections officials are going to use churches, they should at the very least better police political messaging at the sites.

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LGBT

Bryan Fischer Believes Exorcisms Can Cure Homosexuality

By Zack Ford on Nov 20, 2012 at 2:40 pm

David Pakman sat down with the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer to discuss the recent marriage equality wins and other LGBT issues. Fischer claimed he is “for homosexuals, but against homosexuality,” wanting to help them “leave that lifestyle.” He compared homosexuality to drug use — an addiction that people can escape — and he agreed that exorcism could assist in that process:

FISCHER: I think there’s no question that there are spiritual factors at work in this —

PAKMAN: Are they demons?

FISCHER: — that using spiritual weapons of our warfare according to the New Testament can be effective. We know that people can get delivered from homosexual behavior. The former president of the American Psychological Association, Nathan Cummings — he’s seen that happen in his own private clinical practice. He’s seen people get free of homosexual behavior and change their sexual orientation, so it certainly is possible. There may be spiritual factors at work. If there are, then the power of the Gospel, the name of Jesus Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit can be of enormous help.

PAKMAN: And an exorcism might be a way to do that?

FISCHER: Well we believe in the reality of spiritual forces just like Jesus did. [If] you got a problem with demons, David, your problem’s not with me, it’s with Jesus Christ, because he believed in them.

Watch it:

Exorcisms or other forms of spiritual warfare against LGBT people are one of the most extreme forms of ex-gay ministry. Unfortunately, their provocative nature often distract from the psychological abuse of more common forms of ex-gay “therapy” that target vulnerable young people (and their parents).

Fischer went on to cite the fraudulent Regnerus study to claim that same-sex couples can never be good parents. When asked when he decided to be straight or if he could change his attractions, Fischer refused to answer, choosing instead to simply erase the experiences of millions of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals by reducing their lives to “sexual behavior.”

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Health

After Cutting Tax Credit For Children, Michigan Republicans Consider One For Fetuses

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Nov 20, 2012 at 2:29 pm

State legislators in Michigan held a hearing on Tuesday to consider House Bills 5684 and 5685, which would allow taxpayers to receive tax relief for unborn fetuses past 12 weeks’ gestation. The proposed legislation is an odd push for Michigan Republicans, partly because Progress Michigan notes the state slashed tax credits for children last year — meaning that although parents living in Michigan do not qualify for additional tax breaks to offset the cost of caring for their own children, they could soon be able to claim a tax credit for an unborn fetus.

Progress Michigan’s executive director points out that the proposed legislation is a dangerous step toward endowing fetuses with the same rights as human beings while disregarding the real economic needs of Michigan’s children, 341,000 of whom currently live in high-poverty areas:

“It’s clear Lansing Republicans have the wrong priorities by wasting time on these extreme bills,” said Zack Pohl, Executive Director of Progress Michigan. “This is really a backdoor way of passing extreme personhood legislation, which has been rejected by voters in states across the country. Even worse, this would create a special new tax credit for unborn fetuses, after Lansing Republicans eliminated the tax credit for living, breathing children last year. It’s time for our elected leaders to get their priorities straight and start working together to create good jobs and improve education.”

The National Conference of State Legislatures believes this type of legislation could represent the first of its kind, although they acknowledged that the issue of states providing tax credits for fetuses has not been widely studied.

The nonpartisan House Fiscal Agency has estimated that allowing Michigan residents to claim a tax credit for unborn fetuses would cost the state between $5 million and $10 million annually in lost tax revenue.

(HT: Alison C)

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Economy

GOP Senator Only Favors ‘One Compromise’: ‘That All Spending Be Cut’

By Scott Keyes on Nov 20, 2012 at 2:15 pm

After Democrats racked up massive victories in this month’s elections, Tea Party Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) announced that he’s willing to compromise on budget issues, as long as compromise only means “that all spending be cut.”

In a speech to incoming Republicans and the Tea Party Patriots in Washington DC on Friday, Paul addressed the looming fiscal showdown — just as some in his party are expressing a willingness to compromise on tax issues after the election.

However, Paul was having none of it. “There is one compromise I would be in favor of and that’s that all spending be cut,” he said to applause from the audience. Paul then went on to single out one item conservatives should be willing to cut — “waste in the military budget” — in return for liberals being willing to cut entitlements and welfare:

PAUL: There is one compromise I would be in favor of and that’s that all spending be cut. The reason why it’s a compromise though is I believe national defense is the most important thing we do up here, it is a constitutional function of government, we should do it. But my compromise is I’m willing to look at military spending and understand that not all of it is going toward national defense. [...]

I think the compromise is conservative — we’re all conservatives who believe in a strong national defense — we compromise enough to say let’s look for some waste in the military budget. The liberals though have to compromise and say entitlements have to be fixed. We have to look at domestic welfare.

Watch it:

Not only is Paul’s “compromise” patently one-sided, it also skews heavily toward the side that lost the election. Americans actually prefer a solution that Paul didn’t even address: raising taxes on the wealthy. Indeed, 60 percent of voters, including a substantial share of GOPers, support increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, according to exit polling.

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Climate Progress

Nearly 200 Leading Global Companies And Investors Call For ‘Clear, Stable, Ambitous’ Carbon Price

By Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 20, 2012 at 2:00 pm

by Tom Wittig

Even as the Obama Administration backs away from making climate change an immediate priority in its second term, the world’s leading companies — some of them fossil fuel companies — are calling for more action.

Last week, Exxon reiterated its support for a carbon tax in order to “address rising emissions.” And this week, Royal Dutch Shell has come out in support of a global initiative to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The oil giant cosigned a letter with Statoil and 100 other companies asking politicians worldwide to put a predictable price on carbon.

The joint letter will be presented to Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner on Climate Change:

A clear, stable, ambitious and cost-effective policy framework is essential to underpin the investment needed to deliver substantial greenhouse gas emissions reductions by mid-century. As business leaders, we believe that the certainty created by this policy framework and the investment it will unlock offers the prospect of increased business success and job creation in key sectors including energy, transport and the built environment.

Released ahead of the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, the letter points out that “a convincing strategy to reduce emissions… continues to evade the global community,” but warns against considering carbon pricing a “silver bullet.” Instead, the companies advocate combining carbon pricing “with other locally appropriate policies.”

And just today, a group of 80 investors with more than $1 trillion in assets issued a similar letter to world governments calling on them to establish better policies to encourage swifter climate action:

Investors worldwide are currently taking actions to address climate risks and opportunities. These range from considering and addressing climate risks in their investments, directly investing in assets such as renewable energy, low-carbon energy infrastructure, and clean technology, encouraging companies to improve energy efficiency and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, measuring and disclosing the carbon performance of their own portfolios, to persuading regulators to require corporate disclosure of the business impacts of climate change. These efforts are not yet sufficient and must be scaled up dramatically. Governments will need to adopt stronger, more consistent policy frameworks which provide the right market signals to support increased investment.

These calls for action come one day after the World Bank released a new report summarizing the state of climate science. The study concludes that the world will encounter “unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods” if it continues on its path to a 4˚C increase by 2100.

While Shell’s support of carbon pricing is not unprecedented, – it admitted internally pricing of $40 per ton CO2 in 2010 — it does provide new fodder for the dialogue around pricing carbon. Unfortunately, even though Shell, Exxon and the world’s top investors are endorsing this kind of carbon policy, the Obama Administration still won’t touch it.

Tom Wittig is an intern on the ocean policy team at the Center for American Progress.

LGBT

Pushed Through The Cracks: Transgender Lives And Deaths On The Day Of Remembrance

By Kellan Baker, Guest Blogger on Nov 20, 2012 at 1:40 pm

Crossposted from Open Society Foundations.

The list seems endless.

Deoni Jones, age 23. Stabbed to death in Washington, DC.
Agnes Torres, age 35. Decapitated and thrown in a ditch in Atlixco, Mexico.
Anil Aayiramthengu, age 39. Throat slit in Thangassery, India.
Thapelo Makutle, age 24. Throat slit and mutilated in Kuruman, South Africa.
Barbarita Alemán, age 21. Shot to death in Colonia San Martín, Honduras.
Secil Dilşeker, age 46. Throat slit in Antalya, Turkey.
Sirena Paola, age 44. Beaten to death in Maicao, Colombia.
January Marie Lapuz, age 26. Stabbed to death in New Westminster, Canada.
Rayza Morais Costa, age 18. Bound and shot to death in Belém, Brazil.
Cassandra Zapata, age 39. Strangled to death and burned in Rouen, France.

November 20th is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we remember these names among those of the hundreds of other transgender people who were murdered in 2012. According to the Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide project, murder took the lives of more than 1,080 transgender people in 56 countries between 2008 and 2012. This number is only the tip of the iceberg, as it includes only the handful of cases that garner media attention.

As the trans scholar and advocate Susan Stryker puts it, many people have difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they cannot recognize that person’s gender. As a result, trans people in countries around the world frequently encounter extreme prejudice, harassment, and even murderous violence based simply on who they are.

There have been many different ways throughout history and across cultures of conceptualizing gender and describing the process of negotiating socially determined gender boundaries. Over the last century, the term ‘transgender’ has evolved as a popular umbrella term for people whose gender identity — their internal sense of being a man, a woman, or another gender — or gender expression is different from that typically associated with their birth sex. Some people claim a trans identity, while others are identified as trans on the basis of social definitions of masculine and feminine.

Trans people, like any group of people, come from a wide range of backgrounds. They live in cities and rural areas; are young, elderly, and middle-aged; began to live as their true gender when they were children, young adults, or much later in life; and live in families of all varieties. Trans people, and the communities they live in, are diverse in terms of factors such as race, income, and sexual orientation.

While violence can affect trans people from any background, its patterns are anything but random. The overwhelming majority of the lost trans lives that we honor on the Transgender Day of Remembrance are transgender women of color. Some were immigrants. Many struggled to make a living through sex work and were attacked by clients and police alike. Most were poor. In life and in death, their names and histories hover on the edge of invisibility in societies that accorded them few safe places to call their own.

This invisibility, like the brutality of the violence that claims so many trans people, is a reflection of the pervasive poverty, sexism, and other forms of systematic exclusion that circumscribe trans lives. Transgender people routinely confront institutionalized discrimination in areas of everyday life such as health care, housing, employment, education, and legal recognition in their true gender.

Anti-trans discrimination in health care is a particularly cruel reality, since many trans people need transition-related medical services to fully embody their true selves. And even while seeking the same basic health care that anyone might need to fix a broken bone or treat the flu, trans people frequently encounter biased and inadequate treatment from health care providers and denials of financial support from national health systems and health insurance programs.

The consequences of discrimination in health care are deadly. Transgender people are not only disproportionately likely to be victims of violence: They are also more likely to contract HIV, to go without preventive care that can catch diseases like cancer early, and to attempt suicide. In a recent study of more than 6,400 transgender people in the United States, for example, 41 percent of trans people reported attempting suicide — a rate 25 times higher than the general population.

Across the world, trans people are being excluded from jobs, turned away by doctors, funneled into prisons, and left to die by the side of the road. They are not slipping through the cracks: Indifference, hatred, and violence are actively forcing them down through the gaps in our social safety nets, our health care systems, and the legal systems of citizenship by which our societies determine whose lives matter.

The thousands of trans people whom we remember this November 20th must rely on the living to seek their justice. Fortunately, trans activists and their allies in countries across the globe are fighting to end the violence and invisibility that erase trans lives and advocating for policies that respect gender diversity and the full human rights of trans people.

A forthcoming report from the Sexual Health and Rights Project at Open Society Foundations, Transforming Health: International Rights-Based Advocacy for Trans Health, provides snapshots of 16 trans health and rights initiatives from 9 countries and the World Health Organization. The report makes recommendations across fields such as health care, data collection, and government identity document policies that we hope can help build a world in which there are no new names to read out at the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Until then, we must not only work for justice here and now — we must pause this November 20th and remember our dead.

Deoni, Agnes, Anil, we remember you. Thapelo, Barbarita, Secil, we remember you. Sirena, January, Rayza, Cassandra, and so many others — you will remain forever in our hearts.

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Health

Top Three Things You Need To Know About The New Obamacare Rules

By Sy Mukherjee on Nov 20, 2012 at 1:25 pm

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a slew of important new Obamacare rules and regulations today, continuing a widely expected post-election effort to successfully implement President Obama’s landmark health care reform law by 2014.

In a call with reporters, CMS and HHS outlined the new proposed rules, which instruct insurers, providers, and governmental institutions on how they must proceed in implementing Obamacare measures — ranging from a ban on discriminating against Americans with pre-existing medical conditions to public wellness initiatives such as coverage for employees’ gym use. Here are the three most important things you need to know about the new rules:

1) Insurers will be prohibited from discriminating against Americans with pre-existing conditions. Long considered one of the health insurance industry’s most odious practices, refusing to extend coverage to Americans suffering from a pre-existing medical condition will soon be a thing of the past. The first of CMS’s proposed rules mandates that insurance companies will need to base their premium rates solely on an individual’s age, family size, geography, and history of tobacco use — preventing discrimination against Americans for any other reason, such as their gender or their chronic illnesses. The rule will also set strict limits on how much insurers can vary the premiums they charge Americans based on these factors, marking an end to gender rating practices that charged women more than men for the same medical services. This will be a boon to the over 120 million Americans who suffer from a pre-existing condition in one form or another.

2) State exchanges will establish a standard of “essential health benefits” that every plan will be required to cover. Obamacare will require the plans offered under state-wide health insurance exchanges in 2014 to clear federal benchmarks across ten “essential health benefit” categories, including access to maternal care, mental health services, preventative health care, and prescription drug coverage. These assured benefits — which are supposed to reflect the level of coverage offered by a typical employer-sponsored plan — will help correct for spotty coverage that does not actually meet Americans’ medical needs. CMS’s proposed rule requires state exchanges to offer to the same level of coverage as a statewide benchmark health plan of the state’s choosing. If a state’s chosen benchmark plan does not cover all of Obamacare’s required benefit categories — for instance, by not offering mental health services — then the federal government will intervene and supplement that plan so that it does meet the health law’s coverage requirements. The rule also creates standards for prescription drug coverage so that such coverage actually meets Americans’ health care needs and prohibits health plans from designing their benefits in a way that discriminates against certain groups of Americans.

3) Wellness programs will help promote public health and curb health care costs. The last of the three proposed rules is joint guidance from HHS, the Treasury, and the Department of Labor regarding sponsorship of workplace wellness programs. Obamacare encourages preventative health initiatives and a transition from “sick care” to actual “health care” in an effort to both improve Americans’ quality of life and lower national health spending. Under the proposed rule, employers are encouraged to continue both participatory and health-contingent wellness programs — such as subsidizing the cost of employees’ fitness center memberships or enrolling employees in tobacco-cessation programs — in exchange for federal rewards.

These rules will give states more clarity as they move forward in implementing the Affordable Care Act. Although many Obamacare details must still be worked out — particularly regarding the statewide insurance exchanges — the reform law has made enormous strides in the last year that will result in a fairer, more accessible, and more affordable American health care system that is a marked improvement over the pre-Obamacare era. “It’s important to remember what this market looked like back in 2009… We were definitely headed in the wrong direction,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on the conference call.

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Security

Rebels Capture Key City In Democratic Republic Of Congo

By Hayes Brown on Nov 20, 2012 at 1:22 pm

With the world focused on the conflict in Gaza and President Obama’s trip to Asia, rebel forces taking a city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has received little attention. Members of the M23 group on Tuesday seized control of the border-town of Goma, a city of a little over one million inhabitants, capturing its radio station and parading downtown.

The fall of Goma is the latest move in one of Africa’s longest and bloodiest conflicts. Complicating the matter is Rwanda’s alleged support for the rebels. While M23 rebels on Monday withdrew to positions further from Goma to provide space for political talks, putting forward a list of demands in order to seal a cease-fire, the Congolese government rebuffed the offer.

That refusal set off the current clashes between Congo’s army and rebels, leading to an army withdrawal and M23 control of Goma. The Rwandan and Congolese presidents are reported to be meeting today to help defuse the crisis. The Ugandan government meanwhile, also accused of supporting M23, has said that it has called for calm, while blaming a U.N. report for the new violence.

M23′s rise can be seen as a continuation of events in 2008, during which another Rwandan-backed group known as the CNDP sowed chaos in resource-rich Eastern Congo. After the European Union threatened to intervene, the solution at the time, agreed to on Mar. 23, 2009, was to integrate the CNDP into the Congolese army. Instead of forging a lasting peace, many of those same soldiers defected earlier this year to form the M23, led by wanted war-criminal Gen. Bosco Ntaganda.

NGOs such as Amnesty International and others are highlighting the plight that internally displaced citizens face caught in the cross-fire, as thousands have fled. Oxfam’s humanitarian coordinator Tariq Riebl, currently on the ground near Goma, said yesterday, “Families have been split up overnight and people are desperately going between sites trying to find loved ones. If fighting intensifies further, there are very few places people can go for safety. With almost 2.5 million people now displaced across eastern Congo, this catastrophe requires a concerted humanitarian and diplomatic response.”

Meanwhile, members of the United Nations peacekeeping force in the Congo, the largest in the world with 6,700 blue helmets in the North Kivu region alone, had utilized attack helicopters to bolster Congolese assaults on M23 positions for months, and retains control of Goma’s airport. However, the U.N. has reported that is pulling “non-essential personnel” from Eastern Congo as a precaution and the peacekeepers were unable to prevent Goma’s fall.

At the United Nations Security Council, French diplomats are currently circulating a draft resolution expressing its intention to impose financial and travel sanctions on the M23′s political and military supporters. While the text does not specifically call out Rwanda or Uganda, the draft is in line with a proposal put forward last week by a U.N. Group of Experts to apply these bans to the Rwandan Defense Minister. Rwanda is due to join the Council as a rotating member in Jan. 2013, a position that is facing intensifying scrutiny. The U.S. has not provided comment at this time whether they support France’s draft, which is due to be voted upon at 5:30 PM EST.

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NEWS FLASH

AG Holder Reportedly Staying On For Start of Second Obama Term | Several outlets are reporting that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to stay on for at least part of President Obama’s second term. The Wall Street Journal reports Holder “has accepted the president’s request to stay on, though for how long has yet to be settled,” and sources tell Fox News Holder will stay “for about a year.” Holder revealed during remarks earlier this month that was mulling a departure in Obama’s second term. Holder faces new challenges in a second term, as the Department of Justice comes under fire for following protocol in reporting Gen. David Petraeus’ affair, and Washington and Colorado await reaction to new state marijuana laws.