(Tom has been an extraordinary ally and supporter of EJS for many years. We congratulate him and wish him much success in returning to MALDEF.)

Since August 2005, Saenz has served as Counsel to Mayor Villaraigosa and as a member of the Mayor’s four-person Executive team. Saenz has helped to lead the Mayor’s legislative effort to change the governance of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in order to secure a quality education for all students in Los Angeles and has recently served as the Mayor’s lead liaison on labor negotiations as the City strives in partnership with workers to address its serious financial situation.

“We could not ask for a better civil rights leader than Thomas Saenz to take the helm of MALDEF at this critical time,” said Patricia A. Madrid, Chairman of the MALDEF Board of Directors and former New Mexico Attorney General. “The Latino community is currently facing a drastic rise in hate crimes and witnessing an explosive rebirth of extremist anti-immigrant rhetoric and measures that adversely affect all Latinos. A highly respected attorney and community leader, Thomas brings a wealth of legal expertise and dedication to civil rights causes that fundamentally define the future of Latinos. We are looking forward to a great future under his leadership as we work together to advance the mission of MALDEF,” Madrid added.

“Tom Saenz has been a trusted advisor who understands the importance of public service and working on behalf of those in need,” said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “His zealous leadership, legal prowess and counsel have helped diversify our body of City commissioners, provide living wages for our City’s workers, and demand a quality education for every child in Los Angeles. I thank Tom for his devoted service to the City of Los Angeles and wish him all the best in his new endeavor. MALDEF is not only inheriting a brilliant legal mind, but also a passionate and committed champion of civil rights.”

Saenz had previously served as MALDEF’s lead counsel for 12 years. During that time he successfully challenged California’s unconstitutional Proposition 187 and led numerous civil rights cases in the areas of immigrants’ rights, education, employment, and voting rights. Saenz achieved several victories against ordinances unlawfully restricting the rights of day laborers, served as lead counsel in the 2001 challenge to California’s congressional redistricting, and initiated the employment discrimination lawsuit resulting in a $50 million settlement with Abercrombie and Fitch. Saenz was also the lead drafter of the Amicus brief on behalf of Latino organizations supporting affirmative action in the Supreme Court case, Grutter v. Bollinger.

Saenz said he is looking forward to the new challenges and opportunities. “Throughout its 40-year history, MALDEF has been a national leader on all legal and policy issues affecting the Latino community. I look forward to leading a very strong MALDEF staff in successfully addressing the next set of challenges facing what is now the largest minority group in this country, a group whose progress is essential to our nation’s success,” Saenz stated.

Prior to joining MALDEF early in his legal career, Saenz clerked at both the federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after graduating summa cum laude from Yale University and receiving his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.

“Tom Saenz is an outstanding choice, he represents an extensive and celebrated record as a champion for civil rights and social justice. Throughout his career as Chief Counsel to Mayor Villaraigosa and as legal counsel for MALDEF, Saenz has proven to be a cornerstone for legal activism in our country,” stated Wade Henderson, President and CEO, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). “I can think of no better leader to take on the challenge of continuing the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s nationwide movement for equality and justice.”

“MALDEF’s work is now more important than ever before. Tom has spent his professional life serving as a champion for civil rights and social justice. His legal career has been devoted to protecting the people’s civil and constitutional rights. His lawsuits overturned local ordinances banning day laborers from seeking employment and he will lead the fight to ensure that the promises of justice and equality are a reality for all Americans,” stated Dolores Huerta, Co-founder of United Farm Workers of America and President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation.

Saenz has an extensive and celebrated background.

At the beginning of August 2005, Thomas A. Saenz became Counsel to the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, where he serves as a member of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s executive team and provides legal and policy advice to the mayor. Previously, Saenz practiced civil rights litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a national organization dedicated to securing and promoting the civil rights of Latinos in the United States, where he served as Vice President of Litigation. As Vice President, Saenz oversaw MALDEF’s efforts nationwide to pursue civil rights litigation in the areas of education, employment, political access, immigrants’ rights, and public resource equity.

Saenz was born and raised in southern California. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University, and he received his law degree from Yale Law School. Saenz then served as a law clerk to the Honorable Harry L. Hupp of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, and to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Saenz joined MALDEF as a staff attorney in 1993; he became Los Angeles Regional Counsel in 1996, National Senior Counsel in 2000, and Vice President of Litigation in 2001. At MALDEF, Saenz served as lead counsel in numerous civil rights cases, involving such issues as educational equity, employment discrimination, immigrants’ rights, day laborer rights, and voting rights. For example, he served as MALDEF’s lead counsel in successfully challenging California’s Proposition 187 in court; as such, he presented extensive written and oral arguments on numerous occasions in three different cases involving the anti-immigrant initiative. He was also MALDEF’s lead counsel in two court challenges to Proposition 227, the English-only education initiative that voters enacted in 1998, and he successfully challenged several ordinances barring day laborers from soliciting employment. Saenz also served as MALDEF’s lead counsel in challenging California’s congressional redistricting in 2001.

For eight years, Saenz taught “Civil Rights Litigation” in the spring semester as an adjunct lecturer at the U.S.C. Law School. Saenz currently serves on the Los Angeles County Board of Education, and he previously served on the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations.

“Why am I compelled to write?… Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.” – Gloria Anzaldua

I have been thinking a lot about the role of artists and writers in this new era of our American democracy. As we emerge from an eight year period where any form of dissent was inherently labeled “un-American,” you can feel our country struggle to regain its footing around how best to move forward. Newspapers are shutting down at a rate previously unseen and everything about how we think and get our information is shifting in ways that requires creative thinking and a visionary ability to see things that have never yet be.

O, let America be America again — The land that never has been yet –

And yet must be — the land where every man is free.

- Langston Hughes

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for after all, or so we have chanted and been told. I remember the night Obama first uttered that line — in his speech on Super Tuesday, as our nation realized that the Democratic primaries would draw on for some time. As soon as he said it, the historian friend I was with turned to me and we both shouted at the same time: June Jordan!

The late great June Jordan is still one of the most published African American authors you’ve likely never heard of, and she originally wrote that line at the close of one of her poems about the role of women in the unrest of an Apartheid controlled South Africa.

And who will join this standing up

and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

It was a poet who gave our nation, and new President, the words that led to our visioning of how this time of potential and possibility could become real. Back when few thought a black man named Barack Hussein Obama would become President, we needed some visionaries out in cold Iowa, door knocking and caucusing, to remind us of what was potential. June’s words later came in to give us a way to speak about what we were doing.

As we deal with a financial crisis, the level of which we have not seen since the Great Depression, and as we emerge from a time of secrecy and torture, the role of artists is becoming more prominent as the nation re-envisions itself.

Elizabeth Alexander became the fourth poet in the history of this nation to read at an Inauguration when she read her Praise Song at Obama’s historic Inauguration. Obama believed a poet was needed in this time.

As an active Obama supporter and poet, I had cause to think about Elizabeth Alexander when Obama chose the anti-gay Rev. Warren to give the invocation at the Inauguration. I, like many of my LGBT peers, was displeased, to say the least. After years of too little sleep and campaigning in all sorts of states in all sorts of weather, always as an out lesbian, I felt betrayed by the decision.

The LGBT community — as is too often the case — was in many ways the first case study of how a community responds when they feel as if a President they supported let them down. Some decided to boycott the Inauguration. Others brushed off the decision and said that it would politically be a poor idea to express any discontent.

I was not happy with either of those options, particularly as I had spent so long convincing my community to actively support Obama, because I believe he would actively support us. And I got my fair share of angry or hurt emails and voicemails from friends and supporters. As a poet, and one trained by the late June Jordan that poetry is often urgent and the most necessary form of protest, I wrote a poem expressing how I felt, and then proceeded to post it everywhere online and send it to everyone I knew. In fact, I also sent it to a few folks I didn’t know, including Elizabeth Alexander, whom I had read also was a poet mentored by June. Elizabeth read my poem and wrote in response in minutes.

Dissent is a tricky art. As is the visualizing of a nation that is better than the one in financial ruin that we have inherited. Taking Obama’s suggestion, I say we call in the artists.

Justin Bond, formerly of the Tony-nominated Kiki and Herb, has been traveling the country, singing original songs about the state of our economic crisis and using his songstress ways to, as he puts it, “cast spells,” for a better America. In between cabaret songs, he banters about how he hopes some of the bailout money serves to get him health coverage, and bemoans some of what he sees as Obama’s missteps, before declaring to his audience that Obama is not some “Post-Modern slave sent to do all the work to save us from our own crisis.” And then he sings Marat/Sade. That’s one way of viewing it.

Or there are the words of punk musician and poet, Patti Smith, posted on her blog on Inauguration Day:

“We pray he will be a good man and we a good people.”

In every community and everywhere you look, artists are leading the way in visualizing how we can emerge from this time and actively engage in pushing a government so many of us support, so that it can be a government we are also proud of. There is the “Change You Want to See” Gallery in Brooklyn, offering a space for this thinking. And the gloriously beautiful and insightful blog meets artwork series In The Pursuit of Happiness, penned by Maira Kalman in the New York Times. All over this country, writers and musicians are pausing in their lives of trying to survive, like we all are, in this harsh economic crisis, to pen ideas of how we can be a better collective people than we’ve most recently been.

There is no simple policy answer for how we get from this point to a better place. There is also no simple answer for how a country relearns to be democratically healthy and engaged in the continual crafting of a government, particularly during the times between elections. But, for what it’s worth, I would suggest we take time to head the words of the artists around us. As the writer Rachel Syme put it as we entered into 2009, “This year is one where we need beauty and innovation and smart people and new ideas more than ever.” Here’s the valuing those things, wherever we are lucky enough to find them.

Tom would have brought to that position an extensive and celebrated background as a champion for civil rights, social justice and progressive values.

We were surprised to learn on Friday that President Obama appointed Maryland labor secretary Tom Perez to the post. The announcement was followed by reports that the administration offered the job to Tom Saenz and rescinded it because of “political considerations.”

At the same time that we congratulate Mr. Perez’s appointment to the position, we’re also mystified and incredibly disappointed by the administration’s seemingly unjustified change of heart about Tom Saenz.

Some say that the decision was based on the possibility that Tom’s progressive views on immigration would have fueled a nominations battle with Senate Republicans.

We hope there was a better reason.

As regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Tom served as lead counsel in civil rights cases involving such issues as educational equity, employment discrimination, immigrants’ rights, day laborer rights and voting rights.

He served as MALDEF’s lead counsel in successfully challenging California’s Proposition 187 in court, presenting extensive arguments on numerous occasions in three different cases involving the anti-immigrant initiative.

Tom clerked at both the federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after graduating summa cum laude from Yale University and receiving his law degree from Yale Law School.

His qualifications for the Assistant Attorney General position were never in question.

Please contact the White House and ask for an explanation of why the administration reneged on Tom Saenz’s appointment. President Obama has asked us to hold him accountable. We should do so now.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

UPDATE FEB. 18: The video is being revised so the embedded player doesn’t work right now. I’ll post the new one when it’s done.

Almost 75 folks braved the weather on Feb. 15 to meet Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came To Be,” at San Francisco’s new political hotspot, Mercury Lounge. The video above was taken by Dave Johnson (thanks for putting that together, Dave!). A post of the evening is also on the Commonweal Institute’s site.

I joined EJS President Eva Paterson in co-hosting this event with Commonweal Institute, Ellee Koss, Netroots Nation, Rebecca Prozan, Matt Haney and Dexter Ligot-Gordon.

A very special thanks to Mercury Lounge for their incredible support, including hosting our event on a night that they’re usually closed, and to Commonweal Institute for underwriting this event.

Mike also appeared at Monday’s Drinking Liberally and today at a lunchtime event at Manika Jewelry co-hosted by Vida Benavides, Monica Walsh, Laura Efurd, Maria Echeveste,Yoko Nakagawa, Keith Kamisugi, Gene Benavides, Bouapha Toommally, Trina Villanueva, Hector Preciado, Emi Gusukuma, Tessie Guillermo and Daphne Kwok.

Visit http://theprogressiverevolution.com to learn more about the book and buy it online.