Saturday, December 30, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.
I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.
To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.
Please feel free to share.
Invite at least one other person to subscribe today! https://buttondown.email/AnnettesNewsRoundup
____________________________
Breaking news. 💥💥 Friday.
A three-judge panel at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia affirms a lower court’s ruling that former President Donald Trump can be sued by U.S. Capitol Police officers seeking to hold Trump financially liable for the Washington riot that took place on Jan. 6, 2021.
The ruling is the latest loss for Trump, whose lawyers continue to argue in court that presidential immunity shields him from criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.
Key players: United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judges Sri Srinivasan, Bradley Garcia and Judith Rogers; Trump lawyer John Sauer; special counsel Jack Smith; columnist E. Jean Carroll
On Friday, a federal appeals court affirmed a district court’s ruling that Capitol Police officers can proceed with lawsuits seeking to hold Trump liable for the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol building, Law & Crimereported.
In multiple cases, Trump’s lawyers have argued that since Trump was still president on the day his supporters attempted to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, all of his statements and actions should be viewed as part of his official duties and are therefore protected from criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.
The three-judge panel disagreed, siding with the lower court’s ruling issued on Dec. 1 that presidential immunity claims did not protect Trump from civil lawsuits seeking damages for his alleged role in the Capitol riot.
“When a first-term President opts to seek a second term, his campaign to win re-election is not an official presidential act,” the lower appeals court wrote in its decision.
Trump’s lawyers are also seeking to have Smith’s election interference case dismissed on similar grounds.
Last week, Sauer wrote in a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that no president could face a criminal prosecution “based on conduct for which he was acquitted by the U.S. Senate” despite a majority vote to oust him from office.
On social media, Trump has said he was “doing my duty as president” by claiming the election was rigged against him.
The D.C. Circuit will hear oral arguments in that case on Jan. 9.
This week, a federal appeals court ruled that presidential immunity does not protect Trump from civil defamation lawsuits filed by Carroll, the second of which is scheduled to begin on Jan. 16.
Why it matters: Friday’s ruling means that lawsuits filed against Trump by Capitol Police officers can proceed, and it sets the stage for the next presidential immunity battle on Jan. 9. (Yahoo News).
____________________________
A new New York Times article on the October 7 Hamas attack.
A New York Times investigation revealed graphic details of sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. As the Times itself wrote, “The Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.”
An article based on the investigation appeared in the print and digital versions of the Times on December 28th.
I am choosing not to reprint the Times article here as I usually would because it is so disturbing. But I thought the readers of the Roundup should know about its existence.
A link to the article is here if you choose to read it but I provide the link with a serious warning. The Hamas attack was barbaric and the article is painful and graphic. If you choose to do so, read with great caution.
____________________________
What is happening about Trump and Constitution Article 14. Paragraph 3?
Yale professor Timothy Snyder says the Constitution bars Trump from the Presidency.
Trump cannot run for office by Timothy Snyder.
If you pick up your copy of the Constitution, as I have just done, you can see that its plain language forbids Donald Trump from running for office. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is as clear as can be on this point. Anyone who has taken an oath as an officer of government, and then taken part in an insurrection, may not hold any office thereafter.
I have been travelling in places where Trump has support, reading letters to the editor and editorials in local newspapers, and listening to what people have to say. The three arguments that I hear seem to be pretty much the same ones made by lawyers and in the broader media. I just can’t find any argument that would incline me to ignore what the Constitution clearly states.
The first move people make is to change the subject. It is not the Constitution. It is “the Democrats” who are just trying to keep Trump off the ballot.
The very best text I have read on the topic of Trump’s eligibility for office, the one that initiated this discussion at a level no one else has yet attained, was written by the legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen. Though I do not know them, I will say with some confidence that these men are not registered Democrats.
This is only worthy of mention, though, because it affirms the hopeful proposition that people who hold various political views can agree about the fundamentals of the Constitution and about the desirability of constitutional rule.
We are all subject to the Constitution and we can all claim rights under it, regardless of those political commitments. To say that we can discard the Constitution because “the Democrats” or “the Republicans” or any other group appeal to it is to defy the document itself and to ignore what it means to have constitutional rule.
The second thing I hear is that in a democracy everyone can run for president.
Certainly one can have a debate about who should be able to run for office. In our constitutional system, however, a candidate for president must be a U.S. citizen, born in the United States, of a certain age, who has resided in the U.S. for a certain period, and who has not previously been an officer of government and taken part in an insurrection (directly or by giving aid and comfort).
Of those five limitations (citizenship, place of birth, age, residence, lack of insurrectionary past), surely the last is the least constricting. The citizenship requirement rules out more than 95% of the people in the world. Place of birth seems a bit unfair. It is not something that people choose. And it excludes people who have actually chosen America by becoming citizens. There are foreign-born citizens who want to run for president, and who would be strong candidates. Age might or might not be reasonable as a limitation — should we really exclude people under 35? And if we do, perhaps we should also exclude people over a certain age?
Compared to these limitations, the ban on insurrectionists seems the least debatable. It involves very few people, has to do with choices they themselves have made, and is motivated more clearly than the other limitations by the protection of constitutional rule as such.
The prior three paragraphs are me debating the merits of what the Constitution says. We can all do this. And perhaps the Constitution should be altered. What we all have to acknowledge, though, is that in our system, not everyone can run for the office of president.
The third point people make is that Trump is not an insurrectionist because he has not been convicted as such in court. I don’t think that this is an argument made in good faith. Trump himself does not contest the facts. Indeed, his purported campaign for president right now is based precisely on his participation in an insurrection, which he advertises in public appearances and in social media.
There are deeper points to be made, though. To read the Constitution in this way, as not executing itself, is to deny it of its basic dignity and purpose. There is also some political common sense to be applied here. When a high officer of the United States takes part in an insurrection, it would be expected that he (in this case it is “he”) would then try to alter lower-court decisions (as Trump in fact has).
In the specific case of section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, the insurrection clause that we are discussing here, it is quite clear that the purpose was to establish a qualification for running for office, not to define a criminal offense. An insurrectionist might or might not also be a convict at the time of an election; either way, he is not eligible to run.
If we believe in the Constitution and in constitutional rule, the issue is clear. Donald Trump cannot run for any federal or state office. We might have strong feelings about this; but the reason we have a Constitution in the first place (and the rule of law in general) is to avoid government by strong feelings.
Our Supreme Court is dominated now by justices who claim to care about the plain reading of the Constitution, or the intent of the people who wrote its provisions. This should make this case particularly easy for them.
It is possible, of course, that these justices are simply politicians who espouse their textualism and originalism only when it suits them, in the service of supporting other politicians. Should this prove to be the case, their own office, and indeed the Constitution itself, would be in grave danger (a subject for another article).
We are about to find out. (Substack).
Where else are there challenges to Donald Trump’s appearing on the ballot?
Lawsuits seeking to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot were filed in about 30 states, but many have been dismissed; there are active lawsuits in 14 states, according to a database maintained by Lawfare, a website about legal and national security issues.
Those states are: Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. (A judge has dismissed the Arizona suit but the dismissal is being appealed.) (New York Times).
____________________________
It’s hard to be a black woman in America, especially if you are high achieving.
They will just keep coming after you.
Behind the Campaign to Take Down Harvard’s Claudine Gay.
From the time she began carving her path through the most elite private schools in the nation to the presidency of Harvard University, Claudine Gay earned plaudits and promotions.
She also amassed detractors who were skeptical of her work and qualifications and outraged by what they saw as the political decisions she made as an increasingly powerful administrator.
Those two forces collided in spectacular fashion this month after plagiarism allegations that began circulating online about a year ago spilled into public view due to the efforts of conservative activists including Christopher Rufo, who has said he wants to damage Gay’s career.
The allegations have sparked criticism of Harvard over the process that led to Gay’s selection as president, the first Black woman to hold the post, and the university’s transparency around how it responded to the plagiarism claims.
Harvard said it first learned about allegations of plagiarism against Gay in October and that the Harvard Corporation, the school’s 12-member governing board, engaged three political scientists from outside the university to carry out their own investigation. The school has declined to identify them or release their review.
In December, Harvard said the review revealed no evidence of intentional deception or recklessness in Gay’s work as a political scientist but did find instances of inadequate citation which “while regrettable, did not constitute research misconduct.” Gay requested corrections, and the board reaffirmed its support for her and has said additional charges of plagiarism were without merit.
What the school didn’t initially disclose is that after the allegations were brought to the governing board in October by the New York Post, the board hired a law firm that specializes in defamation law. That firm, Clare Locke, sent a 15-page letter to the Post saying the alleged instances of plagiarism were “both cited and properly credited,” according to excerpts of the letter published by the paper. The school threatened to sue the paper if it published allegations against Gay.
“Our letter responded only to specific passages identified by the Post on October 24,” the law firm said in a statement, adding that the paper “made its own decision” on whether to publish the allegations. The Post published stories this month. —the corporate parent of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, also owns the New York Post.
For years people who identify themselves as academics have aired their resentments and grievances toward Gay on publicly accessible chat boards like the econjobrumors blog and Political Science Rumors. As Gay rose in prominence the posts about her became more frequent and negative—but they also held some truth.
Opportunities in academia are limited, and universities attract bright and competitive scholars who often don’t land the job they wanted or think they have earned. The boards are repositories for the anonymous resentments that accrue, and the mix can be toxic, said Jennifer Hochschild, a Harvard professor of government and African-American Studies who has worked with Gay.
“When I was department chair, I sent out notices to my grad students saying, ‘Don’t read these things,’” she said. “There’s a huge negative slant, there’s a piling-on process and tremendous disaffection.”
Hochschild said that women are disproportionately targeted. Many of Gay’s supporters attribute some of the criticism to her race, and cite research that indicates there is a double standard for Black women in power. A 2022 McKinsey report said Black women leaders are more likely to have people question their competence compared with others.
Over the past year, the accusations against Gay were a frequent topic of discussion including accusations that she is a serial plagiarist.
“Whole sentences in her literature review lifted off original sources with no quotation marks,” wrote one person who called themselves Economist 1f7f on econjobrumors.com. The post is time stamped 11 months ago.
Harvard’s recent findings of inadequate citation in Gay’s work have only fueled criticisms of its hiring process.
“The corporation has to do their homework in the sense that when they make a choice for a leader, they have to look at the entire background of that leader,” said Avi Loeb, a professor of physics at Harvard and an outspoken critic of Gay. “That’s their responsibility because otherwise, you risk getting into a situation that we’re in right now.”
A spokesman for Harvard declined to comment and said Gay wasn’t available to comment. She didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University, Stanford University and Harvard, where she rose quickly through the administration’s ranks. Harvard launched its search for a new president in the summer of 2022 after Lawrence Bacow announced he would resign. On Dec. 15 of that year, the board named Gay the next president of the university. It was the shortest selection process for Harvard in nearly 70 years, according to the Harvard Crimson.
Penny Pritzker, who chaired the presidential search committee, described Gay as having a “rare blend of incisiveness and inclusiveness, intellectual range and strategic savvy, institutional ambition and personal humility, a respect for enduring ideals and a talent for catalyzing change,” according to a letter to the school community announcing the appointment.
As Gay prepared to become president, criticisms swirled around campus.
Alongside rumors of plagiarizing, critics condemned Gay’s publication record as too thin to have earned consideration for the presidency. She has published 11 papers and no books. Her H-Index, which attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar, is an 11, according to Elsevier, an academic publishing company. By comparison, Dartmouth President Sian Beilock, who is younger than Gay, has an H-Index of 54.
Critics online and on campus took issue with her performance as dean of faculty, which began in 2018, with some saying she lowered Harvard’s standards by indulging a political agenda to attract more faculty of color. They also said she weakened Harvard’s position on academic freedom by censoring conservative points of view.
Within weeks of her inauguration, the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s race preference admission policy was unconstitutional. Then the school was ranked last among nearly 300 schools on a list produced by a free-speech advocacy organization.
After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Gay came under fire for not swiftly condemning a pro-Palestinian statement from students who blamed Israel. She drew even more criticism during a congressional hearing on Dec. 5 when she gave equivocal responses to a question from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), on whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct.
Also in early December, Rufo, who has advocated against critical race theory and believes universities are advancing a damaging left-wing ideology, received an anonymous file of about 40 pages with side-by-side highlighted passages detailing the alleged plagiarism. He said he knew immediately “that this is a weapon of war.”
Rufo, who is also an adviser to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his war on what he considers woke universities, purchased the academic papers and the software to verify the accounts of plagiarism.
After the outcry over Gay’s congressional testimony, Rufo decided to strike, publishing a report leveling his accusation that the president of Harvard was a serial plagiarist. That report was followed by others in conservative publications including the Washington Free Beacon.
“I think the entire corporation needs to resign as well as President Gay,” he said in an interview. “I would be happy to join the corporation to help turn it around.” (Douglas Belkin and Arian Campo-Flores, WSJ)
____________________________