August 31, 2023

Thursday, August 31, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Biden Challenges Congress to Take Action on the ERA

President Joe Biden issued a challenge to Congress on Saturday “to act swiftly to recognize ratification of the [Equal Rights Amendment]”—part of his official proclamation on Women’s Equality Day, when the U.S. celebrates the formal adoption of the 19th Amendment, which enshrined women’s right to vote into the Constitution in 1920.

“It is long past time to definitively enshrine the principle of gender equality in the Constitution,” said Biden. “Together we can and must build a future where our daughters have all the same rights and opportunities as our sons, where all women and girls have a chance to realize their God-given potential, and where we can finally realize the full promise of America for all Americans.”

ERA advocates have laid out a strategy for final recognition of the ERA: 

• a joint congressional resolution to remove the timeline and recognize the ratification of the ERA. House Joint Resolution 25 was introduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Senate Joint Resolution 4 by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) in the House and Senate, respectively. “Constitutional law scholars carefully crafted this resolution’s language, modeled on the congressional resolution recognizing the 14th Amendment, in order to prevail in any future legal challenges to the ERA,” reported Carrie Baker in Ms.

• a separate congressional resolution, called the “ERA Now” resolution, instructing the archivist to publish the ERA as the 28th Amendment. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), co-chair of the Congressional Caucus for the Equal Rights Amendment, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) introduced the legislation. (The resolution is meant to work in concert with the one above.)

• a “discharge petition,” which seeks to compel the House of Representatives to vote on H.J. Res. 25 to remove the arbitrary deadline for ratification. Under House rules, if a discharge petition to compel a vote on a particular piece of legislation is signed by 218 members of the House, it must immediately be brought before the full chamber for a vote, regardless of any objections or attempts to block the legislation from being considered. Now that Pressley has filed it, the petition will remain open until it garners the necessary 218 signatures necessary to be called for a vote.

• a petition drive to show widespread support for the amendment. (Sign the petition here.) Public support for the ERA is around 85 percent.

• The ERA, along with abortion, will likely play a large role in the 2024 elections, as voters learn whether their senators and representatives support women’s and gender equality. In polling commissioned by Ms. magazine and Feminist Majority Foundation by Lake Research Partners last year, abortion and women’s rights were the most important and highly motivating issues among battleground state young women voters ages 18-29 in determining their vote. Among women voters of all ages in the battleground states, abortion and women’s rights were tied with the economy in determining their votes.

  Only with the ERA ratified as part of the Constitution, said Biden, will the U.S. be “a nation worthy of the abilities and ambitions of our women and girls.” (Ms. Magazine).

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Guilty verdicts arrive. More trials and verdicts will happen.

Rudy Giuliani is liable for defaming Georgia election workers, judge rules.

The case will now head to trial, where a jury will determine the amount of damages that Giuliani must pay to the two election workers.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Rudy Giuliani is legally liable for defaming two Georgia election workers who became the subject of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election that were amplified by Donald Trump in the final weeks of his presidency.

In an unsparing, 57-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell said Giuliani had flagrantly violated her orders to preserve and produce relevant evidence to the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, resulting in a “default” judgment against him. She also ordered him to pay Freeman and Moss “punitive” damages for failing to fulfill his obligations.

Last month, Howell ordered the former mayor to pay nearly $90,000 of the election workers’ legal expenses due to what she found was noncompliance with her earlier discovery orders. In her ruling Wednesday, the judge ordered Giuliani and his businesses to pay an additional roughly $43,000 due to the failures. Those sums are separate from any damages a jury may impose. (Politico).

Enrique Tarrio, ex-Proud Boys leader, faces 33 years. Judge ill, Sentencing delayed in Jan. 6 case.

The sentencing hearing for Enrique Tarrio, the former national chairman of the Proud Boys convicted for seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, has been rescheduled.

His hearing was originally set to begin at 10 a.m. ET Wednesday, but was rescheduled for Sept. 5 at 2 p.m. ET.

Tarrio could face the stiffest penalty doled out so far in the government's massive prosecution of Capitol rioters.

Prosecutors want him sentenced to 33 years in prison for his role in conspiring with his lieutenants to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results in Congress and to keep former President Donald Trump in power. (NPR)

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Individuals Saved Democracy.

I think it is worth looking at 2020 and remembering that Individuals Matter, always, though I don’t agree with Charlie Sykes’ pessimism in the post below 👇 for 2024.

“In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience – the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men – each man must decide for himself the course he will follow." -- John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage.

Where Are the GOP Heroes Now? - by Charlie Sykes

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, left, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, center, and Georgia Secretary of State Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling are sworn in as the House Jan. 6 select committee holds its fourth public hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, June 21, 2022.

Tim Alberta told his story in Politico:

In the end, it wasn’t a senator or a judge or a general who stood up to the leader of the free world. There was no dramatic, made-for-Hollywood collision of cosmic egos. Rather, the death knell of Trump’s presidency was sounded by a baby-faced lawyer, looking over his glasses on a grainy Zoom feed on a gloomy Monday afternoon, reading from a statement that reflected a courage and moral clarity that has gone AWOL from his party, pleading with the tens of thousands of people watching online to understand that some lines can never be uncrossed.

Van Langevelde was a member of Michigan’s board of state canvassers, the ministerial body with the sole authority under state law to make Joe Biden’s victory over Trump official.

Republicans were heavily pressuring the young lawyer to block the certification of Biden’s victory. He refused.

“We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” declared Van Langevelde. “As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men.’ This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”

For Van Langevelde the decision was political suicide.

He works for Republicans in the Statehouse. He gives legal guidance to advance Republican causes and win Republican campaigns. As a Republican, his mandate for Monday’s hearing—handed down from the state party chair, the national party chair and the president himself—was straightforward. They wanted Michigan’s board of canvassers to delay certification of Biden’s victory.

Never mind that Trump lost by more than 154,000 votes, or that results were already certified in all 83 counties.

The plan was to drag things out, to further muddy the election waters and delegitimize the process, to force the courts to take unprecedented actions that would forever taint Michigan’s process of certifying elections.

Not because it was going to help Trump win but because it was going to help Trump cope with a loss. The president was not accepting defeat. That meant no Republican with career ambitions could accept it, either.

Which made Van Langevelde’s vote for certification all the more remarkable.

As a result of his stand, Van Langevelde was later removed from the board, even as the Michigan GOP quadrupled down on election denialism. On Monday, the NYT’s Nick Corasaniti documented the party’s extraordinary crazification and collapse.

Mr. Trump’s election lies spread like wildfire in Michigan, breaking the state party into ardent believers and pragmatists wanting to move on. Bitter disputes, power struggles and contentious primaries followed, leaving the Michigan Republican Party a husk of itself.

A flaming election denier was elected state chairwoman and the party is now broke.

But the story is the same in state after state. With the notable (and still remarkable) exception of Georgia, many of the heroes of 2020 have been purged, excommunicated, and sidelined.

You thought things were bad after 2020? It could be worse next year.

For the moment, I’m not going to weigh in on the debate about whether Mike Pence’s defiance of Trump was “heroic.” (JVL says yes. Kevin Williamson has a more jaundiced view.)

But the heroism of less prominent actors can hardly be gainsaid. As the Guardian acknowledged last year: “A few good Republicans stopped Trump – but his threat to democracy isn’t over.”

There was, of course, Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger, who refused to help Trump “find” an additional 11,780 votes.

In Arizona, Maricopa County officials like Stephen Richer and Bill Gates defied the deranged rantings of Trump and his Kari Lake-like harridans.

When Trump himself called the state’s Republican governor to get him to block the certification of the vote, Doug Ducey sent the call to voice mail.

Some of the Arizona Republicans paid a steep price for their resistance. The former GOP Speaker of the Arizona House, Rusty Bowers, described the pressure campaign:

Bowers told the Jan. 6 committee that Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuilani initiated an extreme pressure campaign immediately after the election, urging Bowers to use his powers as House speaker to substitute Biden electors with electors loyal to Trump to change the Electoral College count. During a phone call, Bowers said, he pressed the duo for their evidence of voter fraud, but they provided none. “We’ve got lots of theories, but we don’t have the evidence,” Giuliani ultimately admitted, according to Bowers’ testimony.

Bowers refused to play along, and he appeared to choke up when he explained to the committee why. “I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to,” he said. “How else will I ever approach [God] in the wilderness of life, knowing that I ask of this guidance only to show myself a coward in defending the course he led me to take?”

Trump targeted him for retribution, declaring at a rally: “Rusty Bowers is a RINO coward who participated against the Republican Party in the totally partisan unselect committee of political thugs and hacks the other day and disgraced himself, and he disgraced the state of Arizona.”

Last year, Bowers was soundly defeated in a GOP primary.

And, after an “onslaught of harassment and violent threats for certifying the results of the 2020 election,” Gates, a Maricopa County supervisor, announced that he would not be running for re-election. The Wapo noted:

He did not directly cite the prolonged attacks against him, his wife and three daughters as the basis for his decision to not pursue another four-year term to represent the county. The threats, doxing and online harassment that began during the pandemic and continue today have at times prompted him and his family to flee their home.

In May 2021, Gates sought professional help from a therapist and, soon after, learned he was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, triggered by the strain of his public fight against falsehoods about the county’s election-related work.

Gates’s departure after serving two full terms on the board reflects the dominance of the election-denying movement in Arizona, led by Republican Kari Lake.

**

There were others.

Think about Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both now out of office. Or the other Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump after the attempted Insurrection. Most of them are gone.

There were key White House aides who pushed back (and later testified); and top officials of Trump’s own DOJ who refused his efforts to install a sock-puppet as acting AG to facilitate his coup.

Former Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, former acting deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and former Office of Legal Counsel head Steven Engel all testified before the committee about the pressure they faced to use their positions at the Justice Department to help then-President Trump overturn his election loss.

There were also conservative judges like J. Michael Luttig who declared that the vice president had no legal authority to overturn the election. And then, all of the judges — many of them GOP appointees — who rejected Trump’s attempts to get the courts to intervene.

Remember also that all of the living former Republican defense secretaries signed a remarkable op-ed article saying that the election was over and calling for a peaceful transfer of power:

Former Secretaries of Defense Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, Leon Panetta, William Perry and Donald Rumsfeld signed the opinion piece.

Two Pentagon heads who served under Trump — Jim Mattis and Mark Esper — also signed it. Trump removed Esper in November as part of a major shakeup at the Department of Defense.

And there were the state legislative leaders who refused Trump’s demands that they throw out the popular votes.

In state after state, top GOP officials, as well, refused to knuckle under Trump’s pressure.

They resisted him despite knowing that doing so could well cost them their political careers, given that so much of Trump’s base had so easily fallen victim to his election lies and were likely to be angered by their refusal to go along with his illegal demands.

Where are they all now? And who will take their place? (The Bulwark).

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Playwright Tina Howe has died.

Tina Howe, Playwright Best Known for ‘Coastal Disturbances,’ Dies at 85.

Tina Howe in 2009.

Tina Howe, who in plays that could be extravagant productions or small-cast gems zeroed in on the humor, heartache and solidity of her characters’ lives, particularly the female ones, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 85.

Her family said the cause was complications of a broken hip sustained in a recent fall.

Ms. Howe was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, for “Painting Churches” in 1984 and “Pride’s Crossing” in 1997. Her “Coastal Disturbances” had a 350-performance run on Broadway in 1987 and was nominated for the Tony Award for best play.

In the foreword to a 1984 collection of her plays “Museum,” “The Art of Dining” and “Painting Churches,” she described those three works this way, a summary that applies to much of her output:

“They share an absorption with the making and consuming of art, a fascination with food, a tendency to veer off into the primitive and neurotic, and of course a hopeless infatuation with the sight gag.”

Her plays also generally share another attribute: They have multidimensional female characters of a type that were not often seen when she started out in the 1970s. As she told an interviewer in 2004 on the CUNY TV program “Women in Theater,” in those years many artistic directors were men who were interested only in plays in which female characters were victims. It was harder, she said, to get support for a play that featured “a strong woman, a sexy woman, a smart woman.”

Some of her plays were sprawling creations, like “Museum,” which, set in the gallery of a major art museum, had a cast of almost 50 when it premiered in 1976 at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater. “Coastal Disturbances,” as Ms. Howe described it in the preface to a 1989 collection, takes place on “a beach complete with heaving ocean and 20 tons of sand.”

“I seem to go out of my way to make putting them on as hard as possible,” she wrote of those types of play.

But she also wrote more intimate works, one of which, “Painting Churches,” took her career to a new level when it had its premiere at Second Stage in Manhattan in 1983. The play has just three characters: a married couple and their artist daughter, who as the play progresses paints her parents’ portrait, with truths about the family revealed as she goes about the task. Ms. Howe described it as a sort of reverse image of “Museum,” in which characters talk about art; in “Painting Churches,” the characters become art.

Frank Rich, reviewing the production in The New York Times, invoked a line spoken by the father late in the play.

“‘The whole thing shimmers,’ he says, in a line of art criticism that can also serve as an apt description of Miss Howe’s lovely play,” Mr. Rich wrote.

After its run at Second Stage, the production moved to another Midtown theater and ran for months more.

“Coastal Disturbances” also opened at Second Stage, in 1986, and it, too, drew raves. That play is about four generations of vacationers gathered on a beach, though this is merely the premise.

“It was really about the anguish of love and the ache of love and the exhilaration and the heartbreak and the joy,” Annette Bening, who played the central role, a photographer named Holly who has a relationship with a lifeguard, said in a phone interview.

Annette Bening in the central role of Ms. Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances,” which opened Off Broadway in 1986.

Ms. Bening, who earned a Tony nomination after the play moved to Broadway, was new to New York and largely unknown at the time. Holly, she said, was a thinly veiled version of Ms. Howe herself, which meant that she and Ms. Howe developed a bond.

“She was incredibly incisive and hard-core intelligent,” Ms. Bening said, “and her plays reflected all of that.”

Mr. Rich, reviewing “Coastal Disturbances,” called it “distinctly the creation of a female sensibility, but its beautiful, isolated private beach generously illuminates the intimate landscape that is shared by women and men.”

“Coastal Disturbances” showed Ms. Howe’s flair for absurdity. In one scene, Ms. Bening was buried up to her neck in sand by the lifeguard (played by Tim Daly) while relating a somewhat erotic fantasy involving anthropomorphized dolphins.

In the introduction to a 2010 collection of her plays, Ms. Howe explained her penchant for wacky scenes.

“I came of age during the heyday of Absurdism when it was the fellas who were shaking up perceptions of what was stage worthy — Pirandello, Genet, Ionesco, Beckett and Albee,” she wrote. “Their artistry and daring were thrilling as they scrambled logic and language, but where were their female counterparts, shaking up what was stage worthy for us? Since I was a hopelessly unevolved feminist with no ax to grind, who better to take on the challenge than me?”

Mabel Davis Howe was born on Nov. 21, 1937, in Manhattan to Quincy and Mary (Post) Howe. (She was called Tina from childhood and made it her legal name when she turned 18, her son, Eben Levy, said.) Her father, an author, journalist and broadcast commentator, worked for CBS radio and ABC television. Her mother was an amateur artist who exhibited on Long Island.

Marx Brothers movies were among Ms. Howe’s childhood passions and influenced her playwriting.

“The whole point was to keep piling excess upon excess,” she wrote in the 1989 collection. “Why shouldn’t it be the same in the theater?”

While she was attending Sarah Lawrence College, the actress Jane Alexander, a friend and fellow student, directed one of Ms. Howe’s first plays, “Closing Time.” Ms. Howe graduated in 1959 and then spent a year in Paris.

“The most profound thing that happened to me that year was seeing ‘The Bald Soprano’ by Ionesco,” she told The Times in 1983. “That exploded me all over the place.”

She married Norman Levy, a teacher and writer, in 1961 and accompanied him to Maine and Wisconsin while he finished his degrees. In 1967, when Mr. Levy got a job teaching at the State University of New York at Albany (now the University at Albany), the couple moved to Kinderhook, N.Y., where Ms. Howe made a start working on plays in earnest.

In 1970, her play “The Nest,” which she described as a “funny, erotic play about women and how fierce and pathetic they are when dealing with men,” received a production at the Mercury Theater on East 13th Street in Manhattan. That the first sentence of Clive Barnes’s review in The Times didn’t kill her fledgling career was something of a miracle.

“It is always rash to use superlatives,” Mr. Barnes wrote, “but it does most forcibly occur to me that ‘The Nest,’ which boldly calls itself a play and even more boldly opened last night at the Mercury Theater, must be on any reasonable short list of the worst plays I have ever seen.”

Ms. Howe, though, kept at it, drawing attention not only for “Museum” but also for “The Art of Dining” (staged at the Public Theater in 1979) and other plays. In 1983 she won an Obie Award for her recent works. Numerous other awards followed.

Among her most successful plays after “Coastal Disturbances” was “Pride’s Crossing,” in which a 90-year-old swimmer looks back on her life. That piece was staged at Lincoln Center in 1997.

Cherry Jones, left, and Julia McIlvaine in a scene from Ms. Howe’s “Pride’s Crossing,” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in 1997.

“Old women have great power,’‘ Ms. Howe said at the time. “Magic is afoot with them. A lot of times they are not on this earth; their thoughts are in never-never land. But in with the magic and the dreaming is that anger that old women have. I wanted to put that voice, that fever, that sort of animal yelp of self-preservation on the stage.”

André Bishop, producing artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater, recalled a playwright with a unique style.

“Tina was a deliciously idiosyncratic writer whose playful wit and sense of the absurd infused all her work,” he said in a statement. “She was delightful, as were the plays written in her highly distinctive voice.”

Ms. Howe and Mr. Levy settled in Manhattan in 1973 and had most recently lived in the Bronx. Mr. Levy died last year. In addition to her son, Ms. Howe is survived by a daughter, Dara Rebell, and three grandchildren.

In an Instagram post yesterday, the playwright Sarah Ruhl called Ms. Howe both a friend and a mentor.

“One of the last times I visited her,” Ms. Ruhl wrote, “she said: ‘I still want to write. Women are still an undiscovered country.’” (New York Times).

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We loved the “Blue Super Moon.” Hope you had the pleasure of seeing it too.

Courtesy. Eve Ellis.

The last Blue SuperMoon was in 2018 during a lunar eclipse, and the next Blue SuperMoons will occur as a pair in 2037.

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