September 14, 2023

Thursday, September 4, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Kamala is always busy.

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Jamie Raskin is better.

Rep. Jamie Raskin appeared on MSNBC on Monday night. His hair has grown back. May he stay healthy. We need his insights and courage.

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Lawsuit first in Colorado and now Minnesota.

Currently, Americans live in a world guided by interpretations of the Constitution. 14th amendment. Paragraph 3. We turn to the Constitution for answers. 14th Amendment. Paragraph 3. He who instigated and supported an insurrection should not be allowed to run for office.

Trump faces another 14th Amendment candidacy challenge, this time in Minnesota | CNN Politics.

CNN) — A liberal group filed a lawsuit Tuesday to block former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot in Minnesota, the second major lawsuit in two weeks that hopes to invoke the 14th Amendment’s arcane “insurrectionist ban.”

The cases are seen as legal long shots. Trump denies wrongdoing and has vowed to fight to remain on the presidential ballot. The new Minnesota lawsuit was filed in state court by Free Speech For People, one week after another group initiated a similar challenge in Colorado.

A post-Civil War provision of the 14th Amendment says any American official who takes an oath to uphold the US Constitution is disqualified from holding future office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or have “given aid or comfort” to insurrectionists.

However, the Constitution doesn’t spell out how to enforce this ban, and it has been applied only twice since the late 1800s, when it was used against former Confederates.

“Donald J. Trump, through his words and actions, after swearing an oath as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution, then engaged in insurrection as defined by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the new lawsuit says. “He is disqualified from holding the presidency or any other office under the United States.”

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of eight Minnesota voters, including a former GOP-appointed state Supreme Court justice, a former Democratic secretary of state and an Iraq War veteran who ran his county GOP chapter. (CNN).

What if things changed?

Originalism would be recognized as a cult, not a methodology.

Some worship a document defined by the appeasement of slave owners. Is it time to open a discussion on what a seriously revised Constitution or even one cut from whole cloth would mean?

Scholars warn of danger in an outdated Constitution.

‘Tyranny of the Minority’ warns Constitution is dangerously outdated.

The U.S. Constitution desperately needs updating, say Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

“We have a very, very old constitution; in fact, the oldest written constitution in the world,” notes Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government. “It was written in a pre-democratic era. It hasn’t been amended much compared to other democracies. As a result, we have these institutions in place that most other democracies got rid of over the course of the 20th century.”

In their new book “Tyranny of the Minority,” the comparative political scientists argue that these antiquated institutions, including the Electoral College, have protected and enabled an increasingly extremist GOP, which keeps moving farther to the right despite losing the popular vote in all but one of the last eight presidential elections. The scholars also survey governments worldwide for examples of democratizing reforms. And they draw from history in underscoring the dangers of our constitutional stasis.

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s 2018 bestseller, “How Democracies Die,” drew from global case studies to argue that Donald Trump represented a threat to core democratic principles, even flagging the possibility that he would refuse to cede power. Today, in light of the 2020 election — and the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted to overturn the results — the authors say it’s clear the threat is larger than Trump.

“The new book makes the case that large segments of the Republican Party leadership have lost commitment to democratic rules of the game,” said Levitsky, the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. “The fact that the party remains radicalized means the challenge is ongoing.”

The Gazette spoke with Levitsky and Ziblatt, who this week was named the next director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, about the state of the nation. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Q&A

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

GAZETTE: You write that many U.S. institutions have fallen out of step with our peer democracies. What are some examples of this?

LEVITSKY: The United States has a plethora of counter-majoritarian institutions, some of which are essential to democracy. Our independent judiciary and our Bill of Rights are two examples. But we also have a set of counter-majoritarian institutions that don’t exist in most democracies and are arguably antithetical to democracy. The most obvious one is the Electoral College, which allows those who win fewer votes to capture the presidency.

Another is the U.S. Senate, which gives vast overrepresentation to sparsely populated states like Vermont and Wyoming and the Dakotas. It has repeatedly allowed the party that wins fewer votes to win control of the Senate. In addition, the filibuster is a super-majority rule; you need, in effect, 60 votes to pass legislation in the Senate.

ZIBLATT: I would add to that list also this: a federal judiciary with lifetime appointments. This structure allows political minorities from the past to dominate present-day majorities. I want to emphasize that Steve and I are not advocates of untrammeled majorities. But the combination of all these institutions leaves the U.S. in a situation where majorities have a harder time governing than any of our peer democracies — including many that according to all metrics are more vibrant democracies than our own.

“The United States did not become what contemporary political scientists would call a democracy until 1965.”

— Steven Levitsky

GAZETTE: You note that our Constitution, drafted in a pre-democratic era, inspired many nascent democracies. But other governments have done more to update their constitutions. What are some of the key reforms seen elsewhere?

ZIBLATT: Most countries began the 20th century with upper chambers, or the equivalent to the Senate — the House of Lords in Britain, Germany’s Bundesrat. In places where they continue to exist, they were made much more proportional to population after 1945.

LEVITSKY: When Latin America became independent in the 1820s, Latin American elites designed their constitutions with the United States as a model. Therefore, the indirect election of the presidency was commonplace across the 19th and into the 20th century. All of these countries, over the course of the 20th century, eliminated their electoral colleges.

GAZETTE: The Electoral College comes off as a real relic in the book. How has it survived?

LEVITSKY: There have been serious efforts to abolish the Electoral College. In the late 1960s, a proposed constitutional amendment to replace it with direct presidential elections was supported by President [Richard] Nixon and leaders of both major parties, and it had majority support in both houses of Congress. It passed the House but failed to get the two-thirds majority needed in the Senate.

GAZETTE: One chapter revisits the United States during the late 19th century amid the backlash to Reconstruction and makes comparisons to the challenges of today. What are some of those parallels?

ZIBLATT: The first is that the pushback was often by political leaders who were interested in protecting their own interests. Southern Democrats were worried about being overwhelmed, in their view, by Black voters, who were majorities in many Southern states and by and large voted for the Republican Party. The second is the passage of various voting restrictions, essentially disempowering huge segments of the population. We call this constitutional hardball, where politicians pass laws to undermine democracy.

LEVITSKY: We don’t tend to focus much on this as Americans, but there were coups during the Reconstruction period — violent seizures of power, stolen elections. And authoritarian rule was consolidated via constitutional hardball, as Southern legislatures violated the 15th Amendment by using poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures to strip African Americans’ right to vote for more than 70 years. The United States did not become what contemporary political scientists would call a democracy until 1965.

“Even if we get through the 2024 election with our democracy intact, unless we reform our democracy, we will remain in this fragile position where every national election is a national emergency.”

— Daniel Ziblatt

GAZETTE: You also write about “semi-loyal democrats.” Who are they, and why do you consider them such a threat to democratic principles and policies?

LEVITSKY: We are drawing here from the eminent late Spanish political scientist Juan Linz, who wrote a very influential book in the 1970s about democratic breakdown. He distinguished between loyal, disloyal, and semi-loyal democrats. And semi-loyalists are tricky, because they look like normal politicians. They’re dressed in suits, not in “QAnon Shaman” costumes.

The real test between a loyal and a semi-loyal democrat is: What do they do when a threat to democracy emerges in their own camp? A loyal democrat is willing to cross the aisle and work with political rivals to isolate and defeat authoritarians. Semi-loyalists do not. When an authoritarian threat emerges, they will tolerate and even condone it. They will downplay violence and abuses of power or refuse to speak out against them. And they will refuse to work across the aisle in defense of democracy. That, unfortunately, is exactly what we saw after the 2020 election.

GAZETTE: You write that the U.S. is either becoming a truly multiracial democracy or we will not be a democracy at all. Where do things stand at this moment?

ZIBLATT: America has two different strands in its political life. On the one hand, overwhelming majorities support liberal democracy. Younger Americans also tend to be much more open to the demographic changes taking place. On the other hand, there is always a reaction to efforts to make our society more democratic. What we’re seeing in the lead-up to the 2024 election is a continued battle between these forces.

One of the points of our book is that the latter force tends not to be a majority, but we continue to be vulnerable given our institutions. We got through the 2020 election, just barely. Even if we get through the 2024 election with our democracy intact, unless we reform our democracy, we will remain in this fragile position where every national election is a national emergency.

GAZETTE: What can the individual citizen do to push for some of the reforms you see elsewhere?

ZIBLATT: In the short term, voting is critical. And specifically not voting for people who break democratic norms. In the long run, we have to change the structure of our politics. We propose a set of institutional changes in the book, but institutional reform doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires mass mobilization — generations of people pushing for institutional changes. One of the most inspiring examples for us was tracing the rise of the women’s suffrage movement through the 19th century. It took generations of women to change voting rules in the United States.

LEVITSKY: Don’t get tired. Don’t lose patience. Reconsolidating our democracy is going to take years and maybe decades. There will be wins. There will be losses. The women’s suffrage movement and the Civil Rights Movement show just how hard and long and slow a process this can be.(Harvard Gazette).

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The issue of women taking their husband’s names.

Article #1.

Last week, I posted an article by Connie Schultz, wife of Sherrod Brown on this very topic. You may want to re-read it.

Married 19 Years, Still Not Changing My Name.

Article #2. A Tradition Going Strong: Brides Who Take Their Husbands’ Names - The New York Times.

The women least likely to do so tend to be liberal or highly educated or Hispanic, new data shows.

Irene and Colin Evran with their daughter, Maven, at a party last year in San Francisco to celebrate their 2020 pandemic wedding. She changed her name in part to have the same name as their children

When Irene Evran, formerly Irene Yuan, married Colin Evran three years ago — in a civil ceremony on Zoom during the depths of the pandemic — the decision to take his name felt like a natural one.

Her mother had kept her maiden name, as is traditional in China, where they are from. But Ms. Evran thought it would be easier to share a name with her husband and their future children. It was important to him, she said, and she liked how his name sounded with hers.

“It wasn’t a difficult decision,” said Ms. Evran, 35, of San Francisco. “There may be deep-rooted traditional influence, but it felt pretty simple and straightforward.”

The bridal tradition of taking a husband’s last name remains strong. Among women in opposite-sex marriages in the United States, four in five changed their names, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.

Fourteen percent kept their last names, the survey found. The youngest women were most likely to have done so: A quarter of respondents who were 18 to 34 kept their names.

Hyphenated last names were less common — about 5 percent of couples across age groups took that approach — and less than 1 percent said they did something different, like creating a new last name. Among men in opposite-sex marriages, 5 percent took their wife’s name.

Marital naming has become yet another way in which Americans’ lives diverge along lines of politics and education. Among conservative Republican women, 90 percent took their husbands’ name, compared with 66 percent of liberal Democrats, Pew found. Eighty-three percent of women without a college degree changed their names, while 68 percent of those with a postgraduate degree did.

The women who keep their names are likely to be older when they marry, research shows, and to have established careers and high incomes. They have invested in “making their name” professionally, said Claudia Goldin, an economist studying gender at Harvard who co-wrote a paper with that title with Maria Shim.

As Taylor Swift sang about an ex-boyfriend on “Midnight Rain”: “He wanted a bride, I was making my own name.” Even so, Jennifer Lopez represented a much more common experience when she became Mrs. Affleck last year, long after she had made her own name.

People are marrying later than in previous generations, and highly educated people are more likely to marry. That would suggest that more women would be keeping their names, said Sharon Sassler, a sociologist at Cornell who studies young people’s transitions into adulthood.

“However, we adjust to the gender norms of our time, which, ‘Barbie’ notwithstanding, is not a very pro-feminist time period,” she said.

Also, she said, weddings are a time of highly gendered traditions: “I don’t think a lot of women want to talk about, ‘How is marriage a patriarchal institution?’ especially as they’re making the decision to enter into marriage.”

Some younger women say the decision has become more practical than political — they find it easier to have the same name as their future children, and to simplify dinner reservations or utility bills.

Immigrants to the United States and Black and Hispanic women are less likely to take a spouse’s name. Eighty-six percent of white women did, Pew found, compared with 73 percent of Black women and 60 percent of Hispanic women. (It is customary to keep one’s name in many Spanish-speaking countries.) There were not enough Asian American women in the sample to analyze.

When Olivia Castor, 28, a corporate lawyer in Chicago, married three weeks ago, she decided to take both routes. She is in the process of legally changing her last name to that of her husband, Austin McNair, but she will continue to use Castor professionally.

She is the daughter of Haitian immigrants, and wanted to keep her Haitian last name and honor her family’s role in her education and career success.

“It meant a lot to me to have that family name, a legacy of accomplishment in the U.S., and I didn’t want to let go of that,” she said. “But I also wanted to embrace the new life and family I’m starting with my husband.”

Pew’s findings, from a poll of 2,740 married people, conducted in April, are consistent with other data showing that roughly 20 percent of women have kept their names since the practice took hold in the 1970s. But it’s hard to know how it’s changed over time because there has been so little research on it. (It’s seen as a “women’s issue,” and thus “not seen as valuable by people who fund research,” said Laurie Scheuble, a professor emeritus at Penn State who co-wrote a paperon name changing in 2012.)

Pew’s survey did not include enough same-sex couples to draw conclusions. Some said that because of the lack of a tradition, same-sex couples felt freer in their choice.

For Rosemary and Christena Kalonaros-Pyle — who work in marketing in New York and celebrated their July marriage with 115 family members and friends in Mexico — the solution was to hyphenate.

“We wanted to both have the same last name as our children would have, just because legally it’s a lot more prudent, especially as a same-sex couple, where in certain states and certain countries things are recognized differently,” Rosemary Kalonaros-Pyle said.

They also wanted to keep her Greek last name — and honor the last name of Christena Kalonaros-Pyle’s father, who died before her wife could meet him.

“It was a little bit of legal logistics,” she said, “and a little bit of emotions.” (New York Times).

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For fun.

John Fetterman’s Reaction to Biden Impeachment Is All We Care About | The New Republic.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden on Tuesday, and Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman is calling it out for the deeply unserious move that it is. 

When asked for a response to the news, Fetterman feigned shock and distress.

 “Oh my God, really?” he asked, his voice squeaking upward in pitch as he grabbed his head in his hands.

Fetterman’s response says all we need to know about how the Democrats feel about this impeachment inquiry: It’s one big joke.

The House speaker has launched this inquiry, despite having no evidence of wrongdoing by the president and despite criticism from members of his own party. On Sunday, Republican Representative Ken Buck slammed the entire impeachment inquiry. 

“The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden—if there’s evidence—linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor,” Buck said. “That doesn’t exist right now.” 

The impeachment inquiry could also spell trouble for the 18 Republicans representing districts Biden won in 2020. (New Republic).

When Fetterman was asked about McCarthy’s plans for the impeachment inquiry last week, he responded: “Go ahead. Do it, I dare you.”

“It would just be a big circle jerk on the fringe right,” Fetterman added.

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From the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As a Doctor, a Mother and the Head of the C.D.C., I Recommend That You Get the Latest Covid Booster. By Mandy K.Cohen.

We have come a long way since the early days of 2020. Back then, I was the head of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services and working alongside Gov. Roy Cooper to navigate the uncertainty, the challenges and the fear around Covid-19. My extended family was in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. I didn’t realize then that it would be over a year until I saw them in person again. All I wanted was for them to be safe.

Now, as I lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we are in such a different place — no federal mandates, no travel restrictions. With vaccines, testing and treatment, we are once again enjoying fun-filled family vacations and celebrating milestones together.

While we would all love to leave Covid-19 in the rearview mirror for good, the virus is still here. And it will probably always be with us. The good news is that we have the tools to help people avoid serious illness, hospitalization, death and long Covid symptoms. We can minimize the virus’s damage to our lives by using one of our most effective tools in combating the virus: updated Covid-19 vaccines.

Covid-19 vaccines are the best way to give the body the ability to keep the virus from causing significant harm. Extensive studies and real-world experience have shown that they are safe and they work. And most Americans take them. Since the Covid-19 vaccines became widely available in 2021, more than 270 million Americans have received shots, preventing countless deaths and hospitalizations.

Some viruses, however, change over time. This coronavirus is one of them. It finds ways to evade our immune systems by constantly evolving. That’s why our vaccines need to be updated to match the changed virus. Even though many Americans have been exposed to previous versions of the virus because they’ve been infected, that protection decreases over time. This is partly why you can get Covid more than once and why you can still get very sick even if you had it before. That’s why the C.D.C. is recommending an updated Covid-19 vaccine, which is better matched to the currently circulating virus, for everyone age 6 months and older.

Covid-19 continues to pose a health threat, especially to older Americans. From January to July 2023, 88 percent of deaths from Covid-19 were among people who were age 65 years or older. Those with certain underlying health conditions — approximately 70 percent of American adults — and weakened immune systems also are at greater risk than younger, healthier Americans.

What’s more, anyone who gets infected with Covid can develop long Covid, and I don’t want any American to experience that if it can be avoided. People with long Covid can have many ongoing symptoms — like extreme tiredness, shortness of breath and headache — that diminish their quality of life. So far, studies have found that the people who may be more likely than others to get long Covid were unvaccinated against the virus, got severely ill from Covid (though even mild cases can also lead to longer-term symptoms) or had underlying health conditions.

These vaccines were put through extensive clinical trials before they were widely introduced in 2021, and since then, their safety has been intensely monitored, with more than 670 million doses administered in the United States over more than two years. Our understanding of them means that, like the annual flu vaccine, manufacturers can now focus on developing the best match for circulating strains.

The Biden administration has been working to ensure easy and convenient access to the updated Covid-19 vaccine so that most people will still be able to get free ones. For people with health insurance, most plans will cover the Covid vaccine at no cost. People who don’t have health insurance or with health plans that do not cover the cost can get free vaccines from their local health centers and pharmacies participating in the C.D.C.’s programs. To find a participating location, visit Vaccines.gov.

If you get Covid-19, remember that treatment is available. Paxlovid, pills you take twice a day for five days, can help reduce the severity of illness and may help prevent long Covid. It works best when taken soon after symptoms begin. That’s why people with Covid symptoms should get tested and ask their doctor about treatment.

In addition to treatments such as Paxlovid, we have other tools to protect our health, such as widely available at-home tests and common-sense strategies like improving ventilation, masking and hand washing. These tools can help prevent Covid infections specifically, as well as other viral infections that are common in the coming winter months.

On the basis of patterns we have seen so far, the C.D.C. believes the United States will most likely continue to experience Covid-19 in somewhat seasonal upticks. However, there is good news. This is the first fall and winter virus season in which vaccines are — or soon will be — available for all three viruses responsible for most for hospitalizations and deaths: the coronavirus, respiratory syncytial virus or R.S.V. and flu viruses. The more people who get the shots, the bigger difference it can make in how many Americans are sick and the ability of our health care system to handle influxes of patients.

As a doctor, a mother and the head of the C.D.C., I would not recommend anything to others that I wouldn’t recommend for my own family. My 9- and 11-year-old daughters, my husband, my parents and I will all be rolling up our sleeves to get our updated Covid-19 vaccines along with our flu shots soon. I hope you and the people you care about will do the same. (New York Times).

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