Wednesday. June 28, 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! buttondown.email/AnnettesNewsRoundup
_________________________
Joe is always busy.
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is now law.
Pregnancy protections. For 10 years, advocates have fought for better protections for pregnant workers in the U.S. Today, their work comes to fruition; the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is now in effect.
President Joe Biden signed the legislation into law in December as part of the year-end omnibus spending bill.
As of today, pregnant workers are entitled to “reasonable accommodations” connected to pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions.
Previously, workers could claim some protections via the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, but those processes were more onerous, says Sarah Brafman, national policy director at the worker justice organization A Better Balance. Thirty states—but not all—already have similar protections on the books.
“Before the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, workers in this country did not have a nationwide, affirmative, explicit right to get accommodations or job changes at work while pregnant or postpartum,” Brafman explains. “And now they will.”
Workers now have legal protection to request “light duty” in physically demanding jobs, temporary transfers to new duties or teams, more frequent bathroom breaks, a stool to sit on at work, permission to eat or drink while working, or additional time off before or after childbirth. The law also protects the jobs of workers who need flexible scheduling for prenatal appointments or remote work arrangements.
When the PWFA was first introduced a decade ago, it was a Democratic bill. By the time it passed last year, protecting pregnant workers had become a bipartisan issue. The Senate voted 73-24 to add these protections to the spending bill with the support of about half the Republican caucus.
In April, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act went into effect. That law explicitly requires employers to provide employees with time and space for lactation breaks. Lactation-related needs are also protected through the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
“Our federal law, which hasn’t been updated for 40 years, is finally catching up to the needs of workers in this country,” Brafman says. (The Broad Sheet, Forbes).
Roe.
Congress must act. pic.twitter.com/YFfWLUpdsM
— President Biden (@POTUS) June 24, 2023
Bidenomics.
Before MAGA REPUBLICANS get their memo to tell lies about Bidenomics, I want to be sure you all know that this administration is working #ForThePeople and believes in you! Bidenomics is the opposite of Reaganomics. Instead of trickle down, we believe in building the economy up⬆️ pic.twitter.com/OxQ7RImZN8
— Pat Fuller 🟧🟦☮️ (@bannerite) June 26, 2023
_________________________
Kamala is always busy.
Stonewall happened June 28, 1969.
Vice President Kamala Harris, with TV host Andy Cohen, paused for selfies with patrons inside the Stonewall Inn on Monday.
_________________________
The Supreme Court will speak.
So, what’s coming down the pike this week at the Supreme Court.
Here are the major issues set to be decided:
Affirmative action. The conservative justices’ questioning at oral arguments led most observers to predict that they will rule against race-based affirmative action for college admissions in some fashion, which would create dramatic changes for universities across the country. But it’s unclear how far the justices will go: they could opt for a narrow decision striking down the Harvard and UNC programs, while still allowing race to play some role in admissions processes.
Student loans. Six Republican-led states have challenged President Biden’s plan to wipe away up to $20,000 in student loan debt for federal borrowers. The recent decisions in Haaland v. Brackeen and United States v. Texas (see above) have given progressives some hope that the justices will rule their way — since conservatives rejected GOP-led states’ standing to sue in both cases — but the questioning at oral arguments was certainly not sympathetic to the Biden program.
Election law. In past opinions, some of the conservative justices have expressed support for a radical doctrine known as the “independent state legislature theory,” which argues that only state legislatures — not state courts — are allowed to set election rules. In Moore v. Harper, a dispute stemming from North Carolina, justices are being asked to rule on the theory for the first time. Swing votes Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett seemed skeptical during oral arguments, but even a decision embracing parts of the theory could upend redistricting and election law.
LGBT rights. In 2018, the Supreme Court issued a narrow ruling in a closely watched case about whether a Colorado baker’s refusal to make a wedding cake for a gay couple violated the state’s anti-discrimination law. Now, the same Colorado law is before the court again, as a website designer asks whether she has the right to refuse to create wedding websites for same-sex couples. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the more conservative court has an opportunity to tread where the justices didn’t in 2018 and make a more expansive ruling on the intersection of gay rights and the freedom of speech.
All of these cases are expected to be decided this week. So far, the court has only announced one session for releasing opinions — this morning [Tuesday] at 10 a.m. ET — but the justices will likely add others as the week goes on. (Gabe Fleisher, Wake Up to Politics).
Breaking. 🥁 💥💥 The verdicts start to roll in.
The Court rejected Moore v Harper and with it, the “independent state legislature theory,” which stems from a Trump followers’ interpretation of the Constitution's Elections Clause. The “independent state legislature theory” asserts that state legislatures have complete authority to set presidential and congressional elections rules without oversight from state courts.
Had the Court embraced this theory, state legislatures would have the right to throw out all ballots and hijack elections for US Congress and the Presidency and even choose electors for Presidential Elections.
Supreme Court rejects controversial Trump-backed election law theory.
CNN) — The Supreme Court said that the North Carolina Supreme Court did not violate the elections clause of the US Constitution when it invalidated the state’s 2022 congressional map, rejecting a broad version of a controversial legal theory pushed by supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 6-3 opinion. [Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissented.]
One more thing. Yes, had this verdict gone the other way, it could have ended Democracy.
Here is the SCOTUS opinion, against Moore v. Harper.
Paul Saunders Professor at Georgetown University and former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, Neal Katyal, who is well known to viewers of MSNBC, argued the case against North Carolina Republican lawmakers supporting the “independent state legislature theory” in Moore v. Harper at the Court yesterday.
Many thought this case couldn’t be won, but Katyal won it big - 6-3 - and saved our Democracy.
Let me correct the record below and say that I told @neal_katyal yesterday after we left the Court that his was the single best oral argument I have ever heard made before the Supreme Court of the United States. He was masterful! https://t.co/zte9W3XAcZ
— @judgeluttig (@judgeluttig) December 9, 2022
_________________________
Trump spoke.
Listen to Trump’s notorious audio of classified documents in here.
The audio recording of the 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump discusses holding secret documents he did not declassify.
Hear the conversation. 👇
https://youtu.be/u95MfcLRBVk
Here is an edited transcript from Daily Kos.
The recorded conversation starts immediately with Trump proclaiming that U.S. military leadership, and particularly former chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, are “bad, sick people.” But then he jumps immediately into audibly fumbling through papers.
Trump: “Well with Milley, let me see that. I’ll show you an example. He said that I want to attack Iran. Isn’t it amazing, I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him.”
Trump stops flipping through papers at this point and there is a sharp sound, as if he is stabbing the page with a finger.
Trump: “This was him. He presented me this. This is off the record, but they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some–this wasn’t done by me. This was him.”
The sound of pages turning resumes.
Trump: “Also it’s pages long. Look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. It’s it amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like highly controversial, secret …”
Laughter in the background.
Trump: “This is secret information. Look at this! The attack …”
At this point, someone comments that “Hillary would print that out all the time.” Trump then comments, “She would send it to Anthony Weiner.”
But the joke is on Trump, because even the comments about Hillary Clinton demonstrate that what he was paging through was not newspapers or magazine clippings, but the actual classified documents—just as he said. And as Trump makes clear, it’s not just one document. It’s a “big pile of papers” that he has with him at the Bedminster club.
The argument that when talking about “papers” Trump meant newspapers is as thoroughly shredded by the conversation as the idea that Trump had somehow declassified this material before leaving office. Not only does he brag about the material being “secret” repeatedly, the conversation goes on, as it did in the indictment, to make things absolutely, abundantly clear.
Trump: “This was done by the military and given to me. Uh, I think we can probably print?”
Staffer: “Well, we’ll have to see, yeah. We’ll have to try to–”
Trump: “Declassify it.”
Staffer: “Yeah.”
Trump: “See, as president I could have declassified it, now I can’t, you know, but this is classified.”
Staffer: “We have a problem.”
Trump: “Isn’t that interesting? It’s so cool. And look, we heard I have a–and you probably didn’t believe me, but now you believe me.”
___
Trump weighed in on the audio too. 👇 Claims it exonerates him. Huh?
To quote Daily Kos, “this is material right out of a prosecutor's dream.”
Oh DAMN. Liz Cheney speaks out right after the Trump tape was released last night and says, “We’re electing idiots.” There is simply no better word I can think of to describe Donald Trump & his sycophants in Congress than idiot. We must do better.
— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) June 27, 2023
Also from Daily Kos. A court appearance was postponed Tuesday for a Donald Trump valet who's charged with helping the former president hide classified documents that the Justice Department wanted back.
A lawyer for the valet, Walt Nauta, told a judge that Nauta had been unable to find a Florida-based attorney and that he was stuck in Newark, New Jersey, and unable to fly down for the arraignment because of a flight that sat for hours on the tarmac before being canceled.
The lawyer, Stanley Woodward, said Nauta expressed his apologies to the court for not being present.
“Mr. Nauta takes very seriously the charges that he is facing,” he said.
As a result, a judge pushed Tuesday's scheduled arraignment back until July 6.
_________________________
A message from the outgoing director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky.
An argument for having a robust Center for Disease Control and Prevention to serve the nation.
Rochelle Walensky: Our Pandemic Despair Is Fading Too Quickly.
Exactly one year after the first laboratory-confirmed case of Covid-19 was identified in the United States, I began my tenure as the 19th director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the time, vaccines were available, but new variants continued to emerge. I viewed my primary charge as bringing this country from the dark and tragic pandemic days into a more restored place.
In the two and a half years since that day, the world has faced an unrivaled density of public health challenges. There was the evolving Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the first-ever global mpox outbreak. The largest outbreak of the Sudan species of Ebola virus in Uganda in two decades threatened to spread across international borders; the first U.S. case of paralytic polio since 2013 was identified; over 80,000 immigrants from Afghanistan arrived, some with cases of active measles and other diseases that were contained; and the largest and longest highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak among flocks of birds is ongoing around the world.
Public health work will continue to be critically important, and the challenges just as complex. Yet I fear the despair from the pandemic is fading too quickly from our memories, perhaps because it is too painful to recall a ravaged nation brought to its knees.
As the leader of the C.D.C., I had the privilege of a unique perspective, seeing public health in the United States for both its challenges and its gifts. And yet the agency has been sidelined, chastened by early missteps with Covid and battered by persistent scrutiny. We tackled the aforementioned threats and barreled forward to address the hard lessons learned along the way. Even amid the challenges, Americans must recognize the need for a strong public health system and for a robust C.D.C.
I believe that scientific expertise should not take a back seat to partisan will. That said, public health and scientific recommendations inevitably intersect with social values and policy. Acknowledging this intersection is not to suggest that elected leaders — regardless of party — should disregard science or undermine its integrity. We in public health must recognize that recommendations do not occur within a vacuum; rather, they affect other sectors of American life — education, the economy and national security, to name a few.
The job of public health is to strike an appropriate balance between protecting the health of all those who live in the United States while minimizing the disruption to the normal functioning of society. The goal is to offer science-driven recommendations that balance protection and practicality in the context of one’s individual risk tolerance and value set. For example, the question of how low the rates of infections in schools need to be for them to remain open has much to do with whether you have an immunocompromised family member in the household, or whether you can supplement education with personal tutors or whether you require school lunches for your child’s nutritional needs.
All of this is made easier with strong institutions and a strong public health work force. Decades of underinvestment in public health rendered the United States ill prepared for a global pandemic. Some estimates suggest we are 80,000 public health workers short across the United States to meet basic public health needs. To this day some of our public health data systems are reliant on old fax machines. National laboratories lack both state-of-the-art equipment and skilled bench scientists to work them. During the pandemic, the answer to these prevailing problems was a rapid infusion of money — resources that were swiftly withdrawn.
It is not enough to support public health when there is an emergency. The roller coaster influx of resources during a crisis, followed by underfunding after the threat is addressed, exposes a broken system and puts future lives at risk. Longstanding, sustainable investments are needed across public health, over time and administrations, to position the United States to be better prepared for the next large-scale infectious disease outbreak or other health threat.
The responsibility of the public health community and its leaders to articulate strategy and communicate regularly with the public has also never been more apparent. Four years ago, most people were much less familiar with the C.D.C. We felt our primary audience was mostly health scientists, academics and public health practitioners, and our initial pandemic messages were frequently speaking to those scientifically attuned. Today, our audience is all the people of this country — from those in the Bronx to rural Montana to Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, all the way to Guam.
Over the past year, I started an effort, called C.D.C. Moving Forward, to address pandemic breakdowns and restore eroded trust. The goal is to make the C.D.C. the public health agency the American people demand and deserve. This includes many changes, among them more regular communication with people, politicians and other public health leaders. I found significant benefit in regularly meeting with members of Congress as well as visiting health departments across the nation and C.D.C. offices around the world to learn more about needs on the ground while discussing our shared priorities. Continuing this kind of work can go a long way in building trust and making clear the C.D.C.’s goals.
Delivering information both in scientific detail and in plain language can be challenging, especially when messaging is met by efforts to compromise our work with nefarious intent. As a society, we must be more discerning of dubious rhetoric. People deserve accurate information to make the best health decisions — accounting for their own vulnerabilities and ideals — for themselves and their families.
I’m hopeful for the future of public health in America because of the people I met during my tenure who, in spite of the challenges, care deeply about this work. Among the greatest gifts of my time at the C.D.C. has been meeting the people of the agency who worry about public health day and night so that you do not have to. Many spent significant time during the pandemic away from their families, because the task at hand was so important to the greater good.
Most people are likely to never know the name of the person who rappelled from a helicopter to drop Covid-19 test kits onto a cruise ship, nor the fear of a public health officer deployed to an Ebola-laden Ugandan community to carry out a family risk assessment. You may not have considered the grueling hours necessary to conduct door-to-door exposure assessments after the Ohio train derailment, and you most likely do not know the tenacity of the team of C.D.C. experts who, after months of investigation, isolated a deadly bacteria normally found half a world away from a commonly sold air freshener (the contaminated batch now off the market). And that’s how it’s supposed to be. The people who do this work for you — who often put themselves in harm’s way — serve you and the nation tirelessly, skillfully and selflessly.
I want to remind America: The question is not if there will be another public health threat, but when. The C.D.C. needs public and congressional support if it is going to be prepared to protect you from future threats. God speed to the 20th director, and to my incredible friends at the C.D.C.
_________________________
Pending Coffee? Pending sandwich? Maybe we should all try it.
There was a little coffee shop where two people arrived and approached the counter.
— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) June 27, 2023
“Five coffees ☕️ please. Two for us and three pending.”
They paid, they took their two coffees and left.
I asked the waiter. "What’s this about pending coffees?"
“Wait and you'll see."
Some… pic.twitter.com/sdwmEPBCLN
True and beautiful story! In Napoli we call it “caffe sospeso “… I like the translation “pending”. The generosity of Neapolitans is the result of centuries of survival struggle only possible by mutual help. It was the poor helping the poorer. Now it’s a part of Neapolitan dna
— Alex Carrella (@alecarrella) June 27, 2023
_________________________