Wednesday, April 12, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.
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Joe is always busy.
Poetry-loving Biden heads to Ireland, home of the 'best poets in the world.’
President Biden wears his Irish Catholic heritage on his sleeve — a fact that will be on full display during his visit to Ireland this coming week. The trip marks the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that ended violence in Northern Ireland. But it is also a personal visit. Biden plans to see two counties where he has family roots.
So while Biden is expected to talk diplomacy and economics, there's a very good chance he also cites the great Irish poets William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney along the way.
In a way Biden found his own voice through Yeats. But it was a different Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright [ Seamus Heaney] whom Biden quoted as he accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for president in August 2020.
When hope and history rhyme
"The Irish poet Seamus Heaney once wrote [in the 1990 Play, The Cure at Troy ], 'history says don't hope on this side of the grave, but then once in a lifetime, the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme," Biden said at the convention.
Biden connected the writing to his campaign, saying that it was America's moment "to make hope and history rhyme, with passion and purpose."
"They always used to kid me because I am always quoting Irish poets on the floor of the Senate," Biden said at a White House event in honor of the singer Elton John. "They think I did it because I'm Irish. That's not the reason. I do it because they're the best poets in the world." (NPR).
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Democrats choose Chicago for 2024 convention.
The United Center, Chicago.
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Democrats announced Tuesday they will host their 2024 convention in Chicago, after seriously considering Atlanta and New York City, elevating the Midwest as a bedrock of their party.
Why it matters: President Biden faced pressure from Democrats in all three cities, but those in Chicago argued that picking a right-to-work state like Georgia would create major tensions with labor unions and white-working class voters just two months before the election.
Democrats hosted their 2020 convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' urging.
This is the first normal convention since Democrats went virtual in 2020 because of the pandemic, and the first time hosting in Chicago since 1996 — when the party nominated Bill Clinton for president and Al Gore for vice president.
Driving the news: The Democratic National Committee decision also comes the week after Brandon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, won the Chicago mayoral race after a contentious battle over how the party should handle crime in big cities.
President Biden's relationship with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who's considered a political and financial leader within the party, fortifies the decision to host there.
The backdrop: Democratic leaders from each city pressed DNC members for months and focused their pitches on how their respective regions would impact not just nominating, but electing the next president.
The last time labor felt rebuffed by a Democratic president's convention site selection, it boycotted and redirected money and time to a different event.
"It was a slap in the face" when Democrats selected right-to-work state North Carolina in 2012, Lonnie Stephenson, former president of the IBEW, told Axios. "Normally, we give financial support and we didn't that year."
The bottom line: Democrats are clear that they believe choosing Chicago will help build a winning coalition in 2024, and hope to maintain support in the Midwestern "blue wall" states of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
It gives them an opportunity to tout the White House's economic agenda and infrastructure successes, and re-focus on manufacturing as a way to appeal to middle-class voters. (Axios).
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Alvin Bragg is not a wimp.
DA Bragg sues Jim Jordan claiming 'an unconstitutional attempt to undermine' the case.
The New York prosecutor who is pursuing criminal charges against former President Trump says a Republican-led congressional committee is trying to interfere with his case.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleges "an unconstitutional attempt to undermine" his investigation and is suing Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, for what he says are Jordan's attempts to influence an active New York state prosecution.
What's in Bragg's lawsuit against Jordan?
Now with this lawsuit, Bragg is hitting back at the committee, suing to block Pomerantz from testifying. He said Congress has no power to investigate local prosecutors, and that the subpoena violates state sovereignty, and is politically motivated.
In the lawsuit against Jordan, Bragg says he wants the court to invalidate the subpoena issued to Pomerantz, and is also asking the court to prevent any future subpoenas on him or any of his current or former employees.
Jordan responded to the lawsuit in a tweet, saying Trump was indicted "for no crime" and that Bragg is trying to block congressional oversight. (NPR).
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Here is the 50-page suit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, which accuses Mr. Jordan of a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” on the prosecution of Mr. Trump and a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack” the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. (New York Times).
The suit 👇 cites the letter Alvin Bragg sent to Jordan, which accuses Jordan and his House Republicans of “acting more like a criminal defense counsel trying to gather evidence for a client than a legislative body seeking to achieve a legitimate legislative objective.”
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Mr. Jordan responded in a statement on Twitter.
“First, they indict a president for no crime,” he wrote. “Then, they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it.”
In response to the letters’ focus on federal funds, the district attorney’s office said that it had spent about $5,000 worth of federal money on investigations into Mr. Trump and his company between October 2019 and August 2021, most of it on litigation related to a court battle with Mr. Trump over access to his tax returns. (New York Times).
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One more thing.
Last night, the Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, in charge of the case, entered an order denying the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) Bragg was requesting and setting a fast briefing schedule for considering whether to enter a preliminary injunction. She ordered Bragg to serve the lawsuit on the defendants by 9:00 p.m. tonight and gave the defendants until 9:00 a.m. on April 17, 2023, to respond, with a hearing to follow on April 19, 2023, at 2:00 p.m. Read the Court’s order here. (Source. Joyce Vance).
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Clarence Thomas should resign.
54 Years Ago, a Supreme Court Justice Was Forced to Quit for Behavior Arguably Less Egregious Than Thomas’s.
Let us flood Chief Justice Roberts with letters:
Supreme Court of the United States
1 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20543.
Make him know our thoughts on Clarence Thomas’ behavior - egregious and corrupt. Let an unprecedented flood of mail at the least be noted in the historical record.
Suggesting that Democrats and Republicans agree on anything involving the Supreme Court these days sounds like the ramblings of a madman. But it is worth recalling that the last time such serious allegations were made against a sitting justice, Congress did respond firmly, and in bipartisan fashion. Justice Abe Fortas’s departure from the court in 1969 is both a blueprint for how lawmakers could respond today and a benchmark of how far we have fallen.
Fortas, a Democratic appointee, got caught up in a scandal that involved much smaller dollar amounts than the lavish trips Justice Thomas took, even factoring in inflation. Fortas accepted $20,000 to consult for a foundation working on civil rights and religious freedom. Justices consulting for nonprofits was once not so unusual: William O. Douglas had a paid position with the Albert Parvin Foundation, and Warren Burgerhad one with the Mayo Foundation.
There were other clouds around Fortas. His contract with the foundation had originally been for $20,000 in annual payments for consulting work for the rest of his life, and there had been an earlier controversy over a course he was paid $15,000 to teach at American University while on the court. He also had an unfortunate habit of continuing to offer advice to President Lyndon Johnson, whom he had long advised, even after joining the court. But it was his involvement with Wolfson that forced him off the court.
In 1969, Life magazine reported on Fortas’s long-extinguished ties to Wolfson’s foundation, and on the money he had returned, and a scandal ensued. We now know the Nixon administration was helping Life with its investigation, including with some improper leaks, in an attempt to drive Fortas off the court.
When Life’s revelations appeared, Republicans in Congress demanded that Fortas resign. That was not surprising — the liberal Fortas had been appointed by Johnson. What was remarkable by today’s standards is that Democrats demanded his ouster, too.
These Democrats called for Fortas to step down even though President Richard Nixon, a Republican, would appoint his successor, which would help to flip the court from a liberal majority to a conservative one. They made clear that they were more concerned with the court and the country than with their ideology or their party.
The defenses being made on Justice Thomas’s behalf hardly pass the laugh test. It was just, as Justice Thomas put it, “personal hospitality” among close friends? That would be a nice meal at a friend’s home, not an invitation to travel the world like royalty on a plutocrat’s dime. And about that friendship: ProPublica reports that Justice Thomas’s rich benefactor, the real estate developer Harlan Crow, befriended him after he became a justice. It is hard to believe that if Justice Thomas started voting like Justice Sonia Sotomayor the friendship or the free island hopping would continue.
ProPublica reported that neither Mr. Crow nor his firm has had a case before the court since Justice Thomas joined it. But Justice Thomas and his conservative allies have been catering to the interests of the ultrawealthy for years, from striking down campaign finance limits to making it harder for workers to unionize. Mr. Crow also serves on the board of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, whose website makes clear that it takes a keen interest in cases before the court.
Justice Thomas’s windfall has “no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court,” according to ProPublica. It is also part of a climate of growing ethical rot. Justice Thomas has been voting in cases in which his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, has ties to the parties involved. Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016 in a free room at a luxury ranch owned by another very rich man.
The harm all of this does is incalculable. According to Gallup, trust in the federal judiciary is at a record low. But the impact goes beyond the court, damaging American democracy itself. Behavior like Justice Thomas’s plays into the popular belief that across government, the fix is in — that the rich and powerful are buying off decision makers to get what they want.
Democrats have been screaming foul. Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, called Justice Thomas “corrupt as hell” and demanded that he resign, one of several Democratic Congress members urging resignation or impeachment. Democrats in Congress are also pushing for a code of ethics for the justices who, unlike lower court federal judges, are not covered by one.
Republicans, however, have been deafeningly silent. Fox News has filled the void by locating an “expert” to declare that the story about Justice Thomas is “politics plain and simple.” Influential Republicans in Congress are reported to be working behind the scenes to block the push for a code of ethics.
If our body politic were as healthy today as it was in 1969, leaders of both parties would be demanding Justice Thomas’s resignation, and he would be as worried about being impeached by a Republican House as Fortas was by a Democratic one. And we would hear Republicans in Congress say, as Tydings once did, that what matters most of all is not party or ideology but that “the confidence of our citizenry in the federal judiciary must be preserved.” (Adama Cohen, former member of the Editorial Board, New York Times).
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Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times yesterday.
With his close ties to a powerful, property-owning billionaire, Thomas embodies the historic role of the Supreme Court in American politics, not as a liberator or defender of the rights of political and social minorities, but as a partner to and ally of moneyed interests.
Thomas also shows us something of the real world of corruption. The Supreme Court’s ruling in McDonnell v. United States notwithstanding, corruption is much more than a cartoonish quid pro quo, where cash changes hands and the state is used for private gain. Corruption, more often than not, looks like an ordinary relationship, even a friendship. It is perks and benefits freely given to a powerful friend. It is expensive gifts and tokens of appreciation between those friends, except that one holds office and the other wants to influence its ideological course. It is being enmeshed in networks of patronage that look innocent from the inside but suspect to those who look with clearer eyes from the outside.
The Supreme Court is not going to police itself. The only remedy to the problem of the court’s corruption — to say nothing of its power, — is to subject it to the same checks and limits we associate with the other branches.
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This week’s New Yorker and the artist who drew it.
Courtroom Artist Jane Rosenberg On Her Viral Sketch of Trump.
As cameras were not permitted into the New York courtroom where Trump was arraigned on April 4, few had the distinct pleasure of witnessing this historic moment up close. One of those people was veteran courtroom artist Jane Rosenberg, whose sketch of a despondent Trump went viral online and will soon grace the cover of the New Yorker.
The sketch shows Trump, arms crossed, half-eyeing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with disdain. Visible in the background is Justice Juan M. Merchan, the judge overseeing the case, and other security men and court clerks.
“Trump was looking glaringly at the district attorney as he was reading the indictment. I had to get that expression,” Rosenberg told me in a phone interview. “He looked pissed off; he wasn’t happy to be there.”
With over 40 years of experience in the business, Rosenberg’s track record includes sketches of high-profile felons such as El Chapo, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Cosby, and others. But this might be her most high-profile gig yet.
“It’s the most pressure I’ve ever had in an assignment,” she said. “The media attention was the biggest I’ve seen.”
“I’m used to people mocking my sketches on social media,” she said. “This time it was a combination of mocks, praise, and memes.”
I asked Rosenberg to describe the experience of drawing the famously grotesque ex-president. “Trump is really fun to draw,” she intoned. “He’s got tons of expression on his face and that crazy hair that is almost like a hat.”
“I’m not saying it’s a happy or pleasant face, but he has a unique look that is fun to capture.”
Beyond media outlets, Rosenberg’s work has also been featured in several exhibitions, including the 2017 Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration at the Library of Congress. Now, at age 72, she has no intention of slowing down.
“I just love drawing people,” she said.(Hakim Bashara.Hyperallergic.com).
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Comstock Act! Comstock Act! Remember those words.
An Abortion-Pill Ruling Signals Pro-Lifers’ Next Push.
It is happening. “They” turn to the Comstock Act to try to ban all abortions.
Kacsmaryk’s unprecedented ruling, however, is not just a bid to block access to abortion pills. It is an open invitation to anti-abortion-rights groups to use the Comstock Act—a law passed 150 years ago and rarely enforced in the past century—to seek a nationwide federal ban on all abortions.
A closer look at the Texas judge’s decision suggests that the anti-abortion-rights movement’s attack on abortion pills is merely a staging post in that strategic effort. Although the ruling raises complex questions about a court’s authority to withdraw approval of a drug and the FDA’s options in responding, and could also have effects on states that protect abortion, these were not its most important implication.
That came in an argument supplied by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian group that led the litigation in the Texas case, in its effort to undermine access to mifepristone.
Taking his cue from that argument, Kacsmaryk spotlighted the federal Comstock Act of 1873, an anti-vice law that prohibited mailing “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” as well as anything “advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.”
The FDA has followed a consensus interpretation of the Comstock Act that has not faced serious challenge since the 1920s, which allows the mailing of abortion drugs when the seller does not intend them to be used unlawfully. Kacsmaryk dismissed this argument, concluding instead that the “plain text of the Comstock Act” controlled the result of the case—and mifepristone, he reasoned, was clearly an abortion drug that could not be mailed.
No abortion method exists in the United States that does not use something “designed, adapted, or intended for abortion” and sent through the mail or via another carrier. Abortion clinics do not make their own drugs or devices; they order these items from pharmaceutical-distribution companies and medical-equipment suppliers. Taken to its logical conclusion, Kacsmaryk’s ruling means that all abortions already violate criminal law.
For abortion opponents, the Comstock Act is the only realistic way to force through a national ban. That’s because it has nothing to do with what the American people want or what the Constitution means.
When it comes to Comstock, the recipe for success requires simply the support of conservative judges who are indifferent to precedent and the constitutional concerns raised by reviving a law long regarded as a dead letter. Anti-abortion-rights activists have made the same bet that Judge Kacsmaryk has: They have not captured the hearts or minds of the American people, but they may have captured the courts. (Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Professor of Law at UC Davis. She is the author of Roe: The History of a National Obsession and Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment.This appeared in the Atlantic).
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A Reminder.
Evan Gershkovich, journalist and child of Russian-Jewish emigres.
New symbol at Passover seders: an empty seat for Evan Gershkovich.
This happened on Monday.
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America’s embrace of guns makes this situation painfully ordinary.
U.S. gun violence rise: Two governors lose friends in mass shootings.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear speaks during a news conference after a gunman opened fire at a bank on April 10 in Louisville.
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The governors of Kentucky and Tennessee both lost friends in mass shootings over the past two weeks.
The big picture: The shooting at a Louisville bank on Monday, which came just two weeks after a mass shooting at a Nashville school, are part of an increase in gun violence in the U.S. over the past decade.
There have been 146 mass shootings so far this year, meaning there have been more mass shootings than days in 2023, per data from the Gun Violence Archive.
Of note: About a fifth of U.S. adults say they or someone close to them has had an experience with gun violence in the past five years.
Zoom in: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said he lost one of his "closest friends" in Monday's shooting, which left at least four people dead and nine others injured.
"Tommy Elliot helped me build my law career, helped me become governor, gave me advice on being a good dad," Beshear said. "He was an incredible friend."
"These are irreplaceable, amazing individuals that a terrible act of violence tore from all of us," Beshear said of the victims.
Meanwhile, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) revealed after the Nashville shooting late last month that among the 6 people killed at a Christian elementary school was Cindy Peak, a close friend of his wife, Maria Lee.
"Cindy was supposed to come over to have dinner with Maria last night after she filled in as a substitute teacher yesterday at Covenant," Lee said the day after the shooting.
Cindy and Maria and [Covenant head of school] Katherine Koonce were all teachers at the same school and have been family friends for decades."
Zoom out: The number of U.S. kids dying by gunfire keeps rising, Axios' Erica Pandey reports.
Gun deaths among Americas' children rose 50% in the last two years, according to a new Pew Research Center report.
More children and teens were killed by guns in 2021 than in any year since 1999, the first year the CDC began tracking the data. (Axios).
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What to do about the NYC MTA?
Many who know me know that I sing 3 songs on how to improve New York. Top of the list is Free Public Transportation.*
Subway and bus fares are a tax on those who need public transportation most but are least able to pay.
To you, dear reader, does a subway fare increase affect your life seriously? Probably not.
But it affects many around you with lesser resources - your building staff, your house cleaners, your child’s caretakers, your children’s teachers, people who lost their jobs, elderly people living on fixed pensions and social security and many others.
Gale Brewer is the public official who has heard me most on this, and inquired. She told me no one in the City Council would undertake the issue of how to make subways/buses free. The roadblock is always the same - money.
But money and will are the answers too.
I have followed with joy and frustration as other cities instituted free or deep, deep discounted public transportation. Kansas City. Boston. Seattle. Berlin.
Imagine then my happiness this morning when I read the article below.👇 I am not alone.
#FreeSubways #FreeBuses
How to Improve the M.T.A.? Experts Offer Five Ideas.
The agency that runs New York City’s subway and buses has fewer riders and shaky finances. Experts have ideas for addressing the problems.
Here are five ideas that experts say could help address the crisis:
Spend money to make money
Strike new union deals
Shore up the M.T.A.’s finances
Build better
And my favorite-
Make it free.
Some transportation experts want the M.T.A. to take cues from other cities that are considering free or drastically reduced transit fares.
They believe that everyone should have the right to ride at no cost, just as there is no charge to attend public school or to get police assistance. And supporters of the move think lawmakers should come up with a mix of steady revenue sources to pay for free transit.
“It makes absolutely perfect sense to incentivize in every way that we possibly can the use of mass transit and public transit,” said John Samuelsen, an M.T.A. board member and the international president of the Transport Workers Union. The potential benefits, Mr. Samuelsen added, include boosting the region’s economy, reducing vehicle congestion and making the system more resilient against catastrophic events such as the pandemic.
Mr. Samuelsen pointed to Kansas City, whose transit system is fare-free, and Boston, which has experimented with making some bus routes free. Last summer, the German government offered deep discounts on mass transit, selling a month’s travel ticket on all subways, buses, trams and regional lines for just 9 euros (at the time, $9.56 or less than four trips on the New York City subway at the current $2.75 fare).
The idea has supporters in New York City. As part of state budget negotiations, some lawmakers are pushing to phase in free bus service by fully subsidizing 10 routes across the city, two in each borough.
But any proposals to make transit free will face steep opposition, in part because the M.T.A. relies heavily on fare revenues.
(New York Times).
My other “songs” are 2) compactors in every building, to lessen trash - and rats, and 3) affordable housing - to end homelessness and in doing so, improve the quality of every New Yorker’s life.
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American Medical Association’s first gay president to take over at tumultuous time.
CHICAGO (AP) — The first openly gay person to lead the American Medical Association takes the reins at a fractious time for U.S. health care.
Transgender patients and those seeking abortion care face restrictions in many places. The medical judgment of physicians is being overridden by state laws. Disinformation is rampant. And the nation isn’t finished with COVID-19.
In the two decades since Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld first got involved with the AMA as young medical resident, the nation’s largest physicians’ group has tried to shed its image as a conservative self-interested trade association. While physician pocketbook issues remain a big focus, the AMA is also a powerful lobbying force for a range of public health issues.
Two years ago, the AMA won widespread praise for announcing a plan to dismantle structural racism within its ranks and the U.S. medical establishment. It has adopted policies that stress health equity and inclusiveness — moves that inspired critics to accuse it of “wokeness.”
At 44, Ehrenfeld will be among the AMA’s youngest presidents when he begins his one-year term on June 13. An anesthesiologist, Navy combat veteran and father of two young children, he spoke recently to The Associated Press about his background and new job. (Associated Press).
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