April 17, 2024

Wednesday, April 17, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

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A Victory on Abortion.

– In effect. Ten months after the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act went into effect, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has finalized its enforcement of the law. The EEOC’s regulations were held up, unsurprisingly, by disagreement over abortion.

The PWFA passed as a bipartisan piece of legislation in 2022 promising to protect workers and their jobs during pregnancy. It guarantees accommodations like time off for medical appointments, bathroom breaks, permission to eat or drink on the job, and stools to sit on. When the act got to the EEOC, the commission included abortion as part of “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions,” language that dates back to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

That enraged some Republican lawmakers, who said the agency expanded the scope of the law beyond what Congress intended, and led to an active comment period, in which about 96,000 out of 100,000 public comments on the law mentioned abortion, according to Bloomberg Law. In practice, the AP reports, the most likely accommodation related to abortion would be time off for an appointment or recovery, which is not required to be paid time off. Nor are employers required to cover abortion via health insurance plans.

But after all that hubbub, the EEOC agreed on the terms of enforcing the law, and accommodations related to abortion are still included as part of its protections. An EEOC spokesperson said that the agency has interpreted “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” to include “the decision to have or not to have an abortion” since 1979—“through both Republican and Democratic administrations.”

The difference now, of course, is that the latest EEOC decision comes after the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

And yet the EEOC’s decision to stick with precedent is a rare common-sense victory for abortion rights these days, when headlines more often spotlight increasing restrictions. Abortion is a “related medical condition” to pregnancy and childbirth; the reversal of Roe doesn’t change that. And a law that guarantees job protections for pregnant people should also guarantee protections for people whose pregnancies end. (Emma Hinchliffe, The Broadsheet).

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Day two of Trump’s first criminal case.

New York Times -

Trump Criminal Trial Seats 7 Jurors, Adjourns Until Thursday.

“ 7 jurors have been chosen for the panel that will decide the first criminal trial of a former American president, as the crucial jury selection phase of the case against Donald J. Trump unexpectedly accelerated on Tuesday afternoon.”

Jonah Bromwich in the New York Times Reporting from the courthouse -

“Trump is leaving the courtroom and we are done for the day. Justice Merchan said that if jurors continue to be seated at this pace, opening arguments will likely begin Monday. Court will not be in session tomorrow, but will be back on Thursday.”

It’s a legal requirement that Trump must be in court in person.

One issue was - couldn't the oh so devoted father go to his son’s graduation? The answer is NO.

Journalist Jonathan Alter, in the Courtroom, reported this: “But now the courthouse rumor mill is aflame over whether Trump skipped Don Jr.’s, Eric’s, Ivanka’s, and Tiffany’s graduations. The betting is that he went to Ivanka’s from Choate but not the others.”

Do you think Trump even knows when Barron’s birthday is?

Judge Merchan ruled on this too.

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Will more than 350 January 6 rioters - and Trump - have charges dropped in June because of a Supreme Court verdict?

Supreme Court divided over key charge against Jan. 6 rioters and Trump.

The Supreme Court appeared deeply divided Tuesday over whether prosecutors improperly stretched federal law to charge hundreds of participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — a decision that will impact those rioters and, potentially, Donald Trump’s election interference trial in D.C.

The court’s conservatives, who make up a majority on the nine-member bench, appeared most skeptical of the government’s decision to chargeparticipants under a law that makes it a crime to obstruct or impede an official proceeding — in this case the joint session of Congress that convened to formally certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory.

Several, including Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr., expressed concern through a series of hypothetical scenarios about giving prosecutors broad power that they suggested would allow the government to target peaceful protesters, disruptive hecklers or someone who pulls a fire alarm to delay a vote in Congress.

“Are all of those federal felonies subject to 20 years in prison?” Gorsuch asked.

More than 350 people have been prosecuted under the statute, which was enacted after the exposure of massive fraud and destruction of documents during the collapse of the energy giant Enron and carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. More than 100 have been convicted under the statute, and received sentences well below the maximum penalty.

The court’s ruling has the potential to unwind those convictions and sentences and upend the charges still pending for other defendants.Three Jan. 6 defendants have already had their sentences reduced ahead of a decision by the Supreme Court.

The court’s decision could also further delay Trump’s already stalled trial for allegedly trying to remain in power after his 2020 defeat. Two of the four charges he faces are based on the obstruction statute, and he could move to have those charges dismissed if the Supreme Court rules for the rioters.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who was back in court after an unexplained absence Monday, repeatedly asked whether the Justice Department had ever used the obstruction statute against other violent protesters, suggesting that the government was engaging in selective prosecution.

“There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings. Has the government applied this provision to other protests in the past?” Thomas asked. Democratic lawmakers had urged the justice not to participate in the Jan. 6 case because of efforts by his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, to overturn Biden’s victory.

Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, defending the government, said she could not provide an example in which others had violently stormed a building to block an official proceeding, in part because “I’m not aware of that circumstance ever happening prior to Jan. 6.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed to reinforce that point when she later said: “We’ve never had a situation before where there’s been a situation like this with people attempting to stop a proceeding violently. So I’m not sure what a lack of history proves.”

Much of the discussion Tuesday centered on how to properly interpret the text of a statute in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed by Congress in 2002, after the Enron scandal. The meaning of the word “otherwise” appeared key as the justices discussed how narrowly or broadly prosecutors can apply the statute.

The law applies to anyone who “corruptly — (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or (2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”

Prelogar told the justices that the second clause should be read as a “catchall” that prohibits unanticipated methods of impeding an official proceeding — like occupying the Capitol building and forcing the suspension of Congress’s joint session certifying the election results. The word “otherwise” means “in a different manner,” she said.

Only two justices — Elena Kagan and Sotomayor — seemed to fully embrace the Justice Department’s position. Kagan said Congress intentionally used broad language as a backstop for other potential types of obstruction.

Sotomayor agreed, suggesting that it was a straightforward question: “I don’t see why that’s not the backstop that Congress would have intended, and it’s the language it used.”

The case was brought by Joseph W. Fischer, an off-duty Pennsylvania police officer who attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally. Fischer’s trial was put on hold while he challenged the decision to charge him with obstructing Congress — one of several counts he faces, including assaulting a federal officer in the police line outside the Capitol.

A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the charge, and he appealed to the Supreme Court.

In arguing the case, known as Fischer vs. U.S., lawyer Jeffrey T. Green said the two sections of the statute must be read together, and urged the court to reject the government’s broad interpretation of the statute used to charge his client. The obstruction measure is all about preserving the availability of evidence, he argued, as well as Congress’s interest in protecting the integrity of an investigation or other official proceeding.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. seemed to agree, suggesting that the second section of the statute is defined by what precedes it and cannot be read on its own. He referred Prelogar to a unanimous opinion released by the court Friday and authored by Roberts. That decision, in a case involving workers’ rights and arbitration, restated the principle that more general “catchall” terms are “controlled and defined by reference to the terms that precede it.”

“You can’t just tack it on and say, ‘look at it as if it’s standing alone,’ because it’s not,” Roberts told Prelogar, referring to the government’s broader use of the law.

Two other justices, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, seemed interested in limiting the ways in which the government can use the statute so that it would apply only to evidence-related obstruction, but without automatically derailing hundreds of Jan. 6 cases.

Barrett asked Fischer’s lawyer whether prosecutors could try to prove his client did interfere with evidence by trying to prevent electoral vote certificates from being counted at the desk of Vice President MikePence.

What if, Barrett suggested, “the goal was to shut down the proceeding and therefore interfere with the evidence reaching the vice president.”

Green acknowledged it’s a “closer” question, but insisted that Congress was prohibiting only altering documents or other evidence, not merely delaying their dissemination.

Although Trump’s name was not mentioned once during oral argument, the obstruction charges against the former president are based in part on allegations that he schemed with others to submit to Congress slates of phony electors from swing states and to get lawmakers to toss out lawful ballots. (The Washington Post).

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Christine Blasey Ford has written a memoir.

Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again.

Her new memoir doubles as a modern-day horror story.

I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified,” Christine Blasey Ford said in the fall of 2018, introducing herself to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a television audience of millions. Early in One Way Back, the memoir Ford has written about her testimony, its origin, and its aftermath, she repeats the line. She feels that terror again, she writes. She is afraid of having her words taken out of context, of being a public figure, of being misunderstood. “Stepping back into the spotlight comes with an infinite number of things to worry about,” Ford notes, before returning to the story at hand. The moment is brief, but remarkable all the same: Rare is the writer who will confess to fearing her own book.

Memoirs like One Way Back are sometimes treated as justice by another means: books that step in where accountability has proved elusive—­correcting the record, filling in the blanks, and restoring a narrative to its rightful owner. One Way Back, more than five years in the making, is partly that kind of reclamation. Ford’s story, for many Americans, began and ended on the day of her testimony: the day when she shared details of an attack at a house party in 1982—an assault committed, she alleged, by Brett Kava­naugh, then a Supreme Court nominee. The memoir corrects the story by expanding it, placing the testimony in the broader context of Ford’s life and detailing what came later. And it rescues its author, in the process, from the confines of iconography. Ford the narrator is quirky and insightful and prone to interrupting herself with long digressions (into psychological theories, the radness of Metallica, the mechanics of surfing, the ecosystemic importance of kelp forests). She lets her idiosyncrasy loose on the page. But Ford knows better than most the toll that telling one’s story can take.

Kavanaugh, who denied Ford’s allegations, was confirmed to the Supreme Court by a two-vote margin on October 6, 2018—a year and a day after The New York Times published the investigation about Harvey Weinstein that helped inspire #MeToo’s growth into a mass movement. This was a resonant coincidence. Over the course of that year, countless people had put their wounds into words, trusting that the stories they told could be tools of justice. They wanted to be heard. They asked to be believed. They practiced a civic form of faith. What they did not anticipate—what they should not have needed to anticipate—was the caveat that has revealed itself in the long years since: Stories may be believed, and still ignored.

Ford’s own story, in many ways, was an exception to #MeToo’s rule. She was listened to. She was, to a lesser extent, heard. Half a decade later, though, her claim rests in the same in-between space where the claims of many others do: It lingers, alleged but never litigated—its airing cut short when Kavanaugh was confirmed. One Way Back channels the frustrations of that abridgment. But the book also details Ford’s life after the confirmation: the death threats, the upheaval, the backlash. As her story goes on, its testimony comes to read as an indictment—not of one person, but of a form of politics that sees stories as weapons in an endless war. For her, the personal unexpectedly became political, and then the political proved to be inescapable. Ford, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, is used to making sense of her experience by naming it. The intervening years, though, have resisted that kind of therapeutic clarity. So does, to its credit, the memoir itself. Closure, in Ford’s story as in so many others, is a relief that never comes.

Ford grew up near Washington, D.C., among gated houses and country clubs and people who treated politics as their business and their birthright. She left as soon as she could (college in North Carolina, grad school in Southern California, then family and home and work in Northern California). She taught at Stanford. She spent her free time surfing. She followed politics in the generalized way that most Americans do. In the summer of 2018, though, Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, and Kavanaugh’s name was in the news, and the night lodged somewhere in her memory—receding and recurring and receding again over the years—returned. Ford realized, to her surprise, that her childhood field trips to marbled monuments had stayed with her: She had retained a sense of civic duty.

“Let me be clear: This is not a political book,” Ford writes early in the memoir, and you could read the disclaimer in many ways—as an attempt to distinguish between partisan politics and a broader form of civic engagement; as a defense against long-standing charges that she is a pawn of the Democratic Party; as an effort to set One Way Back apart from other Trump-era memoirs. But that disclaimer, its phrasing right out of the career politician’s playbook, also distills one of the book’s core tensions: Politics, in the memoir, encroaches on everything else. Ford does not want it to encroach on her story. Ford came forward in the first place, she suggests, not as an activist, or even necessarily as a feminist. She came forward as a scientist. She had a piece of evidence to share, and believed that those assessing Kava­naugh’s fitness for office would be glad to have it. “I thought that if the people on the committee had taken this very esteemed job in public service, they wanted to do the right thing,” Ford writes. “I thought I could save Trump the embarrassment of choosing an unviable candidate.”

“Hold for laughs,” she writes, referring to the woman who believed politics to be public service and Donald Trump to be capable of embarrassment. But Ford also conveys pride in the woman she was—an idealist who, in her idealism, was both mistaken and correct.

Ford decided to relay her claim in July 2018, and spent the dizzying weeks until late September trying, and failing, to be heard. She reached out to politicians and journalists, telling them what she could remember of the party that night 36 years earlier: the scene in the house; the boy on top of her, groping, laughing, so drunk that she feared he might kill her by accident; the bathing suit she wore under her clothes. She was not raped, she repeatedly clarified, but assaulted. Ford describes the politicians she confided in, on the whole, as sympathetic but hesitant. They listened, and their aides took very good notes, and Ford wasn’t quite sure what they did after that.

She was not fully aware of the politics of the matter: Her story was a grenade that nobody wanted to be holding when it exploded. She simply knew that her story was not turning into action, and she was slightly baffled by the delay. And the politicians, she implies, didn’t know what to do with her. They wanted to know why she was coming forward—why now, why at all. “Civic duty,” in partisan politics, is an explanation that raises doubts.

In relating all of this, Ford is asking readers to accept what the politicians, in her description, could not: that she would do something simply because she considered it the right thing. Authorship may have an authoritarian edge—the writer includes and excludes, edits and spins, creating a story that is an act of will—but it brings vulnerability, too. Every testimony, whether delivered to the Senate or to readers, will confront audiences that double as judges. And American audiences tend to treat earnestness itself as cause for suspicion.

Ford the memoirist faces the same challenges that Ford the witness did. To tell her story—to have that story believed—she has to sell herself as the storyteller. She has to deliver a testimony that serves, inevitably, as self-defense too. No wonder Ford regards her book with fear. Even before she testified, One Way Back suggests, Ford lost hold of her story. She had planned to stay anonymous; instead, in September, her name became public. (Five years later, she remains unsure of who leaked her identity and changed her life.) Then the smear campaign started, and the death threats began. She did not realize that her testimony would be televised, she writes, half-acknowledging her naivete, until she was making her way to the Senate chamber.

And she did not realize that, in the testimony itself, she had brought data to a gunfight. The professor had prepared for the occasion as if it was a lecture, marshaling details and context, aiming for clarity. Kava­naugh spoke after Ford, and the gulf between the two testimonies was, in retrospect, an omen. She offered evidence. He offered grievance. She spoke science. He spoke politics. She was piecing together fragments of a story, parts of which she had forgotten. He was controlling the narrative.

ith kava­naugh’s confirmation, Ford expected to move on as the news cycle did. But although coverage tapered off, the smears continued. In mid-­September, after her name had become widely known, Ford—along with her husband, Russell, and their two adolescent sons—had moved out of their house. “Hotel arrest,” as Ford calls it, was a safety precaution made necessary by the threats, and made possible, in part, by a GoFundMe campaign that an anonymous donor started. It was a surreal blend of luxury and fear: extreme isolation, ongoing uncertainty, days’ worth of room-service cheeseburgers.

And the strangeness extended beyond the Senate vote. Ford could not return home. She could not return to work. She could not go out in public without protection. The media attention trained on her friends and family in the lead-up to the testimony—and the partisan cast of the event—had strained some of her relationships, and cost her some others. The fear that had been acute became chronic. She entered another phase, “hibernation.”

By this point, the reader has learned enough about Ford to understand why the precautions would have seemed like punishments. She is rebellious by nature. She is curious by profession. She is prone to overthinking. And there she was, surviving but not fully living, in a confinement made more confusing because it was punctuated with kindness—and made more frustrating because it refused to end. Earlier in the memoir, Ford describes the relief she felt when she assumed that the whistleblower chapter of her life was behind her. “I did it,” she thought to herself, after her testimony’s opening statement. “Hardest part is over.” The book is full of lines like that—false endings, further evidence of Ford’s naivete—and they do not merely foreshadow the hardship to come. They turn a memoir, at junctures, into a horror story. Just when the heroine thinks she has escaped, she hears the thudding footsteps once more.

As Ford’s story goes on, those moments of revoked catharsis condition the reader to do what Ford started to do: treat the promise of resolution with suspicion. Soon the scientist was struggling to diagnose her own situation. She spent a stretch in a fog that she calls her “gray blanket era.” She talks about life in the “abyss.” She considered moving (to a small town where she could “teach at a community college, and listen to grunge music all day”). She flailed for a time, and her book flails with her.

Ford is aware, she notes, that people would prefer a tidier story, a more hopeful one. Audiences are happy to consume accounts of other people’s pain; they tend to expect, though, that the storytellers will consider it their role to guide them to an end. But Ford cannot. One Way Back is a title derived from surfing—a sport that begins in freedom and ends in a foreclosure of options. Once you’ve paddled out past the break—­once you’ve fought to reach the calm of the open ocean—­you have only one way to get back to land: through the waves, either riding them or caught within them. We watch as Ford, for a period, gets pummeled so regularly that she seems to lose her bearings. She is getting sadder. She is, perhaps worse, becoming cynical. Whether she can even believe in a way back isn’t clear.

Ford the former idealist finds respite, briefly, in the formulaic, accusatory stories of partisan discourse. The scientist explains the other side as “evil.” She toggles between anger and despair, wanting to hope that things will get better, but suspecting all the while that hope might be a delusion. She talks the endemic talk of memoir as a way to control the narrative. The woman who always looked for the biggest waves—and who once dared to briefly try piloting a small plane (despite a deep fear of flying)—seems, in those moments, to be unmoored. Many people she encountered earlier in the memoir saw idealism as a form of weakness. Now she seems at risk of believing them.

One Way Back is proof that Ford has emerged from the abyss, but what makes her account unusual and valuable is the way it refuses the comfort of firm ground. The psychologist, by the end of the book, might offer closure. The scientist might offer conclusions. The author might offer catharsis. But Ford can offer none of those. Instead, she offers a model of resilience.

Her predicament is singular, but has become a familiar one. Readers, too, might have struggled against cynicism. Readers, too, might have believed that their optimism was a virtue—only to be left wondering whether they had been foolish or betrayed. The waves keep coming. They have their own small currents. They can force you forward; they can pull you back. They can propel and impede you at the same time. The only thing to do in the tumult, Ford suggests, is keep aiming for the shore. (Megan Garber, The Atlantic).

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Today, the President of Columbia University will testify before the House Committee of Education.

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik: What I Plan to Tell Congress Tomorrow.

Antisemitism and calls for genocide have no place at a university. My priority has been the safety and security of our community, but that leaves plenty of room for robust disagreement and debate.

Minouche Shafik receives an honorary degree during a Columbia University commencement ceremony in May 2023. She became president of the university on July 1, 2023.

Last December, three of my peers testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about antisemitism on university campuses. Tomorrow I will have the opportunity to appear before the same committee and share what we have learned as we battle this ancient hatred at Columbia University.

Oct. 7 was a day, like Sept. 11, 2001, that changed the world. None of us anticipated the horrific Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, nor the impact of those events across universities like Columbia and all of American society. The committee before which I will testify tomorrow is itself a diverse body, representing the broad spectrum of views that makes America unique in its tolerance of—and pride in—rigorous debate. That makes it not unlike a university, and it is my hope that we can begin to find common ground in finding solutions to antisemitism—not just to make college campuses safer and more welcoming to Jewish students, but for the sake of our democracy.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, I have spent the most of my time addressing its aftershocks. It is hard to describe how difficult this has been, especially on a large, diverse urban campus with students from all over the world and a long tradition of political activism.

For the thousands of Jewish and Israeli members of our community, the attack had a deep personal impact. Many knew people who had been killed or taken hostage. Indeed, to many in our community, Israel’s very survival appeared to be at stake. At the same time, for other members of our community, many of whom also have direct ties to the region, Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza were part of a larger story of Palestinian displacement, as well as a continuing and escalating humanitarian catastrophe. Not surprisingly, passions ran deep, demonstrations erupted, feelings were hurt, some members of our community were frightened and many more were concerned.

As president of the university, my immediate responsibility was to ensure the physical safety and security of our community. We were for the most part successful in that respect. Most of our students, faculty and staff understood this priority, welcomed it and were crucial partners in helping us keep our campus safe.

A more complicated issue was the conflict between the free-speech rights of pro-Palestinian protesters and the impact that these protests were having on our Jewish students and their supporters. Some things that were said at those protests and on social media were profoundly unsettling and frightening. Trying to reconcile the speech rights of one part of our community with the rights of another part of our community to live in a supportive environment or at least an environment free of fear, harassment and discrimination, has been the central challenge at our university and on campuses across the country.

This challenge raised unprecedented questions: Who could demonstrate? Where? When? What kinds of speech were protected and what kinds were not? What rules were being violated? What disciplinary procedures were needed and what actions did the circumstances warrant? The answers were not always easy, and at times we were simultaneously implementing new policies and modifying existing ones. Six months later, we have learned, sometimes the hard way, several important lessons that should help us better address these questions going forward.

First, it is important to recognize that, by and large, we have not been dealing with two “warring camps” in this debate. Contrary to the depiction we have seen on social media, most of the people protesting do so from a place of genuine political disagreement, not from personal hatred or bias or support for terrorism. Their passion, as long as it doesn’t cross the line into threats, discrimination or harassment, should be protected speech on our campus, especially if it reflects diplomatic, political, historical or policy beliefs. Indeed, debating these kinds of issues, even though they may be discomforting to some, is an essential part of what a university should be about.

At the same time, while disagreement and debate are to be welcomed at a university, that should happen within specific parameters. Calling for the genocide of a people—whether they are Israelis or Palestinians, Jews, Muslims or anyone else—has no place in a university community. Such words are outside the bounds of legitimate debate and unimaginably harmful. No cause is so important as to justify threatening annihilation to anyone. There has to be a better way to make an argument.

Second, while there may be some easy cases, drawing the line between permissible and impermissible campus speech is enormously difficult. The U.S. Supreme Court has struggled for more than two centuries to define the limits of free speech under the First Amendment, and that struggle continues. Don’t expect universities to figure it out overnight. When such fundamental issues are at stake, we need to think hard about where we set the boundaries, and we are doing precisely that.

In thinking about these boundaries of permissible speech, one idea that we have adopted at Columbia is to define a designated space for protests. This approach allows for fewer limits on speech—usually a desirable value at a university—because those who don’t want to hear what is being said need not listen. It also means that the core functions of the university—teaching and learning, research in libraries and labs—can continue uninterrupted.

Third, it is essential to remember that universities and their presidents aren’t politicians. To the extent that we are present in the public conversation, it should be more as constructive facilitators, not commentators. My own view is that official university statements should be limited to issues that speak directly to life on campus. The university should return to its core mission of fostering a range of perspectives and the scholarship, discoveries and good citizenship that flow from it. At the same time, students and faculty should feel unconstrained in developing their own opinions.

Fourth, universities are communities, and we should become models for how people grow and thrive when they live side by side with others who are different. The last half-century has seen groups previously excluded from the academy pouring in—women, Black people, Jews, Muslims and many more. It is a great thing for higher education to reflect society and for groups that have been marginalized or excluded to be welcomed. But in responding to this positive shift, I fear that we may have underinvested in the many things that we share and in the common human experiences that bind us together.

Despite the intense upheaval of the last six months, this larger truth should not be lost. Antisemitism has been with us for thousands of years, and we must forcefully and relentlessly reject its current resurgence. Not only is this bias intolerable in its own right, but as the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned, “Antisemitism is always an early warning sign of a dangerous dysfunction within a culture because the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.” It is no accident that antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and discrimination against sexual identity often coexist.

It is not the responsibility of Jewish people to eradicate antisemitism. That is a job for all of us. We must urgently and relentlessly fight this terrible form of hate. Universities, the great purveyors of education, must be leaders in fighting all forms of discrimination. That means shifting our focus from slogans toward education, community, compassion and human decency so that we can shape citizens who will become exemplars of a better society. (Minouche Shafik, President of Columbia University, in WSJ).

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Meet Lisa Blatt.

Nice to know another lawyer like Neal Katyal who fights the good fight.

Nearing 50 Supreme Court arguments in, lawyer Lisa Blatt keeps winning.

WASHINGTON (AP) — No woman has appeared more often before the Supreme Court than Lisa Blatt, who will make her 50th argument this month.

No lawyer, male or female, has done it with quite the same mix of humor, passion and style. And her win-loss record isn’t bad, either: 40-6, with two cases yet to be decided.

She elicits laughs and the occasional sharp response from the justices, who seem to enjoy Blatt’s presentations as much as they respect her legal acumen.

When Blatt joked that Justice Samuel Alito was being her “enforcer” with a friendly question in a case about a claimed retaliatory arrest that was argued last month, the justice said, “I’m not trying to be your enforcer by any means. ... You don’t need one, by any means.”

The Supreme Court’s guide for lawyers who are arguing before the justices essentially warns against trying to emulate Blatt.

“Attempts at humor usually fall flat. The same is true of attempts at familiarity,” the guide advises. “Avoid emotional oration and loud, impassioned pleas. A well-reasoned and logical presentation without resort to histrionics is easier for listeners to comprehend.”

She can be strikingly informal, in one case referring to the highest court in the land as “you guys.” She is often blunt, once telling Justice Elena Kagan that her question was factually and fundamentally wrong. She has resorted to the personal, in one case where she felt her Harvard-educated opponent was being condescending. “I didn’t go to a fancy law school, but I’m very confident in my representation of the case law,” the University of Texas graduate said.

“Texas is a fine law school,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, just as the arguments were ending and before the court handed Blatt a unanimous win.

Blatt also can be hyperbolic, cautioning last year that a decision against her client, a Turkish bank, would be “borderline, you know, cataclysmic.” A ruling that recognized a large swath of Oklahoma as tribal land would have “earth-shattering” consequences, she said in 2018. The justices risked causing “madness, confusion, and chaos” if they ruled for a high school student who was suspended from the cheerleading squad over a vulgar social media post.

Clients keep hiring her and the court keeps agreeing to hear her cases, said Paul Clement, Blatt’s friend and onetime boss at the Justice Department.

“She just has this kind of inimitable style, and she’s very confident in her own style and the justices love it,” said Clement, who has argued more than 100 times at the Supreme Court. Only a dozen active lawyers who have made as many as 50 arguments.

Blatt, 59, makes no apologies.

“Oral argument is like truth serum. Under the stress of their questioning, you can’t become someone you aren’t,” she said in an email. “I do think I am very direct but at bottom, my style reflects the fact that I want to win and the Court to step into the shoes of the party I am representing.”

She heads the Supreme Court and appellate practice at the Williams and Connolly law firm, where her husband also is a partner. They have two children in law school. Blatt has argued just over half her high court cases in private practice, the rest as a Justice Department lawyer.

When she made her first appearance at the court in December 1996 at the age of 31, there were two women on the court, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ginsburg. Blatt had been a clerk for Ginsburg on the federal appeals court in Washington.

Today, four of the nine justices are women, a record. The percentage of women who argue before them is lower, though the number has jumped markedly this term. Since October, just over one-third of the arguments were made by women, compared with under one-quarter of arguments the year before.

Blatt is one of only a handful of women in private practice who regularly argue at the Supreme Court and she has called out the lack of diversity. Last term, two women in her firm argued three cases between them and her onetime partner Charles McCloud is one of the few Black men who have argued at the court in recent years. McCloud now works for the Justice Department.

She also courted controversy in 2018, when as a self-described “liberal Democrat and feminist,” Blatt publicly backed Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. She called him “the best choice that liberals could reasonably hope for” at a time when Republicans controlled the Senate and the White House. Blatt testified before college professor Christine Blasey Ford came forward with the explosive allegation that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her while they were in high school. Kavanaugh has denied any misconduct.

Opponents of Kavanaugh’s confirmation complained that Blatt spoke up because she often represents wealthy clients at the Supreme Court. In a tweet at the time, Brian Fallon, then with the progressive judicial reform group Demand Justice, wrote that Blatt puts “corporate interests ahead of progressive causes.”

Corporate clients are an important part of Blatt’s business and include Google, Atlantic Richfield Co., Bank of America and Starbucks. She is representing the coffee chain in what will be her 50th argument in a dispute with the National Labor Relations Board over efforts by workers to unionize at a store in Memphis, Tennessee.

On Monday, Blatt is representing James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, who is appealing his bribery conviction. Other clients include Lynn Goldsmith, the photographer who won a copyright fight involving an Andy Warhol image of the singer Prince, and state and local government officials.

The case she argued last month that prompted the “enforcer” exchange with Alito involved a city council member in the San Antonio suburb of Castle Hills, Texas, who contends she was arrested on a trumped-up charge because she spoke up against the mayor and his allies.

Blatt, representing the mayor, said it would be easy to get away with crimes if the court rules against the mayor.

“I mean, I really would advise every criminal to put a, you know, political bumper sticker on their car,” she said, to laughter.

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Once more on Caitlin Clark and Women’s Basketball.

Hoda and Jenna share upset over Caitlin Clark's WNBA rookie salary: ‘The gap is so jarring.’

Count Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager among the many people upset by the low salary Caitlin Clark will earn in the WNBA.

Clark, the former University of Iowa sensation who took her team to back-to-back NCAA Tournament championship games, was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 WNBA draft by the Indiana Fever on April 15.

Her four-year contract is worth a total of $338,056, per Spotrac, a site that tracks player contracts. In 2024, she’ll earn $76,535. In 2025, it’s $78,066 and in 2026, it’s $85,873. In 2027, she has an option for $97,582.

Hoda was gobsmacked when she learned what Clark’s salary will be.

“I saw it and I was like, ‘This can’t be right,’” she said April 16 on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna.

Victor Wembanyama, who was the No. 1 pick in last year’s NBA draft, is playing under a four-year, $55 million contract in which he earned $12.1 million in his first season, according to Spotrac.

Hoda mentioned the top pick in the NBA draft gets $10 million, saying that the difference between men and women is frustrating.

Caitlin Clark affects even the WNBA Draft.

The woman with her is Cathy Engelbart, Commissioner of the WNBA.

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