Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's shining moment
This post was originally published on this site
We begin today with Harvard Law Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin writing for CNN that while Judge Jackson’s all but certain ascension to the United States Supreme Court is a cause for celebration, the nation’s educational institutions are failing to nurture many possible future SCOTUS justices.
During her confirmation hearings, Jackson acknowledged the dramatic changes in our country over the past 60 years that facilitated her own ascent. Without the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s ban on race- and sex-based discrimination in education and employment, Jackson’s chances of attaining the sterling educational and legal credentials that helped prepare her for a US Supreme Court nomination would have been slim to none. Even with the Civil Rights Act in place, it took years of lawsuits and protests to pry open the doors of predominantly White universities and elite sectors of the legal profession for Black Americans.
But while there is certainly cause to celebrate the change that Jackson’s confirmation to the court symbolizes, that celebration is not enough. We must also question whether American institutions are doing what they must to ensure that all students – including the many people of color and young women and girls who will be inspired by Jackson’s ascent – have a real chance to achieve their full potential.
Sadly, our educational institutions still fail to nurture the talents of many American children. State-mandated racial segregation and sex discrimination are illegal today. But the likelihood of success in American K-12 and post-secondary schools still relies heavily on factors beyond an individual’s control – often correlated with race and gender in ways that reinforce the effects of past, then-lawful discrimination.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe says that you can call the Senate vote to confirm Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court a lot of things but don’t dare call it bipartisanship.
Jackson becoming the Supreme Court’s 116th associate justice is a foregone conclusion. Yet when those final votes are counted, the Biden administration will tout as a victory that the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court was confirmed by a bipartisan vote. While true by a fragile sliver, it’s an empty flex for President Biden and his fellow Democrats.
This isn’t a boost for bipartisanship. What it represents is evidence of a party so poisoned by its own ideologies that most Republicans, including every GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, denied their support to the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in decades.[…]
Jackson, a longtime federal judge, is one of the most popular Supreme Court nominees in recent history. In a Gallup poll, 58 percent said the Senate should vote for her confirmation. After Republicans turned Jackson’s hearing last week into a conspiracy theory Twitter thread, 72 percent in a Marquette Law School national survey said they would vote for her if they were senators, up from 64 percent.[…]
So whatever you call this, don’t call it bipartisanship. That lets craven Republicans off the hook. They should instead be tarred by their own hypocrisy. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said there’s “no question” that Jackson is qualified for the high court, but he won’t vote to put her there. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska praised Jackson’s “impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law,” but he opposes her confirmation.
Jonathan Leader Maynard writes for JustSecurity limning the fine legal distinctions between “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocide.” all of which may be applicable to the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine.
What exactly do we know, at this stage, about the nature of the violence committed by Russian forces against Ukrainian civilians? As a scholar of genocide and armed conflict, I am wary of expressing absolute confidence in any claim about violence while it is still ongoing. When we are inside the “fog of war” it is extremely difficult to piece together a reliable picture of events occurring along combat fronts or in occupied territories. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that the Russian military has committed serious atrocity crimes in Ukraine involving both a) the indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, including via cluster munitions; and b) targeted killings and rapes of civilians by Russian forces. On the Ukrainian side, there is some evidence of much more limited law-of-war violations by Ukrainian troops such as the mistreatment of Russian prisoners of war, but Ukrainian authorities have denounced such violations, said any such actions must cease, and are currently investigating the allegations.
Contrary to the apologists for such abuses, these sorts of atrocities are not simply an inevitable part of war. Studies have shown that states directly target civilians in roughly 1/5 to 1/3 of all armed conflicts – an unacceptably high figure, but one which highlights how most states, most of the time, make serious attempts to respect the legal principles of distinction and non-combatant immunity.
Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall notes that the world is not at all unified on the question of what to do with regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
China, the world’s largest country by population, is the most visible example, trying to balance its interest in a “no limits” strategic alliance with Russia with not getting tarred by Russia’s bad acting. The issue of Taiwan is also central to the equation for China. But it’s not just China. Brazil has basically stayed on the sidelines, in part likely due to President Bolsonaro’s already pro-Russia stance. So has South Africa. Remember that South Africa is run by a party which still has among its old guard many who were either educated or trained in the Soviet Union. In recent years India has taken the first steps toward an alliance bringing together powers on either side of China as a counterbalance to China’s growth and ambitions — the so-called “Quad” of democratic states. But India too has been highly resistant to joining the condemnations and sanctions against Russia. In the case of India, the driver is at least in part the long military-to-military and weapons-sales relationship between the Soviet Union/Russia and India. Russia has also agreed to sell lots of oil to India at undermarket prices.
You’ll notice here that these are the so-called BRIC or BRICS countries. In each case there are particular drivers but the underlying and likely more driving factor is simply not wanting to get drawn into a squabble that looks to largely be about Europe and the United States. It’s not their fight and a unipolar world or one driven by the concerns of the U.S. and the EU isn’t in their interests.
Then there are the big oil producing states of the Persian Gulf. They are united with Russia in the OPEC+ group and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have both been using post-COVID inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to squeeze the United States to back their policies toward Yemen and Iran.
A 10-reporter team writes for Der Spiegel that Germany may have to prepare for a worse case scenario if supplies of natural gas from Russia are halted.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany has been facing a situation that had previously been considered unfathomable. Europe’s largest industrialized nation may soon have to ration its energy supplies, essentially throttling the economy. The gas is still flowing, but many are afraid they won’t be able to rely on it for much longer. At the latest since the Kremlin announced that Russia would only accept payment in rubles for its energy exports, there has been a mood of alarm among politicians and the business community. Revelations over the weekend that the Russian military may have committed ghastly war crimes in towns under its occupation have intensified that alarms and redoubled calls for a suspension of energy imports from Russia.
German Economics Minister Robert Habeck declared the early warning stage of the emergency plan. The step primarily aimed at speeding up preparations in government agencies and companies.
How well Germany manages this emergency will determine whether the country can defend its competitiveness – or lose hundreds of thousands of jobs, as leading trade unionists have warned in recent days.
Even Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post misses former President Barack Obama
The Obama years were filled with strife, controversy and partisanship. But looking back, it’s clear what will be remembered. It won’t be Sarah Palin’s infamous “death panels” myth or even the dreadful rollout of the Healthcare.gov website. What will matter are the things that helped Americans survive a financial crash (for example, saving the car industry and stabilizing the financial industry) and gain health-care coverage. Destruction and chaos might generate temporary fervor among voters, but it’s building something sustainable that defines a politician.
“We didn’t get everything we wanted,” Obama said at the White House event announcing an expansion of the Affordable Care Act. “That wasn’t a reason not to do it.” That seemed to be a message not only for members of his party still reeling from their failure to pass the gigantic Build Back Better agenda, but also voters. Big, complex problems are not solved perfectly, immediately and permanently. Expectations cannot be too high, or moments of incremental progress will become occasions for grief. […]
Obama also reminded the country of something fundamental yet often derided in these cynical and careerist times. “We’re not supposed to do this just to occupy a seat or to hang on to power,” he said. “We’re supposed to do this because it’s a making a difference in the lives of the people who sent us here.” Courage. Principle. These are foreign concepts to the entire GOP, with exceptions you can count on one hand.
Oh.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that we may not have had a “Great Resignation” after all.
For some time, many people, myself included, have been telling a story about this situation that goes by the name of the Great Resignation. That tale goes like this: The Covid pandemic caused many Americans to reconsider whether they really wanted or needed to keep working. Fear of infection or lack of child care kept some workers home, where they discovered that the financial rewards of their jobs weren’t enough to compensate for the costs of commuting and the unpleasantness of their work environment. Older workers, forced into unemployment, decided that they might as well take early retirement. And so on.
Well, when my information changes, I change my mind — a line often but dubiously attributed to John Maynard Keynes, but whatever. And the past few months of data have pretty much destroyed the Great Resignation narrative.
Have large numbers of Americans dropped out of the labor force — that is, they are neither working nor actively seeking work? To answer this question, you need to look at age-adjusted data; falling labor force participation because a growing number of Americans are over 65 isn’t meaningful in this context. So economists often look at the labor force participation of Americans in their prime working years: 25 to 54. And guess what? This participation rate has surged recently. It’s still slightly below its level on the eve of the pandemic, but it’s back to 2019 levels, which hardly looks like a Great Resignation…
David C. Grabowski, Marilyn Rantz, and Jasmine L. Travers of STATnews detail some proposals for improving the inadequate state of nursing home care in the United States.
About 1.3 million Americans live in the country’s 15,000 nursing homes, where they are cared for by roughly 3 million staff members. As we write this, nearly 170,000 nursing home residents are estimated to have died from Covid-19. Many, many more were isolated from family and friends during the 20-month lockdown. Bed sores, severe weight loss, depression, and mental and functional decline have spiked among nursing home residents. And nurses, certified nurse aides, and others who work in these facilities, putting their own lives at risk, have worked in the most challenging of conditions without adequate pay or support.
Sadly, the care of nursing home residents and support for those providing that care have been long-standing issues. As we heard from a daughter and caregiver of two parents with dementia who needed nursing home care, “The pandemic has lifted the veil on what has been an invisible social ill for decades.”
President Biden recommended several reforms for nursing homes during his State of the Union address. These included minimum staffing standards, increased oversight, and better financial transparency. Although these provide a start, much more comprehensive and system-level action is necessary to transform this care in the United States.
Finally today, Clare Watson writes for Nature that contracting a COVID-19 infection may increase one’s risk for contracting diabetes.
Al-Aly and Yan Xie, an epidemiologist also at the VA St Louis Healthcare System, looked at the medical records of more than 180,000 people who had survived for longer than a month after catching COVID-19. They compared these with records from two groups, each of which comprised around four million people without SARS-CoV-2 infection who had used the VA health-care system, either before or during the pandemic. The pair previously used a similar method to show that COVID-19 increases the risk of kidney disease3, heart failure and stroke4.
The latest analysis found that people who had had COVID-19 were about 40% more likely to develop diabetes up to a year later than were veterans in the control groups. That meant that for every 1,000 people studied in each group, roughly 13 more individuals in the COVID-19 group were diagnosed with diabetes. Almost all cases detected were type 2 diabetes, in which the body becomes resistant to or doesn’t produce enough insulin.
The chance of developing diabetes rose with increasing severity of COVID-19. People who were hospitalized or admitted to intensive care had roughly triple the risk compared with control individuals who did not have COVID-19.
Even people who had mild infections and no previous risk factors for diabetes had increased odds of developing the chronic condition, says Al-Aly. Of the people with COVID-19 who avoided hospitalization, an extra 8 people out of every 1,000 studied had developed diabetes a year later compared with people who were not infected. People with a high body-mass index, a measure of obesity — and a considerable risk factor for type 2 diabetes — had more than double the risk of developing diabetes after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Everyone have a great day!