The Court End Of The Stick
February 10, 2022
The Good News
- Evidence Builds That US Omicron Wave Is Waning as Cases Fall (WSJ)
- Dolly Parton’s theme park will soon pay for employees to go to college (CNN)
“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.” – Maya Angelou
Getting Into The Race
After the 2018 midterms, the number of GOP women in the House dropped to 13, with the only Black Republican woman representative losing after Trump panned her. Two Black Republicans remained in Congress, both men: one Representative and one Senator. The 2022 midterm results will likely be very different. The GOP charge to flip the House is being led by women and people of color. House Republicans have laser-focused their recruitment efforts on candidates who can transform the makeup of a party pilloried for its overwhelming roster of white men.
Every Republican who flipped a Democratic House district in 2020 was a woman or person of color. GOP leaders want to replicate that success on a larger scale, and this could be the year it happens. Case in point: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and strategists from the top House Republican Super PAC spent two elections trying to lure John James – a Black West Point graduate, Army veteran-turned-businessman, and highly sought-after GOP recruit – to run for a Detroit-area congressional seat. Last week, they finally landed him. “John is a blue-chip recruit, and his candidacy effectively means Democrats can’t win this seat in 2022,” said the president of the GOP Super PAC involved in drafting James. “Getting these kinds of people not only defines the future of the party, but it also ensures that we are going to win these seats in 2022 … [and] be in an exceptionally good position to hold these seats for some time to come.”
Broadly speaking, there are more Republican women and Hispanics running for Congress than ever before. 253 women and 228 people of color have filed to run as Republicans for House seats. McCarthy is on a mission to diversify the party, which includes plans to open up donor pools to star candidates and help them clear primary fields. Monica De La Cruz is a McCarthy-backed candidate running in South Texas. She says the House minority leader “wants to show that our district and myself as a candidate are welcomed into the Republican Party, and they’re excited to have a Hispanic, female, Republican, small-business owner bilingual that lives on the border, that shares the conservative values.”
James already has name recognition in Michigan and a massive donor list, giving him a giant head start, while Democrats are still recruiting. Elsewhere, female, Black, and Hispanic GOP candidates are frontrunners to win several more open or swing seats in November. Besides De La Cruz, there is Wesley Hunt, a Black Army veteran also running in Texas; Army reservist Esther Joy King in Illinois; and Juan Ciscomani in Arizona. (NYT, Politico)
Up A Greek Without A Paddle
- Last week, Greece’s agriculture minister, Spilios Livanos, traveled to Sparta to announce compensation payments would be made to farmers who had suffered crop damage from frost. While in Sparta, Livanos met with the mayor and was caught on video laughing about how compensation payments for natural disasters can help win elections.
- Livanos was heard saying that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ conservative New Democracy party won an uphill election battle in 2007 “by taking bags (of money) to compensate” those affected by wildfires that had ravaged southern Greece weeks earlier, killing scores of people. The mayor himself had been a cabinet official when the New Democracy party was in government in 2004-2009. Mitsotakis became party leader in 2016 and wasn’t part of the 2004-2009 government.
- But he will be front and center in Greece’s next parliamentary election in 2023, so he didn’t appreciate what Livanos had to say. When Mitsotakis demanded an explanation from Livanos, the chagrined minister “admitted that he should have reacted differently,” and offered his resignation, which was accepted. (ABC)
Pope Asks For Forgiveness
- The German Catholic Church commissioned a German law firm to look into how cases of sexual abuse were handled in the Munich archdiocese between 1945 and 2019. Retired Pope Benedict XVI, 94, was the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who headed the archdiocese from 1977 to 1982.
- The law firm’s report faulted Benedict’s handling of four cases during his time as archbishop, accusing him of misconduct for having failed to restrict the ministry of the four priests even after they’d been convicted criminally. The report, released January 20, also faulted Benedict’s predecessors and successors, estimating there’d been at least 497 abuse victims over the decades and at least 235 suspected perpetrators.
- On Tuesday, Benedict asked forgiveness for any “grievous faults” in his handling of clergy sex abuse cases, but denied any personal or specific wrongdoing. Benedict’s lack of a personal apology or admission of guilt immediately riled sex abuse survivors, who said his response reflected the Catholic hierarchy’s “permanent” refusal to accept responsibility for the rape and sodomy of children by priests. (ABC News)
Additional World News
- ‘Everything is gone’: Madagascans face destitution in cyclone’s wake (Reuters)
- UAE National Council delegation in first visit to Israeli Knesset (Al Jazeera)
- US approves support deal with Taiwan for Patriot missiles (ABC)
- Haitian Prime Minister involved in planning the President’s assassination, says judge who oversaw case (CNN)
- In Philippines election, late dictator’s son aims to restore family pride (Reuters)
- The world is on fire and our leaders are failing, poll finds (Politico)
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All Virginia Business
- In 2021, Democrats who controlled Virginia’s General Assembly passed proposed constitutional amendments to let voters decide whether to remove legally-outdated language prohibiting gay marriage from the state Constitution and automatically restore voting rights of felons who’ve served their terms. To become voter referendums this fall, the measures needed to pass a second time, but now the Virginia House is narrowly controlled by Republicans, who defeated both measures in subcommittee on Tuesday morning.
- Similar measures are still alive in the Senate, but the House would need to reverse its position for them to succeed. Currently, Virginia’s governor has sole discretion to restore a felon’s voting and other civil rights, like serving on a jury or running for office. The voting rights resolution had wide-ranging outside support, but died without any discussion on the merits by Republicans on the subcommittee.
- The Supreme Court made Virginia’s gay marriage prohibition unconstitutional, but advocates for its removal said the language remains undignified and hurtful. Lobbyists for faith-based organizations argued against removing the language. (ABC News)
The Court End Of The Stick
- The Supreme Court has made its first decision dealing with the 2022 elections. On Monday, five of the Court’s six conservative justices allowed Alabama’s congressional redistricting map to remain in place while the legal challenge plays out, meaning the Republican-drawn map will be used for the state’s upcoming primary, and probably for the entire election cycle.
- In January, a federal district court found that the Alabama map likely violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it only includes one district where Black voters have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. The lower court had ordered a new map to be drawn, which could have led to Democrats gaining another seat in the House in the fall.
- Chief Justice John Roberts once again joined the Court’s three liberal justices in dissent. Roberts would have allowed the district court opinion to stand while the appeals process played out. SCOTUS will hear the full case next fall. (CNN)
Additional USA News
- Lawsuit accuses Harvard of ignoring sexual harassment by professor (Reuters)
- Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Harris, evacuated from a DC school following bomb threat (WaPo, $)
- Banker sentenced to year in prison in Manafort loan scheme (Politico)
- ‘Cheese is like heroin’: New York mayor raises eyebrows with drug comparison (Guardian)
- GOP lawmaker accuses Capitol Police of breaking into his office (Axios)
- Free Community College Is Off the Table, Jill Biden Says (NYT, $)
A New Policy
- Pornography websites in the U.K. could soon be legally required to verify the age of users on their sites to ensure they’re at least 18. The proposed new internet safety laws are part of the draft Online Safety Bill, which aims to give children better protection from explicit online material. The measures could mean watchers will be asked to prove they own a credit card, or confirm their age via a third-party service. Ofcom, the U.K.’s communications regulator, would be able to fine non-complying websites up to 10% of their global turnover, or block them from being accessible in the U.K. Website bosses who fail to cooperate might also be held criminally liable.
- Studies show that half of 11 to 13-year-olds have seen pornography at some point. Companies can decide how best to comply with the new rules, but Ofcom says firms shouldn’t process or store data beyond checking someone’s age. Because despite widespread use of age verification technology in sectors like online gambling, there are still fears it poses privacy risks. (A database of pornography users would certainly be a huge hacking target for blackmailers.) Advocates of preserving digital rights and freedoms say the new rules would benefit age verification companies while offering “little practical benefit for child safety, and much harm to people’s privacy.”
- As one privacy advocate said: “There is no indication that this proposal will protect people from tracking and profiling porn viewing.” There’s also no indication this new legislation does anything to prevent children from being physically and mentally exploited. In announcing the age verification plans, U.K.’s Digital Economy Minister said: “Parents deserve peace of mind that their children are protected online from seeing things no child should see.” (BBC)
Additional Reads
- Sprawling sponge gardens found deep beneath the Arctic sea ice (CNN)
- Astronomers discover a pair of young “twin” asteroids, barely older than the United States (Salon)
- Troy Kotsur is the first deaf man nominated for an acting Oscar (NPR)
- Alfa Romeo’s first plug-in hybrid crossover comes with an NFT (Ars Technica)
- Bitfinex hack: US authorities arrest a New York couple and seize $3.6 billion in stolen cryptocurrency (CNN)
- Indonesia’s tyre-bound crocodile finally freed after six years (Reuters)