In an interview with Politico (5/19), Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) attempted to deflect attention from his state’s abysmal maternal mortality rate by blaming Black people for the barriers and systemic issues that have led to, well, high mortality rates among Black mothers.
“About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear,” Cassidy said in an interview for the Harvard Chan School of Public Health series Public Health on the Brink. “Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.”
“For whatever reason? Hmm, what might those reasons be? Because Sen. Cassidy appears to believe it’s a big … mystery,” Aldous Pennyfarthing noted at DailyKos (5/21).
‘Well, for one thing, there are the socioeconomic disparities that greatly affect access to prenatal health care and health care in general, especially in this country. These disparities contribute immensely to worse outcomes. And the key driver of these disparities is—you guessed it—Republican politicians like Bill Cassidy,” who also happens to be a physician.
Michelle Williams, the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health, laid out numerous reasons for these terrible outcomes, in response to Cassidy’s statement. And those causes go well beyond a simple lack of access to proper care:
“Another well-documented driver of disparities: During childbirth and recovery, as in other aspects of medical care, Black women have far too often been dismissed as complainers when they seek help for symptoms that can presage serious complications, such as shortness of breath or swelling legs. It happened even to Serena Williams.
“Researchers have also begun to document the pernicious ‘weathering’ effects of chronic stress among people of color. This stress, often stemming from both structural racism and individual acts of discrimination, has a corrosive effect on health over time and can affect multiple body systems, even in relatively young and otherwise healthy women. Pregnancy can magnify the impacts of weathering and lead to serious complications.”
Of course, Cassidy’s “reasoning” is pretty noxious if you stop to think about what he’s saying—to White people, that is: “Hey, don’t worry about it. You’re doing just fine,” Pennyfarthing noted.
Williams again:
“We have a crisis in maternal mortality in this country, and it’s a crisis of terrifying proportions for women of color. This is not a moment to quibble about how states are ranked. It’s not a moment to correct for race. It’s a moment to step up and declare that our rate of maternal mortality in the United States is shameful and unacceptable. It’s a moment to assert that Louisiana—precisely because it has such a large population of Black women—must seize a leadership role in making pregnancy and childbirth safer for all.”
Of course, delving into the real reasons for these widely divergent outcomes is hard—which is why Cassidy seems content to simply throw up his hands and say “whatevs.” But while these problems may seem intractable, that perception only exists because we’ve spent so many years shrugging our shoulders and ignoring our history. So let’s ignore it even harder, shall we?
Fortunately, not everyone in Louisiana is as benighted as Cassidy.
Veronica Gillispie-Bell, the medical director of Louisiana’s Perinatal Quality Collaborative and Pregnancy Associated Mortality Review, noted that “race is a social construct, it is not a biological condition,” and poorer outcomes are always going to come down to racism whether we want to admit it or not.
“There’s two things that are always going to drive the disparities. It’s going to be systemic racism — the historical processes and policies that have been put in place that disenfranchise Black and brown people — and then the other part of that is going to be implicit bias,” said Gillispie-Bell. “Black and brown individuals don’t always get the same quality of health care in the health care system as their white counterparts.”
REPUBLICANS BROUGHT PARTISAN ATTACKS TO FORMULA CRISIS. BIDEN BROUGHT A CARGO PLANE WITH 35 TONS OF FORMULA. The Biden administration’s push to increase the supply of baby formula is seeing real results as a military C-17 cargo plane brought 132 pallets containing 35 tons of formula to Indianapolis, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (5/22). The formula, which came from Switzerland via Germany, is a specialized hypoallergenic type that will be distributed to medical providers to get to the babies and toddlers who need it most. It will be enough to feed 9,000 babies and 18,000 toddlers for a week. Another military flight with 114 pallets of hypoallergenic formula is expected in the coming days.
Additionally, under President Joe Biden’s invocation of the Defense Production Act, two authorizations were issued allowing formula makers to get priority access to the ingredients and equipment they need.
The Biden administration’s efforts both to get specialized formula to babies who can’t tolerate regular cow’s milk-based products and to increase the supply being manufactured in the US stand in contrast to the Republican response to the baby formula shortage, which has been a combination of partisan attacks and voting against measures to ease the shortage.
On May 18, 192 House Republicans voted against a bill to provide $28 million to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to increase inspection staff—remember that a key reason for the shortage was concerns about contamination forcing the closure of a major formula plant—as well as preventing the sale of fraudulent formula during the crisis and improving data collection. Just 12 Republicans voted for the bill. Nine House Republicans also voted against a bill to ensure that people on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) can access formula, given a system where states contract with specific formula companies and if those brands are out of stock, WIC recipients cannot get anything else.
The WIC waiver bill did pass the Senate by unanimous consent on May 19, so there are nine House Republicans who are even worse than Republicans senators like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. [They are Reps. Thomas Massie (KY), Paul Gosar (AZ), Chip Roy (TX), Andy Biggs (AZ), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Lauren Boebert (CO), Clay Higgins (LA), Matt Gaetz (FL), Louie Gohmert (TX).]
But prospects for the FDA funding to pass the Senate are dim.
In addition to voting against funding to tackle the crisis, Republicans have used the formula shortage for vile partisan attacks basically calling for the Biden administration to starve immigrant babies in US custody. Republican after Republican howled in outrage that border facilities had some formula on hand for migrant babies detained after being brought across the border—as is required by a long-standing legal settlement that calls for the government to offer people in its custody basic humane treatment, including feeding them. Which, for babies, means formula. For those who are not breastfed, no other food will do. Even Donald Trump abided by this requirement, with a 2020 Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report on how the federal government was handling migrants arriving at the border in 2019 including the line, “We also observed all Border Patrol stations had food, snacks, juice, and infant formula available for children.”
Now that formula is in the headlines, though, Republicans used it as a political tool to demand that the US government starve immigrant babies.
NEARLY 90,000 SMALL BUSINESSES IN US ARE AT RISK OF CLOSING AFTER REPUBLICANS KILL MAIN STREET RELIEF BILL. Advocates for independently-owned businesses warned that restaurants, gyms, and other Main Street businesses across the US will be forced to close in the coming months after Republicans in the Senate (5/19) blocked a $48 billion package to provide relief to owners who have struggled to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic, Julia Conley noted at CommonDreams (5/20).
The bipartisan Small Business COVID Relief Act (S. 4008), which was meant to replenish the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF) passed last year, was cosponsored by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), but still failed to get more than five Republican senators to support it.
The vast majority of GOP lawmakers claimed that helping locally-owned restaurants and bars to stay open and continue employing people in their communities would worsen inflation and contribute to the deficit, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) saying on the Senate floor that “dumping more money in the economy is simply pouring $5-a-gallon gas on an already out-of-control fire.”
As a result, said Erika Polmar of the Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC), “we estimate more than half of the 177,300 restaurants waiting for an RRF grant will close in the next few months.”
The bill would have given $40 billion to independent restaurants left out of the restaurant relief program which passed last year but ran out of funds in just three weeks, with only one in three applicants receiving grants.
“Local restaurants across the country expected help but the Senate couldn’t finish the job,” said Polmar. “Neighborhood restaurants nationwide have held out hope for this program, selling their homes, cashing out retirement funds, or taking personal loans in an effort to keep their employees working.”
The RRF bill would also have given $2 billion for gyms and fitness centers, $2 billion for live event companies, $2 billion for bus and ferry operators, $1.4 billion for companies near border crossings which have shut down during the pandemic, and $500 million for minor league sports teams.
Along with Wicker, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) were the only Republicans who joined Democrats in voting for the bill. The Democrats needed at least 10 Republicans to support the legislation to reach 60 votes required by the legislative filibuster.
SUPREME COURT ROLLS BACK RIGHT TO COMPETENT COUNSEL. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution is the latest casualty of a rogue US Supreme Court, with the radical extremists deciding that no, not everyone really is entitled to competent legal defense and once again overturning Supreme Court precedent to do it. The court, 6-3, ruled (5/23) that federal judges cannot hear new evidence from death row inmates arguing that their state-appointed lawyers did not provide constitutionally adequate defense, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (5/23).
This, as University of Texas law professor Lee Kovarsky argues in a thread on Twitter, will particularly hurt indigent defendants—those who have to rely on public defenders and state-appointed lawyers in appeal. It also reverses precedent from just a decade ago from the Supreme Court in Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler, decisions that gave defendants the right to appeal to a federal judge if state-appointed defense and post-conviction lawyers failed to provide a competent defense.
This means that innocent people are going to be put to death. One of them is likely to be Barry Jones, one of the petitioners in this case whose conviction came after shoddy police work and inadequate defense. David Ramirez, the second petitioner, is severely mentally disabled. That fact was never raised by his defense attorney, even though federal law would exempt Ramirez from the death penalty.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent. “The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to the effective assistance of counsel at trial. This Court [in Martinez] has recognized that right as ‘a bedrock principle’ that constitutes the very ‘foundation for our adversary system’ of criminal justice,” she wrote. “Today, however, the Court hamstrings the federal courts’ authority to safeguard that right. The Court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.”
“In reaching its decision, the Court all but overrules two recent precedents that recognized a critical exception to the general rule that federal courts may not consider claims on habeas review that were not raised in state court,” she continued.
“This decision is perverse. It is illogical: It makes no sense to excuse a habeas petitioner’s counsel’s failure to raise a claim altogether because of ineffective assistance in postconviction proceedings, as Martinez and Trevino did, but to fault the same petitioner for that postconviction counsel’s failure to develop evidence in support of the trial-ineffectiveness claim. In so doing, the Court guts Martinez’s and Trevino’s core reasoning. The Court also arrogates power from Congress: The Court’s analysis improperly reconfigures the balance Congress struck in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) between state interests and individual constitutional rights.
“By the Court’s telling, its holding (however implausible) is compelled by statute. Make no mistake. Neither AEDPA nor this Court’s precedents require this result. I respectfully dissent.”
The same Supreme Court extremists who are poised to toss federal abortion rights presumably in respect to the sanctity of life have just ensured that more people—some of whom are innocent—will be put to death by the state. It’s enough make you think what’s going on here among the conservatives really has nothing to do with the preservation of life at all.
MILLIONS MORE KIDS GOING HUNGRY SINCE GOP, MANCHIN KILLED EXPANDED TAX CREDIT. A new analysis confirms that the number of US households with kids that report not having enough food to eat has surged in the months since Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) joined Senate Republicans in refusing to extend the expanded Child Tax Credit benefit beyond mid-December, Kenny Stancil noted for CommonDreams (5/20).
Data from the Household Pulse Survey (HPS), a nationally representative internet survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, shows that from April 27 to May 9, 15% of households with children reported food insufficiency—defined as sometimes or often not having enough food to eat in the past week. In early August, the percentage of families with kids that reported struggling with hunger was roughly 9.5%.
Food has become more expensive in recent months as a handful of corporate grocery giants and meat, egg, and dairy conglomerates have raised prices while cutting frontline worker pay and raking in record profits amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But Manchin and the GOP’s decision to allow the enhanced CTC benefit to expire at the end of last year is making it even harder for millions of families to make ends meet.
Right-wing lawmakers let the enlarged CTC lapse despite ample evidence that the popular measure improved the lives of children nationwide. In January, the first month since July 2021 that eligible families didn’t receive a monthly payment of up to $300 per child, 3.7 million kids were thrown into poverty.
BIDEN HAS MAJORITY ON POSTAL SERVICE BOARD OF GOVERNORS. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? The Senate (5/13) confirmed Dan Tangherlini and Derek Kan to serve on the US Postal Service Board of Governors. Biden now has a majority of the Senate-confirmed Biden appointees on the nine-member board, Steve Benen noted at Maddowblog (5/13).
Tangherlini, a Democrat and former head of the General Services Administration during the Obama administration, replaces Ron Bloom, a Democratic Trump appointee who supported controversial postmaster general Louis DeJoy, and will serve a term that lasts through December 2027. Derek Kan, a Republican and former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, replaces Republican John Barger, and will serve on a term through December 2028.
DeJoy, a former Republican fundraiser and deputy RNC finance chair, became postmaster general amid controversy as he faced an FBI investigation over a campaign-finance scandal, among other ethics allegations. (DeJoy said in March that he’s been cleared in the straw-donor matter.)
DeJoy’s problematic policies haven’t been well received either: The Republican has, among other things, implemented changes intended to make some mail service “permanently slower,” Benen noted.
President Biden does not have the legal authority to fire the postmaster general, though he probably wishes he did. Early last year, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters, “I think we can all agree — most Americans would agree — that the Postal Service needs leadership that can and will do a better job.” She added months later, “We are, of course, deeply troubled, continue to be deeply troubled, as many Americans are, by the earlier reporting on Postmaster General DeJoy’s potential financial conflicts of interest and take serious issues with the job he’s doing running the Postal Service.”
Benen noted, “It’s tempting to simply count members by party, which shows the board with four Democrats, four Republicans, and an independent. But with one of the Democrats having been appointed by Trump, and one of the Republicans having been appointed by Biden, the partisan lines aren’t as neat as they might appear.
“The better way is to count members by president: Biden now has five appointees on the USPS board (three Democrats, one Republican, and one independent), while Trump has four appointees (three Republicans and a Democrat).
“In other words, if we put party affiliations aside, Biden’s picks now have a majority, even if Democrats don’t. And while it’s possible that some of the incumbent president’s nominees will go their own way and ignore the White House’s wishes, if Biden’s appointees follow the Democratic president’s vision, this could spell trouble for DeJoy and his controversial postal plan.
“Watch this space.”
RED STATES OPEN SECOND FRONT AGAINST CALIFORNIA WAIVERS: A group of 17 red states (5/13) challenged EPA’s reinstatement of California’s waiver allowing the state to enforce more-stringent greenhouse gas standards through model year 2025 vehicles, Politico reported (5/16). This fresh legal attack is the same as that raised by the states in April in lingering litigation of the Trump EPA’s revocation of California’s waiver — that the Clean Air Act’s 50-year-old waiver program for California is entirely unconstitutional, whether it’s used for greenhouse gases or conventional pollutants, because it favors one state.
“The Act simply leaves California with a slice of its sovereign authority that Congress withdraws from every other state,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said. The lawsuit is led by Ohio and joined by Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
HOUSE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE PLANS 6 PUBLIC HEARINGS IN JUNE. IS THAT ENOUGH? The Guardian reports that the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack is planning to hold six public hearings in June on how Donald Trump and some allies broke the law in their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. But Rick Wilson, a former top GOP strategist and the co-founder of The Lincoln Project, sounded alarm bells, saying the committee members are not putting enough effort into making their case to the public.
The British newspaper, citing sources familiar with the inquiry, said it had reviewed a draft schedule prepared by the House committee. The first hearing is scheduled for June 9 and the last hearing on June 23 will be televised in prime time, Charles Jay noted for DailyKos (5/23).
The Guardian reported:
“We want to paint a picture as clear as possible as to what occurred,” the chairman of the select committee, Congressman Bennie Thompson, recently told reporters. “The public needs to know what to think. We just have to show clearly what happened on January 6.”
The select committee has already alleged that Trump violated multiple federal laws to overturn the 2020 election, including obstructing Congress and defrauding the United States. But the hearings are where the panel intends to show how they reached those conclusions.
According to the draft schedule, the June public hearings will explore Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, starting and ending with prime-time hearings at 8 pm on the 9th and the 23rd. In between, the panel will hold 10 am hearings on the 13th, 15th, 16th and 21st.
The Guardian said the schedule is subject to change. The two prime-time hearings are scheduled to last between one-and-a-half and two hours, while the four other morning hearings will last between two and two-and-a-half hours.
Each hearing will be led by a select committee member, the sources told the newspaper, but the questioning of witnesses who have been subpoenaed to appear will be primarily conducted by the committee’s top investigative lawyers. The investigators also intend to use flash texts, photos, and videos to illustrate the testimony, the sources said.
The Guardian report added that the panel will lay out how the efforts to overturn the election results unfolded over a 65-day period from the time Trump falsely claimed victory until Jan. 6:
The select committee is expected, for instance, to run through how the Trump White House appeared to coordinate the illegal plan to send fake electors to Congress, the plot to seize voting machines, and the unlawful plan to delay the certification of Biden’s win.
The panel is also expected to chart the reactivation of the Stop the Steal movement by the Trump activist Ali Alexander and associates, and how he applied for a permit to protest near the Capitol on Jan. 6 but never held the “Wild Protest” and instead went up the Capitol steps.
The select committee additionally intends to address the question of intent, such as why Trump deliberately misled the crowd that he would march with them to the Capitol, and why he resisted entreaties to call off the rioters from obstructing the joint session on January 6.
The sources said the current schedule calls for capping off the six hearings with a close examination of video footage of leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups meeting in a parking lot on Jan. 5 and their activities at the Capitol.
The sources said the select committee wants to draw a connection between “Trump’s political plan for January 6 and the militia groups’ violence at the Capitol in what could form evidence that Trump oversaw an unlawful conspiracy.”
Wilson sharply criticized the committee’s plan to only hold six hearings in a Twitter thread:
“SIX HEARINGS? SIX? Are. You. F***ing. Kidding. Me?” before adding, “Does no one understand the ballgame here?
“The witnesses from the Trump world will filibuster, bulls**t, evade and jerk themselves off on live TV for roughly 40% of the hearings. Everyone will have a long statement at the opening.”
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 23, 2022
Wilson went on to say: “You have to create a spectacle. You have to make people care. You have to have drama. You have to drag and grind the people who tried to do this so long and so hard their knees bleed. A coup attempt that goes unpunished is a training exercise.”
And he warned that should the GOP take control over Congress next year, they will hold months of hearings on Hunter Biden’s laptop, begin impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden for failing to secure the border, and hold months of “show trials” on Afghanistan or antifa.
“4/ I PROMISE you, if the GOP was in charge of this, the hearings would NEVER, EVER, EVER stop.
“Six hearings means the GOP will try to disrupt them (see Gaetz et al previously) and the Democrats will mumble their objections.”
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 23, 2022
Just for comparison’s sake, the Senate Watergate Committee headed by Democratic Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina began holding public hearings on May 17, 1973. In all, the committee held 51 days of public hearings, a total of 319 hours, before issuing its final report on June 27, 1974.
In May 1974, the House Judiciary Committee began holding formal impeachment hearings against President Richard M. Nixon, and in late July approved three articles of impeachment. Nixon resigned in August 1974 before he could be impeached in a House vote.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2022
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