Mehmet Oz and Mike Pompeo

Dear Commons Community,

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo came out swinging against Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz yesterday, raising what he described as “national security concerns” about the TV personality, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump.

Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration as CIA director and then the State Department’s top diplomat, endorsed Oz’s opponent, David McCormick, a former hedge fund chief executive officer, in February. Meanwhile, Trump is holding a Pennsylvania rally on Friday to tout his support for Oz ahead of the Republican primary there on May 17.  

The heart surgeon, widely known as the host of the daytime “Dr. Oz Show,” was born in Ohio to Turkish immigrant parents and is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Turkey..  He claimed in February that he had never been politically involved in Turkey “in any capacity,” and has said he would renounce his Turkish citizenship if he wins office.

Oz’s campaign spokesperson Brittany Yanick confirmed to ABC News on Wednesday that Oz had, in fact, voted in Turkey’s 2018 election. She denied that it constituted “political involvement,” and said he had voted for the opposition candidate who lost to President Recep Tayyep Erdogan.

Pompeo, who has endorsed Oz’s GOP primary rival Dave McCormick, said on a conference call on yesterday that McCormick hosted with reporters: “We criticize American candidates all the time because they didn’t vote. This is different from that. … he engaged in the Turkish political process. That raises in my mind a lot of judgments about his priority.”

“The people of Pennsylvania and the Americans [Oz] will be representing [in the] Senate, voting on important national security matters, need to understand the scope and depth of his relationship with the Turkish government,” Pompeo said on the call.

For a civilian, voting in another country’s election would set off a “giant, flashing red light” for security concerns, Kel McClanahan, the executive director of the nonprofit public interest law firm National Security Counselors, told ABC.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Oz, a longtime New Jersey resident, had used his in-laws’ address in Pennsylvania to register to vote in the state in 2020, but Oz’s campaign representative insisted he’d moved to Pennsylvania. Politico reports that Oz voted in New Jersey as recently as 2020.

Oz has said he’s retained his Turkish citizenship to care for his sick mother. He served in the Turkish military for 60 days in the 1980s, owns property in Turkey and won a lucrative endorsement contract with Turkish Airlines, which has close ties to Erdogan, according to ABC. Turkey’s authoritarian leader has increasingly become more closely aligned with Russia and Russian interests.

“Any single one of those would be enough to torpedo a [security] clearance,” McClanahan said.

Oz’s campaign called McCormick’s attacks on Oz “pathetic and xenophobic,” but did not mention Pompeo.

If Oz wins the Senate seat and renounces his dual citizenship, he would be following in the footsteps of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who was a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen until formally renouncing his Canadian citizenship in 2014.

Interesting issue especially since it was raised by a Trump loyalist!

Tony

Row after row of graves of Covid victims in Manaus, Brazil. Ten countries accounted for 68 per cent of global excess deaths: Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States Credit: MICHAEL DANTAS/AFP

Dear Commons Community,

The World Health Organization yesterday released new estimates that show nearly 15 million people in the world have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic — or roughly three times more than the number of coronavirus deaths officially reported.

About 14.9 million people around the world died as a “direct or indirect result” of COVID-19 — or what the WHO refers to as “excess mortality” — between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2021, far more than the 5.4 million coronavirus deaths officially reported to the global health body during that span.

According to WHO, excess mortality is calculated as the difference between the number of deaths that have occurred and the number that would typically be expected in non-pandemic years. (The estimated range of excess deaths was 13.3 million to 16.6 million over the 24-month period, according to that methodology.)

The 14.9 million figure includes people who died from complications due to COVID-19 as well as indirect deaths, such as people who did or could not seek treatment for other serious conditions due to the strain that the pandemic put on health care systems.

“These sobering data not only point to the impact of the pandemic but also to the need for all countries to invest in more resilient health systems that can sustain essential health services during crises, including stronger health information systems,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said in a statement.

About 84% of the excess deaths were concentrated in Europe, Southeast Asia and North and South America.

In India, there were 4.7 million excess deaths according to the new estimates, or 10 times the official figure reported to the WHO and almost a third of the excess deaths globally.

The excess death toll was higher among men (57%) and people above the age of 60 (82%).

The release of the new data comes as the United States is bracing for another grim pandemic milestone: 1 million COVID-19 deaths.

According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 996,000 Americans have died of complications from the virus. And there have been more than 81 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. to date.

COVID keeps taking and taking!

Tony

Karine Jean-Pierre

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden yesterday named Karine Jean-Pierre to be the next White House press secretary, the first black woman and openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, with incumbent Jen Psaki set to leave the post next week.

Jean-Pierre takes on the role as the White House faces an uphill battle to help Democrats hold onto the House and Senate in this fall’s midterm elections, and as the administration struggles to address Americans’ concerns about soaring inflation and the state of the economy. She also comes into the job as Biden faces a daunting array of foreign policy challenges, including the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and North Korea’s escalating nuclear testing program. Biden is set to visit South Korea and Japan later this month and Europe in June.

Biden is also bringing back longtime Democratic strategist Anita Dunn as his senior adviser. She had served in the Biden White House last year for several months after Biden was sworn into office.

“Karine not only brings the experience, talent and integrity needed for this difficult job, but she will continue to lead the way in communicating about the work of the Biden-Harris administration on behalf of the American people,” Biden said in a statement praising Jean-Pierre, who has served as his principal deputy press secretary since Inauguration Day.

Psaki, who leaves the White House on May 13, praised her successor, noting the significance of the history-making appointment.

“Representation matters and she will give a voice to many, but also make many dream big about what is truly possible,” Psaki said.

She said Biden offered the job to Jean-Pierre yesterday in the Oval Office. White House staffers were gathered after the offer and greeted Jean-Pierre with applause, an official said. Two “warm bottles” of champagne was procured for a toast in paper White House cups, the official added, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal gathering.

When Jean-Pierre delivered her first press briefing last year, she told reporters, “it’s a real honor to just be standing here today.”

“I appreciate the historic nature, I really do,” she said.

She had occasionally took the lectern in the press briefing room instead of Psaki and more frequently held off-camera “gaggles” with reporters when Biden was traveling on Air Force One. She traveled with Biden to Europe last fall in March instead of Psaki, who had tested positive for COVID-19 before both trips.

Before joining the Biden presidential campaign, Jean-Pierre was the chief public affairs officer of the progressive group MoveOn.org and a former political analyst for NBC and MSNBC. She also worked in political affairs in the Obama White House and on his reelection campaign.

The press secretary is responsible for holding daily briefings with the news media and leading a department of more than a dozen staffers who help address queries from the press.

When she took the job, Psaki, who has two young children, said publicly she aimed to remain in the job for about a year. She is expected to be joining MSNBC later this year.

Biden said Psaki “has set the standard for returning decency, respect and decorum to the White House briefing room.”

“I want to say thank you to Jen for raising the bar, communicating directly and truthfully to the American people, and keeping her sense of humor while doing so,” Biden said. “I thank Jen for her service to the country, and wish her the very best as she moves forward.”

Dunn is a partner at the Democratic consulting firm SKDK, and was a senior adviser on Biden’s 2020 campaign and previously chief strategist and communications director for President Barack Obama. The White House said she is returning to “assist in advancing the President’s policy and communications objectives.”

We will miss Jen Psaki who has been brilliant in the role of press secretary and we wish Ms. Jean-Pierre the best of luck!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The draft Supreme Court opinion leaked on Monday suggesting the right to abortion will be overturned will have its most severest impact on Black and Hispanic Women.  This is especially true if you live in a conservative state that already limits access to abortions.

And if the U.S. Supreme Court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortions, minority women who already face limited access to health care will bear the brunt of it, according to the Associated Press.

The potential impact on minority women became all the more clear on Monday with the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion suggesting the court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion. The draft decision is not yet final but it sent shockwaves through the country. Overturning the Roe v. Wade decision would give states authority to decide abortion’s legality. Roughly half, largely in the South and Midwest, are likely to quickly ban abortion.

When it comes to the effect on minority women, the numbers are unambiguous. In Mississippi, people of color comprise 44% of the population but 81% of women receiving abortions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health statistics.

In Texas, they’re 59% of the population and 74% of those receiving abortions. The numbers in Alabama are 35% and 69%. In Louisiana, people of color represent 42% of the population, according to the state Health Department, and about 72% of those receiving abortions.

“Abortion restrictions are racist,” said Cathy Torres, an organizing manager with Frontera Fund, a Texas organization that helps women pay for abortions. “They directly impact people of color, Black, brown, Indigenous people … people who are trying to make ends meet.”

Why the great disparities? Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, which provides financial support for women seeking abortion, said women of color in states with restrictive abortion laws often have limited access to health care and a lack of choices for effective birth control. Schools often have ineffective or inadequate sex education.

If abortions are outlawed, those same women — often poor — will likely have the hardest time traveling to distant parts of the country to terminate pregnancies or raising children they might struggle to afford, said Roberts, who is Black and once volunteered at Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.

“We’re talking about folks who are already marginalized,” Roberts said.

Amanda Furdge, who is Black, was one of those women. She was a single, unemployed college student already raising one baby in 2014 when she found out she was pregnant with another. She said she didn’t know how she could afford another child.

She’d had two abortions in Chicago. Getting access to an abortion provider there was no problem, Furdge said. But now she was in Mississippi, having moved home to escape an abusive relationship. Misled by advertising, she first went to a crisis pregnancy center that tried to talk her out of an abortion. By the time she found the abortion clinic, she was too far along to have the procedure.

She’s not surprised by the latest news on the Supreme Court’s likely decision. Most people who aren’t affected don’t consider the stakes.

“People are going to have to vote,” said Furdge, 34, who is happily raising her now 7-year-old son but continues to advocate for women having the right to choose. “People are going to have to put the people in place to make the decisions that align with their values. When they don’t, things like this happen.”

Torres said historically, anti-abortion laws have been crafted in ways that hurt low-income women. She pointed to the Hyde Amendment, a 1980 law that prevents the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in rare cases.

She also cited the 2021 Texas law that bans abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy. Where she lives, near the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, women are forced to travel to obtain abortions and must pass in-state border patrol checkpoints where they have to disclose their citizenship status, she said.

Regardless of what legislators say, Torres insisted, the intent is to target women of color, to control their bodies: “They know who these restrictions are going to affect. They know that, but they don’t care.”

But Andy Gipson, a former member of the Mississippi Legislature who is now the state’s agriculture and commerce commissioner, said race had nothing to do with passage of Mississippi’s law against abortion after the 15th week. That law is the one now before the Supreme Court in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.

Gipson, a Baptist minister who is white, said he believes all people are created in the image of God and have an “innate value” that starts at conception. Mississippi legislators were trying to protect women and babies by putting limits on abortion, he said.

“I absolutely disagree with the concept that it’s racist or about anything other than saving babies’ lives,” said Gipson, a Republican. “It’s about saving lives of the unborn and the lives and health of the mother, regardless of what color they are.”

To those who say that forcing women to have babies will subject them to hardships, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a white Republican, said it is “easier for working mothers to balance professional success and family life” than it was 49 years ago when Roe was decided.

Fitch, who is divorced, often points to her own experience of working outside the home while raising three children. But Fitch grew up in an affluent family and has worked in the legal profession — both factors that can give working women the means and the flexibility to get help raising children.

That’s not the case for many minority women in Mississippi or elsewhere. Advocates say in many places where abortion services are being curtailed, there’s little support for women who carry a baby to term.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states, and people in low-wage jobs often don’t receive health insurance. Women can enroll in Medicaid during pregnancy, but that coverage disappears soon after they give birth.

Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black infants were about twice as likely as white infants to die during the first year of life in Mississippi, according to the March of Dimes.

Across the country, U.S. Census Bureau information analyzed by The Associated Press shows fewer Black and Hispanic women have health insurance, especially in states with tight abortion restrictions. For example, in Texas, Mississippi and Georgia, at least 16% of Black women and 36% of Latinas were uninsured in 2019, some of the highest such rates in the country.

Problems are compounded in states without effective education programs about reproduction. Mississippi law says sex education in public schools must emphasize abstinence to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Discussion of abortion is forbidden, and instructors may not demonstrate how to use condoms or other contraception.

This is a terribly sad situation for women of color in states that restrict abortion.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Stanford University will launch a new school focusing on climate change thanks to a $1.1 billion gift from billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, the university announced on Tuesday.

The gift, one of the largest single donations to an American institute of higher education, will open the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability this fall. The school combines several existing Stanford departments and institutes and will hire dozens of new faculty members over a decade, as well as establish an accelerator to provide grants for new projects.

“We have designed a school for the future combining knowledge generation and impact, building on the strong foundation established through Stanford’s history of scholarship,” said Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, in a statement.

Stanford engaged in a years long process to define a vision for a new school focused on climate change. The Doerrs connected with Stanford after learning about the new school, university spokesperson Mara Vandlik said in an email.

“This is the decisive decade, and we must act with full speed, and scale,” John and Ann Doerr said in a statement.

One of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors, John Doerr is chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he has worked since 1980, successfully advocating for early investment in technology companies like Google, Amazon and Slack. He has authored a book published last year “Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now,” that outlines technology and policy priorities for attaining a livable future. Ann Doerr is the board chair of the online education provider Khan Academy, as well as an advisory trustee and former board member of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Isabelle Leighton, the interim executive director of the Donors of Color Network, hailed the donation, saying it’s exciting to see large, new donations related to climate change but urged donors and universities to include communities currently affected by climate change in finding solutions. Her network has asked major foundations who give to climate change causes to pledge 30% of their donations to organizations led by people of color.

“While it’s really great to invest in research and analysis, you have to make sure that you’re looking at the full picture of what we need to do to actually make the change and the shift,” Leighton said. “The people who are most directly impacted by what’s happening from climate change need to be a very strong voice, if not the leading voice, in what the solution needs to look like.”

She pointed to renewal energy projects supported by a network of frontline communities, the Climate Justice Alliance, as an example.

In addition to the donation from the Doerrs, Stanford received $590 million from other donors. Some of the funds will go toward constructing two new buildings, the university said.

The new school would accept gifts from fossil fuel companies or other industries, Vandlik said.

“Stanford is committed to conducting research that will accelerate the transition to a decarbonized economy worldwide,” she said. “The transition is going to require partnership with industries in order to implement new technologies at the enormous scale required.”

Congratulations Stanford and thank you to the Doerrs!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Henderson State University in Arkansas plans to cut 25 degree programs and lay off 67 faculty members, 44 of them tenured, to help stabilize its finances.

Officials at the University in Arkadelphia, Ark., shared the proposal on Monday, along with a letter from the chancellor, Chuck Ambrose. The plan followed years of financial turmoil that resulted in hiring freezes, spending cuts, and budget deficits. Administrators agreed to declare a state of financial exigency in February, a step that allows the institution to quickly eliminate academic programs and personnel.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Over the last 20 years, Henderson’s long-term debt has grown from $14 million to $78 million, which requires payments of approximately $6.9 million annually, according to an FAQ on the financial situation. The institution lacks adequate financial reserves because of years of deficit spending. It has not been able to recover financially despite a $6-million advance from the State of Arkansas in July 2019.

“We cannot grow our way out of this challenge without implementing significant academic restructuring through the financial-exigency process,” Ambrose said in his letter.

The recommended cuts, detailed in the proposal, will be considered by the Arkansas State University System’s Board of Trustees on Thursday morning.

The proposal describes the changes as a way for Henderson to redefine “the future of institutional performance” based on factors like instructional cost and student success, and as a way to align the university with the needs of the 21st-century work force.

How would Henderson do that? The proposal calls for eliminating 88 faculty positions, including 56 tenured ones, 44 of which are currently filled, for a projected savings of $5.3 million through the 2024 fiscal year. Biology, chemistry, English, and mathematics are among the 25 degree programs to be phased out over time. Students enrolled in them will be able to finish their degrees through a combination of on-campus instruction and, in some cases, the help of “educational partners.”

How did university officials decide which programs to cut? An FAQ for the restructuring states that a financial-exigency committee and the chancellor based their decisions on data about academic and net marginal costs, student outcomes and completion, and the labor market and work-force demand.

The proposed cuts are not the first changes university administrators have sought in order to restructure and save money. One-day-per-week furloughs are already in effect for the campus’s state-funded employees, and some department-chair and sub-dean positions are on their way out.

The announcement left some faculty members devastated and wondering about the university’s future.

“As someone in one of those programs that seems destined for complete elimination, I find it shocking,” said James Engman, a professor of biology.

Engman, who has taught at Henderson for 26 years, said the news that he and many other professors could soon be jobless was crushing.

“So many of us have worked so hard — and pay at Henderson has never been good, it’s never been competitive,” Engman said. “The people who have persisted as faculty here have done so, not for the money, but for the love of the job and the love of the students.”

Carolyn Eoff, a math professor, has worked at Henderson for 27 years. Her mother taught there for 30 years before her, and her three children are alumni.

”It’s hurtful, but I was expecting it,” Eoff said.

Engman, who is also president of the Faculty Senate, said some faculty members received phone calls on Monday about how the proposed cuts would affect them.

In addition to worrying about their jobs, many professors are concerned about the students and the programs to be eliminated, called teach-out programs.

“You look down that list of teach-out programs, many of us are asking, ‘How can you be a college if you don’t do any of those things?’” Engman said.

Henderson has long been considered a liberal-arts university, but the program cuts could change that.

“Really, it becomes more of a technical school,” Engman said.

For most students, college is more than just job training, Eoff said. It’s also a chance to learn more about the world around them and be introduced to fields like music and art even if they are science majors.

“It is just heartbreaking,” Eoff said, “to see those programs be put on the chopping block.”

We keep seeing these situations where once stable colleges and universities are struggling financially.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Toronto Blue Jays may have lost to the New York Yankees last night, but a Toronto fan won the day on social media with a simple act of kindness.  See the video above.

Dear Commons Community,

Washington D.C. was abuzz all day yesterday with talk about who leaked the US Supreme Court’s draft to overturn Roe v. Wade.  Did a liberal law clerk do it? Or a conservative? What about John Roberts? Or was it just left in the printer?  Paul Blumenthal of The Huffington Post examines four possible theories on who the leaker is.  Below is his entire article.

Interesting stuff!

Tony

——————————————————————

Who Leaked The Supreme Court Draft? Here Are 4 Theories!

By  Paul Blumenthal

May. 3, 2022, 06:44 PM EDT |

Someone inside the Supreme Court leaked a draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn two landmark abortion rights decisions, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, to Politico. That much we know.

But we don’t know who did it and why they did it. While the main story here is that the Supreme Court now has five votes to overturn women’s reproductive rights, the provenance of the leak still matters. In fact, it very much matters for abortion rights, as it might help the public understand the behind-the-scenes politics within the court that could affect the ultimate outcome of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

There are a very limited number of people who could leak a draft opinion to the press from inside the Supreme Court. There are the nine justices themselves, their law clerks and their support staff.

Below are the current theories and why they may or may not affect the outcome here.

A Liberal Law Clerk Leaked It

After Politico published the story on the leaked opinion, the initial speculation online was that this must have been done in anger by a liberal law clerk. This theory, while initially attracting some followers from left-leaning organizations in praise of a “brave clerk,” has come to dominate the right-wing reaction.

Republican political consultants and media figures quickly decided that the leaker must be a specific clerk for one of the liberal justices. They went so far as to name this clerk and put a photo of them online. (HuffPost is not naming this person in order to avoid putting a baseless target on them.)

There is, however, no evidence that this person was the leaker aside from the fact that they are liberal, opposed the nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh as many liberal or left-leaning lawyers were, and at one point spoke to one of the two Politico reporters who broke the leak story.

This theory feels plausible. But it doesn’t make much sense.

For one, the three-justice liberal bloc on the court lacks real power, and leaking a draft wouldn’t fix that. The liberal justices have to convince two Republicans to come to their side, which is a very high hill to climb on such a high-priority issue for the conservative movement as abortion.

And there’s the timing. The leaked draft opinion was written in February. Why wait months to leak it? The liberals, having been in the minority for ages now, still try to influence majority opinions they oppose by making tiny changes around the edges, Yale Law School professor and former Supreme Court clerk Amy Kapczynski tweeted on Tuesday.

“Why leak something and undermine that whole strategy?” Kapczynski asked.

It’s entirely possible that the leaker is a liberal law clerk acting out of anger or pique or a desire to be anointed as a hero by the Corporate Fake News MSDNC, or whatever.

But if the theory is they were trying to change the outcome, it doesn’t make sense. Sure, conservatives will claim that Democrats are now going to do an “insurrection” on the Supreme Court, but you would have to hammer a pylon through your brain to actually believe that.

A Conservative Law Clerk Leaked It

Another theory is that a conservative law clerk leaked the opinion to make sure it is the final opinion. There’s no evidence this theory is correct, either, but it does have one point in its favor: It’s rooted in the history and structure that underlies the internal functioning of the Supreme Court.

The internal deliberations of the Supreme Court tend to work like this: A vote is taken on the outcome of a decision and the most senior justice then assigns the opinion to a member of the grouping with a majority of five or more votes. That decision is written and later circulated for edits and for the other justices to write their dissents and concurrences. First concurrences, and then dissents are circulated. Then the majority opinion can be edited for a final draft.

“[T]his is about the right timing for concurrences to come out,” Kapczynski tweeted on Tuesday. “I think best bet is that Chief Justice Roberts circulated one recently, adopting a more moderate position.”

This is the point at which justices may begin to change their minds about the original opinion they said they supported.

So, in theory, Roberts could be trying to peel off members of the original five justices who joined Alito’s majority opinion to secure an opinion that does limit abortion but stops short of overturning Roe and Casey.

Roberts, while known to oppose abortion, has always kept public opinion about the court’s legitimacy as his paramount concern. For this reason, he has sought to slow-walk the social changes the court’s conservatives are pursuing. Notably, he did not side with the five other conservative justices in allowing Texas’ recent anti-abortion law to go into effect nor did he join Alito’s leaked majority opinion.

If a conservative clerk wanted to prevent justices from that original group of five from jumping ship, leaking the draft could be a way to do it. If the court announces an opinion in June and it shows that Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett joined an opinion that doesn’t overturn Roe, they will be assailed as the spawn of David Souter.

Signs that conservatives are worried about Roberts’ moderating influence had already emerged in conservative media. A Wall Street Journal editorial warned on April 26 that Roberts “may be trying to turn another Justice now,” just as Roberts himself switched sides in the 2012 case that ended with him writing an opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act. The editorial even contained a “guess” that Alito was the author of the forthcoming majority opinion.

“We hope he doesn’t succeed — for the good of the Court and the country,” the editorial stated.

This warning shot came within days of when the Politico reporters likely obtained the leaked memo — they were working on the story on May 1, according to The New York Times, four days after The Wall Street Journal editorial.

“If a conservative clerk wanted to prevent justices from that original group of five from jumping ship, leaking the draft could be a way to do it.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that conservative media provided an inkling of the internal workings of the court.

In May 2012, conservative pundits and media outlets wrote a succession of columns warning that Roberts may have wobbled and decided to side with the liberals in the Affordable Care Act case. The existence of these columns seemed to suggest some kind of leak had come from inside the court that the conservatives had lost Roberts.

The National Review ran an editorial on May 24, 2012, calling on Roberts to ignore calls for him to side with liberals and uphold the health care mandate. Then on May 26, 2012, a column by George Will came out with the headline, “Liberals put the squeeze to Justice Roberts.”

“Soon after the message trickled from the Court that Roberts’s vote was ‘in flux,’ a right-wing bat signal went out, with a clear message: we need to tell the chief justice to grow a backbone,” Josh Blackman, a conservative lawyer, wrote in his book “Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare.”

“George Will and others answered that call. Conservatives, who had been noticeably quiet about the outcome of the case after the conference, suddenly perked up in the home stretch, precisely when the war was being waged within the Court over the final vote.”

A similar thing happened in 2019 around the high court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which affirmed that gay and transgender individuals are protected from discrimination by the Civil Rights Act. One month after arguments were heard in the case, National Review and The Wall Street Journal published pieces aimed at steering conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch away from the textualist arguments the liberal Justice Elena Kagan had made.

These public calls failed, and Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion based on the original understanding of the text of the Civil Rights Act.

The theory that a conservative clerk leaked the Dobbs v. Jackson opinion has a logic to it. There’s a purpose, beyond self-aggrandizement or creating a shock: It could be meant to prevent any of the five justices who signed on to Alito’s leaked opinion from going with a softer ruling instead.

And if that’s the reason for the leak, it’s an important statement on the internal struggles of the court, an opaque and unelected institution with incredible power over American lives.

Roberts Or One Of His Clerks Leaked It

Now we are getting into the more outlandish theories, but let’s work this one out anyway.

“The story that makes the most sense re the leak is actually Chief Justice Roberts, trying to illustrate to a swing justice what the backlash would be like,” Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at Real Clear Politics, tweeted on Tuesday. “But it is also completely out of character for Roberts; burn the village to save the village isn’t his style.”

This has a logic to it, but, as Trende notes, nothing could be more out of character than for Roberts, or one of his clerks, to do this. It goes against everything that he has worked toward as chief justice — although, so does this leaked opinion. Still, it’s hard to imagine that Mr. Court Legitimacy would enable this leak and then issue a press release announcing an investigation into the leak.

Other Theories

Could the opinion have been leaked by a support staffer who found a copy accidentally left in a printer? Or could it have come from a computer hack?

These theories are highly unlikely. The Politico article contains background information from “[a] person familiar with the court’s deliberations,” that explains “that four of the other Republican-appointed justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — had voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December, and that line-up remains unchanged as of this week.”

Dear Commons Community,

Washington D.C. was in an uproar last evening after a draft opinion suggests the U.S. Supreme Court could be poised to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide.  This according to a Politico report released yesterday. 

A decision to overrule Roe would lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states and could have huge ramifications for this year’s elections. But it’s unclear if the draft represents the court’s final word on the matter — opinions often change in ways big and small in the drafting process.  As reported by Politco and the Associated Press.

Whatever the outcome, the Politico report represents an extremely rare breach of the court’s secretive deliberation process, and on a case of surpassing importance.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” the draft opinion states. It was signed by Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority who was appointed by former President George W. Bush.

The document was labeled a “1st Draft” of the “Opinion of the Court” in a case challenging Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

The court is expected to rule on the case before its term ends in late June or early July.

The draft opinion in effect states there is no constitutional right to abortion services and would allow individual states to more heavily regulate or outright ban the procedure.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” it states, referencing the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey that affirmed Roe’s finding of a constitutional right to abortion services but allowed states to place some constraints on the practice. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

A Supreme Court spokeswoman said the court had no comment and The Associated Press could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the draft Politico posted, which dates from February.

Politico said only that it received “a copy of the draft opinion from a person familiar with the court’s proceedings in the Mississippi case along with other details supporting the authenticity of the document.”

The draft opinion strongly suggests that when the justices met in private shortly after arguments in the case on Dec. 1, at least five voted to overrule Roe and Casey, and Alito was assigned the task of writing the court’s majority opinion.

Votes and opinions in a case aren’t final until a decision is announced or, in a change wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, posted on the court’s website.

The report comes amid a legislative push to restrict abortion in several Republican-led states — Oklahoma being the most recent — even before the court issues its decision. Critics of those measures have said low-income women will disproportionately bear the burden of the new restrictions.

The leak jumpstarted the intense political reverberations that the high court’s ultimate decision was expected to have in the midterm election year. Already, politicians on both sides of the aisle were seizing on the report to fundraise and energize their supporters on either side of the hot-button issue.

An AP-NORC poll in December found that Democrats increasingly see protecting abortion rights as a high priority for the government.

Other polling shows relatively few Americans want to see Roe overturned. In 2020, AP VoteCast found that 69% of voters in the presidential election said the Supreme Court should leave the Roe v. Wade decision as is; just 29% said the court should overturn the decision. In general, AP-NORC polling finds a majority of the public favors abortion being legal in most or all cases.

Still, when asked about abortion policy generally, Americans have nuanced attitudes on the issue, and many don’t think that abortion should be possible after the first trimester or that women should be able to obtain a legal abortion for any reason.

Alito, in the draft, said the court can’t predict how the public might react and shouldn’t try. “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” Alito wrote in the draft opinion, according to Politico.

People on both sides of the issue quickly gathered outside the Supreme Court waving signs and chanting on a balmy spring night, following the release of the Politico report.

Reaction was swift from elected officials in Congress and across the country.

In a joint statement from Congress’ top two Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “If the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years — not just on women but on all Americans.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, said people seeking abortions could head to New York. “For anyone who needs access to care, our state will welcome you with open arms. Abortion will always be safe & accessible in New York,” Hochul said in a tweet.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said in a statement, “We will let the Supreme Court speak for itself and wait for the Court’s official opinion.” But local officials were praising the draft.

“This puts the decision making back into the hands of the states, which is where it should have always been,” said Mississippi state Rep. Becky Currie.

Congress could act, too, though a bill that would write Roe’s protections into federal law stalled in the Senate after passing the House last year with only Democratic votes.

At Supreme Court arguments in December, all six conservative justices signaled that they would uphold the Mississippi law, and five asked questions that suggested that overruling Roe and Casey was a possibility.

Only Chief Justice John Roberts seemed prepared to take the smaller step of upholding the 15-week ban, though that too would be a significant weakening of abortion rights.

Until now, the court has allowed states to regulate but not ban abortion before the point of viability, around 24 weeks.

The court’s three liberal justices seemed likely to be in dissent.

It’s impossible to know what efforts are taking place behind the scenes to influence any justice’s vote. If Roberts is inclined to allow Roe to survive, he need only pick off one other conservative vote to deprive the court of a majority to overrule the abortion landmark.

Twenty-six states are certain or likely to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned, according to the pro-abortion rights think tank the Guttmacher Institute. Of those, 22 states already have total or near-total bans on the books that are currently blocked by Roe, aside from Texas. The state’s law banning it after six weeks has already been allowed to go into effect by the Supreme Court due to its unusual civil enforcement structure. Four more states are considered likely to quickly pass bans if Roe is overturned.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia, meanwhile, have protected access to abortion in state law.

This year, anticipating a decision overturning or gutting Roe, eight conservative states have already moved to restrict abortion rights. Oklahoma, for example, passed several bills in recent weeks, including one that goes into effect this summer making it a felony to perform an abortion. Like many anti-abortion bills passed in GOP-led states this year, it does not have exceptions for rape or incest, only to save the life of the mother.

Eight Democratic-leaning states protected or expanded access to the procedure, including California, which has passed legislation making the procedure less expensive and is considering other bills to make itself an “abortion sanctuary” if Roe is overturned.

The draft looked legitimate to some followers of the court. Veteran Supreme Court lawyer Neal Katyal, who worked as a clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer and therefore has been in a position to see drafts, wrote on Twitter: “There are lots of signals the opinion is legit. The length and depth of analysis, would be very hard to fake. It says it is written by Alito and definitely sounds like him.”

This is a bombshell of a leak!

Tony

Sergey Lavrov – Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

Dear Commons Community,

Israel yesterday lashed out at Russia over “unforgivable” comments by its foreign minister about Nazism and antisemitism — including claims that Adolf Hitler was Jewish. Israel, which summoned the Russian ambassador in response, said the remarks blamed Jews for their own murder in the Holocaust.

It was a steep decline in the ties between the two countries at a time when Israel has sought to stake out a neutral position between Russia and Ukraine and remain in Russia’s good stead for its security needs in the Middle East.

Asked in an interview with an Italian news channel about Russian claims that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country, Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine could still have Nazi elements even if some figures, including the country’s president, were Jewish.

“So when they say ‘How can Nazification exist if we’re Jewish?’ In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything. For some time we have heard from the Jewish people that the biggest antisemites were Jewish,” he said, speaking to the station in Russian, dubbed over by an Italian translation.

In some of the harshest remarks since the start of the war in Ukraine, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called Lavrov’s statement “unforgivable and scandalous and a horrible historical error.”

“The Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust,” said Lapid, the son of a Holocaust survivor. “The lowest level of racism against Jews is to blame Jews themselves for antisemitism.”

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who has been more measured in his criticism of Russia’s invasion, also condemned Lavrov’s comments.

“His words are untrue and their intentions are wrong,” he said. “Using the Holocaust of the Jewish people as a political tool must cease immediately.”

Israel’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem called the remarks “absurd, delusional, dangerous and deserving of condemnation.”

“Lavrov is propagating the inversion of the Holocaust — turning the victims into the criminals on the basis of promoting a completely unfounded claim that Hitler was of Jewish descent,” it said in a statement.

“Equally serious is calling the Ukrainians in general, and President (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy in particular, Nazis. This, among other things, is a complete distortion of the history and an affront to the victims of Nazism.”

In Germany, government spokesman Steffen Hebstreit said the Russian government’s “propaganda” efforts weren’t worthy of comment, calling them “absurd.”

Nazism has featured prominently in Russia’s war aims and narrative as it fights in Ukraine. In his bid to legitimize the war to Russian citizens, President Vladimir Putin has portrayed the battle as a struggle against Nazis in Ukraine, even though the country has a democratically elected government and a Jewish president whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

Ukraine also condemned Lavrov’s remarks.

“By trying to rewrite history, Moscow is simply looking for arguments to justify the mass murders of Ukrainians,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Lavrov’s remarks exposed the “deeply-rooted antisemitism of the Russian elites.”

World War II, in which the Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people and helped defeat Nazi Germany, is a linchpin of Russia’s national identity. Repeatedly reaching for the historical narrative that places Russia as a savior against evil forces has helped the Kremlin rally Russians around the war.

Israel was formed as a refuge for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. Over 70 years later, the Holocaust is central to its national ethos and it has positioned itself at the center of global efforts to remember the Holocaust and combat antisemitism. Israel is home to a shrinking population of 165,000 Holocaust survivors, most in their 80s and 90s, and last week the country marked its annual Holocaust memorial day.

But those aims sometimes clash with its other national interests. Russia has a military presence in neighboring Syria, and Israel, which carries out frequent strikes on enemy targets in the country, relies on Russia for security coordination to prevent their forces from coming into conflict with one another. That has forced Israel to tread lightly in its criticism of the war in Ukraine.

While it has sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine and expressed support for its people, Israel has been measured in its criticism of Russia. It has not joined international sanctions against Russia or provided military aid to Ukraine.

That paved the way for Bennett to be able to try to mediate between the sides, an effort which appears to have stalled as Israel deals with its own internal unrest.

The Holocaust and the constant manipulation of its history during the conflict has sparked outrage in Israel before.

In a speech to Israeli legislators in March, Zelenskyy compared Russia’s invasion of his country to the actions of Nazi Germany, accusing Putin of trying to carry out a “final solution” against Ukraine. The comparisons drew an angry condemnation from Yad Vashem, which said Zelenskyy was trivializing the Holocaust.

The Russian government and its representatives are burying themselves as a despicable lot!

Tony