by tyler | Apr 17, 2023 | CNN, opinions
On Monday, the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee — chaired by Donald Trump ally Rep. Jim Jordan — is set to hold a field hearing in New York City called “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan.” A statement bills the hearing as an examination of how, the Judiciary Committee says, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s policies have “led to an increase in violent crime and a dangerous community for New York City residents.”
In response, Bragg’s office slammed Jordan’s hearing as “a political stunt” while noting that data released by the New York Police Department shows crime is down in Manhattan with respect to murders, burglaries, robberies and more through April 2, compared with the same period last year.
In reality, this Jordan-led hearing isn’t about stopping crime but about defending Trump — who was recently charged by a Manhattan grand jury with 34 felonies. Trump pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges stemming from an investigation into a hush-money payment to an adult film actress. The former president also is facing criminal probes in other jurisdictions over efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Bragg sued Jordan and his committee last week in federal court, accusing the Judiciary Committee chairman of a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack” his office for its investigation and prosecution of Trump by making demands for confidential documents and testimony.
While Jordan and his committee appear focused on discrediting the investigation into Trump, why aren’t they looking into two recent bombshell reports by ProPublica that raised red flags about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ financial relationship with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow? After all, the House Judiciary Committee’s website explains that it has jurisdiction over “matters relating to the administration of justice in federal courts” – for which the revelations concerning Thomas fit perfectly.
First, we learned in early April that Crow had provided Thomas and his wife, Ginni, for decades with luxurious vacations including on the donor’s yacht and private jet to faraway places such as Indonesia and New Zealand. That information was never revealed to the public. (In a rare public statement, Thomas responded he was advised at the time that he did not have to report the trips. The justice said the guidelines for reporting personal hospitality have changed recently. “And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future,” he said.)
Then on Thursday, ProPublica reported that Thomas failed to disclose a 2014 real estate deal involving the sale of three properties he and his family owned in Savannah, Georgia, to that same GOP megadonor, Crow. One of Crow’s companies made the purchases for $133,363, according to ProPublica. A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires Supreme Court justices and other officials to make public the details of most real estate sales over $1,000.
As ProPublica detailed, the federal disclosure form Thomas filed for that year included a space to report the identity of the buyer in any private transaction, but Thomas left that space blank. Four ethics law experts told ProPublica that Thomas’ failure to report it appears to be a violation of the law. (Thomas did not respond to questions from ProPublica on its report; CNN reached out to the Supreme Court and Thomas for comment.)
The House Judiciary Committee has long addressed issues such as those surrounding Thomas. In fact, the committee is where investigations and the impeachment of federal judges often commence.
One recent example came in 2010 with Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr., whom the committee investigated and recommended for impeachment.
The committee’s Task Force on Judicial Impeachment said evidence showed Porteous “intentionally made material false statements and representations under penalty of perjury, engaged in a corrupt kickback scheme, solicited and accepted unlawful gifts, and intentionally misled the Senate during his confirmation proceedings.” The Senate later found Porteous guilty of four articles of impeachment and removed him from the bench.
Yet the Judiciary Committee has neither released statements nor tweets raising alarm bells about Thomas. Instead, its Twitter feed is filled with repeated tweets whining that C-SPAN won’t cover Monday’s New York field hearing. Worse, the committee retweeted GOP Rep. Mary Miller’s tweet defending Thomas as being attacked “because he is a man of deep faith, who loves our country and believes in our Constitution.”
Jordan’s use of his committee to assist Trump should surprise no one. The House January 6 committee’s report called the Ohio Republican “a significant player in President Trump’s efforts” to overturn the election. The report detailed the lawmaker’s efforts to assist Trump including on “January 2, 2021, Representative Jordan led a conference call in which he, President Trump, and other Members of Congress discussed strategies for delaying the January 6th joint session.” As a result, the January 6 committee subpoenaed Jordan to testify — but he refused to cooperate.
In contrast with the House panel, the Senate Judiciary Committee — headed by Democrats — announced in the wake of the reporting on Thomas that it plans to hold a hearing “on the need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards.” Beyond that, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia sent a letter Friday calling for a referral of Thomas to the US attorney general over “potential violations of the Ethics in Government Act 1978.”
The House Judiciary Committee’s website notes, “The Committee on the Judiciary has been called the lawyer for the House of Representatives.” Under Jordan that description needs to be updated to state that the Committee on the Judiciary is now “the lawyer for Donald J. Trump.” And the worst part is that the taxpayers are the ones paying for Jordan’s work on Trump’s behalf.
by tyler | Apr 13, 2023 | CNN, opinions
This past weekend, I had one of the most unusual experiences of my life: a day of air travel that was easy, sensible, efficient — dare I say pleasant. Passengers and airport staff alike were friendly and polite. The airplane seat offered enough room for both of my legs and both of my arms. We took off on time and landed early. My shoes stayed on the whole time I was at the airport.
It was a reminder of what travel could be. It was also in Johannesburg, South Africa, not in the US, and happened under a particular set of circumstances — a domestic flight on the Saturday afternoon of a long holiday weekend when most travelers had already reached their destinations. I have no doubt that the Joburg airport, like every other major-city air hub, is not always an emblem of efficiency and warmth. But last Saturday, it was — which highlighted just how unpleasant and undignified air travel often is, particularly within the United States.
More than 20 years after Sept. 11, 2001, only passengers who pay for the privilege can avoid removing their shoes and laptops from their bags by submitting their personal information ahead of time and undergoing background checks. Admittedly, I do pay — I don’t want to wait in a long security line, walk my stocking feet through a metal detector and have to un- and re-pack the MacBook I’ve carefully crammed into my carry-on. But the existence of pay-to-play shorter-line security options like Clear and TSA Pre-Check make clear that it is indeed possible to pre-screen a critical mass of passengers to avoid the morass of cranky people trying to pull on their shoes while re-packing their electronics.
Passengers are likely arriving to the security checkpoint already stressed and annoyed, especially when they’ve made the mistake of trying to get their boarding pass from an actual human. There are often few airline staff to be found at the check-in desk, let alone at the automated kiosks (in our post-Covid era, try not to think about how many other people’s filthy fingers have touched those screens) that may or may not fully function. And then there’s the bag drop line — and that extra $30 per bag, if not more, for those who thought they were booking the cheapest ticket.
Still, you should be glad. After all, if you’ve dropped off your checked bag, it means your flight is still — in theory — taking off. Earlier this spring, I had the all-too-common experience of showing up for an ultra-early morning flight only to find it had been cancelled, with no text, email, phone call or other notification to let me know. I had been rebooked for the next day, but the airline wouldn’t cover a hotel or food, leaving me in the lurch. And I’m far from the only person who has been left high and dry by a flight cancellation. Last year, more than 2% of all flights in the US were cancelled, the highest number of any year in the past decade, excluding 2020 when Covid-19 started raging.
So, let’s say your flight is still scheduled and you’ve paid extra money to travel with a bag. You’d be mistaken to believe you’re in the clear.
We can skip over the gate area of the airport itself — universally overpriced food, astoundingly inefficient design, generally miserable — and go right to boarding, where airline policy routinely collides with bad passenger behavior. Boarding groups are a sharp reminder of just how low-status the airlines have deemed most travelers, and travelers seem to swiftly adapt to their new designation by crowding around the boarding gate like livestock jockeying to be first to the dinner trough — blocking those trying to board, slowing the whole system down.
But who can blame them when airplanes simply don’t have enough overhead bin space to accommodate all of the carry-on luggage that passengers now bring in order to avoid those extra baggage charges, not to mention the long waits at baggage claim? Once passengers actually set foot on the aircraft, they engage in a “Will it fit?” comedy of trying to stuff too-full bags into overhead bins.
The whole process is a nightmare, to say the least, and that’s if you’re simply traveling alone. Everything from check-in to the TSA line to the overpriced airport food is more painful with a kid (or kids) in tow. Including the airplane seats themselves: Parents routinely cram into these already-tiny seats with an infant, which frankly sounds worse to me than living in Shaq’s body for a day and flying coach.
Of course, anyone who is taller than 5’2” or over 120 pounds is likely not enjoying the friendly skies. I’m significantly smaller than the average American woman, and when I fly domestic my knees nearly hit the seat in front of me; my body width fills out most of the seat. How men who could bench-press me manage to fit into what are essentially pitched-forward children’s chairs is both a mystery and a testament to human fortitude.
The truth is that most American adults do not comfortably fit in airplane seats, and yet airlines continue to make the seats tiny and uncomfortable, forcing passengers to be humiliated — or to shell out more money just to get a few more centimeters of space.
Yes, airlines are struggling with staff shortages and lost revenue due to the pandemic. But air travel was bad well before the pandemic. Airlines also received billions in federal dollars to keep them afloat. And carriers are now returning to profitability, undercutting their rational for stripping away more and more of the basics that make travel tolerable, from food to luggage to reasonable lines.
There are some fairly straightforward solutions here. The first is government: stricter rules for airlines, coupled with easing the experience of security checks for all flyers. The government could pre-screen passengers without an extra fee, or — even better — revamp security measures and have clear communication available for passengers about why they’re necessary.
And the government could crack down on the worst airline excesses. It took intervention from the Biden administration to make airlines stop the unconscionable practice of charging parents to sit near their children. This was a good first step. But if flights are delayed or canceled, airlines should have to pay up. The government should also explore minimum standards for seat size and space to make sure that the average US citizen can fly safely and comfortably, even if it costs more to reconfigure planes and reduce seating.
I travel a decent amount for both work and pleasure, and because I am not super rich, the indignities of the process never fail to grate. But every once in a while, like this past weekend as I settled into my oversized South African Airways seat without having broken a sweat, I’ll see a little glimmer of what air travel could be.
by tyler | Apr 13, 2023 | CNN, opinions
Oops … we did it again. The US national security team is once more ignominiously living out the line made famous by pop star Britney Spears after finding itself back in the uncomfortable position of watching state secrets ping-pong around the internet. As a veteran of the National Security Council and State Department, I have a couple of ideas about what we need to change to get Spears’ song off repeat.
We don’t have all the details yet about how and which highly classified Pentagon intelligence reports found their way to social media this time. Officials familiar with the situation have told CNN that the leaked documents appear to be part of a daily intelligence briefing prepared for top Pentagon leaders. We also don’t yet know who is responsible – a contract worker, a career civil servant, a political appointee or someone else who obtained access to the information. But since significant leaks have come from contract workers many times before, that’s one loophole the Biden administration should be sure to close. Indeed, whatever the cause of this latest breach, it should galvanize us to shut the revolving door of access to our most sensitive secrets.
Twenty years ago, the War on Terror led to a massive expansion in the use of contractors in sensitive positions across our government, from translators to intelligence analysts. We needed to rapidly ramp up our response to the terrorist threat and staff operations across two battle zones, and it was faster and easier in many cases to hire contractors than to seek congressional approval for permanent national security positions.
But now, too much of our intelligence, defense and diplomatic structure relies on people who are essentially temps. The Office of the Secretary of Defense alone has over 4,000 contractors. Unfortunately, onboarding new career officials can take years. The State Department, which the Biden administration pledged to rebuild after being degraded under President Donald Trump, has only seen its staff grow incrementally.
It’s time for us to both right-size and rethink the role of contractors, some of whom, based on my experience, can have access to way too much highly classified intelligence, including the Pentagon’s daily briefing. Unfortunately, as we have painfully learned from past transgressions, including the well-known case of National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked a sensitive surveillance program to the media, and the less well-known case of Shapour Moinian, who just last year pleaded guilty to selling secrets to the Chinese, contractors’ sense of duty and dedication can differ dramatically from the career crew (not that career public servants haven’t also wrongly shared classified information).
As an American diplomat, I managed and at times had to mitigate many of the difficulties presented by a large contract staff. Too often, they had a short-term focus and were motivated by money, not mission. I saw the Provincial Reconstruction Team I served on at Contingency Operating Base Speicher outside of Tikrit, Iraq, plagued by problems with contractors underperforming, overbilling and creating serious security situations by straining ties with our Iraqi counterparts.
To be sure, most contractors do make critical contributions to our national security mission. They add technical skills, perform logistical tasks that are not good uses of career officials’ time and fill gaps from staff shortages. And the speed and convenience in hiring make it easier to get some things done. But the sheer volume of contractors used has left some of our most sensitive programs and intelligence extraordinarily and unnecessarily exposed.
What really needs to change is contractors’ access to so much classified material. A new standard should be instituted that limits contractors’ access to the highest level of intelligence to exceptional circumstances – and only then when an agency head approves it.
This administrative action could cost the government some money by forcing it to hire more permanent employees for roles requiring that level of information. But it would be worth it to massively reduce our vulnerabilities. It could also help restore the confidence of allies in our ability to safeguard what they share with us.
But beyond contractors, there are other short-time workers who contribute to the problem. And they sit at the top of the organization. When President Joe Biden came into office, he promised to elevate experience and empower career officials. That did not happen. Instead, the upper ranks of the Defense and State Departments, along with the National Security Council, were packed with political appointees and other non-Foreign Service staff. This is particularly dangerous following the institutional destruction and devastation left by the Trump administration.
Political appointees often avoid tackling really tough bureaucratic challenges like the overreliance on contractors. After all, they seldom stick around long enough (in many cases less than two years) to understand the classification system, let alone do anything to improve how it operates. And even if they get how it works, it can take too much time beyond that to address such systematic issues. Systemic changes also often trigger institutional resistance, and political appointees might not have the deep relationships and institutional knowledge to get changes made in the first place. Finally, there are few incentives or rewards on offer for those who achieve an important administrative advance.
While Oval Office holders are unlikely to stop handing out jobs to political allies, Biden can still make improvements. For starters, there should be a minimum time commitment from those appointed to high political office. I’ve seen too many posts on my LinkedIn over the last year from Biden appointees hailing the few months they spent in their positions before moving on. This turnover creates massive disruptions and gaps in our national security structure.
The next change ought to be in appointees’ job descriptions, with each one required to make at least three substantive security improvements developed by their team during their tenure.
We won’t ever completely secure our secrets, and we will always need some contractors. However, there are a number of fairly easy and effective steps that Biden and his team can take now. Don’t wait for a long review. Don’t blame the last administration, as it did with the after-action report on Afghanistan. Don’t expect the next person to deal with it.
Biden came into office promising to rebuild and restore confidence in our beleaguered national security bureaucracy. He can and must do more, before we once again are playing Spears’ hit track.
by tyler | Apr 12, 2023 | CNN, opinions
Republicans who instigated my removal from the Tennessee House last week, along with and that of my legislative colleague Rep. Justin Jones, apparently failed to anticipate the nationwide backlash that their actions would engender. Democracy prevailed and the rule of law has won.
This week, I will retake my seat. After a vote held Wednesday afternoon by the Shelby County Commission, I will once again represent the beautifully diverse jurisdiction of District 86 in Memphis in Tennessee’s Assembly — as I did until Thursday of last week, when Republicans voted to remove me and Rep. Jones.
The unprecedented and partisan move by the chamber’s Republican supermajority to expel me from my duly-elected position temporarily silenced the voices of my constituents and flouted their right to be represented in the House. But it failed – as it did for Rep. Jones, when he was sent back to the House on Monday following a vote by the council of his district in Metro Nashville.
This should be a chastening moment for revanchist forces in Tennessee’s legislature and across the country. Over the long haul, the undemocratic machinations employed to oust us from office are destined to fail. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once famously said that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. Events this week demonstrated, more than ever, that this is indeed the case.
The stated reason for my expulsion was that I, Rep. Jones and another Democratic colleague, Gloria Johnson, “breached decorum” by peacefully walking side by side to the well of the House Chamber to acknowledge rampant gun violence that has victimized and traumatized grieving children and families across our state and around the nation.
If decorum was breached, it was by the heavy-handed Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House, which denied us the chance to speak during regular order, cut off our microphones, later disabled our voting machines and revoked our access to the building.
My colleagues and I exercised our First Amendment rights and joined chants from the floor during a recess hastily called by House Speaker Cameron Sexton in a further attempt to silence us and our constituents.
We followed the directive of Article 2, Section 26 of the State Constitution to oppose policies injurious to the people who elected us. As a result, we were put on display in that very House to “stand trial” for our alleged offenses.
The spectacle was a gross miscalculation by Republicans in the chamber. It turns out that most Americans care deeply about democracy. Most people care about equality and progress. And over two-thirds of Americans — including four out of 10 Republicans — support the kind of common sense gun safety laws that Rep. Jones, Rep. Johnson and I were protesting in favor of, in the wake of the senseless March 27 Covenant School massacre.
And yet, calls for common sense gun reform measures fall on deaf ears in our legislature where a Republican supermajority is wildly out of step with most people’s values.
Our aggressively gerrymandered legislature ignores the wishes of constituents on combating gun violence. Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs will never have a 10th birthday party. They’ll never go to a dance, graduate high school, fall in love or cast a vote. Their loved ones will never hug them again. Neither will the families of school custodian Mike Hill, substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, or Head of Covenant School Katherine Koonce. They were all senselessly gunned down at that school in Nashville.
People in Tennessee aren’t even required to purchase a permit to publicly carry guns in the state of Tennessee. Now the GOP-led legislature is considering lowering the age of permitless gun purchase and carry from 21 to 18. And at a time when we should be looking for ways to reduce the prevalence of firearms, Republican lawmakers are considering a measure to arm teachers in Tennessee, the state with some of the laxest gun safety laws in the country.
The Nashville massacre came just weeks after 20 people were killed in shootings in Memphis over a 10-day period in February. There have been far more mass shootings in the US this year than there have been days. Virtually everyone in Tennessee knows someone whose life has been touched by preventable gun violence, including me. A high school classmate and beloved son and middle school employee, Larry Thorn, was murdered just a few months ago. More guns simply cannot be the answer.
In Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and where multiple Klan, White Nationalist, and neo-Nazi organizations still thrive, the condescension and barely-veiled racism heaped on Justin Jones and me, and on the communities we represent, were on full display last Thursday night.
The Republican legislator who authored the expulsion resolution against me stood to belittle me and to minimize the deeply serious concerns of my constituents and the thousands of protestors present. He told me that he and his White conservative colleagues were “enraged” that I had had the audacity to walk, unbidden, to the front of the chamber and acknowledge the grieving families. He did so while upholding the status quo of a majority that denied equal rights to people who look like me.
But legislators don’t need permission to walk to the well of the House. There is no sanction against our peaceful actions during recess. And we are required by the Tennessee State Constitution to object to policies injurious to the well-being of our constituents.
The fact is, I break decorum with my very presence in that chamber. I am the son of a pastor and a school teacher. I am the grandson of two strong Black women who stood up against all that Tennessee hurled at them throughout the 20th century and beyond.
A new Tennessee is being born in its emerging miraculous diversity. The vast majority of people who wrote in to our largest state newspaper, The Tennessean, decried the breach of democracy they witnessed as the GOP supermajority expelled us.
I celebrate my return to the House to do the work for my constituency. Before being voted into office in a January 24, 2023 special election, I fought as a community activist against corporate environmental racism dumping toxins into Black communities in Southwest Memphis and won. My constituents sent me to the Tennessee State House to continue this work in their name. We will never be silenced. We will not sit down. We will not move to the back of the bus or the back of the house. We will march forward.
We will continue to challenge the Old South and bring about a Renewed South, one that is fair and just and democratic for Black, brown, White, indigenous, transgender, poor, immigrant — for all people. And we will win. Because we are on the right side of history.
by tyler | Apr 11, 2023 | CNN, opinions
The new movie “Air,” about the creation of Air Jordans, offers up a new genre: the anti-biopic. That’s true not least because we never see the star himself.
Rather than focus in on Michael Jordan’s foibles and flaws — the usual fodder for Hollywood films, it’s about the creation of what makes him him — a basketball superstar who is not only an exceptional talent but one who transformed the way American businesses do their business. Yes, Jordan is a billionaire, but he’s earned it. And that’s what is significant about his story and this movie: Those who do the work receive compensation for it.
That origin story centers largely on his mother, played forcefully by Viola Davis. Not only did she literally create him, of course, but she also contributed to his success. Yes, he has greatness, but Mrs. Jordan also has business acumen.
That worked with what Sonny Vaccaro, the basketball scout played by Matt Damon, and ultimately Nike, were trying and willing to do: build a brand around a person. It hadn’t been done quite that way before. And it served the purposes of the young player as the No. 3 draft pick in 1984, just as it served the interests of a sneaker brand that had little presence in the basketball market, one yet untapped among the Black community.
As Damon says to his old pal Ben Affleck (also the director), who plays Nike co-founder and CEO Phil Knight, what they have going for them is that Nike had no truly successful basketball shoes. Way to turn a weakness into a strength.
And that is a broader metaphor for what ends up being a historic moment in the history of sports, fashion and the world of work. At one point, the shoe designer Peter Moore says there’s only been one truly innovative moment in the long saga of shoes: the making of a left and a right for each pair. And that, he points out, happened 600 years ago.
But now, as the story unfolds, comes another, with significance not just for shoes but for the history of labor more broadly — the idea that those who do the hard work should be rewarded for their efforts. This innovation, which Jordan’s mother insists on to close the deal with Nike over its seemingly more attractive rivals Converse and Adidas, comes as the dramatic heart of the movie. And the closing credits reinforce the historic nature of this moment when we learn that Vaccaro, formerly known as the “sneaker pimp,” went on to fight a historic case against the NCAA to ensure that college athletes receive compensation for their moneymaking performances.
Of course, we also learn that the Air Jordan deal, sealed before the player ever set foot in the Chicago Bulls arena, translated into millions of dollars for Michael Jordan. And much could be said about his megastardom.
But the movie in the capable hands of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, working-class duo who came to fame quoting Howard Zinn to snobby Harvard University students in their breakout film, “Good Will Hunting,” know their history. Rather than sophomoric students, they are now grown up, and they can change their obscure pedantic references for subtle storytelling by way of invoking the “boss” — not Phil Knight, who is the film’s literal boss, but Bruce Springsteen, that iconic storyteller.
In a powerful scene, Jason Bateman, who plays a Nike marketing director, explains that rather than singing along to a patriotic anthem, he now realizes that “Born in the U.S.A.” is a song about disillusionment and disappointment with American ideals, that the Vietnam War as an imperial disaster is a broader commentary on what so much of Springsteen’s music is about: the struggles of the working man who has little control over his own destiny.
That changed with Michael Jordan’s contract. The working man got his due. Of course, Damon and Affleck can’t resist flaunting their lefty pedigree. In the same scene, Bateman acknowledges that the company benefits from the reliance on production of their products in sweatshops of South Korea and Taiwan. But that too is handled with subtlety. He does not footnote his sources. True, the New Left historian Walter LaFeber, not quite as famous as Zinn, but still an academic icon, had obviously not yet written his account of the global capitalism of Air Jordans. But the mention of production from developing nations is enough of a nod to the duo’s sophistication as students of history.
Also subtle is how the movie is most definitely of the current Black Lives Matter moment. It tells a true story that took place in 1984. But it also speaks to the inversion of power that is taking place in 2023. A strong powerful Black mother shapes the destiny of her Black son. This is a hopeful story.
For all the mothers we see on camera today, grief-stricken over the tragic deaths of their murdered sons, here Viola Davis flips the script and makes sure that fate deals differently with her boy. It’s not for nothing that the movie ends with a real-life tribute of Jordan honoring his mother. Of course, we also see President Barack Obama serving as a surrogate father as he places a White House Medal of Honor around the star’s neck. There is no chokehold or knee here.
In the end, the movie also functions as a nostalgic set piece. Members of the audience bop their heads along to the iconic music of the period, a playlist that is notably White. That’s not a simple whitewashing of history. It’s because the world of hip-hop and Black culture was just getting off the ground. And that kind of celebration of Black culture, even as it is commodified by corporate America, featured no less of a star than Jordan. He not only changed the game of basketball, but he changed American culture.
And Jordan also, at least in this telling, changed the world of work. Here is a 21-year-old kid who his agent tells all his suitors wants a fancy new car to sign on the dotted line. But really what motivates him and his foresighted mother is a desire for a cut of the deal. A shoe is just a shoe until the right man steps into it and gives it value, a line deployed at key moments.
Another key moment, which reinforces the difference between this movie and the conventional biopic, is when in short order Damon sums up the outline of every star’s life and therefore the narrative structure of every celebrity motion picture: the rise and the inevitable decline. But here that is not the main event. As Damon explains, it is the branding of Jordan that will make him not only rich but immortal.
In that moment, it’s almost as if he’s teeing up Mrs. Jordan for the demand that she will soon make to give him a stake in the profits. Yes, Jordan has his fair share of missteps and setbacks off the court after a long string of successes. But his biggest triumph came with the way he changed the participation of the star — in this case a young Black man — in the making of his own marketing success.
I’d choose this subtle story over the usual biopic as both a compelling and realistic account of when history pivoted to celebrate those who would emerge from the shadows.
by tyler | Apr 11, 2023 | CNN, opinions
Dueling decisions in two federal district courts last week are likely to set up a showdown at the Supreme Court over the fate of the abortion pill mifepristone. If abortion opponents are successful, access to the pill — reportedly used in more than half of abortions in the United States — will be severely undercut.
Beyond the dangerous precedent this sets for challenges to other important FDA-approved drugs that some political factions don’t like, the case is an alarming expression of the way right-wing activists are using junk science to bypass the will of the American public and restrict abortion.
US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas blocked the use of mifepristone Friday after the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a group of antiabortion doctors, employed dubious arguments to challenge the medication’s approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000.
The group alleges that the FDA failed to engage in a rigorous review of the drug, lacked the authority to approve the drug and rushed it to market without thorough consideration of the health implications (the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the plaintiffs, claims that the drug imperils the health and even lives of pregnant women.)
The FDA, in appealing the Texas ruling, supported its process for authorizing Mifiprex, the brand name for mifepristone. The “FDA approved Mifeprex more than 20 years ago based on a comprehensive review of the scientific evidence available and determined that it was safe and effective,” the agency said. “The approval was based on the best available science and done in accordance with the laws that govern our work.”
The Texas suit additionally claims that mifepristone was criminalized under the 1873 Comstock Act, a federal law that prohibits mailing any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” That legal interpretation would limit access to mifepristone because drug suppliers need to ship it to providers.
For now, the drug remains available. Kacsmaryk gave the government a week to file an appeal, which is among the legal measures underway to keep the ruling from going into effect. At the same time, in a case brought by 17 states and the District of Columbia, U.S. District Judge Thomas Owen Rice in Washington state ordered the FDA to keep mifepristone available in those jurisdictions.
The states had argued that the FDA should lift some of the restrictions on mifepristone access, which they argued were unnecessary and unsupported by science. Rice instead ordered the FDA to preserve access in the states that had brought suit.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling is unprecedented. It is rare for parties to challenge the FDA’s approval of drugs, but for a judge to second-guess a decision on a drug that has safely been on the market for more than 20 years is just about unheard of — especially when there is no legitimate case that the plaintiffs have the standing to sue.
Any fair investigation of the FDA’s process would show that there are no grounds for challenging mifepristone’s approval, especially 23 years after the fact. The drug received extensive review — more than four years — before FDA approval. Moreover, claims that mifepristone threatens the health of those who take it are unfounded. The drug has a better safety record for use than Viagra and penicillin. Notably, it was available and used for years without incident in Europe.
Altogether, for those who take mifepristone “serious side effects occur in less than 1% of patients, and major adverse events—significant infection, blood loss, or hospitalization—occur in less than 0.3% of patients. The risk of death is almost non-existent.”
The case was never about the safety of mifepristone, however. Antiabortion groups like the ADF cling to dubious scientific claims to bypass majority politics, putting decisions in the hands of conservative judges and confusing voters who don’t always feel qualified to have an opinion on how a drug like mifepristone works.
Since 2022, voters have sent a clear message when the question is what abortion law ought to look like: They have sided with supporters of abortion rights in six out of six ballot initiatives, boosted Democratic candidates and, just last week, transformed the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A recent Ipsos poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans want medication abortion to be kept legal.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling is part of a strategy to take the question away from voters and to reframe abortion as something that ordinary Americans neither understand nor get a say about. Such an approach isn’t new, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon; if the antiabortion movement can’t win in a fair democratic fight, its members will seek out ways to change the rules.
Many antiabortion groups have long tried to undermine abortion by claiming that it harms girls and women — and that abortion opponents were seeking to protect pregnant people from the “abortion industry.”
This strategy underwrote targeted regulations of abortion providers (TRAP laws), onerous clinic regulations and statutes forcing women to receive medically unnecessary and invasive vaginal ultrasounds. State legislatures enacted burdensome laws requiring waiting periods before a woman can legally terminate a pregnancy. This all despite the fact that a woman is about 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than having an abortion.
When the Supreme Court upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2007, dubious scientific arguments became even more central to antiabortion advocacy. In Gonzales v. Carhart, the court held that in circumstances of scientific uncertainty, legislators would have more latitude to regulate abortion. That incentivized antiabortion groups to identify or manufacture uncertainty by creating their own data and fielding their own witnesses.
Implausible scientific claims are now visible on social media, in lawsuits and in congressional hearings. In a separate fight, for example, the antiabortion group Students for Life of America has asked the FDA to reconsider its mifepristone approval by making claims about the ill effects of abortion on wastewater.
In Congress, abortion opponents testified — contrary to the position taken by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — that life-saving abortions, or even abortions in cases of rape, were not “abortions” at all. (By taking this position, abortion opponents can still defend bans with no or few exceptions by claiming that abortion is never necessary.)
That Kacsmaryk embraced snake-oil science underscores concerns that broader dangers loom. If his ruling stands, this case sends a message that challengers don’t need to have science on their side, or even the standing, to sue. All that matters is control of the courts.
