Новости за 15.04.2021

You can tell that House and Senate Democrats are serious about court-packing by the new bill’s name: the Judiciary Act of 2021. They didn’t burden it with an insufferable acronym, like the Judicial Upkeep, Democracy, Growth, and Expansion, or JUDGE, Act, or something pedantic like the Save Our Courts Act. By connecting it to previous Judiciary Acts that built and expanded the federal courts since 1789, Democrats are trying to suggest that there’s precedent and continuity to their proposal.

What also must be known about Bernie Madoff, who died on Wednesday at the age of 82, is that prior to the revelation in December 2008 that he had been running the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, he was, for most of his career, one of the most well-respected figures in finance. He was anything but marginal. He served as the chairman of Nasdaq three different years in the 1990s, and served on the boards of many Wall Street organizations. The funds he ran attracted some of the richest people in the world. Читать дальше...

No one who watched the inauguration of Joe Biden could have missed that he was a Roman Catholic. Before the day’s public ceremonies, he attended a private Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, named for the patron saint of civil servants. Then, at the Capitol, a Jesuit priest and former president of Georgetown University, Father Leo O’Donovan, used an otherwise ecumenical prayer to remind the audience that a Catholic had asked for God’s blessing for George Washington’s inauguration. Читать дальше...

Although we’re still less than three months into the Biden administration, there’s already an eagerness all around to characterize and define his presidency. This is understandable on a psychological level⁠—we live in harrowing and uncertain times; the American people and opinion leaders are trying to understand where the country is going and how quickly we might get there. And that’s led to a grasping for historical analogues to which Biden and his agenda might be compared.

The United States has one national Constitution and one national Bill of Rights. But sometimes it feels like this country has two First Amendments. There is the one that was written down in the late eighteenth century and has almost two-and-a-half centuries of jurisprudence built around it. And then there is the folk understanding of the First Amendment in certain circles, where getting banned from Twitter is a free-speech violation beyond anything that George Orwell could have imagined.

There’s one big thing the Biden administration could do to beat back the global pandemic: urge the World Trade Organization to waive patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines. To date, it hasn’t done that, despite calls from India, South Africa, and 100 other mainly low- and middle-income countries represented in the WTO. Instead, protections for patent-holders in the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, or TRIPS, prevent such countries from manufacturing the vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer... Читать дальше...