Новости за 20.07.2022

Anyone wondering whether the still-emerging findings of the January 6 committee will impact the 2022 midterms should look no further than Wisconsin’s Senate race. Increasingly, Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, is struggling to explain recent revelations from the congressional panel about how he almost received two slates of fake electors that his chief of staff tried to deliver to then–Vice President Mike Pence.

I claim no insight into the mind of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Democrats’ ever-elusive fiftieth vote. Manchin has a habit of saying he’s amenable to compromise and then, as negotiations near their end, finding some reason to scuttle the deal. I don’t recall encountering this tactic before. The nearest equivalent is when a legislator pretends he or she is open to compromise, wrings some concessions, then votes against final passage. That isn’t very nice, but at least it achieves a strategic goal: Concessions have been won. Читать дальше...

In the weeks since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which allows states to make abortion illegal, there has been a raft of stories about patients with chronic illnesses being denied their prescriptions for methotrexate, a common autoimmune medication seen as the “gold standard” treatment for arthritis, lupus, Crohn’s, and other conditions. Uncertainty around what can legally be dispensed given the new abortion restrictions, especially in states... Читать дальше...

The Puerto Rico Status Act introduced last week in the House of Representatives is the latest in a long line of efforts to address the legislation’s namesake issue. It would allow Puerto Ricans to choose between statehood, independence, and free association; for the first time ever, that vote would exclude the status quo and bind Congress to the result. Therefore, it’s the most serious attempt in decades to decolonize the largest and longest-held U.S. possession.

In 1996, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed one of the most misleadingly named bills in the 20th century: the Defense of Marriage Act, also known as DOMA. It did not defend a single marriage in the nearly two decades that it remained on the books. To the contrary, DOMA denied federal legal benefits of marriage to countless couples solely because the spouses happened to be of the same gender.