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Strong Grassroots Opposition Stops "Skinny Repeal" in Senate
The League of Women Voters president, Chris Carson today issued the following statement on the Senate voting down the health care repeal bill:
"Early Friday morning a bipartisan majority of U.S. Senators said 'no' to legislation that would take health care away from millions of Americans. It is time for Congress to stop futilely trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and get to work on fixing the law to improve health care for the American people."
WASHINGTON
The League of Women Voters president, Chris Carson today issued the following statement on the Senate voting down the health care repeal bill:
"Early Friday morning a bipartisan majority of U.S. Senators said 'no' to legislation that would take health care away from millions of Americans. It is time for Congress to stop futilely trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and get to work on fixing the law to improve health care for the American people."
The League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan political organization, has fought since 1920 to improve our systems of government and impact public policies through citizen education and advocacy. The League's enduring vitality and resonance comes from its unique decentralized structure. The League is a grassroots organization, working at the national, state and local levels.
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Health Professionals Warn of 'Extremist' Trump Pick for NIH
"He will set American health, innovation, and science back for a generation," said one virologist of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
Nov 27, 2024
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and Stanford University professor who shot to prominence during the pandemic due to his heterodox views around Covid lockdowns, is President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the National Institutes of Health.
In announcing his selection, Trump wrote that Bhattacharya and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, will work together to "Make America Healthy Again."
However, Bhattacharya's nomination was met by alarm from some health professionals who warned that the views he expressed during the pandemic make him a poor choice to run the globe's premier medical research agency.
"Despite his mild manners, Bhattacharya is a self-interested extremist who gives cover to anti-vaxxers and promotes policies that will kill people. He will set American health, innovation, and science back for a generation. He's not here to reform NIH. He's here to destroy it," wrote the virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen on X.
Biomedical scientist and public health communicator Dr. Lucky Tran wrote: "Please google Great Barrington Declaration. If it had been implemented, millions more people would have died at the start of the pandemic. Now, one of its architects will lead the NIH (if confirmed), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world," wrote biomedical scientist and public health communicator Dr. Lucky Tran.
Another doctor, Alastair McAlpine, echoed these sentiments, writing that Bhattacharya is a "terrible" choice for head of NIH.
Bhattacharya is known for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, a treatise published in October 2020 that advocated for a "focused protection" approach to the pandemic.
"The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk," Bhattacharya and his co-authors wrote.
The document was named after the Massachusetts town where the three authored and signed the proposal. That work took place on the campus of a libertarian think tank, the American Institute for Economic Research.
The proposal caught the attention of Trump's White House in 2020. Trump, for his part, minimized the threat of the virus, chafed against lockdowns during the pandemic.
Public health groups criticized Bhattacharya and his co-authors, arguing that the proposal would threaten vulnerable individuals, according to reporting a the time. Then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, also denounced the approach in an October 2020 interview with The Washington Post: "This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment."
"What I worry about with this is it's being presented as if it’s a major alternative view that's held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community. That is not true," he said.
Now, four years later, Bhattacharya has been tapped to fill Collins' former seat.
Bhattacharya has also expressed an interest in shaking up NIH itself. "I would restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn't have a small number of scientific bureaucrats, dominating a field for a very long time," Bhattacharya said in a January 2024 interview with the Post.
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'Pathetic': France Says It Will Not Enforce ICC Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu
"So they will apply this to Putin as well?" asked one political analyst.
Nov 27, 2024
A day after French Prime Minister Michel Barnier told Parliament that the government would fulfill its obligations as a state party to the Rome Statute and uphold the International Criminal Court's arrest warrants for top Israeli officials, the country's Foreign Ministry announced it would not detain the two officials if they set foot in France.
The Foreign Ministry claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have "immunities" because Israeli is not a party to the Rome Statue and doesn't recognize the authority of the ICC.
"Such immunities apply to Prime Minister Netanyahu and other ministers concerned and will have to be taken into account if the ICC were to ask us to arrest and surrender," said the ministry.
The ICC issued the warrants on November 21, saying it had found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Netanyahu and Gallant have intentionally deprived civilians in Gaza of food, water, medicine, and other essentials since Israel began its bombardment of the enclave in October 2023 and its near-total blockade on humanitarian aid.
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has accused Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as a Hamas leader, of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Article 27 of the Rome Statute states that all people subject to arrest warrants are equal before the ICC, including heads of state.
Article 98 has been invoked as a "loophole" by state parties in the past when governments have refused to arrest other leaders whose countries do not recognize the ICC; it states that the court can't request the arrest of a non-ICC official if the arrest would require an ICC member to violate its international law obligations on immunity.
But the ICC rejected Jordan's Article 98 claim when it refused to arrest former Sudanese head of state Omar al-Bashir in 2017 and Mongolia's when it refused to turn over Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year.
"No international court has ever found that a head of state or high ranking individual has immunity before it, and Article 27 was meant to codify that principle," said Leila Sadat, former ICC special advisor on crimes against humanity, told Middle East Eye.
Former HRW executive director Kenneth Roth suggested the ICC should reject France's claim that Netanyahu has immunity, asking if French President Emmanuel Macron would also allow Bashir or Burmese army general Min Aung Hlang to walk free.
"So they will apply this to Putin as well?" added political analyst Yousef Munayyer.
The Middle East Monitorreported that France's statement on Wednesday came after a phone call between Netanyahu and Macron following the ICC's announcement last week.
RMC Radio reported that Macron told the Israeli prime minister that France "would uphold international law and noted that judges could grant immunity to heads of state."
Amichai Stein of the Israeli public broadcasting network KANN reported that senior U.S. and Israeli officials pressured France to make the statement on Wednesday, saying Macron's government would not take a leading role in Tuesday's Israel-Lebanon cease-fire deal unless France asserted it would not arrest Netanyahu and Gallant.
Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy called France's announcement "pathetic" and urged "more legal sanctions against Netanyahu and other ministers as quickly as possible," noting that the ICC warrants "apparently worked as leverage" to secure the cease-fire.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said immediately after the ICC warrants were announced that "decisions are binding on all states party to the Rome Statute, which includes all E.U. Member States."
But as HRW noted, along with France's announcement on Wednesday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has invited Netanyahu to Hungary and has said he wouldn't face arrest there, even though the country is a party to the Rome Statute.
"Ensuring the ICC has the ability to implement arrest warrants will require defending the court against external pressure and coercive measures. That means that right now E.U. support for arrests should include preparedness to adopt measures to protect the court from possible U.S. sanctions," wrote Alice Autin of HRW's Communications and International Justice Program.
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Is Bernie Sanders Launching a Third Party? 'Not Right Now, No'
"Real change in this country will come about when an organized working class leads the fight for justice," the Vermont senator said in a new interview.
Nov 27, 2024
An email Sen. Bernie Sanders sent to supporters this past weekend fueled speculation that he could be laying the groundwork for a new political party in the wake of Democrats' crushing defeat in the 2024 election.
But in an interview with The Nation's John Nichols published Tuesday, Sanders (I-Vt.) said that he's not considering forming a party to challenge the entrenched Democratic and Republican establishments—at least not at the moment.
"Not right now, no," Sanders told Nichols, who asked the senator directly about his email to supporters and whether he intends to create a new party.
The senator argued in the email it is "highly unlikely" that the Democratic leadership will "learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media, and our political life."
Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, told Nichols that while he's not currently backing the creation of a new party, he is making the case that "where it is more advantageous to run as an Independent, outside of the Democratic primary process, we should do that." He also emphasized the need for more working-class candidates across the country.
"Real change in this country will come about when an organized working class leads the fight for justice. We need working-class candidates to help us do that."
The senator said the upstart campaign of Independent Dan Osborn—a union steamfitter who launched an unexpectedly close challenge to two-term Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) while shunning the state's Democratic establishment—"should be looked at as a model for the future."
"He took on both political parties," Sanders said of Osborn, who outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points in Nebraska and is now launching a PAC aimed at helping working-class candidates run for office.
"He took on the corporate world," Sanders continued. "He ran as a strong trade unionist. Without party support, getting heavily outspent, he got through to working-class people all over Nebraska. It was an extraordinary campaign, and it tells me that the American people are sick and tired of seeing the rich getting richer. They think billionaires dominate both political parties. They want real change, and Dan's campaign raised those issues in a very significant way."
Since Trump's victory earlier this month, Sanders has been scathing in his assessment of the current state of the Democratic Party and its long-term trajectory as it hemorrhages working-class support.
"The Democratic Party is, increasingly, a party dominated by billionaires, run by well-paid consultants whose ideology is to tinker around the edges of a grossly unjust and unfair oligarchic system," Sanders told Nichols. "If we are ever going to bring about real change in this country, we have got to significantly grow class consciousness in America."
In his email over the weekend, Sanders wrote that Democratic leaders "are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns," making them reflexively hostile to the kinds of transformative changes needed to "build a multi-racial, multi-generational working class movement" with the power to challenge the nation's deeply unequal economic and political status quo.
"How do we recruit more working-class candidates for office at all levels of government? Should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties? How do we better support union organizing?" Sanders asked in the email. "These are some of the political questions that, together, we need to address. And it is absolutely critical that you make your voice heard during this process."
"Not me. Us," he added, reprising the central message of his 2020 campaign. "That is the only way forward."
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