After Texas Ruling, Democratic States Move to Stockpile Abortion Pills

The governor of Massachusetts has asked the University of Massachusetts to purchase a one-year supply of the abortion pill mifepristone, and issued an executive order shielding pharmacists who stock the drug, abortion providers and patients from criminal and civil liability.

Washington State is using its Department of Corrections and the University of Washington to stockpile a four-year supply of the drug, and has fast-tracked legislation allowing health care providers to distribute it.

Officials in Maine, where at least 70 percent of abortions are done using pills, and in Maryland said this week that they were exploring purchasing additional doses of mifepristone.

Since a federal judge in Texas last week invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, states led by Democrats have been scrambling to adjust to a possible future without it.

The judge’s decision could affect access to the pill in all states, even where Democrats and voters have acted to secure abortion rights.

The pill is the first in a two-drug medication regimen used in over half of abortions in the United States. A second pill, misoprostol, can be used alone but is not as effective as both drugs together.

The judge, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, put his ruling on hold for a week to allow time for appeals; the Justice Department appealed the ruling on Monday. A separate ruling by a Washington State federal judge hours after the Texas ruling directly contradicted the Texas judge and ordered the F.D.A. to make no changes to the availability of the drug in the states involved in that suit. Many expect the dispute to head to the Supreme Court.

In the interim, states are trying to figure out how to prepare for different scenarios in a fast-changing legal landscape.

Some states are looking to misoprostol, the second drug in the two-drug regimen, which was not covered in the Texas judge’s preliminary ruling.

Thomas Pushed To Kill Disclosure Laws While Getting Secret Billionaire Gifts (e-newsletter by The Lever)

While refusing to disclose lavish gifts from a billionaire, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas pushed to invalidate all political spending disclosure laws in America, insisting that donors have a constitutional right to anonymously influence politics with unlimited amounts of cash.

The undisclosed gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow — who has links to groups that file amicus briefs lobbying the Supreme Court — were exposed by a ProPublica report last week. If Thomas now faces no investigation or consequences for potentially violating long-standing federal ethics laws, his actions could create a precedent effectively legalizing unlimited, unreported gifts in much the way he demanded for political donations.

In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its notorious Citizens United ruling, declaring that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — and therefore could be made limitlessly.

But that ruling, which unleashed billions of dollars in dark money election spending, did not go far enough for Thomas, who had previously insisted that there exists an “established right to anonymous speech.” He supported the Citizens United majority ruling, but issued a concurring opinion insisting that judges should overturn all rules that require transparency in political spending.

“This court should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements,” Thomas wrote. He argued that donors could face retaliation and “ruined careers” when they disclose their political spending, citing an example from California in which supporters of a ballot measure ending same-sex marriage were allegedly harassed for donating to the ballot measure campaign.

Thomas decried the prospect of transparency empowering members of the public to come up with ways to try to shame donors and the public officials they bankroll.

“Disclaimer and disclosure requirements enable private citizens and elected officials to implement political strategies specifically calculated to curtail campaign-related activity and prevent the lawful, peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights,” he wrote.

The ProPublica report delineates numerous instances in which Thomas and his wife accepted gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from Crow, a billionaire Republican donor, potentially violating a 1978 federal ethics law.

Should the Justice Department, Congress, and the Supreme Court now eschew any investigation or punishment, they could help Thomas achieve the vision he described in Citizens United: a political system that in practice allows billionaires and corporations to deliver unlimited anonymous cash to public officials, in total secrecy and with complete impunity.

“Letting wealthy donors engage in unchecked, private influence campaigns seems to be a core principle of Justice Thomas’s vision for our democracy,” Derek Martin, spokesperson for the government watchdog group Accountable.US, told The Lever. “But hardworking Americans who aren’t buddies with billionaire benefactors know that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Now that Clarence Thomas’s true priorities are out of the shadows, he needs to be held accountable.”

Citizens United “Does Not Go Far Enough”
The Supreme Court has famously refused to adhere to an ethical code, and Congress has not used its statutory power to write one for the highest court. Justices have declined to recuse themselves from cases in which they have financial interests as well as cases involving organizations that publicly supported their confirmation campaigns.

The justices have also maintained close ties with donor-funded groups such as Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society and the Supreme Court Historical Society.

But Thomas’s disdain for ethics rules stands out, and shows in opinions he’s written in key campaign finance cases. Even in cases where Thomas joined the majority, he issued concurring opinions arguing that the court had not gone far enough in discarding political spending limits or disclosure laws — repeatedly asserting that the court had erred in its 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which upheld the constitutionality of contribution limits to federal candidates.

TODAY, as we mourn with the families of those lost in Nashville & Louisville to gun violence, we won’t be silent! We’ll march from The National Civil Rights Museum to the County Commission in support of, justice, gun violence prevention and Our Representative Justin J. Pearson! pic.twitter.com/xJcwOYPeM8

— Justin J. Pearson (@Justinjpearson) April 12, 2023

From Pearson’s op-ed in the Grey Lady:

In January, my former high school classmate Larry Thorn was shot dead. Larry was sweet and beloved and a coach and secretary at a Shelby County, Tenn., middle school when he was killed on Jan. 10, just a month before I took my seat in the State House. In February, in only 10 days, 20 people were shot in mass shootings in Memphis, the community I represented. And on Monday, five people were shot dead at the Old National Bank in Louisville, Ky.

In the wake of the March 27 Covenant School mass shooting in Nashville that took six precious lives, including that of the 9-year-olds Hallie Scruggs, Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney, our people are traumatized. They want action.

Following the school massacre, I walked into work in the State House each day seeing hundreds of young protesters, many with signs that asked, “Am I next?”

We were traumatized, too. We wanted action, too. And the difference was — it was literally our job to act.

Yet, Republican legislators refuse to take meaningful action.

Instead, some have averted their eyes and hurried into the chamber, walking through hundreds of mourning protesters to discuss a bill to further expand gun rights by allowing teachers to carry weapons on campus. But many of us did not. We stopped and embraced traumatized children, parents and elders. We prayed. We protested.

In this season of rebirth and renewal, I stood beside my people with hope. For God said, “Let light shine out of darkness.”

Last week, the people of Tennessee and the nation witnessed an assault against democracy when my colleague Justin Jones and I, both young Black Democratic men, were expelled from office for allegedly breaching decorum on the House floor. My former colleague, a 60-year-old white female Democratic representative, Gloria Johnson, had also joined our peaceful protest against gun violence but narrowly survived expulsion. Mr. Jones has since returned to the House after a vote by the Nashville Metropolitan Council. I’m hoping the Shelby County Board of Commissioners similarly puts me back in the House on Wednesday.

There is something amiss in the decorum of the State House when G.O.P. leaders like Representative Paul Sherrell, who proposed death from “hanging by a tree” as an acceptable form of state execution (Mr. Sherrell later apologized for his comment) feel comfortable berating Mr. Jones and me for our peaceful act of civil disobedience. This, in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Klan, a land stained with the blood of lynchings of my people.

I wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced. We who were elected to represent all Tennesseans — Black, white, brown, immigrant, female, male, poor, young, transgender and queer — are routinely silenced when we try to speak on their behalf. Last week, the world was allowed to see it in broad daylight.

In such a hostile environment for democracy, I’m inspired by the late civil rights fighter and congressman John Lewis, who in 1965, when demonstrating for voting rights in Selma, Ala., endured a police beating that almost took his life. In 2016, after the tragic Pulse nightclub massacre that killed 49 people, he led a sit-in on the U.S. House floor for 25 hours to protest the inaction of lawmakers in the pockets of the National Rifle Association.

My mother, a schoolteacher, and my father, a pastor, instilled in me the hope that justice is possible for all. When I was 15, I attended a Memphis City School Board meeting with my parents to give a speech demanding access to quality textbooks and classes that white peers in their school districts had. These were resources that increased their opportunities for a good college education — chances that Black students, too, deserved.

A few years ago, I helped lead a coalition of community activists in the fight against the construction of the Byhalia Connection crude oil pipeline project in my late grandmothers’ community in southwest Memphis, where, according to a 2013 study, the risk of cancer is four times higher than the national average. Both of my grandmothers died from cancer. Our coalition killed the project before it killed more of us. We fought, and we won.

Unchecked gun violence, environmental racism and denial of basic health and human services should enrage us all and compel us to action.

It’s not just our individual voices that were sanctioned and silenced last Thursday. It was the voices of the nearly 135,000 Tennesseans we represented — many desperate for protection from the absence of many common-sense gun safety laws in our state. Since the Covenant School shooting, the Republican supermajority in the State House has done little but advance a bill that would allow teachers to carry guns in school and propose a $140 million budget increase to pay for the presence of armed guards in public schools, further militarizing them without adequate evidence that this makes schools safer.

Besides expanding already expansive gun rights, Republican-led statehouses across the country are proposing and passing staggering numbers of bills that serve a fringe, white evangelical agenda that abrogates the rights and freedoms of the rest of us. They’re passing legislation to control the intellectual freedom of writers and educators, proposing laws that would restrict the bodily autonomy of transgender children and people who can become pregnant, and curtailing even our right to vote. Combined with a shrinking social safety net as people lose access to resources to meet basic health, housing and food needs, we have a nation in pain and peril.

In a small victory for our people clamoring for change, Gov. Bill Lee announced Tuesday that he would sign an executive order strengthening background checks for buying firearms and called for Republican lawmakers to support a red flag law.

I was elected early this year by the people of Memphis and Millington to stand up for all of us against encroachments on our freedoms.

I will continue to fight with and for our people, whether in or out of office. We and the young protesters are the future of a new Tennessee. Those who seek to silence us will not have the final say.

Amazing. One step at a time… https://t.co/mc9f10tLkB

— Kiran Sreepada (@KiranSreepada) April 12, 2023

At age 63, President Franklin Roosevelt was photographed while posing for a portrait at “Little White House,” Warm Springs, Georgia. (This photograph remained secret for decades.) The next day, today 1945, he died. pic.twitter.com/0ZmsVa7f36

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) April 12, 2023

Still the best president of the 20th century. TR isn’t too far behind him. I’ll always be grateful too to LBJ, who set up Medicare and Medicaid.

Dave Dayen

Pharma Cash Built the Conservative Court Majority That Now Harms Pharma

The pharmaceutical industry is very upset. Right-wing federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of abortion medication mifepristone could severely damage companies’ ability to develop and market prescription drugs. Companies could spend a fortune getting a drug approved, only to see the courts take issue with the process, and the money washed down the drain. To them, it’s the worst thing a court ruling can be: bad for business.

That’s why Big Pharma is speaking out. On Monday, industry leaders fashioned an open letter condemning Kacsmaryk’s “act of judicial interference,” which “creates uncertainty for the entire biopharma industry … Adding regulatory uncertainty to the already inherently risky work of discovering and developing new medicines will likely have the effect of reducing incentives for investment, endangering the innovation that characterizes our industry.” Over 400 industry CEOs and top executives have signed on to the letter, as of Tuesday afternoon.

Because of a separate ruling from a judge in Washington state and the Biden administration’s swift appeal, it’s unclear what will happen to mifepristone access. The case is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court.

But the industry’s lament about judicial activism feels a bit like Dr. Frankenstein expressing outrage over the destruction carried out by his monster. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole, and many of the individual officials who signed the letter, financially supported the Senate Republicans who confirmed Kacsmaryk to the federal bench.

Kacsmaryk was confirmed in June 2019 on a mostly party-line vote. Of the 53 Senate Republicans then in office, only Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) voted against him. Thirty-eight of those 52 Kacsmaryk supporters are still in office.

The vast majority of these members have received personal donations from top employees of the pharmaceutical industry and their company PACs who signed the open letter. And Senate Republicans more generally have benefited from the largesse of drug industry trade associations.

To be fair, many Democrats also get a heaping share of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash. Like many industries, they want both parties in their pocket as deeply as possible. A 2021 report in Stat News found that two-thirds of all members of Congress received contributions from pharmaceutical firms leading up to the 2020 election. Pfizer alone, which has three signatories on the letter, donated to 228 lawmakers through its political action committee that cycle.

But the industry’s giant money-spray approach to most of Washington didn’t account for how anti-abortion zealotry could harm their business model. Senate Republicans, who elevated the judge whose ruling threatened the functioning of the U.S. drug approval system, have since then been uncharacteristically quiet about it.

Though it’s possible that the ruling will create an irreparable split, given the alignment between drugmakers and anti-regulatory Republicans (all of whom opposed price negotiation on prescription drugs through Medicare last year), it’s unlikely to happen. The only lawmakers who are sure to get left out of the campaign funding bonanza are progressives who want to cut spending on prescription drugs.

For now, all we have are the hard numbers, showing that Senate Republicans voting for Kacsmaryk got to the Senate in part on the backs of Big Pharma.

Take Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla, perhaps the loudest private-sector chief executive attacking the Kacsmaryk ruling. Since 2019, he has given large personal donations to most of the Senate Republican leadership, the ones who set the legislative calendar and made sure Kacsmaryk got confirmed.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) got $2,800, and top deputies John Thune (R-SD) and John Cornyn (R-TX) got $5,800 and $5,000, respectively. Former Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner got $5,000 from Bourla before he was defeated in 2020, and he dutifully voted for Kacsmaryk, along with the other recipients of campaign cash. (Bourla also maxed out to pro-pharma Democrats Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Chris Coons of Delaware in the past few years; neither of them voted for Kacsmaryk.)

The PACs of Pfizer, Genentech, Biogen, and Lundbeck, all of whose CEOs signed the open letter, have given donations to 45 of the 52 Republican senators who voted for Kacsmaryk over the past three election cycles, for a total of $584,999, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Leading the pack was Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, who received $36,500 over those three cycles from all four firms. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) received $32,000, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) received $27,000, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) received $24,000, also raking in donations from all four firms. Thirty of the senators received at least $10,000.

Scott in particular has become a darling of the pharmaceutical industry in recent years, with $99,000 in donations in just the second half of 2021, according to Kaiser Health News. Scott is a presumed 2024 presidential candidate.

In addition to the four companies mentioned above, eight other companies whose top executives signed the open letter are part of the 30 core members of PhRMA, the leading trade association for the drug industry. That includes officials from Bayer, Bristol Myers Squibb, Incyte, Ipsen, Merck, Novartis, Sage, and Takeda. The CEOs of Incyte and Sage signed the document.

Unlike many individual companies, PhRMA’s donations are tilted toward Republicans, with 81 percent of its $1.5 million in donations from 2007 to 2022 going to the GOP. McConnell and Cornyn have been the largest recipients of PhRMA money in Congress in that period, with $31,500 and $28,500, respectively. The industry really moved its money into Republican hands in 2019, when they feared a Democratic trifecta in the 2020 elections would make pricing reforms more likely. The Senate remained in Republican hands after the 2018 midterms, thanks in part to PhRMA, and Senate Republicans confirmed Matthew Kacsmaryk the next year.

The on-the-books funding doesn’t take into account the millions of dollars in dark money that PhRMA has given in the past several years. Because of the inability to track the cash, we don’t know precisely how much the pharmaceutical industry gave, but we can say that outside groups spent nearly $1 billion on Senate Republican candidates in the 2022 election cycle. One $4.5 million donation from PhRMA in 2020 supported the American Action Network, a right-wing group.

A large number of the executives who signed the open letter come from the biotechnology sector. Seven signers of the letter are members of the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), the industry’s leading trade group, including the chair (Paul Hastings, CEO of Nkarta Therapeutics) and the immediate past chair (Jeremy Levin, CEO of Ovid Therapeutics). Levin told The New York Times that Kacsmaryk’s ruling “completely upends the F.D.A.’s authority.” BIO’s interim CEO has separately spoken out in similar terms.

BIO contributed over $354,000 to campaigns and candidates in the 2022 election cycle, including $37,700 to 18 Senate Republicans. Sens. Steve Daines (R-MT) and Todd Young (R-IN) were the biggest recipients among the Senate GOP; both voted for Kacsmaryk. Another $56,000 was given to Senate Republican candidates in the 2020 cycle, led again by Daines and Young.

So if the pharmaceutical industry is looking for someone to blame when right-wing judges don’t respect the FDA approval process, and if they want to cry about the significant investments into drug development that could be lost if it gets blown up, they could try looking in a mirror.

There’s also a cool chart in the article listing all of the GQP who obtained donations from their corporate masters. However, the chart is too large for me to scrape and paste here without it looking very choppy.

No Labels’ Real Label: Vanity Candidates ‘R’ Us

Over at No Labels, things are hoppin’. With $70 million in the bank, the organization is busy qualifying its own ballot line in a range of states so it can run an independent candidate for president in 2024. (Despite its claim that it seeks to restore trust in government, No Labels has declined to identify where that $70 million came from.) It has already won ballot status in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), seeking to reclaim his hold on the nation’s attention now that he’s no longer the swing vote in the Senate, and facing probable defeat should he seek re-election to the Senate next year, is the likeliest recipient of No Labels’ You-Too-Can-Be-the-Presidential-Spoiler Prize. Other possible claimants (though if Manchin runs, they’d almost surely have to settle for the vice-presidential line) include Maryland’s former governor, Republican Larry Hogan, and the general flotsam that has floated around No Labels for years. (At one No Labels New Hampshire presidential primary forum I covered in 2019, speakers included Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard.)

Leading Democrats of the centrist persuasion, including Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and No Labels co-founder Bill Galston, are now scurrying away from the group as fast as they can, pointing out that characterizing a race likely pitting Joe Biden against Donald Trump as one in which no sober-minded centrist could make a choice—which is precisely No Labels’ line—is pernicious hooey. Third Way, an organization of centrist Democrats devoted to defeating the left in intraparty tussles, has expressed voluble alarm at No Labels’ plan, noting that the states in which No Labels is now gathering signatures are both swing and blue, but decidedly not red. That can only be interpreted as a ploy to weaken Biden and the Democrats.

No Labels justifies its actions by insisting that both Democrats and Republicans have become entirely creatures of extremists. Lest you think I overstate the organization’s message, consider this video that it is sending out to potential donors, whose existence was revealed last week by The New Republic’s Daniel Strauss.

“With the extremes on both sides dominating the primaries,” the video warns, “the two parties are on a path to nominating candidates most eligible voters will find unacceptable.” Above these words, the video shows photos of four political figures—in order of appearance, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.

The Democrat who will surely be his party’s nominee next year, one Joseph R. Biden, has been mysteriously omitted from No Labels’ list, even though it was Biden who “dominated the primaries” that the Democrats held in 2020, and will do the same in 2024 should he run, which is virtually guaranteed.

Depicting the Democratic Party as an amalgam of left extremes is, of course, the daily fare offered up by Fox News and like polemicists (political scientists call this the “Carlson-Hannity-Teixeira Syndrome”). But not even Fox has gone so far as to suggest that Biden will somehow vanish between now and 2024.

The video is also filled with shots of empty polling places, anticipating “an election in which the majority saw no viable choice.” This despite the fact that the 2020 election saw by far the highest turnout in American history, and that elections since then—like in Wisconsin last week—have also seen record-high turnout. Looking all the way back to the post–Civil War era, party polarization has usually boosted turnout, not depressed it. No Labels’ claims to the contrary are rebutted by the record levels of voting in the Republican North vs. Democratic South voting of the 1870s and ’80s, and the huge increase in turnout between 1932 and 1936, during which interval Franklin Roosevelt pushed the New Deal through Congress despite major Republican opposition.

For an organization that once included at least one serious political intellectual (Galston), No Labels has been willfully indifferent to the leading role that the Republican Party’s plunge into ethno-nationalism has played in the current political polarization. Galston’s Brookings colleague Tom Mann and his co-author, the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein, documented the degree to which the Republicans’ move rightward has greatly eclipsed the Democrats’ move left, but that seems to have made no impression on the No Labels crowd. Neither has No Labels noticed that the elements of Bernie Sanders’s left-wing program that Biden has embraced—affordable child care, tax credits for families with children, free public-college tuition, higher taxes on the rich—are, by the evidence of every poll on the subject, among the most popular public policies with the American public.

But it’s precisely such ideas that a Manchin or a Hogan will run against should No Labels manage to get one of them on the ballot. Who is it, then, that No Labels envisions as their constituency? The group constantly cites polls that show growing numbers of Americans view themselves as independents, but ignores the same polls when they go on to ask if that group of Americans regularly votes for one party or the other. (That’s just what the vast majority do.) Many have also noted that a Biden-Trump rematch, featuring a sitting president who’ll be 81 years old in 2024 and a former president who’ll be 78, leaves voters, especially younger ones, longing for less geriatric choices. But among the sweet birds of youth vying for the No Labels line, Manchin will be 76, and Larry Hogan will be 67. Should they opt out, there’s always No Labels’ noodge-in-residence, Joe Lieberman, who’ll be 82.

What No Labels can’t seem to reckon with is that there are a host of burning issues in today’s America that come down to binary choices. The foremost of these in voters’ minds is a woman’s right to an abortion. As events would have it, Joe Manchin was the one Senate Democrat who voted no on a bill last year that would have restored that right in the wake of the Supreme Court’s revocation of Roe v. Wade. Manchin joined every Republican to ensure the measure failed, which it did by a 49-51 margin. I suppose from No Labels’ perspective, that was a stellar act of bipartisanship. My hunch is that, should he be the No Labels candidate for president next year, the majority of No Labels’ much beloved swing voters will reject Manchin in light of his anti-choice position, as well as the prospect that voting for him could toss the election to the Republicans, who share his opposition to a woman’s right to choose.

With each passing day, it becomes clearer that No Labels is fundamentally a vanity enterprise, offering such figures as Manchin, Hogan, and even Lieberman a way to stay in the limelight. Its ancillary effect may be to enable Trump or some other Trumpified Republican to take state power, at considerable cost to American democracy and decency. To No Labels and the Manchins of this world, that appears to be something between a secondary and a negligible concern.

🚨BREAKING: @Justinjpearson UNANIMOUSLY reappointed by the Shelby County commission, will join @brotherjones_ back in the legislature

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 12, 2023

As we conjectured..

Ooohh. Republicans rejoice, the market is deciding. 🙂 https://t.co/muIQJ2Tsn2

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) April 12, 2023

https://www.statnews.com/2023/04/12/sanders-plans-to-haul-insulin-executives-to-testify-in-senate/

Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to call the chief executives of the country’s largest insulin manufacturers to testify before his health committee, according to insulin maker Eli Lilly and two sources familiar with the plans. The move will keep the pressure on the companies over their prices despite the fact that they have said they plan to lower the list price of their older insulin products.

Sanders has alluded publicly to plans to hold a hearing on insulin affordability, but it was not clear that he planned to ask the executives of insulin makers to testify.

The committee is targeting next month for the hearing, two sources familiar with the plans said, though no dates have been officially announced. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We understand that Senator Sanders intends to invite Lilly’s CEO to discuss our recent announcement to cut insulin prices by 70% and cap patient out-of-pocket costs at $35 per month. Lilly is committed to doing its part to ensure that people with diabetes have affordable access to insulin, but breaking down remaining barriers and driving systemic change will require action and engagement from all stakeholders, including payers, healthcare entities, employers and the government. We look forward to discussing solutions with the HELP committee,” an Eli Lilly spokesperson said in a written statement.

“We are aware that Sen. Bernie Sanders intends to hold a hearing, and if asked to participate, we plan to do so,” a Novo Nordisk spokesperson said.

Sanofi declined to comment.

A Sanders spokesperson said the panel did not yet have a hearing to announce.

The hearing will be the latest installment in the Vermont independent’s campaign to hold pharmaceutical executives accountable for pricing practices. He called Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel before the committee in March to grill him about the company’s decision to hike the price of its Covid-19 vaccine.

The companies’ decision to lower their prices for some insulin products was welcomed by lawmakers as a step that would benefit consumers. But the move also allows them to avoid the penalty of major Medicaid rebates. Lilly, the first to dramatically cut the price of insulin, will avoid paying Medicaid about $150 in price-inflation rebates for each vial sold to Medicaid.

Lilly on March 1 announced it will lower the list price for some of its insulin products and will cap the monthly cost of insulin for the insured at $35. Weeks later, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi also drastically cut the list price of older insulin products.

Among the lower priced products is Lilly’s Insulin Lispro, a generic of its Humalog product. Lilly is dropping the price to $25 a vial. Sanders and Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) recently introduced a bill to cap the cost of insulin products at $20 a vial.

Drug pricing still polls well, and Democrats continue to push measures to lower prices after passing legislation that allows Medicare to negotiate prices, penalizes price inflation, and caps seniors’ annual drug costs.

Insulin cost-cutting legislation in the commercial market could be a part of a package of health care bills that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has directed committee chairs to put together; Sanders’ health committee is at the center of that effort.

Insulin has been the poster child of high drug prices because it’s widely used and, although updated several times over the years, the core ingredient was discovered about 100 years ago. Insulin makers say the net price that they receive has remained stable for years, despite the rapid growth of list prices. The higher list prices allow drugmakers to buy their way onto insurance formularies with ever-increasing rebates to drug middlemen.

The link is to a newsletter called STAT news. It requires payment. I saw this noted by Ady Barkan and decided to try it out for a month for free.

The Texas Senate approved a bill that would prohibit professors from “compelling” a student to adopt certain political beliefs.

“My worry here is that SB 16 is a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Karma Chávez, a UT-Austin professor.https://t.co/hXDTzOVUnR

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) April 12, 2023

NEW: Video reveals Indiana jail guards left Josh McLemore, 29, naked in solitary confinement for 3 weeks straight before he died of malnutrition. He was in a state of psychosis and had no bed or bathroom while trapped in a windowless cell w lights on 24/7https://t.co/zJbkW9mvVp

— Sam Levin (@SamTLevin) April 12, 2023

NEW: UPMC ranked #1 in the nation for the largest “fair share deficit” in the country—meaning they spent less on community investment / charity care compared to the value of their tax exemption than any other “nonprofit” hospital in America.

Shameful! https://t.co/OuAdwRL8jD

— Congresswoman Summer Lee (@RepSummerLee) April 11, 2023

Lee Fang presents another side of the Twitter files. Taibbi definitely goofed on this one, but it’s helpful to see another context. Lee mentions at the end that he is working for himself these days.

MSNBC pundit Mehdi Hasan, in a series of tweets over the last five days, has repeatedly claimed that Matt Taibbi “deliberately & under oath misrepresented” the facts when he testified to Congress last month.

Hasan linked to a video of Taibbi’s testimony, in which the Racket News journalist noted that “Twitter executives did not distinguish between [the Department of Homeland Security] or [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] and this group [the Election Integrity Partnership]” and that emails show and EIP worked in concert with CISA to flag content for moderation. Hasan claimed this is a lie, that Taibbi conflated a private nonprofit with a government agency during his testimony, and that EIP only worked with the Center for Internet Security, or CIS, a private sector organization with a similar acronym, not CISA.

It’s a serious charge and federal crime to make false statements to Congress, one punishable with prison time.

But the record shows that CISA, the government agency, was involved in the very formation of EIP and was one of the most important government partners to the group in its bid to influence content moderation decisions at firms such as Facebook and Twitter. EIP’s own leaders have said as much, and there is endless documentation – from publicly available websites, to discovery from litigation, and from the “Twitter Files” – that all confirm this relationship and CISA’s role in assisting EIP.

In other words, Hasan is wrong and presents a deeply distorted view of the mechanics of this process. Taibbi’s testimony, especially the video excerpted by Hasan, is accurate.

Worse, after being presented with evidence of CISA working directly with EIP, Hasan doubled down, repeating his false allegation that Taibbi lied under oath. In this post, I’ll provide a quick overview of the evidence, including new Twitter emails that have not been published before, that conclusively show that Taibbi was correct to connect CISA and EIP as partner organizations. Hasan’s repeated allegation is simply a bizarre and defamatory smear.

First, it’s worth understanding the acronyms underlying this story. CISA is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, that was created in 2018. The Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, is an academic-led consortium that took shape in 2020 focused on election-related misinformation. And CIS is the Center for Internet Security, a nonprofit government contractor that manages information-sharing projects for CISA and DHS, among other clients.

I should disclose that I have a professional connection to this issue. I accompanied Taibbi once to Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, where I stopped by briefly to request and copy some emails. I used documents obtained from Twitter’s archives to do some reporting of my own. One story showed how the Pentagon operated a network of covert fake accounts to advance the U.S. military’s messaging operations in the Middle East. The documents also revealed that Twitter executives had full awareness of this program and refused to shut it down for years, despite promises to swiftly block state-backed influence operations. During my visit, Twitter had no input on my searches or reporting and to the best of my knowledge, the attorney conducting the document requests complied with whatever I asked.

I’ve also been following the government agency CISA’s work for some time. As early as 2015, when the legislation enacting the agency was gaining steam, I wrote about how CISA represented a “major new privacy threat.” The legislation provided a special liability shield for corporations to “feed massive amounts of communications to private consortiums and the federal government” under the vague rubric of protection against undefined “cyber threats.”

Last year, in October, before the Twitter Files, and using primarily a DHS whistleblower and documents produced from litigation, Ken Klippenstein and I reported on the expansive role CISA had taken in seeking to shape political speech on social media platforms. The reporting charts the history of government interference in social media, from the early concerns around ISIS recruitment and 2016 Russian meddling, to the formation of the FBI’s highly active task force that eventually corresponded with Twitter executives about content moderation issues on a near-daily basis. The reporting charted the evolution of CISA, which eventually decided to define election-relation communication on social media as a form of cyber security, as well as the agency’s close work with NGOs like EIP.

This history isn’t particularly hidden. EIP, in a publicly available report on its website, notes that the group was formed in consultation with CISA in July of 2020. The organization very clearly states that CISA is one of its main stakeholders, along with CIS, which was contracted to manage an information sharing consortium with CISA and local election officials called ISAC. Here’s the EIP report:

Alex Stamos, the director of EIP, gave a talk at the Atlantic Council, in which he outlined the “major stakeholders that we operated with, that we worked beside at EIP, our partners in government, most particularly those in CISA and DHS.”

Internal Twitter emails that have not been published before, that I obtained in December of last year, show how this partnership functioned on a practical basis. On October 1, 2020, for example, then-Twitter attorney Stacia Cardille reached out to Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at the company, to forward on an email chain from both CISA, the government agency, and CIS, the nonprofit with which it frequently works, regarding conservative tweets warning about the supposed dangers of vote-by-mail.

The tweet in question was a claim that a California man had found unopened ballots in the dumpster, and a concern that this claim could represent misinformation that was being amplified by Russian sources.

A member of EIP’s team and someone working at the California Secretary of State were the first people to flag the tweet, forwarding it onto the consortium led by CIS. From there, CIS and EIP, both nonprofits, categorized the tweet as a potentially dangerous form of misinformation that required action by social media companies, and emailed both CISA and Twitter to have the tweet taken down.

The email chain between CIS and EIP officials and Twitter’s security team over just that one tweet show how closely these nonprofits work with the U.S. government’s national security arms. Officials at those organizations copied DHS official Brian Scully, who worked at CISA, along with other CISA email accounts, in their emails to Twitter executives calling for the company to remove the tweet.

“Our hope is the platforms can do more to take down the misinformation. The EIP has been tracking this spread under ticket EIP-243 and has more examples,” Aaron Wilson, an election security official with CIS, wrote in an email to CISA, which was sent on to Twitter.

Twitter executives discussed the issue, noting there was no evidence of foreign influence. But they nonetheless decided to delete the tweet. An archive of the tweet is here.

Another exchange between CISA and Twitter that I unearthed again illustrates how closely the nonprofits, EIP and CIS, work with the Department of Homeland Security. In that email thread, Robert Schaul, a DHS official at CISA, cited EIP’s internal flagging system when requesting that Twitter delete a tweet .

There are two major issues presented by these exchanges.

One of course is the content. Should the national security agencies like DHS and CISA interject into political speech issues? One could argue that they should as long as they are rigorously balanced, accurate and nonpartisan. Notably, Twitter executives censored Republican concerns around vote-by-mail, while allowing Democrats to spread conspiracy theories about the dangers of vote-by-mail. (For example, here’s an Eric Holder tweet raising baseless concerns against vote-by-mail, that was discussed internally at Twitter but not censored or fact-checked.) Still, this is a debate worth having that raises important constitutional and ethical questions. Many would say that there is no room for the government to be pressuring media outlets or social media firms on political speech grounds, especially around an election.

The other issue is the one raised by Hasan and is simply functional. Did CISA play a role in EIP in its quest to shape content decisions at Twitter? The answer is obviously, “yes.”

Hasan claimed that only CIS, the government contractor, was involved, not CISA. That’s clearly not true, and not something that even CISA, EIP or CIS has claimed in the past. The government agency CISA worked hand-in-glove with CIS, in support of EIP. Hasan isn’t explaining any of this to his viewers and is instead engaged in a vicious character assassination effort.

Where else can you find information on CISA working closely on election-related content moderation with the big social media firms? NBC News, the media outlet that is owned by Comcast, the cable giant that also employs Hasan, reported on this relationship during the election. If Hasan is still confused about the role of CISA, he could in fact ask his employer. Comcast is a partner to CISA through its consortium for communication platforms.

The Taibbi-Hasan debate speaks to the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. news media. Every journalist gets things wrong occasionally. Taibbi has conceded that he made an error in one of his tweets, though not in his congressional testimony, and swiftly corrected it. Many of Hasan’s claims have been debunked, including his false claim, first flagged by journalist Aaron Mate, that he “never said a word about the Hunter Biden story” and of course this CISA-EIP issue. Hasan’s version of journalism means never correcting his own falsehoods. But since Hasan works for a cable news network where exciting a polarized audience is the chief performance metric, he is sure to benefit from the gotcha-style assault on Taibbi.

The so-called debate is part of Hasan’s larger effort to obscure the importance of the revelations in the Twitter files by focusing obsessively on Elon Musk’s motives for allowing the disclosure of internal company documents. Hasan avoided, for example, addressing the substance of Taibbi’s reporting on the “Hamilton 68” dashboard. Taibbi’s reporting revealed that the tool, which Hasan’s employer MSNBC relied on liberally over the years, was essentially a fraud that relied on unfounded innuendo to smear critics of the national-security state as Russian stooges. Hasan, who has criticized national-security abuses in the past, has also failed to grapple with the Twitter Files’ exposure of the FBI’s persistent influence over Twitter’s content moderation policies. Hasan briefly discussed the latter topic, but never fully explained it to his MSNBC audience. Instead, we get a strange and personalized attack on Taibbi as a journalist, and a smear that he intentionally misled Congress under oath.

A brief note to readers:

Last month, I left The Intercept after more than eight years there. I’ll have more to say on that later. For now, I will be primarily focused on investigative reporting on this Substack. Look for much more original content here in the weeks and months to come. I’ll be breaking news on a range of topics. Please DM on Twitter with tips and ideas. I’m open to any thoughts.

JB Pritzker Answers Chicago Questions by Illinois Students at Harvard’s Institute of Politics

Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who did not endorse in Chicago’s mayoral election, on Monday night told students at Harvard’s Institute of Politics that his job with Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson is “to work well with him.

“Success for Chicago means success for the state. We also need the rest of the state to succeed,” Pritzker said.

“That’s why I didn’t endorse anybody in the mayoral election. I may have opinions about things and share them privately with my family, but it was important to me that whoever wins, that I was going be their ally getting things done for the city.”

He also added a dose of nuance to being labeled a “progressive.”

“You keep drilling in on the ‘progressive’ label, and you know what, I’m OK with that. But I just want to maybe modify it and say I would describe myself as a pragmatic progressive,” Pritzker said.

Chicago-area students getting their undergraduate, graduate or law degrees at Harvard University peppered Pritzker with questions — on policy and politics.

All seven questions Pritzker took at Harvard’s Kennedy School Institute of Politics forum — which he headlined — were from students with a Chicago connection.

So many that Pritzker quipped, “Apparently everyone here at Harvard is from Illinois.”

That’s not true, of course.

Pritzker spent the day at Harvard’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., at the invitation of Quentin Fulks, his former top political advisor who is now a fellow at the IOP, coming to the program after managing the 2022 re-election campaign of Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. Fulks has been mentioned as a potential top staffer for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.

That the students who were asking Pritzker questions turned out to all be connected to the Chicago area was a coincidence, a Harvard IOP spokesperson told me. The questioners were not pre-selected. Students just lined up at the four microphones at the John F. Kennedy Forum and asked away.

Highland Park’s Rachel Jacoby, a second-year grad student working toward a master’s in public policy, was already tackling gun violence as an organizer for March for Our Lives when a gunman killed seven people and wounded dozens of others at Highland Park’s July 4 parade.

After that, her activism only increased, including work on the Illinois assault weapons ban that Pritzker signed. Even with Democrats controlling both chambers in the Illinois General Assembly, it was a lift.

Given that there is no support in Congress for a federal assault weapons ban — even given the latest horrors in Nashville and Louisville — Jacoby asked Pritzker about “what advice and leadership lessons you would have for other governors and states who may want to pass an assault weapons ban.”

Pritzker’s answer — in short — elect more Democrats.

“Just elect the right person, in the right position,” the governor said. “But that only happens if people are out there knocking on doors and making sure that the public understands how vitally important it is. That’s how we got that done.”

Dylan Horwitz from Buffalo Grove, a first-year law student, graduated from Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, in Lake County, a top public school in Illinois. Horwitz said Stevenson was “obscenely overfunded,” compared with schools downstate and in Chicago.

“I was wondering if you think there’s any appetite in Springfield for any redistributive policies, or do you think even that might be too far afield for the current, like, state of politics?”

The phrase “redistributive policies” refers usually to programs that channel more to people with less and make those with more pay their fair share. Pritzker lamented that his drive for a graduated income tax in Illinois — changing the system so those at the very top income levels pay a more equal share — failed to win the needed 60% of the vote.

Pritzker said he fought “like heck” for it and put his own money into the campaign to pass the “Fair Tax” amendment — a drive led, as it happens, by Fulks.

“I still believe in a graduated income tax. I still believe in making sure that we have a tax system that’s fair, and that you use the word redistributive, but importantly, that every child no matter what ZIP code they live in, gets a good education, a good public education. And we’re working at that every day, but it’s not going to be as easy as it would have been had we had a graduated income tax.”

And speaking of the Fair Tax — where billionaires Pritzker and Ken Griffin, the Republican who opposed it — poured tens of millions of their own money into moves to block or pass the measure — a student followed up:

Andy Wang from Naperville asked the governor, “I’m wondering if you’re worried about the rise of money, just big money in politics in Illinois and across the U.S., especially as someone who arguably has benefited a lot from that money yourself?”

“Yes, and the answer is we need campaign finance reform both in Illinois and nationally,” Pritzker said.

Source: Chicago Sun-Times