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The Census Privacy Fight With Huge Voting Rights Implications Hits Major Inflection Point 
COVID and the Roots of Reform
When I was 19 I got assigned to a work study job as a research assistant for Daniel Rodgers, a history professor who, fortuitously, turned out to be one of two or three people who taught me how to think. The research I was going to do was for a project that was eventually published a decade later as Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. The book is about the trans-Atlantic connections, borrowings, rivalries between reformers and states during the period in which virtually all North Atlantic states devised some version of what we call welfare states. There were rich well-springs of home grown reformism in the US. But looking to models in Europe was a constant focus. A recurrent theme is that the US so often seemed to be a late arriver to these reforms or resisted them because of beliefs in American exceptionalism or a more general resistance to state action.
Where Things Stand: Flynn Has Been Busy Post-Pardon
In the waning days of his presidency, former President Trump pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, ending a years-long, messy legal battle in which Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI only to reverse course, hire Sidney Powell as his lawyer, and seek to reverse his plea.
There’s an article today in the Times which reports that we may never reach ‘herd immunity’ for COVID or at least that we may not do so for a very long time. The article strikes me as needlessly alarmist, in part because the ‘news’ being reported is as much a question of semantics or people being informed about epidemiology as it is some new negative development in the course of the pandemic. The details are probably what you would expect, a mix of vaccine hesitancy, more transmissible viral strains and viral evolution that slowly chips away at vaccine immunity all working together to put ‘herd immunity’ out of reach. But I want to zoom in on the potential role of vaccine hesitancy or politics-driven resistance to vaccines.
The Atlantic has a piece by Ron Brownstein on the 2022 election and whether or not the Democrats can avoid a “wipeout”. It is, typically for Brownstein, quite good.
My worry is not that there will be a wipeout but that Republicans may have a comparatively disappointing midterm and still take control of at least the House. The mix of redistricting, the strong pattern of mid-term losses for first term Presidents and the fact that the margin is already razor thin – these all stack the deck heavily against the Democrats. Most of the article goes over different strategies Democrats are discussing and specifically the general consensus that they are better served going big on their policy agenda than trimming their sails to avoid antagonizing swing voters or Republicans.
Let me share a couple thoughts of my own on this question.
Where Things Stand: We’ve Been Covering The Duggars For A While
The Russian Nesting Doll of Giuliani’s Corruption
I had worried that federal prosecutors might be forced to whittle the fullness of Rudy Giuliani’s criminal conduct down to a technical violation of failure to report lobbying on behalf of a foreign entity. But reports this morning suggest his legal peril may go well beyond that. Federal investigators seem to be looking at his decision to work with Russian spies to damage Joe Biden and spread disinformation about his family and seek the ouster of the US Ambassador to Ukraine as part of the extortion plot that eventually got Trump impeached.
