The fight is only just beginning. Democrats were eager to impress that message upon a crowd that gathered outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday afternoon after emerging from a sit-in on the House floor demanding action on gun control that lasted more than 24-hours.
“Don’t give up, don’t give in,” the Democratic congressman and civil-rights leader John Lewis said as onlookers waved rainbow-colored signs that read “Disarm Hate.” The crowd began to sing the civil-rights protest anthem “We Shall Overcome,” with lyrics slightly modified to suit moment: “We shall pass a bill someday.” A woman recording a video on her cellphone remarked aloud, “This is history, baby,” to no one in particular.
The sit-in was an unusual moment of protest inside the United States Congress. The willingness to make such a bold, publicity-ready move suggests the Democratic Party feels emboldened to demand action on gun control in the wake of a tragic mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub earlier this month. In the end, however, Democrats did not succeed in securing a vote on the gun-control measures they had hoped for in staging the protest.
Faced with that failure, Democrats insist this is only the beginning. “We’re going to continue to work,” Lewis said in a brief interview outside the Capitol. “Many people are supporting our efforts,” he said. “People all over America and around the world are supporting our efforts to do something about gun violence.”
The sit-in may also indicate that House Democrats are increasingly willing to make use of confrontational tactics to make their voices heard. “It’s not just about guns,” the Democratic congressman James Clyburn said in an interview. “This particular issue is about guns, but this is just the start … I wouldn’t get hung-up on sit-ins, but I would call it activism.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi seemed reluctant to declare that this will be the way Democrats try to get their message on future issues. “No, I think you have to just take it on a day-to-day basis,” she said at Thursday’s press conference. She called the sit-in a reflection of the “the complete insistence that we cannot go through another moment of silence without taking action” on gun violence.
The sit-in seemed to intensify the divide between Democrats and Republicans on guns. House Speaker Paul Ryan denounced the action as a “publicity stunt,” during an interview with CNN. “This is not about a solution to a problem,” he said. “This is about trying to get attention.” House Republicans expressed frustration over the Democrats’ action, describing the event as a political distraction and a way to obstruct the business of legislating.
In an interview, the Republican congressman Mark Meadows said that while it is “certainly within every member’s right to be able to articulate their concerns,” he disagreed with the tactics deployed by Democrats. As Yoni Appelbaum noted, “even having phones switched on, much less snapping photos, tweeting updates, or periscoping the proceedings, is a violation of the rules of the House”—all common sights during the sit-in.“I think it poses a very bad precedent and quite frankly other nations are watching what is happening,” Meadows said.
The Democrats’ agenda faced criticism from progressives as well. Democrats were agitating for a vote on measures to expand background checks for gun purchases and prevent suspected terrorists from buying the weapons. As The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani wrote, the “unusually bold and moving tactic was undercut by the fact that its chief goal is a political gimmick that would do little to stop gun violence, while expanding the use of a deeply flawed anti-terror watchlist.”
In spite of various criticisms, many House Democrats appeared defiant and energetic Thursday afternoon. “The American public has been crying out for help on this issue, for their families, for their kids, and we said ‘We hear you, we’re listening to you and, we’re going to do something about it,’” the Democratic congresswoman Rosa DeLauro said in an interview. “We may leave here today, but everybody is going home to a district where they’re going to take this fight on, and in addition to that we get back on July 5th and nothing changes. We’ve only just begun.”
Other Democrats reveled in the fact that they had been able to broadcast to a wide audience using social media. Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic congressman from Texas who live-streamed the Sit-in on Facebook, said, “In a one-hour period, when I was streaming, we received 10,000 comments.” He pointed to his social-media metrics as evidence of the event’s resonance. “There was obviously a lot of pent-up urgency and excitement about this.”
For now, it seems unlikely that House Democrats will win the votes they seek on gun control. But their agitation on the issue will probably continue, and maybe increase. —Clare Foran
Roll Call photographer Tom Williams tweeted several images of the scene outside the Capitol this afternoon. House Democrats addressed on-lookers after concluding their sit-in at roughly 1 p.m.
.@repjohnlewis @repjoecrowley @Clyburn speak on the East Front after the #NoBillNoBreak sit-in to end #gunviolence pic.twitter.com/MRsqXf5MHr
— Tom Williams (@pennstatetom) June 23, 2016
It was an odd juxtaposition, this sit-in. Led by Representative John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, it drew its spirit from the non-violent protests at lunch counters and bus terminals across the South that ignited national interest and eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Throughout the day Wednesday, black Democrats shared stories of people shot and killed in their communities, driving home the point that gun violence is not merely a problem of policy—it is also a matter of race and justice.
But some have pointed out the incivility of the proposal the sit-in supports, the so-called “no-fly, no-buy” bill.
Thanks for sitting in. Let's ditch racist no-fly-buy bill and make this a movement for the real fight against guns. https://t.co/W8geMD6sgJ
— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) June 23, 2016
As the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the Senate version of the “no-fly” bill, argued in a letter, government terrorist watch lists have long been criticized for targeting Muslims with little evidence:
Publicly available information and the ACLU’s experience with people who know or credibly suspect that they have been watchlisted raises serious concerns that the government applies the watchlists in an arbitrary or discriminatory fashion, particularly against American Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities. An internal August 2013 government document, for example, shows that Dearborn, Michigan—home to the country’s largest concentration ofArab-Americans—was second only to New York City in the number of people on the government’s “known or suspected terrorist” watchlist. This was despite the fact that, as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan noted at the time, not a single person from Dearborn had ever been prosecuted for terrorism.
Granted, Democrats also want other things, including stronger background checks and a ban on assault weapons. But while the central chant of “no-fly, no-buy” may incrementally help solve one civil-rights crisis—the slaughter of people of color by guns—some say it unfortunately worsens another.
House Democrats are now hugging, shaking hands, and taking photos on the floor. The sit-in is now over, and they plan to address supporters outside the Capitol in the next few minutes.
Georgia Representative John Lewis, who helped lead the House sit-in, is addressing his fellow members on the floor right now. “We’re gonna win the struggle,” Lewis said, calling for members and constituents to organize. To his colleagues, he said: “You got it out there, you got in the way, you got in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble. So we must never give up or give in. We must keep the faith and come back here on July 5, more determined than ever before."
It sounds like House Democrats might be wrapping up their sit-in. They held a meeting earlier today on steps forward. “We’re going back to our congressional districts...and we will not allow this body to ever feel as comfortable as they have felt in the past silencing our voices,” South Carolina’s James Clyburn just said on the floor. They'll return on July 5, he notes, and “we will be operating on a new sense of purpose."
House Speaker Paul Ryan's disdain for Democrats' sit-in is clear: “I don't think this should be a very proud moment for democracy or for the people who stage these stunts.”
Ryan, speaking at his weekly press briefing Thursday morning, seemed agitated, criticizing Democrats for violating the norms of the House. He told reporters that he was worried about the precedent the sit-in could set, and hit Democrats for sending fundraising missives off the sit-in.
“If this is not a political stunt, then why are they trying to raise money off this—off of a tragedy?” Ryan said.
Social media has played a critical role in the House sit-in. Democrats used platforms, such as Periscope, to live stream from the chamber floor when C-SPAN was unable to air the protests. Similarly, the hashtag #NoBillNoBreak and #HoldTheFloor took off on Twitter. Politico’s Carla Marinucci reports:
Reported by @Twitter: In the last 24 hours, #NoBillNoBreak and #HoldTheFloor have been Tweeted 1.4M times.
— Carla Marinucci (@cmarinucci) June 23, 2016
It appears some Democratic members of the New Hampshire House of Representatives are staging a sit-in of their own in the state capitol. Local reports say about dozen legislators are participating.
In solidarity with our friends in DC, #NHHouseDems are sitting in today in Concord. #DemocraticSitIn #NHPolitics pic.twitter.com/WuAjJkhomE
— NH House Dem Caucus (@NHHouseDems) June 23, 2016
While Periscope was the Democrats' streaming app of choice on Wednesday amid a broadcast blackout, the New Hampshire legislators are recording their broadcast using Meerkat.
The mood inside the House gallery feels subdued this morning as Democrats continue speeches and a sit-in demanding a vote on gun control measures.
It was a long night, and members of Congress who stuck around are clearly exhausted. At least a few lawmakers dozed off, according to Ted Deutch, a Democratic congressman from Florida. “There were definitely some people sleeping,” he said, adding that he wasn’t going to name any names. “I have not pulled an all-nighter in quite a while,” Deutch said. “It’s certainly my first one on the House floor.”
Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from Illinois, said she was stepped on while sitting on the floor. When asked if it was by a Republican, she said yes. “I don’t know if it was intentional, but there certainly was no apology,” she said, though she noted that she wasn’t hurt. “He was in a hurry to get over to his side ... and there was a certain amount of contempt.” Democrats have been “inspired, in part, by the kind of cynicism we saw last night from the Republicans,” she said.
What happens next? “It could be another hour, it could be five hours, ten hours, that I don’t know,” Deutch said. “I really don't know what the plan is,” Schakowsky said, “[but] what I do know is this is really just the beginning.” She added: “We own this issue now. This is now the issue for the Democratic caucus. I don’t know what form it will take…but we are not giving up.”
Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work.
The 89 people who work at Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools, are used to having an unconventional employer. Everyone’s salary, including the CEO’s, is public. All employees work remotely; their only office closed down six years ago. And as a perk, Buffer pays for any books employees want to buy for themselves.
So perhaps it is unsurprising that last year, when the pandemic obliterated countless workers’ work-life balance and mental health, Buffer responded in a way that few other companies did: It gave employees an extra day off each week, without reducing pay—an experiment that’s still running a year later. “It has been such a godsend,” Essence Muhammad, a customer-support agent at Buffer, told me.
Some of the colors we see on creatures such as blue jays and poison-dart frogs aren’t created by pigments at all.
Peacocks, panther chameleons, scarlet macaws, clown fish, toucans, blue-ringed octopuses, and so many more: The animal kingdom has countless denizens with extraordinarily colorful beauty. But in many cases, scientists know much more about how the animals use their colors than about how they make them. New work continues to reveal those secrets, which often depend on the fantastically precise self-assembly of minuscule features in and on the feathers, scales, hair, and skin—a fact that makes the answers intensely interesting to soft-matter physicists and engineers in the photonics industry.
Many of the colors seen in nature, particularly in the plant kingdom, are produced by pigments, which reflect a portion of the light spectrum while absorbing the rest. Green pigments like chlorophyll reflect the green part of the spectrum but absorb the longer red and yellow wavelengths as well as the shorter blue ones. Which specific wavelengths get reflected or absorbed depends on the pigment’s molecular makeup and the exact distances between the atoms in its molecular structures.
Leagues are seeing the downside of treating vaccines as simply a matter of personal choice.
When the NBA announced Wednesday that Phoenix Suns point guard Chris Paul was being sidelined indefinitely under the league’s coronavirus-safety protocols, the next question was obvious: Had Paul been vaccinated?
For COVID-19 concerns to interrupt Paul’s brilliant playoff run seemed particularly cruel—not only because the widespread availability of vaccines has made transmission of the virus largely preventable, but also because the Suns had just secured a spot in the Western Conference finals. Even though Paul is one of the best NBA point guards ever, this week’s development was another unfortunate entry in his long history of medical problems during the playoffs.
The television analysts Matt Barnes and Jalen Rose, both of whom are former NBA players, soon reported that Paul had indeed been vaccinated. But all the discussion of his status raised another important question: Do fans even have the right to know, and do journalists have the right to ask, if a player has been vaccinated against COVID-19?
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.
A common ideology underlies the practices of many ultra-wealthy people: The government can’t be trusted with money.
When ProPublica published its report last week on the tax profiles of 25 of the richest Americans, jaws dropped across the United States. How was it possible that plutocrats such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett could pay nothing in income taxes to the federal government? What sneaky sleights of pen, what subterfuge, what acts of turpitude could have led to this result?
The shock stems, in part, from a disturbing reality: Nowhere does ProPublica assert that these men cheated, lied, or did anything felonious to lower their tax burdens. The naked fact of the matter is that not a single one of the documented methods and practices that allowed these billionaires to so radically minimize their tax obligations was illegal.
To get better sleep, stop treating it like a chore.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
For many people, the cruelest part of daily life is the transition between wakefulness and sleep. When you should be sleeping, you want to be awake; when you should be awake, you want to stay asleep. It is easy to regard sleep as a torment: hard to attain and then hard to give up, day after day after day.
According to the CDC, about 70 million Americans have chronic sleep problems. Insomnia affects between a third and a half of U.S. adults at one point or another. And we Americans are not unusually afflicted—one 2016 study reported that worldwide, 10 to 30 percent of the population experiences insomnia; some studies find rates as high as 50 to 60 percent.
On the heels of WandaVision, two new series—Kevin Can F**k Himself and Physical—explore how pop culture can limit the roles that women play in real life.
The creators of Kevin Can F**k Himself have yet to go on the record about this, but they’re clearly tired of lopsided sitcom marriages. The series, with its pointed title, seems to be a roast of shows starring the comedian Kevin James over the years, such as The King of Queens; notably, his characters’ spouses didn’t have lives of their own outside of doting on him. (One even got unceremoniously written out off-screen between the first and second seasons.) Kevin’s protagonist, Allison (played by Annie Murphy of Schitt’s Creek), takes after those long-suffering wives: She flits along the edges of the frame, ever dutiful and understanding of her husband, Kevin (Eric Petersen), in spite of his childish antics and myriad jokes at her expense.
There’s no way of knowing how bad things will get in the U.S. In a way, that’s a luxury.
This much is clear: The coronavirus is becoming more transmissible. Ever since the virus emerged in China, it has been gaining mutations that help it spread more easily among humans. The Alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom last year, is 50 percent more transmissible than the original version, and now the Delta variant, first detected in India, is at least 40 percent more transmissible than Alpha.
What’s less certain, however, is how the virus’s increased transmissibility will affect the pandemic in the United States. Alpha’s arrival prompted worries about a new surge in the spring, but one never came. The proportion of Alpha cases kept going up, but the total number of cases kept going down. People got vaccinated. Alpha became dominant in the U.S. Cases fell even further. The virus had become more biologically transmissible, but it wasn’t being transmitted to more people.
Kodak changed the way Americans saw themselves and their country. But it struggled to reinvent itself for the digital age.
Above, clockwise from bottom-right: Kodak founder George Eastman takes a picture, circa 1925. High Falls in Rochester, New York, Kodak’s hometown. Postcard of the Kodak Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, 1964. FIGHT, a group seeking to change Kodak’s hiring practices, protests at a shareholders’ meeting, 1967.
This article was published online on June 16, 2021.
When I was in fifth grade, my class took a field trip to the George Eastman Museum, in Rochester, New York, as the fifth graders at my rural elementary school, 30 minutes south of the city, did every year. Housed in a Colonial Revival mansion built for the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company in 1905, the museum is home to one of the most significant photography and film collections in the world. But our job there was to stare at old cameras the size of our bodies, marvel at the luxury of having a pipe organ in your house, and write down what a daguerreotype is to prove that we’d been paying attention. At the end of the tour—in a second-story sitting room full of personal artifacts—we were presented, matter-of-factly, with a copy of Eastman’s suicide letter, dated March 14, 1932: “My work is done. Why wait?” Eastman shot himself in the heart with a Luger pistol at the age of 77.
Sacrificing for their kids makes fathers happier. Acknowledging that sacrifice will make everyone happier.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
My late father was a generous and kind man, but often morose. He was troubled about matters large and small, be they the fate of the world or the water in the basement.
I remember two times when he seemed genuinely happy. The first was when, unable to meet our family’s needs with his modest teaching salary, he took on a second job driving a bus. The other was a few years later, when he decided to advance his career—once again for the good of our family—by pursuing his Ph.D. During both periods, he was exhausted and overworked. But he smiled and laughed more than usual, and seemed untroubled by the small annoyances and big quandaries that normally brought him down. He looked back on those periods with real fondness.
All his life, Justin managed to escape his own story—until now.
A fatal accident at a waterslide park was the result of gross negligence, lax state regulations, and a whole lot of hubris.
What can an individual do about climate change? The easiest answer: make this one dietary switch.
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