Democratic political icon James Carville and former White House Chief of Staff (2017) and Republican National Committee Chairman (2011-2017) Reince Priebus sat down with USC students prior to the event, 'Finding Common Ground on the State of our Democracy' to answer questions, and share insights.
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Honor The Past Without Shame: Anniversaries Pass, Trauma Remains
Jan 29, 2025
Even as the wildfires of California continue, having affected an estimated 200,000 residents and resulted in 27 deaths, the memory of the Northridge Earthquake of January 1994 and the mass devastation and destruction afterward still linger three decades later.
The fires raged recently on the anniversary of the earthquake in the San Fernando Valley in California, when 33 people died and 7,000 were injured with a damage cost estimated up to $40 billion. The loss of life, livelihood, and long-term lingering trauma experienced has been widely recognized by mental health professionals and the lay community as well.
As a community, many not only understood the physical loss but understood that many would be impacted throughout their lifetime. Many became disabled by the earthquake, some temporarily, while others indefinitely.
As a neighborhood, we understood, grieved, and we were compassionate and kind, because we saw this mass disaster with our own eyes, and could hear the devastation as it happened. It has been widely recognized by researchers as a factor in collective trauma.
For the estimated 16 million survivors of domestic/intimate partner violence and their children each year, their earthquakes happen in the shadows—creating physical and psychological trauma—or chronic PTSD. While this is well-documented and recognized, culturally, the effect of the trauma is often minimized or dismissed.
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Recent research shows that few survivors receive positive support as they are often expected to “move forward,” “work through it,” or simply “get over it.” Some survivors express they also have experiences of loss of life and cope with long-term psychological trauma and disabilities.
Communities do not always welcome them with open arms, compassion, empathy, or understanding, because of societal perceptions and individual beliefs of deservingness as documented by extensive research. The immediate and long-term effects of stigmatization set the foundation for developing Complex PTSD and means people will experience significantly more emotional dysregulation issues.
These are negative perceptions, further reinforcing an already internalized sense of devaluation, leading to discriminative responses when seeking assistance. Negative labeling and stereotypes result in victims of domestic/intimate partner violence reporting experiencing discriminatory practices when seeking housing. They are perceived as unstable, experiencing evictions simply due to their victimhood.
This is in stark contrast to the treatment of victims of mass natural disasters, like earthquakes and wildfires.
Survivors of domestic violence report that they often reveal in detail to the larger community the abuse and violence they experienced. They must also have to prove it, to be believed, or risk being discounted. If believed, they can be shuffled throughout a multitude of short-term interventions and treatments with the expectation of overcoming their trauma.
They are expected to “complete treatment,” “graduate from group therapy,” and be recognized by others by becoming a “thriver.”
Unfortunately, as a culture, unlike earthquake survivors, survivors of domestic/intimate partner violence are somehow not afforded the same grace of empathy, compassion, and acknowledgment, of long-lasting trauma.
Many survivors report they are shamed for remembering, judged for their inability to move forward, and shamed for their acquired disabilities. Their trauma is long-standing, their wounds and loss internalized. Their grief is silenced, and their loss is insurmountable.
A study revealed in detail that victims' of domestic/intimate partners experience shame within the context of their abusive relationship, often anticipating how others will respond to their victimization. This significantly amplifies their internalized shame.
This shame—often tethered to social shame—can lead to detrimental effects for the victim by adversely impacting their need to reach out and access much-needed supportive services. The social shaming mimics and often parallels the dynamics of power and control their abuser exerted over them.
Yet with a disaster like the 1994 earthquake, the difference of how people are judged by their reactions is clear: a mass natural disaster is out of their control. Domestic/violence is seen as the outcome of an individual's inability or unwillingness to see the red flags, that they made a choice and they were in control. They stayed and it happened.
But, the effects on the mind and the body of a survivor of intimate partner violence are as traumatic as an earthquake. Until this is recognized within our culture, it will take so much longer to heal.
Elizabeth Vera is a Domestic Violence Survivor, founder and CEO of Vera Strategies Training and Consulting, national speaker with 30 years of advocacy and a member of The OpEd Project Public Voices Fellowship on Domestic Violence and Economic Security.
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A group of students from the Univerity of Pennsylvania's Political Empathy Lab visited the state capitol in Harrisburg on a "listening tour" of voters last summer.
Photo Courtesy of UPenn
UPenn Political Empathy Lab students study bridging ideological divide
Jan 29, 2025
Originally published by Public News Service.
A group of University of Pennsylvania students got up close and personal with Keystone State voters recently as they studied solutions to bridging the ideological divide.
Students with Penn's Political Empathy Lab traveled across the state last summer and talked with people at parks, libraries and county fairs. The goal was to listen to Pennsylvanians as they discussed the issues in the 2024 campaign.
Lia Howard, professor of political science at the university and director of the lab, said the students emphasized using critical listening skills to understand the voters better.
"Democratic listening is one of the most important and undervalued things that are happening right now," Howard contended. "Because we're just so inundated by talk, expression, and we don't get enough time to practice listening to another human being."
Howard pointed out the students recorded 45 hours of audio during their sessions, producing a podcast series and presenting what they learned on and off campus. Another statewide tour is scheduled for this spring, and Howard added she will eventually publish the students' findings.
Howard noted the lab was formed to put into direct practice some of the theoretical concepts her students study and apply them to Pennsylvania during the 2024 election.
"We weren't trying to do polling or necessarily canvassing, though both are really important and I'm all for both," Howard explained. "That wasn't our role. It was really to think about what we were bringing and how we could connect."
The students traveled more than 2,500 miles across the state and learned about each city or town before engaging the voters. Howard emphasized the students found showing empathy as they listened often drew a higher degree of candor and openness in the responses they received.
"Empathy is something that you just practice. You have to do it to get it," Howard stressed. "I think it's worth working those muscles out, especially under times of duress. I think our country needs a lot more of that working out and building those muscles because we're a democracy, and that's what we need to do."
Penn has put together a program to extend the Political Empathy Lab's concept to other locations nationwide.
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A view of destruction as Palestinians, who returned to the city following the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, struggle to survive among ruins of destroyed buildings during cold weather in Jabalia, Gaza on January 23, 2025.
Getty Images / Anadolu
The Fragile Ceasefire in Gaza
Jan 28, 2025
Ceasefire agreements are like modern constitutions. They are fragile, loaded with idealistic promises, and too easily ignored. Both are also crucial to the realization of long-term regional peace. Indeed, ceasefires prevent the violence that is frequently the fuel for instability, while constitutions provide the structure and the guardrails that are equally vital to regional harmony.
More than ever, we need both right now in the Middle East.
The ceasefire in Gaza, that seems to be holding, is cause for celebration and, for some, optimism. Every day that passes without the destructive violence of the past sixteen months, and every hostage that is released during the present truce, provides some hope that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might ease a bit. Negotiators on both sides should be commended.
But the hard work of finding an enduring solution to a centuries-old dispute remains. And that is where constitutions come in. Constitutions in the region are certainly part of the problem; maybe they can also be part of a lasting solution.
No one should doubt that constitutions function differently in Middle Eastern countries than in many other parts of the globe. Nathan Brown has written that constitutions in most Arab states are “generally viewed as elegant but insincere expressions of aspirations that rulers issue in an effort to obscure the unrestrained nature of their authority. Constitutions are written not to limit authority…but to mask it.” He’s right, of course. If modern constitutions are meant to limit political power, establish government institutions, enumerate individual and group rights, and identify a nation’s most fervent aspirations, most Middle Eastern constitutions badly miss the mark. To paraphrase Brown’s primary take-away: constitutions perform only minimally in a nonconstitutional Arab world.
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And now consider that a written constitution does not even exist in Israel.
The story of why is familiar. In May, 1948, the National Council of the newly-established State of Israel issued a Declaration of Independence. In it was the promise of a fresh constitutional draft. It would take four months for the Israeli constitutional framers to whip up such a draft, declared the Declaration of Independence. Well, that four months came and went, and, despite efforts to resurrect the call for drafting a constitution over the next 77 years, supporters of Israeli constitutionalism are still waiting.
So, we have nonliberal constitutions in many Arab countries and an unwritten constitution in Israel. Sadly, both make sense. To suggest that Arab countries should all of a sudden become liberal republics is both foolish and parochial, and to condemn Israeli leaders for refusing to check their authority as guardians of Jewish statehood is arrogant.
And yet those Arab constitutions, and the lack of a written constitution in Israel, is a big part of the problem. Constitutions are not a source of accountability in the region. Any solution, whether it be two-state or one, has to reckon with these constitutional deficiencies. Even slight reform of the fundamental laws in the Middle East would make a difference. The strengthening of political accountability in authoritarian Arab regimes would make negotiations with Israel more productive. (There was some hope for progress after the Arab Spring more than a decade ago. That hope has faded.) Equally, the extension of additional freedoms to Palestinians in Israel will help to ease the impasse. Both adversaries must move their “constitutions” to the left. Not an easy task, for sure. But one that would have long term, positive ramifications.
Neither constitution has to fully resemble those in North America or Western Europe. But both have to move, ever so slightly, in those directions.
Modern constitutions are like ceasefire agreements. If followed, they can right the political ship, provide much needed time and space for reflection, and, yes, even save lives. The Middle East conflict appears intractable at the moment. Constitutional reform in the region is part of the solution.
Beau Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
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The Committee on House Administration meets on the 15th anniversary of the SCOTUS decision on Citizens United v. FEC.
Medill News Service / Samanta Habashy
Money Makes the World Go Round Roundtable
Jan 28, 2025
WASHINGTON – On the 15th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and one day after President Trump’s inauguration, House Democrats made one thing certain: money determines politics, not the other way around.
“One of the terrible things about Citizens United is people feel that they're powerless, that they have no hope,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Ma.).
The roundtable discussion focused on the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision on prohibiting the government from restricting independent spending on political campaigns. The ruling unleashed corporate spending on elections and its impact was felt in the last election, where billionaire donors fueled Trump’s presidential win. Democrats on the Committee on House Administration convened the roundtable and only Democrats participated.
However, Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, said he supported the ruling in 2010 and still does now because the Supreme Court was correct in deciding that the First Amendment protected independent political spending by corporations and other groups.
He said Citizens United is not responsible for the “bad developments” in American politics.
“I think almost any constitutional right can potentially be destroyed by saying you're not allowed to expend resources in order to exercise the right. That's certainly true of the right of freedom of speech. If you say, ‘Well, you can say what you want, but you can't spend money to disseminate your speech or broadcast,’ that would clearly destroy the right of freedom of speech,” he said.
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According to PBS News, the 2024 presidential election was the second most expensive election since the 1980s. OpenSecrets reported that the amount spent was $5.5 billion.
Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, an advocacy group, told the gathering of lawmakers that the wealth of the ten richest people in the world surged by $64 billion the day after Trump was elected. She added that Elon Musk’s net worth had “increased by $200 billion just this year.”
She said the Court’s Citizens United decision was “disastrous,” and it not only opened the floodgates to unlimited and undisclosed spending, but it shut the door on getting anything done.
She said that before Citizens United, there were 14 instances of Republicans joining with Democrats to address climate change, and after it passed, the oil and gas lobby became the number one spender in elections, and “there have since been zero instances of us being able to address that since.”
Muller said yesterday’s inauguration was the culmination of the consequences of the last 15 years and the start of what she referred to as “the Billionaire’s Ball” because “just seven people donated a billion dollars to elect Donald Trump.” Now, some of them sit at the head of government agencies, “like Dr. Oz, who made a fortune as a snake oil salesman.”
In his last address to the nation, former President Joe Biden warned that rich people were having so much sway in politics that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.”
McGovern, however, argued that the word ‘oligarchy’ should not be used because “people don’t know what that means.”
He suggested, instead, that lawmakers keep drawing the connection to show how big money influences particular policies.
“If you're on a committee that deals with healthcare, tie the fact that Trump is trying to undo efforts to lower the cost of pharmaceuticals. We have to keep making the connection,” he said.
Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) contradicted McGovern, “The reality is that we need to tell the truth, and if people don't understand the language we're using, it doesn't mean that we don't tell it to them. It means that we have to get them up to speed on the language.”
Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) joked that she could use tequila in her coffee after the witnesses’ testimony “because it all feels awful.” But she said that these issues are exactly why she believes it’s her responsibility to do everything she can to make sure that people understand the impact of money in politics.
Ramirez, a daughter of immigrants, was the first Latina ever to be elected to serve Illinois in Congress.
“It's 2025, why is that? It's too damn expensive to run for Congress,” she said.
Some legal experts said Citizens United does not determine who wins elections.
Joe Luppino-Esposito, deputy legal policy director at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said that the candidates with the most money do not always win.
“Ask [former Vice President] Kamala Harris, who spent well over a billion dollars,” Luppino-Esposito said. “She dwarfed [Trump] completely, and he still prevailed. It’s definitely not the case that whoever has the most dollars automatically wins.”
According to Forbes, Harris’ campaign raised around $20 million from big donors between October and November, compared to Trump’s $5 million.
Luppino-Esposito disagreed with the alarms Democrats raised about oligarchs.
“Every party has their own oligarchs,” he said. “Everybody has their own people that they hail as their leaders in industry. When the case came down in 2010, there was this perception that corporate money was all going to be on the Republican side of the aisle, and that is very, very far from the case. Both sides have engaged in the arms race… Trump is not as afraid to tout that these people are on his side, whereas President Biden had the same type of people on his side as well [like George Soros].”
Somin, from George Mason University, said he’s unhappy with the winners in the recent election, but he does not blame Citizens United.
“American politics since 2010 has certainly gone in much worse directions than I had expected or hoped,” he said. “I don't think Citizens United is the culprit.”
“There are going to be some people who can exercise liberty in some ways more effectively than others. If you're a famous celebrity like Taylor Swift, when you speak, many more people are going to pay attention,” he said. “With almost every constitutional right, there's some degree of inequality in the sense of how effectively you can exercise that right, but I don't think there's anything unique to money and speech in that respect.”
During the roundtable, Lee conceded that it’s not just Republicans who protect big money in politics. Democrats publicly oppose Citizens United, but their actions don't align with their words.
“In our Democratic party, we won't even get rid of money and politics… when it's just us, and we have to start to talk about the why. I am the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania. I do not come from money,” she said. “There is no one in my phone who I can call and ask for a significant amount of money. And because there's no such person in my network, people like me are systematically blocked from representing in Congress.”
Lee added that any one who cares about mass shootings, the climate, environmental racism, or taking down Big Pharma, should care about money in politics.
“If we can't put our money where our mouth is, then we have to be very real about whether or not we are actually fighting for the best interest of the American people,” Lee said. “We can't combat Big Pharma if we are also accepting money from them. Democrats have to be more serious about serving the people, and we can't do that if we are not serious about combating our own issues with taking money in politics.”
Samanta Habashy is a student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, majoring in journalism and international studies.
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