Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Well, this is scary. I have known about Candida albicans for quite some time – 40-60% of us have some somewhere in our gut, but our immune systems generally keep it in check. In the mid-eighties, when DH and I both started allergy treatment, we were routinely tested for it; because of allergies tying up the immune system, it can get out of control if you have some, and especially food allergies. It was then treated with nystatin or some similar drugs,

I certainly never knew that, or why, it’s so hard to come up with antifungal drugs that aren’t as bad as the fungus itself. Candida albicans, the Candida which causes “thrush,” used to be considered annoying, but controllable. No one knew about these other strains of Candida Boy, have things changed! And rapidly!

=================================================================

Why the CDC warns antibiotic-resistant fungal infections are an urgent health threat

Cornelius (Neil) J. Clancy, University of Pittsburgh

In 2013 I took care of a gentleman who underwent surgery for what all his physicians, including me, thought was liver cancer. Surgery revealed that the disease was a rare but benign tumor, rather than cancer. As you might imagine, he and his family were overjoyed and relieved.

However, two weeks after this surgery, he developed a liver abscess – an encapsulated tissue infection. Surgeons operated to remove the abscess. Two days later, test results revealed that the abscess was caused by a fungus called Candida that was resistant to echinocandins, our most powerful drugs against this fungus.

The patient underwent multiple surgeries and received various antibiotics thereafter, but his abscess kept growing back. He died four weeks after the first surgery to remove the abscess. The cause of death was sepsis due to his echinocandin-resistant Candida infection, which, at the time, was uncommon in the U.S. This tragic case demonstrated to me firsthand the devastating impact of drug-resistant fungal infections.

In the years since, I have cared for over a dozen patients who have died due to antibiotic-resistant fungal infections. On Nov. 13, 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report on antibiotic resistance threats in the U.S., warning that drug-resistant fungi have become major public health problems.

The new report revealed that 18 microorganisms cause almost 3 million antibiotic resistant infections and 35,000 deaths annually. For the first time, this report includes several antibiotic resistant fungi: Candida auris, other drug-resistant Candida (as in my patient above) and azole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus. These resistant fungi are especially threatening because only three classes of antifungal medicines are currently available.

Antibiotic-resistant fungi?

We have heard a lot in recent years about the public health crisis of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but less attention has been paid to antibiotic-resistant fungi. In part, this is because fungi became common causes of disease only over the past 30 years. During this time, the risk for serious fungal infections rose as more people suffered weakened immune systems stemming from increased bone marrow and organ transplantation, new drugs to treat cancer and other diseases, and complex surgeries. The widespread use of more potent antibiotics to treat resistant bacterial infections also has contributed by creating less competition for fungi to grow in human tissues.

Fungi include yeasts, which grow as spherical cells; and molds, which grow as elongated, tubular cells. Both yeasts and molds are more closely related genetically to humans than they are to bacteria. Therefore, it is hard to develop antibiotics that attack fungi without damaging human cells.

Candida are yeasts that commonly cause skin rashes, urinary tract infections and vaginal infections. However, they are also the third-leading cause of sepsis and other life-threatening infections in U.S. hospitals.

Candida auris was discovered in 2009, but it was almost never encountered in a medical setting until 2015, when numerous infections suddenly occurred on multiple continents. It is now one of CDC’s five most “urgent threats” for two principal reasons.

First, it demonstrates very high-level antifungal resistance. Ninety percent of strains are resistant to fluconazole, the frontline antifungal in many countries; 30% are resistant to two antifungal classes; and between 3% and 5% to all antifungals.

Another reason that the CDC is concerned about C. auris is that it has the unique ability to spread from person to person through contact with hands and clothes of health-care workers or contaminated medical devices. It also persists outside of humans in health-care environments, and causes large, long-standing infectious outbreaks. C. auris is a remarkably robust organism that can survive standard disinfection methods, high temperatures and salt solutions that kill other microbes.

Since the first U.S. case in 2016, C. auris has caused more than 800 infections in 13 states. CDC and local health departments currently are working to contain numerous health-care outbreaks. It is unclear why this fungus has arisen now, although climate and other environmental changes may have played a role. Likewise, it is unclear how widely C. auris will expand in the U.S. or globally.

It’s not just C. auris we need to worry about

Other drug-resistant fungi in the Candida family are also considered “serious threats” by CDC. These strains cause more than 34,000 infections annually, more than are caused by C. auris, but they are less likely to spread from person to person and cause outbreaks. Nevertheless, deeply invasive C. auris and other drug-resistant Candida infections are similar in severity, resulting in the death of 40% of patients.

Another dangerous fungus species the CDC singled out is Aspergillus fumigatus, which is a mold found in soil and vegetation that releases spores that most people inhale daily without problems. However, people with weakened immune systems – especially cancer patients or transplant recipients – can develop lung or other organ infections that kill between 50% and 75% of infected patients.

Azole antifungals are the only drugs that kill A. fumigatus without causing serious side effects. Azoles also are used widely in agriculture. Azole-resistant A. fumigatus infections are most common in Europe, where they have been linked to agricultural and patient use. Although these infections still are uncommon in the U.S., CDC has placed azole-resistant A. fumigatus on its “resistance watch list” because azole use is so widespread in this country and vulnerable patient populations are large.

Tackling antibiotic-resistant fungi requires many strategies

How is the U.S. fighting antibiotic-resistant fungi? CDC and health departments are leading the way in surveillance for resistance and, in the case of C. auris, outbreak containment and prevention. Containment involves rapid and accurate diagnosis of C. auris infections, and the use of hospital gowns, gloves, equipment and cleaning materials that reduce the likelihood of spreading the fungus.

Various U.S. government agencies have funded research that is leading to new antifungal drugs and improved diagnostic tests.

Organizations that grade the quality of medical care for the public now require health-care facilities to have antibiotic stewardship programs that reduce inappropriate prescribing and development of resistance.

Efforts are underway also to control antibiotic use in agriculture and animals, since resistance cannot be tackled by only focusing on human medicine. CDC and other U.S. agencies are working closely with international partners, because antibiotic-resistant microbes do not recognize geographic borders. Finally, the crucial first step in tackling a problem is to recognize it, which is why the CDC report on antibiotic resistance threats is so important.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]

Cornelius (Neil) J. Clancy, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of Mycology, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

=================================================================

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, this is an area which demonstrates quite vividly why we need to fund medical research – despite the machinations of all those who would defund it completely.Please! Help!

The Furies and I will be back.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse …
==================================================================

The forgotten mass destruction of Jewish homes during ‘Kristallnacht’

Wolf Gruner, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Every November, communities around the world hold remembrances on the anniversary of the Nazis’ brutal assault on the Jews during “Kristallnacht.”

Also known as “the Night of Broken Glass,” it’s one of the most closely scrutinized events in the history of Nazi Germany. Dozens of books have been published about the hours between Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, when Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decided to unleash violence against Jews across Germany and the annexed territory of Austria with the aim of driving them out of the Third Reich.

Most accounts tend to emphasize the attacks on synagogues and shops, along with the mass arrests of 30,000 men. A few note the destruction of Jewish schools and cemeteries.

Attacks on Jewish homes, however, are barely mentioned.

It’s an aspect of the story that has rarely been researched and written about – until now.

A pattern emerges in survivor accounts

In 2008, when I arrived at the University of Southern California from Germany, I had been researching Nazi persecution of the German Jews for 20 years. I had published more than six books on the topic and thought I knew just about everything there was to know about Kristallnacht.

The university happened to be the new home of the Shoah Foundation and its Visual History Archive, which today includes over 55,000 survivor testimonies. When I started to watch interviews with German-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, I was surprised to hear many of them talk about the destruction of their homes during Kristallnacht.

Details from their recollections sounded eerily similar: When Nazi paramilitary troops broke the doors of their homes, it sounded as though a bomb had gone off; then the men cut into the featherbeds, hacked the furniture into pieces and smashed everything inside.

Yet none of these stories appeared in traditional accounts of Kristallnacht.

I was perplexed by this disconnect. Some years later, I found a document from Schneidemühl, a small district in the East of Germany, that listed the destruction of a dozen synagogues, over 60 shops – and 231 homes.

These surprising numbers piqued my interest further. After digging into unpublished and published materials, I unearthed an abundance of evidence in administrative reports, diaries, letters and postwar testimonies.

A fuller picture of the brutal destruction of Jewish homes and apartments soon emerged.

For example, a Jewish merchant named Martin Fröhlich wrote to his daughter that when he arrived home the afternoon of that fateful November day, he noticed his door had been broken down. A tipped-over wardrobe blocked the entrance. Inside, everything had been hacked into pieces with axes: glass, china, clocks, the piano, furniture, chairs, lamps and paintings. Realizing that his home was now uninhabitable, he broke down and – as he confessed in the letter – started sobbing like a child.

A systematic campaign of destruction

The more I discovered, the more astonished I was by the scale and intensity of the attacks.

Using address lists provided by either local party officers or city officials, paramilitary SA and SS squads and Hitler Youth, armed with axes and pistols, attacked apartments with Jewish tenants in big cities like Berlin, as well as private Jewish homes in small villages. In Nuremberg, for example, attackers destroyed 236 Jewish flats. In Düsseldorf, over 400 were vandalized.

In the cities of Rostock and Mannheim, the attackers demolished virtually all Jewish apartments.

Documents point to Goebbels as the one who ordered the destruction of home furnishings. Due to the systematic nature of the attacks, the number of vandalized Jewish homes across Greater Germany must have been in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.

Then there are devastating details about the intensity of the destruction that emerge from letters and testimonies from postwar trials.

In Euskirchen, a house was burned to the ground.

In the village of Kamp, near the Rhineland town of Boppard, attackers broke into the house of the Kaufmann family, destroyed furniture and lamps, ripped out stove pipes, and broke doors and walls. When parts of the ceiling collapsed, the family escaped to a nearby monastery.

In the small town of Großauheim, located in the state of Hesse, troops used sledgehammers to destroy everything in two Jewish homes, including lamps, radios, clocks and furniture. Even after the war, shards of glass and china were found impressed in the wooden floor.

‘Everything ravaged and shattered’

The documents I found and interviews I listened to revealed how sexual abuse, beatings and murder were commonplace. Much of it happened during the home intrusions.

In Linz, two SA men sexually assaulted a Jewish woman. In Bremen, the SA shot and killed Selma Zwienicki in her own bedroom. In Cologne, as Moritz Spiro tried to stop two men from destroying his furniture, one of the intruders beat him and fractured his skull. Spiro died days later in the Jewish hospital.

In a letter dated Nov. 20, 1938, a Viennese woman described her family’s injuries to a relative:

“You can’t imagine, how it looked like at home. Papa with a head injury, bandaged, I with severe attacks in bed, everything ravaged and shattered… When the doctor arrived to patch up Papa, Herta and Rosa, who all bled horribly from their heads, we could not even provide him with a towel.”

The brutality of the attacks didn’t go unnoticed. On Nov. 15, the U.S. consul general in Stuttgart, Samuel Honaker, wrote to his ambassador in Berlin:

“Of all the places in this section of Germany, the Jews in Rastatt, which is situated near Baden-Baden, have apparently been subjected to the most ruthless treatment. Many Jews in this section were cruelly attacked and beaten and the furnishings of their homes almost totally destroyed.”

These findings make clear: The demolition of Jewish homes was an overlooked aspect of the November 1938 pogrom.

Why did it stay in the shadows for so long?

In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, most newspaper articles and photographs of the violent event exclusively focused on the destroyed synagogues and stores – selective coverage that probably influenced our understanding.

Yet, it was the destruction of the home – the last refuge for the German Jewish families who found themselves facing heightened public discrimination in the years leading up to the pogrom – that likely extracted the greatest toll on the Jewish population. The brutal attacks rendered thousands homeless and hundreds beaten, sexually assaulted or murdered.

The brutal assaults also likely played a big role in the spate of Jewish suicides that took place in the days and weeks after Kristallnacht, along with the decision that tens of thousands of Jews made to flee Nazi Germany.

While this story speaks to decades of scholarly neglect, it is, at the same time, a testament to the power of survivor accounts, which continue to change the way we understand the Holocaust.

Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

==================================================================
This knowledge isn’t really new; it’s been in public records since it happened. But it has been “lost” by so much more emphasis being placed on the destruction of shops, synagogues, and other public buildings (possibly because those places are where the glass is.) So it’s probably new to many readers here, as it is to me.

But this adds in the imagination a new insight into how many people were actually involved, and the organization which went into it. Half a dozen crazies, no matter how motivated, cannot do that much to 231 homes in one night, to use a figure from one area. Further, those records kept by the SS which were used to find the homes to destroy must have been painstakingly collected over a goodly period of time. Well – today we have Facebook. Oh, yes, and voters’ records databases.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, not to be paranoid, but what should we do when we see this as a possibility under the current regime? Besides what we are already doing – fighting the regime with whatever skills and talents that we have.

The Furies and I will be back.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

In looking around for something to share with the Furies, I was mostly – well, pretty well exclusive,y – finding articles that are unrelated to current events and just “interesting.” Not a bad thing, of course, especially now. And this is one of them. But this one stood out as requesting action which maybe someone could take if you’ve ever spent any part of an autumn in New England. Bet you never thought any autumn leaf tour photos could some day be useful.
==================================================================

Leaf peep for science – I want your old photos of fall foliage

Stephanie Spera, University of Richmond

Every October, when I was growing up in Massachusetts, my parents would check out the fall foliage reports and determine where we were going to drive to see the colorful leaves. And they still do. In New England, leaf peeping, as it’s called, is a billion dollar industry and millions of people travel to the region during foliage season.

In Maine’s Acadia National Park, visitation has more than doubled in September and October since the early 1990s. Tourists book leaf peeping cruises, bus trips and lodging packages, all scheduled to coincide with what’s traditionally been the somewhat predictable fall foliage season.

But Earth’s climate is changing. A big question is how climate change’s impacts on the timing, duration and vibrancy of fall foliage will affect the tourist season.

Pulling together all kinds of data

Untangling the relationship between climate, fall foliage and visitorship in Acadia National Park – the goal of my research – requires a variety of data, including meteorological observations, park visitor surveys and knowledge of when fall foliage starts, peaks and ends every year.

As an environmental scientist, one of the primary ways I study changes in vegetation phenology – that is, the timing of biological events like flowering, leaf out, or onset and duration of fall foliage – is through the use of satellite data. Every day, dozens of satellites circle the Earth collecting data on everything from land cover to weather to sea surface temperatures to ground water to the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

These data are crucial in teasing apart environmental changes. Scientists have used satellite data of land cover and vegetation to show that as global temperatures increase, trees are flowering earlier and earlier.

But like all technology, the farther back in time you go, the lower the quality of the data. Even worse, there isn’t any reliable satellite data over Acadia National Park before the year 2000 at all. So my team needs to get creative.

Science behind the seasonal display

Here’s what biologists do know. As summer turns to autumn, the days get shorter and colder, both of which are signals to trees to stop photosynthesizing and producing the chlorophyll that makes their leaves green. With green chlorophyll out of the picture, the orange and yellow carotenoid pigments in the leaves that are masked by all the chlorophyll production all summer have their moment to shine.

In some trees, cooler weather cues the production of a chemical called anthocyanin, which helps trees pull the nutrients from their leaves into their trunk and roots. Anthocyanin is responsible for those gorgeous red and purple leaves on trees like red maples and dogwoods.

While every tree is different, studies have found that earlier spring bud burst, warmer temperatures and a dry fall are linked to a later fall foliage season. A shorter foliage season can result from a hot summer and wet fall. Additionally, the concentration of nitrogen in the atmosphere – which humans are releasing into the atmosphere on faster time scales than nature does – affects just how red those gorgeous maples get.

The northeastern U.S. has gotten warmer and wetter over the last century. How have these climate changes affected the timing, vibrancy and duration of fall foliage in Acadia National Park? Have tourists, in turn, changed how and when they visit the park?

Looking in new places for old foliage records

To answer this question, my team is using historical data on temperature and precipitation in Acadia National Park. What we’re missing, though, is information about when fall foliage has started and peaked, going back through the decades.

Most historical records of phenology, like those of Henry David Thoreau, are focused on the spring season. Historical documentation of fall foliage is harder to come by.

My colleagues and I are mining National Park reports and old newspapers, like this article in the Oct. 12, 1893 Bar Harbor Times, which is local to Acadia National Park:

“The autumn foliage on Mount Desert was never more brilliant than this year. The hills are ablaze with crimson and yellow, and the woodbine embowered cottages are resplendent with opalescent tints. But, alas ‘tis but the beetie glow in the consumptive’s cheek. A few weeks and winter’s white pail will cover all the autumn glories.”

But the records are few and far between.

We’ve found one continuous record of fall foliage since 1975, although it’s not focused on the Acadia area. Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire has been collecting data on onset and peak of fall foliage since the mid-1970s. Interestingly, their data show that since 1975 fall foliage gets going earlier in the year, but peak fall foliage occurs later.

Maybe you have the selfies we seek

This lack of data is why we need citizen scientists to help us fill in the gaps.

With apps and programs like Nature’s Notebook, iNaturalist, BudBurst and eBird, it’s never been easier for anyone to share their observations of the world around them. Scientists have recently been trawling social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and Instagram for data to estimate park visitation rates, map monarch butterfly and snowy owl sightings and understand the various ways people value different landscapes.

Collecting photos from people who’ve traveled to Acadia is helping us validate the satellite data we do have. My team is able to make sure what we see in the satellite images actually represents of what is happening on the ground in the park. We are so appreciative of all the photos we’ve received from people who have visited Acadia this year. And we have received a bunch, 907 to be exact, of submitted photos from the post-cellphone camera era.

That doesn’t get us back to before the advent of continuous satellite data, though. We need leaf peepers to dig deeper into their personal photo albums to help us figure out the timing of fall foliage before the year 2000.

Those earlier photos – from a time of yore when you actually had to remove film from a camera and take it to get developed – are proving much harder to come by. So far we have two data points from before 2010, one from 1987 and one from 1981.

We’re asking for your help. We know those awkward family photos of you or your parents in their 1970s bell bottoms standing in front of Acadia’s Jordan Pond exist. And we want them. If you have any old vacation photos taken in the park during the fall, scan them and send them our way.

Understanding the relationships between climate change, fall foliage and park visitorship have important implications for park management, the local economies of towns on and around Mount Desert Island, and those of us who love visiting Acadia in the fall. So leaf peep – for science.

Stephanie Spera, Assistant Professor of Climate Change & Remote Sensing, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

==================================================================
I’m afraid I’m no help. I have autumn pictures back to the eighties, but they’re all in Colorado. But I certainly will be sure to hang on to them now, in case someone here decides to so a similar study. We do have a dependency on tourists here, certainly.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I don’t see how it could hurt to inspire people in other areas of the nation, and the world, to look into something similar It could even really help.

The Furies and I will be back.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

So, the House of Representatives is full-on investigating Donald John Trump with the intent of impeachment. If you, or someone you know, hasn’t noticed, that’s because Trump is stonewalling on allowing either documents or testimony to be provided to the committees concerned (in itself an impeachable offense, of course. All this is quite frustrating. It won’t, of course, derail the investigation, but it may – it is intended to – delay it substantially So when I found this Creative Commons article which discusses the effect of delay, along with other factors, I thought it was well worth sharing.

There are many who are clamoring for immediate, or at least speedy, results. My take is that, to be blunt, if there may end up being face-eating leopards around, we should at the very least be aware that we also have faces which could be eaten.
====================================================================

Investigations usually hurt a president’s public reputation – but Trump isn’t usual

Douglas L. Kriner, Cornell University and Eric Schickler, University of California, Berkeley

Will the House impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump ultimately have any effect?

Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi had long resisted calls for impeachment, arguing that it is “just not worth it.” However, the Trump administration’s initial refusal to release to Congress documents concerning the intelligence community whistleblower’s complaint about the administration’s treatment of Ukraine encouraged the Speaker to cross that line.

We have explored the relationship between hearings into alleged executive branch misconduct and public opinion in our 2016 book, “Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power.”

Investigations often damage a president’s reputation in the public eye – but that may not matter to a historically unpopular president like Trump.

A check on the presidency

The power to oversee the executive branch is among Congress’ most important powers. Investigations have historically afforded Congress a meaningful check on an increasingly powerful presidency.

Perhaps the most important way that investigations check presidential power is by lowering public support for the president. By eroding the president’s reserve of political capital, investigators can change how politicians behave, both in Congress and in the White House.

This can create momentum for new legislation, encourage presidential concessions, or simply weaken the president’s political position with broad consequences.

In our book, we built a comprehensive data set of all congressional investigations of the executive branch from 1898 through 2014.

We then merged it with presidential approval data, which first became regularly available in 1953, to see how investigations affected approval ratings from Eisenhower to Obama.

Even after statistically accounting for the possibility that low approval ratings might also encourage Congress to investigate an administration more aggressively, we found that investigations systematically eroded public support for the president.

Historically, every 20 additional days of investigative hearings cost the president roughly 2.5% in the polls.

So a short-term investigation is survivable. But a long-term investigation could seriously diminish the president’s political capital and even threaten his or his party’s electoral fortunes.

How Trump is different

Will the current impeachment inquiry have the same corrosive effect on support for President Trump? The allegations of abuse of power are more serious than those driving many of the investigations in our historical data.

However, there are reasons to believe that support for Trump may be more resilient.

President Trump’s approval rating has been remarkably stable over the past three years. This suggests to us that the power of events to move public opinion has diminished substantially.

President Trump has had both a lower ceiling -– his first term approval ratings were historically low, given the strength of the economy – and a higher floor than his predecessors.

What’s more, partisan lines have hardened to an extent that is arguably unparalleled in the past century.

Here’s how that partisanship is relevant: There is nothing unusual about the members of a president’s party defending him in the face of accusations of wrongdoing. But in past cases, there generally was a reasonably sized faction of members of the same party in Congress who were willing to take on the president when his administration’s actions were particularly egregious.

In today’s intensely polarized Congress, it is unlikely that there is any revelation that would persuade more than a small handful of Republicans to turn on President Trump. Absent this, public opinion is unlikely to move.

At the same time, many congressional Republicans are standing by Trump because they believe that is what their voters want. Staunchly partisan voters encourage elites to toe the party line and use more inflammatory language. That, in turn, only reinforces voters’ inclination to stick with their party.

Checks and balances

Investigations offer Congress a tool to push back against presidential power when it cannot legislate.

However, for investigations to succeed and produce meaningful political or policy change, they usually must be able to shine a light on administration misdeeds and move the needle of public opinion. To do so, investigators must have access to the information they require.

The Trump administration has refused to cooperate with congressional subpoenas and requests for information, and continues to receive the unconditional support of most Republicans for the president. That suggests that the impeachment inquiry, like other investigative efforts of the 116th Congress, faces severe obstacles that earlier investigations had not confronted.

The kinds of revelations that in the past surely would have been sufficient to move the public and elected officials may no longer be sufficient. The question is whether the revelations in Trump’s case will surpass the barriers imposed by today’s intensely polarized politics.

[ Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day. ]

Douglas L. Kriner, Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions, Cornell University and Eric Schickler, Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

====================================================================

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, you probably know even better than we do that every enterprise which involves human beings is more or less a crap shoot. An action designed to accomplish one goal can have that effect, or it can have the opposite effect, or it can just fizzle. I think we can be pretty sure that House Democrats, particularly our Democratic leadership, are considering all of the factors above. We do not even have the opportunity of jury selection. The jury for this trial is the United States Senate, and it’s already been selected. There have been a few hopeful signs, but there are no guarantees. And we must have hard evidence.

The Furies and I will be back.