Trailblazing politician Shirley Chisholm is awarded Congress’ highest honor
Bipartisan legislation to honor the late Shirley Chisholm, the nation’s first Black congresswoman, became law last week, as the 118th Congress winds down with a final flurry of bills.
President Joe Biden signed the Shirley Chisholm Congressional Gold Medal Act on Thursday, posthumously honoring Chisholm, who died in 2005, with Congress’s highest award for her distinguished service and achievements including a plethora of legislative pieces to ensure immigration reform, child support, getting federal lands back to Native tribes, the bases of food stamps in what started as efforts to aid the end of the Vietnam war and creating what is now known today as WIC – the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.
Days prior, Vice President Kamala Harris signed the measure in her role as president of the U.S. Senate, flanked by the bill’s two lead sponsors, Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif.
“It was an honor to stand next to Vice President Kamala Harris as she signed this historic bill,” Lee said in a statement according to NBC News. Chisholm became a mentor to Lee as a college student and as Lee built her own career in public service.
Biden on track to appoint more federal judges of color than any other president
As President Joe Biden makes a final push to confirm judicial nominees before his term in office ends, he is on track to have appointed more federal judges of color than any president before him.
On Dec. 16, the Senate confirmed Biden’s judicial nominee for the Northern District of Georgia, Tiffany Johnson, making her the 40th Black woman he has appointed to lifetime federal judgeships – more than any president in a single term.
Overall, about 60% of Biden’s 233 appointees are people of color, according to figures the White House shared with NBC News and NBC News shared in their report.
White House communications director Ben LaBolt said in an emailed statement that Biden is “proud to have strengthened the judiciary by making it more representative of the country as a whole and that legacy will have an impact for decades to come.”
“Even before taking office, President Biden signaled to the Senate that he wanted to make sure that people who had been historically excluded from our judiciary” are included, said Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the fair courts program and an adviser at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Black woman from Alabama receives nation’s third pig kidney transplant
A 53-year-old Alabama woman with kidney failure who waited eight years for an organ transplant has received a kidney harvested from a genetically modified pig, NYU Langone Health surgeons announced on Dec. 17.
The patient, Towana Looney, went into surgery just before Thanksgiving. She was in better health than others who have received porcine organs to date and left the hospital 11 days after the procedure.
The case will be watched by the transplant community, as success could speed initiation of a clinical trial.
Patients on waiting lists represent only a fraction of the more than 550,000 who are on dialysis. Many patients don’t qualify for waiting lists, which screen candidates carefully because organs are in such short supply.
Black patients, like Looney, make up 35% of those on dialysis, despite representing only 13.5% of the population, partly because of risk factors like high rates of hypertension, diabetes and heart disease.