Justice Department move should worry some who sold stock before market tanked
Opinion by Elie Honig
Now that the Justice Department reportedly has started reviewing stock transactions made by lawmakers shortly before the dramatic market downturn caused by the coronavirus, we should get answers to key questions about whether those transactions were criminal or otherwise improper. While we cannot know what the Justice Department will ultimately find, the very fact that it has started to probe could be bad news for those involved.
As a former federal prosecutor, I know that the Justice Department does not begin reviewing financial transactions based on guesswork or hunches. As the FBI's formal guidelines describe the standard to open even a preliminary investigation, there must be at least some "allegation or information indicative of possible criminal or national security-threatening activity." In other words, you don't need a fire, but you do need a spark.
The Justice Department review reportedly is focused, at least in part, on Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who claims he relied solely on public news reports to guide his investment decisions. Other senators -- including Kelly Loeffler from Georgia, Dianne Feinstein from California, and Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma -- may have benefited from fortunately-timed stock sales before the market downturn.
Loeffler, Feinstein and Inhofe's offices said the FBI had not contacted them in connection with the stock sales. Loeffler denied any wrongdoing, stating she has used a third-party adviser and had not learned of the sales until afterward. Senate records show that Feinstein's husband -- and not Feinstein herself -- sold stock, and she denies having any input into her husband's financial decisions. And Inhofe similar denied any involvement in the investment decisions in question.
Meanwhile, Burr's attorney has stated that he "welcomes a thorough review of the facts in this matter, which will establish that his actions were appropriate." The attorney added, "The law is clear that any American -- including a Senator -- may participate in the stock market based on public information, as Senator Burr did. When this issue arose, Senator Burr immediately asked the Senate Ethics Committee to conduct a complete review, and he will cooperate with that review as well as any other appropriate inquiry."
Whether the case ultimately results in criminal charges for insider trading depends primarily on one key phrase: "material, non-public information." If the stock sales at issue were based on such information, then insider trading charges could be in play.
Let's break that down. Senators may have received non-public information before these stocks were sold. In fact, senators routinely receive closed-door briefings -- including about public health crises, such as coronavirus, so potentially pertinent information could have been shared with them. That said, we cannot be certain who was in those briefings.
And information is "material" if a reasonable investor would consider it relevant to the decision to buy or sell stock; in other words, information is "material" if it is important enough to move an investor's needle. We don't yet know precisely what information the senators received behind closed doors, but briefers don't tend to waste senators' time with trivial or irrelevant chatter.
Even if Burr's decision, for example, to sell stock were based on a mixture of material, non-public information (which is prohibited) and information known to the general public (which is not), it could still be insider trading under federal law if the material, non-public information "was a factor, however small, in the defendant's decision to purchase or sell stock."
And while some of the senators have claimed they did not directly make the stock transactions themselves, they could be liable for insider trading if they provided material, non-public information to others with the intent that it be used to make stock purchases or sales.
For now, we must wait for officials to complete their investigation, which could result in criminal charges by the Justice Department, civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (which reportedly is participating in the review), congressional investigation and disciplinary action -- or nothing at all.
But the conveniently-timed trades -- which collectively saved millions of dollars in losses for senators -- have raised the public specter of wrongdoing and profiteering as the nation grapples with a massive public health and economic crisis.
March 31, 2020
Rednecks forever...
Idaho governor signs two bills that limit the rights of transgender people
By Andy Rose and Hollie Silverman
Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed two bills into law Monday that limit the rights of transgender people.
One measure bans transgender girls from playing on girls' and women's sports teams, while the other prohibits transgender people from changing their gender on Idaho birth certificates.
Little's office did not comment on the laws.
House Bill 500, also known as the Fairness in Women's Sports Act, says "athletic teams or sports designated for females, women, or girls shall not be open to students of the male sex." The measure says that a "dispute" about an athlete's gender can only be resolved by examining "the student's reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously 19 produced testosterone levels."
Little also signed into law Monday House Bill 509, which prohibits transgender people from obtaining a new birth certificate with their gender identity on it.
In 2018, a federal court struck down a similar bill that sought to prevent gender from being changed on birth certificates.
The state ACLU said both laws violate the rights of transgender Idahoans.
"The ACLU of Idaho condemns Governor Brad Little's decision to sign discriminatory, unconstitutional, and deeply hurtful anti-transgender bills into law," a statement said. "Leaders from the business, faith, medical, education and athletics communities will not forget this decision or what it says about the governor's priorities during a global pandemic. The ACLU will see the governor in court."
The ACLU of Idaho said the first bill is in direct violation of current policies set by the Idaho High School Activities Association. The passing of this bill makes Idaho the first state in the country to pass legislation against transgender students, the ACLU statement said.
Lindsay Hecox, a transgender woman and runner at Boise State University said in the ACLU statement that the bill unfairly targets people like her.
"Supporters of this bill are attempting to fix a problem that was never there. It specifically targets people like me and all transgender female athletes and denies us the opportunity to compete in sports," Hecox said. "It's unfair, unnecessary and discriminatory, and it ignores the commitment we've made to rigorous training and the importance of athletic competition to our lives."
By Andy Rose and Hollie Silverman
Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed two bills into law Monday that limit the rights of transgender people.
One measure bans transgender girls from playing on girls' and women's sports teams, while the other prohibits transgender people from changing their gender on Idaho birth certificates.
Little's office did not comment on the laws.
House Bill 500, also known as the Fairness in Women's Sports Act, says "athletic teams or sports designated for females, women, or girls shall not be open to students of the male sex." The measure says that a "dispute" about an athlete's gender can only be resolved by examining "the student's reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously 19 produced testosterone levels."
Little also signed into law Monday House Bill 509, which prohibits transgender people from obtaining a new birth certificate with their gender identity on it.
In 2018, a federal court struck down a similar bill that sought to prevent gender from being changed on birth certificates.
The state ACLU said both laws violate the rights of transgender Idahoans.
"The ACLU of Idaho condemns Governor Brad Little's decision to sign discriminatory, unconstitutional, and deeply hurtful anti-transgender bills into law," a statement said. "Leaders from the business, faith, medical, education and athletics communities will not forget this decision or what it says about the governor's priorities during a global pandemic. The ACLU will see the governor in court."
The ACLU of Idaho said the first bill is in direct violation of current policies set by the Idaho High School Activities Association. The passing of this bill makes Idaho the first state in the country to pass legislation against transgender students, the ACLU statement said.
Lindsay Hecox, a transgender woman and runner at Boise State University said in the ACLU statement that the bill unfairly targets people like her.
"Supporters of this bill are attempting to fix a problem that was never there. It specifically targets people like me and all transgender female athletes and denies us the opportunity to compete in sports," Hecox said. "It's unfair, unnecessary and discriminatory, and it ignores the commitment we've made to rigorous training and the importance of athletic competition to our lives."
Will be devastating
History's verdict on Trump will be devastating
By Michael D'Antonio
In a crisis, all is revealed.
After a lifetime devoted to avoiding responsibility and accountability -- for his lies, his deceptions, his hype, and his cruelty -- President Donald Trump has met his match in the pandemic of 2020. His bluff and bluster are powerless as thousands of Americans die and the blame falls, in part, on his failure to heed the warnings and execute a robust national response. This occurred even though a pandemic playbook had been left behind by the Obama administration. Early in the crisis, Trump said "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming from China. It's going to be just fine."
Weeks were wasted and now the price of this fiasco will likely be a loss of life far greater than 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina.
On one level, Trump's failure can be traced to his original lie: the false image he sold to the American people in order to hide his shortcomings. Never a competent manager of complex organizations -- witness his many bankruptcies -- Trump rose to fame pitching the illusion that he was a great businessman. As he sought the presidency he used counterattacks, lies, and skillful denials to avoid answering for his record and gain the White House.
As someone who has studied Trump for years, I thought it was inevitable that he would eventually reach a moment of reckoning as president. I couldn't have imagined that it would come with the catastrophic consequences now facing the nation as Covid-19 overwhelms health care systems and brings the economy to a standstill. Trump's profound personal shortcomings -- deficiencies of his heart and mind -- helped bring us to this moment.
The first of Trump's weaknesses? His lack of emotional intelligence and empathy, which causes him to struggle to relate to human suffering. The developer who made tenants miserable so they would move out allowing him to build luxury condos, became the president who downplayed hurricane deaths in Puerto Rico, and now barely speaks of those stricken and killed by the coronavirus. Instead, he obsesses over TV ratings and the economy as if his image in the media and the ups and downs of Wall Street indices matter more than life itself.
The second of Trump's deficiencies is a habit of mind that discounts expertise and elevates convenient opinions supported by cherry-picked sources of misinformation. Businessman Trump exhibited this willful ignorance when, for example, he said the scientific connection between asbestos exposure and disease was a matter of a conspiracy carried out by mobsters. Candidate Trump discounted the expertise of experts leading the war on terror. And President Trump has claimed to have extensive knowledge on a vast array of topics from forest management to drones.
Trump's arrogance as a businessman and a candidate was obnoxious but not terribly dangerous. In a president, it puts America's fate into the hands of a man who was incapable of learning even from his own aides. Faced with an enemy that is literally killing people he stayed true to form as he pushed an unproven coronavirus treatment that's still under scientific review. "What do we have to lose?" Trump asked musing that people could just get prescriptions for the drug. But without clear messaging there's plenty to lose. A man died and his wife was under critical care after the two tried to self-medicate for the novel coronavirus with chloroquine phosphate -- an additive used to clean fish tanks.
The wife said she heard people on TV talking about the drug chloroquine.
Ignorant as he can seem, the President seems to sense that this moment will establish his reputation in perpetuity. He said as much last week when he observed that, "the history books will never forget" America's response to the coronavirus. What he did not mention, however, is that his response to the pandemic will be examined in minute detail -- it is this prospect, the prospect of accountability, that looms over him now.
Until this crisis, Trump had avoided accountability with remarkable consistency. Born into astounding wealth, he avoided accountability by persuading creditors that he was too big to fail even after he ran businesses into the ground. In politics, he deflected accountability by blaming others, especially the press and Democrats, for problems that occurred on his watch. Recently, when asked about the dreadful federal failures on coronavirus testing, he said, bluntly, "I don't take responsibility at all."
Historians will eventually write books detailing what journalists already know about the Trump administration's dereliction of duty when the pandemic hit. America's Covid-19 death toll now passes 2,800 and the caseload exceeds 157,200 cases, But through much of the time that the number of cases was growing, the White House offered no coherent national response to the crisis. There have been sparse moments when Trump has sounded like a leader capable of handling this crisis -- like during his briefing on Sunday, in which he announced that he was extending social distancing guidelines through the end of April. But these moments don't last long before Trump back to pitting states against each other and attacking journalists who ask legitimate questions about his response to the pandemic.
No federal agency is rallying health care workers to move to hot spots where they are needed. Instead of assertively coordinating and distributing vital equipment, the administration is letting states, hospitals, and federal agencies compete against each other. Trump even went so far as to accuse medical workers of hoarding supplies.
Recently Trump introduced a bit of personal petulance to this dynamic, suggesting that governors who aren't sufficiently deferential should be ignored by the White House. (He leavened this remark by noting that Vice President Mike Pence is not following his lead.) Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom Trump singled out for criticism, reported that orders made for equipment had been canceled as suppliers favored the feds over her state.
The president's complaints about not being appreciated remind us that he takes everything personally and that his personal qualities of heartlessness and intellectual dishonesty will hobble his response to our suffering. Acutely attuned to his own feelings, he's so numb to the pain of others that he avoids talking about it. If he has shed a tear or allowed his voice to tremble with grief during this pandemic I have not observed him do it. Likewise, he remains devoted to discounting reliable scientific information that shows things getting worse in favor of happy talk. With health care workers reusing disposable masks and using trash bags as protective gowns, Trump considered the federal effort to supply hospitals and announced, "It's hard not to be happy with the job we're doing."
Meanwhile, governors across the country are demonstrating what competence, empathy, and intelligence look like. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for one, has used his televised briefings to offer accurate information and authentic human concern. He doesn't ignore the pain and grief but rather acknowledges it and shares his own. Everything about Cuomo's briefings, right down to the concise slides flashed to accompany his words, reeks of competence. Where Trump repeats buzzwords and tries to sell himself as all-powerful, Cuomo demonstrates that he understands the pandemic and can communicate the facts.
At the epicenter of the nation's and the world's pandemic, Cuomo has been reminding us that the worst of the crisis is just beginning. The same is true for history's assessment of President Trump. The coronavirus is immune to his manipulation and spin. It is the defining challenge of his presidency and of his life. Compared with other presidential crises, like the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina, it has occurred slowly, with ample warning, giving the president many opportunities to act and, we see now, fail.
The accounting will continue. And like the pandemic, it will be devastating.
By Michael D'Antonio
In a crisis, all is revealed.
After a lifetime devoted to avoiding responsibility and accountability -- for his lies, his deceptions, his hype, and his cruelty -- President Donald Trump has met his match in the pandemic of 2020. His bluff and bluster are powerless as thousands of Americans die and the blame falls, in part, on his failure to heed the warnings and execute a robust national response. This occurred even though a pandemic playbook had been left behind by the Obama administration. Early in the crisis, Trump said "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming from China. It's going to be just fine."
Weeks were wasted and now the price of this fiasco will likely be a loss of life far greater than 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina.
On one level, Trump's failure can be traced to his original lie: the false image he sold to the American people in order to hide his shortcomings. Never a competent manager of complex organizations -- witness his many bankruptcies -- Trump rose to fame pitching the illusion that he was a great businessman. As he sought the presidency he used counterattacks, lies, and skillful denials to avoid answering for his record and gain the White House.
As someone who has studied Trump for years, I thought it was inevitable that he would eventually reach a moment of reckoning as president. I couldn't have imagined that it would come with the catastrophic consequences now facing the nation as Covid-19 overwhelms health care systems and brings the economy to a standstill. Trump's profound personal shortcomings -- deficiencies of his heart and mind -- helped bring us to this moment.
The first of Trump's weaknesses? His lack of emotional intelligence and empathy, which causes him to struggle to relate to human suffering. The developer who made tenants miserable so they would move out allowing him to build luxury condos, became the president who downplayed hurricane deaths in Puerto Rico, and now barely speaks of those stricken and killed by the coronavirus. Instead, he obsesses over TV ratings and the economy as if his image in the media and the ups and downs of Wall Street indices matter more than life itself.
The second of Trump's deficiencies is a habit of mind that discounts expertise and elevates convenient opinions supported by cherry-picked sources of misinformation. Businessman Trump exhibited this willful ignorance when, for example, he said the scientific connection between asbestos exposure and disease was a matter of a conspiracy carried out by mobsters. Candidate Trump discounted the expertise of experts leading the war on terror. And President Trump has claimed to have extensive knowledge on a vast array of topics from forest management to drones.
Trump's arrogance as a businessman and a candidate was obnoxious but not terribly dangerous. In a president, it puts America's fate into the hands of a man who was incapable of learning even from his own aides. Faced with an enemy that is literally killing people he stayed true to form as he pushed an unproven coronavirus treatment that's still under scientific review. "What do we have to lose?" Trump asked musing that people could just get prescriptions for the drug. But without clear messaging there's plenty to lose. A man died and his wife was under critical care after the two tried to self-medicate for the novel coronavirus with chloroquine phosphate -- an additive used to clean fish tanks.
The wife said she heard people on TV talking about the drug chloroquine.
Ignorant as he can seem, the President seems to sense that this moment will establish his reputation in perpetuity. He said as much last week when he observed that, "the history books will never forget" America's response to the coronavirus. What he did not mention, however, is that his response to the pandemic will be examined in minute detail -- it is this prospect, the prospect of accountability, that looms over him now.
Until this crisis, Trump had avoided accountability with remarkable consistency. Born into astounding wealth, he avoided accountability by persuading creditors that he was too big to fail even after he ran businesses into the ground. In politics, he deflected accountability by blaming others, especially the press and Democrats, for problems that occurred on his watch. Recently, when asked about the dreadful federal failures on coronavirus testing, he said, bluntly, "I don't take responsibility at all."
Historians will eventually write books detailing what journalists already know about the Trump administration's dereliction of duty when the pandemic hit. America's Covid-19 death toll now passes 2,800 and the caseload exceeds 157,200 cases, But through much of the time that the number of cases was growing, the White House offered no coherent national response to the crisis. There have been sparse moments when Trump has sounded like a leader capable of handling this crisis -- like during his briefing on Sunday, in which he announced that he was extending social distancing guidelines through the end of April. But these moments don't last long before Trump back to pitting states against each other and attacking journalists who ask legitimate questions about his response to the pandemic.
No federal agency is rallying health care workers to move to hot spots where they are needed. Instead of assertively coordinating and distributing vital equipment, the administration is letting states, hospitals, and federal agencies compete against each other. Trump even went so far as to accuse medical workers of hoarding supplies.
Recently Trump introduced a bit of personal petulance to this dynamic, suggesting that governors who aren't sufficiently deferential should be ignored by the White House. (He leavened this remark by noting that Vice President Mike Pence is not following his lead.) Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom Trump singled out for criticism, reported that orders made for equipment had been canceled as suppliers favored the feds over her state.
The president's complaints about not being appreciated remind us that he takes everything personally and that his personal qualities of heartlessness and intellectual dishonesty will hobble his response to our suffering. Acutely attuned to his own feelings, he's so numb to the pain of others that he avoids talking about it. If he has shed a tear or allowed his voice to tremble with grief during this pandemic I have not observed him do it. Likewise, he remains devoted to discounting reliable scientific information that shows things getting worse in favor of happy talk. With health care workers reusing disposable masks and using trash bags as protective gowns, Trump considered the federal effort to supply hospitals and announced, "It's hard not to be happy with the job we're doing."
Meanwhile, governors across the country are demonstrating what competence, empathy, and intelligence look like. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for one, has used his televised briefings to offer accurate information and authentic human concern. He doesn't ignore the pain and grief but rather acknowledges it and shares his own. Everything about Cuomo's briefings, right down to the concise slides flashed to accompany his words, reeks of competence. Where Trump repeats buzzwords and tries to sell himself as all-powerful, Cuomo demonstrates that he understands the pandemic and can communicate the facts.
At the epicenter of the nation's and the world's pandemic, Cuomo has been reminding us that the worst of the crisis is just beginning. The same is true for history's assessment of President Trump. The coronavirus is immune to his manipulation and spin. It is the defining challenge of his presidency and of his life. Compared with other presidential crises, like the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina, it has occurred slowly, with ample warning, giving the president many opportunities to act and, we see now, fail.
The accounting will continue. And like the pandemic, it will be devastating.
Roll back fuel efficiency standards because??????
New York Times: Trump administration to roll back fuel efficiency standards, weakening efforts to combat climate change
By Veronica Stracqualursi
The Trump administration is planning to finalize a rule that will loosen tough fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, a move that will have large environmental consequences and weaken former President Barack Obama's efforts to combat climate change,The New York Times reported.
The finalized rule, prepared by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation, is expected to be unveiled Tuesday.
According to the Times, the new rule does away with the Obama-era standards from 2012 for automakers to produce vehicles with an average fuel economy to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 model year vehicles, lowering it down to 40 miles per gallon, according to the Times.
The Trump administration would mandate a 1.5% annual increase in fuel efficiency, compared to the 5% annual increase under Obama, the Times reported.
"This rule when finalized will benefit all Americans by improving the U.S. fleet's fuel economy, reducing air pollution, making new vehicles more affordable for all Americans and save lives," EPA spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer told The Washington Post, adding that she could not comment on specifics because it's still being reviewed.
On Twitter Monday, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler argued that the final rule will raise US fleet fuel economy, lower air pollution and "make new vehicles more affordable."
According to the Times, a recent draft plan showed that the new rule would allow for nearly a billion more tons of carbon dioxide released, as well as 80 billion more gallons of gasoline consumed.
An internal economic analysis found that while the new fuel economy standard would lower new car and truck prices, it would increase the amount consumers pay for gasoline and ultimately cost the US economy between $13 billion and $22 billion, the Times noted.
Citing two people briefed on the rule, the Post reported that the government's estimates found that more Americans will die as a result of the increased air pollution from the new standards compared to if the current standards were kept within a similar period.
The rule, expected to be implemented in late spring, is likely to draw legal challenges from several states, according to the Times.
Shortly after taking office, the Trump administration had moved to reexamine those tougher Obama-era standards and end California's authority to set tougher emissions standards than the federal standards for itself and 12 other states.
For decades, California has had a waiver under the Clean Air Act that allows it to set its own emissions standards due to the state's history of intense air pollution. President Donald Trump announced in September he was revoking California's waiver, prompting the Golden State to lead a coalition of Democratic-contolled states and cities in suing the administration.
Fearing that drawn out litigation would lead to regulatory uncertainty, leading automakers asked the Trump administration in June to abandon their plans to scrap the emissions standards and restart talks with California about a compromise.
By Veronica Stracqualursi
The Trump administration is planning to finalize a rule that will loosen tough fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, a move that will have large environmental consequences and weaken former President Barack Obama's efforts to combat climate change,The New York Times reported.
The finalized rule, prepared by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation, is expected to be unveiled Tuesday.
According to the Times, the new rule does away with the Obama-era standards from 2012 for automakers to produce vehicles with an average fuel economy to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 model year vehicles, lowering it down to 40 miles per gallon, according to the Times.
The Trump administration would mandate a 1.5% annual increase in fuel efficiency, compared to the 5% annual increase under Obama, the Times reported.
"This rule when finalized will benefit all Americans by improving the U.S. fleet's fuel economy, reducing air pollution, making new vehicles more affordable for all Americans and save lives," EPA spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer told The Washington Post, adding that she could not comment on specifics because it's still being reviewed.
On Twitter Monday, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler argued that the final rule will raise US fleet fuel economy, lower air pollution and "make new vehicles more affordable."
According to the Times, a recent draft plan showed that the new rule would allow for nearly a billion more tons of carbon dioxide released, as well as 80 billion more gallons of gasoline consumed.
An internal economic analysis found that while the new fuel economy standard would lower new car and truck prices, it would increase the amount consumers pay for gasoline and ultimately cost the US economy between $13 billion and $22 billion, the Times noted.
Citing two people briefed on the rule, the Post reported that the government's estimates found that more Americans will die as a result of the increased air pollution from the new standards compared to if the current standards were kept within a similar period.
The rule, expected to be implemented in late spring, is likely to draw legal challenges from several states, according to the Times.
Shortly after taking office, the Trump administration had moved to reexamine those tougher Obama-era standards and end California's authority to set tougher emissions standards than the federal standards for itself and 12 other states.
For decades, California has had a waiver under the Clean Air Act that allows it to set its own emissions standards due to the state's history of intense air pollution. President Donald Trump announced in September he was revoking California's waiver, prompting the Golden State to lead a coalition of Democratic-contolled states and cities in suing the administration.
Fearing that drawn out litigation would lead to regulatory uncertainty, leading automakers asked the Trump administration in June to abandon their plans to scrap the emissions standards and restart talks with California about a compromise.
It is amazing how many heads can fit up Orangutan's asshole....
Trump insists on congratulations while America braces for the worst
Analysis by Stephen Collinson
It is falling to President Donald Trump to lead America into its most tragic month in decades, as experts say the coronavirus pandemic could kill more citizens than the Vietnam and Korean wars combined.
But the President's bullish, self-congratulatory rhetoric -- a staple of a presidency that has divided the nation -- is still jarring with the desperate reality of a fast-worsening pandemic that is running out of control.
On the day that heralded another grim new record in reported deaths -- more than 500 -- and that the fatality toll was roughly on par with those killed on September 11, 2001, Trump opened his daily news conference with a stark message, even though he still struggles to summon the empathy appropriate for such a time of mourning.
Trump, who will be called upon to steady an anguished nation in the days to come, warned the country of a "vital 30 days" ahead, a day after extending social distancing guidelines until the end of April.
"Our future is in our own hands and the choices and sacrifices we make will determine the fate of this virus and really the fate of our victory," he said.
Historic test
No recent President has faced the kind of pervasive public health crisis that now confronts Trump. No administration's response would be completely surefooted. And Trump's optimism is important for a country that may be about to lose tens of thousands of citizens, according to forecasting models. His belated decision to listen to top public health officials represents progress and will save many lives.
The President's administration faces many crucial decisions in the coming days that will determine how grave the eventual death toll will be, and how quickly the economic shutdown that has pitched millions out of work can be lifted. He must put in place intricate plans to stem the full fury of Covid-19 and to eventually ease the nation out of its defensive crouch.
It's no exaggeration to say Trump faces the most critical month of his presidency yet -- and how he conducts himself will be crucial for the country and his own hopes of reelection. But there are signs that he does not fully understand the stakes nor is willing to relegate his own interests in favor of the common good.
Trump still appears to be marveling at the spread of the virus, which he says no one could have predicted. Health experts had anticipated its arrival in the US for months as he predicted a miracle would occur and it would just go away.
And on a day when so many Americans died, he boasted at one point that his hair blowing in the breeze in the White House Rose Garden was his own, marking an inappropriate tone for a harrowing national moment.
Trump blasted reporters for asking "snarky" questions when they use facts and his own words to point out shortcomings in the effort to combat the virus in the United States, which now has more confirmed infections than any other nation. His reaction did not dispel the impression that he is more interested in protecting his reputation than fixing mistakes that may worsen the pandemic.
Governors warn federal government is still falling short
There are clear signs that the federal government response -- for instance, with the approval of fast new viral testing kits and the swift construction of field hospitals -- is finally gearing up.
Yet Trump's belated mobilization of the federal government, which he touts in briefings every day -- after his weeks of downplaying the crisis -- appears likely to come too late for the peak period of infections, expected in the next few weeks.
He announced on Monday the dispatch of thousands of surgical masks and protective gear for health care workers. But front-line doctors and nurses still lack what they need.
Trump boasted that the United States had now conducted more coronavirus tests than any other nation -- more than a million. But health experts say the administration was unprepared to test sufficient people when it might have done more to stop the pandemic. And the US is still testing fewer people per capita than some other countries, such as South Korea.
Trump lauded Ford and GE, saying they would churn out 50,000 ventilators in 100 days. But governors in multiple states told the President on Monday that they lacked the machines and other supplies needed ahead of a surge on hospitals within days.
Trump painted the opposite picture, telling governors: "I haven't heard about testing being a problem."
In his news conference, he denied there had been any criticism of his leadership in his call with governors.
"I think for the most part, I think they were saying thank you for doing such a great job," the President said.
With Trump in the thick of his reelection race, his daily early evening briefings are increasingly fusing with his political strategy, and the crisis is already shaping the 2020 race.
On Sunday, he embraced warnings by senior health officials that 100,000 or more Americans could die from coronavirus if he failed to extend his self-distancing guidelines. Trump alone among senior officials had been itching to ease the measures.
There was a subtle yet significant shift in his rhetoric on Monday.
"By very vigorously following these guidelines, we could save more than 1 million American lives. Think of that: 1 million American lives," the President said.
The comment suggested that at the end of a national disaster that has been exacerbated by his leadership failings, he will bill himself as a victorious wartime President who rescued many Americans from death.
Split America
National Democrats -- who unlike governors do not have to work with the federal government each day -- appear to be laying the groundwork to block this strategy with their own new counter-messaging. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned Sunday on CNN: "As the President fiddles, people are dying."
Trump's entire presidency has been an exercise in whipping up his political base, and a new CNN/SSRS poll on the pandemic suggests his leadership in this crisis is following a familiar model.
Some 48% of Americans said the government has done a good job in preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus, while 47% say the government has done a poor job. Opinions are sharply split according to partisan identification -- a factor likely to hamper national unity at a vital moment.
Some 77% of Republicans say the federal government is doing a good job preventing the virus's spread, compared with 27% of Democrats.
Trump's news conferences remain a self-serving mix of the most positive developments in the coronavirus fight, saved up for campaign-style announcements. On Monday, Trump posed like a game show host's assistant as he lifted a new testing kit out of its box for the cameras -- and the President basked in testimonials to his leadership from Cabinet officials and invited corporate CEOs.
The reality of the coronavirus crisis appears far less upbeat on the front lines than it does from Trump's boisterous sessions in the White House Rose Garden, however.
Maryland's Larry Hogan, a Republican who's one of several governors who introduced tough stay-at-home orders on Monday, warned that the Washington metro area was likely to replicate the difficult scenes in New York soon.
"We're just two weeks behind New York, with ... higher numbers here than they were at two weeks ago," Hogan told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
Hogan warned that warnings by the federal government's top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci that 100,000 Americans could die in the pandemic were a best case scenario.
"Just to put that in perspective, that's more than the number of Americans that died in the Vietnam war and the Korean war added together. And we're not talking about over a number of years. We're talking about in a very short period of time," Hogan said.
Analysis by Stephen Collinson
It is falling to President Donald Trump to lead America into its most tragic month in decades, as experts say the coronavirus pandemic could kill more citizens than the Vietnam and Korean wars combined.
But the President's bullish, self-congratulatory rhetoric -- a staple of a presidency that has divided the nation -- is still jarring with the desperate reality of a fast-worsening pandemic that is running out of control.
On the day that heralded another grim new record in reported deaths -- more than 500 -- and that the fatality toll was roughly on par with those killed on September 11, 2001, Trump opened his daily news conference with a stark message, even though he still struggles to summon the empathy appropriate for such a time of mourning.
Trump, who will be called upon to steady an anguished nation in the days to come, warned the country of a "vital 30 days" ahead, a day after extending social distancing guidelines until the end of April.
"Our future is in our own hands and the choices and sacrifices we make will determine the fate of this virus and really the fate of our victory," he said.
Historic test
No recent President has faced the kind of pervasive public health crisis that now confronts Trump. No administration's response would be completely surefooted. And Trump's optimism is important for a country that may be about to lose tens of thousands of citizens, according to forecasting models. His belated decision to listen to top public health officials represents progress and will save many lives.
The President's administration faces many crucial decisions in the coming days that will determine how grave the eventual death toll will be, and how quickly the economic shutdown that has pitched millions out of work can be lifted. He must put in place intricate plans to stem the full fury of Covid-19 and to eventually ease the nation out of its defensive crouch.
It's no exaggeration to say Trump faces the most critical month of his presidency yet -- and how he conducts himself will be crucial for the country and his own hopes of reelection. But there are signs that he does not fully understand the stakes nor is willing to relegate his own interests in favor of the common good.
Trump still appears to be marveling at the spread of the virus, which he says no one could have predicted. Health experts had anticipated its arrival in the US for months as he predicted a miracle would occur and it would just go away.
And on a day when so many Americans died, he boasted at one point that his hair blowing in the breeze in the White House Rose Garden was his own, marking an inappropriate tone for a harrowing national moment.
Trump blasted reporters for asking "snarky" questions when they use facts and his own words to point out shortcomings in the effort to combat the virus in the United States, which now has more confirmed infections than any other nation. His reaction did not dispel the impression that he is more interested in protecting his reputation than fixing mistakes that may worsen the pandemic.
Governors warn federal government is still falling short
There are clear signs that the federal government response -- for instance, with the approval of fast new viral testing kits and the swift construction of field hospitals -- is finally gearing up.
Yet Trump's belated mobilization of the federal government, which he touts in briefings every day -- after his weeks of downplaying the crisis -- appears likely to come too late for the peak period of infections, expected in the next few weeks.
He announced on Monday the dispatch of thousands of surgical masks and protective gear for health care workers. But front-line doctors and nurses still lack what they need.
Trump boasted that the United States had now conducted more coronavirus tests than any other nation -- more than a million. But health experts say the administration was unprepared to test sufficient people when it might have done more to stop the pandemic. And the US is still testing fewer people per capita than some other countries, such as South Korea.
Trump lauded Ford and GE, saying they would churn out 50,000 ventilators in 100 days. But governors in multiple states told the President on Monday that they lacked the machines and other supplies needed ahead of a surge on hospitals within days.
Trump painted the opposite picture, telling governors: "I haven't heard about testing being a problem."
In his news conference, he denied there had been any criticism of his leadership in his call with governors.
"I think for the most part, I think they were saying thank you for doing such a great job," the President said.
With Trump in the thick of his reelection race, his daily early evening briefings are increasingly fusing with his political strategy, and the crisis is already shaping the 2020 race.
On Sunday, he embraced warnings by senior health officials that 100,000 or more Americans could die from coronavirus if he failed to extend his self-distancing guidelines. Trump alone among senior officials had been itching to ease the measures.
There was a subtle yet significant shift in his rhetoric on Monday.
"By very vigorously following these guidelines, we could save more than 1 million American lives. Think of that: 1 million American lives," the President said.
The comment suggested that at the end of a national disaster that has been exacerbated by his leadership failings, he will bill himself as a victorious wartime President who rescued many Americans from death.
Split America
National Democrats -- who unlike governors do not have to work with the federal government each day -- appear to be laying the groundwork to block this strategy with their own new counter-messaging. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned Sunday on CNN: "As the President fiddles, people are dying."
Trump's entire presidency has been an exercise in whipping up his political base, and a new CNN/SSRS poll on the pandemic suggests his leadership in this crisis is following a familiar model.
Some 48% of Americans said the government has done a good job in preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus, while 47% say the government has done a poor job. Opinions are sharply split according to partisan identification -- a factor likely to hamper national unity at a vital moment.
Some 77% of Republicans say the federal government is doing a good job preventing the virus's spread, compared with 27% of Democrats.
Trump's news conferences remain a self-serving mix of the most positive developments in the coronavirus fight, saved up for campaign-style announcements. On Monday, Trump posed like a game show host's assistant as he lifted a new testing kit out of its box for the cameras -- and the President basked in testimonials to his leadership from Cabinet officials and invited corporate CEOs.
The reality of the coronavirus crisis appears far less upbeat on the front lines than it does from Trump's boisterous sessions in the White House Rose Garden, however.
Maryland's Larry Hogan, a Republican who's one of several governors who introduced tough stay-at-home orders on Monday, warned that the Washington metro area was likely to replicate the difficult scenes in New York soon.
"We're just two weeks behind New York, with ... higher numbers here than they were at two weeks ago," Hogan told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
Hogan warned that warnings by the federal government's top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci that 100,000 Americans could die in the pandemic were a best case scenario.
"Just to put that in perspective, that's more than the number of Americans that died in the Vietnam war and the Korean war added together. And we're not talking about over a number of years. We're talking about in a very short period of time," Hogan said.
Dividing....
Coronavirus is dividing blue cities from their red states
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein
The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic is opening a new front in the long-running conflict between blue cities and red states.
Across a wide array of states with Republican governors, many of the largest cities and counties -- most of them led by Democrats -- are moving aggressively to limit economic and social activity. State officials, meanwhile, are refusing to impose the strictest statewide standards to fight the virus.
A growing chorus of big-city officials in red states like Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas and Missouri are now urging their governors to establish uniform statewide rules, arguing that refusing to do so undercuts their local initiatives by increasing the risk the disease will cluster in neighboring areas -- from which it can easily reinfect their populations.
"We need a statewide 'safer at home' order," says Clay Jenkins, the county judge -- in effect, the county supervisor -- in Texas' Dallas County. The refusal by Gov. Greg Abbott to issue such a directive, Jenkins told me, in an argument echoed by many other municipal officials in red states, "makes it more likely that we will run out of hospital beds, and our curve will be steeper, more people will get sick at once."
Likewise, Robyn Tannehill, the mayor of Oxford, Mississippi (home of the University of Mississippi), told me in an interview that the absence of a statewide rule was undercutting their local efforts to control social interaction.
"As we are a regional health care and shopping destination, we have people coming through from surrounding counties that are not [imposing] a stay at home order," she said. "When they come here, you don't know who you are passing in the Kroger or the Walmart. ... I think a statewide stay-at-home order is very necessary."
The Republican governors most resisting statewide action have almost all argued that smaller counties should not face the same restrictions as larger ones. "What may be right for places like the large urban areas may not be right at this particular point in time for the" smaller counties with fewer cases, Abbott said last week.
While echoing that logic, other GOP governors resisting calls for action from large cities have also cited more ideological arguments. Missisippi Gov. Tate Reeves last week painted extensive shut-down orders as an expression of overly intrusive government. "In times such as these, you always have experts who believe they know best for everybody," he said. "You have some folks who think that government ought to take over everything in times of crisis — that they, as government officials, know better than individual citizens."
Similarly, Missouri's GOP governor, Mike Parson, argued that rather than government action "it is going to be personal responsibility" that wins the struggle against the virus.
While some Republican governors elsewhere have imposed strict uniform measures, the clash is dividing these states along familiar lines. In almost every state now, including pillars of the Republican coalition such as Texas and Georgia, Democrats have established a dominant position in the largest metropolitan areas. Simultaneously, both in the statewide contests and legislative elections, Republicans have grown increasingly reliant on support from outer suburbs, as well as small town and rural communities.
As the two parties' geographic bases of support have separated so profoundly, conflicts have grown more common in states where the big cities now tilt toward Democrats but the Republican dominance in small towns and rural communities (combined with continued competitiveness in suburban areas) still gives them the overall edge. The coronavirus is now pushing at that jagged divide, especially because it is now concentrated primarily in the largest population centers.
"It's just another manifestation of this very terrific polarization, the metros versus the nonmetro areas," says Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist. "Underlying it is the enormous demographic and economic divisions" between them.
Rural areas are less worried
Though concern is rising about the outbreak in all areas of the country, the share of rural residents who say they are "very worried" about contracting the disease still lagged well behind the number in urban and suburban areas in an ABC/Washington Post Poll released last week.
Across many states with Republican governors, these diverging perspectives have contributed to sharp splits between the states' policies and those adopted by the largest population centers.
In recent days, cities including Miami, Birmingham, Nashville, Atlanta, Jackson (Mississippi), Houston, Dallas, Austin, St. Louis, Phoenix and Tucson have adopted complete stay-at-home orders or other tight restrictions on movement and economic activity. But in each case, their state governments -- Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Missouri and Arizona -- have resisted comparable statewide limits.
That puts these Republican governors in contrast not only with the many Democratic governors who have issued sweeping statewide restrictions, but the few GOP governors -- including in Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia -- who have done so as well.
In a day of fast-moving developments some of these gaps narrowed on Monday, though they did not disappear. In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey issued a statewide stay-at-home order that contained significant exemptions, including for golf courses and beauty parlors. In Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee issued a statewide stay-at-home advisory, though not a mandatory order. And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a stay-at-home order for just four populous counties in South Florida.
As the coronavirus caseload rises in states across the country, the lack of statewide action is drawing more alarms from mayors and other municipal leaders, including some elected Republicans, in the red states' biggest metropolitan areas.
Last week, for instance, the mayors of Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington (the latter two Republicans), joined by the leaders of several local hospital systems, wrote Abbott to urge him to impose statewide restrictions. "[We] believe a statewide approach to limiting non-essential business or commerce -- rather than allowing a patchwork of regulations in neighboring cities and counties -- is imperative to slowing the spread of COVID-19, which does not stop at county lines or city limits," they wrote.
Likewise, a coalition of mayors from central Tennessee last week wrote Lee to urge statewide restrictions, as local medical leaders have proposed. "We feel strongly that the quickest path to recovery is a uniform response to this challenge," wrote the mayors group in a letter signed by Ken Moore, the mayor of Franklin, a fast-growing Nashville suburb.
In Arizona, Ducey acted only after pointed criticism from the Democratic mayors of Phoenix and Tucson and a letter earlier in the day urging a statewide shutdown from a group of nine mayors. Shortly after Ducey issued his order on Monday afternoon, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego wrote on Twitter: "This order is insufficient if he does not narrow his list of 'essential' services. Essential services during #COVID19 are not golf and beauty salons. They are first responders, grocers, pharmacists, and few others."
A patchwork of rules
Generally, the red state mayors have said they understand that rural parts of their state may not require exactly the same restrictions as larger population centers. In Mississippi, Tannehill, for instance, says very small communities without their own grocery stores might need to allow some restaurants to stay open to serve a few small groups at a time.
In an interview last weekend, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who is himself recovering from a coronavirus infection, said he was not now worried about controlling travel to his area from distant rural parts of the state where there is little infection. "Our bigger issue is getting people that are traveling from New York or traveling from abroad," Suarez told me. "I'm not really worrying about somebody traveling from Ocala," a city in Central Florida.
But Suarez, one of the few Republican mayors in the nation's largest cities, said he still preferred that DeSantis, a fellow Republican, issue a statewide stay-at-home rule because that would make it easier for him to coordinate policies with his own county of Miami-Dade and neighboring South Florida counties such as Broward. "Obviously a statewide standard would make it easier because there doesn't have to be any debate or issue," he said this weekend. "I feel like I've been pulling the county to come along and so that's been the frustration for me."
On Monday morning, DeSantis, after resisting a statewide shutdown for days, shifted direction and took a middle course: He agreed to impose a common "safer at home" order on four southeast counties -- Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe.
Jenkins, the Dallas County executive, and a Democrat, likewise said statewide action would provide more assurance that all of his neighboring counties in North Texas follow the same approach. "It requires hours of my day to be spent lobbying the various jurisdictions that have now enacted a Dallas County safer at home model," he says.
The difficulty of holding to a common front across north Texas without a statewide order will increase, Jenkins says, if President Donald Trump, in fact, calls for reopening more economic activity sooner than public health experts prefer. (Trump, after last week urging an early resumption of business, pivoted on Sunday to acknowledge social distancing measures would need to remain in place through April.)
"All of my compatriots in every other county are Republicans, who are elected largely in the Republican primary by who can get to the right and hug Trump more than the other guy," Jenkins says. As a result, he says, if Trump calls for reopening, "it puts tremendous pressure on them that they will be harming their constituents, that it's a hoax, it's not that serious, that they need to put the desire of the President over the strong guidance of the medical community. So it's absolutely harmful."
Erin Zwiener, a Texas Democratic state representative, represents fast-growing suburbs south of Austin. She says that even apart from the President's comments, the governor's refusal to act makes it more difficult to overcome resistance to stay-at-home orders from powerful local business interests.
"It means that the local leaders have a harder time building the argument," she said. "If the governor doesn't think it's important enough to act, why does the county have to act?" The result has been "just a patchwork" of different rules even "where you have these communities going right into each other. The lines are pretty arbitrary and the virus doesn't respect them."
Reversing an argument
In resisting statewide action, Republican governors such as Abbott in Texas, DeSantis in Florida, Brian Kemp in Georgia and Parson in Missouri have stressed above all the need for local flexibility in responding to the crisis. Rather than impose common limits across their own states, DeSantis and Abbott have imposed quarantines on people arriving from other states, particularly the New York region.
Ironically, stressing local flexibility is the opposite of the argument that GOP governors and legislatures have made over the past decade as they have passed an escalating series of laws to preempt or overturn liberal municipal ordinances on an array of subjects.
Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University Law School who studies state preemption efforts, says he "nearly fell out of his chair" when he heard Abbott call for local control in responding to the coronavirus because Texas has been among the most aggressive Republican-leaning states in preempting laws from Democratic-leaning cities over the past decade.
In those red states, Republican legislators have typically argued for invalidating local ordinances on the grounds that "there needs to be uniform statewide rules," Briffault says. "That seems inconsistent with the [current] position that if you think it's OK for your county you go ahead, but we are not going to deal with the rest of the state. It is certainly the opposite argument from the one they are normally making."
The tension between Republican-run state governments and Democratic-leaning city governments has notably intensified over the past decade. The most famous of these confrontations came in 2016, when North Carolina's GOP-controlled Legislature and then-Republican governor collaborated on the so-called "bathroom bill" that overturned a city of Charlotte ordinance intended to ensure equal rights for transgender individuals. But that conflict was only one drop in a torrent of state efforts to overturn city and county rules through recent years.
As Briffault documented in a 2018 law review article, states have acted to overturn a wide array of city policies, with the most common collisions occurring around municipal initiatives to raise the minimum wage, establish paid sick leave or family leave for workers, regulate gun sales and ownership, bar local rent control ordinances, establish environmental rules such as bans on plastic bags, or limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The "preponderance of ... preemptive actions and proposals have been advanced by Republican-dominated state governments, embrace conservative economic and social causes, and respond to -- and are designed to block -- relatively progressive regulatory actions adopted by activist cities and counties," Briffault wrote in his law review article.
The current struggle over responding to the coronavirus, in one respect, inverts this pattern of conflict: In this case, it's the blue cities and counties pleading for a statewide standard and the red governors touting regional variation. But in the larger sense, the pointed collision over enforcing social distancing extends the underlying dynamic now driving politics in so many GOP-leaning states: an intensifying struggle for control of each state's direction between major metropolitan areas that are growing more Democratic and a tenuous Republican majority that revolves around the outer suburbs and small towns beyond them.
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein
The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic is opening a new front in the long-running conflict between blue cities and red states.
Across a wide array of states with Republican governors, many of the largest cities and counties -- most of them led by Democrats -- are moving aggressively to limit economic and social activity. State officials, meanwhile, are refusing to impose the strictest statewide standards to fight the virus.
A growing chorus of big-city officials in red states like Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas and Missouri are now urging their governors to establish uniform statewide rules, arguing that refusing to do so undercuts their local initiatives by increasing the risk the disease will cluster in neighboring areas -- from which it can easily reinfect their populations.
"We need a statewide 'safer at home' order," says Clay Jenkins, the county judge -- in effect, the county supervisor -- in Texas' Dallas County. The refusal by Gov. Greg Abbott to issue such a directive, Jenkins told me, in an argument echoed by many other municipal officials in red states, "makes it more likely that we will run out of hospital beds, and our curve will be steeper, more people will get sick at once."
Likewise, Robyn Tannehill, the mayor of Oxford, Mississippi (home of the University of Mississippi), told me in an interview that the absence of a statewide rule was undercutting their local efforts to control social interaction.
"As we are a regional health care and shopping destination, we have people coming through from surrounding counties that are not [imposing] a stay at home order," she said. "When they come here, you don't know who you are passing in the Kroger or the Walmart. ... I think a statewide stay-at-home order is very necessary."
The Republican governors most resisting statewide action have almost all argued that smaller counties should not face the same restrictions as larger ones. "What may be right for places like the large urban areas may not be right at this particular point in time for the" smaller counties with fewer cases, Abbott said last week.
While echoing that logic, other GOP governors resisting calls for action from large cities have also cited more ideological arguments. Missisippi Gov. Tate Reeves last week painted extensive shut-down orders as an expression of overly intrusive government. "In times such as these, you always have experts who believe they know best for everybody," he said. "You have some folks who think that government ought to take over everything in times of crisis — that they, as government officials, know better than individual citizens."
Similarly, Missouri's GOP governor, Mike Parson, argued that rather than government action "it is going to be personal responsibility" that wins the struggle against the virus.
While some Republican governors elsewhere have imposed strict uniform measures, the clash is dividing these states along familiar lines. In almost every state now, including pillars of the Republican coalition such as Texas and Georgia, Democrats have established a dominant position in the largest metropolitan areas. Simultaneously, both in the statewide contests and legislative elections, Republicans have grown increasingly reliant on support from outer suburbs, as well as small town and rural communities.
As the two parties' geographic bases of support have separated so profoundly, conflicts have grown more common in states where the big cities now tilt toward Democrats but the Republican dominance in small towns and rural communities (combined with continued competitiveness in suburban areas) still gives them the overall edge. The coronavirus is now pushing at that jagged divide, especially because it is now concentrated primarily in the largest population centers.
"It's just another manifestation of this very terrific polarization, the metros versus the nonmetro areas," says Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist. "Underlying it is the enormous demographic and economic divisions" between them.
Rural areas are less worried
Though concern is rising about the outbreak in all areas of the country, the share of rural residents who say they are "very worried" about contracting the disease still lagged well behind the number in urban and suburban areas in an ABC/Washington Post Poll released last week.
Across many states with Republican governors, these diverging perspectives have contributed to sharp splits between the states' policies and those adopted by the largest population centers.
In recent days, cities including Miami, Birmingham, Nashville, Atlanta, Jackson (Mississippi), Houston, Dallas, Austin, St. Louis, Phoenix and Tucson have adopted complete stay-at-home orders or other tight restrictions on movement and economic activity. But in each case, their state governments -- Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Missouri and Arizona -- have resisted comparable statewide limits.
That puts these Republican governors in contrast not only with the many Democratic governors who have issued sweeping statewide restrictions, but the few GOP governors -- including in Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia -- who have done so as well.
In a day of fast-moving developments some of these gaps narrowed on Monday, though they did not disappear. In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey issued a statewide stay-at-home order that contained significant exemptions, including for golf courses and beauty parlors. In Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee issued a statewide stay-at-home advisory, though not a mandatory order. And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a stay-at-home order for just four populous counties in South Florida.
As the coronavirus caseload rises in states across the country, the lack of statewide action is drawing more alarms from mayors and other municipal leaders, including some elected Republicans, in the red states' biggest metropolitan areas.
Last week, for instance, the mayors of Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington (the latter two Republicans), joined by the leaders of several local hospital systems, wrote Abbott to urge him to impose statewide restrictions. "[We] believe a statewide approach to limiting non-essential business or commerce -- rather than allowing a patchwork of regulations in neighboring cities and counties -- is imperative to slowing the spread of COVID-19, which does not stop at county lines or city limits," they wrote.
Likewise, a coalition of mayors from central Tennessee last week wrote Lee to urge statewide restrictions, as local medical leaders have proposed. "We feel strongly that the quickest path to recovery is a uniform response to this challenge," wrote the mayors group in a letter signed by Ken Moore, the mayor of Franklin, a fast-growing Nashville suburb.
In Arizona, Ducey acted only after pointed criticism from the Democratic mayors of Phoenix and Tucson and a letter earlier in the day urging a statewide shutdown from a group of nine mayors. Shortly after Ducey issued his order on Monday afternoon, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego wrote on Twitter: "This order is insufficient if he does not narrow his list of 'essential' services. Essential services during #COVID19 are not golf and beauty salons. They are first responders, grocers, pharmacists, and few others."
A patchwork of rules
Generally, the red state mayors have said they understand that rural parts of their state may not require exactly the same restrictions as larger population centers. In Mississippi, Tannehill, for instance, says very small communities without their own grocery stores might need to allow some restaurants to stay open to serve a few small groups at a time.
In an interview last weekend, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who is himself recovering from a coronavirus infection, said he was not now worried about controlling travel to his area from distant rural parts of the state where there is little infection. "Our bigger issue is getting people that are traveling from New York or traveling from abroad," Suarez told me. "I'm not really worrying about somebody traveling from Ocala," a city in Central Florida.
But Suarez, one of the few Republican mayors in the nation's largest cities, said he still preferred that DeSantis, a fellow Republican, issue a statewide stay-at-home rule because that would make it easier for him to coordinate policies with his own county of Miami-Dade and neighboring South Florida counties such as Broward. "Obviously a statewide standard would make it easier because there doesn't have to be any debate or issue," he said this weekend. "I feel like I've been pulling the county to come along and so that's been the frustration for me."
On Monday morning, DeSantis, after resisting a statewide shutdown for days, shifted direction and took a middle course: He agreed to impose a common "safer at home" order on four southeast counties -- Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe.
Jenkins, the Dallas County executive, and a Democrat, likewise said statewide action would provide more assurance that all of his neighboring counties in North Texas follow the same approach. "It requires hours of my day to be spent lobbying the various jurisdictions that have now enacted a Dallas County safer at home model," he says.
The difficulty of holding to a common front across north Texas without a statewide order will increase, Jenkins says, if President Donald Trump, in fact, calls for reopening more economic activity sooner than public health experts prefer. (Trump, after last week urging an early resumption of business, pivoted on Sunday to acknowledge social distancing measures would need to remain in place through April.)
"All of my compatriots in every other county are Republicans, who are elected largely in the Republican primary by who can get to the right and hug Trump more than the other guy," Jenkins says. As a result, he says, if Trump calls for reopening, "it puts tremendous pressure on them that they will be harming their constituents, that it's a hoax, it's not that serious, that they need to put the desire of the President over the strong guidance of the medical community. So it's absolutely harmful."
Erin Zwiener, a Texas Democratic state representative, represents fast-growing suburbs south of Austin. She says that even apart from the President's comments, the governor's refusal to act makes it more difficult to overcome resistance to stay-at-home orders from powerful local business interests.
"It means that the local leaders have a harder time building the argument," she said. "If the governor doesn't think it's important enough to act, why does the county have to act?" The result has been "just a patchwork" of different rules even "where you have these communities going right into each other. The lines are pretty arbitrary and the virus doesn't respect them."
Reversing an argument
In resisting statewide action, Republican governors such as Abbott in Texas, DeSantis in Florida, Brian Kemp in Georgia and Parson in Missouri have stressed above all the need for local flexibility in responding to the crisis. Rather than impose common limits across their own states, DeSantis and Abbott have imposed quarantines on people arriving from other states, particularly the New York region.
Ironically, stressing local flexibility is the opposite of the argument that GOP governors and legislatures have made over the past decade as they have passed an escalating series of laws to preempt or overturn liberal municipal ordinances on an array of subjects.
Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University Law School who studies state preemption efforts, says he "nearly fell out of his chair" when he heard Abbott call for local control in responding to the coronavirus because Texas has been among the most aggressive Republican-leaning states in preempting laws from Democratic-leaning cities over the past decade.
In those red states, Republican legislators have typically argued for invalidating local ordinances on the grounds that "there needs to be uniform statewide rules," Briffault says. "That seems inconsistent with the [current] position that if you think it's OK for your county you go ahead, but we are not going to deal with the rest of the state. It is certainly the opposite argument from the one they are normally making."
The tension between Republican-run state governments and Democratic-leaning city governments has notably intensified over the past decade. The most famous of these confrontations came in 2016, when North Carolina's GOP-controlled Legislature and then-Republican governor collaborated on the so-called "bathroom bill" that overturned a city of Charlotte ordinance intended to ensure equal rights for transgender individuals. But that conflict was only one drop in a torrent of state efforts to overturn city and county rules through recent years.
As Briffault documented in a 2018 law review article, states have acted to overturn a wide array of city policies, with the most common collisions occurring around municipal initiatives to raise the minimum wage, establish paid sick leave or family leave for workers, regulate gun sales and ownership, bar local rent control ordinances, establish environmental rules such as bans on plastic bags, or limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The "preponderance of ... preemptive actions and proposals have been advanced by Republican-dominated state governments, embrace conservative economic and social causes, and respond to -- and are designed to block -- relatively progressive regulatory actions adopted by activist cities and counties," Briffault wrote in his law review article.
The current struggle over responding to the coronavirus, in one respect, inverts this pattern of conflict: In this case, it's the blue cities and counties pleading for a statewide standard and the red governors touting regional variation. But in the larger sense, the pointed collision over enforcing social distancing extends the underlying dynamic now driving politics in so many GOP-leaning states: an intensifying struggle for control of each state's direction between major metropolitan areas that are growing more Democratic and a tenuous Republican majority that revolves around the outer suburbs and small towns beyond them.
Touts unproven drugs
Fact check: Trump again touts unproven drugs for coronavirus, and other misleading statements from Monday's briefing
By Daniel Dale and Marshall Cohen
President Donald Trump made another series of inaccurate and misleading statements during his coronavirus press briefing Monday afternoon from the White House Rose Garden.
Trump inaccurately characterized previous statements he has made downplaying the severity of the crisis. He again talked up medications that have not been clinically proven safe or effective for use against the coronavirus. Immediately after boasting about having superior knowledge of South Korea, he misstated the population of Seoul. And in touting progress on coronavirus testing, he omitted important context.
Here's a fact check of his statements from the briefing.
South Korea and coronavirus testing
Trump touted the number of coronavirus tests the US has conducted, saying "over 1 million Americans have now been tested, more than any other country by far." Later in the briefing, when asked when the US per capita number will be "on par" with the per capita number in other countries, Trump said, "It's very much on par." (He later added, "I didn't talk about per capita.")
Facts First: Trump was omitting important context. The US has conducted far fewer tests per capita than some other countries, such as South Korea and Italy, though it has been closing the gap in recent days.
Trump would be correct about being "on par" with South Korea if he was talking specifically about recent days rather than the whole pandemic; each day since last Tuesday, the US has conducted more tests per capita than South Korea. But South Korea was much quicker to ramp up testing in the first place, slowing the spread of the virus there.
South Korea's number of new cases reported daily has sharply declined -- to 78 on Monday , from a peak of 909 new cases on February 29.The US, with a population of about 330 million people, had more than 160,000 known coronavirus cases as of Monday. South Korea, with a population of about 52 million people, had about 10,000 cases.
Some state governors continue to say that they have not been given access to all the test kits they need; CBS and the New York Times reported that Trump responded to such an assertion from Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock on a Monday phone call between the President and governors, by claiming, "I haven't heard about testing in weeks."
Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, was asked on Fox News on Monday night how long it will take until the average person who feels sick with symptoms such as a dry cough, body aches and fatigue -- which can be indicative of the coronavirus -- can get tested. He responded, "It's not going to be this week or next week."
Anti-malaria drugs for coronavirus
Trump and members of his administration on Monday again mentioned two drugs that could potentially help combat the coronavirus.
Over the weekend, large drugmakers announced that they were providing millions of doses of the drugs to the federal government, and the Food and Drug Administration issued emergency approval for the Trump administration's plan to send the drugs to hospitals across the country.
The medicines, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are anti-malaria drugs that have been used off-label at hospitals to treat coronavirus patients.
Facts First: While public health officials are hopeful that the drugs will work against coronavirus, Trump's tone hasn't matched the science, which is extremely limited and anecdotal at this early stage.
Trump's over-the-top optimism has been tamped down by the medical professionals on the White House task force handling the pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top public health official on infectious diseases, said the proof is only anecdotal. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was similarly careful with his language on Monday, and referred to the drugs as "potential Covid-19 treatments."
Trump has repeatedly touted the drugs in recent weeks, even though there haven't been any clinical trials in humans proving that they work for coronavirus. Earlier this month, Trump tweeted that the drugs "have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine."
CNN Health's Arman Azad wrote about this on Sunday. He said: "Thus far, there is little scientific evidence that chloroquine, or its closely-related analogue hydroxychloroquine, are effective in treating Covid-19. ... While there's limited evidence on the efficacy of chloroquine, or hydroxychloroquine, the FDA said the drugs' benefits outweighed their risk."
Trump's past comments about the virus
CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta asked Trump what he has to say to Americans who are upset with him for having repeatedly downplayed the virus in February and early March. Acosta read out a series of Trump quotes, including a February 23 remark in which Trump claimed the virus was "very much under control in this country" and a March 10 remark in which Trump said, "It will go away. Just stay calm, it will go away."
Trump responded, "If you look at those individual statements, they're all true: stay calm, it will go away. You know it is going away."
Facts First: Trump's previous comments were not "all true." The virus was clearly not "under control" in February -- nor was it under control in mid-March, when Trump made another version of the claim, and nor is it under control today.
And Trump was misleading when he said on March 10 that the virus "will go away." While the virus may eventually be eliminated in the United States, Trump did not mention that thousands of Americans could die before this happened, nor that the country could have to implement drastic measures to try to slow its spread.
Experts also warn that there could be a second wave of the virus in the US even after the immediate crisis is over.
"#COVID19 won't go away. It'll infect the southern hemisphere as they winter and will want to come back to U.S. in fall," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who formerly served as Trump's Food and Drug Administration commissioner, wrote on Twitter after Trump's comment on Monday. "But we'll have a massive surveillance system by then, and I believe more than one drug to both prevent and treat infection. Our tool box will be very different."
Seoul's population
Talking about why South Korea has conducted more coronavirus tests per capita than the US, Trump noted that South Korea is more densely populated. He said, "I know South Korea better than anybody. It's a very tight. Do you know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is? Thirty-eight million people. That's bigger than anything we have."
Facts First: Trump was wrong about Seoul's population. The population of the city itself was about 10 million in 2019. The Seoul metropolitan region, known as the Seoul Capital Area, had a population of about 26 million.
Trump has, over the last two years, increased Seoul's supposed population. In 2018, he said it was 28 million, then that it was 30 million. In early 2019, he said it was "30-some-odd million."
By Daniel Dale and Marshall Cohen
President Donald Trump made another series of inaccurate and misleading statements during his coronavirus press briefing Monday afternoon from the White House Rose Garden.
Trump inaccurately characterized previous statements he has made downplaying the severity of the crisis. He again talked up medications that have not been clinically proven safe or effective for use against the coronavirus. Immediately after boasting about having superior knowledge of South Korea, he misstated the population of Seoul. And in touting progress on coronavirus testing, he omitted important context.
Here's a fact check of his statements from the briefing.
South Korea and coronavirus testing
Trump touted the number of coronavirus tests the US has conducted, saying "over 1 million Americans have now been tested, more than any other country by far." Later in the briefing, when asked when the US per capita number will be "on par" with the per capita number in other countries, Trump said, "It's very much on par." (He later added, "I didn't talk about per capita.")
Facts First: Trump was omitting important context. The US has conducted far fewer tests per capita than some other countries, such as South Korea and Italy, though it has been closing the gap in recent days.
Trump would be correct about being "on par" with South Korea if he was talking specifically about recent days rather than the whole pandemic; each day since last Tuesday, the US has conducted more tests per capita than South Korea. But South Korea was much quicker to ramp up testing in the first place, slowing the spread of the virus there.
South Korea's number of new cases reported daily has sharply declined -- to 78 on Monday , from a peak of 909 new cases on February 29.The US, with a population of about 330 million people, had more than 160,000 known coronavirus cases as of Monday. South Korea, with a population of about 52 million people, had about 10,000 cases.
Some state governors continue to say that they have not been given access to all the test kits they need; CBS and the New York Times reported that Trump responded to such an assertion from Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock on a Monday phone call between the President and governors, by claiming, "I haven't heard about testing in weeks."
Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, was asked on Fox News on Monday night how long it will take until the average person who feels sick with symptoms such as a dry cough, body aches and fatigue -- which can be indicative of the coronavirus -- can get tested. He responded, "It's not going to be this week or next week."
Anti-malaria drugs for coronavirus
Trump and members of his administration on Monday again mentioned two drugs that could potentially help combat the coronavirus.
Over the weekend, large drugmakers announced that they were providing millions of doses of the drugs to the federal government, and the Food and Drug Administration issued emergency approval for the Trump administration's plan to send the drugs to hospitals across the country.
The medicines, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are anti-malaria drugs that have been used off-label at hospitals to treat coronavirus patients.
Facts First: While public health officials are hopeful that the drugs will work against coronavirus, Trump's tone hasn't matched the science, which is extremely limited and anecdotal at this early stage.
Trump's over-the-top optimism has been tamped down by the medical professionals on the White House task force handling the pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top public health official on infectious diseases, said the proof is only anecdotal. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was similarly careful with his language on Monday, and referred to the drugs as "potential Covid-19 treatments."
Trump has repeatedly touted the drugs in recent weeks, even though there haven't been any clinical trials in humans proving that they work for coronavirus. Earlier this month, Trump tweeted that the drugs "have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine."
CNN Health's Arman Azad wrote about this on Sunday. He said: "Thus far, there is little scientific evidence that chloroquine, or its closely-related analogue hydroxychloroquine, are effective in treating Covid-19. ... While there's limited evidence on the efficacy of chloroquine, or hydroxychloroquine, the FDA said the drugs' benefits outweighed their risk."
Trump's past comments about the virus
CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta asked Trump what he has to say to Americans who are upset with him for having repeatedly downplayed the virus in February and early March. Acosta read out a series of Trump quotes, including a February 23 remark in which Trump claimed the virus was "very much under control in this country" and a March 10 remark in which Trump said, "It will go away. Just stay calm, it will go away."
Trump responded, "If you look at those individual statements, they're all true: stay calm, it will go away. You know it is going away."
Facts First: Trump's previous comments were not "all true." The virus was clearly not "under control" in February -- nor was it under control in mid-March, when Trump made another version of the claim, and nor is it under control today.
And Trump was misleading when he said on March 10 that the virus "will go away." While the virus may eventually be eliminated in the United States, Trump did not mention that thousands of Americans could die before this happened, nor that the country could have to implement drastic measures to try to slow its spread.
Experts also warn that there could be a second wave of the virus in the US even after the immediate crisis is over.
"#COVID19 won't go away. It'll infect the southern hemisphere as they winter and will want to come back to U.S. in fall," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who formerly served as Trump's Food and Drug Administration commissioner, wrote on Twitter after Trump's comment on Monday. "But we'll have a massive surveillance system by then, and I believe more than one drug to both prevent and treat infection. Our tool box will be very different."
Seoul's population
Talking about why South Korea has conducted more coronavirus tests per capita than the US, Trump noted that South Korea is more densely populated. He said, "I know South Korea better than anybody. It's a very tight. Do you know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is? Thirty-eight million people. That's bigger than anything we have."
Facts First: Trump was wrong about Seoul's population. The population of the city itself was about 10 million in 2019. The Seoul metropolitan region, known as the Seoul Capital Area, had a population of about 26 million.
Trump has, over the last two years, increased Seoul's supposed population. In 2018, he said it was 28 million, then that it was 30 million. In early 2019, he said it was "30-some-odd million."
Republican Losses
President Trump Argues That More Voting Means More Republican Losses
AJ VICENS
President Trump just flat-out admitted that Republicans will lose elections if more people vote.
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said on Monday morning, discussing voting provisions pushed by Democrats in a coronavirus response package. “They had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
As states around the country postpone elections, congressional Democrats have pushed for funding and legal authority to institute vote by mail and other procedures to ensure broad and safe democratic participation in a pandemic. While Republicans have complained about how the crisis is being used to “federalize elections,” the president’s comments suggest those protests are actually motivated by GOP lawmakers’ fear of losing their jobs.
AJ VICENS
President Trump just flat-out admitted that Republicans will lose elections if more people vote.
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said on Monday morning, discussing voting provisions pushed by Democrats in a coronavirus response package. “They had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
As states around the country postpone elections, congressional Democrats have pushed for funding and legal authority to institute vote by mail and other procedures to ensure broad and safe democratic participation in a pandemic. While Republicans have complained about how the crisis is being used to “federalize elections,” the president’s comments suggest those protests are actually motivated by GOP lawmakers’ fear of losing their jobs.
Grab Power
Trump Ally in Europe Uses COVID-19 Fears to Grab Power
Hungary’s nationalist prime minister just sidelined his own parliament.
RUSS CHOMA
On Monday, Hungary’s parliament awarded its nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, the power to rule by decree until his government decides the coronavirus crisis has passed. The move effectively eliminates any democratic opposition, and critics have already assailed it as an authoritarian power grab. Orban doesn’t have many friends in Europe—he is staunchly anti–European Union and has condemned the concept of open European borders, claiming “mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life, but a lower one”—but he has found one in Donald Trump.
Trump met with Orban last spring, over the objections of his then–national security adviser, John Bolton. He praised Orban and drew comparisons between himself and the Hungarian.
“You’re respected all over Europe. Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK,” Trump told his guest. “You’ve done a good job and you’ve kept your country safe.”
At the time, a group of US Congress members objected to the meeting, expressing “deep concern about Orbán’s crackdown on democracy, increased Russian and Chinese influence, and use of anti-Semitic and xenophobic language.”
Orban, who has cultivated close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, is known as one of Europe’s fiercest critics of Ukraine, which borders Hungary to the east. According to testimony last fall during the buildup to the impeachment trial, Trump aides were concerned about Orban trying to influence the president against Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Several witnesses testified that they believed Orban was responsible for Trump’s belief that Ukraine was corrupt and set against him.
The new law gives Orban wide-ranging emergency powers and the ability to prosecute people who he says are spreading misinformation about the pandemic. It also suspends elections and referendums. There is no expiration date on the emergency powers.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a Hungary expert at Princeton University, told NPR that Orban is leading the way among likeminded world leaders in using the virus to push for more power:
“Bolsanaro in Brazil, Kaczynski in Poland…Trump in the United States, all of them have thought about using emergency powers. But no one has yet gone as far as Orban to really shut down democracy as anybody knew it in Hungary before.”
Hungary’s nationalist prime minister just sidelined his own parliament.
RUSS CHOMA
On Monday, Hungary’s parliament awarded its nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, the power to rule by decree until his government decides the coronavirus crisis has passed. The move effectively eliminates any democratic opposition, and critics have already assailed it as an authoritarian power grab. Orban doesn’t have many friends in Europe—he is staunchly anti–European Union and has condemned the concept of open European borders, claiming “mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life, but a lower one”—but he has found one in Donald Trump.
Trump met with Orban last spring, over the objections of his then–national security adviser, John Bolton. He praised Orban and drew comparisons between himself and the Hungarian.
“You’re respected all over Europe. Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK,” Trump told his guest. “You’ve done a good job and you’ve kept your country safe.”
At the time, a group of US Congress members objected to the meeting, expressing “deep concern about Orbán’s crackdown on democracy, increased Russian and Chinese influence, and use of anti-Semitic and xenophobic language.”
Orban, who has cultivated close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, is known as one of Europe’s fiercest critics of Ukraine, which borders Hungary to the east. According to testimony last fall during the buildup to the impeachment trial, Trump aides were concerned about Orban trying to influence the president against Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Several witnesses testified that they believed Orban was responsible for Trump’s belief that Ukraine was corrupt and set against him.
The new law gives Orban wide-ranging emergency powers and the ability to prosecute people who he says are spreading misinformation about the pandemic. It also suspends elections and referendums. There is no expiration date on the emergency powers.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a Hungary expert at Princeton University, told NPR that Orban is leading the way among likeminded world leaders in using the virus to push for more power:
“Bolsanaro in Brazil, Kaczynski in Poland…Trump in the United States, all of them have thought about using emergency powers. But no one has yet gone as far as Orban to really shut down democracy as anybody knew it in Hungary before.”
Rolling Back Environmental Rules
As the Nation Worries About Coronavirus, the Trump Administration is Rolling Back Environmental Rules
Some of the changes could make us more vulnerable to COVID-19.
REBECCA LEBER
As the coronavirus spreads and grabs headlines, the federal government has been quietly removing the rules that protect people and the environment from pollution.
On Tuesday, the rule on the chopping block is a 2012 standard targeting car pollution. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler is expected to announce a weaker replacement for the Obama administration’s standards. EPA is already locked in a legal bottle with California over whether the agency can revoke the state’s longstanding waiver to pursue tougher standards.
While the old clean car standards required an average 5 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions annually from cars and light truck fleets, the Trump administration’s version, called the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient Vehicles, requires just 1.5 percent. It would keep the US lagging behind most of the world in its fuel efficiency requirements. Most of the domestic auto industry isn’t even on board with the Trump administration’s rule, saying it would cause more instability and would even cost the economy 60,000 jobs.
Those few percentage points might not sound like a major change, but the difference means more pollution clogging people’s lungs—a public health crisis that also makes us more vulnerable to COVID-19. Even without the threat of a respiratory illness, the reversal means a total 18,500 premature deaths, 250,000 more asthma attacks, 350,000 other respiratory problems, and a total $190 billion health costs between now and 2050, according to an Environmental Defense Fund analysis.
By the Trump administration’s own count, the rule change would cause 299 premature deaths annually by 2050. Then there are the climate costs: The transportation sector, already the United States’ biggest source of carbon pollution, would add the equivalent of 68 additional coal plants running at full blast for five years.
That’s not all that the environmental agencies have been up to the past few weeks. While announcing last week it was suspending much of the agency’s enforcement, the EPA moved forward earlier in March with its controversial rule limiting what science the agency is allowed to consider in its daily work.
Meanwhile, the Department of Interior has continued offering up millions of acres in public lands for sale to the oil and gas industry. And Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday rejected California and Nevada’s state protections of the endangered sage grouse, delisted by the Trump administration from the Endangered Species Act.
Next, watchdogs expect the EPA to finalize its rollback of a coal power plant standard that limits the brain-damaging mercury and arsenic they release.
The reason for the rush has a lot to do with bets on whether this is Trump’s final year in office. The administration is in a race against an artificial deadline set by the 1996 Congressional Review Act that allows a simple majority in Congress to easily reverse Trump’s rollbacks in 2021. But the law only applies to regulations that were passed in the final 60 days of the congressional calendar, which means you can count on a lot more rollbacks until that deadline in late May. Without the CRA, a Democratic administration could spend much of its first term slowly working to reverse the damage Trump has unleashed.
Some of the changes could make us more vulnerable to COVID-19.
REBECCA LEBER
As the coronavirus spreads and grabs headlines, the federal government has been quietly removing the rules that protect people and the environment from pollution.
On Tuesday, the rule on the chopping block is a 2012 standard targeting car pollution. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler is expected to announce a weaker replacement for the Obama administration’s standards. EPA is already locked in a legal bottle with California over whether the agency can revoke the state’s longstanding waiver to pursue tougher standards.
While the old clean car standards required an average 5 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions annually from cars and light truck fleets, the Trump administration’s version, called the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient Vehicles, requires just 1.5 percent. It would keep the US lagging behind most of the world in its fuel efficiency requirements. Most of the domestic auto industry isn’t even on board with the Trump administration’s rule, saying it would cause more instability and would even cost the economy 60,000 jobs.
Those few percentage points might not sound like a major change, but the difference means more pollution clogging people’s lungs—a public health crisis that also makes us more vulnerable to COVID-19. Even without the threat of a respiratory illness, the reversal means a total 18,500 premature deaths, 250,000 more asthma attacks, 350,000 other respiratory problems, and a total $190 billion health costs between now and 2050, according to an Environmental Defense Fund analysis.
By the Trump administration’s own count, the rule change would cause 299 premature deaths annually by 2050. Then there are the climate costs: The transportation sector, already the United States’ biggest source of carbon pollution, would add the equivalent of 68 additional coal plants running at full blast for five years.
That’s not all that the environmental agencies have been up to the past few weeks. While announcing last week it was suspending much of the agency’s enforcement, the EPA moved forward earlier in March with its controversial rule limiting what science the agency is allowed to consider in its daily work.
Meanwhile, the Department of Interior has continued offering up millions of acres in public lands for sale to the oil and gas industry. And Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday rejected California and Nevada’s state protections of the endangered sage grouse, delisted by the Trump administration from the Endangered Species Act.
Next, watchdogs expect the EPA to finalize its rollback of a coal power plant standard that limits the brain-damaging mercury and arsenic they release.
The reason for the rush has a lot to do with bets on whether this is Trump’s final year in office. The administration is in a race against an artificial deadline set by the 1996 Congressional Review Act that allows a simple majority in Congress to easily reverse Trump’s rollbacks in 2021. But the law only applies to regulations that were passed in the final 60 days of the congressional calendar, which means you can count on a lot more rollbacks until that deadline in late May. Without the CRA, a Democratic administration could spend much of its first term slowly working to reverse the damage Trump has unleashed.
Clean out the gene pool...
Liberty University brings back its students, and coronavirus, too
Elizabeth Williamson
As Liberty University’s spring break was drawing to a close this month, Jerry Falwell, its president, spoke with the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service about the rampaging coronavirus.
“We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,” Dr. Thomas Eppes said he told Falwell. But he did not urge him to close the school. “I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, ‘This is what you should do, and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Eppes said in an interview.
So Falwell — a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened the university last week, igniting a firestorm, epidemiologically and otherwise. As of Friday, Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggest COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. Another eight were told to self-isolate.
“Liberty will be notifying the community as deemed appropriate and required by law,” Falwell said in an interview Sunday when confronted with the numbers. He added that any student returning now to campus would be required to self-quarantine for 14 days.
Of the 1,900 students who initially returned last week to campus, he said more than 800 had left. But he said he had “no idea” how many students had returned to off-campus housing.
“If I were them, I’d be more nervous,” he added, because they live in more crowded conditions.
For critical weeks in January and February, the nation’s far-right dismissed the seriousness of the pandemic. Falwell derided it as an “overreaction” driven by liberal desires to damage Trump.
Although the current crisis would appear epidemiological in nature, Eppes said he saw it as a reflection of “the political divide.”
“If Liberty sneezes, there are people who don’t like the fact that Liberty sneezed,” he said in an interview. “Mr. Falwell called me to listen to a view that wasn’t exactly his. Great leaders do that type of thing.”
The city of Lynchburg, Virginia, is furious.
“We had a firestorm of our own citizens who said, ‘What’s going on?’” said Treney Tweedy, the mayor.
Some Liberty officials accuse alarmed outsiders of playing politics. Tweedy has called Falwell “reckless.” And within the school, there are signs of panic.
“I’m not allowed to talk to you because I’m an employee here,” one student living on campus wrote in an email. But, he pleaded, “we need help to go home.”
Under the Falwell family’s leadership, Liberty University has grown in five decades from a modest Baptist college to an evangelical powerhouse with cash investments and endowments of nearly $2 billion, nearly 46,000 undergraduates and a campus that sprawls across Lynchburg and neighboring counties in Virginia. Total enrollment, including online students, exceeds 100,000.
The institution is a welcome and generous presence in this Blue Ridge Mountain region, where the percentage of Lynchburg residents living in poverty is twice the state average. Liberty and its Thomas Road Baptist Church donate goods and services; its medical students conduct free health screenings; and its students participate in city beautification, maintenance and charity projects.
The university was founded by Falwell’s famous father as a bastion of social conservatism, one that was unabashedly combative as it trained what it called “Champions for Christ.” If anything, the younger Falwell has made it more so since his father’s death.
The mayor and city manager here, Bonnie Svrcek, felt relieved two weeks ago, when Falwell assured them that he fully intended to comply with Virginia’s public health directives and close the school to virtually all students, most of whom were scattering for spring break. Then he changed his mind.
“We think it’s irresponsible for so many universities to just say ‘closed, you can’t come back,’ push the problem off on other communities and sit there in their ivory towers,” Falwell said Wednesday on a radio show hosted by a far-right conspiracy theorist, Todd Starnes.
“We’re conservative, we’re Christian, and therefore we’re being attacked,” he said.
Michael Gillette, a former mayor of Lynchburg and a bioethicist now working with its hospitals on rationing scarce ventilators, disagrees.
“To argue that criticism of Liberty is based on political bias is unfounded and unreasonable,” he said. “Liberty just did not take this threat as seriously as others have.”
Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, Lynchburg city officials and a growing number of Liberty students, parents and employees have urged Falwell to reverse course, but such pleas have only prompted a stream of often conflicting statements.
“Our messages did change throughout the week as the governor’s orders changed. We had to adapt,” Falwell said.
Falwell initially said only international students or those with nowhere else to go would remain. Then he welcomed back a much larger group of about 1,900 students to campus housing last week, in addition to faculty members and staff. Others returned to off-campus rentals in Lynchburg.
Students who remained at home had to return last week to clean out their rooms, a requirement that was later relaxed. Faculty members were at first ordered back to campus, even though they would be teaching online. Then some were allowed to work from home. Falwell also waffled on whether the school would issue refunds to students who did not return for the semester before announcing Friday that most would receive a $1,000 credit for next year’s bills.
Falwell and his administration have worked to tamp down dissent. After a Liberty undergraduate, Calum Best, wrote on his personal Facebook page that students should receive refunds, he said Liberty’s spokesman, Scott Lamb, called his cellphone to berate him. Asked about the call, Lamb said he was simply objecting to an error in the post, and Best was “spinning.”
After Marybeth Davis Baggett, a professor, wrote an open letter asking the university’s board of trustees to close the campus, Falwell mocked her on Twitter as “the ‘Baggett’ lady.”
Jeff Brittain, a Liberty parent, wrote on Twitter, “I’m as right wing as they get, bud. But as a parent of three of your students, I think this is crazy, irresponsible and seems like a money grab.” Falwell replied, calling him a “dummy.”
All of this has left even his critics scratching their heads.
“It’s honestly hard to figure out what his motives are,” Best, the student who wrote the Facebook post, said in an interview. “If he had purely political motives, he’s being way more conservative than even Trump is being right now. Trump is at least allowing doctors to say their piece. Jerry is not. It kind of shocks me at this point.”
On campus, the administration says it is adhering to Virginia’s public health mandates, but students are flouting them. While security guards appear to be enforcing state advisories requiring a 6-foot distance from others and gatherings of no more than 10 people, students are still assembling in closer proximity to eat, play sports, study and use dormitory restrooms. Decals slapped on furniture that say “Closed for Social Distancing” have wound up on laptops and car bumpers. Study tables are farther apart, but shared computer terminals remain. While some students are trying to adhere to social distancing guidelines, they live in group houses, pile onto city buses and crowd the few businesses that remain open in Lynchburg.
It was not supposed to be this way. As the number of reported cases of the coronavirus in Virginia began rising, Tweedy said Falwell personally assured her that the school would not fully reopen. “We have some students who cannot go anywhere or they have nowhere to go,” she recalled his telling her. “The number on that day was 300 or so students, and even if it was a few more, we said, ‘OK, well, thank you.’”
But as spring break drew to a close in mid-March, all Liberty students were encouraged to return.
“We never discussed numbers, and I never told them the dorms would be closed,” Falwell said Sunday. “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on what was said.”
Falwell runs Liberty his own way, and his word is law. Professors are not tenured and can be fired at will. The administration controls the student newspaper.
Falwell echoes Trump’s talking points on the coronavirus, which he often calls the “flu.”
“It’s just strange to me how many are overreacting” to the pandemic, Falwell said on “Fox & Friends” on March 10. “It makes you wonder if there is a political reason for that. Impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump.”
Lynchburg is particularly ill-prepared to become a hot spot. Hospitals in the region have a total of 1,174 beds, only 55 of them intensive care, according to a recent analysis by the Harvard Global Health Institute. Those must serve 217,000 adults, nearly 50,000 of whom are 65 or older. Tests for the coronavirus remain in short supply.
Falwell has played down the dangers of his decision in interviews with the news media, where he has even suggested that the coronavirus is a North Korean bioweapon. On Fox News, he blithely asserted that the cure rate for COVID-19 “is 99.7% for people under 50,” adding that “we have talked to medical professionals, numerous medical professionals, before making this decision.”
An archived version of Liberty’s website said those medical professionals included the school’s own public health faculty and campus health providers as well as “Dr. Jeffrey Hyman of Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care provider.”
When contacted by The New York Times, Northwell Health denied that Hyman provided any formal guidance to Liberty, adding that he is not an infectious disease specialist. In a statement, the hospital system said that Hyman was a personal friend of the Falwell family who told them in private conversation “that reconvening classes would be a ‘bad idea.’”
Elizabeth Williamson
As Liberty University’s spring break was drawing to a close this month, Jerry Falwell, its president, spoke with the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service about the rampaging coronavirus.
“We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,” Dr. Thomas Eppes said he told Falwell. But he did not urge him to close the school. “I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, ‘This is what you should do, and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Eppes said in an interview.
So Falwell — a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened the university last week, igniting a firestorm, epidemiologically and otherwise. As of Friday, Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggest COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. Another eight were told to self-isolate.
“Liberty will be notifying the community as deemed appropriate and required by law,” Falwell said in an interview Sunday when confronted with the numbers. He added that any student returning now to campus would be required to self-quarantine for 14 days.
Of the 1,900 students who initially returned last week to campus, he said more than 800 had left. But he said he had “no idea” how many students had returned to off-campus housing.
“If I were them, I’d be more nervous,” he added, because they live in more crowded conditions.
For critical weeks in January and February, the nation’s far-right dismissed the seriousness of the pandemic. Falwell derided it as an “overreaction” driven by liberal desires to damage Trump.
Although the current crisis would appear epidemiological in nature, Eppes said he saw it as a reflection of “the political divide.”
“If Liberty sneezes, there are people who don’t like the fact that Liberty sneezed,” he said in an interview. “Mr. Falwell called me to listen to a view that wasn’t exactly his. Great leaders do that type of thing.”
The city of Lynchburg, Virginia, is furious.
“We had a firestorm of our own citizens who said, ‘What’s going on?’” said Treney Tweedy, the mayor.
Some Liberty officials accuse alarmed outsiders of playing politics. Tweedy has called Falwell “reckless.” And within the school, there are signs of panic.
“I’m not allowed to talk to you because I’m an employee here,” one student living on campus wrote in an email. But, he pleaded, “we need help to go home.”
Under the Falwell family’s leadership, Liberty University has grown in five decades from a modest Baptist college to an evangelical powerhouse with cash investments and endowments of nearly $2 billion, nearly 46,000 undergraduates and a campus that sprawls across Lynchburg and neighboring counties in Virginia. Total enrollment, including online students, exceeds 100,000.
The institution is a welcome and generous presence in this Blue Ridge Mountain region, where the percentage of Lynchburg residents living in poverty is twice the state average. Liberty and its Thomas Road Baptist Church donate goods and services; its medical students conduct free health screenings; and its students participate in city beautification, maintenance and charity projects.
The university was founded by Falwell’s famous father as a bastion of social conservatism, one that was unabashedly combative as it trained what it called “Champions for Christ.” If anything, the younger Falwell has made it more so since his father’s death.
The mayor and city manager here, Bonnie Svrcek, felt relieved two weeks ago, when Falwell assured them that he fully intended to comply with Virginia’s public health directives and close the school to virtually all students, most of whom were scattering for spring break. Then he changed his mind.
“We think it’s irresponsible for so many universities to just say ‘closed, you can’t come back,’ push the problem off on other communities and sit there in their ivory towers,” Falwell said Wednesday on a radio show hosted by a far-right conspiracy theorist, Todd Starnes.
“We’re conservative, we’re Christian, and therefore we’re being attacked,” he said.
Michael Gillette, a former mayor of Lynchburg and a bioethicist now working with its hospitals on rationing scarce ventilators, disagrees.
“To argue that criticism of Liberty is based on political bias is unfounded and unreasonable,” he said. “Liberty just did not take this threat as seriously as others have.”
Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, Lynchburg city officials and a growing number of Liberty students, parents and employees have urged Falwell to reverse course, but such pleas have only prompted a stream of often conflicting statements.
“Our messages did change throughout the week as the governor’s orders changed. We had to adapt,” Falwell said.
Falwell initially said only international students or those with nowhere else to go would remain. Then he welcomed back a much larger group of about 1,900 students to campus housing last week, in addition to faculty members and staff. Others returned to off-campus rentals in Lynchburg.
Students who remained at home had to return last week to clean out their rooms, a requirement that was later relaxed. Faculty members were at first ordered back to campus, even though they would be teaching online. Then some were allowed to work from home. Falwell also waffled on whether the school would issue refunds to students who did not return for the semester before announcing Friday that most would receive a $1,000 credit for next year’s bills.
Falwell and his administration have worked to tamp down dissent. After a Liberty undergraduate, Calum Best, wrote on his personal Facebook page that students should receive refunds, he said Liberty’s spokesman, Scott Lamb, called his cellphone to berate him. Asked about the call, Lamb said he was simply objecting to an error in the post, and Best was “spinning.”
After Marybeth Davis Baggett, a professor, wrote an open letter asking the university’s board of trustees to close the campus, Falwell mocked her on Twitter as “the ‘Baggett’ lady.”
Jeff Brittain, a Liberty parent, wrote on Twitter, “I’m as right wing as they get, bud. But as a parent of three of your students, I think this is crazy, irresponsible and seems like a money grab.” Falwell replied, calling him a “dummy.”
All of this has left even his critics scratching their heads.
“It’s honestly hard to figure out what his motives are,” Best, the student who wrote the Facebook post, said in an interview. “If he had purely political motives, he’s being way more conservative than even Trump is being right now. Trump is at least allowing doctors to say their piece. Jerry is not. It kind of shocks me at this point.”
On campus, the administration says it is adhering to Virginia’s public health mandates, but students are flouting them. While security guards appear to be enforcing state advisories requiring a 6-foot distance from others and gatherings of no more than 10 people, students are still assembling in closer proximity to eat, play sports, study and use dormitory restrooms. Decals slapped on furniture that say “Closed for Social Distancing” have wound up on laptops and car bumpers. Study tables are farther apart, but shared computer terminals remain. While some students are trying to adhere to social distancing guidelines, they live in group houses, pile onto city buses and crowd the few businesses that remain open in Lynchburg.
It was not supposed to be this way. As the number of reported cases of the coronavirus in Virginia began rising, Tweedy said Falwell personally assured her that the school would not fully reopen. “We have some students who cannot go anywhere or they have nowhere to go,” she recalled his telling her. “The number on that day was 300 or so students, and even if it was a few more, we said, ‘OK, well, thank you.’”
But as spring break drew to a close in mid-March, all Liberty students were encouraged to return.
“We never discussed numbers, and I never told them the dorms would be closed,” Falwell said Sunday. “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on what was said.”
Falwell runs Liberty his own way, and his word is law. Professors are not tenured and can be fired at will. The administration controls the student newspaper.
Falwell echoes Trump’s talking points on the coronavirus, which he often calls the “flu.”
“It’s just strange to me how many are overreacting” to the pandemic, Falwell said on “Fox & Friends” on March 10. “It makes you wonder if there is a political reason for that. Impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump.”
Lynchburg is particularly ill-prepared to become a hot spot. Hospitals in the region have a total of 1,174 beds, only 55 of them intensive care, according to a recent analysis by the Harvard Global Health Institute. Those must serve 217,000 adults, nearly 50,000 of whom are 65 or older. Tests for the coronavirus remain in short supply.
Falwell has played down the dangers of his decision in interviews with the news media, where he has even suggested that the coronavirus is a North Korean bioweapon. On Fox News, he blithely asserted that the cure rate for COVID-19 “is 99.7% for people under 50,” adding that “we have talked to medical professionals, numerous medical professionals, before making this decision.”
An archived version of Liberty’s website said those medical professionals included the school’s own public health faculty and campus health providers as well as “Dr. Jeffrey Hyman of Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care provider.”
When contacted by The New York Times, Northwell Health denied that Hyman provided any formal guidance to Liberty, adding that he is not an infectious disease specialist. In a statement, the hospital system said that Hyman was a personal friend of the Falwell family who told them in private conversation “that reconvening classes would be a ‘bad idea.’”
Hospitalizations double
Bay Area coronavirus updates: California hospitalizations double over weekend
By Amy Graff, Alyssa Pereira and Eric Ting
The number of California coronavirus patients requiring hospitalization or intensive care increased sharply over the weekend.
Governor Gavin Newsom stated Monday that the number of individuals requiring hospitalization nearly doubled from 746 on Friday to 1432 on Monday, and the number of patients in intensive care beds tripled from 200 to 597.
The governor signed an executive order to add 50,000 temporary hospital beds through June, and asked licensed health care workers in the state to lend a hand in the crisis.
“If you’re a nursing school student, a medical school student, we need you,” Newsom said Monday. “If you’ve just retired in the last few years, we need you.”
March 30, 5:20 p.m. A second Muni operator has reportedly tested positive for coronavirus.
The San Francisco Examiner reported Monday that the operator drove buses out of Muni's Presidio Yard, which will be thoroughly cleaned. SFMTA officials are working to determine when the individual developed symptoms and which vehicles they drove.
March 30, 4:45 p.m. The California Arts Council conducted a statewide survey in early March for both organizations and individuals working in the arts, finding the majority of respondents have had events canceled and have lost a substantial portion of their income.
The survey found individuals lost an average of $23,857 and organizations an average of $193,642 in revenue. Additionally, 66% of organizations and 85% of individuals have been forced to cancel events or have had events canceled.
By Amy Graff, Alyssa Pereira and Eric Ting
The number of California coronavirus patients requiring hospitalization or intensive care increased sharply over the weekend.
Governor Gavin Newsom stated Monday that the number of individuals requiring hospitalization nearly doubled from 746 on Friday to 1432 on Monday, and the number of patients in intensive care beds tripled from 200 to 597.
The governor signed an executive order to add 50,000 temporary hospital beds through June, and asked licensed health care workers in the state to lend a hand in the crisis.
“If you’re a nursing school student, a medical school student, we need you,” Newsom said Monday. “If you’ve just retired in the last few years, we need you.”
March 30, 5:20 p.m. A second Muni operator has reportedly tested positive for coronavirus.
The San Francisco Examiner reported Monday that the operator drove buses out of Muni's Presidio Yard, which will be thoroughly cleaned. SFMTA officials are working to determine when the individual developed symptoms and which vehicles they drove.
March 30, 4:45 p.m. The California Arts Council conducted a statewide survey in early March for both organizations and individuals working in the arts, finding the majority of respondents have had events canceled and have lost a substantial portion of their income.
The survey found individuals lost an average of $23,857 and organizations an average of $193,642 in revenue. Additionally, 66% of organizations and 85% of individuals have been forced to cancel events or have had events canceled.
Let these fuckers die...
Pastor arrested for violating rules amid virus outbreak
Tamara Lush and Chris O'meara
Florida officials have arrested the pastor of a megachurch after detectives say he held two Sunday services with hundreds of people and violated a safer-at-home order in place to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
According to jail records, Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne turned himself in to authorities Monday afternoon in Hernando County, where he lives. He was charged with unlawful assembly and violation of a public health emergency order. Bail was set at $500, according to the jail's website, and he was released after posting bond.
Hillsborough Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a news conference Monday that he negotiated with the attorney of Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne to turn himself in to authorities in Hernando County. His church is located in Tampa.
“Not only did the church comply with the administrative order regarding six-foot distancing, it went above and beyond any other business to ensure the health and safety of the people," said a statement from Liberty Counsel, Howard-Browne's law firm. "Contrary to Sheriff Chronister’s allegation that Pastor Howard-Browne was ‘reckless,” the actions of Hillsborough Country and the Hernando County Sheriff are discriminatory against religion and church gatherings.”
Howard-Browne isn't alone in refusing to curtail in-person worship services despite public health orders designed to stop the virus from spreading. Churches in Ohio, Kentucky and Louisiana have continued to invite worshippers in recent days as at least a half-dozen states offer some degree of exemption for faith in their orders to shutter nonessential activity during the pandemic.
Chronister said his command staff met with The River at Tampa Bay Church leaders about the danger they are putting themselves — and their congregation — in by not maintaining appropriate social distancing, but Howard-Browne held the services. The Sheriff's Office also placed a digital sign on the road near the church driveway that said “practice social distancing.”
“Shame on this pastor, their legal staff and the leaders of this staff for forcing us to do our job. That's not what we wanted to do during a declared state of emergency,” Chronister said. “We are hopeful that this will be a wakeup call."
The church has said it sanitized the building, and the pastor said on Twitter that the church is an essential business. He also attacked the media for “religious bigotry and hate.” In the statement released late Monday afternoon, Liberty Counsel said the church enforced the six-foot distance rule between family groups, made sure the staff wore gloves, gave every person who entered hand sanitizer, among other things.
The county and governor’s orders require gatherings, including those held by faith-based groups, be fewer than 10 people to limit the spread of COVID-19. A live stream of Sunday's three-and-a-half-hour church service showed scores of congregants. In a Facebook post, Howard-Browne said coronavirus “is blown totally way out of proportion.”
On March 18, the church called its ministry an essential service, just like police and firefighters, and said it would keep its doors open.
In a Facebook video Sunday, Howard-Browne said “it looks like we're going to have to go to court over this because the church is encroached from every side.”
“This is really about your voice. The voice of the body of Christ,” he said.
As recently as last year, Howard-Browne's church hosted an event with Paula White-Cain, who was named an advisor leading President Donald Trump’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative. She's also an unofficial spiritual advisor to the president.
Tamara Lush and Chris O'meara
Florida officials have arrested the pastor of a megachurch after detectives say he held two Sunday services with hundreds of people and violated a safer-at-home order in place to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
According to jail records, Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne turned himself in to authorities Monday afternoon in Hernando County, where he lives. He was charged with unlawful assembly and violation of a public health emergency order. Bail was set at $500, according to the jail's website, and he was released after posting bond.
Hillsborough Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a news conference Monday that he negotiated with the attorney of Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne to turn himself in to authorities in Hernando County. His church is located in Tampa.
“Not only did the church comply with the administrative order regarding six-foot distancing, it went above and beyond any other business to ensure the health and safety of the people," said a statement from Liberty Counsel, Howard-Browne's law firm. "Contrary to Sheriff Chronister’s allegation that Pastor Howard-Browne was ‘reckless,” the actions of Hillsborough Country and the Hernando County Sheriff are discriminatory against religion and church gatherings.”
Howard-Browne isn't alone in refusing to curtail in-person worship services despite public health orders designed to stop the virus from spreading. Churches in Ohio, Kentucky and Louisiana have continued to invite worshippers in recent days as at least a half-dozen states offer some degree of exemption for faith in their orders to shutter nonessential activity during the pandemic.
Chronister said his command staff met with The River at Tampa Bay Church leaders about the danger they are putting themselves — and their congregation — in by not maintaining appropriate social distancing, but Howard-Browne held the services. The Sheriff's Office also placed a digital sign on the road near the church driveway that said “practice social distancing.”
“Shame on this pastor, their legal staff and the leaders of this staff for forcing us to do our job. That's not what we wanted to do during a declared state of emergency,” Chronister said. “We are hopeful that this will be a wakeup call."
The church has said it sanitized the building, and the pastor said on Twitter that the church is an essential business. He also attacked the media for “religious bigotry and hate.” In the statement released late Monday afternoon, Liberty Counsel said the church enforced the six-foot distance rule between family groups, made sure the staff wore gloves, gave every person who entered hand sanitizer, among other things.
The county and governor’s orders require gatherings, including those held by faith-based groups, be fewer than 10 people to limit the spread of COVID-19. A live stream of Sunday's three-and-a-half-hour church service showed scores of congregants. In a Facebook post, Howard-Browne said coronavirus “is blown totally way out of proportion.”
On March 18, the church called its ministry an essential service, just like police and firefighters, and said it would keep its doors open.
In a Facebook video Sunday, Howard-Browne said “it looks like we're going to have to go to court over this because the church is encroached from every side.”
“This is really about your voice. The voice of the body of Christ,” he said.
As recently as last year, Howard-Browne's church hosted an event with Paula White-Cain, who was named an advisor leading President Donald Trump’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative. She's also an unofficial spiritual advisor to the president.
3 states block abortion bans....
Judges block 3 states from enforcing abortion bans pegged to pandemic
Ohio, Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama and Oklahoma are among the other states that recently moved to suspend access.
By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
Federal judges on Monday lifted restrictions Texas, Ohio and Alabama imposed on abortion during the coronavirus pandemic in decisions that could have repercussions for several more Republican-led states that have deemed the procedure non-essential during the crisis.
In Texas, District Court Judge Lee Yeakel sided with abortion clinics and granted a temporary restraining order through April 13 while arguments on the underlying legality of the state's order play out.
In Ohio, District Court Judge Michael Barrett similarly sided with Planned Parenthood and other groups challenging the state's ban and issued a two-week temporary restraining order.
In Alabama, District Court Judge Myron Thompson ordered the suspension of the state's abortion ban until he can hear arguments in a video conference on April 6.
"The State’s interest in immediate enforcement of the March 27 order — a broad mandate aimed primarily at preventing large social gatherings — against abortion providers does not, based on the current record, outweigh plaintiffs’ concerns," he said.
Iowa, Mississippi and Oklahoma are among the other states that recently moved to suspend access to the procedure as the pandemic intensified, arguing it would preserve desperately needed medical supplies. Texas’ order was one of the strictest, threatening a $1,000 fine or 180 days of jail time on abortion providers who violated the ban.
Yeakel agreed with Texas clinics who argued that women who need an abortion can’t live with a weeks- or possibly months-long delay. Clinic operators told reporters Monday that they’ve already had to cancel hundreds of appointments since the ban took effect last week.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has argued that the state exercised proper discretion in halting the procedures because abortions are not “immediately medically necessary” or needed to save the life or health of the mother.
"Regarding a woman's right to a pre-fetal-viability abortion, the Supreme Court has spoken clearly. There can be no outright ban on such a procedure,” wrote Yeakel, an appointee of President George W. Bush who has sided with abortion providers in several previous cases.
"This court will not speculate on whether the Supreme Court included a silent 'except-in-a-national-emergency clause' in its previous writings on the issue," he added.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday night his office would appeal "to ensure that medical professionals on the frontlines have the supplies and protective gear they desperately need."
The Ohio abortion clinics that challenged the state's ban said inspectors visited their clinics on March 26 and 27 but never indicated whether or not they were found to be violating the prohibition. The clinics on Monday sued and asked for the temporary restraining order, arguing their “physicians credibly fear being immediately shut down and prosecuted if they continue to provide surgical abortions.”
Barrett, also a Bush appointee, agreed to halt enforcement of the ban while he hears arguments in the case.
He wrote the state did not make a convincing case that banning abortions would save enough masks and other gear for medical workers dealing with the pandemic to outweigh the "irreparable harm" it would cause to individuals wanting to terminate their pregnancies.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said in a statement that he's consulting with the state Department of Health about next steps, "be it an emergency appeal, a trial on the preliminary injunction, a more specifically drawn order or other remedy."
The American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights also filed lawsuits in Iowa and Oklahoma challenging bans on surgical abortion during the pandemic as violations of Roe v. Wade.
“This ruling sends a message to other states: Using this pandemic to ban abortion access is unconstitutional," said Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, after the Texas ruling was announced.
As the red states move forward with bans, some progressive states are labeling abortion and family planning an essential service during the pandemic and exploring ways to make it easier for people to access these services without physically coming into a clinic.
On Monday, 21 state attorneys general led by California’s Xavier Becerra wrote to the FDA urging the agency to lift federal restrictions on telemedicine prescriptions of abortion pills.
“Denying women care and forcing them to travel unnecessarily is not only shortsighted, it is putting women across the country in harm’s way,” the letter reads.
Ohio, Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama and Oklahoma are among the other states that recently moved to suspend access.
By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
Federal judges on Monday lifted restrictions Texas, Ohio and Alabama imposed on abortion during the coronavirus pandemic in decisions that could have repercussions for several more Republican-led states that have deemed the procedure non-essential during the crisis.
In Texas, District Court Judge Lee Yeakel sided with abortion clinics and granted a temporary restraining order through April 13 while arguments on the underlying legality of the state's order play out.
In Ohio, District Court Judge Michael Barrett similarly sided with Planned Parenthood and other groups challenging the state's ban and issued a two-week temporary restraining order.
In Alabama, District Court Judge Myron Thompson ordered the suspension of the state's abortion ban until he can hear arguments in a video conference on April 6.
"The State’s interest in immediate enforcement of the March 27 order — a broad mandate aimed primarily at preventing large social gatherings — against abortion providers does not, based on the current record, outweigh plaintiffs’ concerns," he said.
Iowa, Mississippi and Oklahoma are among the other states that recently moved to suspend access to the procedure as the pandemic intensified, arguing it would preserve desperately needed medical supplies. Texas’ order was one of the strictest, threatening a $1,000 fine or 180 days of jail time on abortion providers who violated the ban.
Yeakel agreed with Texas clinics who argued that women who need an abortion can’t live with a weeks- or possibly months-long delay. Clinic operators told reporters Monday that they’ve already had to cancel hundreds of appointments since the ban took effect last week.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has argued that the state exercised proper discretion in halting the procedures because abortions are not “immediately medically necessary” or needed to save the life or health of the mother.
"Regarding a woman's right to a pre-fetal-viability abortion, the Supreme Court has spoken clearly. There can be no outright ban on such a procedure,” wrote Yeakel, an appointee of President George W. Bush who has sided with abortion providers in several previous cases.
"This court will not speculate on whether the Supreme Court included a silent 'except-in-a-national-emergency clause' in its previous writings on the issue," he added.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday night his office would appeal "to ensure that medical professionals on the frontlines have the supplies and protective gear they desperately need."
The Ohio abortion clinics that challenged the state's ban said inspectors visited their clinics on March 26 and 27 but never indicated whether or not they were found to be violating the prohibition. The clinics on Monday sued and asked for the temporary restraining order, arguing their “physicians credibly fear being immediately shut down and prosecuted if they continue to provide surgical abortions.”
Barrett, also a Bush appointee, agreed to halt enforcement of the ban while he hears arguments in the case.
He wrote the state did not make a convincing case that banning abortions would save enough masks and other gear for medical workers dealing with the pandemic to outweigh the "irreparable harm" it would cause to individuals wanting to terminate their pregnancies.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said in a statement that he's consulting with the state Department of Health about next steps, "be it an emergency appeal, a trial on the preliminary injunction, a more specifically drawn order or other remedy."
The American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights also filed lawsuits in Iowa and Oklahoma challenging bans on surgical abortion during the pandemic as violations of Roe v. Wade.
“This ruling sends a message to other states: Using this pandemic to ban abortion access is unconstitutional," said Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, after the Texas ruling was announced.
As the red states move forward with bans, some progressive states are labeling abortion and family planning an essential service during the pandemic and exploring ways to make it easier for people to access these services without physically coming into a clinic.
On Monday, 21 state attorneys general led by California’s Xavier Becerra wrote to the FDA urging the agency to lift federal restrictions on telemedicine prescriptions of abortion pills.
“Denying women care and forcing them to travel unnecessarily is not only shortsighted, it is putting women across the country in harm’s way,” the letter reads.
Coronavirus misinformation
Twitter: Laura Ingraham tweet broke rules against coronavirus misinformation
Ingraham tweeted praise for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug championed by the president as a potential treatment for the virus.
By CRISTIANO LIMA
Fox News host Laura Ingraham has deleted a tweet touting an unproven coronavirus treatment that a Twitter spokesperson said today ran afoul of its rules against misleading health information.
Ingraham earlier this month tweeted praise for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug championed by President Donald Trump as a potential treatment for the virus, despite little evidence to that effect.
In the March 20 tweet, Ingraham claimed that the drug was already in use in “many hospitals,” including at Lenox Hill in New York, and was showing “very promising results,” according to a screenshot viewed by POLITICO. The tweet referenced a segment on the host’s prime-time show that erroneously attributed information to a Lenox Hill doctor who in fact does not work at the facility.
Fox News later issued a correction saying the segment had misstated the doctor's relationship to the hospital. A network spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment today.
A Twitter spokesperson said earlier today that the company required Ingraham to delete the post for violating its policies. But the company later reversed course, saying Ingraham was not forced to take it down.
Twitter separately required Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to delete a post for making a number of erroneous statements, including calling hydroxychloroquine "100% effective" in treating Covid-19, the site Mediaite reported Saturday. Under Twitter policy, accounts can be locked until tweets that run afoul of its rules are deleted. Giuliani has since posted several other tweets touting the drug.
The social media giants in recent weeks have beefed up their policies against misleading claims amid the outbreak. In another enforcement action, Google recently removed the far-right show Infowars from its Android App for spreading coronavirus misinformation.
The moves come as the Trump administration express growing interest in hydroxychloroquine's potential as a coronavirus treatment, including a Food and Drug Administration authorization issued Sunday for emergency use of the drug. Career scientists have expressed skepticism and called on the agency to first pursue clinical trials.
Ingraham tweeted praise for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug championed by the president as a potential treatment for the virus.
By CRISTIANO LIMA
Fox News host Laura Ingraham has deleted a tweet touting an unproven coronavirus treatment that a Twitter spokesperson said today ran afoul of its rules against misleading health information.
Ingraham earlier this month tweeted praise for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug championed by President Donald Trump as a potential treatment for the virus, despite little evidence to that effect.
In the March 20 tweet, Ingraham claimed that the drug was already in use in “many hospitals,” including at Lenox Hill in New York, and was showing “very promising results,” according to a screenshot viewed by POLITICO. The tweet referenced a segment on the host’s prime-time show that erroneously attributed information to a Lenox Hill doctor who in fact does not work at the facility.
Fox News later issued a correction saying the segment had misstated the doctor's relationship to the hospital. A network spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment today.
A Twitter spokesperson said earlier today that the company required Ingraham to delete the post for violating its policies. But the company later reversed course, saying Ingraham was not forced to take it down.
Twitter separately required Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to delete a post for making a number of erroneous statements, including calling hydroxychloroquine "100% effective" in treating Covid-19, the site Mediaite reported Saturday. Under Twitter policy, accounts can be locked until tweets that run afoul of its rules are deleted. Giuliani has since posted several other tweets touting the drug.
The social media giants in recent weeks have beefed up their policies against misleading claims amid the outbreak. In another enforcement action, Google recently removed the far-right show Infowars from its Android App for spreading coronavirus misinformation.
The moves come as the Trump administration express growing interest in hydroxychloroquine's potential as a coronavirus treatment, including a Food and Drug Administration authorization issued Sunday for emergency use of the drug. Career scientists have expressed skepticism and called on the agency to first pursue clinical trials.
Controversial doctor
In France, controversial doctor stirs coronavirus debate
Didier Raoult touts the use of an anti-malarial drug to treat Covid-19, pitching him head-to-head with public health authorities.
By ELISA BRAUN
Sitting behind his desk in a hospital in the southern French city of Marseille, Didier Raoult has convinced thousands, including the U.S. president, that a common antimalarial drug can save people infected by Covid-19.
In a few short weeks, the controversial microbiologist has become France’s best-known doctor after announcing the coronavirus “endgame” on Youtube.
He is also a ticking time bomb for the government and health authorities, as his supporters and some high-profile politicians challenge official policy on battling the coronavirus.
“Why don’t we use it?” Bruno Retailleau, the head of conservative group Les Républicains in the Senate, asked on France Inter. “It has one advantage: It is not expensive. … Is it because Big Pharma labs would like to make money on the back of our fellow citizens?” he added.
The antimalarial chloroquine and its related compound, hydroxychloroquine, have been the focus of intense debate in France since Raoult, the head of a university hospital institute in Marseille, announced what he said were promising results on a small sample of patients in late February.
Since then, people have been queuing outside his hospital to get treatment, despite warnings from the scientific community about problems with the way Raoult designed and carried out his trials — the results of which were not peer-reviewed prior to publication.
Raoult's team examined a small number of patients, and chose which received treatment with the malaria drug and which did not. That breaks with standard practice in clinical trials of randomly assigning patients to treatment or control groups to avoid bias. The scientists also failed to collect full data from some patients, failing to follow the study protocol they had designed.
Raoult’s social media followers — his YouTube updates attract over a million views — express outrage that health authorities are not freely allowing the use of the drug, forcing the government to publicly justify its strict guidelines on chloroquine, which is marketed only as an antimalarial drug and for specific conditions such as lupus.
“Dr. Raoult’s study involves 24 people. What kind of health minister would I be if, on the basis of a single study conducted on 24 people, I told French people to take a medicine that could lead to cardiac complications in some people?” said Health Minister Olivier Véran on France 2.
Chloroquine and its compounds have been used to treat Covid-19 patients in several affected countries, including China, but Raoult’s comments contrast with his peers’ approach, who have treated it as one of several medications showing potential. It’s part of four treatments currently tested in an EU-wide clinical trial called Discovery.
In the U.S., President Donald Trump’s push for the decades-old malaria medicine — he vowed to “make that drug available almost immediately” — disrupted public health agencies’ coronavirus response.
Raoult’s latest study, published online on Friday, raised a fresh wave of criticism from the scientific community.
Some patients treated with hydroxychloroquine reportedly died of cardiac arrest, according to newspaper Le Point, raising serious concerns about the risks associated with the treatment.
‘Maverick’ doctor
A self-described “maverick” in the medical community, 68-year-old Raoult is a reputed scientist in his microbiology field — noticeably for his work on giant viruses — yet he cuts a controversial figure for his skeptical comments on Darwin’s law, climate change, some vaccines and even recommendations about exposure to the sun and alcohol consumption.
“I don’t care what others think,” he told local newspaper La Provence. “I’m not an outsider, I’m the one that is the furthest ahead.”
His free spirit attitude and his battles with the Parisian elite have turned him into a media sensation.
“Paris has a sort of 18th century Versailles syndrome. … Everybody talks to everybody, recommends each other among friends, it’s very endogamic,” Raoult told Libération. “The world doesn’t work like that anymore.”
Public officials are taking him seriously, up to the highest level.
Raoult was officially a member of the first scientific council set up by French President Emmanuel Macron to advise him on the coronavirus epidemic, although he stopped attending meetings after a disagreement over the level of screening and testing.
“There is no bad blood between Didier Raoult and the Élysée,” a spokesperson for the president told POLITICO, adding that Macron himself associated with him early on within scientific advisory boards to the government.
“I hear impatience,” Véran said during a press conference with Prime Minister Edouard Philippe Saturday. “I am talking regularly to Professor Raoult,” he added, while pointing at the lack of scientific consensus over his results.
The government last week allowed chloroquine to be used under strict medical supervision in hospitals, following the go-ahead from public health watchdog the High Council for Public Health, which said it could be used for the most serious Covid-19 cases after agreement between caregivers.
Raoult was quick to thank Véran on Twitter, touting the move as a victory, despite later government clarifications that the decision strictly followed guidelines from health authorities.
Raoult has some 371,000 supporters on his Facebook group, and over 200,000 followers on Twitter. Eric Drouet, an influential figure in France’s Yellow Jackets protest movement, and Juan Branco, a lawyer and political activist, have lent their support and helped the professor become a social media star.
Conspiracy theorists now use “Dr. Raoult” keywords as a way to engage in online debates, which risks making the public health messages barely audible to many people.
“We are now living in a world of fake news and hyper-communication where it becomes very complicated for public authorities and crisis management players to distinguish between the true and the false,” said David Gruson, a former health adviser to ex-Prime Minister François Fillon.
In terms of health policy, “there is now a greater sensitivity to media phenomena on the one hand and, on the other hand, a willingness not to lose the sense of protecting patients’ interests,” he added.
France Inter radio reported cases of patients threatening to sue hospitals if they don’t get chloroquine, while some Facebook users post very popular “chloroquine diaries.”
The resulting surge in demand at French pharmacies has alarmed experts who warn against overhyping unproven medicines, and fear there will be shortages for lupus patients who use chloroquine to avoid inflammations associated with their auto-immune disease, France 24 reported.
Politically, Macron’s opponents are only too happy to use Raoult and his popularity to undermine the government’s message in the coronavirus crisis.
“Didier Raoult is too unloved by all those beautiful persons [from the government] not to arouse interest,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leading far left opponent of Macron, on his blog.
Far-right leaders have also sided with Raoult, with National Rally leader Marine Le Pen saying that general practitioners should be allowed to prescribe chloroquine “right away,” and questioning the government’s assessment of the situation.
Didier Raoult touts the use of an anti-malarial drug to treat Covid-19, pitching him head-to-head with public health authorities.
By ELISA BRAUN
Sitting behind his desk in a hospital in the southern French city of Marseille, Didier Raoult has convinced thousands, including the U.S. president, that a common antimalarial drug can save people infected by Covid-19.
In a few short weeks, the controversial microbiologist has become France’s best-known doctor after announcing the coronavirus “endgame” on Youtube.
He is also a ticking time bomb for the government and health authorities, as his supporters and some high-profile politicians challenge official policy on battling the coronavirus.
“Why don’t we use it?” Bruno Retailleau, the head of conservative group Les Républicains in the Senate, asked on France Inter. “It has one advantage: It is not expensive. … Is it because Big Pharma labs would like to make money on the back of our fellow citizens?” he added.
The antimalarial chloroquine and its related compound, hydroxychloroquine, have been the focus of intense debate in France since Raoult, the head of a university hospital institute in Marseille, announced what he said were promising results on a small sample of patients in late February.
Since then, people have been queuing outside his hospital to get treatment, despite warnings from the scientific community about problems with the way Raoult designed and carried out his trials — the results of which were not peer-reviewed prior to publication.
Raoult's team examined a small number of patients, and chose which received treatment with the malaria drug and which did not. That breaks with standard practice in clinical trials of randomly assigning patients to treatment or control groups to avoid bias. The scientists also failed to collect full data from some patients, failing to follow the study protocol they had designed.
Raoult’s social media followers — his YouTube updates attract over a million views — express outrage that health authorities are not freely allowing the use of the drug, forcing the government to publicly justify its strict guidelines on chloroquine, which is marketed only as an antimalarial drug and for specific conditions such as lupus.
“Dr. Raoult’s study involves 24 people. What kind of health minister would I be if, on the basis of a single study conducted on 24 people, I told French people to take a medicine that could lead to cardiac complications in some people?” said Health Minister Olivier Véran on France 2.
Chloroquine and its compounds have been used to treat Covid-19 patients in several affected countries, including China, but Raoult’s comments contrast with his peers’ approach, who have treated it as one of several medications showing potential. It’s part of four treatments currently tested in an EU-wide clinical trial called Discovery.
In the U.S., President Donald Trump’s push for the decades-old malaria medicine — he vowed to “make that drug available almost immediately” — disrupted public health agencies’ coronavirus response.
Raoult’s latest study, published online on Friday, raised a fresh wave of criticism from the scientific community.
Some patients treated with hydroxychloroquine reportedly died of cardiac arrest, according to newspaper Le Point, raising serious concerns about the risks associated with the treatment.
‘Maverick’ doctor
A self-described “maverick” in the medical community, 68-year-old Raoult is a reputed scientist in his microbiology field — noticeably for his work on giant viruses — yet he cuts a controversial figure for his skeptical comments on Darwin’s law, climate change, some vaccines and even recommendations about exposure to the sun and alcohol consumption.
“I don’t care what others think,” he told local newspaper La Provence. “I’m not an outsider, I’m the one that is the furthest ahead.”
His free spirit attitude and his battles with the Parisian elite have turned him into a media sensation.
“Paris has a sort of 18th century Versailles syndrome. … Everybody talks to everybody, recommends each other among friends, it’s very endogamic,” Raoult told Libération. “The world doesn’t work like that anymore.”
Public officials are taking him seriously, up to the highest level.
Raoult was officially a member of the first scientific council set up by French President Emmanuel Macron to advise him on the coronavirus epidemic, although he stopped attending meetings after a disagreement over the level of screening and testing.
“There is no bad blood between Didier Raoult and the Élysée,” a spokesperson for the president told POLITICO, adding that Macron himself associated with him early on within scientific advisory boards to the government.
“I hear impatience,” Véran said during a press conference with Prime Minister Edouard Philippe Saturday. “I am talking regularly to Professor Raoult,” he added, while pointing at the lack of scientific consensus over his results.
The government last week allowed chloroquine to be used under strict medical supervision in hospitals, following the go-ahead from public health watchdog the High Council for Public Health, which said it could be used for the most serious Covid-19 cases after agreement between caregivers.
Raoult was quick to thank Véran on Twitter, touting the move as a victory, despite later government clarifications that the decision strictly followed guidelines from health authorities.
Raoult has some 371,000 supporters on his Facebook group, and over 200,000 followers on Twitter. Eric Drouet, an influential figure in France’s Yellow Jackets protest movement, and Juan Branco, a lawyer and political activist, have lent their support and helped the professor become a social media star.
Conspiracy theorists now use “Dr. Raoult” keywords as a way to engage in online debates, which risks making the public health messages barely audible to many people.
“We are now living in a world of fake news and hyper-communication where it becomes very complicated for public authorities and crisis management players to distinguish between the true and the false,” said David Gruson, a former health adviser to ex-Prime Minister François Fillon.
In terms of health policy, “there is now a greater sensitivity to media phenomena on the one hand and, on the other hand, a willingness not to lose the sense of protecting patients’ interests,” he added.
France Inter radio reported cases of patients threatening to sue hospitals if they don’t get chloroquine, while some Facebook users post very popular “chloroquine diaries.”
The resulting surge in demand at French pharmacies has alarmed experts who warn against overhyping unproven medicines, and fear there will be shortages for lupus patients who use chloroquine to avoid inflammations associated with their auto-immune disease, France 24 reported.
Politically, Macron’s opponents are only too happy to use Raoult and his popularity to undermine the government’s message in the coronavirus crisis.
“Didier Raoult is too unloved by all those beautiful persons [from the government] not to arouse interest,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leading far left opponent of Macron, on his blog.
Far-right leaders have also sided with Raoult, with National Rally leader Marine Le Pen saying that general practitioners should be allowed to prescribe chloroquine “right away,” and questioning the government’s assessment of the situation.
Next rescue package
Pelosi aims to move fast on next rescue package
The speaker is eager to include Democratic priorities in any coronavirus relief bill.
By SARAH FERRIS, ANDREW DESIDERIO and MARIANNE LEVINE
House Democrats are moving rapidly on ambitious plans for a fourth coronavirus relief package, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi eager to put her imprint on legislation that she says could be ready for a vote in the coming weeks.
Pelosi told reporters Monday that Democrats are in the early stages of drafting another major bill that will not only shore up health systems and protect frontline health care workers but could include substantial investments in infrastructure.
“Our first bills were about addressing the emergency. The third bill was about mitigation. The fourth bill would be about recovery. Emergency, mitigation, recovery,” Pelosi said on a conference call. “I think our country is united in not only wanting to address our immediate needs — emergency, mitigation, and the assault on our lives and livelihoods — but also, how we recover in a very positive way.”
But Democrats’ approach could put them on a collision course with senior Republicans, who say they are very much in wait-and-see mode when it comes to another potential multi-trillion-dollar bill and are warning Pelosi not to try to jam the Senate with a progressive plan.
“They’re approaching it — it seems like — as an opportunity to pass their political and ideological agenda. We’re approaching it as, ‘How do we protect the public health and our economy?’ And those are pretty divergent goals,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The early skirmishing suggests that the next round of deal-making might not go nearly as quickly as the last rescue package, even as economists say much more government assistance is likely to be needed — and potentially soon.
Pelosi’s push toward a new relief measure comes after a series of tense negotiations with McConnell and White House officials yielded a $2 trillion bill to save the U.S. economy and provide aid to individuals, businesses and states dealing with the pandemic.
That legislation, which President Donald Trump signed on Friday, was largely negotiated by Senate leaders and caused consternation among House Democrats who felt many of their priorities had been ignored. The previous package, Republicans have countered, was crafted almost entirely by Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Pelosi said she hopes the next bill will also ultimately be bipartisan in the end: “As I said, all three of our bills have been bipartisan. We would want this one to be so as well.”
House Democratic leaders discussed their ideas on a call with their rank and file on Monday, with key chairmen and their staff already assembling more than half-dozen proposals — many of which were left on the cutting room floor during previous rounds of talks with Republicans.
In particular, Pelosi signaled to her caucus that infrastructure would likely be part of the “phase 4” package, specifically ticking off priorities like water systems, broadband and the energy grid.
“It is clear that we need to do more, and that is particularly true when it comes to protecting the health and safety of frontline health workers,” House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) told reporters earlier Monday.
The bill could see a vote on the floor within weeks. The House is scheduled to be out until April 20, and lawmakers are eager to avoid a return to the Capitol until absolutely necessary amid the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak.
Pelosi said the House would likely vote on the package after they return from the Easter and Passover holidays in late April, though there’s always the possibility lawmakers return sooner if Congress is needed to act. Alternatively, if lawmakers are far from a deal, they may stay away for longer.
“I do think that it is really important that as soon as we are here, we are ready to pass legislation,” Pelosi said.
Three days after Trump signed the $2 trillion bill, it’s not immediately clear how much more help might be needed. But top Democrats have been vocal about pushing for another rescue measure — with even bigger cash payments to Americans — as the virus continues to ravage the U.S. economy and more are infected. Initial jobless claims have soared past 3 million and public health officials are predicting potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Many Democrats are also eager to make another fight for policies — like robust family and medical leave programs and stronger worker protections for first responders — that were turned down by GOP negotiators in previous bills.
Democrats have also said the federal government will likely need to send more cash to state and local governments, as well as cover the costs associated with coronavirus treatments and food assistance. Even as he battles with some governors, Trump has also acknowledged the need to deliver more emergency funds to states.
“States are bleeding out,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), whose district has 1,800 cases, said in an interview Monday. “There’s no revenue coming in, then you add to that, the massive costs of care and treatment. That’s just a huge hole to dig out of. We’re going to need more resources.”
Then, Gottheimer added, there are big questions about how to stimulate the economy in the weeks and months ahead when normal life begins to resume: “Are people going to rush back to a restaurant? Are they going to rush back to an amusement park? There are going to be certain things that take longer to come back.”
Republicans, meanwhile, have said it’s too early to consider what might be included in a potential “Phase 4” package, noting that the current relief measure is in the process of being implemented.
“Let’s let this work. Let’s let this work inside America,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said last week.
Senate Republicans in particular are not eager to rush into another large stimulus package, particularly with a focus on infrastructure and other spending not directly related to the health crisis. And they were quick to dismiss Pelosi’s “Phase 4” proposal as nothing more than an ideological wish list.
“It just seems to be a fundamental difference in how we’re approaching this and how the House is approaching it,” Cornyn said.
Senate Republicans are also wary of getting forced to pass another House spending package that they had little input on. While the Senate passed the “Phase 2” package overwhelmingly, McConnell had to urge his caucus to “gag and go for it” because of concerns over its paid sick leave provisions.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) acknowledged that it was Pelosi's prerogative to outline her vision of the next plan, but said he remains concerned about one chamber forcing the other chamber to swallow its proposal.
“I think it would be a very bad choice, if she's going to do that, for us to start anticipating, ‘ok we've got to defer to them and pass in essence whatever they decide,’” Lee said.
At least one Senate Democrat does not want to rush into a fourth coronavirus relief bill. Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, said the federal government’s “oversight” of the $2 trillion package could spur some technical corrections to the law.
“I’m not sure you need another bill at this stage,” Cardin said in an interview, citing progress with the small-business loans that he helped craft in the previous iteration. “I’m not against planning. I think at this stage, I think it would be premature to talk about what would be in the next bill for small business.”
Meanwhile, some Senate Republicans are open to a possible “Phase 4” package and have begun early talks with colleagues.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican who occasionally breaks with her party, said the next relief bill should address the mental health concerns that are likely to result from the wide-scale social-distancing practices nationwide, in addition to the human impacts of an economic crisis that has upended Americans’ livelihoods and shuttered small businesses.
“We saw after the Depression in the ‘30s the number of suicides. We know the impacts on people when you are in close quarters with a lot of stress,” Murkowski told reporters after presiding over a brief pro forma Senate session on Monday. “We see domestic violence. We see substance abuse. We see levels of addiction that we wish were not present with us.”
The $2 trillion package came together last week after marathon negotiations and a hefty dose of partisan sniping. But the bill ultimately passed 96-0 in the Senate — providing a glimmer of hope for those expecting lawmakers to set aside their ideological differences in a time of crisis.
“I don't think that this is an effort for the House to jam the Senate or the Senate to cram something down the House,” Murkowski said. “Just as we shouldn't pit Republicans against Democrats, we shouldn't pit one body of the Congress against the other. We’ve got too much to do.”
The speaker is eager to include Democratic priorities in any coronavirus relief bill.
By SARAH FERRIS, ANDREW DESIDERIO and MARIANNE LEVINE
House Democrats are moving rapidly on ambitious plans for a fourth coronavirus relief package, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi eager to put her imprint on legislation that she says could be ready for a vote in the coming weeks.
Pelosi told reporters Monday that Democrats are in the early stages of drafting another major bill that will not only shore up health systems and protect frontline health care workers but could include substantial investments in infrastructure.
“Our first bills were about addressing the emergency. The third bill was about mitigation. The fourth bill would be about recovery. Emergency, mitigation, recovery,” Pelosi said on a conference call. “I think our country is united in not only wanting to address our immediate needs — emergency, mitigation, and the assault on our lives and livelihoods — but also, how we recover in a very positive way.”
But Democrats’ approach could put them on a collision course with senior Republicans, who say they are very much in wait-and-see mode when it comes to another potential multi-trillion-dollar bill and are warning Pelosi not to try to jam the Senate with a progressive plan.
“They’re approaching it — it seems like — as an opportunity to pass their political and ideological agenda. We’re approaching it as, ‘How do we protect the public health and our economy?’ And those are pretty divergent goals,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The early skirmishing suggests that the next round of deal-making might not go nearly as quickly as the last rescue package, even as economists say much more government assistance is likely to be needed — and potentially soon.
Pelosi’s push toward a new relief measure comes after a series of tense negotiations with McConnell and White House officials yielded a $2 trillion bill to save the U.S. economy and provide aid to individuals, businesses and states dealing with the pandemic.
That legislation, which President Donald Trump signed on Friday, was largely negotiated by Senate leaders and caused consternation among House Democrats who felt many of their priorities had been ignored. The previous package, Republicans have countered, was crafted almost entirely by Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Pelosi said she hopes the next bill will also ultimately be bipartisan in the end: “As I said, all three of our bills have been bipartisan. We would want this one to be so as well.”
House Democratic leaders discussed their ideas on a call with their rank and file on Monday, with key chairmen and their staff already assembling more than half-dozen proposals — many of which were left on the cutting room floor during previous rounds of talks with Republicans.
In particular, Pelosi signaled to her caucus that infrastructure would likely be part of the “phase 4” package, specifically ticking off priorities like water systems, broadband and the energy grid.
“It is clear that we need to do more, and that is particularly true when it comes to protecting the health and safety of frontline health workers,” House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) told reporters earlier Monday.
The bill could see a vote on the floor within weeks. The House is scheduled to be out until April 20, and lawmakers are eager to avoid a return to the Capitol until absolutely necessary amid the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak.
Pelosi said the House would likely vote on the package after they return from the Easter and Passover holidays in late April, though there’s always the possibility lawmakers return sooner if Congress is needed to act. Alternatively, if lawmakers are far from a deal, they may stay away for longer.
“I do think that it is really important that as soon as we are here, we are ready to pass legislation,” Pelosi said.
Three days after Trump signed the $2 trillion bill, it’s not immediately clear how much more help might be needed. But top Democrats have been vocal about pushing for another rescue measure — with even bigger cash payments to Americans — as the virus continues to ravage the U.S. economy and more are infected. Initial jobless claims have soared past 3 million and public health officials are predicting potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Many Democrats are also eager to make another fight for policies — like robust family and medical leave programs and stronger worker protections for first responders — that were turned down by GOP negotiators in previous bills.
Democrats have also said the federal government will likely need to send more cash to state and local governments, as well as cover the costs associated with coronavirus treatments and food assistance. Even as he battles with some governors, Trump has also acknowledged the need to deliver more emergency funds to states.
“States are bleeding out,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), whose district has 1,800 cases, said in an interview Monday. “There’s no revenue coming in, then you add to that, the massive costs of care and treatment. That’s just a huge hole to dig out of. We’re going to need more resources.”
Then, Gottheimer added, there are big questions about how to stimulate the economy in the weeks and months ahead when normal life begins to resume: “Are people going to rush back to a restaurant? Are they going to rush back to an amusement park? There are going to be certain things that take longer to come back.”
Republicans, meanwhile, have said it’s too early to consider what might be included in a potential “Phase 4” package, noting that the current relief measure is in the process of being implemented.
“Let’s let this work. Let’s let this work inside America,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said last week.
Senate Republicans in particular are not eager to rush into another large stimulus package, particularly with a focus on infrastructure and other spending not directly related to the health crisis. And they were quick to dismiss Pelosi’s “Phase 4” proposal as nothing more than an ideological wish list.
“It just seems to be a fundamental difference in how we’re approaching this and how the House is approaching it,” Cornyn said.
Senate Republicans are also wary of getting forced to pass another House spending package that they had little input on. While the Senate passed the “Phase 2” package overwhelmingly, McConnell had to urge his caucus to “gag and go for it” because of concerns over its paid sick leave provisions.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) acknowledged that it was Pelosi's prerogative to outline her vision of the next plan, but said he remains concerned about one chamber forcing the other chamber to swallow its proposal.
“I think it would be a very bad choice, if she's going to do that, for us to start anticipating, ‘ok we've got to defer to them and pass in essence whatever they decide,’” Lee said.
At least one Senate Democrat does not want to rush into a fourth coronavirus relief bill. Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, said the federal government’s “oversight” of the $2 trillion package could spur some technical corrections to the law.
“I’m not sure you need another bill at this stage,” Cardin said in an interview, citing progress with the small-business loans that he helped craft in the previous iteration. “I’m not against planning. I think at this stage, I think it would be premature to talk about what would be in the next bill for small business.”
Meanwhile, some Senate Republicans are open to a possible “Phase 4” package and have begun early talks with colleagues.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican who occasionally breaks with her party, said the next relief bill should address the mental health concerns that are likely to result from the wide-scale social-distancing practices nationwide, in addition to the human impacts of an economic crisis that has upended Americans’ livelihoods and shuttered small businesses.
“We saw after the Depression in the ‘30s the number of suicides. We know the impacts on people when you are in close quarters with a lot of stress,” Murkowski told reporters after presiding over a brief pro forma Senate session on Monday. “We see domestic violence. We see substance abuse. We see levels of addiction that we wish were not present with us.”
The $2 trillion package came together last week after marathon negotiations and a hefty dose of partisan sniping. But the bill ultimately passed 96-0 in the Senate — providing a glimmer of hope for those expecting lawmakers to set aside their ideological differences in a time of crisis.
“I don't think that this is an effort for the House to jam the Senate or the Senate to cram something down the House,” Murkowski said. “Just as we shouldn't pit Republicans against Democrats, we shouldn't pit one body of the Congress against the other. We’ve got too much to do.”
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