1.
2. Wisconsin Republicans refused to let a deadly pandemic (with the greatest impact in Democratic strongholds in Milwaukee) get in the way of guaranteeing a low-turnout election for a state supreme court seat. Speaker of the Assembly Robin Vos, outfitted in head to toe PPE, assures the public that everything is fine.
3. Charles Sykes – who for twenty five years was immersed in the “conservative movement, both as an observer and as a full participant” and knows all the Republican players, including Robin Vos – explains the election’s significance and the context in Wisconsin politics. (I recommend Sykes’ book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, which presents an insiders’ account of how conservative media “succeeded in convincing our audiences to ignore and discount any information whatsoever from the mainstream media. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the Right’s immunity to false information.”)
4. Richard Hasen (“How Republicans are using the pandemic to suppress the vote“) suggests that Republicans may be willing to go to far greater lengths than they did in Wisconsin to rig the November election. He foresees two possibilities. The first (a 180-degree pivot from Wisconsin Republicans), is to emphasize the grave risks to public health and simply close polling places in Democratic cities and swing states. (Shutting down polling places – creating voting deserts, in effect – in Democratic areas of a state is a tried and true method of voter suppression.) The second method is more novel: a direct assault on the right of citizens to cast votes.
More ominously, as Mark Joseph Stern has pointed out, state legislatures have the power under the Constitution to choose presidential electors. In its infamous 2000 decision in Bush vs. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court remarked that although every state legislature had given voters the power to vote directly for the president and to allocate the state’s electoral college votes, state legislators could take back that power at any time.
What’s to stop Trump from appealing to Republican-controlled legislatures in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to take back this power from voters under the pretext that the risk of COVID-19 makes voting too difficult? Although all these states, except Arizona, have Democratic governors, some believe that the legislatures could take back this power even without the agreement of the governor. [My emphasis.]
5. The United States now leads the world in coronavirus deaths. The lack of national leadership that brought this about is disgraceful.
6. Today’s New York Times offers the most recent review of Donald Trump’s ongoing failures to protect the American public (“He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus”).
By the last week of February, it was clear to the administration’s public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.
7. Last month Trump declared, “We’re not a shipping clerk,” but the continuing refusal of the federal government to take command is costing lives. Instead, his administration has relied on five large medical supply companies to step into the breach. These companies are distributing personal protective equipment — but their regular customers are getting first dibs on all PPE, regardless of need. Governors with coronavirus hotspots have to stand in line while scrambling to find their own sources for gear.
Admiral John Polowczyk, who leads FEMA’s Procurement Task Force, explains: “I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain, say, look, they have trucks to go to the hospital door every day. We’re bringing product in. They’re filling orders for hospitals, nursing homes like normal.”
But things are hardly normal. As a result, according to governors with hospitals that lack PPE, “this has led to confusion and chaotic bidding wars. Until the bottleneck is sorted out, it will be market forces and corporations that often decide who gets scarce supplies and who doesn’t.”
(Image: courtesy of NASA.)