James.galbraith

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) speaks to the media after weekly policy luncheons on Capitol Hill July 21, 2020 in Washington, DC. | Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Senate Republicans want to give sweeping lawsuit immunity to businesses accused of helping spread the coronavirus.

On Monday, Senate Republicans unveiled their opening offer in negotiations over new legislation to mitigate the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Senate GOP’s $1 trillion package of proposals arrived just days before enhanced unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July, meaning that many jobless Americans’ incomes will drop precipitously if a new bill isn’t signed into law this week.

House Democrats passed their proposal 10 weeks ago — a $3 trillion package that extends the enhanced benefits and provides various forms of relief to individuals, businesses, and state governments.

One of the centerpieces of the Senate Republican package is a bill that would give businesses sweeping immunity from lawsuits alleging that they helped spread the coronavirus to their workers or customers.

It’s such a high priority that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told CNBC on Tuesday that Republicans are “not negotiating over liability protection” — a position that, if true, could blow up any possibility of additional pandemic relief becoming law.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, warned that McConnell’s refusal to negotiate over the proposed liability shield is a sign that McConnell “does want to get to an agreement” on additional pandemic relief.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) echoed Pelosi, saying that “we asked [Treasury Secretary Steven] Mnuchin and [White House Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows to go back and see if Mr. McConnell really meant that. Because that would mean he’s probably not interested in any bill at all.”

It’s easy to see why Democrats feel this way. When this bill’s critics describe the Republican proposal, they frequently use a strong word: “impossible.” As Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said in a Senate floor speech denouncing the bill on Tuesday, the legislation “makes it nearly impossible to prevail” in court against a company accused of taking inadequate measures to slow the spread of the pandemic.

The bill, entitled the SAFE TO WORK Act, places a wide array of obstacles before workers and consumers who allege that they were infected due to a business’s negligence — or even against plaintiffs who allege they were infected because of truly reckless behavior by a business. Many of these obstacles are significant barriers to liability in and of themselves. But the combination of these many new hurdles could give businesses all but total immunity from lawsuits alleging that they allowed the virus to spread unchecked.

As Remington Gregg, a lawyer with Public Citizen, told me, “it is near impossible for a suit” to even get to court under the Republican proposal. And once a suit commences, proving a plaintiff’s case is “almost impossible.”

Among other things, the bill requires plaintiffs to identify “all places and persons” they visited and “all persons who visited [their] residence” two weeks prior to the onset of symptoms. It shields businesses from liability unless they acted in “reckless disregard” of their legal obligations — while simultaneously reducing the scope of those obligations in many jurisdictions. It imposes a heightened burden of proof on plaintiffs. It shields many businesses so long as they have a “written or published policy on the mitigation of transmission” that aligns with “applicable government standards.” And it drastically limits the remedies available to most plaintiffs who somehow overcome all of these hurdles.

Oh, and one more thing. It allows businesses to sue — and collect damages and attorney’s fees from — anyone who so much as writes a letter to a business demanding compensation for certain Covid-19-related legal violations, if the allegations in that letter are later deemed “meritless.” And it allows the United States attorney general to sue law firms, unions, and other entities that are “engaged in a pattern or practice” of seeking compensation for similar violations.

The bill, in other words, does not simply make it nearly impossible for Covid plaintiffs to prevail in court. It also discourages lawyers from even taking on clients with the coronavirus who want to hold a business accountable for their infection, because those lawyers could potentially face crippling costs for representing such clients.

What the bill does

The Republican proposal imposes a wide array of barriers on plaintiffs alleging that they became infected with Covid-19 due to the negligent (or worse) actions of their employer or a business that they patronized. Think of a meat-packing plant that forbids its workers from wearing masks, and that forces them to work in close quarters even though the bosses are aware that workers are becoming sick.

As noted above, these barriers require plaintiffs to give a detailed account of where they’ve been and who they’ve been in contact with prior to becoming infected; they limit the amount of money damages available to most plaintiffs; and they actively discourage lawyers from taking clients with Covid-19-related concerns.

Perhaps most significantly, the bill drastically alters the legal and evidentiary standards governing suits against a business accused of spreading the coronavirus.

Though tort law varies by state. plaintiffs who claim they were injured by a business will typically prevail if they can show that the business was negligent in allowing an injury to happen. As Gregg explains, that means that the business failed “to take reasonable care under the circumstances.”

There is already a great deal of flexibility built into this “reasonable care” standard. Courts, for example, might excuse an error by an emergency room physician who is so inundated with Covid-19 cases that they can barely focus on each individual patient, even though they might hold another doctor liable for the same error if that doctor were acting in ordinary circumstances.

Similarly, a business that did not require its employees to wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, when little was known about the disease and how it spreads, would likely not be liable for this mistake. But a business that did not require masks after the benefits of mask-wearing became widely known is more likely to be deemed negligent.

Negligence suits are normally weighed under a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, meaning the plaintiff must show that the entirety of the evidence supporting their position is more persuasive than the evidence supporting the defendant’s position.

The SAFE TO WORK Act makes several significant changes to this ordinary framework.

First, it requires plaintiffs to prove far more than negligence to prevail. Rather, the plaintiff must show that a business committed a “conscious, voluntary act or omission in reckless disregard” of its legal obligations to that plaintiff. It’s not enough, in other words, for a plaintiff to show that a business failed to “take reasonable care” to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Rather, plaintiffs will generally have to show that the business made a conscious choice to ignore the danger that its actions would spread the disease.

Second, a plaintiff has to do more than show that a preponderance of the evidence supports their claims. Rather, they must prove their claims by “clear and convincing evidence,” a heightened burden of proof that courts typically reserve for unusually sensitive cases. For instance, if the government wants to confine a person with mental illness against their will because they believe that person to be a threat to themselves or others, the government typically must prove that such confinement is justified by clear and convincing evidence.

Third, the bill specifically requires a plaintiff to prove — again, by clear and convincing evidence — that the business’s reckless behavior exposed them to the coronavirus, and that this “actual exposure to coronavirus caused the personal injury of the plaintiff.”

The implications of this requirement are profound. Imagine a worker in a meat-packing plant who is infected on the job due to unsafe working conditions. Now imagine that, on the same day that the worker becomes infected, they make a weekly grocery shopping trip. Under the Republican proposal, this worker has a heightened burden to prove that they became infected at work and not at the grocery store. That’s a difficult task under a preponderance of the evidence standard. It could very well be impossible under the more demanding clear and convincing evidence standard.

It should be noted, moreover, that these are only some of the additional burdens imposed on coronavirus plaintiffs by the SAFE TO WORK Act. Taken together, the many burdens imposed by this law will make it extraordinarily difficult for such plaintiffs to even find a lawyer willing to take their case. They will make it unusually hard for that lawyer to even file a complaint. And, even if the case proceeds to trial, the plaintiff will face a nearly insurmountable burden of proof.

On top of all that, if the plaintiff does prevail, the bill places strict limits on the amount of money damages they are able to collect unless they can show that the business engaged in “willful misconduct.”

The case for the Republican proposal

The SAFE TO WORK Act opens with nearly a dozen pages of findings laying out Senate Republicans’ case for immunizing businesses from Covid-19-related liability. “To halt the spread of the disease,” the bill notes, “state and local governments took drastic measures. They shut down small and large businesses, schools, colleges and universities, religious, philanthropic and other nonprofit institutions, and local government agencies.”

But now, the United States faces an “economic storm,” and additional government spending “alone cannot protect the United States from further devastation.” Rather, “only reopening the economy so that workers can get back to work and students can get back to school can accomplish that goal.”

The bill, in other words, fairly candidly places the goal of “reopening the economy” before the goal of continuing to halt the spread of Covid-19. The bill also claims that “one of the chief impediments to the continued flow of interstate commerce as this public health crisis has unfolded is the risk of litigation.” Such lawsuits “threaten to keep” many businesses and other institutions “from reopening for fear of expensive litigation that might prove to be meritless.”

There is little evidence, however, that Covid-19-related litigation is a major impediment to economic growth — or even that it is particularly common. Hunton Andrews Kurth, a multi-national law firm that primarily represents corporate clients, tracks coronavirus-related litigation within the United States. As of this writing, its database identifies 3,832 legal complaints filed since January 30 — the date the first legal complaint in the database was filed — relating to the disease. (Disclosure: My father was a partner at Hunton & Williams, one of two firms that merged to form Hunton Andrews Kurth.)

Nearly 4.000 cases may seem like a lot — but about 16 million civil lawsuits were filed in state trial courts in 2018, according to the Conference of State Court Administrators and the National Center for State Courts. So the 3,832 coronavirus-related cases identified by the Hunton database are a tiny fraction of the American justice system’s civil docket.

Most of the cases flagged by the Hunton database, moreover, are not the sort of personal injury or employment-related suits targeted by the SAFE TO WORK Act. Some, for example, involve contractual obligations that could not be performed due to the pandemic. Others are suits brought by students seeking refunds from colleges or universities. Many are suits challenging state public health orders requiring businesses to close.

Fewer than 100 of the cases listed in the Hunton database involve personal injury or wrongful death suits brought on behalf of people who claim they were exposed to the coronavirus in a workplace or other business setting.

So what happens now?

Many opponents of the Republican proposal doubt that Senate leaders actually believe this bill will become law. “It’s very clear that this is not a serious attempt at policymaking,” Gregg, the lawyer from Public Citizen, told me. McConnell’s threats to not negotiate notwithstanding, the SAFE TO WORK Act reads more like an intentionally provocative entry into negotiations with congressional Democrats than a proposal that has any serious chance of passing muster with those Democrats.

“I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that [Republicans] will come out and say ‘we’re willing to compromise,’” Gregg told me, though he was concerned that, by taking such an extreme position in their initial proposal, Senate Republicans could tilt the negotiations and the final compromise in their direction.

It’s unlikely that Republicans will agree to a compromise that does not include some kind of liability protections for businesses in the broader package of pandemic relief legislation. McConnell has repeatedly claimed that some kind of liability shield is a “red line” and that “we can’t pass another bill unless we have liability protection.”

So what would a reasonable compromise look like? University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel and Northwestern University law professor Daniel Rodriguez lay out one possibility in an op-ed that ran Tuesday in the Washington Post. Instead of just giving a blanket liability shield to businesses, they propose Congress should reward businesses that promote public health with a limited degree of lawsuit immunity.

Suppose that a hairdresser tests positive for Covid-19. The best way to prevent more infections would be for this individual’s employer to immediately identify who that hairdresser’s clients were in the last several days, and to call them and warn them that they may have been exposed to the virus.

But there’s a problem, Hemel and Rodriguez explain. “The salon owner worries that by doing so, she could be opening the door to lawsuits from customers who become ill.”

To avoid this problem, Hemel and Rodriguez propose a targeted fix: “A safe harbor from tort liability for businesses that inform customers about potential exposures within 24 hours of the business receiving notice that one of its employees or another customer on its premises had covid-19.”

Such a proposal would not be without costs. As the two professors acknowledge, it could prevent some customers from being compensated by genuinely negligent businesses. And a safe harbor for businesses that immediately warn customers “might weaken incentives for businesses to take safety precautions in the first place.” But these costs would, at the very least, have offsetting benefits — Hemel and Rodriguez’s proposal would give businesses a powerful incentive to warn customers of possible infection.

When I asked Hemel about this proposal, he pointed to a couple examples of similar legal rules that protect negligent companies or individuals that try to correct their error. The Federal Rules of Evidence, for example, provide “that subsequent remedial measures cannot be used to prove negligence, culpable conduct, product defect, or failure to warn.”

For example, if Toyota recalls cars with a defective airbag, the fact that a recall happened cannot be used to prove that the airbag was defective — because otherwise Toyota would be reluctant to conduct a recall in the first place.

Similarly, Hemel noted, many states have “I’m sorry” laws that provide that “if a doctor apologizes to you for a medical error, you can’t use the apology as evidence in your malpractice suit.”

As Hemel admits, neither of these examples are a “perfect analogy” for his and Rodriguez’s proposal. Though lawyers cannot cite a product recall as evidence that a product was defective, they still might be able to prove that product defective by other means. Hemel and Rodriguez, by contrast, propose giving much broader immunity to businesses that swiftly warn their customers about possible infection.

But their proposal is also fairly narrowly targeted and, unlike the euphemistically named SAFE TO WORK Act, Hemel and Rodriguez accept that protecting the public health is a valuable goal that shouldn’t be undermined by over-broad legal immunity.

Republicans waited until the last moment to even offer a proposal for the next round of pandemic relief legislation. If that legislation does not pass in just a few days, millions of Americans’ incomes will fall off a cliff — and the nation could plunge deeper into economic ruin.

And yet, McConnell insists that no bill will pass unless it includes a liability shield. If he sticks to that position, that’s not just terrible news for the country — it’s likely to be a disaster for the Republican Party in an election year.

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Workers make surgical gowns in Changyuan, China, on April 9, 2020. Because of trade and transportation difficulties tied to the pandemic, US hospitals are buying less equipment from international suppliers, particularly ones in China. | Li Jianan/Xinhua via Getty Images

Hospitals have had to turn to domestic suppliers for masks and other equipment, putting them in greater financial jeopardy. 

Over 16.5 million people around the world have been infected by Covid-19, and the numbers continue to rise steadily. The pandemic has severely disrupted almost every aspect of the global economy, including the global supply chain. Across the world, factories have shut down or slowed production; countries have restricted exports and imports; and transportation has slowed or halted.

While this turmoil has affected many industries, America’s health care system has been hit especially hard. Over the past two decades, US health care has come to rely heavily on international suppliers, especially in China, for thousands of essential products, from surgical gowns to syringes. In fact, as of 2019, the US was the largest importer of medical goods — including of personal protective products — in the world.

Over the past few months as the pandemic raged, most US hospitals and health systems have responded by turning to domestic suppliers. They are more reliable given the difficulties with transportation and trade, which have become worse since the pandemic began.

This trend is likely to continue, as hospitals and health care systems try to ensure that they have a steady supply of essential products.

But this new domestic strategy has a particular disadvantage: In general, it is much more expensive. And this puts hospitals, and potentially, their patients in greater financial jeopardy.

Higher domestic prices are likely due to a combination of the increased costs of manufacturing in the US, as well as the booming demand that has outpaced supply. For example, in December, Johns Hopkins Medicine, where I oversee the supply chain, was paying 40 cents for a gown from our supplier in China. We are now paying $9 per gown, from a domestic supplier. That’s more than 20 times the former price — all at a time when we need more gowns than ever. This change has the potential to significantly increase health care costs, and will only add to the existing strain on health care providers, health insurers, and consumers.

Right now, increased supply costs may not seem like the most important health care issue we face. And it’s not. The immediate task of saving lives obviously takes precedence over all other concerns.

But to save lives, we need personal protective equipment, we need tubing, we need gowns. And we also need to be able to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of our institutions. Without a reliable, affordable supply of a range of products, we can’t properly care for our patients, both those with Covid-19 and those with other health problems.

How the medical supply crisis got so bad

The current supply problems began in January. With the initial coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan and the realization that it would likely spread globally, hospitals around the world began to stock up on supplies, which decreased their availability. Beyond the overall turmoil brought on by the pandemic, China took additional steps to protect itself that further obstructed the supply chain.

In February, to ensure that the country had adequate domestic supply, the Chinese government took over the production and distribution of medical products. China was not the only country to do this, but because it is a leading global supplier of so many health care products — personal protective equipment (PPE) such as N95 masks, medical devices, antibiotics and pharmaceutical ingredients, to name a few — the decision had major consequences. In 2019 alone, China supplied a quarter of the entire globe’s face masks.

According to the Congressional Research Service, which earlier this year published a report on US imports of medical supplies, China exported in 2019 nearly $21 billion in pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and health care products to the US. There are no figures yet for 2020, but health care imports from China will almost certainly drop significantly.

For some products, US reliance on China was particularly high. Last year, the US imported $1.9 billion in PPE from China, about 30 percent of our total PPE imports.

China’s response is understandable; it was dealing with a significant disease outbreak. But in the US, this move kicked off shortages of PPE, as well as some medicines, and other important health care products — shortages from which we haven’t yet recovered.

Can we fix the supply problem before the pandemic ends?

China seems to have its outbreak relatively under control, and it has now somewhat eased limits on exports of medical supplies. This is good news, but the steps so far will not meet the overall increased demand.

The pandemic will continue to wreak havoc with logistics, creating bottlenecks that have slowed the movement of supplies. Pandemic restrictions, in particular physical distancing, slow down almost every part of the process, especially production. And some of our suppliers tell us that they are starting to see shortages in the raw materials they need for production, such as the material typically used to make isolation gowns. So it’s likely that health care providers will continue to rely more on domestic suppliers.

There are some benefits to this turn to US supplies. The route from factory to bedside is more stable, and providers are helping to support US workers, and the US economy.

But at the same time, the higher costs are putting pressure on health care; even before the pandemic, most providers were striving to cut budgets. Those pressures will only grow: the pandemic has increased costs at many hospitals (see: the huge increase in the costs of medical gowns), while also reducing revenue, due to the enormous number of appointments and elective procedures (which usually generate a substantial amount of health care systems’ income) that have been canceled and postponed.

So what can we do? I don’t have all the answers, and to be honest, I don’t think anyone does. The first step is to raise awareness of the problem.

On the ground, a potential solution is to return to reusable supplies. Over the past two decades, most hospitals replaced many reusable products with disposables. Johns Hopkins, and I suspect many other systems, will reconsider that choice. And we can do more to conserve supplies, using them carefully and only when necessary.

We also need to diversify our supply chains, connecting with manufacturers in India, Central America, and elsewhere. We can also focus on self-manufacturing; over the past few months, for instance, volunteers at Johns Hopkins have assembled tens of thousands of face shields. Of course, this sort of free labor is not the solution, but local supply handling could help ease the burden somewhat.

Federal and state governments can help by ensuring that domestic product manufacturers aren’t unfairly raising prices, as has apparently occurred in some places. They could also provide financial and logistical support to health care providers so they can better manage higher supply costs.

As this situation continues to evolve, the health care system and its partners will need to develop creative solutions to help ensure that hospitals can continue to afford to keep everyone safe.

Lisa Ishii, a head and neck surgeon, is the senior vice president of operations for Johns Hopkins Health System.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

President Donald Trump acknowledged Tuesday that he did not raise reports of Russian bounties on American troops during his phone call last week with President Vladimir Putin, suggesting U.S. intelligence on the matter was “fake news.”

“No, that was a phone call to discuss other things. And frankly, that’s an issue that many people said was fake news,” Trump told Axios’ Jonathan Swan.

When pressed on who specifically had used that term to describe the U.S. intelligence, Trump said: “I think a lot of people. If you look at some of the wonderful folks from the Bush administration, some of them, not any friends of mine, were saying that it’s a fake issue, but a lot of people said it’s a fake issue.”

The president did not identify which officials from former President George W. Bush’s administration had spoken dismissively of the alleged Russian bounties, which came to light last month after The New York Times first reported that U.S. intelligence officials concluded the Kremlin’s military intelligence unit offered to pay Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan to kill American troops and other coalition forces there.

Top administration officials have been inconsistent in their explanations of the extent to which Trump was briefed on the bounties, but POLITICO reported earlier this month that the White House told congressional lawmakers the relevant intelligence was included in the president’s daily written brief in late February.

Trump’s remarks Tuesday represent the White House’s first public confirmation that he did not discuss the bounties when he spoke with Putin last Thursday.

According to a White House readout of the call, the two leaders talked about “efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic while continuing to reopen global economies,” as well as “critical bilateral and global issues.”

Trump also “reiterated his hope of avoiding an expensive three-way arms race between China, Russia, and the United States and looked forward to progress on upcoming arms control negotiations in Vienna,” the White House said.

On Tuesday, Trump said he and Putin “had a call talking about nuclear proliferation, which is a very big subject where they would like to do something, and so would I. We discussed numerous things.”

But as for the alleged Russian bounties, Trump said: “I have never discussed it with him, no. I would. I have no problem with it.”

Both White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and the president have refused to comment in recent days on whether the bounties came up in the latest conversation between Trump and Putin.

At a White House briefing last Friday, McEnany told reporters she was not on the call and that the bounty intelligence “is unverified still to this day,” claiming there are “dissenting opinions within the intel community.”

“We don’t talk about what we discuss, but we had plenty of discussion, and I think it was very productive,” Trump said Monday of his conversation with Putin, during a visit to a vaccine production plant in North Carolina.

Asked about U.S. intelligence that Russia had been supplying weapons to the Taliban, Trump justified the alleged Kremlin arms program by pointing to U.S. support for Afghan fighters during the Soviet Union's war there in the 1980s.

“Well, we supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too. You know, when they were fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan,” Trump said.

Trump suggested he has not been formally briefed on intelligence suggesting that Russia was arming the Taliban — intelligence endorsed by Trump’s own former commander of U.S. and NATO-led international forces in Afghanistan, retired Army Gen. John W. Nicholson.

“I’m just saying, we did that, too,” he continued. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask Nicholson about that. He was there for a long time. Didn’t have great success because, you know, he was there before me. And then ultimately, I made a change.”

Trump said he “had heard” Russia was arming Taliban fighters, but added, “again, it’s never reached my desk.”

The president’s likening of Russian activity in Afghanistan to U.S. government actions is reminiscent of other statements Trump has issued in apparent defense of Putin’s authoritarian regime.

When he was asked in 2015 about the high-profile murders of several journalists who had been critical of the Russian leader, Trump memorably told MSNBC: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

And after Bill O’Reilly, then of Fox News, characterized Putin as a “killer” in an interview with the president in 2017, Trump responded: “You got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

More than 60 percent of voters think the U.S. should fully test any coronavirus vaccine — even if that delays rolling it out and allows the virus to keep spreading in the meantime, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

Just 22 percent of respondents said the government should make a vaccine available as soon as possible, even if it had not been fully tested. Republicans (26 percent) were slightly more likely than Democrats (21 percent) to favor getting a vaccine out as quickly as possible.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised that a vaccine will be available by year's end — raising fears among researchers and public health experts that his administration will rush to approve a shot without clear evidence that it is safe and effective.

“In the race for a highly sought-after COVID-19 vaccine, voters are not willing to sacrifice safety for expediency. Roughly two-thirds say the United States should prioritize fully testing any potential coronavirus vaccine, even if that means a delayed offering to the public and a continued spread of the virus,” said Kyle Dropp, co-founder and chief research officer at Morning Consult.

Nearly three-quarters of Republicans said they trust Trump more than Joe Biden, Democrats' presumptive presidential candidate, to oversee vaccine development. But Biden's support among Democrats (81 percent) was stronger than Trump's support among Republicans (72 percent), and Biden drew a higher proportion of Republican voters (8 percent) than Trump did Democrats (4 percent).

Overall, 44 percent of poll respondents favored Biden to lead the vaccine push, versus 33 percent who chose Trump.

The poll also reveals a gap between Republicans' and Democrats' willingness to be vaccinated. While 82 percent of respondents overall said they would take a U.S.-made shot, 24 percent of Republicans and 9 percent of Democrats said they would refuse one.

The findings raise fresh questions about the success of U.S vaccination efforts if an effective vaccine emerges — which could translate into how quickly the country could return to some level of normalcy. It is not clear how much public attitudes about a vaccine could change if a shot becomes available.

Vaccines from the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna began the final stage of clinical trials in the U.S. this week. Results that reveal whether those vaccines work are expected before the end of the year, the companies said. Two Chinese-made vaccines are also in end-stage trials overseas.

Poll respondents said they would be less likely to take a coronavirus vaccine that was made in China than one made in the U.S. Twenty-three percent said they would not take a China-made vaccine, compared to 17 percent who would turn down an American shot.

The largest group declining a China-made vaccine were those who viewed Trump “very favorably,” with 40 percent saying they would not take a vaccine made in China.

The poll did not find any major differences across ethnicities in respondents' willingness to take a coronavirus vaccine, regardless of its origin.

Seventeen percent of white respondents, 16 percent of Hispanic respondents and 20 percent of Black respondents said they would not take a U.S. vaccine. Twenty-two percent of whites respondents, 17 percent of Hispanic respondents, and 27 percent of Black respondents said they would be unwilling to take a China-made shot.

The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll was conducted online from July 24 to 26 among a national sample of 1,997 registered voters. Results from the full survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Morning Consult is a global data intelligence company, delivering insights on what people think in real time by surveying tens of thousands across the globe every single day.

More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these two documents: Toplines | Crosstabs

A federal judge’s deadline for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release children detained with their parents at migrant family jails came and went on Monday. Over 100 children, who are currently detained in facilities that Judge Dolly Gee herself said are “on fire” due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, remain detained past her deadline because her order was now apparently "unenforceable,” NBC News’ Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff explained.

“Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California said Saturday that the conditions she laid out in June as prerequisites for releasing the children from detention over COVID-19 concerns had not been met,” the report said. “Namely, the children's parents had not agreed to release them, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not agreed to release parents with their children, and another court with jurisdiction over the parents had not ordered their release.”

As advocates like immigration attorney Amy Maldonado have said, none of this has to be happening. “They could let people out tomorrow,” told Mother Jones. “They could have let people out six months ago.” Yet the Trump administration has been steadfastly against releasing children and their parents together, which is the right thing to do.

Instead, as Prism’s Tina Vasquez has reported, officials have been looking toward forcing a “binary choice” on parents that’s no choice at all: “The protocol will force parents detained alongside their children during the pandemic to choose between remaining detained in unsafe facilities where a deadly virus is spreading, or sending their children away to live with sponsors,” she wrote.

As BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month, officials may still proceed with their inhumane plan in spite of medical experts hired by the administration itself loudly warning about the traumatic effects of family separation on kids and their parents.

"That ICE is considering repeating one of the darkest moments of this administration—separating children from their families—knowing this will cause serious medical and psychological harm to children is nothing less than willful endangerment,” Dana Gold, an attorney at the Government Accountability Project who represents the experts, told BuzzFeed News. “That DHS’s own medical and mental health experts need to speak up to try to prevent this agency from inflicting imminent harm on innocent children is another grotesque example of the government ignoring its medical experts.”

ICE has insisted conditions inside facilities are safe when we know that ICE has misled the public when it comes to the pandemic. ICE’s tally of COVID-19 among detention facility employees lists only 45 confirmed cases; that number is so low because the agency isn’t counting contracted workers. In reality, more than 900 detention staffers have tested positive. “Forty-seven cases of the virus have been documented at the Karnes family detention center and one at the Dilley detention center, both located in Texas,” Mother Jones reported. “And lawyers say their clients still aren’t being adequately protected.”

What happens next to these children is unclear, and even a former Department of Homeland Security official tells Ainsley and Soboroff that what the Trump administration is doing—or refusing to do, rather—is intentional brutality: “‘It’s preposterous,’ said a former ICE official who served during both the Obama and Trump administrations. ‘There’s no reason other than cruelty.’” 

Donald Trump was given a direct one-on-one briefing on how Russia is funding Taliban militants in Afghanistan over a year ago. He received a direct daily brief on how Russia was offering bounties for the murder of American troops over five months ago. Since that date, Trump has spoken to Vladimir Putin at least eight times. That includes a call made last week, well after the public became aware that Russia has both offered, and paid out, for the murder of U.S. forces.

But in all the times he’s talked with Putin, Trump hasn’t seen fit to discuss how Russia is paying for American deaths, and for the Taliban to keep Afghanistan in turmoil so that the United States can’t withdraw its remaining forces. And in a Tuesday interview with Axios, Trump left absolutely no doubt, “I have never discussed it with him.”

White House officials are still claiming that Trump hasn’t been briefed on the Russian bounty story because the NSA disagreed with the CIA over the strength of the evidence. However, the strength of the evidence appears to be overwhelming. Not only has the United States received reports that Russia was offering Taliban militants a bounty for the murder of U.S. and allied forces, there is also direct evidence that these bounties have been paid. That includes a raid on individuals in Afghanistan who were involved in moving funds between the Kremlin and the Taliban.

Worse, the whole argument from Trump and the White House seems to be hanging on the tiniest of semantic loopholes. While White House officials claim that Trump was never briefed over the bounty program because the NSA had concerns about the evidence, it’s absolutely clear that Trump was briefed that Russia was sending funds to the Taliban. Trump has been briefed on how Russia has worked to keep the United States entangled in Afghanistan since 2017. Trump has known about Russian efforts to cost America both lives and dollars by extending that war for almost his entire term in office.

But he’s done nothing. Worse than nothing. Trump has not only repeatedly attempted to reward Russia through actions like trying to force the G7 to readmit Russia and inviting Putin to take part as a guest, he has directly provided intelligence to Russia on U.S. actions regarding the Taliban. That’s despite knowing that the Taliban and Russia were on the same team.

That leaves Trump and the White House just clutching at the word “bounty.” Sure, they were aware that Russia was supporting a terrorist organization working to destabilize Afghanistan, and that Russia was providing funding to this organization even as it was carrying out attacks on American forces, allied forces, and civilians. The idea that no one said “bounty” to Trump is the only thing they’re clutching … and based on past reporting even that is not true.

What does seem to be absolutely true is that, despite every briefing he’s been given, Trump has done nothing about Russia’s continuing efforts to conduct a proxy war in Afghanistan and keep American forces involved in a conflict that has been costly in every sense. One thing is absolutely certain: Trump knew about the program when he conducted his last series of calls with Putin, because by then the evidence of the Russian bounty program was available to the public. And still he didn’t even bother to bring it up.

Of the call to Putin conducted just last Thursday, Trump said, “We don't talk about what we discussed, but we had plenty of discussion.” Asked again why he did not bring up Russia’s interference in Afghanistan, Trump continued, “That was a phone call to discuss other things, and frankly that’s an issue that many people said was fake news.”

Trump did not apparently tell anyone what the “other things” about which they had “plenty of discussion” might be. But he was definitive that he has never, in three years and dozens of conversations, confronted Vladimir Putin over the sure knowledge that Russia is funding terrorists who are killing Americans and destabilizing a region. It might be nice to know what Trump considers more important.

One week after news outlets hailed Donald Trump's pivot to a new, more sober tone on the coronavirus, Trump literally fled the briefing room Tuesday over tough questioning about his promotion of a video of doctors making false Covid-19 claims.

The doctors’ assertions—that neither masks nor social distancing are useful deterrents of coronavirus—were so egregious, in fact, that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all took down the video, according to the Washington Post. And one of those supposed medical experts was Stella Immanuel, who has previously claimed that doctors make medicine from alien DNA and the uterine disorder endometriosis is the result of women having sex with demons in their dreams—aka, the ‘demon sperm’ doc. Hoo boy.

Trump, who recirculated the video Monday night in multiple tweets that have since been deleted, defended it at Tuesday's task force briefing. “I think they’re very respected doctors. There was a woman who was spectacular," he said, without specifying which one.

But CNN's Kaitlan Collins doubled back on the topic of Immanuel, who also touted the zero-evidence claim that hydroxychloroquine is a “cure for Covid.”

"The woman that you said is ‘a great doctor’ in that video that you retweeted last night said that masks don’t work and there is a cure for COVID-19—both of which health experts say is not true," Collins said to Trump. "She’s also made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens and that they’re trying to create a vaccine to make you immune from becoming religious. So what’s the logic in retweeting that?"

Trump questioned whether it was same woman. “Well maybe it’s the same, maybe it’s not," he said, "but I can tell you this. She was on air, along with many other doctors, they were big fans of hydroxychloroquine. And I thought she was very impressive, in the sense that from where she came—I don’t know which country she comes from—but she said that she’s had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients and I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her.”

But when reporters persisted in asking Trump about his push for mask wearing last week, he abruptly ended the briefing—as in, ran for cover.

Guess what? Trump's not going to win over the suburbs touting the hydroxychloroquine claims of a woman who promotes alien DNA cures and warns of demon sperm.

Watch Trump crash and burn.

Amid a national reckoning on the injustices faced by Black Americans, Congress has so far agreed on just one response: Study the problem.

The House this week approved a bill to create a first-of-its-kind federal commission to examine the impact of systemic racism on Black men and boys — a long-time priority of the Congressional Black Caucus that gained momentum after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in May.

The bill, which now goes to President Donald Trump’s desk after passing the Senate last month, is expected to become the first piece of legislation signed into law as a result of months of protests over police brutality. But some fear that it could be the last, at least until after the November election.

“This is an important first step in the right direction,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries said in a brief interview after the bill passed Monday. “Much more will need to be done, consistent with the bills that have already been acted upon by the House.”

Democrats and Republicans have hailed the 19-member commission as a long-overdue way to begin tackling decades of lingering racism toward Black men, starting with policy recommendations across the government. The group, hand-picked by leaders in Congress and the administration, would look broadly at disparities on everything from incarceration rates and drug abuse to school performance and health.

Many lawmakers acknowledge that the legislation isn’t enough to address protesters’ demands for an immediate overhaul of the nation’s law enforcement practices. But with Republican leaders resisting Democratic proposals for broad reforms, the commission is likely to be the most far-reaching policy to go into effect in the coming months.

Still, the legislation could have a long-term impact.

“It’s a very progressive and aggressive bill,” Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), the bill’s long-time champion, said in an interview, adding that it’s intended to look at the deep-rooted effects of racism in the lives of Black men and boys, and not just policing. It would be housed within the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“When people approach a Black boy on the street, they cross the street. If a Black man gets in an elevator, people get off,” Wilson said. “All of these systemic racist scenarios as it relates to being a Black man and existing in America make me want to scream.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who shepherded the bill on the Senate side, said the forum created to discuss these issues “could turn out to be very meaningful.”

“People will look at commissions and kind of roll their eyes,” he added. “But the various factors that are contributing to the academic, economic, societal underperformance, typically among African American boys and men, needs to be better understood.”

The commission, while an accomplishment for a Congress that seems to agree on little these days, is a far cry from the sweeping changes lawmakers in both chambers were pursuing in June, as the nationwide racial injustice protests dominated the news.

But that momentum quickly came to a halt after the Senate failed to advance a bill in late June — likely dooming any meaningful action on police reform until after the election or next year. Once again, a Congress that only seems to function when facing a deadline-fueled crisis, failed to answer the calls of Americans demanding change.

While protesters are still in the streets of many major cities, lawmakers have quickly pivoted to the next looming crisis — in this case, the latest coronavirus rescue package. But even that effort is sputtering as Senate Republicans continue to bicker over their own proposal and the parties remain far apart.

Democrats say key lawmakers, led by CBC Chairwoman Karen Bass, are privately still trying to enact more sweeping police reforms after this summer’s stalemate. But several lawmakers and aides are skeptical that a bipartisan agreement can be reached and signed into law anytime soon.

In the meantime, the House and Senate have turned to a less contentious option — the commission — which was opposed by just a single lawmaker in both chambers: GOP Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama.

Wilson, the bill’s original author, said she hopes the council will focus on some of the issues addressed in the House Democrats’ policing bill, like the use of chokeholds by police. The CBC would likely have power over the direction of the commission, given that a half-dozen of its members, including its chair, would sit on the panel.

The House’s sweeping policing bill, named after George Floyd, sought to end racial profiling in law enforcement and curb the use of force through provisions like a ban on chokeholds and “no-knock” warrants, stronger data collection on misconduct, and limits on the use of military equipment.

Senate Republicans, meanwhile, had written a bill to incentivize local police departments to refrain from tactics like chokeholds, but without strict requirements. That bill, largely drafted by the GOP’s lone Black senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, was ultimately blocked by Senate Democrats, who said it was crafted without their input and didn’t go anywhere near far enough.

Wilson, a former school administrator, has spearheaded the idea of a commission on Black men and boys since her days on the Miami-Dade county school board nearly 30 years ago. Eventually, she took her fight to the state legislature and helped enact a state-wide model with the help of Republicans like Rubio, who was then speaker of the Florida House.

This year, Rubio introduced the companion version of Wilson’s bill alongside Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). It was unanimously approved by the Senate in late June, shortly after the Senate GOP’s police reform efforts collapsed.

The House passed its version of the commission bill on July 27, the same day that the late Rep. John Lewis — who had also long advocated for the measure — lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

“For me, it was like an out of body experience that this bill was passing as John was being transported to lie in state in the Capitol,” Wilson said. “It was a chilling confluence of events.”

Marianne Levine contributed to this report.

A highly anticipated forthcoming report from U.S. Attorney John Durham on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation won’t trigger a Justice Department policy against interference in the 2020 presidential race, so the review could be released in the weeks leading up to the November election, Attorney General William Barr indicated to Congress Tuesday.

“I will be very careful. I know what Justice Department policy is,” Barr said during a long-awaited appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. “Any report will be, in my judgment, not one that is covered by the policy and would disrupt the election.”

When asked directly by Rep. Debbie Murcasel-Powell (D-Fla.) whether he would commit to not releasing a report from Durham between now and November, the attorney general flatly declined.

“No,” Barr replied.

In an interview last month with Fox Business Network, Barr said he hoped for some action from Durham this summer, but suggested the coronavirus pandemic had complicated Durham’s work.

“In terms of the future of Durham’s investigation, he’s pressing ahead as hard as he can, and I expect that we will have some developments, hopefully before the end of the summer,” Barr said then.

The Justice Department has historically sought to avoid taking overt investigative steps that could roil an election in the 60 days before Election Day. However, the policy has largely been an informal one, marked by generalized warnings not to take steps that could have political fallout, but no outright ban.

Just weeks before Election Day in 2016, for instance, then FBI director James Comey informed Congress that the bureau was reviewing a newly discovered batch of emails from Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. Though the review did not ultimately alter the FBI’s view that Clinton should not be prosecuted, Democrats widely blame Comey for re-injecting the email issue into the final stretch of the campaign in contravention of DOJ policy.

Barr’s remarks during the House hearing suggest he is taking a narrow view of that policy and may view it as only applicable to investigative steps leading to possible prosecution, not to an investigative report that could have a major impact on the campaign but doesn’t accuse any candidate of wrongdoing.

During the exchange with Murcasel-Powell, Barr referenced a statement he made in May, throwing cold water on the expectations some Republicans had raised that Durham’s report could lead to criminal indictments of top Democratic figures like President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden—the expected Democratic presidential nominee this fall.

“Whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others,” Barr told a news conference then.

In February, Barr issued a memo requiring high-level approvals at the Justice Department before any investigations are opened into presidential or vice presidential candidates, campaigns or their top advisers, as well as House and Senate candidates. The memo was at least in part a response to a Justice Department inspector general review that found investigations into Trump campaign advisers and aides had been opened by the FBI without approval from or immediate notification to Justice Department headquarters—something that was not formally required at the time.

Barr’s February memo says it should be “broadly construed,” but it is not clear whether it covers something like the investigative report Durham is believed to be preparing. Such reports are not common at the federal level, although prosecutors have sometimes explained why no charges were filed in high-profile cases. In any event, Barr’s memo doesn’t prohibit announcements that could upend an election. The directive is largely aimed at ensuring such events don’t catch senior DOJ officials by surprise and Barr has made clear that he’s closely monitoring Durham’s work.

Barr tapped Durham in May 2019 to look into issues related to how the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race began and the decisions to focus on various Trump allies. Durham is also known to have received referrals of potential criminal conduct DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found during the review he released last December of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications related to Trump adviser Carter Page. Officials have said Durham has used a grand jury to gather evidence, but it is unclear whether any direct witnesses to the events have been called to testify.

Some Trump backers have predicted the Durham probe will deliver a thunderclap that could upend the presidential race, but Barr has seemed at times to downplay those predictions. The lack of news in recent months about Durham’s progress has led Republicans to express frustration, even at the House hearing Tuesday.

“It’s been slow,” complained Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, who is running for Senate there. “I think the Durham investigation is something most of us were waiting for.”

But when Collins pressed for details on whether any FBI officials or others were cooperating with Durham’s probe, Barr demurred. “I cannot
get into that,” he said.

During the five-hour-long hearing, Barr said some of the decisions he has made have been beneficial for Biden, including a move to insist that all new investigations related to Ukraine be approved by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Republicans, including Trump, have accused the former vice president of corruption for his dealings relating to Ukraine. No evidence has emerged of wrongdoing on Biden’s part, but his son Hunter has said it was a mistake for him to take a lucrative board post with a Ukrainian company while his father was president.

At the hearing, Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Col.) suggested Barr was centralizing handling of the Ukraine probes to settle political scores, but the attorney general insisted that was not the reason.

“That is a vetting process. … It was cautionary, so that we do not pollute the criminal investigative process with Ukrainian disinformation,” Barr said. “We face a problem with Ukraine which is unreliable information coming in. There’s a lot of corruption there. It’s a hall of mirrors. And I wanted to make sure that before we got into criminal proceedings—and this was to everyone’s benefit, particularly Vice President Biden—that the information was scrubbed in conjunction with the intelligence community."

Several top Democrats are tearing into Senate Republicans' draft coronavirus relief legislation for proposing another $30 billion in defense spending, saying the bill's provisions prioritize buying weapons over aiding unemployed Americans during the pandemic.

The $1 trillion GOP package, released last night, includes billions for the Pentagon to buy more fighters, ships and combat vehicles, among other assets.

"While doing nothing to address rising hunger or provide payroll protection for state and local workers in critical jobs, Senate Republicans are splurging on weapons procurement," House Appropriations Chair Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.

"Amphibious ships don’t feed hungry children, and the Senate Republican bill doesn’t meet the desperate needs of the American people," she added.

The criticism from Lowey and other Democrats indicate that billions more for weapons programs will likely be a source of friction with the House — in addition to deep divides between the parties on unemployment benefits, aid to state and local governments and liability protection for businesses and schools. A $3 trillion relief bill passed by House Democrats in May didn't include any additional defense funding.

The GOP relief legislation sets aside $29.4 billion for the Defense Department and to cover pandemic-related costs to the defense industry. Of that, approximately $11 billion covers reimbursements made to contractors who provide paid or sick leave to employees who can't access federal facilities during the pandemic, which was mandated in March under the CARES Act.

But critics have trained their fire on a separate provision that sets aside more than $8 billion for procurement and other acquisition funding for major weapons programs.

Of that total, the Senate GOP bill includes $686 million for more Lockheed Martin F-35A fighters for the Air Force, $720 million for C-130J transport planes and $650 million to replace the wings on A-10 jets. It also sets aside $1 billion for the Navy to purchase more Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance planes.

The legislation also allocates an extra $2.2 billion for Navy shipbuilding, including $1.4 billion for four new expeditionary medical ships, $260 million for the Expeditionary Fast Transport and $250 million for amphibious warships.

It also adds $800 million for National Guard and Reserve equipment accounts.

Though the bill states the funding for each program is "to prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus, domestically or internationally," it is unclear what link each specific weapons program has to pandemic aid.

In some areas, the programs that would receive funding had been cut in February when the Pentagon diverted money toward President Donald Trump's border wall effort. That includes Guard and Reserve equipment accounts and the Expeditionary Fast Transport, which is built by Austal USA in Mobile, Ala., which is Senate Appropriations Chair Richard Shelby's home state.

House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) accused Senate GOP leaders of attempting to capitalize on the urgency of the pandemic to replenish weapons accounts raided for the border wall while opposing more generous jobless benefits "in the name of fiscal responsibility."

"While it is true that COVID-19 poses a real and credible threat to our national security, you don’t have to be doctor or a four-star general to understand that spending billions on new helicopters, combat vehicles, and fighter jets is not the solution to this complex problem," Smith said in a statement.

The move to beef up weapons programs was derided by Democrats and progressive groups who have opposed more military money after lawmakers granted the Pentagon an extra $10 billion to help battle the pandemic.

"I forgot about that new feature in F-35s where they feed families & pay rent," Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted Monday evening after the bill's release.

A spokesperson for Shelby defended the chairman's approach, arguing the measure will bolster the industrial base at a tenuous time.

"The pandemic continues to threaten the defense industrial base and thousands of vulnerable suppliers across the country who support it. That puts thousands and thousands of jobs in jeopardy," Shelby spokesperson Alyssa Pettus said in a statement. "The Chairman believes Congress must act, not turn a blind eye."

On the Senate floor Tuesday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer slammed the measure as a "wish list for defense contractors."

"Who are the Republicans fighting for in this proposal? If you're a big bank, a defense contractor, a member of the Trump family, the Republican proposal has some good news for you," Schumer said. "But if you can barely afford the rent, can't find work, can't feed your kids or are fighting [for] your family's future, the Republican plan leaves you out in the cold."

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Senate Appropriations Democrat, also dinged the extra defense spending, as well as a proposal for $1.75 billion for a new FBI headquarters building in Washington, D.C., saying "the bill contains billions of dollars for programs unrelated to the coronavirus."

"What does this have to do with the immediate crisis?" he asked.

Republicans and Democrats must still hammer out the differences in their bills before a new round of economic relief can go to Trump's desk.

votefwd.org/...Along with toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and canned goods flying off the shelves during the initial panic surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, firearms surged as well. In fact, the surge in gun sales across the country was unprecedented, and symbolized the kind of shoot first think later ideology Americans have become so well known for. In March, more than 2 million guns were sold, shattering previous records. The sales marked a “64.3 percent increase over what would have been expected based on previous years.”

Now, the University of California Davis is releasing research—not yet peer-reviewed—on those gun sales, and their possible connection to rising gun violence during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, while over 2 million new firearms were purchased “there were 633 excess gun-inflicted injuries—a 17.7 percent increase over expected levels.”

Surprisingly, none of the excess gun-inflicted injuries included anyone shooting the COVID-19 virus itself dead. It turns out that guns are virtually useless in the fight against a virus. This will likely come as a shock to the many MAGA types that believe COVID-19 is like the seasonal flu, though coincidentally, the seasonal flu is also immune to firearms. Not immune to guns and bullets are people trying to stop COVIDiots with guns and no masks from entering enclosed spaces and endangering the public. 

The Trace reports that the UC Davis research team plans on updating their findings to include increases in sales and violence through June. This goes with other similar findings over the years, including the link between gun store prevalence and higher suicide rates.

We need to turn out Democratic voters to defeat Trump in November, even during a pandemic. You can help out from home, no matter where you live, by writing personalized letters to infrequent, but Democratic-leaning, voters in swing states. Click here to set up an account with Vote Forward, the most popular get-out-the-vote activity among Daily Kos activists.

DACA recipients and their supporters rally outside the US Supreme Court on June 18, 2020, in Washington, DC.  | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

DREAMers are facing limbo yet again as Trump explores ending DACA for a second time.

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is considering trying again to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and will not be accepting new applications from immigrants who hope to gain its protections, throwing the future of hundreds of thousands young immigrants who came to the US as children into doubt.

The Supreme Court ruled on June 18 that President Donald Trump couldn’t end the program, which has allowed almost 700,000 unauthorized immigrants known as “DREAMers” to live and work in the US free from fear of deportation, without a more robust rationale. In the weeks since that decision, the administration had remained silent as to whether it would consequently start accepting new applications for the program, causing confusion among those who have been waiting for years for a chance to apply.

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, clarified Tuesday that the administration is reviewing the policy further and may well move forward with ending the program. In the meantime, it will impose new restrictions on applicants — a move that immigrant advocates say is a blatant violation of the Supreme Court’s decision.

That review will examine the legality of the DACA program, which former President Barack Obama created via executive order in 2012, and its impact on immigration trends, a senior administration official told reporters.

“I have concluded that the DACA policy, at a minimum, presents serious policy concerns that may warrant its full rescission,” Wolf wrote in a policy memorandum issued Tuesday. “At the same time, I have concluded that fully rescinding the policy would be a significant administration decision that warrants additional careful consideration.”

In the meantime, the administration will reject all new DACA applications and related applications for work permits, as well as halve the period for which renewals will be valid from two years to just one year. It will also reject most new and pending requests for advanced parole, which allows DACA recipients to travel outside the US for humanitarian, education, or employment purposes.

Approximately 66,000 people have become eligible for the program since 2017, when Trump first tried to rescind the program and stopped accepting new applications. They may have previously missed out because they hadn’t completed the educational requirements or joined the military.

The decision makes DACA a key immigration issue in this fall’s presidential election. It’s not likely that the Trump administration could end DACA entirely before the election or even Inauguration Day in 2021. But if Trump wins a second term, time would be on his side. And even if he leaves office, the only way that DREAMers, including those who have long waited for a chance to apply for DACA, can get assurance of their right to remain in the US is if Congress intervenes.

The DACA program remains popular among both Republicans and Democrats: even 69 percent of Trump voters support protections for DREAMers, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll. But the move suggests Trump is again resorting to restrictive immigration policies as a means of rallying his base.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has vowed to restore DACA and resume accepting new applications. He would also try to work with Congress to pass permanent protections for DREAMers.

“Make no mistake, the vast popularity of the program, combined with a looming election, prevented Trump from immediately ending the program,” Andrea Flores, deputy director of immigration policy for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “But this policy memo makes his intentions clear: His next move is a complete end to the DACA program to destroy the lives of Dreamers once again.”

Immigrant advocates say Trump is obligated to accept new DACA applications

Most people who are granted DACA maintain their status for two years, after which they can apply to renew in additional two-year increments indefinitely. They typically apply while they are still in school or after graduating from high school so that they can obtain a work permit and get a job or attend university.

Immigrant advocates have argued that the Trump administration has been openly defying the Supreme Court’s decision and other court orders, issuing rejection notices to those who tried to newly apply for DACA status. (It has been accepting renewals.)

Lawyers for DACA recipients who had challenged Trump’s initial decision to end the program back in 2017 recently told a New York federal judge that they were concerned that administration officials were ignoring the Supreme Court’s “unambiguous decision and their legal obligations” in refusing to process new applications. And House Democrats Zoe Lofgren and Jerrold Nadler penned a letter to Trump claiming that his failure to resume processing new DACA applications constituted “illegal usurpation of authority in violation of the separation of powers.”

A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration on July 17 to begin processing new applications, finding that the Supreme Court’s ruling restored the program to its status before Trump tried to terminate it in September 2017.

US District Judge Ryan Grimm didn’t set a deadline for the administration to comply, but he is moving forward with a hearing addressing the question of whether he should hold the administration in contempt. And in a recent telephonic briefing, he criticized the administration for failing to clarify its policies with regard to new DACA applications in a timely manner.

“It creates a feeling and a belief that the agency is disregarding binding decisions by appellate and the Supreme Court,” he said. “There is a cost for not having these things clarified, and the plaintiffs have borne the lion’s share of that cost thus far.”

But a senior administration official said Tuesday that Grimm didn’t have the final say given that there remains pending litigation over new DACA applications in other federal courts.

Trump could rescind DACA without Congress’s help

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump claimed that he still wanted to end the program and would submit new paperwork backing up that decision. He accused the justices on Twitter of punting the DACA issue, which has been the subject of contentious legislative debate for the better part of a decade.

It’s not clear exactly how he intends to end the program. He could do so without Congress’s help, but he said during a press conference at the White House on Tuesday that he also intends to work with Congress on creating a “merit-based system” for immigration. He didn’t elaborate further on what that meant, but he has previously described such a system as one that prioritizes high-earners and skilled workers over those with family ties to the US.

The administration could terminate DACA using the same method it employed in 2017: The Department of Homeland Security could issue another memo. Trump could also issue an executive order terminating DACA. But either method would likely be challenged and swiftly blocked in federal court, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell Law School. Whether, and how quickly, the administration could defend its policy on appeal remains an open question.

The justices wrote in their opinion that if they wanted their decision to survive in the courts, the administration would have to address why it decided not to partially roll back protections for DACA recipients — such as taking away their work authorization but still shielding them from deportation. It’s not clear whether the Trump administration has any interest in more narrowly revoking their protections, but even so, it would be devastating for DREAMers to lose their ability to work in the US.

The administration would also have to address why the interests of DACA recipients, who have relied on the program since 2012, do not outweigh the administration’s interests in terminating the program. DACA recipients have been settled in the US for years — some arriving before they were old enough to remember — and have earned degrees and established careers and families here. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has expressed concern that DACA could face litigation because it alleges the program was created illegally via executive action.

Alternatively, the administration could try terminating DACA via the regulatory process, which would put termination on stronger legal footing. But the entire process could last months, if not years, requiring that officials draft and issue a proposed rule, solicit comments from the public, and address those comments before publishing a final rule.

“Neither alternative is likely to terminate the DACA program before the presidential election in November,” Yale-Loehr said. “This makes the election even more important than before. If President Trump wins reelection, he will have another four years to try to terminate the DACA program.”

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We begin this week with baseball again, although not in the way that we had hoped. In light of the news that more than a dozen personnel of the Miami Marlins have tested positive for COVID-19, we examine what went wrong (traveling in big groups across state lines is probably not a great idea right now), what structures need to be in place to prevent this from happening again (maybe don’t let the players and coaches decide if they want to play?) and what the team outbreak means for other major sports leagues (grab your bubble wand, NFL). This might not be the tipping point for baseball — or for any other sport, really. But it’s a warning again for how easily the virus can spread out of control and wreak real havoc on teams, leagues and individuals. You know, like a virus.

Next, we travel to the Great White North, where the NHL is set to play a postseason tournament at two hub locations; the Eastern Conference will form a bubble in Toronto, the Western Conference in Edmonton. There were definitely going to be teams disadvantaged by hockey’s unconventional postseason restructuring: a round robin for playoff seeding among the top four teams in each conference and best-of-five elimination series among the other eight teams. The odds for who will actually hoist the Stanley Cup haven’t changed that dramatically since March — the Boston Bruins, Colorado Avalanche and Tampa Bay Lightning are all still the favorites. But hockey can get weird, and we’re excited to see if, without any kind of home ice advantage, a No. 8 seed can make a deep run through the playoffs. Whatever happens, the NHL seems to have positioned itself to put on an entertaining show this year — and to draw in new hockey fans who might be excited for the release of, say, a legendary, ship-devouring cephalopod in 2021.

Finally, Sara brings us a Rabbit Hole of extra innings and unearned stats. While she starts off talking about how starting with a runner on second in the 10th inning has already proved embarrassing (especially for Shohei Ohtani), the team dives into examples across sports of players being credited for something they didn’t do. From offensive players getting credit for a defensive own goal in hockey to rim tip-ins in basketball, there are apparently lots of different ways to fail upwards in sports.

What we’re looking at this week:

• What led the Marlins to play the Phillies after players tested positive.
• Why the NFL may want to reconsider starting a bubble.
• How the NHL is changing the look and feel of hockey games.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

When it comes to abusing power to, for instance, steal a Supreme Court seat, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is aces. When it comes to legislating, not so much. 

After wasting more than two months since House Democrats first passed their $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill, McConnell and the White House put their heads together to produce a bill so indefensible, GOP senators are running away from it like a burning building. 

In fact, the morning after the bill went public, McConnell couldn't even defend his own bill with a straight face. When he was asked why it included a $1.75 billion-dollar provision to relocate the eyesore of an FBI building that sits a block away from Trump International Hotel, McConnell played dumb.

"Uh, I'm not sure that it is, is it?" McConnell responded. After being informed that it was, he downgraded the bill to "a starting place" that could be built upon.  

"We can't pass a bill in the Senate without Democrats," he acknowledged. "The Republicans are in the majority in the Senate, this is the starting place." That sure oozes confidence—yeah, our bill kind of sucks and Democrats are going to have to bail us out. 

As for the couple-billion dollar gift to Trump, McConnell immediately pointed his finger at the White House. "They'll have to answer the question on why they insisted on that provision," he offered.

That was the high point for the bill. Immediately after, Senate Republicans started dropping like flies.

Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana stood up at the GOP caucus luncheon and demanded to know what was in the bill. “I want to know what's in the bill. That's number one," Kennedy said. “I’m not going to vote for something in the name of unity when I don’t know what’s in the damn thing.”

Not sure why Kennedy is suddenly objecting to blindly supporting things in the name of unity, but kudos to McConnell for making that possible.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri also said he wasn't "inclined" to support it, adding, "It's a mess." And Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska noted, “There are a hundred problems with the plan.” Oh.

But forget three defections—it's more like a giant boatload is coming. "If Mitch can get half the conference, that'd be quite an accomplishment," predicted Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina Tuesday morning. 

By Tuesday afternoon, McConnell was already disavowing pieces of his own bill. "I am opposed to non-germane amendments" he told reporters, specifically naming the FBI building provision. "When we get to the end of the process, I would hope all of the non-covid-related measures are out."

So let's get this straight: McConnell piddled around for nearly three months, then hustled together a dodgy bill that half his caucus hates, leaving him dependent on Democrats for more than half the votes to pass it—and yet he entirely excluded Democrats from the initial discussions?

Meanwhile, the health and welfare of millions of American households hang in the balance while McConnell bombs his legislating 101 class. Seriously, has Speaker Nancy Pelosi ever introduced a bill only to disavow it hours later as her members flee like rats from pesticide?

The answer to that is a hard “no.” Because even though she has a much more diverse caucus than McConnell, Pelosi actually knows how to legislate. Even when internal disagreements occur, she manages to smooth most of them over behind closed doors. And she doesn't introduce bills before they're ready for prime time.

McConnell’s never been good at legislating because it requires actual negotiation instead of simply jamming things down people’s throats. 

Watch McConnell downgrade his own bill in real time—how embarrassing. 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Two theoretical physicists specializing in complex systems conclude that global deforestation due to human activities is on track to trigger the "irreversible collapse" of human civilization within the next two to four decades. If we continue destroying and degrading the world's forests, Earth will no longer be able to sustain a large human population, according to a peer-reviewed paper published this May in Nature Scientific Reports. They say that if the rate of deforestation continues, "all the forests would disappear approximately in 100-200 years." "Clearly it is unrealistic to imagine that the human society would start to be affected by the deforestation only when the last tree would be cut down," they write. This trajectory would make the collapse of human civilization take place much earlier due to the escalating impacts of deforestation on the planetary life-support systems necessary for human survival -- including carbon storage, oxygen production, soil conservation, water cycle regulation, support for natural and human food systems, and homes for countless species. In the absence of these critical services, "it is highly unlikely to imagine the survival of many species, including ours, on Earth without [forests]" the study points out. "The progressive degradation of the environment due to deforestation would heavily affect human society and consequently the human collapse would start much earlier." The paper is written by career physicists Dr Gerardo Aquino, a research associate at the Alan Turing Institute in London currently working on political, economic and cultural complex system modeling to predict conflicts; and Professor Mauro Bologna of the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of Tarapaca in Chile. "Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilization," the paper concludes. "In conclusion our model shows that a catastrophic collapse in human population, due to resource consumption, is the most likely scenario of the dynamical evolution based on current parameters... we conclude from a statistical point of view that the probability that our civilization survives itself is less than 10 percent in the most optimistic scenario. Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilization."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Attorney General William Barr is testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. He is being questioned for his many anti-democratic actions and abuses of power as the chief law enforcement officer in the country. Barr has somehow made Jeff Sessions, a heinous white supremacist himself, seem less of a white supremacist by comparison. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington questioned the attorney general today in an exchange worth noting.

With the backdrop of wildly inappropriate federal secret military police interventions in Black Lives Matter-inspired political protests, Barr attempted to defend his racist and hypocritical position against a real leader, who I wish could be president of the United States, in Rep. Jayapal. Rep. Jayapal was not going to let Barr play the neckless dictator he wants to be, and slammed him for his transparent racist and totalitarian stance on the Black Lives Matter movement and the mind-bending federal interventions in places like Portland. Jayapal began by once again reminding Barr of his anti-democratic actions in the nation’s Capitol, when he organized a gestapo-like use of force to clear the Washington, D.C. streets in order to allow Donald Trump the opportunity to desecrate a bible for a photo op. From there she compared the Barr reaction to peaceful protesters in D.C. to less peaceful, but almost entirely armed white male protesters in Michigan.

REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Let's look at how you respond when the protesters are supporters of the president. On two separate occasions after president Trump tweeted “liberate Michigan” to subvert stay home orders to protect the health of people in Michigan, protesters swarmed the Michigan capitol carrying guns, some with swastikas, Confederate flags, and one even with a dark-haired doll with a noose around its neck. Are you aware that these protesters called for the governor to be lynched, shot, and beheaded?

ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR: No.

REP. JAYAPAL: You're not aware of that?

AG BARR: I was not aware of that.

REP. JAYAPAL: Major protests in Michigan, you're the attorney general and you didn't know that the protesters called for the governor to be lynched, shot, and beheaded. So obviously you couldn't be concerned about that.

Barr isn’t a smart man. You don’t have to be smart to be in our current government. You just have to lack scruples and be willing to cravenly grovel at the every whim of a pathological narcissistic sociopath. Barr has nothing to stand on and repeats the weak sauce argument of a true coward, saying “Well, there are a lot of protests around the United States, and on June 1st, I was worried about the District of Columbia, which is federal.” 

Jayapal has made her point and from here she drives it home, steamrolling over Barr’s bullshit attempt to interrupt and waste the entire world’s time.

REP. JAYAPAL:--In certain parts of the country, you're aware of those. But when protesters with guns ...

BARR:--I am aware of protests --

REP. JAYAPAL:— Excuse me, Mr. Barr. This is my time and I control it. You are aware of certain kinds of protesters, but in Michigan, when protesters carry guns and confederate flags and swastikas and call for the governor of Michigan to be beheaded and shot and lynched, somehow you're not aware of that. Somehow you didn't know about it. So you didn't send federal agents in to do to the president's supporters what you did to the president's protesters. In fact, you didn't -- you didn't put pepper balls on those protesters. So the point I'm trying to make here Mr. Barr, that I think is important for the country to understand, is that there is a real discrepancy in how you react as the attorney general, the top cop in this country, when white men with swastikas storm a government building with guns, there is no need for the president to quote, “activate you.” Because they're getting the president's personal agenda done. But when Black people and people of color protest police brutality, systemic racism, and the president's very own lack of response to those critical issues, then you forcibly remove them with armed federal officers, pepper bombs, because they are considered terrorists by the president. You take an aggressive approach to Black Lives Matter protests but not to right-wing extremists threatening to lynch a governor if it's for the president's benefit. Did I get it right, Mr. Barr?

Barr responded with a super sad attempt to reiterate his job description as he saw it, the lap dog of Donald Trump, but Jayapal cut him off to make sure what Barr was revealing to anyone paying attention.

JAYAPAL: Mr. Barr, let me make it clear: You are supposed to represent the people of the United States not violate people's First Amendment rights. You are supposed to uphold democracy and secure equal justice under the law, not violently dismantle certain protesters based on the president's personal agenda.

With that, Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s time expired. Jayapal had a study showing that mail-in voter fraud does not exist, entered into the Judiciary Committee record, and just like that, as with every time she speaks, America was a better, smarter, and more hopeful place.

House Republicans have had Donald Trump's back at every turn. When they were still in the majority, they did his bidding on health care repeal (though it stalled in the Senate), on tax cuts for the rich and wealthy, and particularly on the Russia probe. As Robert Mueller's team silently worked its investigation, House Republicans eagerly compromised national security to skewer and undermine the probe at every turn. 

But now that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is looking for money to help his caucus stay competitive with Democrats this cycle, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee (RNC) are nowhere to be found.

McCarthy has begged the RNC for financial help "multiple times," according to The Washington Post, and he's also directly asked grifter-in-law Jared Kushner for a donation from the Trump campaign. But while the RNC and the Trump campaign are both awash in cash, none of it is headed toward the House GOP.

Of course, Trump's plummeting approvals are a big part of the reason House Republicans are in such a predicament. Trump has virtually ensured that whatever slim chance they had of reclaiming the majority is entirely dead now. And that's exactly why Kushner—who has extra sway with both the campaign and the RNC—has so far left them to fend for themselves.

Trump's campaign committees and the RNC started the month with $295 million cash on hand, more than twice what Barack Obama had at this time in 2012, according to the Post.

RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel claimed that no final decisions had been made and, presumably, the organization has some investment in not letting House Republicans take such a beating that they'll spend the next decade clawing their way back. 

But Trump and Kushner are a whole different beast. Even Trump seems to see himself as a short-timer and, frankly, when have they ever given away money to anyone or anything? Even Trump's now-defunct charity was never anything more than a front for money-laundering. They've also never been long-ball hitters for the Republican Party, so they have no allegiance to its well-being, particularly if they might not be around in several months. 

“The campaign just wants the money. . . . They don’t care about the House — it’s not their concern,” one official close to the Trump campaign told the Post.

What's even better is that dozens of House Republicans who are cruising to reelection have contributed money from their campaign committees to Trump's reelection—at his request. It's rather unusual, actually, since presidents usually labor to help their congressional counterparts rather than the other way around. And yet, the House GOP can't squeeze a penny out of him. 

Topping it all off, Democrats are crushing the House GOP in fundraising, putting them in position to actually grow their majority this fall. "The DCCC’s 42 most-vulnerable front-line members have an average 5-to-1 cash advantage over their GOP opponents. Additionally, 30 Democratic challengers out-raised their Republican foes in the second quarter of 2020, putting the party in a prime position to grow their ranks in the House," writes the Post.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair, Rep. Cheri Bustos, poured a little salt in the wound, observing, “Washington Republicans have learned the hard way that encouraging people to drink bleach doesn’t make for the most effective fundraising pitch." Oof. The DCCC is currently sitting on a $33 million advantage some 100 days out from the election.

To sum up: House Republicans had Trump's back—and now he's dooming them at the polls and won't cough up any money to ease the blow, even as House Democrats raise money hand over fist. 

It's exactly the kind of send-off lawmakers who turn their backs on their country and betray their oaths of office deserve. 

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The revised second edition includes some scribbled notes about emotional availability and a 20% larger cheese.

Today's News:

In a tweetstorm late Monday, Donald Trump retweeted and shared a viral video of quack doctors touting the dangerous and potentially lethal anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for COVID-19. Some of Trump’s tweets (more than a dozen pushed false claims about hydroxychloroquine) were removed by Twitter and the video was taken down by Facebook, but not before millions saw it. In one video, Dr. Stella Immanuel, said “you don’t need a mask” and said she was treating people with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromax.

ICYMI: Indict Trump for Negligent Homicide

In the tweets, Trump suggested “the use of hydroxychloroquine to tackle COVID-19 is being suppressed in order to keep deaths high and the economy shutdown ahead of November’s election.”

“The tweets also ramped up Trump’s attack on Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),” PharmaPhorum reports.

The Daily Beast reports: “The video, which also featured the doctors dismissing mask-wearing, was eventually taken down by Facebook for “sharing false information” about the virus, after racking up millions of views in a matter of hours. Several right-wing outlets and personalities, however, continued to promote the clip of the doctors’ press conference on Twitter, eventually reaching the president’s timeline. Besides retweeting the clip several times, Trump—who recently said his retweets tend to get him “in trouble”—went on to share several other posts promoting hydroxychloroquine, which the FDA has rescinded for emergency use for the virus.”

These folks are calling themselves "America's Frontline Doctors" and they just started a website on July 15. While several of the people are indeed doctors, the group is made up of quite a cast of characters: anti-vax activists, https://t.co/woG5qFkTWA

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) July 28, 2020

Dr. Stella Immanuel is a minister. A random sermon: "How long are we going to allow the gay agenda, secular humanism, Illuminati and the demonic New World Order to destroy our homes, families and the social fiber of America." https://t.co/hHd1Pt20PE https://t.co/fZwd4sChgH

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) July 28, 2020

Stella Immanuel, the “doctor” seen in the video above, raged at Facebook after it deleted her quack advice.

Hello Facebook put back my profile page and videos up or your computers with start crashing till you do. You are not bigger that God. I promise you. If my page is not back up face book will be down in Jesus name.

— Stella Immanuel MD (@stella_immanuel) July 28, 2020

More on Immanuel, from The Daily Beast: “She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches. She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by ‘reptilians’ and other aliens.”

The post Trump Shares Video of Quack ‘Doctors’ Touting COVID ‘Cure’, Saying ‘You Don’t Need a Mask’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The New York Yankees were apparently unaware that Donald Trump had scheduled himself to throw out the first pitch at an August 15 game so it took them by surprise when he canceled it via Twitter this week. White House staff had no idea either.

Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankees on August 15th. We will make it later in the season!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2020

Trump had apparently made the call after becoming jealous after Dr. Anthony Fauci threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals/NY Yankees opener.

The NYT reports: “Mr. Trump had been so annoyed by Dr. Fauci’s turn in the limelight, an official familiar with his reaction said, that he had directed his aides to call Yankees officials and make good on a longtime standing offer from Mr. Levine to throw out an opening pitch. No date was ever finalized.

The post NY Yankees Unaware Trump, Jealous of Anthony Fauci, Had Scheduled Himself to Throw First Pitch at Game appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

By JM McNab  Published: July 27th, 2020 

An anonymous reader shares a report: Following Walmart's decision last week to shutter its doors on Thanksgiving Day over COVID-19 concerns, fellow big-box behemoth, Target, has announced that it will also be skipping this year's orgiastic capitalist pre-game for the good of consumers and workers. Well, that's the official position at least. "Historically, deal hunting and holiday shopping can mean crowded events, and this isn't a year for crowds," Target execs said in an official statement. It marks the first time since 2011 that the megastore will not be open on Thanksgiving -- a trend long criticized by labor activists for, you know, forcing underpaid retail workers to go into work and stare down deal-hungry shoppers instead of spending time with their own families. It's important to note that these statements from Walmart, Target, and what many predict will be an increasing number of other retailers, are only announcing a moratorium on Thanksgiving pre-Black Friday sales events, and not a cancellation of actual Black Friday plans, which appear to still be going on as planned. In-store Thanksgiving sales first gained in popularity years back when online sales began to eat away at physical stores' holiday season profit margins. Turkey Day events consistently ranked outside the 10 busiest days of the year for most businesses while simultaneously lowering profits from Black Friday itself. So, if you can believe it, it appears this wave of decisions isn't exactly coming from the good of shareholders' hearts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ljw1004 writes: Helmand Province in Afghanistan produces two thirds of the world's opium. Its opium production has more than doubled in the past eight years, due mostly to solar power. "Solar is by far the most significant technological change" in the region for decades, says Dr. Mansfield, author of the report (PDF). The first solar panels were introduced there in 2013. More recently, solar panel installations have doubled every year, and now stand at 67,000. In Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province, solar panels are stacked in the market in great piles three stories high. For an up-front cost of $5,000, farmers can buy panels and a pump to irrigate their fields, and then there are virtually no running costs. "All this water is making the desert bloom," says Richard Brittan, a former British soldier whose company, Alcis, specializes in satellite analysis of what he calls "complex environments." $5,000 is a lot of money -- the average dowry is $7,000 -- but the panels pay for themselves within two years. Farmers used to rely on diesel, which was more costly, unreliable and adulterated, which led to frequent machinery breakdowns. This "is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet. There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change -- or any other ethical consideration, for that matter. This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit. It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin. What does this tell us about solar power? That is simple. The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be. Don't imagine this is some kind of benign 'green' technology. "Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world," reports the BBC. (Those consequences: far more opium in the world; water table dropping by 3m a year; and a major crisis brewing in 10-15 years when the water runs out, the land returns to desert, and 1.5 million people are forced to migrate.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump wants Barr to function as his personal lawyer. Barr once again obliges.

On Wednesday, four big tech CEOs — Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — will come face to face with Congress, in a hearing held by Antitrust Subcommittee Chair David Cicilline. The hearing is one result of a yearlong investigation by Cicilline’s subcommittee into whether these four companies regulate more of the U.S. economy than our public officials do.

For some, this hearing may seem like a series of technical questions about market power, and for others, a mere congressional spectacle. But the stakes are high. This hearing is part of the only major investigation into corporate power by any Congress in recent memory. How this hearing goes, and whether Congress over the next few years develops the confidence to break up and regulate these giants, will in many ways determine whether America remains a self-governing democracy.

That might seem like hyperbole, but it’s not. Until now, the harms of these giants were hidden from the public because they offer free or low-cost services to consumers. But low prices mask a deep threat to our society, starting with an invasive surveillance architecture that has concentrated ad revenue and threatens free expression itself. Two thirds of American counties have no daily newspaper, largely because Google and Facebook have diverted revenue from the free press to themselves. In addition, these entities propagate misinformation, harm mental health and promote racial discrimination, with virtually no accountability. Even a giant ad boycott by a host of corporations opposed to Facebook’s hate speech policies drew a response fit for a monopolist: “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough,” said Zuckerberg. That’s power.

Amazon, meanwhile, has built powers that rival, or exceed, those of the government. In 2004, Jeff Bezos privately told Amazon executives that he wanted to “draw a moat” around the company's customers. The analogy was clear: Amazon would control access to those customers, becoming the only bridge for hundreds and thousands of other companies to reach those consumers.

And 16 years later, it’s clear that Bezos fulfilled his goal to transform his company into the bridge through which American e-commerce flows, reaping profits from the tolls the Seattle-based goliath imposes on the steady stream of goods. As of 2020, there are more than 118 million Prime subscribers domestically, versus 129 million total households in America. Bezos was so successful in digging his moat that it now surrounds virtually the entire nation, and the rules it sets for that commerce affects much of the rest of the consumer economy. As Harvard Law professor Rebecca Tushnet has noted, “Amazon, with its size, now substitutes for government in a lot of what it does.”

The harms here are real. America has lost over a hundred thousand local, independent retail businesses, a drop of 40 percent from 2000 to 2015, largely due to Amazon. And this is not good for consumers; Amazon allows thousands of counterfeit and unsafe products on its marketplace, because it doesn’t have the same liability for products that normal retailers do. Because of its surveillance over its Marketplace, Amazon copies the design of successful products, which destroys the incentive to innovate.

In other words, these four corporations command bridges over which our news, entertainment, goods and services now flow, serving as the digital infrastructure of swaths of the American economy. These dominant platforms, whose market capitalization surpasses the gross domestic product of many large nations, function as the quasi-governmental gatekeepers of America’s commerce and communications. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg once made this point explicitly: “In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company."

Monopolies are Un-American

Technology corporations like to position themselves as the arbiters of the future, but to understand why this hearing matters, it’s important to revisit a long-lost history of American battles against monopoly power. Most Americans, including our leaders, do not know that monopolies, in particular companies that draw a moat between the people and the marketplace, have always, until the past few decades, been seen as deeply un-American.

The first anti-monopoly statute was passed in the colony of Massachusetts in 1641 and its language could not ring any clearer: “There shall be no monopolies granted or allowed amongst us,” with the only exception made for patented inventions, and even then “for a short time.”

A monopoly set off the American Revolution, as Americans threw the tea trafficked by the tea monopolist, the East India Co., into Boston harbor. Throughout the 19th century, judges and legislators dripped scorn on monopolists. In 1829, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in striking down the illegal monopoly of the proprietors of a bridge that suffocated Boston’s commerce, noted that the original settlers “came to this country with a hatred of monopolies, and they ordered, not that no monopoly should be granted, but that none should be allowed.”

In the following centuries, Americans articulated the tension between monopoly rule and democracy with resounding clarity. “Monopoly, whether of wealth, power, business, or what not,” summarized the Ohio Supreme Court in condemning AT&T’s telephone monopoly of the 1920s, “has always been most odious and reprehensible to our American people and their democratic institutions.” If the people want such monopolies, the court wrote, the people should set the terms and conditions through legislation.

And legislatures acted, quite frequently. In the industrial age, Congress passed federal antitrust laws in 1890, 1913, 1936, and 1950. It launched major investigations of corporate power four times in the 20th century. Rep. Emanuel Celler, who ran one of these investigations in the very same committee chaired by Cicilline, made the case in 1950 for freedom in business as a bulwark of democracy, using his perch to examine monopoly power in steel, ticketing, newsprint, aluminum and baseball.

Because Americans and their leaders understood the importance of access to the marketplace, they intuitively recognized that democracy requires eliminating concentrations of power. Congress broke up railroads, banks, aerospace companies, and prevented automobile and telephone giants from invading into adjacent markets. Congress used to regulate our markets, and in doing so, Congress governed.

Citizens Became Consumers

So what happened? How is it that four corporations can now command such heights? In the 1970s, American elites adopted a new philosophy of governance. Two movements, the law and economics school from the University of Chicago on the right, and the consumer rights movement on the left, preached that legislative control of markets was corrupt. Americans were no longer citizens but consumers, and monopolies, according to luminaries such as Milton Friedman and Robert Bork, could serve consumers well. Fear not corporate power, fear merely Big Government. And let the expert economists make decisions about markets, not the rabble.

By 1998, this philosophy was so inculcated in our governing elites that Larry Summers linked American global primacy not to ideals of freedom, but to corporate and institutional dominance, noting that “whether it is AIG in insurance, McDonald's in fast food, Walmart in retailing, Microsoft in software, Harvard University in education, CNN in television news—the leading enterprises are American." Similarly, Senator Dianne Feinstein, in 2010, upon voting against a measure to break up large banks, said to a colleague, “This is still America, right?” We had forgotten so much about who we are that American leaders did not recognize in their own tradition the importance of public control over markets.

Steeped in this confused anti-American ideology favorable to monopoly, the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations did not use merger laws, and Congress did not regulate data or online commerce, so Silicon Valley grew to gargantuan proportions. In other words, Jeff Bezos and his fellow CEOs aren’t powerful sovereign-like entities because they are brilliant, as their boosters would say, or dastardly, as some of their opponents would offer. America has had its share of heroes and miscreants, yet since the Gilded Age few came close to their level of economic dominance. They are governing us, because we the people have refused to do so through our public institutions. These men have merely stepped into the breach, filling up the void.

There are many complicated technical questions about how to get rid of Amazon’s moat, or that of the other three tech goliaths. But the political problem is simpler. To restore democracy, or rule by the many, in the commercial sphere, means to reassert the role of elected representatives. As Chair Cicilline and the members of the Antitrust Subcommittee demand answers from the CEOs of these tech giants, they are beginning to fill the gap that our last several generations of leaders have left.

If they fill it well, they will be reasserting a tradition that is 400 years old, and yet, surprisingly modern.

July 28, 2020 | Scranton, Pennsylvania

Dear Washington,

The president is in trouble. You know it and I know it.

Here we are, just under 100 days out from Election Day, and every metric we have at our disposal—right track vs. wrong track numbers, approval and disapproval ratings, horse race polling nationally and in battleground states—suggests that Donald Trump is headed toward defeat on Nov. 3. The data is especially daunting for its consistency. There is zero sign of minority attitudes softening toward the president; if anything, four years after Trump won just 21 percent of all nonwhite voters, there is reason to suspect that number could dip lower still. At the same time, the president’s bleeding of support among affluent white suburbanites—which caused a Democratic wave in the 2018 midterm—has become a full-blown hemorrhage. After winning college-educated whites by 3 points in 2016, Trump’s party lost this group by 8 points in the midterms; GOP officials fear that margin could approach 15 points this fall and carry Joe Biden into the White House.

It all adds up to a dire outlook for Trump. If he is losing badly among the two fastest-growing blocs of voters—minorities and college-educated whites—is there any hope for the president to win a second term?

Yes, there is. And his reason for hope comes from a familiar place: the white working class.

(Bear with me, Washington. Although I did pass a few million roadside diners in my 20 hours of driving to report this dispatch, and even had lovely meals at two of them, this is not one of those diner stories.)

There exists an assumption that because Trump cleaned up with noncollege-educated white voters in 2016—winning them by a margin of 39 points, “the largest among any candidate in exit polls since 1980,” according to Pew Research—the president has maxed out his support among this much-mythologized group. But this is an assumption, not a fact. For one thing, there is evidence to suggest that while Trump won a bigger share of working-class whites than his predecessors, turnout among this group was higher in prior elections. Moreover, it’s not clear that Democrats have bottomed out with this group; the same polarization that continues to depress Trump’s upper-class white support could propel his working-class white support even higher.

The bottom line, Washington, is that for as well as Trump performed with these voters in 2016, he needs to do even better with them in 2020. He needs to convert more blue-collar Democrats. He needs to turn out more unaffiliated nonpartisans. The question is: Can he?

To answer that question, I needed to escape the self-imposed quarantine that has limited my past three letters to my home base of Michigan. I needed to steep myself in a place that should be bleeding red MAGA country but for whatever reason still isn’t. I needed to visit Scranton.

Now, let’s be clear. Scranton is not significant because of Joe Biden’s biography. Many residents I spoke with, including die-hard Democrats, pointed out that the former vice president moved away from their city as a child, scoffing at the notion of Scranton being Biden’s “hometown.”

Rather, the city is significant because it embodies one side of the Trump-era realignment—the inroads made by Republicans, the losses suffered by Democrats—and the opportunities present for both parties this November.

Scranton is the seat of Lackawanna County, the hardhat-and-lunchbox home to generations of coal miners and plant workers who were left behind by the transition to an information economy. Flanked by 360-degree views of the surrounding mountain ranges, Scranton is a steeply pitched grid of antique churches and sprawling cemeteries, rusting homes and shuttered businesses, a clash of urban decay against bucolic splendor. The population is old—hence the abundance of graveyards, locals joke—undereducated and overwhelmingly white, seemingly ripe for Republican politics.

And yet, the county has long been clannishly Democratic, having gone blue in every presidential election since 1984. In a northeastern quarter of Pennsylvania that has grown ever more conservative on cultural grounds, explaining a political evolution from blue to purple to red, Lackawanna County proved to be a stubborn outlier. In 2012, even as Barack Obama suffered losses or eked out hard-fought wins in surrounding counties, he carried Lackawanna by 27 points over Mitt Romney. That margin was 45 points in Scranton—a blowout for the first Black president in a working-class city that’s more than 80 percent white.

Just four years later, however, Lackawanna County succumbed to the long-running regional trends with a suddenness that still feels jarring to residents of the area. Hillary Clinton hung on for a narrow 3-point victory, but all the underlying trends—a decline in Democratic turnout, a decrease in straight-party ballots cast, a lack of visible enthusiasm for her on the ground—made it feel like a defeat. The 24-point swing toward the Republicans in the county from 2012 to 2016 accounted for a total of 23,154 votes—more than half of Trump’s statewide victory in Pennsylvania.

Like the county, Scranton swung hard—by a margin of 22 points—from 2012 to 2016. Unlike the county, Scranton was still a lopsided victory for the Democrats: Clinton carried the city with 60 percent of the vote. Not only did Clinton defeat Trump in each of Scranton’s four dozen precincts, he didn’t come within 5 points of her in any of them.

On its face, this might seem discouraging for Trump, proof that even under the best of electoral conditions he was unable to get over the top. But there’s an alternative interpretation: Trump left points on the board. By pushing his vote-share toward 45 percent in some of the most storied ancestral Democratic neighborhoods of Scranton—areas that for decades were controlled by union voting and machine politics—the president demonstrated a cultural appeal that transcends partisan politics, making a long-term electoral investment that has not yet fully matured. Maybe voters in Scranton will return to their normal voting behaviors in November. Then again, maybe 2016 was the beginning of their new normal.

To find out, I focused my reporting on a cluster of neighborhoods in West Scranton that form five of the city’s most historically Democratic precincts, each of which saw a swing of more than 30 points toward Republicans in 2016. For three days, I walked their neighborhoods and talked with voters on their sidewalks, lawns and front porches. What I heard was sometimes messy and occasionally self-contradictory. Still, there were clear takeaways in these dozens of conversations, cautionary tales that should scare both parties. But make no mistake. The urgency of these warnings was not equal. If what I heard in Scranton represents an alarm bell for Democrats, it constitutes a blaring siren for President Trump and his Republican Party.

BUTCH MANUEL drives an armored Brinks truck. He is 53 years old, a bushy salt-and-pepper goatee shining against his bronzed skin and buzzed head. When we first got to talking, he told me I was wasting my breath with him. Manuel had never voted, not in his entire life, and wouldn’t be terribly conversant about the election. “It’s not worth my time,” he said. “All they do is promise things and never follow through. It’s all a bunch of lies. That’s what politics is.”

In the next breath, however, Manuel began to explain his attraction to Donald Trump—a businessman who isn’t “another politician” like the rest. He spoke of how the president is new to Washington; how he’s “doing the best he can” under abysmal circumstances; how he’s been under siege from Democrats and the media “since the day he took the job.”

I told Manuel that he sounded like a Trump voter. He shrugged. For that to be true, Manuel said, he would have to be a voter in the first place. That’s when I asked if there was anything Trump could do, between now and November, to change Manuel’s mind, to get him to the polls for the first time in his life.

“I dunno,” he murmured, taking a long pull on his cigarette, gazing out over the street from his elevated front terrace. “That’s a good question.”

Then he shook his head. “Probably not.”

Manuel explained that for someone like him—a lifelong resident of the area, someone who has battled to keep a job, someone who lies awake at night worried about whether his three kids can hold down good work and afford a decent home—the occupant of the White House has little bearing on his life. “Would I rather have Trump than Biden? Yeah,” he said. “But it doesn’t really matter who wins.”

KATHY MANUEL doesn’t share her husband’s apathy.

After Butch went inside to call for her, promising me that she would have more interesting opinions, Kathy emerged with a puzzled look. Her husband was talking politics? With a stranger?

“He’s not gonna vote anyway,” Kathy said, elbowing Butch. “I’m not sure I will, either.”

Kathy is a former Democrat turned independent. She voted for Obama twice, then switched to Trump in 2016, convinced that he would “protect the working people, take care of the elderly, take care of the military, take care of the veterans.” Four years later, she wishes she hadn’t.

“Don’t get me wrong, he’s done some good stuff. But lately he’s just been ticking me off,” Kathy said. She works on the facilities staff at the local hospital, Commonwealth Health Regional, and has been dismayed at the president’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“He’s not taking the virus serious enough. He keeps saying it’ll go away, and that’s not true,” Kathy said. “We need someone to fix this country right now, because it’s a mess. I don’t really like Biden, either. I don’t like how extreme the Democrats are with abortion nowadays. But he’s been around a long time, he seems to know the system, so maybe he can get things back on track. I don’t know. This country is out of whack, and Trump doesn’t seem to care. I’m getting sick of him, you know?”

I asked Kathy if she’s certain that she’ll vote.

“Yeah, I most likely will,” she replied. “And if I do, it won’t be for Trump.”

This struck me as a double whammy. Here were two prime targets for the president’s reelection: one voter he stole from Democrats in 2016, and one voter who preferred him but didn’t turn out. Trump needs both of these voters to break his way in 2020; instead, Kathy is going back into the Democratic fold, and Butch is staying home again.

I heard echoes of this conversation while talking with BOB and BILL MCHALE, brothers who were born and raised in Scranton.

Bill, the elder brother at age 67, sported a thick white beard and sat atop a black Harley-Davidson while talking with Bob, 61, outside their mother’s home under the shade of a towering elm tree. The house, which appears in fine condition, was condemned—“the type of thing that wouldn’t happen if you knew someone at city hall, or knew who to hand an envelope to,” Bill says—and they’ve dumped money and time into getting it up to code. It’s an outrage, the brothers agreed, government picking on the little guy as the roads crumble and the schools languish, all while the former mayor awaits a recommended 30-year sentence for bribery and extortion.

Neither of the McHale brothers voted in 2016. They are fed up with politics and politicians. Bill, a registered Democrat, “wasn’t a fan of Hillary,” and Bob, a conservative-leaning independent, “couldn’t stomach” supporting Trump. Four years later, their positions haven’t changed much.

“I’m not real happy with my party these days,” said Bill, a custodian with the Scranton Public Schools. “They’re too far to the left for me at this point. The older I get, the more to the right I find myself.” He stops suddenly. “Trust me, I’m no Trumper. I think the Republicans are insane. But I don’t like the guy Democrats are putting up, either.”

Why not? “I could have voted for Buttigieg; I liked him. Maybe even Bernie. But the party wanted Biden. And he’s just too old. I don’t think he’s got Alzheimer’s or anything like that, but he does say the damnedest things. I don’t know. I could have voted for him at one point—when he was younger. But I’ll probably wind up sitting this one out too. He’s just too old. And there’s no way in hell I could vote for Trump.”

That said, Bill knows plenty of people who did just that in 2016. “They were so frustrated with everything that they were willing to try something different. They were sick of everything being about Democrat vs. Republican, and not about them. When they heard Trump say he was going to ‘drain the swamp,’ they believed him—”

Bob cuts him off: “But it never happened.” His brother mmm-hmms in agreement.

Bob, a home-care worker, skipped the last election for different reasons. A staunch opponent of abortion, Bob said he couldn’t vote for Clinton. At the same time, Bob said, “I’m a Christian—at least, I try to be—and that made it hard to vote for Trump, with all his scandals and the way he was carrying on.”

He doesn’t think Trump’s behavior has changed much since. What has changed, Bob told me, is the “chaos” he sees unfolding across America.

“The one thing I do like is the way he stands with the police,” Bob said of Trump. “These protests are criminal. I feel sorry for the Blacks, and there are a lot of crummy cops out there. But I don’t want the government taking money away from the police; I think we should be giving them more money and using it for better training, especially to deal with mentally ill people.”

He continued, “There’s a lot of chaos in this world, everything’s upside down. And for all the stuff that’s been thrown at Trump, he shakes it off and keeps on going. I find that refreshing.”

Is that enough to make him vote? “I haven’t decided,” Bob said. “But if I had to choose between the two men, I’d have to choose Trump.”

JOE BARBUTI didn’t vote in 2016, either.

Standing outside his childhood home, a few blocks north of the McHale residence, the 43-year-old Barbuti told me he wasn’t willing to “settle” for either Clinton or Trump. A self-described “Democrat who doesn’t vote based on party loyalty,” Barbuti was never interested in Trump. And despite giving Clinton every opportunity to earn his vote, he said, she never did.

“I just really think Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate,” Barbuti told me. “She was the wrong person to win this kind of area, to win this kind of voter.”

Barbuti, a school paraprofessional who works with autistic students, said he doesn’t necessarily regret sitting out the election. What he does regret is his own naivete, believing what has happened to the United States never could. “You know, whether you liked George W. Bush or Barack Obama, at least they had morals. At least they were good people,” Barbuti said. “I took that for granted back then. And I won’t ever take it for granted again. Trump is not a good person. And I think Biden is going to win because of that.”

Will Barbuti vote this time?

“Definitely,” he said. “I’m not a big Biden guy. Not at all, actually. But it’s time for a change. Trump has divided the country. It’s time to give someone else a chance. That’s how a lot of people seem to be thinking around here. A lot of people in this area who didn’t vote, are going to vote for Biden. And I actually think a lot of Democrats who switched to Trump, are going to go back to voting Democrat this time.”

A few streets over, JOHN MCLANE stood on his lawn squeezing the yellow nozzle attached to a green rubber hose, spraying a bed of red and white perennials.

Unlike many of the folks I met, McLane, a 71-year-old retired lawyer, voted enthusiastically in 2016. A loyal, lifelong Democrat, he felt Clinton would be a solid president and didn’t hesitate to support her.

But, like many of his neighbors, McLane knows lots of people who stayed home in protest of both candidates. “I wasn’t terribly surprised that she lost. There’s an awful lot of people who might have otherwise voted for any other Democrat, who couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton,” he said. “A lot of them were just fed up—first another Bush, then another Clinton, and it was like, ‘OK, enough already.’ People wanted something different. I understand that.”

He continues, “What I still can’t understand is why decent people like these”—he unclenches the trigger, pointing the pistol attachment around his neighborhood with a sweeping motion—“would want something different so badly that they would vote for a scumbag like Donald Trump. I still don’t get it. I never will.”

McLane sympathizes with the plight of individuals who pulled the lever for Trump in 2016. But he wants no mercy shown to the Republican officials who have enabled him. He wants to see the GOP crushed this November—and believes it will happen, courtesy of the “decent people” in his community who fled the Democrats four years ago.

“We don’t have to deal with the anti-Hillary thing anymore. There’s no stigma around Biden,” McLane said. A casual drive around Scranton confirms this: There are a good number of “BIDEN” signs dotting the landscape, including two in McLane’s yard. Four years ago, numerous people observed to me, there were hardly any Clinton signs to be seen.

“Biden is much more relatable to these voters,” McLane continued. “A lot of them will come back to the Democratic Party—both in northeast Pennsylvania and southwest Pennsylvania, where the voters are similar—and that should be more than enough to win back the state. Because, I guarantee you, Trump is going to get crushed in the southeast, in Philadelphia and the suburbs. So, I think Biden wins big here. But I don’t put anything past this president. We have no idea how he’ll respond to losing. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

McLane knows more than a few people who think it’s the Democrats who are “dangerous”—precisely the message Trump and his campaign are pushing amid a summer of national unrest. McLane isn’t buying it.

“Look, I’m a conservative Democrat in a lot of ways. I think Biden is, too. He’ll hold the line. He won’t give in to the any of the far-left craziness,” McLane said. “I don’t agree with people tearing down these statues illegally, for instance, and I doubt Biden does, either. There should be processes for all these things. We don’t want anarchy. That’s how most Democrats feel, that’s why they nominated Biden. And that’s why Trump isn’t going to be able to paint Biden as some kind of extremist. It just doesn’t sell.”

The liveliest discussion in Scranton could be found on the double-wide front patio belonging to DAVE and ANN SHERMAN, a 75-year-old couple who hosted a small get-together under the awning of their duplex on a boiling July afternoon.

The Shermans’ neighbor from across the street, 51-year-old MELISSA KREINBERG, leaned against their white spindled railing at the far end of the porch, opposite Dave. Her son, 16-year-old JERRY SANDY, stood nearby checking his smartphone, while her mother, 80-year-old BOBBIE SANDY, sat on a small patio chair next to Ann Sherman. The Kreinberg home was under construction—a team of Spanish-speaking laborers clung to the rooftop, installing new, beige-colored shingles—and the five-person audience marveled at the danger of the work and the speed with which the contractors were completing it.

“Maybe they don’t know about the $600 per week they could be getting at home,” Kreinberg said, referring to the emergency unemployment being offered due to the pandemic. “That’s why nobody else is going back to work. They’re making more by doing nothing.”

“Bunch of bullshit,” said Dave, who retired after more than three decades as a truck driver. “Enough of the handouts. It’s not going to do anyone any good in the long term.”

Melissa Kreinberg and Dave Sherman don’t often agree. She voted for Trump and thought Clinton was corrupt; he voted for Clinton and thought Trump immoral. Neither one was willing to give an inch on the ballots they cast in 2016, but both were thoroughly agitated with the present state of affairs in America.

“Enough is enough with the protests. They want to destroy America’s history. That’s the one thing I agree with Trump on,” Dave said. “You don’t see us protesting when some Black kids kill an innocent white person, do you?”

“And all the Democrats can say is ‘defund the police,’” she replied.

“Yeah, but it’s Trump who got us here,” Dave shot back. “He said he was going to Make America Great Again. Now look at us! We’re going down the shitter, and he’s the one flushing.”

Kreinberg wasn’t keen on defending the president. She said his “big mouth” makes every problem worse. “But at least he says what’s on his mind. These people, they’re all crooked, every last one of them. That’s why this city’s in shambles. That’s why this country is in shambles.”

Ann Sherman, who had been content to stay out of the crossfire, finally spoke up: “Democrats and Republicans.”

Kreinberg shrugged. “I agree. That’s why I might not even vote.”

Ann shook her head. “Oh, I’m not voting.”

Her husband was stunned. Both Dave and Ann had described themselves as steadfast Democrats. He told me he was counting the days until Election Day. Now, his wife was vowing to stay home. “What?” Dave asked her. “Why not?”

Ann didn’t miss a beat. “Because,” she said, “Biden is senile.”

The porch erupted in groans and laughter and shouting.

“He is! He is!” Ann raised her voice, trying to be heard. “I’m sorry, but he is. And Trump, that asshole, forget about it. He should have never been president in the first place. So, I can’t vote for either one of them.”

Kreinberg, perhaps trying to change the subject to lessen the tension, chimed in: “What about the Independent Party? What about the one guy—what’s his name, the rapper. Canyon West?”

(Her teenage son, Jerry, politely corrected the mispronounced name, and informed his mother that Kanye West was too late to qualify for the ballot in most states. Despite his age, not yet old enough to vote, Jerry seemed to be the most informed participant in the conversation.)

Meanwhile, Dave and Ann continued to debate Biden’s alleged decrepitness. Ann claimed that he couldn’t put a sentence together and often looked lost on television. Dave countered by noting how sometimes, after coming to the kitchen, he stares at the microwave for 30 seconds before remembering what he needed. “That doesn’t mean I’m senile,” he told his wife. “It just means I’m getting older. My brain still works fine.”

In this marital dispute, Ann seemed to have won—by persuading Kreinberg not to vote this November. “I think that’s gonna be the case with a lot of those Trump people,” Kreinberg said. “They gave him a try, but now they’ve given up on him.”

Of course, this could also be understood as a victory for Dave, who wants to see the president defeated at all costs. A Trump voter staying home, he figured, is as good as a Trump voter switching their allegiance to Biden.

“Can you blame them?” he asked Kreinberg. “After four years of this, who could want more?”

Not far from the Sherman residence, a calmer conversation was taking place beneath a small, shaded veranda. The home belonging to JOHN and ROBERTA SEPKOWSKI backed up against the edge of Cathedral Cemetery, a sprawling green space nestled at the base of mountains that climbed so steep as to eclipse the clouds. As their 2-year-old grandson played with his toys, the Sepkowskis listened to ABC Radio, as they do every day, hearing “mostly bad news,” as Roberta said, and worrying about the world they’re leaving to him.

“I just don’t know how all these people are going to make it,” Roberta said, mentioning the wave of local businesses that shut down even before the coronavirus invasion, and the countless more that have been neutered since. “Some people, when they lost their work—like my daughter, when her bar shut down—her husband still works, so they could get by. But what about all these other people? How do they get by?”

John looked grief-stricken, shaking his head morosely. He made clear this wasn’t just about Covid-19. An 81-year-old veteran of the Marine Corps, John was born and raised in Scranton. After leaving the service, he spent decades struggling to provide for his family working dead-end jobs at companies that kept going under. John has seen enough to know that the sickness afflicting his hometown isn’t going to be healed by any vaccine.

“How do they go to college? How do they buy a house? How do they afford to raise a family?” he said, gesturing toward the youngster playing at his feet. “I’m afraid for their future.”

In the present, both John and Roberta will do what they can. That means voting for Biden in November—even though Roberta is a Republican and John, a Democrat, fears that Biden “won’t live out his first term.”

When I asked why she was voting against her party, Roberta said defiantly that Trump isn’t a Republican—and clarified that she didn’t vote for him in 2016, either. “He’s a bad person, but it’s not just about that,” she said. “He got a lot of these people convinced that our companies were going to come back, that he was going to get places like Scranton back on their feet, that he was going to bring our jobs back. But that was a lie. I knew it was a lie. It’s worse than ever.”

John, who spoke slowly due to the oxygen tubes running into his nose, said he would rather die than vote for Trump. “Just saying the name, Trump,” he said, contorting his face into a sour grin, “it’s enough to put a bitter taste in my mouth.” At the same time, John is “not happy at all” about having to vote for Biden, whom he views as weak and servile to a radical left-wing agenda.

“Look around. The world’s gone crazy. And the cops get blamed for all this bullshit?” John said, breathing heavier as his emotion swelled. “Our son-in-law is a sheriff. These people want to defund the police? What would you do without them? What would this world look like without police? Trump is right about that, you know.”

“Well,” Roberta said, “I think that phrase is being misconstrued.”

“Bullshit,” John said. “If the Blacks listened to the police, there wouldn’t be all these killings, wouldn’t be all these knees on their necks.”

“I disagree with that,” Roberta said gently.

“It’s testing my loyalty—to be a Democrat,” John said.

“But you know what?” Roberta offered, looking in my direction. “He’s going to vote for Biden anyway, just to get rid of Trump.”

John stared ahead in silence. Slowly, he began to nod.

That’s all from Scranton, a city that confirmed some of my expectations but defied many others.

I don’t know about you, Washington, but hearing from these voters sure made me wonder whether Trump has any path to reelection. We already knew he’s bleeding support among white suburbanites; if he’s losing any sort of ground with the white working class, it’s difficult to see how he carries a state like Pennsylvania, or Michigan, or Wisconsin—the three battlegrounds that put him in the White House.

You can expect another dispatch before long. In the meantime, if you’ve got places you think I should visit, people you think I should meet, drop me a line: L2W@politico.com.

Until then, take care and enjoy the beginning of baseball season.

Tim

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warns that businesses need protection against “an epidemic of lawsuits” that will arise as workers and customers sue employers over exposure to Covid-19.

Yet data suggests that coronavirus-related litigation isn't very contagious.

Of the 3,727 coronavirus-related cases that have been filed since March, just 185, or less than 5 percent, fall into the personal injury category that McConnell describes — plaintiffs claiming fear of exposure, potential exposure or exposure to Covid-19, according to an analysis by the American Association for Justice of a litigation tracker run by law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth. Instead, the bulk of the legal actions deal with insurance claims and civil rights, including people challenging stay-at-home orders.

The association represents plaintiffs' lawyers; Hunton Andrews Kurth represents more than one-third of Fortune 100 companies, according to its website.

That rate of filings is relatively low, labor law experts and advocates say, considering that more than 4 million cases of coronavirus have been reported in the U.S., and some 145,000 people have died.

“The evidence suggests there has been no explosion in legal claims related to Covid,” said Nicole Berner, general counsel for the Service Employees International Union, adding that it's another effort by businesses and their Republican allies to "escape from legal liability" from workers. "We need now more protections, not less."

The number of personal injury cases was down 14 percent in June from the same month last year, according to an analysis of Westlaw’s Dockets database. Part of this decrease is due to court closures, restrictions on nonessential filings and other pandemic-related complications.

The data could detract from McConnell's efforts to include a liability shield for companies as he enters negotiations with Democrats over the next round of economic relief. His office declined to comment for this story.

Business groups and lawyers for companies maintain that the number of claims is still concerningly high and likely to grow.

“It is a significant number, and a number that will continue to rise because of the unique aspect of this,” said Brad Hammock, a former OSHA attorney who now represents employers in workplace safety cases for Littler Mendelson.

"It's not so much the number as it is just the very threat," adds Joel Griffith, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "Regardless of the number of lawsuits that have been filed, having this liability protection in place is still essential to giving business owners the peace of mind they need to operate in a time like this."

Hunton Andrews Kurth didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under Senate Republicans’ proposal, employers could only be held liable if they didn't make "reasonable efforts" to follow public health guidelines and "engaged in gross negligence or willful misconduct that caused an actual exposure to coronavirus," according to the text of the legislation released Monday.

“No bill will pass the Senate without liability protection for everyone related to the coronavirus,” McConnell told reporters this month. “Nobody should have to face an epidemic of lawsuits on the heels of the pandemic that we already have related to the coronavirus.”

Democrats remain opposed to the liability protections. They advocate instead for a provision that would direct the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency responsible for monitoring workplace safety, to issue a federal standard that would establish protections for those exposed to airborne infectious diseases. Such language was included in a previous coronavirus aid package, but the agency has yet to produce a standard.

"We think there's a path to talk about protecting businesses and workers and customers who come in, and that is our OSHA provision,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this month.

Businesses currently have to comply with a mixture of state- and local-level public health guidelines. Having a federal standard would streamline things for employers so "they know what they need to do,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the HELP Committee, said.

“They don’t want an environment that makes them less competitive if they’re doing the right thing; what they want is standards so that everybody can live up to the same standards and make sure workers are protected,” Murray said. “This is important to their bottom line.”

The issue is starting to garner more bipartisan support: A group of 10 House Republicans including Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia sent a letter to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on July 14 proposing the packaging of liability protections with an Emergency Temporary Infectious Disease Standard from OSHA in the next coronavirus aid package.

“Simply put, if businesses abide by the OSHA standards, they should be protected by baseless lawsuits,” they wrote.

There are already several barriers to filing coronavirus-related claims against companies, including forced arbitration and heightened standards. When combined with the broad language in McConnell's proposal, including the requirement that employers make only "a reasonable effort" to comply with public health guidelines, the liability protections “would make it virtually impossible for workers to hold corporate employers accountable,” said Berner of SEIU.

“The safe harbor here is basically a safe harbor for any business doing anything,” Public Citizen President Robert Weissman said.

Right now, the cases that do make it through carry outsize importance, advocates say. Not only do they have the potential to improve conditions for thousands of workers and consumers, but they act as a deterrent to help keep companies in line at a time when federal enforcement is relatively lax — in part, because of the absence of an OSHA standard.

Of the thousands of complaints that have been filed with OSHA, just one action had been brought, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia testified in June.

“There’s zero happening from the federal government for enforcement,” Weissman said. “So workers really do need access to the courts.”

Virginia became the first state to implement its own emergency standard this month, adopted July 15 following an executive order from Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, and scheduled to go into effect the week of July 27. The rule was prompted, in large part, by a lack of OSHA enforcement, Northam’s office said.

Should liability protections be enacted, advocates warn, they also risk exacerbating racial inequities, since workers of color are overrepresented in frontline careers.

“Bad policy choices and years of discrimination and structural barriers to economic opportunity have left Black and brown people more likely to contract and die from Covid-19,” said LaShawn Warren, executive vice president of government affairs at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “And these are the very same people who will be most harmed by giving businesses sweeping immunity from accountability — low-wage workers, women of color, Black and brown people.”

Management-side lawyers say employers are already doing everything in their power to keep their workers safe, rendering an OSHA standard superfluous — not to mention difficult to draft, given the high degree of uncertainty surrounding Covid-19.

“I don’t think an ETS from OSHA is warranted in this situation given the extensive efforts that employers are taking and the changing nature of the pandemic and what we know about the coronavirus,” said Hammock, the former OSHA official.

They and Republicans express concern that, without protection from litigation, businesses will be hesitant to reopen, thus halting the economy’s recovery.

“Employers are trying to adapt, the government’s trying to adapt, and in the middle of all that you have these lawsuits being filed as well — another hurdle for employers that they have to handle with everything else that’s going on,” said Daniel Deacon, an employment defense attorney with Conn Maciel Carey LLP.

But Democrats maintain that without an ETS, workers’ and customers’ fear of exposure will keep them from returning to businesses and prevent the economy from making a robust comeback.

“Workers are less likely to go back to work … if they have reason to believe that employment will endanger their health,” Weissman said. “And it is a certainty that consumers will not go back to the marketplace, will not go back to businesses, if they don’t believe those establishments are operating safely.”

While some individuals are still dismissing expert recommendations to wear face coverings or masks in public, others are sharing stories of regret. As cases of the novel coronavirus increase in the U.S., anti-maskers nationwide are changing their stances as they experience symptoms of the pandemic. By sharing their stories, individuals who once denied the severity of the virus hope they can emphasize the importance of following safety guidelines to stop the spread of COVID-19.

After vocalizing her views against masks, a city official in Arkansas called herself “selfish” and shared that she no longer doubts the use of masks after being diagnosed with COVID-19. "I knew I was going to die, and I knew I was going to do it alone," Sandra Brand told ABC News affiliate News5. Brand has spent over two weeks in the hospital fighting coronavirus alone.

She shared her story with the news outlet and documented her journey on social media, including experiencing high fevers, body aches, and the inability to breathe. "I can breathe for the first time in over two weeks," she said.

This experience in which Brand emphasized being alone has made her not only change her opinion on masks but advocate for people to wear them. "I'm on the city council in Osceola, we were going to be voting on mandatory masks and I was against it. I was like why should they be able to tell me what to do." She added: "If you can stop somebody from coming in this room and feeling the kind of pain and fear that I have felt, why would you want to be that selfish?"

Not everyone against masks has had the opportunity to rethink their stance after experiencing the virus. A number of individuals have tested positive for COVID-19 and died as a result. Luckily, Brand is now in the hospital’s COVID-19 Unit where she will be using a trial drug in hopes of a quicker recovery, according to News5.

Some states across the U.S. still have no statewide mandate to wear a mask despite the consistent surge in positive cases the U.S. has seen. In many of these states, viral videos have shown individuals resorting to violence after being asked to wear masks in stores by employees. Last week, the U.S. coronavirus death toll surpassed 1,000 for five days straight yet, the Trump administration continues to fail in its response to the pandemic and individuals nationwide continue to protest mask mandates. Without safety measures in place for all residents of the country to abide by, the coronavirus will continue to spread until a vaccine is found. The coronavirus pandemic is real and deadly. Until the current administration acknowledges this and takes appropriate action, cases will continue to increase.