Post 34 - April 14, 2020
Day 34…
Yesterday was quite the day.
It was a day of politics the like of which I can’t remember ever having seen before.
During an additional 2pm briefing, Governor Cuomo announced that the six North-Eastern states that form the main population corridor were forming a consortium to discuss how they would reopen.
Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut, Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, and Governor John Carney of Delaware all called in to the briefing by Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York to express their solidarity and willingness to work together. I think it’s worth noting that all of them are Democrats.
Not worth noting in an “aren’t the Democrats better” way, but because the corridor, in reality, stretches from Boston to Washington D.C. and should also include Massachusetts and Maryland both of whom have Republican Governors. By later on in the afternoon, however, it was announced that Governor Charlie Baker, the Republican from Massachusetts had, indeed, joined the consortium making it a total of seven states. That was an impressive and wise move on Governor Baker’s part. I imagine he is going to get a whole lot of party blow-back coming his way as a result.
On the west coast, the three states of Washington, Oregon and California did exactly the same thing. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon and Governor Jay Inslee of Washington formed a coalition. They are all Democrats as well.
The idea behind these consortiums is that absent any sensible Federal guidance, the States need to figure out how to reopen on our own. In the Northeast, in normal times, millions of people every single day commute between this cluster of States. You can’t open up one of them without being able to open up all of them. New York may be experiencing its apex now, but as several of the other Governors pointed out, many of the others aren’t there yet.
No timeline has been put forth and no guidelines have been put forth. These two separate consortiums of States have been created to DISCUSS and PLAN. No announcements yet.
Throughout this international crisis, the President has repeatedly said that it is up to the States to take care of themselves. And that’s what we’ve been doing. Governor Cuomo issued New York’s stay-at-home guidelines on March 20. Each state near us issued theirs on different days. We took care of ourselves. It follows then that since the stay-at-home orders that we are all living under were all issued on the State level, it is the Governors who need to lift them.
Well.
You had better believe that as I was watching all of this unfold yesterday that I was already making sure that I was going to watch the afternoon briefing from the White House.
Popcorn was made.
It truly was jaw-dropping.
I’m not sure I have ever seen anything like it.
First of all, I cannot think of another moment in our history when states have banded together on their own to deal with something that is affecting the entire country.
Banded together in opposition to the President.
There was the Civil War…
Individual states have certainly resisted Federal laws - think of the Civil Rights Movement - but have clusters of them come together like this before?
I should say that I rarely watch the President’s briefings.
He’s uniformed on most of the issues.
He lies.
His constant need for affirmation is painful to watch.
Yesterday, I couldn’t not watch.
He was completely unhinged.
He did not speak about the victims of the virus.
He did not reassure the country.
He was only interested in how he thinks the media has been attacking HIM.
He is desperately trying to re-write the history of his response to this virus because he thinks the criticism being levied against him is unfair.
He kept pushing that he put the Chinese travel ban in place well before there was a single death in the US. He kept saying that over and over again.
He never issued a travel ban.
What he issued was a restriction against Chinese nationals traveling to the US.
Anybody else was allowed to travel freely. And they did.
Similarly, in Europe, he singled out some European nationals and exempted others from traveling to the US, but again US citizens and permanent residents were under no restrictions at all.
There was never a ban. There isn’t one now.
Testing a few weeks ago seemed to show that most of the US cases came in from Europe, not China, but nothing was really in place to stop it coming in from either place.
Hundreds of thousands of people traveled to the US from both China and Europe during that period.
There was NO ban.
He showed a propaganda video about this. Produced using taxpayer money, it tried to support the President on his claims of an early ban by a careful cherry picking of facts and events.(it left out all of February) It was nothing more than a campaign video produced using taxpayers’ money.
In response, Paula Reid, the CBS White House Correspondent asked him what he had done to prepare for the pandemic with the time he’d bought with the travel ban.
How had he used that time? What about February?
Where was the testing? Where was the support for hospitals?
He flipped out. He never answered her but lashed out and called her a “fake” and “disgraceful”
Moving on from that, he made it clear that he wants to reopen the country.
He wants to be the one that lifts the stay-at-home orders and he wants to do it soon.
When challenged on his authority to do this by reporters, his response was,
“When somebody is President of the United States, the authority is total.”
Take that in.
“When somebody is President of the United States, the authority is total.”
There’s a document called The US Constitution that takes some issue with that. He was pretty fiercely challenged on these remarks by several reporters, but, again, he refused to defend his point of view with facts.
After the briefing Governor Cuomo said, "The constitution says we don't have a king. To say, 'I have total authority over the country because I'm the president', it's absolute, that is a king. We didn't have a king. We didn't have King George Washington - we had President George Washington."
Where does all of this go?
I don’t have any idea. I’m not sure anybody does.
With each passing day, our President seems to get closer and closer to the edge.
What’s on the other side when he goes over?
Every single medical expert is saying that the thing that we need most of all in order to be able get back to our lives is TESTING.
If the Federal Government really wants to have a say in how we reopen, they have to start testing the population far more thoroughly than we are now.
They need to get us the tests.
0.9% of the population have been tested at this point.
That’s it.
We simply do not know where this virus is.
Our Governors are going to reopen the country, not the White House.
The White House didn’t shut it down.
The Governors have made it clear that they would welcome Federal support doing this but, ultimately, it’s up to them.
Where does that leave all of us while this fight is going on?
At home.
With each other.
The country will reopen.
We will get back to our lives.
But not yet.
We are looking at a single extremely damaged man who is being backed into a corner (of his own making) who is lashing out in any way he can.
His supporters are doing nothing to temper it.
There is a natural checks and balances that happens in the Government. It’s still happening.
The Republicans did absolutely everything that they could to screw up the elections in Wisconsin by forcing voters to turn out in person in the middle of a pandemic.
The Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court won anyway, unseating the Republican incumbent. The court went from 5-2 to 4-3. Closer to balance.
The idiocy in Washington is being balanced by clear thinking on the part of our Governors.
I don’t think we should hide from what’s going on, but we shouldn’t panic either.
Individually, we can only control our own lives.
We can do our bit by staying home and staying safe.
We don’t have to do anything else.
So, breathe.
What’s happening around us is unprecedented.
Try and be fascinated and not terrified.
If you can’t do that, then just turn off the TV.
Make some lunch.
Call a friend.
We got this.