Biden touts faster vaccine pace but renews call for vigilance
Allegheny Health Network hosts a community COVID-19 vaccine clinic Tuesday at Dick's Sporting Goods corporate headquarters near Pittsburgh. Credit: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP / Emily Matthews
'Deadly earnest'
President Joe Biden is calling for states to make adults of all ages eligible for coronavirus vaccines by a week from Monday. But to beat the spread of new COVID-19 variants, he also stepped up warnings he's issued countless times against letting up on mask-wearing, social distancing and hand-washing.
"Let me be deadly earnest with you: We aren’t at the finish line. We still have a lot of work to do. We’re still in a life-and-death race against this virus," Biden said Tuesday in remarks at the White House. Cases are up, hospitalizations no longer dropping and "the pandemic remains dangerous," he said. Many states are already beating his new April 19 target for full vaccine eligibility.
Earlier Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki firmly ruled out the federal issuance of so-called vaccine passports. "The government is not now, nor will we be, supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential," she said, citing privacy and fairness concerns. "There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential."
After his own briefing, Biden took a reporter's question about pockets of resistance to receiving the vaccine. Biden credited Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a frequent critic, for urging COVID-19 vaccinations to Republican men, many of whom are shown in polls to be vaccine-hesitant.
Logistical problems pop up in the coronavirus war. For one, the federal government for years paid Emergent BioSolutions, a Maryland firm, to keep a factory ready in case of vaccine shortages in a pandemic. But none of the doses the company has churned out so far were deemed usable due to a regulatory issue, The New York Times reported.
New trends are constantly arising too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week reported a link between outbreaks among younger people and youth sports and extracurriculars.
Meanwhile, in a first for major-league sports since the coronavirus pandemic began, baseball's Texas Rangers allowed a full-capacity crowd to sit side by side at its home opener Monday, raising some concerns.
Biden's All-Star two-step
Biden was asked about whether those who run the Masters golf championship, now moving ahead in Augusta, Georgia, should take a position in the controversy over the state's new GOP-crafted voting rules. The president, again calling them "new Jim Crow laws," acknowledged "another side" to the kind of dust-up that sent Major League Baseball's All-Star Game to ditch Atlanta for Denver this summer.
"The people who need help the most ... who are working for hourly wages, sometimes get hurt the most. It's a very tough decision for a corporation to make," he said. But he also called it "reassuring" to see for-profit operations speak out against the Georgia law, that he supports their decision either way and that Georgia's elected officials can solve the problem by reversing the voting restrictions.
Biden's predecessor Donald Trump has called for a boycott of the MLB and other companies and said the Georgia voting "reforms" don't go far enough. Trump keeps claiming falsely that he won the state and the presidential election.
McConnell's corporate contortion
McConnell resumed his remarks Tuesday on the Georgia voting law by saying it is "stupid" for corporations to take stances on divisive political issues, while noting that his criticism did not apply to their political donations.
"So my warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics," McConnell told reporters at a news conference in Louisville, Kentucky. "It's not what you're designed for. And don't be intimidated by the left into taking up causes that put you right in the middle of one of America's greatest political debates."
Critics have noted the minority leader's support for the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling in 2010 that opened the door — under the aegis of free speech — for corporations, unions and other outside groups to spend unlimited sums on elections.
So McConnell added a caveat to his corporate warning: "I'm not talking about political contributions. Most of them contribute to both sides, they have political action committees, that's fine. It's legal, it's appropriate, I support that."
Filibuster busters?
A change in the complex rules of the Senate, as decided by the official parliamentarian, could have a big impact — the ability of Democrats to sidestep Republican filibusters and approve key legislation with a simple majority.
While congressional Democrats had already planned on resorting to "budget reconciliation," a special, budget-linked procedure with a simple-majority threshold to pass parts of Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure and jobs package, the parliamentarian’s ruling opens the door to using it on certain other priorities, The Associated Press explains.
One of these might be immigration. A fuller explanation of the filibuster as a procedural thicket is here.
Trump's Hatch-it woman
Followers of local news were more likely than others around the nation to be familiar with Lynn Patton in her role as the Housing and Urban Development's regional administrator for New York and New Jersey. Her prior experience came as an event planner for the private Trump Organization. She also was vice president of the Eric Trump Foundation and helped plan his wedding.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel said it fined Patton $1,000 and barred her from federal employment for four years after she violated the Hatch Act, which bars executive branch employees from engaging in political activities while on duty.
At issue in this case was that Patton produced a video with New York City Housing Authority residents to air at the 2020 Republican National Convention. Other Hatch Act violations during Trump's term were blatantly ignored or scoffed at in the White House.
Widening Gaetz-gate
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump booster for years, privately asked the Trump White House for blanket preemptive pardons for himself and unidentified congressional allies for any crimes they may have committed, according to sources quoted by The New York Times in a story posted Tuesday.
But investigators in the Justice Department during the Trump administration had begun questioning Gaetz’s associates about his conduct, including whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and whether he paid for her travel, the Times reported. The pardon was not issued.
"Entry-level political operatives have conflated a pardon call from Representative Gaetz — where he called for President Trump to pardon ‘everyone from himself, to his administration, to Joe Exotic’ — with these false and increasingly bizarre, partisan allegations against him," a Gaetz spokesman said.
More coronavirus news
See a roundup of the latest regional pandemic developments on Long Island and beyond by Newsday's reporting staff, written by Bart Jones. For a full list of Newsday's coronavirus stories, click here.
What else is happening:
- U.S. and Iranian officials said Tuesday that an initial day of indirect talks in Vienna on the U.S. returning to the 2015 nuclear deal was "constructive," but no quick breakthroughs were expected.
- Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) has died at age 84 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The timing for a special election is up to Gov. Ron DeSantis.
- U.S. Capitol Police Officer William Evans, who was killed in a car-ramming attack at a barricade outside the Capitol last week, will lie in honor in the rotunda on April 13, congressional leaders said.
- Tensions are running high between correction officers and inmates at a D.C. jail housing many of the defendants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot cases, including one defendant who says he was severely beaten.
- Biden’s electric vehicle plan encounters a problem that could make him choose between swing-state jobs and American intellectual-property rules, Politico reports.
- An expert shares his apolitical view of what may be bugging the president's dog Major and causing him to bite.
- The White House gusher of gossip that marked the Trump years seems to have dried up.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
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