Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer at the Capitol on Feb. 11.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
At first glance, and second glance, it looks like absolutely no one in charge of anything has any sort of idea what to do about the many problems. Everything is on fire and the firefighters are wearing clown costumes and running in the wrong direction:
• There are now more than 500 confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S., and there may be many more going uncounted because the Trump administration—which claimed as recently as Friday that the outbreak was “contained“—has been shockingly slow to distribute testing kits. Donald Trump gave a press conference at the Centers for Disease Control Friday in which he made a number of obviously false claims while wearing a 2020 campaign hat, then spent the weekend golfing. Monday morning he blamed the media for his problems and asserted that coronavirus is no worse than the flu. (Currently recorded mortality rates for the relevant strain of coronavirus are much higher than those associated with flu viruses, and there are no existing vaccines or antiviral treatments for it.)
• Expectations of virus-related reductions in earning and spending (and some classic crisis-time “turmoil in the oil market”) caused major securities indexes to drop more than seven percent early Monday; a drop of seven percent would be one of the 20 biggest losses in the history of the Dow Jones. (The markets have since recovered slightly and are currently down “only” about five percent. Thanks, markets!)
• Nearly everyone in the Democratic Party—now including Cory Booker and Kamala Harris—is insisting to voters that, amid all this, the country’s best and only option to replace Trump in the presidency is Joe Biden, a 77-year-old who took three days off from public appearances after Super Tuesday and then spoke for 14 minutes at a rally in St. Louis on Saturday. (Seventy-eight-year-old Bernie Sanders—who was recently hospitalized for a heart attack—spoke for 45 minutes at his first post-Super Tuesday rally, which was on Thursday night in Phoenix, then for 45 minutes Friday night in Detroit, then 40 minutes Saturday afternoon in Chicago.)
• “Democratic congressional sources” told MSNBC that some older members of Congess would like to call for a recess of multiple weeks so they don’t catch the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress are led by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, who in addition to being habitually frightened of partisan confrontation and ambitious public-spending proposals, are 79 and 69 years old themselves. And on Sunday, they … blasted Trump in a statement calling for a long list of emergency public-spending programs to mitigate the potential medical and economic fallout of the pandemic? That can’t be right.
No, in fact, it’s true. Pelosi and Schumer are proposing that the government fund paid sick leave, expanded unemployment insurance, expanded food-assistance programs, free coronavirus testing, and full coronavirus treatment reimbursements while also acting to prevent price-gouging.
How hard will they push for these things when Trump’s counterproposal is a list of tax breaks for real-estate developers written on a picture of Carmen Electra? TBD. Still, it is reassuring to see that, as committed as the institutional Democratic Party is to not doing that much better than the status quo, is congressional leaders apparently also don’t want to do much worse, which is where a lot of other indicators would say we’re headed.
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