Tuesday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

By German cartoonist Gerhard Gluck

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are heading to Atlanta today to give speeches on voting rights, but activist groups in Georgia are boycotting the event. Stacey Abrams says she won’t be there because of a scheduling conflict.

According to The New York Times: Biden Will Endorse Changing Senate Rules to Pass Voting Rights Legislation.

President Biden will endorse changing Senate rules to pass new voting rights protections during a speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, the most significant step he will have taken to pressure lawmakers to act on an issue he has called the biggest test of America’s democracy since the Civil War.

Mr. Biden will not go so far as to call for full-scale elimination of the filibuster, a Senate tradition that allows the minority party to kill legislation that fails to garner 60 votes, according to a senior administration official who previewed the speech. But Mr. Biden will say he supports a filibuster “carve-out” in the case of voting rights, the official said.

Citing “repeated obstruction” by Republicans, Mr. Biden will endorse changing the Senate rules, the official said. The president will contend that the filibuster has protected “extreme attacks on the most basic constitutional right.”

“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation,” Mr. Biden will say on Tuesday, according to a preview of his remarks provided by the White House. “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand.”

That’s apparently not enough for a number of Georgia voting rights groups.

The Guardian: Georgia activists warn Biden against a ‘photo-op’ visit that lacks voting rights plan.

A coalition of influential political activists in Georgia that boosted turnout in a state crucial to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 is refusing to attend the visit planned on Tuesday by the US president and Kamala Harris to speak on voting rights.

The group had warned the president and vice-president that they needed to announce a specific plan to get national voting rights legislation passed or risk their high-profile trip to Atlanta being dismissed as “a waste of time”….

…[O]n Monday evening, the coalition of activist groups – Black Voters Matter, Galeo Impact Fund, New Georgia Project Action Fund, Asian American Advocacy Fund, Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council – along with James Woodall, the Georgia NAACP president, announced that “we will not be attending” when Biden and Harris speak.

“Instead of giving a speech tomorrow, the US Senate should be voting tomorrow. What we need now, rather than a visit from the president, vice-president and legislators is for the White House and Senate to remain in DC and act immediately to pass federal legislation to protect our freedom to vote,” the groups said in joint statement.

Illustration by Alessia Turchie

More from CNN: Georgia voting rights groups boycott Biden’s Atlanta speech: ‘We don’t need even more photo ops. We need action.’

Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, and representatives of several voting rights groups urged Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to remain in Washington on Tuesday if they don’t have a clear plan to advance voting rights legislation. Some of the groups that urged Biden to skip his Atlanta trip are the Asian American Advocacy Fund, GALEO Impact Fund Inc. and New Georgia Project Action Fund.

“We don’t need even more photo ops. We need action, and that action is in the form of the John Lewis Voting Rights (Advancement) Act as well as the Freedom to Vote Act, and we need that immediately,” Albright told reporters on Monday.

Several major civil rights leaders are scheduled to attend Biden and Harris’ speeches in Atlanta on Tuesday, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League; Derrick Johnson, the head of the NAACP; Melanie Campbell, the chief executive of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and many other civil rights and voting rights leaders will also be attending.

At The Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart argues: Opinion: Georgia voting activists want to turn Biden away. They’ve got the wrong guy.

After months of justified complaints that the White House was prioritizing everything except preserving voting rights, President Biden and Vice President Harris will head to Georgia on Tuesday to bring their spotlight to the fight. But a high-profile group of Peach State voting rights organizations is saying, “Don’t come.”

While the passion fueling their argument is understandable, their actual argument is not. They’ve got the wrong target, and the wrong tack.

“Georgia voters made history and made their voices heard, overcoming obstacles, threats, and suppressive laws to deliver the White House and the US Senate. In return, a visit has been forced on them, requiring them to accept political platitudes and repetitious, bland promises,” the five organizations wrote. “As civil rights leaders and advocates, we reject any visit by President Biden that does not include an announcement of a finalized voting rights plan that will pass both chambers, not be stopped by the filibuster, and be signed into law; anything less is insufficient and unwelcome.”

By Gerhard Gluck

Biden is neither an empowered king nor an autocrat. In our system of equal branches of government, whatever plan the advocates are demanding from Biden will have to stand on its own in Congress. Thanks to Georgia voters and the two Democrats they sent to the Senate, that party does have control of the chamber, but only by Harris’s tiebreaking vote. That dynamic gives recalcitrant Republicans and Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) incredible and irritating sway.

Biden and Harris are going to Georgia to do the one thing they absolutely can do: use the bully pulpit to drum up public support and pressure those standing in the way of progress. Biden must use the occasion to call for a filibuster carve-out for voting rights. And instead of railing against Biden and Harris, advocates should focus on convincing Manchin and Sinema that adherence to a Senate rule in the face of glaring voter suppression and potential voter subversion is a threat to democracy.

As the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol rushes to gather evidence and conduct interviews, how far it will be able to go in holding former President Donald J. Trump accountable increasingly appears to hinge on one possible witness: former Vice President Mike Pence.

Since the committee was formed last summer, Mr. Pence’s lawyer and the panel have been talking informally about whether he would be willing to speak to investigators, people briefed on the discussions said. But as Mr. Pence began sorting through a complex calculation about his cooperation, he indicated to the committee that he was undecided, they said.

To some degree, the current situation reflects negotiating strategies by both sides, with the committee eager to suggest an air of inevitability about Mr. Pence answering its questions and the former vice president’s advisers looking for reasons to limit his political exposure from a move that would further complicate his ambitions to run for president in 2024.

But there also appears to be growing tension.

In recent weeks, Mr. Pence is said by people familiar with his thinking to have grown increasingly disillusioned with the idea of voluntary cooperation. He has told aides that the committee has taken a sharp partisan turn by openly considering the potential for criminal referrals to the Justice Department about Mr. Trump and others. Such referrals, in Mr. Pence’s view, appear designed to hurt Republican chances of winning control of Congress in November.

Linda Herzog, Flying pigs

Maybe Pence would feel better about cooperating if he were subpoenaed. That way he would have an excuse for talking to the committee.

Meanwhile the latest Covid-19 surge continues to worsen, thanks to the Omicron variant.

The Washington Post: U.S. breaks record with more than 145,000 covid-19 hospitalizations.

The United States surpassed its record for covid-19 hospitalizations on Tuesday, with no end in sight to skyrocketing case loads, falling staff levels and the struggles of a medical system trying to provide care amid an unprecedented surge of the coronavirus.

Tuesday’s total of 145,982 people in U.S. hospitals with covid-19, which includes 4,462 children, passed the record of 142,273 set on Jan. 14, 2021, during the previous peak of the pandemic in this country.

But the highly transmissible omicron variant threatens to obliterate that benchmark. If models of omicron’s spread prove accurate — even the researchers who produce them admit forecasts are difficult during a pandemic — current numbers may seem small in just a few weeks. Disease modelers are predicting total hospitalizations in the 275,000 to 300,000 range when the peak is reached, probably later this month.

As of Monday, Colorado, Oregon, Louisiana, Maryland and Virginia had declared public health emergencies or authorized crisis standards of care, which allow hospitals and ambulances to restrict treatment when they cannot meet demand.

Nurses and other hospital staff continued to fall sick themselves, raising patient-to-nurse ratios in some places to high levels.

“Our systems and personnel are under extreme strain and I’m not sure how long we can sustain it,” Russell Buhr, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, said in an email.

Pig’s Kiss on the Cheek, Gerhard Gluck

Check out this analysis by The New York Times’ David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu of the differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans in two cities–New York and Seattle. People who have been fully vaccinated and boosted are still getting sick from the Omicron variant, but tend to have mild illness while unvaccinated people are more likely to be hospitalized or die.

Here’s some good news from the Associated Press: Home COVID tests to be covered by insurers starting Saturday.

Starting Saturday, private health insurers will be required to cover up to eight home COVID-19 tests per month for people on their plans. The Biden administration announced the change Monday as it looks to lower costs and make testing for the virus more convenient amid rising frustrations.

Under the new policy, first detailed to the AP, Americans will be able to either purchase home testing kits for free under their insurance or submit receipts for the tests for reimbursement, up to the monthly per-person limit. A family of four, for instance, could be reimbursed for up to 32 tests per month. PCR tests and rapid tests ordered or administered by a health provider will continue to be fully covered by insurance with no limit.

President Joe Biden faced criticism over the holiday season for a shortage of at-home rapid tests as Americans traveled to see family amid the surge in cases from the more transmissible omicron variant. Now the administration is working to make COVID-19 home tests more accessible, both by increasing supply and bringing down costs.

Later this month, the federal government will launch a website to begin making 500 million at-home COVID-19 tests available via mail. The administration also is scaling up emergency rapid-testing sites in areas experiencing the greatest surges in cases.

The insurer-covered testing would dramatically reduce costs for many Americans, and the administration hopes that by easing a barrier to more regular at-home testing, it can help slow the spread of the virus, get kids back into school more quickly and help people gather safely.

Finally, The New York Times reports: Russia Positioning Helicopters, in Possible Sign of Ukraine Plans.

The number of Russian troops at Ukraine’s border has remained steady in recent weeks, despite U.S. intelligence predictions of a surge, but American officials say that President Vladimir V. Putin has begun taking steps to move military helicopters into place, a possible sign that planning for an attack continues.

American officials had expected additional Russian troops to stream toward the Ukrainian border in December and early January, building toward a force of 175,000.

While troop movements have slowed, there are still 100,000 military personnel near the border and now the Russians have positioned additional attack aircraft there, American officials said. Attack and transport helicopters, along with ground attack fighter jets, would be a critical Russian advantage, should Mr. Putin decide to invade Ukraine.

U.S. officials say the Russian president’s window for an invasion is limited, dictated by temperatures that will freeze the ground — allowing for the easy movement of heavy vehicles and equipment — before a spring thaw, which could begin by March, creates a muddy quagmire.

Read more details at the link.

What else is happening? What stories are you following today?

Lazy Caturday Reads: SCOTUS, Covid, and the Right Wing Agenda

By Chris Miles

Good Afternoon!!

There’s not a lot of breaking news today, but there are plenty of articles about the the Supreme Court and the pandemic; at the moment those topics are interrelated because of yesterday’s SCOTUS argument on President Biden’s vaccine mandates. The conservative majority on the Court is apparently working to kill Americans in the service of weakening the Federal government.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: COVID Is an Emergency. To SCOTUS’s Conservatives, It’s Also an Opportunity.

A majority of the justices on the Supreme Court may not see COVID-19 as an emergency. But they do see it as an opportunity. This unprecedented pandemic, the deadliest in American history, has forced the executive branch to act swiftly and creatively at each stage of the crisis. Facing an often-deadlocked Congress, President Joe Biden has drawn on old statutes to establish new regulations to stop the coronavirus from spreading and killing more people. Yet in so doing, he has given the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices a chance to hobble his whole agenda. And during oral arguments over Biden’s vaccine mandates on Friday, these justices made it painfully clear that they will also seize this moment to grind down the federal government’s ability to perform even its most basic functions as well.

Friday’s arguments revolved around two rules issued by the Biden administration. The first, which we’ll call the employer mandate, was issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It imposes a requirement on companies with 100 or more employees: Workers must either get vaccinated against COVID-19 or wear a mask at work and undergo weekly testing. The second, which we’ll call the health care mandate, was issued by the Department of Health and Human Services. It obligates hospitals and other care facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid funds, which is most hospitals, to issue a vaccine mandate for workers. This mandate includes medical and religious exemptions. A coalition of red-state attorneys general challenged both rules, and after the lower courts divided, the Supreme Court scheduled a special Friday session to decide their fate.

Cat and Mouse, by Janet Hill

And what a session it was. The nihilism, hypocrisy, and armchair epidemiology on display at times bled into rank anti-vax-ism. The conservative supermajority did not bother to conceal its contempt for the Biden administration’s effort to root new policies in old statutes. As the basis for its employer mandate OSHA cited a federal law that permits it to issue an “emergency temporary standard” when it determines that it’s “necessary” to protect employees from a “grave danger” resulting from “physically harmful” “agents” or “new hazards.” The coronavirus is both an infectious “agent” and a “new hazard” that poses a “grave danger.” So OSHA’s vaccinate-or-test regime fits pretty neatly into Congress’ mandate. But the Republican-appointed justices appeared to begin with the premise that existing law could not possibly authorize this rule, then worked backward to justify their skepticism.

That’s because these justices emerged from a conservative legal movement that has grown obsessed with obliterating “the administrative state”—the hundreds of federal agencies that actually implement laws passed by Congress. Because Congress cannot anticipate every future problem, it has long given these agencies broad mandates to accomplish some overarching goal however their experts see fit. For instance, lawmakers charged the public health experts at OSHA with determining how best to protect Americans from dangers in the workplace. They did not try to predict every hazard that might arise; instead, they simply tasked the agency with deciding how best to confront the most catastrophic risks to American workers.

Please go read the rest at Slate.

Ian Millhiser at Vox: The Supreme Court appears ready to slash Biden’s vaccine mandate for workers.

Benjamin Flowers is Ohio’s solicitor general, and he was supposed to be at the Supreme Court on Friday to ask the justices to nullify a Biden administration rule requiring most workers to either be vaccinated against Covid-19 or to be regularly tested for the disease.

But Flowers had to argue his case over the phone. The reason why? He himself has Covid, and therefore could not enter the justices’ workplace and risk endangering them and their staff.

It’s an elegant metaphor for the kind of see-no-evil approach to Covid-19 that Flowers, and several other lawyers arguing against policies from President Joe Biden’s administration, would impose on the nation. Flowers would have the justices block one of Biden’s most significant efforts to halt a potentially deadly disease that, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted multiple times during Friday’s arguments, is infecting about three-quarters of a million Americans every day this week.

And yet, if Friday’s argument in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor is any sign, there will almost certainly be at least five votes on the Supreme Court to block the workplace Covid rule, which applies to employers with 100 or more employees.

By Catherine Chauloux

Meanwhile, in separate case Biden v. Missouri, the Court considered a rule requiring health providers that accept Medicare and Medicaid funds to be vaccinated. This oral argument was less of a bloodbath for the government, and it seems possible that this more limited rule for health providers will be upheld.

But the oral argument in the first case, NFIB, suggests that the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority is inclined to hand down a very broad decision — one that won’t simply hobble many of the Biden administration’s efforts to quell a pandemic that has killed nearly 830,000 Americans, but that could also fundamentally rework the balance of power between elected federal officials and an unelected judiciary….

Multiple justices appeared eager to impose new restrictions on Congress’s ability to delegate authority to federal agencies. Indeed, the Court could easily give itself a sweeping new power to veto agency regulations that a majority of the justices disapprove of.

A majority of the Court, in other words, appeared much more bothered by the implications of letting the Biden administration fight the pandemic than they are bothered by the many deaths caused by the pandemic itself.

Ironically, Covid is killing off right wing Republicans who refuse to get vaccinated and wear masks. Kent Sepkowitz at The Daily Beast on January 3: Omicron Shows the Unvaccinated Will Never Be Safe.

The Omicron variant of SARS CoV2 has quickly upended at least three facts we thought we had established about t​​he COVID-19 pandemic.

First, the transmissibility of Omicron has shattered all previous records, including those set by the Delta variant, which briefly had been considered just about worst-in-class due its extreme contagiousness. Second, it has shown us that COVID-19 can be a mild disease—if one considers a three- or four-day bout of fatigue, aches, and fever to be mild.

But it is the third revelation that’s the most alarming. Omicron has scrambled a great deal of what we thought we knew about immunity to the infection in the first place. Witness the ease with which it has infected those with one or two—or even three—vaccinations, a phenomenon referred to as vaccine evasion, or VE. Thankfully, the current vaccines still prevent most lethal infections, despite being less effective at preventing infection itself.

By Emily Olson

However, it is not vaccinated people with breakthrough infections who comprise the most unsettling part of the immunity story, even as that makes headlines and dominates social media. Rather, it is the ease with which Omicron has evaded the immunity provoked by previous infection with the Delta or the Alpha (aka the British or B-117) variants that has ominous implications for what’s ahead—and raises the specter of more mass death.

For those willing to accept vaccines, this type of evasion less than a year after the mRNA products entered widespread use is a serious but surmountable scientific challenge. We have long known we may need to develop just-in-time vaccines for a newly—and suddenly—dominant variant. MRNA technology lends itself to exactly that. The technology is available, and though the product will always lag behind the latest pandemic variants, tricks (like third doses and fourth doses of the old, less-finely tuned vaccine) to buy time or innovative technologic shortcuts surely will be developed.

Vaccinated people will—sooner or later—be able to keep up with the always-changing virus.

But the implacable millions for whom vaccination represents some intolerable intrusion on their personal space—call them the Never Vaxxers—represent a very different problem, one that science, persuasion, or even harsh threats seem unable to resolve. We knew there were anti-vaxxers, and we knew the pandemic would not end easily, but these people will not stop dying any time soon.

One more on yesterday’s SCOTUS session from The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus: Opinion: Where was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mask?

On Wednesday morning, Ginni Thomas—wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—endorsed the rally in Washington demanding that Congress overturn the election. She then sent her “LOVE” to the demonstrators, who violently overtook the Capitol several hours later. Two days later, Thomas amended her post with the addendum: “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol].” By that point, five people involved in the insurrection, including a Capitol Police officer, had died.

Thomas, a conservative lobbyist and zealous supporter of Donald Trump, has fervently defended the president over the last four years. On her Facebook page, she frequently promotes baseless conspiracy theories about a “coup” against Trump led by Jewish philanthropist George Soros, a frequent target of anti-Semitic hate. Thomas draws many of these theories from fringe corners of the internet, including an anti-vax Facebook group that claimed Bill Gates would use the COVID vaccine to kill people. In recent months, she also amplified unsubstantiated corruption claims against Joe Biden while insisting, falsely, that the Obama administration illegally spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, then tried to rig the election against him.

By Yana Movchan, 1971

In turn, Trump has rewarded Thomas with an extraordinary amount of access to the Oval Office. Her advocacy group Groundswell got an audience with the president in early 2019. According to the New York Times, the meeting was arranged after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had dinner with the Trumps. (Clarence Thomas and Trump appear to be quite friendly: The justice took his clerks to meet with the president in the Oval Office at least once; Ginni attended as well.) At the White House, Groundswell’s members lobbied Trump against transgender service in the military, which he already prohibited in 2017. The ban took effect in 2019, around the time of Groundswell’s meeting, after the Supreme Court lifted lower court orders blocking it by a 5–4 vote. (Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from the case; he has never recused from any case because of his wife’s lobbying activities.) The New York Times also reported that Ginni Thomas compiled lists of federal employees whom she deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. She sent her lists to Trump, urging him to fire the disloyal employees, though he seems to have largely ignored her. He has, however, stacked his administration with former Thomas clerks.

Throughout the 2020 campaign, Thomas remained active on Facebook, condemning Black Lives Matter, opposing COVID-19 shutdowns, and touting the “Walk Away” movement, which purports to spotlight Democrats who became Republicans under Trump. (At least two individuals featured in the “Walk Away” series, both Black, were actually models from royalty-free stock photos.) She also campaigned for Trump in person—and, according to the Intercept, spearheaded a dark-money operation to support the president. Cleta Mitchell, the Republican lawyer who participated in Trump’s shakedown of the Georgia secretary of state, led the project.

Chief Justice Roberts claims to be concerned about conflicts of interest in the judiciary. Why isn’t he doing anything about this obvious conflict for Clarence Thomas?

I’ll add more links in the comment thread. What stories are you following today?