Yet another person has tested positive for coronavirus after attending the White House Rose Garden super-spreader event for Amy Coney Barrett's nomination.
"This afternoon, doctors confirmed that U.S. Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia’s wife, Trish, tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus," the U.S. Department of Labor said in a statement.
Eugene Scalia is the son of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Mrs. Scalia is experiencing mild symptoms but doing well. This evening, Secretary Scalia received a test and the results were negative; he has experienced no symptoms. The Secretary and Mrs. Scalia will follow the advice of health professionals for Trish’s recovery and the health of those around them," the statement read.
"Both were at the Rose Garden event and sat behind Melania Trump," CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins reported.
The former chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party in the battleground state of Iowa is part of a group with a brutal greeting for President Donald Trump as the president travels to the state for a campaign rally in the middle of a pandemic.
Christopher Gibbs raises corn, soybeans, alfalfa and seed stock beef cattle on his 560-acre farm. The former GOP official explained how Trump's trade war with China have been devastating for farmers during a 2019 interview on MSNBC.
"Certainly, the administration has put forth the bailouts. I call it hush-money to keep farmers sedated," Gibbs told anchor Chris Hayes. "But they put together dollars from the taxpayer, and let’s be very clear, those dollars do not come from China. No matter how many times the president says it, the dollars come right out of the Treasury, right from the American taxpayer."
"I got off the Trump train a long time ago, particularly through the tariff fight. I’ve spoken out against this for over a year," he said.
Gibbs is now leading the Political Action Committee Rural America 2020.
The group put up a billboard slamming Trump for holding a rally during the pandemic:
On Tuesday, The New York Timesreported" that Defense Secretary Mark Esper refused to explicitly rule out sending active troops to guard the polls in U.S. cities.
"Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper declined to rule out sending active-duty military personnel to the polls on Election Day, amid an intensifying debate about the military’s role if a disputed election led to civil unrest," said the report. "Mr. Esper, asked by members of Congress to commit to refusing to send troops to the polls and to commit to facilitating a peaceful transition of power, responded to both queries with the same brief answer: 'The U.S. military has acted, and will continue to act, in accordance with the Constitution and the law.'"
"Mr. Esper’s comments, contained in written answers released Tuesday by two Democratic congresswomen, Representatives Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, come as President Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses," continued the report. "Senior leaders at the Pentagon are privately discussing what to do if Mr. Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and tries to send troops into the streets, as he has threatened to do during protests against police brutality."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the sole dissenter on Tuesday when the Supreme Court decided to allow the Trump administration to cut short the census, which a lower court had ordered must continue until Oct. 31.
Under Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the Census Bureau had initially extended its deadline for completing the census — a count of the people in the United States crucial for determining the distribution of funds, services, and electoral representatives — until the end of October because of disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The census had already been a major point of political controversy, as Republicans stood accused of using a citizenship question (since removed) to discourage minority residents from responding to the survey. But after deciding to extend the census, officials abruptly reversed themselves and cut the count short, hoping to end it by the last day of September.
A group of various individual an entities who fear they would be harmed by this change challenged the decision legally, and eventually the Commerce Department was ordered by the courts to continue the count. But now, the Supreme Court his stayed that order, permitting the administration to stop counting in a brief, unsigned declaration offering no explanation for its decision.
Only Sotomayor objected, writing a detailed dissent explaining why she though the majority's decision is wrong.
"I would deny a stay of that injunction," she wrote. 'The Government fails to demonstrate that the injunction is likely to cause it irreparable harm. Regardless of the merits of respondents' claims, this failure, alone, requires denying the requested stay."
The only reason the administration claimed it needed to end the count early, she said, is that it is required to turn over the results of the census to the president by the end of the year, according to the statute.
But, Sotomayor pointed out, officials have already said that it is "impossible" for the Census Bureau to turn over the results of the count by the Dec. 31 deadline regardless of whether they stop now. And they have an alternative: The administration can ask Congress to simply extend the deadline, which officials had already begun to do by the time the Commerce Department decided to cut the census short. They also could direct more resources toward speeding up the analysis of the census data, Sotomayor said, but the department does not appear to have considered this option.
So while the harms the administration says it will suffer seem dubious, Sotomayor said the harms suffered by people impacted by an undercount could be significant.
"In contrast to the Government's unsupported claims of irreparable harm, respondents will suffer substantial injury if the Bureau is permitted to sacrifice accuracy for expediency. As the District Court found, and the Ninth Circuit credited, '[a]n inaccurate count would affect the distribution of federal and state funding, the deployment of services, and the allocation of local resources," she wrote.
She also noted that the administration has claimed it has already counted 99 percent of people.
"But even a fraction of a percent of the Nation's 140 million households amounts to hundreds of thousands of people left uncounted," she explained. "And significantly, the percentage of nonresponses is likely much higher among marginalized populations and in hard-to-count areas, such as rural and tribal lands."
She also noted that in 2010, the Census continued its count for a full month after already reaching the 99 percent threshold.
"The harms caused by rushing this year's census count are irreparable. And respondents will suffer their lasting impact for at least the next 10 years," Sotomayor concluded.
At his campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, President Donald Trump addressed his collapsing poll numbers with suburban women — begging them outright to stop disliking him and be grateful that he repealed fair-housing regulations for them.
"I ask you to do me a favor. Suburban women: will you please like me?" said Trump. "Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK? The other thing: I don't have that much time to be that nice. You know, I can do it, but I gotta go quickly."
Trump is likely referring to his decision to axe the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which incentivizes communities to ensure that affordable housing is available. There is no polling evidence that suburban voters oppose this rule; however, Trump has repeatedly touted his repeal of it in the hope that it will improve his numbers in the suburbs.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump retweeted a bizarre anti-Biden conspiracy theory that Biden and Obama deliberately had Americans killed at the Benghazi consulate in 2012 to cover up a blood sacrifice of Navy SEALs, and the supposed fact that Osama bin Laden was never really taken out.
— (@)
"Alan Howell Parrot, the subject of a 2010 documentary about his falconry called Feathered Cocaine, has shot to new fame on the right after a video interview with him played over the weekend at the American Priority Conference, a pro-Trump event held at Trump’s Miami resort," reported Will Sommer. "In the video, Parrot, interviewed by conservative personality Nick Noe and the father of a former Navy SEAL who died in Benghazi, makes a series of bizarre claims alleging collusion between Iran, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton ahead of the attack."
"Parrot claims that Biden cut a deal with Iran to set up Bin Laden’s 2011 death in Pakistan," said the report. "But when Iran double-crossed the United States and switched in a Bin Laden body double, in Parrot’s telling, Biden and Clinton arranged for a Navy SEAL helicopter to be shot down to keep the truth about the raid from getting out — a reference to a real-world helicopter attack in Afghanistan that killed 38 people, including 25 Navy SEALs ... Later in the video, Noe claims that the Benghazi compound was attacked to cover up the fact that, supposedly, the missile used in the helicopter attack came from the United States."
The account Trump tweeted promoting the link also has ties to the QAnon movement, a far-right conspiracy theory that Democrats are running a Satanic pedophile cannibal ring.
At Tuesday's Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) laid into President Donald Trump's nominee for comparing her judicial principles to those of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and compared their records.
"Judge Barrett, several times today you have quoted Justice Ginsburg's testimony about not making predictions in future cases," said Harris. "However, she was far more forthcoming at her confirmation hearing about the essential rights of women. In 1993, Justice Ginsburg's confirmation hearing shows that she testified that 'The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being and dignity. It's a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.'"
"Now, Justice Ginsburg did not tell the committee how she would vote in any particular case. But she did freely discuss how she viewed a woman's right to choose," said Harris. "But Judge Barrett, your record clearly shows you hold a different view. In 2006, you signed your name to an advertisement published in the South Bend Tribune. It described Roe v. Wade as 'an exercise of raw judicial power' and called for putting an end to the 'barbaric legacy' of Roe v. Wade. You signed a similar ad in 2013 that described Roe as 'infamous' and expressed opposition to abortion."
"As senators fill in the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said the right to choose is essential to woman's equality, I would suggest that we not pretend that we don't know how this nominee views a woman's right to choose to make her own health care decisions," concluded Harris.
The Democratic Party nominee for vice president did not use her prosecutorial question skills during the beginning of her time questioning Judge Amy Coney Barrett during her confirmation hearings on Tuesday.
Instead, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) lectured Republicans for choosing to prioritize Barrett's confirmation over a coronavirus stimulus bill.
"I want to take a moment to talk with the American people about where we are," and how we got here. "And how we got here."
Harris also put her remarks on the Affordable Care Act in the context of COVID-19, blasting Republicans for seeking to overturn Obamacare during a pandemic.
Amy Coney Barrett had a challenging day before Senate Democrats. She offended a great many people during her Supreme Court nomination hearing Tuesday when she used the term "sexual preference," instead of "sexual orientation," forcing a rare apology from a SCOTUS nominee later in the day.
Judge Barrett claimed she would never discriminate for any reason, which is probably false as she has already in her life outside the courts, but it was one set of questions from Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) that seemed to trip up Judge Barrett.
"Can a hairdresser refuse to serve an interracial couple's wedding, because they disapprove of interracial marriages?" Sen. Booker asked.
"Well, Loving v. Virginia follows directly from Brown, and it makes unconstitutional any attempt to prohibit or for forbid interracial marriage," Barrett replied.
"Could they refuse to serve a black couple's wedding?" Booker asked.
Judge Barrett offered a very strange response.
"Could a baker or a florist refuse to – Title VII prohibits any sort of discrimination on the basis of race by places of public accommodation," Barrett said.
But Sen. Booker didn't ask about "a baker or a florist," he asked about a hairdresser.
Coincidentally, the anti-LGBTQ hate group Judge Barrett has ties to has clients who are bakers and florists, and two of its top cases involve a baker and a florist. Not a hairdresser.
Booker continued, asking about an interfaith couple, and that's when Barrett put the brakes on.
"Well, Senator, I feel like you're taking me down a road of hypotheticals that is going to get me into trouble here because as you know I can't opine on how cases would be resolved, and I've said that whether they're easy questions or hard questions. I can't do that," Barrett insisted.
"So I'm not the lawyer that you are," Booker replied graciously. (He is in fact a highly-regarded attorney.) "But you seem to honor the precedents that are enough to protect discrimination against African Americans, interracial couples, but you stop on saying that unequivocally about people stopping on religious discrimination against a Muslim couple or interfaith wedding?"
Facebook on Tuesday announced a ban on ads that discourage people from getting vaccinated, in light of the coronavirus pandemic which the social media giant said has "highlighted the importance of preventive health behaviors."
"While public health experts agree that we won't have an approved and widely available Covid-19 vaccine for some time, there are steps that people can take to stay healthy and safe," the company said in a statement.
The platform has already banned disinformation and scams as identified by public health institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
It will continue to allow advertisements either pushing for or against government regulations linked to vaccinations.
And it plans to launch a public information campaign in the United States pushing for people to get vaccinated against seasonal flu.
Coronavirus vaccines are expected to be key to moving beyond the pandemic and several labs are currently working on developing the shots.
The United States has pre-ordered millions of doses of vaccines currently under development by Pfizer and Moderna, but also from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax and Sanofi, in order to ensure swift delivery from whichever one makes the breakthrough first.
The tech giants have regularly been accused of allowing anti-vaccine movements to flourish.
According to US health authorities, the number of children who make it to age two without any vaccination has reached more than 0.9 percent among kids born in 2011 and 1.3 percent among those born in 2015.
And the number of applications for vaccine exemptions rose in the year 2017-2018 in the US for the third year in a row.
Yet a major study of more than 650,0000 Danish children who were followed for more than a decade came to the same conclusion as several previous studies: the vaccine against mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) carries no risk of causing autism in children, contrary to a theory advocated by anti-vaccine activists.
On Tuesday, writing for The Washington Post, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin tore into Senate Republicans for their badly-concealed hunger to turn the Supreme Court into a political weapon.
"Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) showed some candor for once," wrote Rubin. "Instead of denying that he wanted to use the Supreme Court to achieve what President Trump and Republicans could not — repealing the Affordable Care Act — he started out Tuesday’s hearing on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation with a confession, of sorts," saying that "Obamacare has been a disaster for the state of South Carolina. All of you over there want to impose Obamacare on South Carolina. We don’t want it. We want something better."
"The American people have plainly said otherwise, having flipped the House in 2018 to Democratic control, largely on the issue of health care. We are also in the middle of an election, during which voters can once again make their voices heard," wrote Rubin. "But Graham and his colleagues, surely sensing a massive defeat ahead, figure Barrett will be the ticket to dismantling the popular health-care statute. Clarity is refreshing."
Graham's remarks, wrote Rubin, are a window into the GOP's entire view of the courts.
"The party that used to see the Supreme Court as interlopers into the political process now looks to 'originalists' to create a pathway to right-wing outcomes," wrote Rubin. "It is fortunate that we can see how closely Republicans’ purported judicial philosophy tracks its agenda. The public is telling us they want a vigorous federal government to address a once-in-a-generation health and economic crisis, racial injustice and global warming. The only way Republicans are going to keep those popular demands from becoming policy (e.g., invalidating carbon emission standards, watering down the Voting Rights Act) is by finding eager allies on the federal bench."
"In a sense, voters now get perfect clarity: Republicans want no significant change in the racial and gender status quo, a hogtied federal government and broad exemptions for those flashing the 'religious liberty' card to shield them from perceived threats to their image of a White, Christian America. That’s the world they are desperately trying to fortify with a Supreme Court entirely out of step with the times," wrote Rubin. "The larger Republicans’ defeat in November, the harder it will be to maintain their backward-looking conception of America."
These seemingly disparate styles, however, are two sides of the same coin – manifestations of a particular version of authoritarian white masculinity that has taken over the GOP since it became the party of Trump.
Not only do these styles perpetuate sexist assumptions about leadership, they also are fundamentally undemocratic because they try to silence dissent, foreclose debate and curtail the participation of anyone with whom they disagree in our democracy.
Trump and Pence’s seemingly disparate debate styles conceal similar approaches and agendas.
Authoritarian white masculinity is a version of patriarchal authority that has asserted itself in U.S. politics in conjunction with the rise of Donald Trump. It assumes that heterosexual white men are best suited to leadership and casts political leadership by women and people of color as inauthentic – for example, the “birther movement” – or threatening – for example, “lock her up.”
The Trump presidency is, in part, a backlash to the election of the nation’s first Black president and to Hillary Clinton’s nomination in 2016 as the first woman to top a major-party presidential ticket. This reassertion of white patriarchal authority is presented as necessary for the nation’s stability and progress. It’s one way Trump delivers on his promise to “make America great again.”
Where progressive political power aims to expand citizenship, voting and participation, conservative authoritarianism aims to curtail it. As a result, progressive women and candidates of color face a complex set of stereotypes and constraints when challenging the white patriarchy on which the U.S. political system is built.
Trump was unconstrained by either expectations of civility or the rules of the debate. The more disruptive, the better. Drawn in by Trump’s provocations, Biden urged Trump to “shut up, man” and called him a “clown.” Debate observers likened the event to a schoolyard brawl or a bar fight.
Although some commentators cheered Pence’s ostensible civility during the vice presidential debate, Pence persistently ignored the rules to which his campaign had assented, speaking past his time limit, refusing to answer many of moderator Susan Page’s questions, and supplanting the moderator’s authority so that he could pose his own questions to Harris.
Pence’s authoritarian masculinity is the genteel version favored in the patriarchal religious and regional communities that compose Trump’s most loyal base: Southern conservatives and white evangelical Christians. During the debate, Pence said it was a “privilege to be on the stage” with Harris and repeatedly thanked the moderator while ignoring her authority.
When Page moved to a new topic, Pence said, “Well, thank you, but I would like to go back to the previous topic.” When she informed him his time was up, he kept speaking as though no one had said anything. When he wanted to interrupt Harris, he placidly insisted, “I have to weigh in.”
Harris: ‘I’m speaking’
Harris’ response to the vice president’s interruptions were popular with women who have experienced similar rudeness.
Harris refused to be steamrolled. Her gender insulated her from being drawn into a competitive masculinity display, as Biden was in his debate with Trump. But that doesn’t mean her task was easy.
Harris’ strategy was to meet Pence’s authoritarian masculinity with an authoritative assertion of her own: “I’m speaking.”
Without appealing to the moderator to intervene on her behalf, she did what men routinely do: she took up space. She claimed time. She articulated her qualifications. But she was careful to do it all with a smile.
The “dominance” strategy did not work well for Trump or Pence, other than garnering the expected partisan praise. But neither is likely to abandon it. More than a campaign tactic, authoritarian masculinity appears to be baked into their worldviews.
And the attraction of authoritarian masculinity seems to be shared by other Republican politicians. On the night of the vice presidential debate, Sen. Mike Lee posted a tweet that implied that something other than democratic governance might be required in order for “the human condition to flourish.”
Presidential campaign cycles present voters with the opportunity to think about the expectations they have of political leaders, who those standards benefit and constrain, and how they promote or impede democratic engagement. As such, campaign communication and presidential debates are about much more than political strategy. They build – or break – American democracy.
On Tuesday, The New York Timesreported that officials with President Donald Trump's campaign wanted former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman to take out a $1 million "corrective" ad campaign taking back the negative statements she made about him on TV and in her book.
"The recommendation was made in a document filed by the Trump campaign from an expert witness last week as part of an ongoing arbitration case; The Times reviewed the document," reported Maggie Haberman. "The witness, Eric W. Rose, a crisis management expert, detailed a lengthy advertising proposal across several platforms that would cost just over $846,000. He did not suggest a time frame by which the ad campaign would need to take place. But the proposal mentions several times the impressions Ms. Manigault Newman’s comments could have left with 'voters,' and was filed a few weeks before the election."
“It would be my recommendation that Ms. Manigault Newman pays for the corrective ads/corrective statements outlined above to counteract the long-term adverse effects of information that appeared as a result of Ms. Manigault Newman violating her confidentially agreement,” said Rose. “If corrective ads are not placed, voters may continue to hold beliefs about the president as a result of Ms. Manigault Newman’s statements.”
According to Paul S. Ryan, director of the government watchdog group Common Cause, such an arrangement would constitute "an illegally large in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign," and that even if she didn't fund the ad herself, her appearance in it would have an in-kind value greater than the $2,800 federal limit to individual campaign contributions.
Allies of the president have reportedly tried several times to silence Omarosa's criticism of the administration. In 2018, she alleged that the Trump campaign offered her a $15,000 per month hush agreement. And last year, attorneys with the Department of Justice sued Omarosa alleging financial disclosure violations.
