There’s no longer any question. We’re in the midst of a wave of new COVID infections, driven largely by the highly contagious Delta variant. Little more than a month ago Israel’s daily case count was in the single digits. It’s now crested over 1,000 a day. Great Britain has seen a similar trajectory and cases counts are rising rapidly in almost every US state. And these are only the parts of the world that have the luxury of widely available vaccines. But in those highly vaccinated countries, the chained relationship between infection, hospitalization and mortality has also clearly been broken. So are we heading back to something like we saw in the Spring of 2020 or the winter of 2020-21 or are reacting to infection numbers in a way that is simply outdated in the context of widespread vaccination?
Many public health experts and officials will tell you that this is the point of vaccines: to prevent death and serious illness, not notional infections which may cause no symptoms at all. Indeed, there’s a real debate about what constitutes infection or cases of COIVD. COVID can briefly take hold and reproduce in a person’s nasal cavity and upper respiratory system before being knocked down by effective vaccines. That will produce a positive result on a PCR COVID test. But it’s an open question whether we should be treating that as an infection or a case of COVID for the purposes of setting public policy or judging our success in emerging from the pandemic.
I’ve written repeatedly over recent months about the politics of opacity in the Biden era. The debates that are in public are largely performative. The consequential conversations are among Senate Democrats and between Senate Democrats and the Biden White House. They are necessarily confidential and private. People who follow politics closely and feel deeply invested in the outcomes find themselves asked to take things on faith. Why didn’t they get to Wednesday’s milestone in April rather than the middle of summer? Why are Democrats still trying to find bipartisan ‘deals’ Republicans will always renege on.
I wanted to have a conversation with someone up there who can walk us through, at least in general terms, just how all this stuff is working and why it works that way. So yesterday we hosted an Inside Briefing with Sen. Brian Schatz (D) of Hawaii. We talked about all these questions and it provided a lot of helpful context to understand why these work as they do even if you don’t think it’s a good way for them to work. I learned a lot from it and I think you will too.
If you’re a member, you can watch our discussion after the jump.
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It’s worth pausing every so often to admire (if that’s the right word) the sheer insanity of the pandemic situation in the United States. Specifically: despite the widespread availability of vaccines for Covid; despite the fact that the vaccines are free; despite the fact that they are astonishingly effective at preventing a disease that is frequently fatal and often results in long-term disability; despite the fact that mass vaccination is clearly the only way we’re going to get out of the Covid pandemic that doesn’t involve mass suffering and trauma on an unimaginable scale; nonetheless, the US vaccination campaign is failing.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) met with the former president in New Jersey yesterday to discuss the midterms — the second such meeting the two have held since McCarthy announced from the House floor that Trump deserved at least some blame for the insurrection.
JoinSenate Dems kick off Era of Good Infrastructure Feelings in the Senate. Kate has the story.
If you haven’t read I hope you will read Josh Kovensky’s excellent write up of the racist storyline behind Trumpite efforts to create a martyrdom narrative around the death of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot to death as she tried to storm the Speaker’s Lobby during the January 6th insurrection. In the context of U.S. political culture this is a story about anti-Black racism and cultural revanche. But many have also recognized the broader context, which is that this is part of an evolving Big Lie “stab in the back” narrative which has been percolating on the right since soon after Trump’s defeat and took on a more certain shape after the January 6th insurrection.
Most of us know generally what “stab in the back” mythology refers to but it is worth understanding in the particulars where the idea comes from and how it relates to today.
With your indulgence, a quick history.
Then-Vice President Mike Pence refused to get in a car to leave the Capitol building after being evacuated from his ceremonial office on Jan. 6, primarily because he knew it would prevent him from doing his job — certifying President Biden’s electoral college victory.
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We’re seeing a raft of stories yesterday and today about a new book from two Washington Post reporters which among other things provides Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley’s account of the aftermath of the 2020 election. In short, he says he and his colleagues were seriously concerned that the defeated President was plotting a coup to remain in office and did everything he could to stand against it.
Milley is a critical and fascinating player in this whole drama. You’ll remember that he accompanied the President on his Lafayette Square photo op debacle and then felt compelled – rightly – to apologize for having done so. But long before that the word was that Milley had gotten the top job in significant part because he had leaned more forward in ingratiating himself with the President than the other top contender for the job. More recently he’s been having a bit of a moment with Democrats. There was that exchange he had in his Capitol Hill testimony pushing back against anti-Critical Race Theory hysteria. And there have been a series of reports over recent weeks which hint at these new revelations.
Remember that little more than a week ago Donald Trump was revving up his rally crowd to go lynch the Capitol Police officer who shot the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt as she broke the last barricaded door protecting fleeing members of Congress. “Now if that were on the other side, the person who did the shooting would be strung up and hung. Now they don’t want to give the name. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? It’s got to be released.” The right wing media has been going full tilt identifying the officer as a black man.
Josh Kovensky digs deeper into the racist fury behind the Ashli Babbitt martyr narrative.
Scratching your head about the inner workings of the Senate? Wondering what on earth is going on with infrastructure and the filibuster? For Inside members, tomorrow at 3pm eastern I’ll be talking with Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. Please join us live and ask your own questions. Register here.