April 8, 2020
Today’s biggest breaking news was that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. He will keep his name on the rest of the primary ballots, intending to get as many delegates as possible for the Democratic National Convention to enable him to have a say in the party platform.
This is disappointing to his supporters, but a good move for him and his ideas. Sanders’s strength has always been in inspirational rhetoric rather than in the coalition-building necessary to get legislation passed, and this will enable him to get his ideas into the Democratic argument for the 2020 election while leaving to others the wheeling and dealing it takes to get those ideas into legislative development. Sanders reminds me of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner of the Civil War era, whose speeches inspired his supporters to take on the institution of human enslavement when few others wanted to touch it, but whose skill set was never in the gritty work of getting legislation passed.
After Sanders dropped out of the race, former vice president Joe Biden issued a statement complimenting Sanders on creating a movement, “a good thing for our nation and our future,” changing the national conversation on income inequality, universal health care, climate change, and free college tuition. For his part, Sanders called Biden “a very decent man, who I will work with to move our progressive ideas forward.”
While Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee and Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, neither nomination seems to me a done deal. The novel coronavirus has changed every equation in modern life, and it seems possible it will change the election equation, too.
The 2020 presidential battle will be fought largely over suburban white women who supported Trump in 2016 but have turned away from him. Both parties will be trying to show they care about women’s issues: Biden has already pledged to pick a woman as a running mate. Although we have no clear signals yet who that will be, we can narrow the field pretty easily because a vice presidential candidate has to bring something to the table to cover a key weakness in the presidential candidate, but has to be a credible option to step into the presidential office if necessary. It also seems quite possible that Trump will jettison Vice President Mike Pence for a different running mate. There is speculation that will be former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, but there are other options. In both cases, the candidates will be signaling what they see as the future of their political party.
The rest of today’s news has either been a follow up to older news or has been too confusing to comb into an understandable shape.
We learned that the trip of former acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly to Guam on Monday to harangue the sailors of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, there to clean the ship of coronavirus and to help the crew infected with it, cost taxpayers $243,151.65, according to estimates by a Navy official. He flew in a modified Gulfstream jet that costs $6,946.19 an hour to fly. The flight time to and from Guam was 35 hours.
Eight senators from both parties, led by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a staunch proponent of inspectors general, have asked Trump to explain by April 13 the “clear, substantial reasons for removal” of the Intelligence Committee Inspector General Michael Atkinson last Friday. Atkinson was the one who warned the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA) that then acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire was illegally withholding an urgent and credible whistleblower complaint, although we did not learn until later it was about the president's July phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
While Trump's letter informing Congress of the firing said Trump had lost confidence in Atkinson, the president over the weekend said: “I thought he did a terrible job. Absolutely terrible.... He took a whistleblower report, which turned out to be a fake report—it was fake. It was totally wrong. It was about my conversation with the President of Ukraine. He took a fake report and he brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay? Not a big Trump fan—that, I can tell you.”
The senators' letter notes that Congress has made it clear “that an expression of lost confidence, without further explanation” does not meet the legal requirement for removal. Congress intended “that inspectors general only be removed when there is clear evidence of wrongdoing or failure to perform the duties of the office, and not for reasons unrelated to their performance, to help preserve IG independence.” The letter also asked Trump to explain “how the appointment of an acting official prior to the end of the 30 day notice period comports” with the law.
If those older stories were straightforward, more confusing was a story from the L.A. Times, which yesterday pulled together a number of reports that have been circulating about the seizure of masks and PPEs coming into the country. It reported that, after telling states to get their own medical supplies to fight the coronavirus, the federal government is intercepting and seizing those supplies from states and hospitals that had ordered them. Reporter Noam N. Levey talked to officials from seven states, who said their materials had been taken and they’ve had no information about when or if they will ever get them back.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not publicly reporting this activity, although a FEMA representative said the agency was working with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense to identify “needed supplies from vendors” and distribute them fairly. But, Levey notes, FEMA refused to supply any more information about how it determined which supplies should be seized or where they are going. One state official told Levey: “Are they stockpiling this stuff? Are they distributing it? We don’t know…. And are we going to ever get any of it back if we need supplies? It would be nice to know these things.”
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Notes
Sanders stays on ballots: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/bernie-sanders-ends-campaign-biden-democratic-nominee
Biden and Sanders: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/491785-biden-credits-sanders-for-starting-a-movement
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/politics/former-navy-secretary-trip-cost/index.html
Grassley letter: https://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04-08%20CEG%20et%20al%20to%20POTUS%20%28IC%20IG%20removal%29.pdf
Trump and Atkinson: https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-trumps-inspector-general-purge-not-national-scandal
Firing letter: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/03/politics/read-michael-atkinson-letter/index.html
LA Times supply story: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-washington-seize-coronavirus-supplies
poll: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/politics/cnn-poll-coronavirus-april-8/index.html