By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday,
September 20, 2022
You may
have noticed that Joe Biden doesn’t pay a lot of attention to what he says
until after he says it — e.g., “minor incursion,” “For God’s sake, this man
cannot remain in power,” “You ain’t black,” his repeated
insistence that the U.S. has an established commitment to defend Taiwan where
one doesn’t exist,
etc. This past weekend, Biden’s habit of blurting out the first thing that pops
into his mind once again made a hash of his administration’s policies.
In that 60
Minutes interview on Sunday, Biden was eager to take a victory lap,
boasting:
The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still
doing a lotta work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over. if you notice, no
one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so, I
think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.
The
problem is that several Biden-administration policies rest upon the argument
that the pandemic is not over. Much like Schrödinger’s cat being both
simultaneously alive and dead, the pandemic is both over and not over,
depending upon what Biden and his administration need at any given moment.
As National Review’s Charlie Cooke observed, this off-the-cuff comment
abrogates the entire justification for Biden’s student-loan-debt cancellation:
Why does Biden’s statement matter so much? I’ll tell you: It matters
because the memo that the Biden administration released to
justify his order rested entirely upon there being an ongoing
emergency, and because, as Biden has just confirmed, there is no
ongoing emergency.
Back in August, Biden’s lawyers argued with half-straight faces that the
2003 HEROES Act — which, as Bloomberg Law has noted, was passed not as a generalized
enabling act but “to help borrowers serving in the military in the wake of the
Sept. 11 attacks” — could be twisted to apply to any national
emergency, including pandemics such as Covid-19. This, of course, was nonsense.
Among the specific problems with Biden’s argument was that the 2003 HEROES Act
does not cover debt cancelation (i.e., transference to
taxpayers); that its “direct economic hardship” language does not allow for
mass relief; that the application of its “or national emergency” language
clearly violates the major questions doctrine; and that the administration’s
insistence that the act was designed to allow the executive branch “to act
quickly should a situation arise that has not been considered” was flatly contradicted
by the fact that the president waited until two-and-a-half years into the
pandemic before acting, and then gave relief to the most privileged people in
America. But, even if one were to ignore all that, one could still not get past
the fact that the powers to which Biden laid claim can be applied only when
there is an active emergency, and that the active emergency Biden is citing has
now passed.
The U.S. federal
government’s official position is that a public-health emergency is still
ongoing. The
Department of Health and Human Services has stated it will give 60 days’
notice before ending
the state of emergency. And yet, HHS secretary Xavier Becerra, caught between his department’s
policies and health experts on one hand and his boss on the other, issued a
statement in response to Biden’s 60 Minutes remarks declaring
that declaring that, “The president
is correct.”
The
president says the pandemic is over, yet his administration is keeping the
state of emergency in effect and apparently the plan is to hope that no one
notices.
Here’s
the administration, laying out its budget request for next year, 18 days ago:
Second, our COVID-19 response efforts continue to require additional
funding. . . . While we have made tremendous progress in our ability to protect
against and treat COVID-19, we must stay on our front foot. Doing so requires
additional resources, which is why today we are updating our previous funding
request. The updated request is for $22.4 billion to meet immediate short-term
domestic needs, including testing; accelerate the research and development of
next-generation vaccines and therapeutics; prepare for future variants; and
support the global response to COVID-19. This funding is vital to our ability
to protect and build on the progress we’ve made.
The
president says the pandemic is over, but he needs another $22 billion to fight
it.
Twelve days
ago, White House
officials told Politico that they were bracing for a perilous
winter, and that “COVID is not over and our response continues to be active,
comprehensive, and led out of the White House. That is not changing right now
or soon.”
Biden’s
Department of Justice is still fighting
in court to defend the CDC’s authority to issue mask requirements on airplanes.
Both on
the campaign trail and in the early days of his presidency, Biden pledged that
he would always follow the science and listen to the experts. Apparently, Biden didn’t
consult with Dr. Anthony Fauci before declaring the pandemic to be over.
“We are
not where we need to be if we are going to quote ‘live with the virus’ because
we know we are not going to eradicate it,” Fauci said Monday. “We must be
aware,” he said later, “that it is likely, that with the combination of the
evolution of variants as well as the seasonal aspects that as we get into this
coming late fall and winter, it is likely that we will see another variant
emerge. And there’s already on the horizon one that looks suspicious that it
might start to evolve as another variant, and that’s the BA.2.75.2.”
Also
note that the administration is trying to get people to receive their updated
Omicron boosters, in a rollout that the New York Times characterized
as “methodical but
muted.”
Unsurprisingly, people are less motivated to go out and get their fourth shot
than they were to get the first three. How motivated will people be to get them
now that the president has appeared on television and declared that, “The
pandemic is over”?
Finally,
while the cases are down, it is worth noting that they were relatively low in
September 2021, too, and then in late autumn and winter, the Omicron wave
arrived and cases and hospitalizations spiked to their all-time highs. A year
ago at this time, cases were on the downward slope, after a rise in southern
states, where people were spending more time indoors in air conditioning.
Between
past infections (more than 95
million reported cases since the start of the pandemic), vaccinations, and boosters, there
are probably very few Americans who don’t have any protection against the virus
at all. Most of us will be fine, and maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll
realize your most recent infection was asymptomatic.
But the
cold weather makes people spend more time indoors, which means that they are
closer together, and all kinds of contagious viruses spread faster and more
easily — this is why winter is called cold-and-flu season. We’re going to have
more Covid-19 cases this winter; hopefully, an overwhelming number will be
mild, indistinguishable from the usual mundane winter cold, and won’t require
hospitalization. But we still have the elderly and immunocompromised among us,
and like with any viral infection, they may well have a harder time fighting it
off.
Considering
the track record of this president — who assured us that the surge of
migrants at the border was a routine seasonal pattern, that the Afghan army was
well-trained and well-equipped and deserved our confidence, that we wouldn’t
see helicopters evacuating people from the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan, that
inflation was transitory, that the U.S. would not enter a recession, that the
supply-chain crisis didn’t occur, that Covid testing would be easy and
plentiful last winter, and that the infant-formula shortage would get resolved
quickly — maybe he should avoid confident declarations that the pandemic is
over.
If the
measuring stick of a pandemic being over was the virus’ influence on daily
life, then the beginning of the end of this pandemic came at the tail of the
Omicron wave, and the end itself came with the with lifting of the
Covid-testing requirement for international travel in June. (You know what moment I would
choose to characterize the end of the pandemic? When
Virginia’s state legislative Democrats surrendered to Glenn Youngkin on school
mask mandates.)
We know
why Biden doesn’t do a lot of sit-down interviews. You never know when he’ll
give a “four or five days ago, man” to George Stephanopolous, a “You’re
being a wise guy” to Lester Holt, or rambling
remarks about interracial couples in commercials to Jimmy Kimmel. Joe Biden is not who he used to
be, physically or mentally, and he wasn’t the most mentally or verbally
disciplined guy even back when he was in his prime. He’s not going to get any
better after he turns 80 this November.
No comments:
Post a Comment