RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/presidential-power-is-limited-but-vast-11586988414?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Trump has come under attack this week for saying he has “absolute authority” to reopen the economy. He doesn’t—his authority is limited. But while the president can’t simply order the entire economy to reopen on his own signature, neither is the matter entirely up to states and their governors. The two sides of this debate are mostly talking past each other.

The federal government’s powers are limited and enumerated and don’t include a “general police power” to regulate community health and welfare. That authority rests principally with the states and includes the power to impose coercive measures such as mandatory vaccination, as the Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). Nor may the federal government commandeer state personnel and resources to achieve its ends or otherwise coerce the states into a particular course of conduct. There is no dispute about these respective state and federal powers.

In most federal-state disputes, the question is what happens when authorities at both levels exercise their legitimate constitutional powers at cross-purposes. Here, the president has the edge. The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause requires that when the federal government acts within its proper sphere of constitutional authority, state law and state officials must give way to the extent that federal requirements conflict with their own. Federal power encompasses a broad power to regulate the national economy. Thus although the president lacks plenary power to “restart” the economy, he has formidable authority to eliminate restraints states have imposed on certain types of critical commercial activity.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/15/exclusive-josh-hawley-says-its-vitally-important-to-open-the-country-as-soon-as-we-possibly-can/

Remaining on lockdown for year to get a vaccine ‘is just not going to work, we can’t do that, it will end up being a humanitarian crisis and nobody wants to do that.’

The United States needs to push hard to open back up, with states taking the lead, Sen. Josh Hawley told The Federalist in a Tuesday interview, saying, “It probably will be a decision the states make state by state because states are going to vary, and what’s good for New York is not what we’re going to need in Springfield, Missouri, for instance, so you’ve got to let the data be the guide there.”

America, he added, has to take a long hard look at our global economy and its vulnerabilities: “We’d be nuts to have suffered through this crisis, suffered through the vulnerabilities in our medical supply chain and our broader economy that this has exposed, and do nothing about it.”

“It’s vitally important that we get the whole country open back up as soon as we possibly can,” Hawley said, “And I can just say here in Missouri people want to do their part, they are doing their part, the streets are empty ,the schools are closed, the shops are closed, but nobody likes this. Americans don’t like not working, they don’t like not going to school… They want to go back to work. Over and over and over people ask me when they can get back to work, when are we going to be able to get back to school … We have got to be pushing hard toward breaking the back of the epidemic and getting to a sustainable place where we can open back up, not only for peoples’ psychologies, not just to support family life, though those things are hugely vital, but also we’re seeing incidents of hunger.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/15/coronavirus_lessons_fact_and_reason_vs_paranoia_and_fear_.html

Given the most recent mortality rates and modeling, it appears that the death toll in America from coronavirus will end up looking a lot like the annual fatality numbers from the flu. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state is now projecting 68,841 potential deaths in America. It is also estimating lower ranges than that. The flu season of 2017-2018 took 61,099 American lives. For this we have scared the hell out of the American people, shut down the economy, ended over 17 million jobs, taken trillions of dollars out of the economy, closed places of worship, and massively disrupted civic life as we know it. Some of our major public officials tell us, still, that there will be no returning to a status quo, that we will have to get used to a new normal. We strongly disagree with that mindset.

A panic and hysteria over a pandemic that does not look to be what so many frightened us into thinking has radically degraded this country. What should be the major lessons learned here? How did we go from an ethos of “Let’s Roll!” when America was hit by a major attack from outside forces two decades ago to “Let’s roll up in a ball”? 

First, New York City is where the epidemic has struck the hardest. The media is centered in New York City. Although sensationalism is not new, something in the 21st century media landscape is: Reporting the news has been replaced with raising alarms, heightening political tensions, and funneling information through a strictly partisan lens. Lost is the notion that if something is too bad to be true — or too good to be true — it probably is not true. Conspiracy theories and extreme rhetoric have replaced fact and reason, as well as reasonableness. These dark impulses have been aided and abetted by a series of left-wing notions that have come to dominate our politics, giving us a new “paranoid style in American politics.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-problem-with-new-york-citys-covid-19-death-rate-estimates/

More on the continuing saga (see here, here, here and here) of the COVID-19 mortality rate — specifically, on why it is so hard to get accurate statistics, notwithstanding that these statistics are essential to decisions about reopening the economy.

Those of us who have been watching the daily numbers closely could not help but notice the dark cloud that drifted Tuesday over what was otherwise cautiously optimistic news. The number of coronavirus cases seems to be dropping, but deaths are suddenly spiking. Why?

It would overstate the matter to say that the tally of new cases is “plummeting,” but the drop has been noticeable: from a level of over 30,000 new cases per day from April 6 through April 11 (and, on three of those days, over 33,000 new cases), we’ve been down to about 27,000 on each of the three days since Sunday.

Initially, deaths also seemed to be dropping markedly: from around 2,000 per day from April 7 through April 11, down to about 1,500 on Sunday and Monday. Then, suddenly, deaths shot up on Tuesday, to 2,407, by far the highest one-day total yet (surpassing the previous high of 2,035 recorded on April 10).

What gives? Well, the main problem right now is New York. As governor Andrew Cuomo noted yesterday, although daily deaths seemed to be edging downward, below 700 on Monday for the first time in a week, they spiked up over 800 again on Tuesday. (Gov. Cuomo is nevertheless heartened by a decrease in hospitalizations, which will hopefully lead to a trend of declining cases and fatalities.) There were also marked daily death toll increases in New Jersey, Louisiana and Michigan, and less pronounced but noticeable increases in Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/15/world-health-organization-director-again-parr

While many have noted World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ effort to deflect criticism of his organization’s response to the Chinese coronavirus by playing the race card, far more revealing was whom he played it against. Under fire for his bias toward communist China, the Beijing-backed director-general, known simply as Tedros, sought to defend himself by slandering Taiwan, the thorn in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) side.

During an April 8 WHO press conference, Tedros unleashed a seemingly unprovoked tirade at Taiwan. He claimed its people were leveling racist attacks at him, apparently with tacit governmental support. Taiwan’s foreign ministry unequivocally denies this charge. Tedros stated:

[S]ince I don’t have any inferiority complex when I am personally affected or attacked by racial slurs, I don’t care because I am a very proud black person or Negro. I don’t care being called even Negro. I am. That’s what came from some quarters and if you want me to be specific, three months ago this attack came from Taiwan. We need to be honest. I will be straight today, from Taiwan and Taiwan the foreign Ministry they know the campaign they didn’t dissociate themselves. They even started criticizing me in the middle of all that insult and slur but I didn’t care.

In response to Tedros’ remarks, I asked the WHO:

Can you provide any specific examples of the “attacks” to which the director-general was referring?
Can you point to evidence suggesting the attacks came from Taiwan, and clarify whether the director-general was saying that private citizens from Taiwan were engaging in such attacks, or rather that its government was doing so?
Can you point to evidence regarding the assertion that Taiwan’s foreign ministry was aware of this “campaign,” and “didn’t dissociate” itself?

As of this writing, the WHO has not responded to these inquiries.