Kenneth Tiven in the USA
America is in the final week of election madness while the Covid-19 pandemic is in the initial weeks of a 3rd wave of renewed hostility to human life here and globally.
Almost 75 million voters have already made their choice with in-person early voting or mail-in ballots. For some perspective, that is more than half of all the votes cast in the 2016 election that propelled Donald Trump into the White House. By midnight Monday that number will be close to 80 million early votes with as many as 70 million people voting on November 3, decent fall weather permitting. If the vote totals get near 150 million it will be an astonishing event considering how voting totals have dropped over the past three decades while population has increased.
Democrats resoundingly won in 2018, gaining control of the House of Representatives as well as several major governorships. Since then the pandemic has killed 225,000 people and crippled the economy. Other than the appointment of conservative Amy Coney Barrett to the empty Supreme Court seat, there has been little to energise Trump supporters except for their devotion to Trump, fed daily by certain media and social network providers with a singular agenda.
This week six members of Vice President Michael Pence’s team tested positive, but he kept campaigning. Infection caseloads are soaring in 40 of the 50 US states. Lockdowns are imminent, as they are in Europe as well. Despite reality, the 62-page report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy claims scientific and technological accomplishments, including,
“ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC. From the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the administration has taken decisive actions to engage scientists and health professionals in academia, industry, and government to understand, treat, and defeat the disease.”
Consider that the British medical journal The Lancet has estimated severe under-reporting globally. Numbers have fluctuated as testing and reporting criteria evolved. The top US infectious disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, says the virus has killed more people than official death tolls indicate. In the USA, infections are close to 9,000,000. It is true that deaths are lower as a percentage of infections but deaths influence how people behave and perceive the situation.
Democratic challenger Joe Biden has for months campaigned against the federal handling of the pandemic. It is the key to his election strategy: “I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country. It’s his ineptitude that caused the country to have to shut down.”
The former chief of staff for Homeland Security revealed this week that he was the author of a critique of the Trump Administration published anonymously last year. Miles Taylor also indicated that immigration executive orders were prepared but reserved for a second term because they were too unpopular for a president seeking re-election. Taylor was highly critical this week of Trump’s remarks questioning the FBI’s arrest of a group of American terrorists conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan State. This encourages extremism, he said.
A police presence at polling sites has always existed because the rules generally allow signs and demonstrations if more than 30 metres from the entrance. This year caravans of honking trucks flying Trump 2020 flags with political rhetoric delivered via bullhorn have made regular appearances at early voting lines across the country. We saw this in New York City when early voting started there.
In Times Square, the Lincoln Project rented a giant billboard to put up signs critical of Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner. There’s little love lost in New York City for Trump and family, which is why he moved his legal residence to Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz demanded removal or “we will sue you for what will doubtless be enormous compensatory and punitive damages.” Lincoln Project attorney Matthew Sanderson fired back: “Please peddle your scare tactics elsewhere. The Lincoln Project will not be intimidated by such empty bluster.” Sanderson added: “Your clients are no longer Upper East Side socialites, able to sue at the slightest offense to their personal sensitivities. They are ‘public officials’.” There is a Supreme Court ruling defending even “vehement, caustic and unpleasantly sharp attacks” on government officials.
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It is possible to imagine that if Trump loses, then lawyers will be busy on all sides of the issues created in the past four years. If Democrats control two branches of government, significant changes to the rules and regulations will be forthcoming, as all the traditional understandings of government behaviour have been abrogated. A Supreme Court in the hands of conservatives will be a ripe target for “Up-Sizing” to protect legislation for social change.