To The Winners
America’s 2020 undisputed (well, maybe not by the President) winner is . . . . the Coronavirus. During this year it took on the world’s most sophisticated healthcare system and achieved unimaginable success. It has already extinguished the lives of over 250,000 Americans and is projected to claim another 190,000 by the end of February. This means that in less than twelve months it will have brought about the deaths of more Americans than were lost in the three and a half years of World War II and may be well on its way to surpassing our Civil War in which roughly 630,000 Americans died, the most of any conflict in our nation’s history.
Of course, what the virus has already accomplished could have never been achieved without the help of our President. He held the nation’s healthcare experts at bay during the months of January and February, giving the virus a chance to get a significant head start against efforts to prevent its spread. Then, he resisted calls to invoke the Defense Production Act which would have enabled the nation’s healthcare workers to obtain the protective equipment and ventilators they needed to fight the disease. Next, he put pressure on the states to cut short their efforts to suppress the spread of the virus so they could restart their economies well in advance of the fall elections. Then, when the virus resurged over the summer, he politicized the wearing of face masks which was being advocated by the head of the nation’s Center for Disease Control with the result that many of his supporters refused wear them. This allowed the situation to further deteriorate. Were this not enough, in the fall he began holding mass gatherings which turned into super-spreader events.
To the virus, our President is undeniably the gift that keeps on giving. Now that he has lost the election, he is taking even more steps to facilitate its spread. He has chosen as his closest medical advisor Dr. Scott Atlas, a man with zero expertise in combatting infectious diseases. Atlas, in turn, has advised him to pursue the same “herd immunity” strategy that was tried unsuccessfully and abandoned by Sweden. This has led the federal government to cease all efforts to arrest the spread of the virus which is currently averaging over 160,000 new confirmed cases each day. Were this not enough, the President is currently blocking the incoming Biden-Harris administration from proceeding with the transfer of the government, thereby putting on hold the incoming administration’s plans to arrest the spread of the virus and to distribute the new vaccines that are currently being readied by Pfizer and Moderna. These delays are providing the virus with yet another opportunity to expand its impact.
The President seems oblivious to the fact that the nation’s fight against the virus is approaching a breaking point. It’s not just that the number of cases is growing very quickly, it’s that the resulting number of hospitalizations all across the country is beginning to overwhelm the ability of the nation’s healthcare systems (particularly those in rural areas) to handle the volume of critically-ill patients. This means that many of them will go untreated and that death rates, which have largely been held in check since the spring, will again start to soar. This time it won’t be a question of not knowing how to treat the disease. It will be an issue of not having the human resources to do what we have learned must be done to prevent unnecessary deaths. Just as the initial delay in combatting the spread of the virus was a terrible blunder, the repeated failure to do so now will be a blunder of even worse proportions owing to the sheer increase in the magnitude of the current problem.
About the time that the virus first came to America, Chinese researchers supplied the world with a complete analysis of the virus’ DNA. This was a vital step forward in the efforts of the world’s scientists to develop vaccines that would arrest its spread. Of the roughly one hundred such efforts, a dozen or more are now approaching fruition. Two U.S. pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer and Moderna) have already completed their first of two phase III (large scale) clinical trials of their new vaccines, both of which show significant promise. While this is clearly welcome news, we still remain a long way from producing, distributing and applying these vaccines which will hopefully defeat the virus.
That’s because, even if these two vaccines achieve their currently announced level of effectiveness (95%), we still don’t know how long they will provide immunity. Secondly, approximately 35% of the Americans surveyed have expressed reservations about being vaccinated; and, for every person who declines to be immunized, the chance that the disease will continue to spread is increased. There are also a number of logistical problems in just getting the nation immunized against the disease. Both vaccines require special equipment to store and transport them and this equipment has to be manufactured and put in place. To make matters even worse, the job of distributing the vaccines and immunizing the population is being left to the states which currently lack funding to accomplish this mission. Thus, many infectious disease experts are predicting that it could be at least another year before the nation will be able to put aside its fears of contracting the virus. By that time, many more businesses will have been lost and lives inalterably changed.
But not all the news is depressing. Joe Biden has been elected; and on January 20, 2021 he will become the nation’s 46th president. Thus, democracy in this country, which was being led down a path toward authoritarianism, has been given a four-year reprieve. Yet, Biden’s victory is fraught with its own dangers. Our new president will be a little like a bull dog who has seized control of the ring in a bull’s nose. Yes, he has successfully achieved what he has spent his whole life preparing to do, but how is a 60-pound bull dog going manage a 1,000-pound out-of-control beast.
The problem, of course is that the Senate is likely to remain under the control of Mitch McConnell who, in a prior conversation with President-elect Biden about the continuing plight of Americans devastated by the pandemic, is reported to have said, ““You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.” This does not bode well for the cooperation that the President-elect is likely to receive from the man who set out to make Barack Obama a “one-term president.”
Control of the Senate currently rests on the outcome of the two run-off elections in the State of Georgia. If the Democrats win both of these elections, the Senate will be split 50/50, permitting Vice President-elect Harris to cast the deciding vote. By any measure though, that should be considered a long-shot even though Biden defeated President Trump in the state by almost 15,000 votes and even though the number of registered Democrats in the state is slightly larger than the number of registered Republicans. The problem is that approximately 17% of Georgia’s registered voters have no party affiliation and generally favor Republican candidates. Moreover, Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia was less than 25% of the number of votes cast for a third-party Libertarian candidate who undoubtedly drew votes away from the President. As someone who spent his formative years living in Georgia, I know that Georgians tend to be skeptical of the federal government and would likely prefer a divided government over one in which the White House and both Houses of Congress are controlled by one party.
Both of the Republican incumbents in these elections are flawed candidates: notably they both made major changes to their stock portfolios after receiving a confidential briefing and they both supported the President whom most independent voters find abhorrent. Thus, it is not inconceivable that one of the two Democratic candidates might come away with a victory. Should that happen, it has been suggested that the Democrats might seek to cut a deal with Mitt Romney (who has occasionally deviated from McConnell’s lead) under which Romney would vote with the Democrats on certain issues including the selection of the Senate majority leader. This too is a long-shot; and I don’t profess to know what it would take to cause Romney to turn on the party that nominated him for president. In all likelihood, we will never find out.
This means that getting any of his legislative agenda enacted is likely to sorely test Biden’s skills at working across the aisle as well as his patience. At best, whatever he is able to accomplish will be a compromise, and he may even face difficulty just getting his cabinet nominations confirmed, not to mention his judicial nominees. At the top of Biden’s agenda will be to have the Congress pass legislation providing financial assistance to the unemployed, small businesses, the states and hospitals. Even though Mitch McConnell has announced that he is now ready to move forward with a new economic stimulus bill, he has made it clear that it will have to be much smaller than what House Democrats have been demanding and it won’t include any monies for the states which he has suggested should work out their financial problems in the nation’s bankruptcy courts.
For the most part, the President-elect will have to proceed, as both of his latest predecessor have acted, through executive orders. This should not pose a problem in rolling back those actions that President Trump has taken via executive orders. It may, however, prove to be an insurmountable obstacle in getting new tax legislation passed. In addition, his efforts at regulatory reform are likely to be opposed by a judiciary that has been hand-picked by the Federalist Society. In short, his term as president is likely to be filled with disappointment.
Perhaps Biden’s most fertile area for potential achievements will be in dealing with foreign governments. He has already announced that on day one of his administration he will have our nation rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the World health organization and reopen discussions with Iran regarding the JCPOA. He will also set out to repair our relationships with the NATO nations. In an effort to rein in China’s unfair trade practices, he will also likely try to resurrect Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership, which Trump also disavowed in favor of his disastrous trade war with China which he boasted would be “easy to win.” While Trump has left Biden with many foreign policy areas in need of improvement, he has also sown such a high level of distrust for our nation that even foreign policy achievements may not come easily.
Biden is also likely to face problems from within his own party. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party will be pressing for major changes in reforming the nation’s healthcare and criminal justice systems as well as in combatting climate change and income and wealth inequality. Unlike Republicans, Democratic members of the House and Senate do not necessarily fall in line behind their leaders. Thus, Biden is likely to find himself caught in a cross-fire between progressive Democrats the Senate Republicans.
In short, Biden’s reward for his hard-fought victory may simply be four years of tsuris.