—The Senate Judiciary Committee begins deliberations today on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans need five more Democratic votes to overcome a filibuster that Democrats have vowed to mount on the nomination.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
Trump Donates His First-Quarter Paycheck to the National Park Service
Carlos Barria / Reuters
President Trump donated his first three months of salary to the National Park Service (NPS) on Monday. The total comes to $78,333.32, which Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, handed in the form of a check to an NPS employee. During his election campaign, Trump promised to donate his $400,000 annual salary if elected, even asking for the press corps’s help in deciding where to send it. The NPS is overseen by the Department of Interior, which said the money would go toward maintaining historic battlefield sites. At these areas alone, the NPS faces a $229 million budget shortfall. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has said the NPS faces an overall maintenance shortfall of $12 billion, and he’s made this one of his top priorities. But it’s unclear how that shortfall will be made up because Trump’s “skinny” budget calls for a 12 percent cut to the Interior Department.
UPDATE: Democrats Have Enough Votes to Filibuster Gorsuch's Nomination; GOP Vows to Press Ahead
(Joshua Roberts / Reuters)
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-9 along party lines Monday to move the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to a full Senate vote. The move comes after Senate Democrats said they have the 41 votes needed to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination, likely forcing Republicans to use the so-called “nuclear option” and put the Supreme Court nominee’s appointment to a full vote. Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to fill the vacancy created by the death last year of Judge Antonin Scalia, has the support of all 52 Republicans in the Senate, as well as of at least three Democrats—Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Donnelly of Indiana—from conservative states that went to Trump. He needed 60 votes—a supermajority—for his nomination to be approved. The “nuclear option” would allow Gorsuch’s nomination to be approved by a simple majority of senators rather than the 60-vote supermajority. Democrats, who are still angry over the Republican refusal to hold hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, whom President Obama nominated to fill Scalia’s spot on the court, insist that if Republicans don’t have 60 votes for Gorsuch, Trump should nominate a judge who can win the support of a supermajority of lawmakers. Despite their opposition, however, Gorsuch is expected to be confirmed.
President Trump meets Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the Oval Office on April 3, 2017. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters)
President Trump welcomed Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the White House Monday, marking the Arab leader’s first visit to Washington since he assumed power following former President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in 2013. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sisi,” Trump told reporters at the meeting. “He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation. We are very much behind Egypt and the people of Egypt.” Though Egypt has been a longstanding U.S. ally—receiving approximately $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid annually—Sisi was never afforded an invitation to the White House under the Obama administration. Indeed, Obama froze aid to the country for two years after Sisi, then Egypt’s defense minister, led a popular uprising against Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government, which was elected the previous year. The U.S.-Egyptian relationship was further strained by alleged human-rights abuses by the Sisi government, including mass arrests, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions. Though Trump noted that both countries “have a few things” they do not agree upon, he said the two countries will work together “to fight terrorism and other things.”
Ecuador's New Socialist President Is Good News for Julian Assange
Mariana Bazo / Reuters
Socialist candidate Lenín Moreno narrowly won Ecuador’s presidential election Sunday night, though his opponent has demanded a recount and protesters from both sides took to the streets. Moreno’s win bucked a trend of center-right victories in South America, and was also good news for Julian Assange, whose fate as an asylee in Ecuador’s embassy in London was predicated on the win. Moreno, a former vice president, won 51 percent of the vote over his opponent, Guillermo Lasso. Lasso was a former banker who offered voters a change from leftist economic policies he blamed for the country’s sagging economy. He also promised to kick Assange out of the embassy within 30 days of taking office. At least one respected exit poll had put Lasso ahead Sunday night, so when news of Moreno’s win came later that evening, Lasso denounced it as fraudulent, saying, “We won’t let them cheat us!” His supporters stormed the country’s election headquarters and battled riot police. As oil prices and exports have fallen in the region, countries like Argentina, Peru, and Brazil have turned to center-right leaders who’ve promised fiscal reforms. But by selecting Moreno, Ecuador remains in the company of Socialist-led Bolivia and Venezuela.
Blast Reported at Metro Station in St. Petersburg, Russia
A general view of St. Petersburg, Russia (Maxim Zmeyev / Reuters)
Updated at 9 a.m.
Russian news reports say an explosion in the St. Petersburg metro system has killed at least people. The blast reportedly occurred at the Sennaya Square metro station.
Public-health leaders in rural America are turning toward the next and more difficult stage of the nationwide vaccination campaign: persuasion.
Americans will soon begin to fall back into the rhythms of pre-pandemic life—attending sunny summer weddings, squishing into booths at chain restaurants, laughing together at movies on the big screen—and it will feel like a victory over the coronavirus. But the virus might not actually be gone. In pockets of the country, vaccination rates could stay low, creating little islands where the coronavirus survives and thrives—sickening and killing people for months after the pandemic has ebbed elsewhere. In a worst-case scenario, the virus could mutate, becoming a highly transmissible and much more lethal version of itself. Eventually, the new variant could leak from these islands and spread into the broader population, posing a threat to already-vaccinated people.
Concerns about blood clots with Johnson & Johnson underscore just how lucky Americans are to have the Pfizer and Moderna shots.
A year ago, when the United States decided to go big on vaccines, it bet on nearly every horse, investing in a spectrum of technologies. The safest bets, in a way, repurposed the technology behind existing vaccines, such as protein-based ones for tetanus or hepatitis B. The medium bets were on vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, which use adenovirus vectors, a technology that had been tested before but not deployed on a large scale. The long shots were based on the use of mRNA, the newest and most unproven technology.
The protein-based vaccines have moved too slowly to matter so far. J&J’s and AstraZeneca’s vaccines are effective at preventing COVID-19—but a small number of recipients have developed a rare type of blood clot that appears to be linked to the adenovirus technology and may ultimately limit those shots’ use. Meanwhile, with more than 180 million doses administered in the U.S, the mRNA vaccines have proved astonishingly effective and extremely safe. The unusual blood clots have not appeared with Pfizer’s or Moderna’s mRNA technology. A year later, the risky bet definitely looks like a good one.
Progressives thought they knew what a Biden presidency would look like. How did they get him so wrong?
Washington in the first days of the Biden administration is a place for double takes: A president associated with the politics of austerity is spending money with focused gusto, a crisis isn’t going to waste, and Senator Bernie Sanders is happy.
People like to tell you they saw things coming. But as I talked to many of the campers in Joe Biden’s big tent, particularly those who, like me, were skeptical of Biden, I found that the overwhelming sentiment was surprise. Few of us expected that this president—given his record, a knife’s-edge Congress, and a crisis that makes it hard to look an inch beyond one’s nose—would begin to be talked about as, potentially, transformational.
Biden, after all, was a conservative Democrat who has exuded personal decency more than he has pushed for structural decency. One conservative publication labeled him “the senator from MBNA” for his friendliness to credit-card companies. He conducted the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings in a way that hurt Hill, for which he later expressed regret. He voted for the Iraq War and eulogized the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond. He began his 2020 campaign telling wealthy donors that, in his vision, “nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”
The CDC has finally said what scientists have been screaming for months: The coronavirus is overwhelmingly spread through the air, not via surfaces.
Last week, the CDC acknowledged what many of us have been saying for almost nine months about cleaning surfaces to prevent transmission by touch of the coronavirus: It’s pure hygiene theater.
“Based on available epidemiological data and studies of environmental transmission factors,” the CDC concluded, “surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and the risk is considered to be low.” In other words: You can put away the bleach, cancel your recurring Amazon subscription for disinfectant wipes, and stop punishing every square inch of classroom floor, restaurant table, and train seat with high-tech antimicrobial blasts. COVID-19 is airborne: It spreads through tiny aerosolized droplets that linger in the air in unventilated spaces. Touching stuff just doesn’t carry much risk, and more people should say so, very loudly.
Just how much is society willing to damage women in order to control them?
For several hundred years, millions of Chinese girls had their bodies painfully misshapen to conform to a prevailing social expectation. Intact feet, girls were told, would damage their marriage prospects. To achieve a more suitable size and shape, young girls’ feet were crushed repeatedly over years. Each excruciating procedure forced the girls to learn to walk anew, rereading the ground from an unfamiliar position and through unimaginable pain.
The tiny “lotus foot” in its delicate silken shoe was seen as one of the most attractive qualities in a prospective bride; the smaller the foot, the more sexually pleasing the girl was. More recent studies have shown that foot-binding was likely practiced not purely for the sake of marriage, but also to keep girls at home and engaged in handicrafts, such as spinning cotton, in order to contribute to their family’s income. The end result, no matter the motivation, was severe physical impairment. Yet despite foot-binding’s brutality, and hundreds of anthropological studies addressing it, the long-term medical consequences of the practice have been largely neglected. Examining the debilitating, lifelong physical effects that foot-binding had on Chinese girls can be crucial for understanding the lengths to which societies will go to restrict women’s freedom.
Our regulators are not fools. But they have a peculiar sense of responsibility that leads them to adopt a fraidy-cat level of caution.
I am one of the nearly 7 million Americans with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine percolating through my tissue at this very moment. It feels good. The sensation of rising immunity to COVID-19 would almost certainly still feel good if I were a woman between the ages of 18 and 48, like all six of the vaccine recipients who later suffered from blood clots. The clots, which might or might not be related to the vaccine, can kill you; one of the six patients died. If you treat the clots the wrong way, the treatment can kill, too—which is why the CDC and FDA paused J&J vaccination yesterday morning, and left the vaccine in my body a limited-edition commodity, like a final gulp of Coke Classic.
Let’s say the connection to the clots is confirmed and the numbers hold. If COVID-19 shots are seasonal, like the flu shot, and you have to get one every year, then your COVID-19 shot will on average kill you if you live to be 7 million years old, which by the way is a serious comorbidity in itself. Government health authorities have to think about low-probability events, and they sometimes withhold drugs from mass distribution because of rare adverse effects. But the J&J vaccine should be redeployed to the front lines of the COVID-19 war as soon as possible, and it should not have been removed from service in the first place.
I don’t think she truly understands the impact that seeing her only once or twice a year is having on us.
Dear Therapist,
Our daughter is engaged to a very nice man who is neither American nor of her religion. They are living together and working in his country. She is beautiful and talented, and has a graduate degree. She had a hard time securing work in that country, and now that she has found a job, she is miserable in it. She calls me every few weeks, but beyond the cursory “How are you?” she calls only to complain, whether it’s about her boss, or the work itself not being what she thought it would be, or the language barrier.
She gave up a very successful and lucrative career in the States to go to graduate school abroad, intending to stay there for work and romance. I had advised her against it.
Misperceptions and rage are blinding Republicans—and their voter-suppression measures may backfire.
It’s not only Georgia.
In every state where Republicans control a chamber of the legislature, bills to restrict voting are advancing fast. Arizona and Texas Republicans have acted especially aggressively to choke off unwanted voters in time for 2022.
Arizona Republicans propose to reduce the number of days for early voting. They want to purge voter rolls of people who missed the previous election. They want to cut off mail-in balloting five days before Election Day. And they want to require that affidavits of identity accompany any ballot that is mailed in.
Texas Republicans are pushing a bill to limit early voting, prohibit drive-through voting, limit the number of ballot drop-off locations, and restrict local officials’ ability to publicize voting by mail.
Television turns to magical realism to explore the trials of early adolescence.
This article was published online on April 14, 2021.
Embarrassment makes for rich literature, but few fictions I can think of capture humiliation with the brute efficiency of “Traumarama.” The series, which ran for a time in Seventeen magazine, offered true stories written by, and for, teenagers—three or so lines, poetic in their brevity, about unruly bodies and unforgiving worlds. Crushes were a common topic. So were pimples and periods. White pants, in the world of “Traumarama,” were Chekhov’s gun.
The series was silly. As a kid, I loved it anyway. It offered commiseration and catharsis. Its mini-melodramas were tales of embarrassment that, in the end, defied embarrassment: How mortifying should any of this be, if so many others were living through it, too?
People who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine will have higher health-care costs. The rest of us will foot the bill.
Imagine it’s 2026. A man shows up in an emergency room, wheezing. He’s got pneumonia, and it’s hitting him hard. He tells one of the doctors that he had COVID-19 a few years earlier, in late 2021. He had refused to get vaccinated, and ended up contracting the coronavirus months after most people got their shots. Why did he refuse? Something about politics, or pushing back on government control, or a post he saw on Facebook. He doesn’t really remember. His lungs do, though: By the end of the day, he’s on a ventilator.
You’ll pay for that man’s decisions. So will I. We all will—in insurance premiums, if he has a plan with your provider, or in tax dollars, if the emergency room he goes to is in a public hospital. The vaccine refusers could cost us billions. Maybe more, over the next few decades, with all the complications they could develop. And we can’t do anything about it except hope that more people get their shots than those who say they will right now.
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