After this week's "Meet The Press," we couldn't stop thinking that we're in the midst of a supply chain of confusion.
From the CDC's messaging problems to Chicago teachers walking out of schools to whether voting rights are important to how we govern ourselves to Republicans denying the actual events of January 6th to our general distrust of each other.
It's almost too much to swallow and as Democratic strategist Cornell Belcher mentioned, covid is like a wet blanket over the country making it difficult to move forward.
Specifically, when it comes to covid, and it should be caveated - if you care, the focus should be on hospitalizations and deaths as Dr. Celine Gounder explained but to mitigate those two factors, more Americans need to be vaccinated. And therein lies the rub as 70 percent of hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated. To go from the pandemic state to an endemic stage, Pennsylvania University's Ezekiel Emanuel explained that the only way to get there is with vaccine mandates that President Biden has put in place. However, the conservative Supreme Court seems to be poised to strike down those mandates. A decision striking down vaccine mandates will only serve to hamper progress for the public's general health, no two ways about it. We're not looking it as a political decision on the part of the court, but what is a political decision is what the Florida Surgeon General announced this week, which is that the DeSantis administration is rolling back testing, which puts people's lives in danger because it renders individual's to know the state of their own health.
The other wet blanket, if you will, is January 6th and the actions surrounding it. There is a fever that will not break as long as Republican leaders do not interdict and be truthful to their constituents as Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-OH) explained. There was a moment on January 7th, 2021 when congress came together to condemn what happened, however, as Mr. Kinzinger noted, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) went down to Mar-a-Lago two weeks after that to meet with the former president and in that instance, he brought back the former president to legitimacy within the party. The Republican party is left in a state of confusion with some totally on board with the big crime, some who know it's a big crime but won't say anyting and then there are the few who are standing up against the former president's wanton authoritarianism.
Hence, the Democratic party is confused on how to approach Republicans because their actions in state legislatures is curtailing voting rights and Republican representatives refusing to even acknowledge that Joe Biden is president. Compounding Democrat's confusion is that the fact that they worked to get the majority only to see it thrown into turmoil by Democratic senators from West Virginia and Arizona respectively.
And what doesn't make sense to us is that fact that State Senates can pass laws with a simply majority, but the U.S. Senate can not, blocking the majority of laws the majority wants.
Panel: Anna Palmer, Punchbowl News; Sara Fagen, Politic Director for the Bush Administration, Cornell Belcher, Democratic Strategist, Peter Alexander, NBC News
A little something to put a point on it:
No comments:
Post a Comment