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DEMOCRATS, TRIAL LAWYERS, AND THE PHASE FOUR FIGHT: The House can’t agree on returning to Washington, but the Senate is back at the Capitol. And just like everyone fought over the last coronavirus aid package — Democrats delayed payroll assistance for weeks while they made other demands — another battle is forming over what is called “phase four” of aid. Some parts of the debate are clear. Everyone knows Congress needs to replenish the Payroll Protection Program. They’ll need to send more money to hospitals. And perhaps direct checks to millions of Americans.
The flashpoint is liability protection. Senate Republicans foresee a wave of lawsuits in the aftermath of the virus crisis and want to include liability protections for businesses. For Democrats, that is a deal killer — no surprise, given that the two parties have been fighting about lawsuits for decades. Now, Senate Republicans are sending out a factsheet pointing out the long and deep financial relationship between Democratic leaders and the nation’s trial lawyers.
“Lawyers and law firms have contributed at least $8,277,581 to Sen. Schumer’s political campaigns,” the sheet says. The same people have contributed at least $1,655,144 to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s campaigns. And $4.6 million to the Democratic National Committee. And $2.9 million to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The Speaker and Sen. Schumer are against liability protection, and we know why that is — because the trial lawyers fund their campaigns,” said one Hill Republican.
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IS TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME GETTING WORSE? David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for the New York Times, but these days he devotes his time to left-wing, non-profit news — and bashing President Trump. He was in fighting form Monday when asked about the president’s re-election prospects during an appearance on Joe Madison’s radio show.
“We’ve got to get this man out of office, or it’s the end of our democracy,” Johnston said. “And down that road lie firing squads. That’s what dictators do.” Johnston, author of a hostile biography of Trump, called himself one of the president’s least-favorite journalists. “Every case that I’ve ever studied that a country has been taken over by a dictator, of course there are firing squads,” Johnston said. “And I would expect to get shot in the first round.”
Wow. But Johnston, of course, is not alone. For example, some corners of the media are filled with speculation that Trump, if he is defeated in November, will refuse to leave office. So what is going on? I asked William Bennett, the former Education Secretary, and got the suggestion that the current crisis might be driving the vulnerable a little more around the bend. “The ‘paranoid style in American politics’ (Richard Hofstadter, 1964) has reached a new high,” Bennett told me via text. “Where does one go from here? No words to describe. And bearing such sentiments is not safe for its carrier, especially in a time of imposed isolation.”
SPEAKING OF PULITZERS: The 2020 prizes were announced Monday. Remember the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which sought to “reframe” the nation’s founding? Perhaps you thought the founding was the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. No, said the Times — the true founding was 1619, when the first Africans were brought to Virginia to be sold as slaves. The Times’ claim was so audacious that some of the nation’s top historians denounced it as “unbalanced,” “one-sided,” “wrong in so many ways,” “tendentious,” and “not only ahistorical but anti-historical.” The paper was even forced to publish what it called a “clarification” that looked like a grudging admission that it got a key part of the story wrong. But not to worry. On Monday, the 1619 Project won a Pulitzer Prize.
