EJ Dionne/WaPo:
Adam Serwer/NY Times:
Philip Bump/WaPo:
Jan Hoffmann/NY times:
Tim Miller/Bulwark:
Once Biden walked his threat to veto the bipartisan agreement without a reconciliation package back, they’re now on board again. NY Times:
The need for saving face in the Senate is paramount. Once they started telling the truth (two track plan with bipartisan deal + reconciliation, which was a well discussed and well covered plan), GOP Senators got embarrassed. That’s what Biden needed to address, and he apparently succeeded.
The face saving maneuvering here has almost nothing to do with what will happen. GOP will get what concessions they can out of a vote they don’t control. That was true last week, and will be true next week.
Zeynep Tufekci/NY times:
Reuters:
The Catholic Bishops’ anti-Biden project is backfiring
That this is even an issue shows how the viruses of the political right have infected the U.S. Church leadership. It stands almost alone in the Catholic world in its singular focus on abortion, as Jason Horowitz reported in the New York Times. He noted that in “much of Europe and Latin America, it is essentially unthinkable for bishops to deny communion to politicians who publicly support abortion rights.”
Having pulled back ever so slightly, the bishops should now drop this ill-conceived project altogether. It will only continue to undercut their capacity — already strained by scandal — to preach, teach and persuade. They might take a moment to ponder the call to dialogue from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and brilliant writer whom Pope Francis lifted up in his 2015 speech to Congress.
“If I insist on giving you my truth, and never stop to receive your truth in return,” Merton wrote, “there can be no truth between us.”
NYC is a pretty amazing place pic.twitter.com/FPPoWeeof9
— Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) June 27, 2021
Adam Serwer/NY Times:
The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump
Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration. This approach has a long history in American politics. The most consistent threat to our democracy has always been the drive of some leaders to restrict its blessings to a select few.
This is why Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump but has not vanquished Trumpism. Mr. Trump’s main innovation was showing Republicans how much they could get away with, from shattering migrant families and banning Muslim travelers to valorizing war crimes and denigrating African, Latino and Caribbean immigrants as being from “shithole countries.” Republicans have responded with zeal, even in the aftermath of his loss, with Republican-controlled legislatures targeting constituencies they identify either with Democrats or with the rapid cultural change that conservatives hope to arrest. The most significant for democracy, however, are the election laws designed to insulate Republican power from a diverse American majority that Republicans fear no longer supports them. The focus on Mr. Trump’s — admittedly shocking — idiosyncrasies has obscured the broader logic of this strategy.
This comports with a lot of conventional wisdom in the fall, that the congressional GOP sought to avoid a party civil war over the crazy Trump election claims precisely in order to hold factions together for the runoffs and to keep Trump engaged in the races.
— Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) June 27, 2021
Philip Bump/WaPo:
The unsurprising and increasingly normalized bloodlust of Donald Trump
From the CNN summary:
Trump also told his team that he wanted the military to go in and “beat the [expletive] out” of the civil rights protesters, Bender writes.
“Just shoot them,” Trump said on multiple occasions inside the Oval Office, according to the excerpts.
When [Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark] Milley and then-attorney general William Barr would push back, Trump toned it down, but only slightly, Bender adds.
“Well, shoot them in the leg — or maybe the foot,” Trump said. “But be hard on them!”
This is remarkable and yet completely unsurprising. That a sitting president should react to clashes with police or acts of vandalism by calling for the military to open fire on Americans is a revelation of historic significance yet, in the sweep of Trump’s comments about and embrace of violence as a tactic, barely eyebrow-raising.
This is an important point: Indictment and conviction of a corporation can have enormous collateral consequences for it, because they can affect the willingness and legal ability of others to do business with the corporation. https://t.co/isDHTo35Io
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 25, 2021
Jan Hoffmann/NY times:
As Parents Forbid Covid Shots, Defiant Teenagers Seek Ways to Get Them
Most medical consent laws require parental permission for minors to get a vaccine. Now some places are easing restrictions for Covid shots while others are proposing new ones.
The vaccination of children is crucial to achieving broad immunity to the coronavirus and returning to normal school and work routines. But though Covid vaccines have been authorized for children as young as 12, many parents, worried about side effects and frightened by the newness of the shots, have held off from permitting their children to get them.
A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only three in 10 parents of children between the ages of 12 through 17 intended to allow them to be vaccinated immediately. Many say they will wait for long-term safety data or the prod of a school mandate. But with many teenagers eager to get shots that they see as unlocking freedoms denied during the pandemic, tensions are crackling in homes in which parents are holding to a hard no.
“As the House Republican leader, Fanone said, ‘it’s important to hear those denouncements publicly.’ And as a police officer who served that day, he said, ‘that’s not what I want to hear.’” https://t.co/QfazQz5N23
— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) June 26, 2021
Tim Miller/Bulwark:
Bipartisan Biden Continues to Be Better at Politics Than You
He ain’t taking your bait.
There remain significant ins and outs and what-have-yous before this framework becomes law; an announcement is not a bill signing. But even just an image of the divides being bridged reinforces how Biden can successfully stick to the same political plan that has improbably worked for him since he launched his campaign saying “the American people want their government to work . . . the country is sick of the division.”
For Biden, the good-faith attempt to live up to this promise accrues to his benefit politically, even if it doesn’t pan out. His bipartisan “we have a deal” press conference offers a stark contrast with the record of his boorish predecessor who, despite claims of being a dealmaker, rarely even brought legislators from the opposing party to the White House. (I remain astonished that Jon Tester, one of the most gettable Democrats in the Senate for Trump on a range of issues, had never been invited to the Oval Office before Biden took over.)
So now regardless of the outcome, when critics on his left flank claim bipartisanship is impossible, or bad-faith right wingers fabricate imaginary divisiveness, Biden will have the receipts.
One of Biden’s personal clichés that proves true for him again and again: “No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.”
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) June 26, 2021
Once Biden walked his threat to veto the bipartisan agreement without a reconciliation package back, they’re now on board again. NY Times:
Infrastructure Deal Is Back on Track After Biden’s Assurances
Moderate Republicans said they believed that the $1.2 trillion bill, which they suggested they could now begin drafting, would have enough G.O.P. support to pass the Senate.
The need for saving face in the Senate is paramount. Once they started telling the truth (two track plan with bipartisan deal + reconciliation, which was a well discussed and well covered plan), GOP Senators got embarrassed. That’s what Biden needed to address, and he apparently succeeded.
The face saving maneuvering here has almost nothing to do with what will happen. GOP will get what concessions they can out of a vote they don’t control. That was true last week, and will be true next week.
Zeynep Tufekci/NY times:
Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.
While the Chinese government’s obstruction may keep us from knowing for sure whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, came from the wild directly or through a lab in Wuhan or if genetic experimentation was involved, what we know already is troubling.
Years of research on the dangers of coronaviruses, and the broader history of lab accidents and errors around the world, provided scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling safety practices persisted.
Worse, researchers’ success at uncovering new threats did not always translate into preparedness.
Even if the coronavirus jumped from animal to human without the involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others.
Sunday just in: +1.2M doses reported administered over yesterday’s total, including 387K newly vaccinated. 66% of adults with at least one dose. 4 states nearing 70% milestone: Delaware, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon! #WeCanDoThis
— Cyrus Shahpar (@cyrusshahpar46) June 27, 2021
Reuters:
Booster may be needed for J&J shot as Delta variant spreads, some experts already taking them
Infectious disease experts are weighing the need for booster shots of the Pfizer/BioNTech, or Moderna mRNA-based vaccines for Americans who received Johnson & Johnson's one-dose vaccine due to the increasing prevalence of the more contagious Delta coronavirus variant.
A few say they have already done so themselves, even without published data on whether combining two different vaccines is safe and effective or backing from U.S. health regulators. Canada and some European countries are already allowing people to get two different COVID-19 shots.
The debate centers on concerns over how protective the J&J shot is against the Delta variant first detected in India and now circulating widely in many countries. Delta, which has also been associated with more severe disease, could quickly become the dominant version of the virus in the United States, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky has warned.
There is no substantial data showing how protective the J&J vaccine is against the new variant. However, UK studies show that two doses of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or AstraZeneca (AZN.L) vaccines are significantly more protective against the variant than one