44 Days and Counting!

 

President-elect Biden continues to meet with groups of mayors, governors and others as he and VP-elect Harris work to set their agenda and name nominees for important administration positions. He has indicated that he will ask for a 100-day mask mandate across the country when he takes office. Yet, just a few days ago, they received their first intelligence security briefing while some officials in the Department of Defense have been prevented from sharing information with transition team members. Moves are underway to obfuscate necessary information and hide recent changes from public view in order to make the transition more difficult. Are you, like me, keeping your fingers crossed that we get though the interim without major mishaps?

It has been about one month since election day and the president has still not conceded. He continues to rail at the election results and insists that there is no way he could have lost.  Last week he called Georgia Governor, Brian Kemp and demanded that he recall all absentee ballots to compare signatures, even though signatures were compared when ballots were received and those envelopes were separated after validation. Georgia has had a hand recount and a second recount done which has not changed the outcome – Biden still won the state by more than 12,000 votes.  Last week he recorded a 46-minute video which he uploaded to Facebook (Facebook noted that these comments could not be verified and were in part untrue); this video included a rant about how he could not have lost a fair election. He went on to claim that early in the evening of election day, he was leading and then later as all of these ballots were “dumped” in from the cities that that started to change the results; as days went on and absentee ballots were counted, he fell further behind in swing states especially.  As more absentee ballots came in, he lost several states where initially he had led, which is another reason his campaign tried to deny counting of all ballots after election day. Most states had a window of 3-5 days for mailed in ballots which could still be counted if the postmark was on or before election day.

What should all of these actions mean to the country as a whole? It appears that the system worked: an election was held; results have been certified in most states and the transition to a new president is underway – albeit with grudging support from the administration.  However, I believe this year has sorely strained our electoral process and fault lines are increasing as the president continues to contest the results and file fruitless lawsuits. Republican elections guru Benjamin Ginsberg wrote an op ed in the Washington Post discussing the concerns he has about this election. He indicated that we got lucky this time and in a future election we may not be, as he noted that weaknesses in the system were revealed. Some way of handling absentee ballots for both security and validation needs to be established; he encouraged counting absentee ballots as soon as they are received to speed up the counting of results. He proposed a bi-partisan commission to look at our election procedures as we have individual states each determining their local responses to holding elections. Would some type of uniformity improve the system or make it more vulnerable to outside interference?  I do not know the answer, but Ginsberg included some advice which included these recommendations: “the reason the system held and Trump failed was that countless individuals honorably did their duty under those laws, even while sometimes under furious attack from the president and his allies.”

One election official who stood up, even as countless ones have not, was a Georgian, elections system manager Gabriel Sterling, who spoke out against the attacks which were being made on election officials.  Workers were being named in online accounts, threatened and attacked both online and with acts directed against them personally. He warned that politicians needed to tone down their rhetoric before someone was killed. He reminded everyone that these workers were doing their jobs and admonished other Republican who remained silent, even in the face of this violence.  Kudos for Mr. Sterling for speaking up! Boos to those other Republicans who remain silent. The Washington Post surveyed all elected Republicans in Congress to see how many had acknowledged that Joe Biden was President-elect and found that only 27 out of 249 members would publicly agree that Biden had won the election.  Two members insisted that the president had won. Eight members supported the campaigns continuing efforts to contest the results. Only 32 members indicated that they would support Joe Biden if he won a majority of the electoral College, while 2 members indicated they would not agree to support him; the remainder did not answer or did not answer clearly.   Following this report, the president demanded to know the names of those who agreed with the election results and would support Biden. The Post did identify members who had announced their positions, but noted that 70 percent of the Republicans did not respond. 

The reporting indicated that this demonstrated the fear that most Republicans have of going against the president and having him, in the future, supporting an opponent in their next election. Actions such as these will perpetuate divisions in the country, as few in his party are trying to dissuade the president from continuing to challenge the results. At the rally in Georgia on Saturday, the president nominally supported the two Senators who will run in the January Senatorial run-off elections, but spent most of his time discussing the lies about how the election was rigged and Biden had cheated in order to win.  He led supporters in chanting “Stop the Steal!” These continued actions can have no positive civic outcomes, but he and his political action committees have raised over 200 million dollars on these claims, so why should he stop?  The PAC is arranged so that most of the money flows to him with no restrictions.  Gee, wonder if he will evade taxes on this also?

The president has demonstrated that he cares little about democracy, in fact, I think that he has teetered on the edge of creating an autocracy with fascist tendencies, as well as a cult like following, so we are quite lucky that he has not been re-elected.  Are his comments about running again in 2024 real or just to promote himself – who knows?  His campaign painted Democrats as Communists or Socialists, but I believe he understands little about either. But he has damaged our transition process and tried to convince about half of this country that he is the legitimate winner, thus undermining the legitimacy of the Biden presidency. He has even announced that he might do his 2024 kick-off on Inauguration Day – thus seeming to indicate he will not attend the ceremony – and of course, staying in the news. With luck, he will spend the next four years in various courts trying to explain all of his wheeling, dealing and illegal activities.

Are you as dismayed about this as I am? This country needs to heal form the events of the last four years, and President Biden needs to do this uniting.  I am hopeful that this can happen and soon.

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COVID Stats – NY Times: (12/5/20)

·      Tonight, it was announced that presidential attorney Rudolf Giuliani has been hospitalized with COVID-19, but is said to be doing well.  This brings to more than 50 members of the presidents’ close contacts who have been afflicted. Yet, he is continuing to hold holiday gatherings at the White House, which are mostly unmasked. One good piece of news – Dr. Scott Atlas - bearer of bad viral advice -has been termed out of his appointment with the COVID task force.

·        Moderna and Pfizer have both applied for Emergency Use authorizations for their COVID vaccines; Astra Zenica and Johnson and Johnson are said to be close behind, so it appears that vaccines are on our horizons. However, the amounts of the first deliveries are only about 10% of the expected amounts for the first immunizations, the distribution systems are fragmented and not yet in place in most areas as states have not received funds to support these efforts. Moderna and Pfizer vaccines require two shots. Each vaccine dose will be free to US residents.

·       The CDC has indicated that health providers such as nurses and nursing home staff and residents will be among the first to get the vaccines. (There are more than 20 million nurses in the US and more than 15,600 nursing homes with more than 1.5 million residents.)

·        COVID stats are climbing – winter is a bad time for viruses and cases have increased more than 12% over the last two weeks; the Thanksgiving travel data has not yet kicked in, so prepare for the numbers to worsen.

Total US cases: 14,513,700. Total new cases: 205,513. Total deaths:282,200. Total new deaths: 2190.

Maryland Cases:212,384. Total new cases:3,193.  Total deaths: 4820. Total new deaths: 30.

The long-term President of the District 14 Democratic Club in Montgomery County– Jerry Samet – died this week of COVID.  He will be missed.

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There is so much happening – but more will have to wait. I will leave you a tweet from Dan Rather: “The White House is very polite these days- everyone is going around saying “pardon me”!”

‘Til next week – peace