Pandemic can’t slow spin cycle
Maybe President Donald Trump will show his contempt for fake news by apologizing to Mary Barra, chairwoman and CEO of General Motors.
Trump has wavered on whether America needs tens of thousands of ventilators for the sickest patients infected by the novel coronavirus. But he gave GM and Barra an earful for not moving fast enough to produce the lifesaving machines.
Trump extended his rant on Twitter, always a dicey move for him. “General Motors MUST immediately open their stupidly abandoned Lordstown plant in Ohio, or some other plant, and START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW !!!!!! the president wrote.
I asked someone with no affinity for GM’s management to assess Trump’s denunciation of the corporation. Darwin Cooper, vice president of United Auto Workers Local 1112 in the Lordstown area, returned my call.
“The president of the United States should know GM sold the Lordstown plant, the jackass,” Cooper said.
It’s a shock, I know, but Trump got it wrong.
GM idled the 6.2 millionsquare-foot Lordstown Assembly factory in March 2019. It had employed more than 4,500 people.
Then GM sold the plant in November to a Cincinnati-based company that hopes to one day build electric trucks in Lordstown.
Trump and every other politician will say we’re all in this pandemic together, looking for a safe way out.
But partisan politics is Trump’s first pursuit. He promised to revive manufacturing in rusty parts of the country that have been hurt by foreign imports. Now, after downplaying the need for ventilators, he’s ripping GM to pander to voters in a swing state.
Maybe Trump didn’t know GM closed the Lordstown plant on his watch. Maybe he pretended not to know, figuring his base would believe whatever he said.
Either way, the episode is an example of why Trump’s daily briefings on the coronavirus are a mix of bad information and political posturing.
Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner to challenge Trump in the November election, need not worry about receiving less exposure than the sitting president. Biden is picking up votes every time Trump opens his mouth.
Political infighting also continues in New Mexico as the coronavirus spreads.
The state Republican Party is suing to stop an attempt led by 27 of the state’s 33 county clerks to conduct the June primary election mostly by mail.
A majority of the clerks figure an election without much in-person voting will save lives.
Steve Pearce, chairman of the state Republican Party, counters that mail-in ballots would open the way for fraud.
He also says the majority of county clerks took their request for an election by mail to the state Supreme Court instead of the Legislature, which has province over the state Election Code.
Thirty-one Republican state
legislators and four county clerks are publicly supporting Pearce’s effort to stop a vote-bymail election.
The Republicans’ lawyer, one Carter B. Harrison IV of Albuquerque, might not mow down the opposition. But he murdered the English language in a pleading to the state Supreme Court.
“There is no legal basis for this Court to grant the relief sought by the Petition, and no factual basis that the Legislature — the indisputably and undisputedly appropriate body for making the changes to the Election Code the Petitioners request — is incapable of convening in a special or extraordinarily session,” Harrison wrote.
He left out indubitably and indeed, but made up a couple of other words in hopes of mesmerizing a justice or two.
Harrison was one one of the lawyers who represented whining Yvette Herrell, the Republican who lost the 2018 election in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District.
Herrell now claims Democrats stole the election with absentee ballots. But when she had the chance, she never contested her defeat to Democrat Xochitl Torres Small. Herrell lost by a decisive 3,700 votes.
She and other Republicans had every opportunity to review the ballots. Herrell quit for one reason only: She knew she lost.
If Pearce and the Republicans win this case, they will stop a vote-by-mail election.
They might also lose in the process if people die after contracting the coronavirus at their polling place.
There’s another possibility to quell the controversy. The Democrat-controlled Legislature might still be able go into virtual session and rewrite the Election Code to clear the way for voting by mail. The Supreme Court could decide by mid-April if such a session is permissible.
New Mexico can conduct an honest election without a crush of people at the polls. It’s the safest route in a dangerous time.
Pearce and Herrell like to talk about life being precious, usually in opposition to abortion. Now they should do the unexpected.
They should advocate for a special virtual legislative session in which a priority item would be the safer vote-by-mail option.
After all, the June election is a primary. Republicans who lose would only have other Republicans to blame.