USA TODAY International Edition
Governing pains
COVID- 19 could join other crises in history
The coronavirus is making it tough to govern, and all three federal branches are feeling the pain.
WASHINGTON – A president in the hospital. Advisers in quarantine. Lawmakers working remotely.
COVID- 19 has struck the highest levels of federal government.
The wheels of government churn forward. But what if the virus keeps spreading throughout the top layers of the Trump administration and Congress on the eve of a national election, during a contentious fight to fill a Supreme Court seat that could help decide that election and as the economy desperately awaits a lifeline from Congress?
President Donald Trump’s hospitalization amplified questions about the federal government’s ability to function fully while its chief executive battles a potentially fatal virus at a crucial time for a politically fractured country.
That has been compounded by positive COVID- 19 tests from his advisers, his campaign manager and three senators in the past two days – Republicans Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina – whose diagnoses have worried other lawmakers they may be next.
Nils Gilman, vice president of programs at the Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles- based think tank, doesn’t fret that the day- to- day activities of the federal government will be compromised. Social Security checks will keep getting mailed. National parks will still accept visitors. The nation’s borders will continue being patrolled.
“Whether the political operations of the government can continue?” he said. “That seems to be very much at risk.”
The country has surmounted political crises before: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945 as World War II raged. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 shocked and devastated the country. President Ronald Reagan nearly died from a gunshot shortly after his inauguration in 1981.
President Woodrow Wilson caught Spanish flu during the pandemic a century ago, six months before suffering a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and blind and effectively incapacitated during the last year of his presidency.
This feels different, given that’s in the middle of a pandemic that has killed more than 209,000 Americans, the most by far of any country. It’s also infecting congressional leaders, and the Supreme Court has only eight members a month from an election it may be asked to settle.
“If there’s a crisis of some sort, what’s going to happen? Are we going to talk about 25th Amendment stuff?” Gilman asked, referring to the provision that allows for the vice president to take over from an incapacitated president. “Are there going to be adversaries globally who might try something while Trump is in the hospital?”
Trump’s physician, Sean Conley, declared during a news conference Saturday that the president was “doing very well” at Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
White House officials sought to convey a sense of business- as- usual. Saturday, officials announced that Trump signed two resolutions appointing citizen regents to the board of the Smithsonian Institution.
Vice President Mike Pence and Cabinet officials, such as Attorney General William Barr, tested negative for the virus though they attended a Rose Garden ceremony Sept. 27 introducing Trump’s pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett.
Most of the more than 100 who attended sat shoulder- to- shoulder and did not wear masks. At least seven attendees, including Trump, Lee and Tillis, tested positive, prompting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, RKy., to declare a two- week recess from floor action Saturday.
McConnell said the recess does not apply to the Judiciary Committee, which will hold hearings on Barrett’s nomination starting Oct. 12.
The decision to march ahead with hearings on the Supreme Court nominee was criticized by Democrats, who uniformly oppose her confirmation.
“If it’s too dangerous to have the Senate in session, it is also too dangerous for committee hearings to continue,” according to a joint statement from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
Republicans hold a 53- 47 advantage in the Senate, and GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine said they oppose a vote to replace Ginsburg before the election.
Any further erosion of Republican support could complicate efforts to seat the high court’s ninth member in time to rule on possible cases involving the elections of the president or members of Congress.
More than 300 lawsuits have been filed in nearly every state, thanks largely to problems associated with COVID- 19 and the expansion of mail- in voting. Republicans, including Trump’s reelection campaign, demand limits on voting by mail while Democrats push for further opportunities.
The nation’s ever- rising political polarization makes it even more likely that local, state and federal elections will wind up in court, not only in the weeks leading up to Election Day but in the days and weeks thereafter.