April 7–April 14, 2020 Ʈ $7.

99

Billions on Yes, Wear Grasshoppers Quarantine

Infrastructure A Mask and Zombies Bod
ABBY SMITH — P.25 YOUR LAND — P.7 ERIC FELTEN — P.53 MARTIN KAUFMANN — P.54

How To
Restart
America
How this ends
PHILIP KLEIN — P.16

How to save
the economy
BRIAN RIEDL — P.22

Cutting red tape

SHOSHANA WEISSMANN — P.19

Federalism
shines
JAY COST — P.14

Pelosi uses coronavirus
crisis to push tax relief
for blue-state millionaires
W
ith millions having lost
their jobs as a result of the
national shutdown aimed
at mitigating the death
toll of the coronavirus
pandemic, Congress, in a rare moment
of bipartisan unity, rushed to pass a $2.2
trillion relief package.
Yet the effort was delayed as House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi attempted to ex-
ploit the process to realize a long list of
completely irrelevant liberal policy goals.
After having been forced to back off, she
then went on to attack President Trump
for being too slow to respond, stating,
“As the president fiddles, people are
dying.”
Now, as Congress begins early dis-
cussions over yet another bill to address
the economic devastation caused by the
coronavirus, Pelosi is back to trying to
exploit the crisis. Only this time, it’s to
benefit ultrawealthy Californians living
in million-dollar homes.
Pelosi made clear to the New York
Times that she wants to undo SALT ret-
roactively in the chaos of this current
crisis.
That is, she wants to restore the abil-
ity of individuals to deduct state and lo-

As Congress begins early
discussions over yet another
bill to address the economic
devastation caused by the
coronavirus, Pelosi is back
to trying to exploit the crisis.
Only this time, it’s to benefit
ultrawealthy Californians
living in million-dollar
homes.
cal tax payments from their federal taxes.
Before the passage of the Trump tax cuts,
this provision channeled benefits dispro-
portionately to wealthy individuals liv-
ing in blue states such as New York and
California who itemize their tax returns
and have major tax burdens. Eliminating
the deduction allowed for other policies,
such as doubling the standard deduction
and the child tax credit, which benefited
middle-class taxpayers.
Democrats in favor of a higher or
unlimited SALT deduction allowance
often point to the disproportionate fed-
eral funds often received by red states.
Few would be so shameless as to couch
the preference as a means of helping the
poor. But, apparently, Pelosi is.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act capped
the deduction at $10,000, roughly the
amount the average person pays in per-
sonal taxes, ranging from federal and
state taxes to other personal and prop-
erty taxes, per year overall.
Both conservative scholars at the
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 1
Editorials
American Enterprise Institute and liber-
als at the Center for American Progress
agree that lifting the SALT deduction
cap would disproportionately benefit
the wealthy. The majority of the gains of
eliminating the SALT deduction would
go to the richest 1%, with nearly all of
it going to the top quintile of earners.
And, unlike the current bipartisan plan
to institute immediate cash payments
to those forced out of their jobs, a re-
moval of the SALT deduction cap would
constitute an indefinite tax cut for the
wealthy.
The SALT deduction cap arguably
hurt Republicans in the midterm elec-
tions, with higher rates of crucial swing-
state voters casting ballots for national
Democrats than statewide ones in areas
hardest hit by the tax law, such as Orange
County. But, in the long term, such a cap
forces individual states to rein in spend-
ing. That’s made the move political bait
to Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer.
It makes sense why Pelosi and Schum-
er have a political interest in softening
the blow of the burden of living in San
Francisco or Manhattan, but removing
the SALT deduction cap provides zero
relief for the workers hurting the most
during this pandemic. Simply put, now
is not the time to dress up simple politics
as extraordinary relief for the public. +
EDITORIALS

Coronavirus exposes protective equipment with local hospi-

tals. But the abortion giant chose to shut
down its health centers and has even

Planned Parenthood’s tried to fundraise off this cynical move,

which reveals its true priorities for the
umpteenth time.

biggest lie This should put to rest the talking

point from those who argue that abor-

T
tion is not the central part of the orga-
housands of businesses have Reading, York, and Harrisburg for abor- nization’s mission and that it’s really
been forced to close their doors tion services only.” primarily focused on women’s health.
as states battle the coronavirus Planned Parenthood of Southeast- Unfortunately, only a few states have
pandemic. Businesses deemed ern Pennsylvania posted a notice say- had the courage to challenge the abor-
“essential,” however, have ing: “Effective March 25, 2020, we have tion giant. Its abortion clinic waiting
been granted an exception, and, in most temporarily closed our Health Centers to rooms are likely aiding the spread of the
states, that exception includes Planned ensure the health and safety of our pa- coronavirus even now.
Parenthood. tients, staff, and community.” However, Planned Parenthood is not an “es-
The abortion giant is still operating above that notice, a banner appears, de- sential” organization. It never has been.
in every state but Texas, with the state’s claring, “COVID-19 UPDATE: Our Abor- Indeed, when the organization was giv-
temporary closure of abortion clinics tion Centers are open!” en the chance to aid the essential fight
(except for medical emergencies) hav- The company’s health centers could against a threat to public health with
ing been upheld by the 5th Circuit Court have legally remained open in most resources or assistance to overworked
of Appeals. Ohio, Alabama, Iowa, and states since they focus almost exclusive- doctors and nurses, it chose instead to
Oklahoma followed Texas’s lead, argu- ly on providing basic medical resources close its health centers and focus on
ing that the states should direct all med- — STD testing, pregnancy services, and aborting babies. It shouldn’t come as a
ical resources toward the fight against vaccines. They even could have aided the surprise that Planned Parenthood cares
COVID-19, but abortion activist groups fight against COVID-19 by sharing basic little about preserving human life. +
quickly filed lawsuits to delay the bans
from going into effect.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood’s
doors are still open. The liberal states
have argued that abortion is an “es-
sential” service because it qualifies as
healthcare, and some of the more cen-
trist states have simply fallen for the false
narrative that Planned Parenthood is a
healthcare provider first and an abortion
center second.
Planned Parenthood’s own decisions,
however, have undermined that notion.
The abortion giant chose to close many of
its health centers due to concerns about
the coronavirus last week and instead
focus its resources on abortion clinics,
which have reportedly experienced an up-
tick in business over the past few weeks.
“To ensure the health and safety
of our patients, staff, and community,
Planned Parenthood Keystone has tem-
SCOT T OLSON/GET T Y IMAGES

porarily closed all of its health centers

for family planning visits effective March
23, 2020,” read one notice from a Penn-
sylvania branch. “At this time, Planned
Parenthood Keystone is serving patients
in Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, Warminster,

2 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020

THIS IS A COMBINED ISSUE. THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER WILL APPEAR IN TWO WEEKS.
APRIL 7-APRIL 14, 2020
Volume 26, Number 14
Editorials
1 Pelosi uses coronavirus crisis
to push tax relief for blue-state
millionaires
2 Coronavirus exposes
Planned Parenthood’s biggest lie
Letter From The Editor
6 View through the pandemic lens
Your Land
7 Don't Show Your Face Viral
Faith Exponential Growth
Video Game Nerds Are the ‘Only
Athletes’ We Have Left The
‘Quarantine 15’ Social Media
Becomes Less Anti-Social
WOTW: ‘Berdymukhamedov’
Features
12 All Hands on Deck
We’ll get back to business when we
get back to health
By Thomas Donohue
14 Pandemic Proves the
Wisdom of Federalism
An idea about self-government that
keeps evolving to meet the moment
By Jay Cost
4 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
16 How This Ends
A path out of the coronavirus
clampdown and back to normal
By Philip Klein
19 Fighting With One Hand
Tied Behind Our Backs
The deregulation that will ensure
we’re prepared ahead of time
for the next crisis
By Shoshana Weissmann
22 How to Save the Economy
What Washington got right
in the pandemic-relief package,
and what remains to be done
By Brian Reidl
Washington Briefing
25 A coronavirus stimulus could finally
bring ‘Infrastructure Week’
to a close
29 Republicans reject Pelosi’s
plans for coronavirus oversight
panel, new relief package
32 Trump’s clout hangs in balance
as White House grapples with
coronavirus
34 The lucky few winners
and the many losers of the
coronavirus business lockdown
35 Coronavirus phone tracking raises
red flags among privacy advocates
36 Two academic brothers have a plan
for putting the country back to
work in just weeks
38 New Marine commandant is
implementing a radical makeover
to confront China
40 Washington Secrets
Business
42 FAA under pressure to expand
drone deliveries to combat
spread of coronavirus
44 Stephen Moore Don’t put
Uncle Sam in corporate
boardrooms
Life & Arts
46 Books White Working-Class Blues
47 Books A Place That Almost Happened
48 Books Stranger Than Science Fiction
50 On Culture Kiwi Comedy in America
51 Film Eric Rohmer at 100
52 TV An Ambitious Yuppie From Hell
53 Downtime Zombies and
Grasshoppers, Oh My
54 Long Life The Burger KKK
54 Sports Quarantine Bod
The Columnists
56 Hugo Gurdon Tiger King and the
coronavirus culture
57 Fred Barnes Trump is right to want
to get the economy started again
58 Daniel J. Hannan Never forget
this wretched moment
59 Kristen Soltis Anderson
Americans are making huge
sacrifices. Make sure they’re worth it
60 Michael Barone Contrast between
China and its neighbors shows
communist regime’s true character
61 Timothy P. Carney Unemployment
insurance is not good enough.
We should be backstopping every
business’s payroll
62 Byron York The #PresidentCuomo
fantasy
Obituary
63 Tom Coburn, 1948 -2020
64 Crossword
COVER: Illustration by Gary Locke
HUGO GURDON: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

View through Editors

the pandemic lens Editor-In-Chief Hugo Gurdon

Executive Editor / Commentary Editor Philip Klein
Executive Editor (Magazine) Seth Mandel
Managing Editor (Magazine) Jay Caruso
Policy Editor Joseph Lawler

W
Senior Editors Keith Koffler, David Mark
Breaking News Editor Daniel Chaitin
orking at the Washington Examiner, the view Business Editor Jay Heflin
Life & Arts Editor (Magazine) Park MacDougald
through my office window is usually of an urban Night News Editor Jon Brown
alley behind a 16th Street club two blocks north of Weekend News Editor Carlin Becker
the White House. To my left, through a glass wall, I Production Editor Joana Suleiman
normally see reporters and editors busy at desks in Chief Web Producer David Sivak
Online Opinion Editor David Freddoso
rows stretching down the newsroom toward 15th Contributors Editor Jason Russell
Street. Design Director Philip Chalk
It’s not like that these days. The newsroom is empty and the lights Deputy Editor (Magazine) J. Grant Addison
are off. Instead, at a makeshift desk on the second floor of my house
Columnists & Writers
several miles away, my view is out over suburban backyards, where Senior Columnists: Michael Barone, Fred Barnes, Paul Bedard,
spring flowers bloom and children play on swingsets. There are, then, Timothy P. Carney, Byron York
some small compensations for social distancing. Senior Writers: David M. Drucker, Susan Ferrechio, Jamie McIntyre,
Kerry Picket, Salena Zito
But this is no buoyant springtime. America’s 330 million people Staff Reporters: W. James Antle III, Mike Brest, Rob Crilly, Madison
are caught in a pincer movement between a deadly disease and a deep Dibble, Katherine Doyle, Jerry Dunleavy, John Gage, Joel Gehrke, Anna
economic recession that may be the only way to avert hundreds of Giaritelli, Zachary Halaschak, Nihal Krishan, Emily Larson, Anthony
thousands, even millions, of deaths. One or two people who were alive Leonardi, Naomi Lim, Abraham Mahshie, Cassidy Morrison, Spencer
Neale, Nic Rowan, Tim Pearce, Kerry Picket, Josh Siegel, Joseph
during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed 50 million people, are Simonson, Abby Smith, Caitlin Yilek
still with us, but none of us alive today can remember anything like what
we are now going through. Commentary Writers: T. Becket Adams, Quin Hillyer, Brad Polumbo,
The entire staff of the Washington Examiner is working flat out Tom Rogan, Tiana Lowe, Kaylee McGhee, Eddie Scarry
Contributors: Noemie Emery, Eric Felten, Grant Gross, Dan Hannan,
to bring readers all the latest developments, all necessary informa- Rob Long, Stephen Moore, John O’Sullivan, Philip Terzian, Kristen
tion, and all the most compelling stories of the coronavirus pan- Soltis Anderson
demic. Our 10 a.m. editors meeting, now via conference call, has
Design, Video & Web
become a sort of coronavirus task force. Perhaps 80% of stories Designers: Amanda Trypanis, Barbara Kyttle, Sarah Marizan
and commentary are now devoted to the crisis gripping the nation Web Producers: Tim Collins, Ashlee Korlach, Tatiana Lozano,
ever tighter. Victor Nava, Jenna Romaine, Tyler Van Dyke
Our White House reporters are covering the response of Presi- Digital Engagement Editor Will Ricciardella
Social Media Manager Emma Colton
dent Trump and his administration to the pandemic, our campaign Social Media Producers: Dominick Mastrangelo, Andrew Mark Miller,
staff report on how it has utterly changed the electoral calculus, Guillaume Pierre-Louis, Carly Ortiz-Lytle, Claude Thompson
demolishing plans for summer conventions and sidelining the Assistant SEO Strategist Sydney Fazio
Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Joe Biden. Reporters covering Videographers: Arik Dashevsky, Siraj Hashmi, Chris Lohr
Photographer Graeme Jennings
healthcare, energy, environment, defense, national security, foreign
policy, and much more write every day about how the microscopic MediaDC
scourge has infiltrated every policy and political proposal of the Chairman Ryan McKibben
President & Chief Operating Officer Stephen R. Sparks
federal government.
Chief Financial Officer Kathy Schaffhauser
This is now our life and our work. At the same time, we know that Chief Revenue Officer Mark Walters
readers’ lives have also been turned upside down to just as great an Audience Development Officer Jennifer Yingling
extent as ours. First, let me wish you the very best during this difficult Chief Digital Officer David Lindsey
IT Director Mark Rendle
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 Viral Faith P. 8  Exponential Growth P. 9  Video
Game Nerds Are the ‘Only Athletes’ We Have Left P. 9
The ‘Quarantine 15’ P. 10  Social Media Becomes

Less Anti-Social P. 10  WOTW: ‘Berdymukhamedov’ P. 11

Don’t Show Your Face

them, the harder it will be for the sick to
infect the healthy. Thus, publicly requir-
ing masks seems like a feasible transition
KENA BETANCUR/AFP VIA GET T Y IMAGES

out of strict social distancing.

A
re we ready to be a country of
masked men and women?
The public has agreed to
stay home to flatten the curve
and prevent the spread of the
coronavirus. But eventually, there will
need to be a next step — a better, more
flexible alternative that allows the coun-
try to begin reopening slowly.
Many health officials have proposed
a medical mask requirement. Masks are
proven to reduce significantly the spread
of droplets that might contain the virus,
which means the more people who wear
This has happened before: Surgical
face masks were widely adopted as pro-
tection against the Spanish flu in 1918,
an epidemic that killed an estimated
675,000 people in the United States. Cali-
fornia Gov. William Stephens declared at
the time that it was the “patriotic duty of
every American citizen” to wear a mask,

April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 7

YOUR LAND

and San Francisco eventually made it the

law. Citizens who were caught in public
without medical masks could be charged
with “disturbing the peace” and fined $5.
Medical masks might once again be-
come the new normal, but people will
want to shed them as quickly as possi-
ble. Unlike Eastern cultures, which have
accepted medical masks as regular, ev-
eryday commodities, Americans tend to
see masks as awkward and obstructive
last resorts.
That might change, however, if the
culture is encouraged to change its per-
spective from the top down. Already,
dozens of celebrities have turned what
is supposed to be an emblem of good hy-
giene into a fashion statement. Design-
ers are creating customized styles. And
Etsy features pages and pages of custom
prints that range anywhere from $6.99
to $40.
Regardless of whether the trend lasts,
it’s probably safe to assume that most of
us will don a medical mask at one point
or another in the near future.
—By Kaylee McGhee Alone, together.

Viral Faith
that searches for prayer hit a five-year uncertainty.

A
s state governments fight to con-
tain the spread of the coronavirus
and as temporary lockdowns con-
tinue, people are looking for relief, and
they’re finding it in prayer.
More than half of all adults in the
United States said they prayed for the
virus to stop spreading, according to a
new Pew Research Center survey con-
ducted in mid-March. Internet searches
for popular prayers have skyrocketed,
too. In fact, Google Analytics data show
high in the month of March.
Government leaders are also turning
to religion. President Trump declared
March 15 a national day of prayer, and
the governors of West Virginia, Louisi-
ana, and Arkansas followed suit soon
thereafter. Smaller cities, too, have asked
residents to pray for their communities,
healthcare workers, and government of-
ficials as the nation struggles to mitigate
the costs of a global pandemic.
“This is a perilous time, and we
must pull together to defeat this virus,”
said Mount Airy, North Carolina, May-
or David Rowe last week before asking
the town’s churches to ring their bells
for two minutes at noon every day. “Re-
gardless of our respective faiths, we have
an obligation and an opportunity to call
upon God for leadership as we together
Economist Jeanet Bentzen described
this turn toward religion as “religious
coping.” Others might simply call it faith.
We are fighting an invisible foe that we
do not fully understand and cannot com-
pletely control. So, it’s only natural that
people would turn to a higher power
that is believed to be all-powerful and
all-knowing and capable of deliverance.
Perhaps this isn’t the phenomenon
Bentzen has made it out to be. Indeed,
I’d argue that asking God for help when
we need it most is one of the most natu-
ral things in the world.
—By Kaylee McGhee
Exponential Growth

T
navigate uncharted waters.”
This religious surge might be tempo-
rary, and it might also be limited to the
he coronavirus is teaching us a lot.
We’re learning more about
our wives, husbands, children, or
CHARLIE NEIBERGALL/AP

confines of the internet since churches roommates as we are cooped up with

and other houses of worship are unable them all day. Every day. We’re learning
to meet in person. But it reveals that more about our neighbors as we look out
many are searching for hope, peace, the rear window to see what they do in
“I’m between reasons right now.” and an answer in the midst of so much their yards, on their balconies, or with

8 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020


their drapes open.
And we’re learning some math con-
cepts, such as “exponential growth,” as
we try to follow the spread of the virus.
Regular people, even the slightly
nerdy who like to follow statistics, are
used to things either going up and down
or growing roughly linearly. The presi-
dent’s poll numbers go up some days and
down some days, as does your team’s
winning percentage (remember sports?).
Your slugger’s home run total climbs one
at a time, and a few dozen homes are
built into your town each year, so that
you can say what the “pace of growth” is.
We’re growing by 60 homes per year.
At this pace, Pete Alonso will hit 52 home
runs …
But viruses don’t spread in this math-
ematically intuitive way, and so people
are trying to wrap their minds around
a mathematical reality that maybe they
grasped for a couple of months in high
school math but that doesn’t come nat-
urally to our brains.
That’s why searches for the phrase
“exponential growth” hit an all-time high
in March, with about 50% more searches
for it than the previous all-time high.
YOUR LAND
Video Game Nerds Are
the Only ‘Athletes’
We Have Left
T
hanks to the coronavirus, March
Madness is canceled, the NBA sea-
son was suspended, and Opening
Day of the baseball season never hap-
pened. The 2021 Olympics are post-
poned, and the Little League season has
been shut down. So, one unforeseen side
effect of this societal shutdown is that
the emerging, once-obscure category
of quasi-athletics known as “esports” is
pretty much the only type of sports left.
It’s experiencing something of a surge
in popularity as a result.
For those outside of Generation Z
who don’t spend their days buried in the
various layers of the internet, esports
are professional-level video game com-
petitions. This isn’t some fringe fad: The
world of esports has become a $1 billion
industry.
Whether competitions focus on war-
fare games or sports-centered video
games such as the NFL-style Madden
football simulator and the globally pop-
It’s the nature of viruses to spread ex- ular soccer video game FIFA, any pro-
ponentially. If every person who has the fessional video-game competition can
virus infects two other people (the low- count as esports. They’re often played in
end estimate for the coronavirus), then various forms of team competition, with
one case will make two new cases, and
those two new cases will each make two
new cases, which will each make two MADE BY JIMBOB.
new cases.
Thus, the number of cases, or even
new cases, doesn’t grow at some pace
like home runs or wins, but it doubles at
some pace. Thus, the United States went
from 100 cases on March 2, to more than
200 on March 5, to more than 400 on
March 7, to almost 800 by March 9, to
1,600 on March 12. The doubling every
two or three days has continued, creating
a line that looks like hockey stick.
Math professors are publishing vid-
eos explaining exponential growth. One
such video, published March 8, has 5
million views.
This added math knowledge is no
cause for celebration, of course, as it por-
tends massive quantities of death and ill-
ness. Our new knowledge of exponential
growth will be a lesson we wish we never
had to learn.
—By Timothy P. Carney
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 9
YOUR LAND

big prize money at stake.

And esports are only getting more
popular during the coronavirus shut-in.
“Esports, or competitive video gaming,
is on the rise, with people tuning in to ev-
erything from Counter-Strike to League of
Legends,” Time magazine reports. “View-
ership on Twitch, the go-to site for game
streamers, is up 31% in March, by one
estimate. People stuck inside are playing
more video games, no doubt. But they’re
also watching the world’s best gamers take
one another on, too.”
The question of whether esports are
“really sports” will continue to divide
critics and fans. While there’s no doubt-
ing the fact that they don’t bring the
same health benefits as traditional ath-
letics, it’s still better during the corona-
virus shutdown for people to have some
form of recreational competition to con-
nect over — and someone to root for.
—Brad Polumbo

Even better than the real thing?

The ‘Quarantine 15’

T
he “quarantine 15” is the new
“freshman 15,” describing the 15
pounds college freshmen suppos-
edly put on during their first year away
from home. Now, that catchphrase ap-
plies to all of us — the quarantined who
When asked what inspired the cake’s
design, Busken Bakery Vice President Social Media Becomes
Brian Busken said he wanted to give
Ohio families a “miniature celebration,”
Less Anti-Social
even if it’s a bit nonsensical.

have nowhere to go but the pantry.
Bakeries across the country are using
this to their advantage. An Ohio baker re-
cently released a new line of “quarantine
cakes” in the shape of toilet paper rolls,
and the cakes sold out almost immediate-
ly. It turns out that Busken Bakery’s cakes
are almost as popular as the rolls of toilet
paper after which they’re designed.
“It is important that we continue to
laugh together as families and enjoy our
time together with our children,” Busken
explained.
Krispy Kreme is also using its plat-
form (and its donuts) to spread joy. The
company announced that healthcare
workers can receive a dozen donuts
for free every Monday until May 11. All
they need to do is go to a Krispy Kreme
drive-thru and show an employee badge
from their hospital or doctor’s office.
“Taking care of ourselves and each
other never has been more important.
Getting through this together by staying
apart seems unnatural. But even now …
there can be joy. It can bring and keep us
‘together’ in this challenging, disruptive
time. At Krispy Kreme, we love bringing
smiles to others, especially those who
N
eighborhood email lists and Face-
book groups can bring out the
worst in people. These days, we’re
generally seeing folks’ better side online.
Even the community bulletin board site
Nextdoor has risen to the occasion — at
times.
Sure, there was the standard bad in-
formation floating around. After Mary-
land’s March 30 “stay-at-home” order
went into effect, one wine shop owner
was posting about an imaginary state-
wide “curfew.”
The busy-body worrywarts who pop-
ulate these boards finally had something
real to worry about. Five-on-five basket-
ball going on, house parties down the
block, or any gatherings that violated
social-distancing rules took the place of
the ordinary pre-COVID posts of people
BUSKEN BAKERY/FACEBOOK

need them the most,” the company said
in a statement.
This goodwill is a helpful reminder that
kindness builds community, even from a
distance. Hopefully, my scale agrees.
“That’s close enough.” —By Kaylee McGhee
“parking in front of my house” or chil-
dren rough-housing too much on the
sidewalk.
For a select few, though, the wide-
spread worrying provided a great oppor-
tunity to complain about anyone having

10 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020


WORD OF THE WEEK
‘Berdymukhamedov’
erdymukhamedov is, first of all,
B a great word that is fun to try to
pronounce several times fast.
But it’s the surname of a terrible guy.
The surreal, personality cult dictator-
ship he runs as self-titled “Father Pro-
tector” of Turkmenistan is not doing
much in the way of public health mea-
sures to battle the coronavirus. But it
is battling “coronavirus.” According to
NPR, “If you happen to utter the word
‘coronavirus’ while waiting, say, for the
bus in the white-marbled capital Ash-
gabat, there’s a good chance you’ll be
arrested. That’s because the Turkmen
government, run since 2006 by the
flamboyant dentist-rapper strongman
Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, has
reportedly banned the word.”
“It’s as if it had never existed,” Re-
porters Without Borders says of the
insane unreality people are having
to pretend to live in. But, of course,
it does exist. And something tells me
there is going to be an odd spike in
officially unattributable pneumonial
deaths in Ashgabat in the next while.
There’s something very familiar
about the theory behind this doomed
strategy of enforced denialism the
totalitarian state is employing, where
if you ban the words that allow us to
name something, you stop its spread.
a good time. One woman in Kensington
piped up on a thread about social dis-
tancing to fret, “I have seen quite a few
children, not accompanied by adults, en-
tering parkland and streams. Just a cau-
tion that warm weather brings out ticks,
snakes, etc, and accidents may happen in
unsupervised areas.”
MYKOL A L AZARENKO/AFP VIA GET T Y IMAGES
As if being barred from bonfires,
basketball, parties, and any social event
wasn’t enough.
But the overwhelming story of coro-
navirus-era community email lists, Face-
book pages, and bulletin boards is an
uplifting one of unprecedented cohesion
and concern for one’s neighbor.
“My block neighbors created a text
thread for the first time and started a Fri-
Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov
The idea is that you can censor the real
thing out of existence along with the
word that refers to it.
It reminds me of a 2007 incident
in which then-President of Iran Mah-
moud Ahmedinejad spoke at Colum-
bia University and said that “in Iran,
we don’t have homosexuals like in
your country. In Iran, we don’t have
this phenomenon.” (Homosexuality is
punishable by death in Iran.) As if sim-
ply denying the phenomenon makes it
go away.
But it’s not uncommon for author-
itarian dictatorships to think they can
dictate to reality, to expect the world
itself to be as obedient as a frightened
subject. In the late Soviet Union, of-
ficials held that many types of crimi-
nality and psychological defects were
the sole product of bourgeois Western
society, which led them to declare
that serial killers did not exist in that
country. This made it a bureaucratic
nightmare to hunt down the actual
Soviet serial killers who did, in fact,
exist, as Robert Cullen chronicles in
day afternoon lawn-chairs-in-the-street
happy hour,” Mercatus Center research
fellow Salim Furth wrote. “NextDoor has
become tolerable. My church has more

‘NextDoor has become
tolerable. My church has
more people engaged for
more hours, especially in
small groups, even though
everything is virtual.
Donations and loans seem
to be flowing more easily
than ever, in all contexts.’
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 11
YOUR LAND
his book about the hunt for Russian
murderer Andrei Chikatilo, The Killer
Department. They should have already
learned that you can’t censor reality
away.
The Turkmen strongman’s instinct
about language is the same one that is
demonstrated by virtually the entire
span of left-wing magazine, opinion,
and academic publishing right now.
Woke language policing is the product
of a shockingly prevalent view that us-
ing hateful words is all that hate is. So,
if you want to fight bigotry, you must
do it by banning or socially sanction-
ing bigoted words. In a recent promi-
nent example covered here, this is why
there was a premonitory push against
“stigmatizing” terms for the corona-
virus tied to a place or animal, such
as “Wuhan flu” or “bat virus.” People
who were going to react to a pandemic
that originated in Chinese bats with
xenophobic harassment against Chi-
nese Americans probably didn’t need
one name or another for their irratio-
nal hate. Most “problematic” beliefs
are not created because we used the
wrong words. And so, like Turkmen
coronavirus and Soviet serial killers,
our prejudices can’t be addressed
merely by taking offending terms out
of the vocabulary. If we want to com-
bat real problems, we should argue
against ideas more and against words
less.”
—By Nicholas Clairmont
people engaged for more hours, espe-
cially in small groups, even though ev-
erything is virtual. Donations and loans
seem to be flowing more easily than ever,
in all contexts.”
In Pelham, New York, which abuts
COVID hot spot New Rochelle, neighbors
used Facebook to form a group dedicated
to sewing masks. Other posts identified
and applauded healthcare workers who
are on the front lines of this war.
Social media generally weakens com-
munity by tearing us away from those
physically proximate. When a contagious
virus has already done the physical sep-
arating, it seems social media can serve
the good.
—By Timothy P. Carney
All Hands
On Deck
We’ll get back to business when we get back to health
By Thomas Donohue
T
he novel coronavirus
outbreak will require
leaders in business
and government to
continue to come to-
gether to help our
nation deal with the
pandemic, support
our healthcare sys-
tem, weather the economic disruption,
and ensure we can come back from this
crisis stronger than ever.
The CARES Act, passed by Congress
unanimously and signed into law by
President Trump, is the largest rescue
package in American history. The U.S.
Chamber of Congress worked vigorous-
ly to advance the legislation because no
family should go bankrupt, no business
should go under, and no industry should
be left in ruins because of the pandem-
ic. The emergency funding programs in
the law will make the difference between
keeping a business up and running over
the coming weeks and being forced to re-
duce salaries, lay off employees, or shut
down forever.
12 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
The CARES Act contains three im-
portant provisions for businesses. First,
it delays payment of employer payroll
taxes, which allows businesses to have
more cash to keep workers on their pay-
rolls. Second, it provides $350 billion in
loans for small businesses. These loans
will support business operations and
can be converted to grants for businesses
that use the money to retain employees.
Third, there is $425 billion in loans, loan
No family should go
bankrupt, no business
should go under, and
no industry should be
left in ruins because
of the pandemic.
guarantees, and support for the Federal
Reserve to shore up midsize and large
businesses. The Fed could leverage these
funds up to $4 trillion.
But the all-hands-on-deck effort
needed is just beginning. We are push-
ing the Treasury Department and the
Federal Reserve to act swiftly to create
a robust lending facility to support loans
to midsize and larger businesses with
minimal regulatory red tape.
In addition, we are urgently focused
on helping small businesses take the
necessary steps to receive aid once lend-
ing facilities have been designated. To
help them get started now, the Cham-
ber put together a step-by-step guide to
applying for and accessing loans, which
can be viewed on the Chamber’s website
(uschamber.com/sbloans). This graphic
guide has already potentially reached
millions of people on social media.
The Chamber is also hosting dozens
of webinars, including with state and
local chamber partners all across the
country, to make sure small businesses
everywhere know what kind of help is
out there and how they can get it. Last
week, one online town hall alone drew
more than 5,000 participants.
While we work to provide fast relief
to the employers and employees who are
suffering, we will continue to support the
businesses and workers firing on all cyl-
inders to respond to this crisis. We can’t
forget that there are millions who are
working more, not less, because of the
coronavirus. They are helping keep peo-
Illustration by Thomas Fluharty
ple safe and keep daily life running for
the rest of us.
Returning to normal requires beating
the coronavirus — and we will. We have
the best doctors and scientists devel-
oping treatments, the most innovative
companies scaling and distributing tests
and treatments, and the best healthcare
system to deliver them. We will get back
to business when we get back to health.
When that happens, working with
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 13
state and local governments and guided
by public health officials, we will reopen
our economy, put people back to work,
and get back to growing.
I’m an optimist. I know we will defeat
the coronavirus, because America has
the will and the strength to tackle any
challenge. +
Thomas J. Donohue is chief executive
officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Pandemic Proves
the Wisdom
of Federalism
An idea about self-government that keeps evolving
to meet the moment
T
he coronavirus out-
break in the United
States has served as
a good reminder to
Americans of the vir-
tues of federalism.
Not only are the pres-
ident and his top staff
working on the crisis
at a national level, but governors, county
commissioners, and mayors are focusing
on the manifestation of this disease on
a state and local level. This enables the
government as a whole to have an ideal
response to the pandemic — tailored to
local conditions without sacrificing na-
tional coherence.
The concept of federalism, or the coex-
istence of federal and state governments
in their own spheres of power, is premised
on the constitutional limits of federal
power. Article I, Section 8 of the Consti-
tution does not grant Congress unlimited
power. Rather, its authority is enumer-
ated, which by implication left the state
governments with the remaining power
of government. When the Bill of Rights
was passed by Congress in 1789, the leg-
islature made that implication explicit in
the 10th Amendment, which reserves all
power not delegated to the federal govern-
14 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
By Jay Cost
ment to the states or the people at large.
Like many aspects of our Constitu-
tion, the concept of federalism was left
vague by the Founding Fathers, to be
worked out through the everyday prac-
tice of politics. As it evolved over the first
few decades of American life, federalism
emphasized the federal government’s
role in foreign policy, as well as creating a
national economic marketplace through
internal improvements, public-private fi-
nancial institutions such as the Bank of
the United States, and tariffs for indus-
try. The rapid pace of industrialization
and integration in the latter part of the
19th century necessarily expanded the
federal government’s power. The Con-
stitution grants Congress the authority
to regulate interstate commerce, which
increasingly amounted to more and more
of American economic activity. In the
20th century, the Supreme Court took a
very broad view of what counted as in-
terstate commerce, legitimizing federal
authority in wide swaths of economic
activity. Starting with the New Deal, the
federal government began intervening in
state matters not by forcing activity but
by offering cash assistance, with strings
attached. The Great Society of the 1960s
followed this approach, further increas-
ing the scope of the federal government.
Nevertheless, the states (which in-
cidentally are sovereign over localities)
retain a great deal of control over many
matters of day-to-day life. Education,
criminal justice, transportation, the en-
vironment, licensing and regulation,
social welfare, and public health all fall
under their jurisdiction to a large degree,
although they are rarely able to make
dictates without at least the indirect influ-
ence of the federal government these days.
This is why the governors and may-
ors are so important in determining how
each of us lives through the coronavirus
pandemic. The president has the pow-
er to shut down foreign travel, and even
travel between the states. He can also
facilitate the procurement of medical
As a matter of pure
political theory,
federalism does not
make a lot of sense.
It was in fact
a compromise.
supplies to places that need it most. But
when it comes to closing your local dry
cleaner or limiting the number of people
who can go out to the park this afternoon,
those are authorities reserved for the
state governments, which in turn parcel
them out to localities. As the U.S. moves
forward through the phases of this coro-
navirus outbreak, federalism will proba-
bly result in some communities enjoying
fewer restrictions on daily life
than others, as state and local
officials make their own deter-
minations about what is best for
each place in the country.
Federalism is a historical
accident. It’s an artifact of the
way the British crown chose to
organize the American colonies
during the 17th and early 18th
centuries. By the end of the
French and Indian War in 1765,
the colonies were hardly united
in any sense of the word. They
were separated by geography,
religion, ethnicity, culture, and
even language. Between that
point and 1776, King George
III and his ministers managed
to antagonize all 13 of the col-
onies, which joined together
mainly because they had no
other choice. The revolution
helped to create a national
American identity, but there
was still substantial resistance
to a comprehensive “union” by
the time of the Constitutional Convention
in Philadelphia in 1787. The delegates to
that meeting were called to assemble
mainly because government and even
civil society were breaking down by that
point, and everybody realized that some-
thing drastic had to be done to handle the
crisis. And even then, Rhode Island did
not bother to send any delegates, so dedi-
cated was it to its own sovereignty.
Some delegates, such as James Mad-
ison and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to
curtail the power of the states severely.
How could two sovereignties govern a
single place at the same time without
conflict or at least inefficiency? They
did not think it possible, which is why
they thought the Articles of Confeder-
ation (the agreement that preceded the
Constitution) was such a failure — it
invested too little power in the national
government, basically rendering it sub-
servient to the states. At the Constitu-
tional Convention, they both proposed
essentially reversing the situation and
Illustration by Gary Locke
making the states servants of the nation-
al government.
But there simply was not the politi-
cal will to do that. In fact, nothing better
demonstrates the “stickiness” of state
sovereignty better than the fact that at
the convention itself, each state received
exactly one vote. So, Madison and his
nationalist allies succeeded in giving the
federal government vast new powers,
such as the authority to tax and regulate
commerce, but they could not convince
the other members to give the feder-
al government a veto over state laws,
which probably would have killed feder-
alism for good. They also failed to create
a Senate apportioned on population. The
small states demanded equal representa-
tion in the upper chamber of Congress,
thereby creating a structural support in
the government itself for federalism.
As a matter of pure political theory,
this system does not make a lot of sense.
It is in fact a compromise between com-
peting visions of how a republic is sup-
posed to operate: federalists such as
Madison and Hamilton who thought it
had to be strongly national and others,
such as Patrick Henry and Melancton
Smith, who thought that states were the
best repositories of power. And it was
a compromise that was forged in light
of the fact that the states were already
in existence by 1787, had been for some
time, and could not simply be destroyed.
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 15
Today, many progressives are wont
to criticize federalism for being irratio-
nal. They seek to expand national au-
thority because it makes sense to create
a uniform government policy for all cit-
izens. But conservatives, at least those
in the mold of the great philosopher Ed-
mund Burke, have an appreciation for
the importance of the evolution of po-
litical institutions. They need not all be
designed out of whole cloth
to be defensible. Similarly,
federalism as a political orga-
nization was never sketched
out in a philosophical trea-
tise; it developed in dribs and
drabs from the settlement
of the Jamestown colony in
1607 until the present day.
But that is not a weakness. It
is, in fact, a strength, for it has
evolved, bit by bit, to meet
various challenges and crises
as they pop up.
And that is exactly what we
are seeing today. Federalism
has been one of the strengths
of the government’s response
to the coronavirus, not one
of its weaknesses. President
Trump and his advisers are
setting broad national poli-
cy, particularly with respect
to international travel, the
approval of treatments, and
the transportation of needed
medical supplies and equip-
ment from one end of the country to
the other. Meanwhile, governors and
local leaders are tailoring life to fit the
circumstances in each community. Each
is attending to the tasks most suited to
them. For instance, states are dealing
with school closures in different ways.
Some have closed schools through the
end of the year, while others have held
off in the hopes of reopening them. That
makes sense in the context of this pan-
demic, which affects some locales more
than others. Federalism gives us the
best of both worlds: a coherent policy
for the entire country that is simultane-
ously flexible for local exigencies.
Federalism as we know it today may
not have been the “idea” of any single
person, but that does not change the fact
that it is a very good thing, especially in
this moment of crisis. +
Jay Cost is a visiting scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute and Grove
City College.
 How This
Ends A path out of the coronavirus clampdown
and back to normal
W
ithin a few weeks
of making land-
fall in America,
the coronavi-
rus has ripped
through our cit-
ies, strained hospitals, wreaked havoc on
the economy, tanked financial markets,
and disrupted virtually every aspect of
life. Governments, businesses, workers,
and individuals of all ages are consumed
with one burning question: How do
things get back to normal?
The disheartening answer is that
things won’t truly be back to normal un-
til there is a tried-and-tested vaccine that
is widely administered. But that could
take until the second half of 2021, maybe
longer. So, everyone should operate on
the assumption that the coronavirus will
be a part of our lives for the next couple
of years.
The more nuanced question is: How
do things get back to some semblance of
normal in the meantime?
Widespread shutdowns within the
economy were a last resort after the
coronavirus arrived and caught the na-
tion completely off-guard. The United
16 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
By Philip Klein
States had virtually no capacity to test
for the virus in the early stages of the
outbreak, and by the time testing start-
ed ramping up, there were more than
100,000 cases nationwide, and New
York City hospitals were on the brink
of collapse. Extreme social distancing
has offered the only hope of slowing the
spread to give the nation’s medical sys-
tem a fighting chance.
But this shutdown is only a short-
term approach. There is simply no way to
keep the economy in hibernation with-
out destroying even previously thriving
businesses and bringing despair to tens
of millions. Closing schools indefinitely
would have enormous consequences for
parents left alone to educate their chil-
dren while trying to hold down full-time
jobs. Sustained social isolation can lead to
serious mental and physical health prob-
lems. People cannot be expected to stay
locked up for the next few years waiting
for a vaccine. They simply won’t do it, so
it’s not a sound basis on which to plan.
What public health professionals
must focus on is creating ways for people
to ease back into their lives without trig-
gering another massive outbreak during
the intervening period. It’s unrealistic to
put everybody’s lives on hold until there
is zero threat from the virus. The goal
should be to reduce the viral threat to an
acceptable level at which it no longer en-
dangers the medical system and then try
to return to our lives as much as possible.
Yuval Levin of the American Enter-
prise Institute framed it this way: We need
a hard pause, followed by a soft start. His
After social distancing,
a second phase would
see states gradually
ease restrictions by
employing better
strategies to prevent
new outbreaks.
Eventually, in a third
phase, all restrictions
fall once a vaccine
is available.
 Police barricades on Park Avenue in New York City, March 27, 2020.
AEI colleague, former Food and Drug Ad-
ministration Commissioner Scott Gottli-
eb, co-authored a paper that laid out a
three-phase plan to get back to normal.
The first phase is the current effort to
slow the spread through enforced social
distancing. The second phase would see
states gradually ease restrictions by em-
ploying better strategies to prevent new
outbreaks. Eventually, in the third phase,
the paper envisions removing all restric-
tions once a vaccine is available and most
people have had the shot. Most forecasts
assume that the number of cases will
peak by late April or at some point in May,
so we’re at least a month away from start-
ing to see restrictions ease.
Although thinking in terms of stages
is a natural approach to a more sustain-
able strategy, it should not distract from
the fact that to be successful, the U.S.
will have to be working on aspects of all
three phases simultaneously. Even while
overseeing shutdown orders and deal-
ing with current medical crises, there
ANGEL A WEISS / AFP / GET T Y
will have to be planning for the gradual
reopening, and also, there will have to be
testing of vaccines and a plan to manu-
facture and administer a successful one
rapidly across the population once one is
proven to work.
Perhaps a better way of thinking about
the question of how the U.S. returns to a
semblance of normal is to divide what’s
required into two broad categories. One
involves better implementing some of
the strategies that have already proved
successful in other countries. The other
involves medical breakthroughs, some of
which could come within months rather
than the years before an effective vaccine
is widely administered.
On the first front, even dismissing
statistics from China as unreliable, it’s
clear that Asian countries have done a
better job than we have of keeping things
under control. One thing South Korea,
Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have
in common is the widespread wearing of
masks in public.
Owing to a shortage of masks for med-
ical professionals, officials aggressively
discouraged the public from wearing
them early on. This is now widely viewed
as having been a mistake. The truth is that
wearing a mask significantly reduces the
transmission of germs. If it became com-
mon during the crisis for people to wear
masks when outside of their homes, it
could greatly slow the spread of the virus.
But because doctors and nurses are now
sterilizing and reusing masks, or relying
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 17
on makeshift solutions, widespread use
of masks cannot be officially advocated.
However, if manufacturers increase pro-
duction rapidly and the public is instruct-
ed to make DIY masks from household
materials, it could help.
Other countries, such as South Korea
and Singapore, have also employed a so-
phisticated system of broad testing and
surveillance of cases. People who test
positive are quarantined, and their con-
tacts are tracked down using measures
that include GPS technology, and those
contacts are notified and also monitored
and isolated.
The U.S. has made great strides in
testing capacity after early failures, but
more needs to be done. Abbott Labs re-
cently announced it had developed a test
that could be deployed at doctors’ offices
and deliver results within minutes. That
could help immensely. But testing won’t
be as effective without finding a way to
isolate cases and trace contacts. The
tricky part is to do this while respecting
privacy rights that are jealously guarded
in the U.S. In an effort to balance these
requirements, MIT researchers have de-
veloped a location tracker app that can
be voluntarily installed on cellphones.
If anybody using it tests positive, they
can press a button, and the app alerts all mune, allowing them to reenter society.
other users who would have been close Given that there are mild or asymptom-
to the infected person while keeping that The quicker a atic cases of COVID-19, it’s possible that
person’s identity anonymous. many more people have antibodies than
In addition to masks and more effec- host of recovery the confirmed case count would suggest.
tive testing, the U.S. could monitor peo- strategies are in The U.S. needs to pursue all of these
ple’s temperatures more aggressively. place — testing and strategies at full speed. The quicker they
Singapore does this not only at airports are in place, the more officials would be
but also to test teachers and students monitoring, universal able to loosen restrictions in the absence
daily to keep schools open. Perhaps mask wearing, of a vaccine. More testing and effective
there’s a near future in which tempera- monitoring would be good, but it would
ture checks become as ubiquitous as
regular temperature be even better when combined with uni-
bag checks after the Sept. 11 terrorist screenings, and versal mask-wearing, regular temperature
attacks. Another strategy that has been disinfection of screenings, and disinfection of public plac-
employed elsewhere that could be ad- es. The ability to open things up would be
opted is for crews to spray large public
public places — the yet greater if medical breakthroughs are
spaces regularly with disinfectant. more officials would added to the other prudent measures.
Beyond looking at what other coun- be able to loosen Ramping up production of ventilators
tries are doing, the U.S. would be in a and protective gear that helps keep med-
better position to ease social distanc- restrictions in the ical workers safe at work would increase
ing rules if there were effective medical absence of a vaccine. our medical system’s capacity, allowing
remedies. If there were a drug that hospitals to handle more extreme
could prevent vulnerable people cases. Slowing the spread of the
from getting infected, or alterna- virus would limit demand for crit-
tively, could treat infected patients ical care, and addressing short-
so they don’t become more severe- ages would increase the system’s
ly ill, it would significantly reduce capacity to provide that care.
the need for intensive care, which Precisely when things could
has been the biggest problem for start loosening up is hard to pin-
hospital systems. point, for cases are still rising
The good news is that there’s quickly. Gottlieb and his co-au-
a realistic chance that some such thors suggest that if the U.S. adopts
treatments will be available well the prevention and monitoring
before a vaccine. One antiviral strategies discussed here, some
candidate, remdesivir, is being states could start loosening restric-
tested in several trials, and the re- tions once they see two straight
sults are expected by late April or weeks of decline in the number of
early May. In the coming months, cases. That could happen in May.
we should also know whether the Whenever that point comes,
much-publicized malaria drugs however, it will be important to
hydroxychloroquine and chloro- keep in mind that the nation isn’t
quine can help treat symptoms going to go instantly from lock-
(though many scientists are skep- down to fully open. It will be a
tical). Even if these both fail, there slow transition that would involve
are other candidates. gradually increasing the number
Medical researchers are also in- of people allowed to attend gath-
novating in other ways. One thing erings. Senior citizens and those
being tried is known as “convales- with poor health will probably have
cent plasma.” The idea is to take to be more risk-averse and remain
antibodies that have developed in separated as much as possible from
people who have recovered from Free at last. the rest of the population.
COVID-19 and give them to infect- Just as, a few months ago, it
ed patients in the hope that the an- was hard to imagine that most
tibodies will enable the patient to of the public would be trapped
stave off infection. these tests can be more widely employed, at home living without readily available
Something else that could be import- it would mean that anybody who has the toilet paper, it may seem difficult now to
ant is the development of serology tests antibodies can be cleared to return to imagine a way out of the current crisis.
SHEL HERSHORN / GET T Y

that can detect the presence of antibod- normal life because they are not at risk But with hard work, planning, innova-
ies. Scientists don’t yet know how long of getting reinfected or infecting others. tion, and some luck, we’ll get there. +
immunity to COVID-19 lasts, but they Germany is experimenting with wide-
believe there is at least temporary im- spread antibody testing and considering Philip Klein is is the executive editor
munity for those who have recovered. If issuing certificates to those deemed im- of the Washington Examiner.

18 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020

 Fighting With
One Hand Tied
Behind Our Backs
The deregulation that will ensure
we’re prepared ahead of time for the next crisis
By Shoshana Weissmann

A
s a part of cur-
rent efforts to
stem the corona-
virus pandemic,
Washington and
state govern-
ments have tak-
en the rare step
of unraveling burdensome regulations.
Along with all of its other disruptions of
daily life, the coronavirus outbreak has
forced the government to initiate an un-
precedented avalanche of much-needed
regulatory reforms, from allowing doc-
tors to work easily across state lines to the works prior to the pandemic,
enabling hospitals to add more beds. It’s that expands nurses’ scope of prac-
a shame it took a crisis. Indeed, had such tice. More states should follow suit in
regulatory reforms been undertaken ear- order to expand access to care generally,
lier, our initial response to the coronavi- but also to reduce doctor strain during
rus likely would have been more swift, example, advanced practice registered times of emergency.
nimble, and effective. As this pandemic nurses are legally required to be overseen Pharmacists can similarly help. They
shows, there is no shortage of fairly mod- by a doctor to prescribe medication. This are playing a growing role in primary
est policy changes that can better pre- means that otherwise qualified nurse care and can refill basic, existing pre-
pare America for what future disasters practitioners are not allowed to provide scriptions without doctor approval in
may come our way. patients care to the full extent of their the majority of states. Evidence shows
Access to healthcare is paramount training. However, in states where they improved access to medications such as
during times of crisis, be it natural di- are allowed greater autonomy, there is hormonal contraception, smoking ces-
sasters or new diseases. Unfortunately, evidence that medical costs are reduced sation products, and drugs for common
states place excessive regulatory burdens and access to care is increased without ailments such as cold sores and eczema
on medical professionals and healthcare adverse consequences. Florida Gov. Ron when pharmacists can prescribe them.
providers. In nearly half of states, for DeSantis recently signed legislation, in Furthermore, this allows increased ca-

Illustration by Jori Bolton April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 19

pacity for doctors to attend to more
pressing cases. In a time of crisis, this dy-
namic allows patients to get their need-
ed prescriptions more easily (and come
in contact with fewer people) and frees
up doctors to spend more time treating
the ill and infirmed. This policy should
be uniformly adopted to ease problems
down the road.
Natural disasters, public health cri-
ses, and the like often necessarily pull
public focus toward some geographical
areas over others. A hurricane may spike
demand for medical care in Florida, so
doctors may be called in from other
states to assist. Indeed, New York is ea-
gerly accepting help from out-of-state
medical professionals, as New York City
hospitals are currently overwhelmed
due to the coronavirus, and medical
professionals themselves have become
sick. That is why, at President Trump’s
direction, the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services issued regulatory
waivers that allow medical professionals
to work in states where they are not li-
censed without violating Medicare rules.
A better model would be for states to rep-
licate Arizona’s first-of-its-kind law that
allows new residents to transfer their
occupational licenses easily when they
move. In this way, there would be a mod-
el in place to expedite licensing for out-
of-state rapid response emergency care.
Doctors, states, and patients wouldn’t
have to rely on emergency orders in or-
der to allow medical professionals to go
where they’re needed.
California also has a law to emulate.
SB601 provides that state agencies is-
suing business or occupational licens-
es may waive fees if someone has been
displaced by a state of emergency. This
means that someone who has been up-
rooted can easily get back to work in
their licensed profession, be it cutting
hair or plumbing, without having to re-
peat some or all of the occupational li-
censing process. States ought to consider
expanding upon this and putting in place
specific plans to expedite the licensing
process so that people won’t be both
displaced and out of work.
Telehealth allows doctors to go where
needed, virtually. Generally, doctors
must be licensed in the state where the
patient is situated or where the telehealth
web platform itself is located. Over the
past three weeks, states including Arizo-
na and Michigan and the federal agency
CMS have expanded access to telehealth
services. However, doing so permanent-
20 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
ly and allowing all U.S. licensed doctors
in good standing to provide online ser-
vices would be a wise change. And states
ought to allow doctors to prioritize the
most important cases on platforms by
expanding the use of “store-and-for-
ward” systems, which allow doctors to
review case information when possible
instead of in real time via a screen. This
model has proven successful.
In too many states, occupational li-
censes can be revoked or suspended if
professionals fall behind on student loans.
And falling behind on loans is particularly
likely during disasters. States are quickly
getting rid of these laws that kick people
while they’re down and make repayment
of loans more difficult, but all remaining
states should wipe them from their codes.
This is especially true as these laws are
regularly used against nurses, whose help
is particularly needed in times of crisis.
Adding capacity to our medical sys-
tem also necessitates suspending cer-
tificate-of-need laws. As Reason’s Eric
Boehm details, “In 28 states, hospitals
must get state regulators’ permission
before adding beds.” While states such
as North Carolina have suspended their
CON laws in order to add hospital beds
quickly, this should have been done long
ago rather than on-the-fly. These laws
make it so “hospitals must get a state
agency’s permission before offering new
services or installing a new medical tech-
nology,” writes Boehm. It is impossible
to know just how much medical capacity
these competitor’s vetoes are artificially
blocking, but it’s time to find out by end-
ing these laws.
The current pandemic has also high-
lighted an opportunity to expand access
to food and alcohol. While governments
are urging people to stay inside, allow-
ing take-out alcohol has helped busi-
nesses stay afloat in the meantime.
Allowing alcohol delivery trucks in Tex-
as to also deliver food, for example, is
helping keep grocery stores in the state
stocked. Stories of food shelves emp-
tying before big storms of any kind are
There is no shortage
of fairly modest policy
changes that can better
prepare America.
common. Making this change perma-
nent would allow similar flexibility for
a variety of disaster scenarios.
Closed schools and empty shelves can
cause more hunger among the homeless
and poor. Private businesses, philanthro-
py, and community and faith-based orga-
nizations have a tremendous capacity to
help fill this need — if they are allowed
to. Last year, health officials in Georgia
sought to shut down MUST Ministries’s
expansive program to feed hungry chil-
dren in the state with excessive regula-
tions. Now, MUST is stepping in to help
local schools make sure their students
don’t go hungry. States ought to stop rou-
tine crackdowns on people who feed the
hungry. Sometimes, this even includes the
government bleaching food intended for
the homeless or otherwise banning food
donations to them. Rather, governments
should partner with any private actor able
to feed the hungry safely.
We must also end regulations that
prevent people from having home-based
businesses. Many localities senselessly
require people working from home to
jump through wild regulatory hoops in
order to work remotely. Those who know
about these prohibitions and laws may
be hesitant to stay home and work during
the coronavirus pandemic or during fu-
ture storms when officials urge people
to stay inside so they won’t be stranded.
California’s AB5, which forcibly required
many independent contractors in the
state to convert to full-scale employee
status, has caused an avalanche of harm
to those happily working from home. Sto-
ries proliferate of people’s struggles after
losing their jobs as freelance copywrit-
ers, editors, and other professionals who
worked from home due to personal dis-
eases or sick family members. Now that
Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered people
to shelter in place, they must stay at home
without income or even much ability to
seek new work. AB5 isn’t working, and the
coronavirus has intensified its problems.
There is no shortage of ways to shore
up America’s readiness for future disas-
ters. Permanent changes now can help
during this pandemic and more so during
future ones. Many of these reforms have
been overlooked or cast aside as trivial,
but they are vital to making sure we are
prepared for anything. +
Shoshana Weissmann is the senior
manager of digital media and a policy
fellow at the R Street Institute, a free-
market think tank.
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 21
How To
Save the
Economy
What Washington got right in the pandemic-relief
package, and what remains to be done
By Brian Riedl
T
he federal response to
the COVID-19 pan-
demic has been his-
toric in its magnitude,
speed, and nearly
unanimous congres-
sional support. But
it has also been mis-
understood, and the
differences between it and past federal
crises, in terms of federal economic in-
tervention, are instructive.
In just two weeks, Congress drafted
and enacted one of the most expensive
bills in American history, with a $2 tril-
lion price tag, that will affect every part
of the economy. This speed reflects the
rapid bipartisan consensus of econo-
mists and policy experts around a set of
policies needed to prevent a short-term
economic crisis from becoming a long-
term depression.
It’s also unique. Despite common
comparisons, the 2020 federal response
22 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
bears little relation to the 2009 stimulus check and businesses that have lost their
legislation that was enacted near the end customers due to the economic lock-
of the Great Recession. That purely par- down. It is meant to prevent businesses
tisan, $787 billion bill was based on the from disappearing, key industries such
outdated Keynesian notion that public as restaurants, airlines, and hotels from
works projects (often pork) would in- collapsing, and families from losing their
crease consumption and demand, tap livelihoods. The standard of success is
into a multiplier, and create a burst of
economic growth. In reality, nearly all
of the 2009 stimulus was implemented
after the Great Recession had ended and
coincided with an economic recovery Allowing industries to
that was even slower than the Obama collapse could likely
White House’s own projections of what
would have happened without the ad- turn a temporary,
ministration’s stimulus bill. sharp, V-shaped
By contrast, the $2 trillion Coronavi-
rus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security,
downturn into an
or CARES, Act is designed as social in- extended depression,
surance, not stimulus. The goal is not to while creating a
stimulate spending broadly across the
economy (though that may result), but
humanitarian crisis as
rather to provide a safety net for individ- millions of families lose
uals who are no longer collecting a pay- their livelihoods.
 A desolate Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles’ Beverly Hills, March 20, 2020 — the day after a statewide stay-home order.
not to boost consumption, but simply to
keep families and businesses afloat.
To analyze the economic effects of
the lockdown, imagine that certain in-
dustries closed for a period in order to
let their workers take an extended sum-
mer vacation. In theory, this should re-
duce output in the short run and draw
down savings and business inventories.
However, because the economic struc-
ture would not be permanently changed,
the end of the “vacation” should revert
this part of the economy back to its pre-
recession performance. Production and
demand should roughly return to earlier
levels, and the same number of workers
would, all else staying constant, be need-
ed in the same businesses and industries.
The obvious difference today is that
workers and businesses have not budget-
ed for this extended, unpaid “vacation.”
So the economic policy challenge is to
make sure that the economy does not
lose the businesses and workers who can
revert the economy back to its pre-lock-
BOB RIHA, JR. / GET T Y
down status. Thus, the federal response
has consisted of five broad strategies: 1)
address the public health crisis, 2) avoid
business bankruptcies with loans to dis-
tressed businesses, 3) minimize layoffs
by subsidizing the payrolls of businesses
that retain their staff, 4) provide generous
unemployment and safety net assistance
to those who have already been laid off,
and 5) empower the Federal Reserve to
lower interest rates and guarantee liquid-
ity for the financial system.
Not surprisingly, Congress couldn’t
resist stuffing some pork into the federal
response, and the $1,200 rebates for most
adults (plus an additional $500 per child)
are poorly targeted and likely to be distrib-
uted too slowly. Yet with 3.3 million jobless
claims in one week, more than four times
the previous record, Washington is wise to
fire all its guns at the free-falling econo-
my. Allowing industries to collapse could
likely turn a temporary, sharp, V-shaped
downturn into an extended depression,
not to mention create a humanitarian
crisis as millions of families lose their
livelihoods. This crisis is not the fault of
families or businesses; the government
ordered an economic shutdown and has
an obligation to compensate its victims.
A key question is how long the eco-
nomic shutdown is sustainable. The
combination of federal emergency as-
sistance and plummeting tax revenues
is adding approximately $1 trillion per
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 23
month to the national debt. To put that
in context, America has run annual defi-
cits exceeding $1 trillion only four times
(2009 through 2012) in its history. The
CARES Act is designed to last approxi-
mately three months, through mid-June.
At that point, Washington continuing to
borrow $1 trillion per month, and push-
ing the 2020 budget deficit to a share of
the economy unseen since the height of
World War II, has three main drawbacks.
First, Washington’s borrowing capac-
ity may eventually become constrained.
Today’s near-zero interest rates suggest
a substantial ability to borrow. But $1
trillion per month for several months
(while other nations are also borrowing
heavily) may eventually begin to shrink
the pool of available savings, leaving the
Federal Reserve to monetize more of the
debt. While there are no current signs of
such challenges, the government is en-
tering uncharted territory.
A second concern is that even gen-
erous federal aid may not be sufficient
to save the number of businesses that
would be necessary for a strong recovery.
Finally, at some point, depleted in-
ventories and constrained supply lines
could bring shortages of basic goods.
The economy is much like a patient: The
longer the illness continues, the more
long-term damage arises that can pre-
vent a full recovery.
Thus, it is critical to reopen the econ-
omy as soon as it can be done safely.
Public health is the first priority. Af-
ter all, many workers will not return to
their jobs if they feel they are in danger,
and reopening too early can risk a sec-
ond pandemic wave while extending the
economic downturn. That said, an ex-
tended depression would have its own
catastrophic effects on the well-being
of families. Nobel Laureate Paul Romer
has suggested that wide-scale testing and
protective equipment could eventually
make it safe enough to reopen parts of
the economy before COVID-19 has been
completely eradicated. Several former
Food and Drug Administration commis-
sioners have produced a roadmap as well.
Whenever the economy reopens,
Washington will likely need to spend
more to bail out state and local gov-
ernments that face their own financial
ruin, and also may not be able to resist a
2009-style Keynesian stimulus bill.
24 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
In addition to recognizing the strong
federal economic response to the pan-
demic, it is worth examining Wash-
ington’s slow public-health response.
Some opportunists have classified the
federal government’s lack of pandemic
preparedness as proof of a long-term
conservative campaign to starve the
government of resources and a case for
government nationalization of health-
care and other sectors.
Such a viewpoint is absurd. Wash-
ington spends $4.5 trillion annually, and
public-health spending has surged since
2000. The federal government failed
not because it is too small, but because
it is not smart. Better planning would
not have cost any more money. The few
billion dollars necessary to expand the
healthcare system’s emergency capacity
and purchase more equipment would
have added up to a rounding error in the
federal budget. The problem was a lack
of imagination, planning, and coordina-
tion — not funds. In fact, other coun-
tries with government-run healthcare
systems have struggled as well.
The United States built a sprawling
government that tries to do everything
for everyone and ends up doing very few
things well. Political leaders are elected
based on grievance politics. Congress
has been reduced to a debating society
that abandons its responsibility for ba-
sic planning and oversight. Washington
failed to prepare adequately for a terror-
ist attack on U.S. soil (9/11), the collapse
of the New Orleans levees (Hurricane
Katrina), the implosion of the mortgage
market (Great Recession), and now, a
major pandemic. Congress wasted a 10-
year economic expansion by adding $9
trillion in new debt, bringing the total
debt to $23 trillion and leaving less fiscal
room to respond to real crises.
Washington was caught flat-footed on
the health front, yet its economic response
has represented a strong policy consen-
sus. The next three steps are to defeat the
pandemic, reopen the economy, and then
bring true priority-setting, preparedness,
and accountability to Washington. +
Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the
Manhattan Institute. Follow him on
twitter @Brian_Riedl.
Congress P. 29
White House P. 32
Finance & Economics P. 34
Cybersecurity P. 35
Healthcare P. 36
National Security P. 38
Washington Secrets P. 40

energy & environment

A coronavirus stimulus could finally

bring ‘Infrastructure Week’ to a close
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 25
WASHINGTON BRIEFING
The issue is whether or not partisan
politics will derail any agreement
By Abby Smith
I
t’s become a running joke in Wash-
ington: It’s always “Infrastructure
Week” as a deal on rebuilding U.S.
infrastructure still appears just out
of reach, overshadowed by intense
partisan politics.
The coronavirus pandemic, though,
could change all that. As President Trump
and top lawmakers look for low-hanging
fruit they can pick to boost an economy
reeling from the outbreak, they’re settling
on a common theme: a massive infra-
structure package.
“With interest rates for the United
States being at ZERO, this is the time to
do our decades long-awaited Infrastruc-
ture Bill,” Trump tweeted March 31. “It
should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Tril-
lion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs
and rebuilding the once great infrastruc-
ture of our Country! Phase 4.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, too, is
pushing hard on infrastructure, outlining
priorities that include rebuilding roads
and bridges, strengthening water infra-
structure, building out broadband, and
modernizing the electricity grid. Many of
those goals could garner bipartisan sup-
port in theory.
On April 1, Pelosi and other top House
Democrats unveiled an updated version
of their legislative framework from Jan-
uary, adding a $10 billion funding boost
for community health centers onto the
already $760 billion price tag over five
years.
Democrats will also roll out detailed
plans to boost education and housing,
which Pelosi told report-
ers would put their over-
all framework “in the
ballpark” of the $2 trillion
Trump is seeking.
And at least some Sen-
ate Republicans already
see infrastructure as the
critical piece of any eco-
nomic recovery.
26 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
Xxxx
“Roads, bridges, tunnels — that has
to be part of that. Funding goes right to
the states, which allows them to put their
plans in action,” said Sen. John Barras-
so. The Wyoming Republican sits in GOP
leadership, chairs the Senate Environ-
ment Committee, and introduced his
bipartisan highway bill last summer with
his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Tom
Carper of Delaware.
That bill, which reauthorizes surface
transportation spending at $287 billion
over five years, has already cleared his
committee. Barrasso said he’s also look-
ing at ways to boost water infrastructure
further.
Infrastructure “does seem to be a real-
ly important way to get resources imme-
diately to the states and people working
right away,” Barrasso told the Washington
Examiner in an interview.
Advocates in the labor and environ-
mental community, too, are clamoring Infrastructure can get
for more infrastructure investment — and people back to work.
quickly.
“Honestly, we would have liked to see
more of that in this legislation because Political disputes over how to pay for
even the most shovel-ready projects take an infrastructure package have consis-
time to plan and engineer,” said Jason tently held up an agreement. However,
Walsh, executive director of the Blue- Trump has suggested he’d prefer that
Green Alliance, which brings together the U.S. borrow the money since interest
major labor unions and environmental rates are near zero.
groups. But he added he understood “the GOP lawmakers are also very wary
need to triage” to deal with the pandemic. that Pelosi wants to use a new round of
Nonetheless, even as the moment coronavirus relief talks to push through
seems ripe for a deal, it’s far from priorities Democrats weren’t able to get
cemented. in the phase three legislation.
Republican leadership in both cham- Pelosi has already signaled as much. In
bers is trying to pump the addition to infrastructure, she said she’ll
brakes on a phase four push for some other priorities, including
coronavirus package, more funding to state and local govern-
cautioning that it’s not ments, money for Washington and the
yet clear whether another U.S. Postal Service, extended paid family
bill is necessary and that leave, and infectious disease protections
lawmakers should wait for healthcare workers.
GET T Y IMAGES
to see how the $2 trillion “I’m not going to allow this to be an
phase three legislation is opportunity for the Democrats to achieve
implemented. unrelated policy items that they would

not otherwise be able to pass,” McCon-
nell said March 31 on the Hugh Hewitt
Show.
McConnell and other Republicans
accused Pelosi of flying back to Wash-
ington at the last minute and demanding
the inclusion of several policy measures,
including emissions limits for airlines and
extensions of wind and solar tax credits.
The latter didn’t even make it into
House Democrats’ phase three counter-
proposal. But even the prospect enraged
Republicans, who said Pelosi was trying
to jam the liberal “Green New Deal” into
the pandemic relief bill. GOP lawmakers
are already bracing for round two.
“This isn’t a time to attempt to reshape
America through the eyes of one politi-
cal party,” House Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy, a California Republican, said
in an April 1 statement addressing Pelosi’s
plans for phase four.
The ordeal also left a bitter taste in
Trump’s mouth.
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to
do the ‘Green New Deal’ because I won’t
do it. I won’t approve it,” Trump said of
his infrastructure push, during a March
There’s an opportunity
to re-industrialize
the U.S. clean energy
manufacturing space,
not just deploy
Chinese-made solar
panels.
– Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser for
the Progressive Policy Institute.
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 27
31 briefing. “We’re not going to do the
‘Green New Deal’ and, you know, spend
40% of the money on things that people
just have fun with.”
Even so, House Democrats say they
want to see an infrastructure package
that not only puts people back to work
but also looks toward what they see as
the next major U.S. crisis: climate change.
“I believe climate change, even in
times of coronavirus, is an existential
threat,” said congressman Peter DeFazio,
an Oregon Democrat who chairs the
House Transportation and Infrastruc-
ture Committee. DeFazio has led work
on the House Democrats’ infrastructure
framework.
“If we’ve got to rebuild our infra-
structure, let’s rebuild it in a way” that
is resilient to extreme weather, uses less
carbon-intensive resources, and moves
away from fossil fuel dependence, he told
reporters April 1.
House Democrats’ infrastructure
framework, for example, would scale up
investments in electric vehicle charging
infrastructure and zero-emissions bus-
es, incentivize sustainable jet fuel devel-
opment and use, and expand renewable
energy infrastructure in low-income
communities.
Emphasizing such a climate focus,
though, could sour Republicans to efforts
by the clean energy sector to push for tax
credit tweaks to help them deal with vi-
rus-related project delays.
The wind and solar industries are
stepping up calls for a “direct pay” op-
tion for their federal incentives, as well
as extensions to the deadlines by which
projects must break ground to qualify for
credits. The energy storage industry has
also requested that Congress approve an
investment tax credit for standalone stor-
age, an independent concept that already
has bipartisan support.
But if those asks are caught up in a
broader partisan climate fight, they could
be set aside.
The clean energy sector has been
quick to quantify the potential economic
harms and job losses that extended proj-
ect delays and uncertainty over tax credits
could create. Those harms aren’t limited
to Democratic states or districts, they say.
WASHINGTON BRIEFING
Tom Kiernan, the head of the Amer-
ican Wind Energy Association, said he’s
focused on wind industry workers and
the rural communities that often benefit
from land-lease or tax payments from
wind projects. And he stressed that dead-
line extensions and a “direct pay” option
are to make sure U.S. industry gets the full
benefit of the existing policy.
“What we’re looking for is some con-
fidence that these policies that Congress
has enacted in the past are available going
forward as presumed when these projects
were designed and the initial planning
was going on,” Kiernan said in a recent
interview.
More broadly, climate advocates, even
right-leaning ones, see an opportunity to
tie climate and clean energy to infrastruc-
ture in a bipartisan way.
Several have pointed to the Senate’s
bipartisan energy bill, which they say
could offer a foundation for agreement
on emissions-cutting measures, mainly
since it includes technology demonstra-
tion programs that could create jobs. That
bill failed two procedural votes in early
March, just before Congress began work-
ing on coronavirus relief in earnest, after
it got caught up in a partisan fight over a
tangential amendment.
“I’d like to see Republicans candidly
support the energy package in a bill and
other provisions” for clean energy tax
credits, said Heather Reams, the execu-
tive director of Citizens for Responsible
Energy Solutions, a conservative clean
energy and climate group. Those policies
“are commonsense, good for the econo-
my, good for the American people, good
for the environment, and good for energy
independence.”
Reams also said she hopes the bipar-
tisan agreement on the phase three coro-
navirus bill is a signal to Democrats that
everyone can benefit if they seek common
ground with Republicans.
Others would like to see lawmakers in
both parties think more creatively as they
consider an economic stimulus. One such
space could be to boost incentives for U.S.
clean energy manufacturing dramatically.
“There’s an opportunity to reindustri-
alize the U.S. clean energy manufacturing
space, not just deploy Chinese-made so-
28 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is outlining priorities on rebuilding roads and bridges,
strengthening water infrastructure, building out broadband, and modernizing the
electricity grid.
lar panels,” said Paul Bledsoe, a strategic
adviser for the Progressive Policy Insti-
tute. He said he thinks such a push could
gain bipartisan support since lawmakers
in both parties recognize how much Chi-
na dominates the clean energy supplier
markets.
“I think we didn’t pay enough atten-
tion to the manufacturing piece of clean
technology in 2009,” added Bledsoe, who
served as a climate adviser in the Clinton
White House. The 2009 American Re-
covery Act, signed by former President
Barack Obama, appropriated around $90
billion for clean energy investments and
focused on scaling up technologies like
solar power.
Supporting clean energy manufac-
turing, too, is critical to set up U.S. com-
panies for the future and to ensure that
emerging low-carbon technologies such
as advanced nuclear and carbon cap-
ture and storage are deployed at scale in
this country as opposed to concentrated
abroad, BlueGreen Alliance’s Walsh said.
Conservatives, meanwhile, are hop-
ing lawmakers’ creative thinking could
extend to regulatory reform, which they
see as a critical complement to any infra-
structure investments.
Barrasso said there’s already some of
that in his highway bill. “It cuts a lot of
red tape so projects can get started and be
done better and smarter and cheaper,” he
told the Washington Examiner.
Democrats, though, are likely to balk
at many efforts for regulatory reform, es-
pecially of environmental laws, out of fear
that Republicans would attempt to weak-
en pollution protections or requirements
that companies review the environmental
effects of their projects.
Conservatives say, though, that cut-
ting red tape would benefit all types of
infrastructure and energy projects, in-
cluding in the clean energy sector.
“The current political climate presents
an opportunity to reduce regulatory im-
pediments to clean energy infrastructure
that stimulate investment and enhance
our fiscal outlook, such as overhauling
environmental permitting, streamlining
power plant interconnection and reform-
ing transmission system planning, utili-
zation, and siting practices,” said Devin
Hartman, director of energy and environ-
mental policy at the R Street Institute, a
free-market think tank, in a statement to
the Washington Examiner.
But Hartman cautioned lawmakers
against pumping money into “political-
ly popular projects,” saying they should
GRAEME JENNINGS/WASHINGTON EXAMINER
instead opt for targeted, temporary relief.
“The COVID response is a multi-
month issue, whereas addressing cli-
mate change requires improving our
institutions and policies to enhance pri-
vate-sector investment over decades,” he
said. +
Abby Smith is energy & environment
reporter for the Washington Examiner.

congress
Lawmakers face partisan
battle over next phase
of coronavirus aid
Not much confidence exists that the parties
will agree on anything substantive
By Susan Ferrechio
A
week after partisan bickering
delayed passage of a $2.2 tril-
lion economic relief package,
Democrats and Republicans
are at odds over whether addi-
tional federal aid is necessary.
House Democrats were primarily
sidelined when the Senate negotiated
the last relief package, and they are now
eager to incorporate their proposals in a
new massive relief measure.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Cal-
ifornia Democrat, outlined a sweeping
proposal last week that would address
the nation’s crumbling infrastructure,
housing problems, education inadequa-
cies, food stamp shortfalls, struggling
pensions, and unsafe working condi-
tions, in addition to providing more in-
dividual aid and money to state and local
governments.
Democrats maintain the three mea-
sures Congress passed last month, which
total nearly $2.4 trillion, falls short of
adequately addressing the economic
impact and health consequences of the
coronavirus.
Congress adjourned until at least
April 20. Still, House Democrats are al-
ready writing a new bill they hope to have
GRAEME JENNINGS/WASHINGTON EXAMINER
ready for a vote when lawmakers eventu-
ally return to the Capitol.
“It’s obvious what is necessary to be
done,” Pelosi told reporters last week,
describing the plans for a new federal aid
package. “To ignore it is to ignore the fact
that the coronavirus crisis is raging, that
we can do something about it to rein it
in. But it takes resources. It takes policy.
It takes a tax code. It takes the willing-
More resources
are needed.
ness of the Congress of the United States
working with the executive branch to un-
derstand that the earlier the investment,
the better for the lives and the livelihood
of the American people.”
Pelosi’s enthusiasm for a new relief
package has been met with opposition
from Republicans in the House and Sen-
ate who say they first want to implement
fully the billions of dollars in federal aid
Congress has already approved before
determining what is needed next.
“I know the Speaker is trying to talk
about a fourth bill,” House Majority
Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Re-
publican, said last week. “I don’t think
that’s appropriate at this time. We just
passed the largest bill in history. We’ve
got to make sure this is implemented
correctly.”
Pelosi’s plans for a fourth relief pack-
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 29
WASHINGTON BRIEFING
age will undoubtedly come with an
enormous price tag. The infrastructure
component, for example, is based on a
$760 billion measure Democrats intro-
duced in January and would add to that
an additional $10 billion to build more
community healthcare centers.
Pelosi also wants the plan to include
money to expand broadband access and
funding to rebuild the nation’s aging wa-
ter infrastructure.
Pelosi said she is hoping to find bi-
partisan support for the measure she is
drafting and plans to talk about it with
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McCon-
nell, a Kentucky Republican.
McConnell controls the Senate floor,
and without his backing, Pelosi’s mea-
sure will simply die in the House.
McConnell last week sounded
unenthusiastic.
“I think first, we need to see what the
effect of the current bill is,” McConnell
said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.
Republicans believe Pelosi is crafting a
relief package that aims to advance parts
of the Democratic agenda that have long
stalled due to lack of bipartisan support.
For example, the infrastructure com-
ponent Pelosi is hoping to advance in-
cludes green energy initiatives sought
by Democrats, such as requirements for
more high-speed rail and electric vehicles.
“I’m not going to allow this to be an
opportunity for the Democrats to achieve
unrelated policy items that they would
not otherwise be able to pass,” McCon-
nell told Hewitt.
Pelosi dismissed the GOP opposition,
noting that President Trump recently
tweeted about his eagerness to address
infrastructure reform in a fourth eco-
nomic relief package. Pelosi’s plan adds
a few things to the list, she said.
“Infrastructure has rarely been a bi-
partisan discussion,” Pelosi said. “And
who can begrudge bringing people clean
water, internet access, community health
centers, and the ability to go to work for
essential workers in this very difficult
time?” +
Susan Ferrechio is chief congressional
correspondent for the Washington
Examiner.
WASHINGTON BRIEFING
white house
Trump’s clout hangs in
balance as administration
grapples with coronavirus
The president has to balance concerns
about a pandemic and the economy
By W. James Antle III
R
ep. Thomas Massie found him-
self at the center of a rare mo-
ment of bipartisan unity when
his attempt to force a record-
ed vote on the coronavirus
emergency spending package
caused everyone from President Trump
to John Kerry and House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi to pile on the Kentucky Republi-
can. The House quelled Massie’s insur-
rection quickly. Still, it was a warning
shot to Trump about what could be next
if the pandemic brings down his job ap-
proval ratings.
32 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
In less than four years, Trump has
brought the Freedom Caucus, a group
of strict House conservatives who have
been a scourge to Republican leader-
ship, to heel. His last White House chief
of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and his current
one, Mark Meadows, were founding
members. Their rank and file was well
represented among the 40 Republicans
who voted no on the $2 trillion bill. Still,
only the outsider Massie, who described
the legislation to the Washington Exam-
iner as the “largest transfer of wealth in
human history,” made much trouble.
Warning
shots.
After Trump signed the economic
rescue bill into law, he announced he
was keeping in place the social dis-
tancing guidelines intended to slow the
spread of the coronavirus. Polls show
the public is profoundly supportive of
both the spending and preserving the
restrictions that are keeping businesses
shuttered in the first place. But portions
of the conservative base are impatient
with both.
“If you are going to keep the economy
shut down until August like [Treasury
Secretary Steven] Mnuchin said, you
are going to have a damn depression,”
FreedomWorks President Adam Bran-
don said. “How in the hell are you going
to get healthcare then?” Brandon’s con-
cerns are not without merit. More than
BILL CL ARK / CONTRIBUTOR / GET T Y IMAGES
10 million people filed for unemploy-
ment benefits in March, with 6.6 million
filing in the final week of the month.
“Thomas Massie is a rare voice of
sanity in Washington, D.C.,” said Young
Americans for Liberty President Cliff
Maloney. “When future generations look
back and wonder why no one questioned
the largest transfer of wealth from low/
middle-class Americans to rich corpora-
tions and special interests, they will see
that one man, Thomas Massie, stood
firm and objected.”
After a spate of public opinion sur-
veys showed Trump gaining in corona-
virus management approval ratings even
among Democrats and independents,
a Morning Consult tracking poll late
last month showed him losing 8 points
among Republicans on this question in
just a week.
If Trump starts to lose support from
the broader electorate, which wants
government action on the coronavirus,
there is a risk these conservatives could
become more outspoken. That’s what
happened to President George W. Bush.
His poll numbers, already weak because
of Iraq, were depressed by an ineffectual
federal response to Hurricane Katrina
and then tanked completely during the
financial crisis. Conservatives in the Re-
publican Study Committee, a Freedom
Caucus precursor, began to insist on
offsetting Katrina relief spending with
budget cuts elsewhere and ultimately
led the GOP conference in a rebellion
against the 2008 bank bailout. Other
voters wanted a more prominent Wash-
ington role in both, and conservatives
abandoned ship last — but abandon it
they eventually did.
Trump’s ability to enforce party disci-
pline stems from his more than 90% ap-
proval rating among Republicans. Even
Massie was careful not to criticize the
president on the rescue package. “For
Nancy Pelosi and [House Minority Lead-
er] Kevin McCarthy, this was all about
avoiding accountability,” he said. Unlike
Bush, Trump is in the middle of a reelec-
tion bid. But time is of the essence on the
coronavirus, which is why the president
tweeted that Massie should be tossed
out of the party.
“Trump’s handling of the coronavirus
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 33
is literally the only thing that matters for
his reelection,” said Republican strate-
gist Scott Jennings. Even against lack-
luster Democratic opposition, another
GOP insider close to the White House
acknowledged the perception that the
outbreak was managed poorly would
likely make Trump “a one-term presi-
dent.” If that starts to look likely, Trump
tweets could lose their power.
The president appears to recognize
the challenge. He has downplayed the
pandemic’s severity less and extended
olive branches to Democrats and even
cable news reporters. “We’re unleashing
every tool in our nation’s vast arsenal
— economic, medical,” Trump said at a
Rose Garden briefing last month. “If you
look, medical, and scientific, military.”
He’ll need to.+
W. James Antle III is the Washington
Examiner’s politics editor.
WASHINGTON BRIEFING
finance & economics
The lucky few winners
and the many losers
of the coronavirus
business lockdown
IT companies are growing while
entertainment-based businesses
have been hard hit by the pandemic
By Nihal Krishan
W
hile most local businesses,
such as hair salons, retail
stores, and bars, are being
devastated by the stay-at-
home orders to slow the
coronavirus outbreak,
other businesses are experiencing in-
credible upswings in sales, such as gun
shops, stores selling groceries, pet sup-
plies, and liquor.
Nationally, gun and ammunition
shops started seeing significant spikes
in sales starting on March 12, around the
same time President Trump declared a
national emergency. Grocery stores, su-
permarkets, pet stores, and liquor stores
also saw big surges in sales at the same
time, according to new data from Wom-
ply, a data analytics and software firm
that focuses on small businesses. These
businesses prospered as consumers na-
tionwide stocked up amid increasing
fears and lockdown orders.
Another analysis of small businesses,
by bookkeeping platform Xendoo, shows
that information technology companies
grew 24% in March compared with the
previous year and, unexpectedly, com-
panies that offer pool, landscaping, and
other related services have not been
drastically impacted by the economic
shutdown in the past couple weeks.
Sales at grocery stores, gun shops,
and liquor stores have started to slow
in the past few days, though, as supplies
dwindle and more people stay at home,
34 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
Liquor sales have exploded in the U.S. and
virtual cocktail parties are on the rise.
but they are still faring far better finan-
cially than most industries across the
country, which have been hit tremen-
dously hard by the coronavirus econom-
ic shutdown.
According to a recent poll by Wom-
ply of 2,300 small business owners, 21%
said their business would last less than
30 days if sales stopped, and 55% said
they would last less than 90 days or
three months. The survey also showed
that many small businesses will already
be dead before the federal government’s
emergency economic relief loans are
provided.
New data collected by Womply from
Wednesday also shows that a significant
majority of small businesses within cer-
tain industries, such as health and beau-
ty, arts and entertainment, bars, sports,
and recreation, have stopped transact-
ing and effectively shut down altogether.
Womply found these trends in small
business activity by analyzing the debit
and credit card transactions of millions
of local businesses across multiple ma-
jor industries.
Brad Plothow, the vice president
of marketing and communications at
Womply, said, “It’s striking how quickly
many of these businesses go from trans-
acting to not at all,” after nonessential
businesses started shutting down from
March 11 onward.
“It’s hard to tell how many are dead
forever versus those who can find a way
to pull out, but it’s not looking good,”
Plothow said.
A potential silver lining during this
period of immense economic hardship,
though, is that certain small business
owners have used the lockdown to im-
plement internal improvements and
become more financially literate about
their companies.
“Small business owners who are
forward-thinking, glass-half-full kind
of people are looking into new technol-
ogies, marketing techniques, and phys-
ical improvements to their businesses,”
said Lillian Roberts, the CEO of Xen-
doo, which provides bookkeeping and
accounting services to hundreds of
small businesses across the country.
“In terms of behavior change, we’ve
seen many more business owners being
engaged in their finances, which makes
them think differently about their busi-
ness. If that behavior stays after the vi-
rus ends, it’ll help small businesses to get
stronger in the long run,” Roberts said.
Roberts also said that she was im-
pressed to see the federal government
act quickly to pass economic relief
packages that she expected would
have a “tremendous impact” on small
LEIL A MACOR/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES
businesses.
“We’ve gone from despair to hope
within the past week. Now small busi-
nesses, they have hope,” Roberts said. +
Nihal Krishan is a reporter for the
Washington Examiner.

cybersecurity
Coronavirus phone tracking
raises red flags among
privacy advocates
Concerns exist that any de-anonymized
data could fall into the hands of hackers
By Grant Gross
I
f you have a smartphone, it’s like-
ly that you’re being tracked, both
by government entities and private
organizations, to measure how U.S.
residents are dealing with the coro-
navirus pandemic.
Location tracking can give gov-
ernment agencies and other groups a
wealth of information about the corona-
virus outbreak, including understanding
whether people are complying with so-
cial distancing orders and understanding
how the virus spreads.
But privacy advocates worry about
government tracking, after news reports
of many government agencies across the
United States monitoring location data.
Although agencies are apparently using
anonymized location data, privacy ad-
vocates say it’s relatively easy to identify
individual mobile phone users, and they
also raise concerns that this use of loca-
tion data opens the door to new govern-
ment surveillance schemes.
Data can be de-anonymized, said Reid
Blackman, a professional ethicist with
Virtue Consultants and a former phi-
losophy professor. “This is particularly
easy when it comes to location data,” he
said. “If, for instance, the person’s phone
is always at a certain location by around
6 to 8 p.m. and doesn’t leave that loca-
tion until sometime the next morning,
you can be pretty sure that this phone’s
owner lives at that location.”
It’s important that organizations
tracking mobile phones for public health
purposes consider the ethical implica-
tions, Blackman added. “There is cer-
tainly a concern that this tracking may be
used for other, more destructive purpos-
es,” he said. “From tracking someone’s
phone, we can know where they go and
with whom they associate.”
In some cases, health and other data
gleaned from location tracking can fall
into the hands of hackers and then be
used to blackmail mobile phone users, he
said. “We already see hackers blackmail-
ing companies, threatening to release
their data if they don’t pay up,” he said.
“We can see the same thing happening
with individuals’ data.”
In addition to apparent government
tracking of location data, private com-
panies are using it as well to study the
coronavirus. In March, data analysis
and collection company Unacast re-
leased a social distancing scoreboard,
using mobile phone location data to rank
state compliance with social distancing
guidelines.
“We created this interactive Score-
board, updated daily, to empower orga-
nizations to measure and understand the
efficacy of social distancing initiatives at
the local level,” the company wrote.
One of the problems with the corona-
virus outbreak is that testing in the U.S.
has been slow to develop, noted Brian
McGinnis, a lawyer with the Indiana law
firm Barnes & Thornburg.
“Without the ability to adequately
track the disease’s spread, governments
are looking towards alternative data
sources to gain more information that
could allow us to better fight this pan-
demic,” he said.
Over the past several years, mobile
phones and apps have tracked and re-
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 35
WASHINGTON BRIEFING
corded a large variety of user informa-
tion, including location. “Where the
world is fighting the rapid spread of a
global pandemic, some are looking for
ways to use this data and other big data
applications as a way to track infectious
cases and, if possible, use that data to
reduce the spread by anticipating out-
breaks and hot spots,” McGinnis said.
Still, the privacy implications are “se-
vere,” he added. “In my experience, the
average person is far from fully aware
of the detailed level of information their
mobile devices can provide about them
and their lives, and further, the way com-
panies and marketers are already using
and profiting from that information.”
David Kennedy, CEO of cybersecurity
consulting firm TrustedSec, also raised
concerns about the amount of data that
mobile phones can collect.
“The larger issue to keep in mind here
is that the mobile advertising industry,
and third-party data collection in gener-
al, is very murky, so we don’t know a lot
of the details,” he said. “These practices
are not heavily scrutinized, and, in many
cases, there is little to no information at
all about how they work.”
It’s difficult to know how much data
mobile phones are collecting and how
it is linked to location data, he noted.
“I expect these mobile advertisers have
access to enough original data and
cross-reference data to be able to identify
individual people,” he said. “I would be
surprised if that is not the case.”
If government agencies have access to
a broad set of mobile phone data, they
may also be able to identify individual
users, he said.
However, public health is an import-
ant goal, Kennedy added. “Let’s all try to
bear in mind here that we are facing an
enormous public health crisis,” he add-
ed. “The government’s stated objective
with this program is definitely well-in-
tentioned and important right now
for public safety. However, what does
concern me is how such data could be
abused down the road, months or years
later, if the sharing continues.” +
Grant Gross is a contributor for the Wash-
ington Examiner.
WASHINGTON BRIEFING
healthcare
Two academic brothers have
a plan for putting the country
back to work in just weeks
Testing is key to keeping those
infected isolated, while allowing
others to return to work
By Cassidy Morrison
T
wo brother academics be-
lieve they have a plan for get-
ting healthy people back to
work without aggravating the
pandemic.
Dr. Laurence Kotlikoff, a
onetime economic adviser to Ronald
Reagan and former presidential candi-
date, has outlined a plan for testing huge
groups of people at a time for the coro-
navirus, allowing authorities to isolate
cases and permit others to go back to
work.
Dr. Michael Kotlikoff, the provost of
Cornell University, says he has put the
basic plan into place in a mouse colony
of 45,000 and successfully wiped out a
viral infection.
“This is actually a prescription for
better health,” said Laurence Kotlikoff.
“We know who’s sick right away. We
quarantine them. So this is a formula for
dramatically reducing the deaths and
morbidity and also getting the econo-
my back on its feet. This is as close to
a no-brainer as I’ve seen in my entire
career.”
The country is in desperate need of a
plan to restart commerce without risk-
ing hundreds of thousands of lives and
overwhelming the healthcare system.
Many millions of workers, especially
those in service industries, have been
sent home in the past few weeks, rais-
ing the specter of an economic calamity
in the case that the spread of the virus
isn’t limited.
The plan is to test groups of 1,000
36 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
Laurence Michael
Kotlikoff Kotlikoff
people at a time on the assumption that
the infection rate hovers around one in
1,000. Health officials could then flag
infections in the sample and narrow
them down until it becomes clear who
the infected individuals are so they can
be quarantined.
The brothers believe that the plan
would allow the economy to get back
to work within two weeks of being
implemented.
They have laid out a version of the
idea, which would have the government
test all workers on designated days. Of-
ficials would swab all workers twice.
The first swab would be pooled into
groups of 1,000 and tested immediately.
If that test turned up negative, all 1,000
would go to work. If the pooled sample
tested positive, the second swap for all
the workers would be tested individual-
ly, allowing officials to determine which
individuals were affected, quarantine
them, and allow the others to go back
to work.
Such an approach would allow for
testing the whole country while using
far fewer tests, which are still in short
supply.
Volunteers or even military person-
nel could go to neighborhoods in mobile
testing vehicles, go door to door, and
collect nasal swabs from people who
live there. The plan would also rely on
using test kits with a fast turnaround
time. Luckily, more and more medical
technology companies are introducing
tests that can produce results in under
an hour.
People who wanted to go to work
would have to submit to being tested
and would be given a green bracelet in-
dicating they were virus-free. “If they
don’t have the bracelet, they can’t go to
a restaurant or to work,” Laurence said.
“The green bracelet would fade to red
every week when it’s time to get tested
again.”
Ideally, testing would be conducted
every day at first because false nega-
tives are to be expected. Daily testing
would become weekly testing and then,
in time, monthly testing.
The scheme has worked in the lab
scenario devised by Michael Kotlikoff,
a veterinarian and professor of molec-
ular physiology. Researchers in his lab
quickly developed a test similar to the
one that is used to diagnose the coro-
navirus, pooled a portion of the samples
from mice, and tested groups of about
500 at a time. Most of the samples were
negative, and for the ones that were pos-
itive, researchers tested the remaining
individual samples and quickly identi-
fied the roughly 12 carriers of the virus.
“This would require a national
or state-by-state mobilization but is
achievable with the testing capacity for
PHOTOS COURTESY OF KOTLIKOFF.NET AND CORNELL UNIVERSITY
COVID-19 that has recently come on-
line,” Michael Kotlikoff said.
In the real world, though, compliance
would be key. A majority of the popu-
lation, about 70%-80%, would have to
take part in order for the operation to be
a success. People would likely be incen-
tivized to participate with the promise
of returning to work or leaving isolation
sooner, Michael Kotlikoff added.
“In practice, however, there will not
be full compliance, and there will be
false negatives, so you would, like, want
 to do this once or twice more before re-
turning people to work, but it could be
done quickly,” Michael said.
Laurence, a Boston University eco-
nomics professor, has spent years devis-
ing unconventional policies to address
intractable problems. He ran for pres-
ident in 2012 and 2016 as a third-par-
ty candidate on platforms meant to be
nonpartisan, economics-informed re-
sponses to problems such as the federal
debt, high healthcare costs, and climate
change.
Now, outside-the-box proposals are
needed more than ever as the country
finds a problem without precedent in
the pandemic.
Most of the country is effectively
shut down, and the Trump administra-
tion has advised people to avoid groups
and nonessential work for at least the
next month on the advice of public
health officials, such as Dr. Anthony
GRAEME JENNINGS/WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Test the whole
country.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a
leader on the White House coronavirus
task force.
Yet neither the administration nor
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 37
anyone else has yet put forward a realis-
tic plan for easing restrictions.
“What we have in place now is to
quarantine basically the entire country
for another month. And then, we’re not
going to be in another position then than
we are today,” Laurence Kotlikoff said.
“Four weeks from now, when we put
someone out in the wild, they will get
infected, and we go back to January 20.
Each day of lockdown, meanwhile,
exacts an enormous price on the house-
holds who’ve had someone put out of
work.
The brothers’ plan would generate a
“much quicker reopen if you could iden-
tify the asymptomatic infected people
and quarantine them,” Michael Kotlikoff
said. “Theoretically, one could immedi-
ately return to normal function.” +
Cassidy Morrison is healthcare reporter
for the Washington Examiner.
WASHINGTON BRIEFING
national security
New Marine commandant is implementing
a radical makeover to confront China
Africa continues to be a training ground for terrorists
By Jamie McIntyre
M
arine Corps Commandant
Gen. David Berger has a
vision for the Corps unlike
that of any of his immedi-
ate predecessors.
To say his 10-year plan
to remake America’s most storied mil-
itary service into an even smaller, more
tailored fighting force is radical would not
be far off the mark.
“If we don’t make some very funda-
38 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
mental changes, we’re going to get left in
the dust,” Berger said at a forum in Wash-
ington last month.
Berger, who took command of the
Marine Corps last July, immediately sent
shock waves through the service with
his Commandants Planning Guidance,
which presaged a fundamental shift to
reorient the Corps to be ready for a fu-
ture war with China, which the Pentagon
now sees as the most significant looming
Going all-in on
countering China.
threat to U.S. military superiority.
It’s a significant departure from the
last two decades, in which a Marine ar-
mored division led the siege of Baghdad,
and Marine units regularly deployed to
CHENG MIN/XINHUA VIA AP
Afghanistan’s restive Helmand province
for sustained counterinsurgency opera-
tions against the Taliban.
Berger wants the Marines to return
to its naval roots, as he outlined in a fol-
low-up document, Force Design 2030, a
blueprint for his vision of a more nimble,
amphibious “force-in-readiness” that
“will be first on the scene, first to help,
first to contain a brewing crisis, and first
to fight if required to do so.”
But what he argues the future Marine
Corps should not be is what it has been
in the past, a de facto second Army con-
figured for land warfare, weighted down
with M1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting
Vehicles, and towed artillery.
“This capability, despite its long and
honorable history in the wars of the past,
is operationally unsuitable for our high-
est-priority challenges in the future,”
writes Berger in his planning document.
“Heavy ground armor capability will con-
tinue to be provided by the U.S. Army.”
Berger wants his Marines to be mas-
ters of what’s called the “WEZ,” or weap-
ons engagement zone, the battle space
within range of an adversary’s air, mis-
sile, and naval forces.
That requires shedding quite a few of
the old “legacy” weapons.
Over the next decade, Berger wants to
jettison all seven Marine tank companies,
three of the 24 current infantry battal-
ions, 16 of 21 cannon artillery batteries,
two of six amphibious assault compa-
nies, three of 14 V-22 tiltrotor squadrons,
three of five heavy-lift helicopter squad-
rons, two of five light attack helicopter
squadrons, and reduce the overall size of
the force by 12,000 Marines.
There is no question in
my mind that whatever
we envision for 2030
won’t look like that in
2030. Not the least of
which is because we
have a pacing threat,
and they’re gonna
make changes along
the way too. So are we.
– Marine Corps Commandant Gen.
David Berger
That would take the force down from
the current 186,000 to around 174,000
Marines, roughly where the Corps was in
the early 70s.
“We have to get smaller to get better,”
argues Berger. “So, we’re going to begin
to contract back toward where our sort
of normal fighting weight is.”
Berger wants fewer manned fighter
jet squadrons and, additionally, smaller,
more affordable amphibious ships de-
signed for naval campaigns in the west-
ern Pacific against China while leaving
land wars in North Korea, Europe, or the
Middle East to the Army.
That means more unmanned aerial
vehicle squadrons and more long-range,
precision ship-killing missiles.
The idea, says Mark Cancian, a re-
tired Marine colonel,
would be to deploy Ma-
rine units around islands
in the South China Sea,
each with the capability
of contesting the sur-
rounding air and naval
space using anti-air and
anti-ship missiles.
“Collectively, these
forces would hem in Chinese forces, pre-
vent them from moving outward, and
ultimately, as part of a joint campaign,
squeeze them back to the Chinese home-
land,” writes Cancian in a recent analysis
for the Center for Strategic and Interna-
tional Studies in Washington.
“We are now at an inflection point. We
have to pivot now toward modernization
while sustaining the readiness that this
committee has resourced,” Berger told
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 39
the House Armed Services Committee
in February. “This pivot, in my opinion,
cannot wait until next year or the fol-
lowing. We must move now or risk over-
match in the future by an adversary. And
that is a risk we will not take.”
So far, Berger’s redesign of the Corps
has the support of Navy leadership, in-
cluding acting Navy Secretary Thomas
Modly and Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of
naval operations, but not everyone is on
board.
Cancian worries that by going all-in
on countering China, while deliberately
not hedging against other contingencies,
the Marines may be unable to pivot if a
more prominent, as yet unseen threat
emerges.
“If the Marine Corps has misjudged
the future, it will fight the next conflict
at a great disadvantage or, perhaps, be
irrelevant,” he writes.
If fully implemented, the changes
would leave the Corps poorly structured
to fight the kind of campaigns that it had
to fight in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq,”
Cancian argues. “The Marine Corps
might plan to defer these conflicts to
the Army, but that has not worked in the
past. Army forces have been too small to
keep the Marine Corps out of sustained
ground combat.”
Berger says one reason he chose a 10-
year time frame for the transformation
is to give time for people
to adjust to the change,
and for a constant reval-
uation and adjustment of
the plan.
“There is no question
in my mind that whatev-
er we envision for 2030
won’t look like that in
2030. Not the least of
which is because we have a pacing threat,
and they’re gonna make changes along
the way too. So are we,” Berger said last
month. “This is something every year,
all the time, you’re going to have to war-
game, iterate, make adjustments along
the way, because the threat, the adver-
sary, is not static.” +
Jamie McIntyre senior national security
reporter at the Washington Examiner.
 “It has been a great escape and
allows me to get away from work
and the news for a few minutes of
inspiration each day,” said Trump.
“Each day is going to be different —
scary, hopeful, or beautiful in its own
now urging the purchase of “defensive
Many ‘exercising guns” as the national lockdown drags on
through April.
their 2nd Amendment Pew-Pew Tactical boss Eric Hung
rights’ told us that firearms are still hot but that
the focus has turned to “more oriented

way. Take advantage of the time we have
together. This has forced us all to break
with the tight grip of normalcy, routine,
and habit and assess that which really
matters and all that we take for granted.
Appreciate how precious life is and that
no day is promised to us. We’re living
through a historic moment, and our
kids all feel that,” she said.
And as she has with her hashtag
campaign, Trump sought to assure the
public that the effort led by her father,
President Trump, will work. “I truly
believe that as a nation, we will emerge
from this stronger and more unified
than ever before and individually and
collectively rise to greater heights,” she
said. +
S
ome of the top prepper advisers
who rightly counseled people in
the early days of the coronavirus
crisis to hoard toilet paper and fuel are
home-defense guns like pump action
shotguns and cheaper handguns.” And
with that, he added, ammunition and
sights for those guns.
Hung, whose Pew-Pew is a one-stop
educational and review site for weapons
and prepping advice, said there has
also been a surge in rookie gun buyers
looking for self-defense items.
Justin Anderson, the marketing
director for Hyatt Guns of Charlotte,
North Carolina, one of the nation’s
biggest, told us, “Most of the
customers we’re seeing are new to gun
buying. So, if there’s one bright spot
during this crisis, it’s seeing people
exercising their Second Amendment
rights for the first time.”+

on deep background

- Pete Buttigieg, the Hill,” he told Georgetown

former 2020 Democratic
presidential candidate, took
a lot of guff from rivals
who sneered that he lacked
experience as a small-town
mayor. Now, out of the race
and back home in South
Bend, Indiana, where he
was mayor for eight years,
he’s pushing back. “I respect
what goes on on Capitol
GETTY IMAGES
University students via
Zoom, “but I just don’t
think that being mayor of
the 300th-largest city in
America is any less relevant
to the presidency than
being the 300th most senior
member of the House,”
a reference to a handful
of ex-2020 candidates. …
-With the Democratic
National Convention being
pushed to mid-August
due to the coronavirus, energy mining on the Outer administration has quieted
lots of lobbyists and news Continental Shelf ringing the its recent attacks on China
organizations are happy they United States has paid off. for hiding the extent of the
didn’t lock in hotel, air, and Interior Secretary David coronavirus outbreak. The
car reservations yet. One Bernhardt told us the reason, we hear, is that the
lobby firm told us they had nation raked in $57 million White House is trying to get
planned to rent a bar near extra this year from energy as much useful equipment
the convention and would leases and was added to the and personal protective gear

have lost tens of thousands conservation cash it dishes from the communist nation
of dollars. … - President to states every year, now before it starts attacking
Trump’s expansion of at $227 million. …-The again. ... -

April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 41

 technology

FAA under pressure to expand

drone deliveries to combat
spread of coronavirus

42 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020


Drones could reduce the spread
of infections due to fewer people
handling packages
By Jay Heflin
T
he coronavirus has prompted
calls for the Federal Aviation
Administration to expand its
rules for drones delivering
packages to help limit per-
son-to-person contact and
slow the spread of the virus in the Unit-
ed States.
“People are looking at new ways to
deal with social distancing, [and] they’re
absolutely looking at new technologies to
do that,” said Brett Velicovich, a strategic
adviser at WhiteFox Defense Technolo-
gies Inc., a drone airspace security firm.
He added that “there is a lot of pressure
happening right now from drone advocacy
groups as we speak. They are telling the
FAA to get moving on authorizing these
drones to be used for various purposes.”
The FAA said it had received inquiries
to expand drone operations to combat the
coronavirus sweeping the nation, which
has infected hundreds of thousands and
killed thousands.
Increased drone use would lower the
risk of spreading the virus because fewer
people would touch the packages that are
being delivered to homes and elsewhere,
said Ashkhen Kazaryan, the director of
civil liberties at the technology think tank
TechFreedom, which examines legal and
policy questions raised by changes in
technology, including drone usage.
“There’s a lot of possibilities for con-
tamination, whereas with drones delivery,
no one is touching it aside from the person
packing the drone and the person receiv-
ing the package,” she said, adding that
“some of the other countries have been
implementing more drones to mitigate
risks associated with person-to-person
contact.”
MICHAEL SHROYE/AP
She said that Amazon has been testing
drone deliveries in the United Kingdom
because the FAA rules are too restrictive.
“Amazon has been testing commer-
cial deliveries in the U.K. for a few years
now. They have a more relaxed and inno-
vative approach to drone deliveries than
the United States,” she said. Amazon de-
clined to comment.
The FAA recently allowed drone op-
erators to obtain what is called a “Part
135 certification,” which mostly covers
rules for manned flights, like aircraft
transporting travelers, that have been
expanded to include drone deliveries.
Part 135 certification requires that
drone operators provide the FAA with
the routes that the drones will be flown
to make deliveries, and therein lies the
problem. Unlike aircraft that fly to and
from fixed locations, i.e., airports, drones
can fly anywhere, but becoming certified
restricts their delivery locations.
Guido Fuentes, an aeronautical engi-
neer, explained the restriction during a
Dronelaw.pro broadcast shortly after the
FAA expanded Part 135 certification to
include drones.
“This couldn’t be just some random
route where people will say, ‘Well, deliver
a pizza to a location that really has never
There’s a lot of
possibilities for
contamination, whereas
with drones delivery,
no one is touching it
aside from the person
packing the drone and
the person receiving
the package.
–Ashkhen Kazaryan, director of civil
liberties at the technology think tank
TechFreedom
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 43
been visited by the drone at all.’ These
are still very structured routes,” he said.
Kazaryan deemed the certification
to be more of an exemption than an
allowance.
“It doesn’t automatically clear the
way for drone deliveries across the
country. It’s more of an exemption than a
widespread allowance,” she said, adding
that drone operators “get a certification
for specific locations.”
She also mentioned that the FAA is
“very slow and heavy” when it comes to
granting the certifications.
“Bottom line is that there are some
movements but with regulation both
on federal, state and local level and very
slow regulatory process drone delivery
won’t be a reality for a while, unless FAA
or states step up and put together a reg-
ulatory infrastructure that can save lives
in the midst of this pandemic,” Kazaryan
wrote via email.
Drone expert Velicovich said the
only thing standing in the way of drones
making deliveries anywhere in the U.S.
is regulation because the technology is
already available.
In other areas of the world, such as
China, drones make food deliveries to
promote social distancing. In Rwanda,
medical supplies, including blood, are
delivered via drone.
“The blood is literally parachuted
down from the drone and delivered to
the hospital,” Velicovich said, adding
that “it’s not that the technology already
doesn’t exist to date to do that: It abso-
lutely does. It’s more a regulation thing.
The FAA in the U.S. is the most restric-
tive in the entire world. So when we
know we can deliver blood and medical
supplies via drone in Rwanda, which is
already happening, the FAA is not allow-
ing that to happen in the United States.”
UPS received its Part 135 certification
last October and is exploring how best to
use drone deliveries in the current crisis.
“We are exploring potential ways UPS
Flight Forward could contribute during
this emergency,” a spokesperson told the
Washington Examiner. +
Jay Heflin is the business editor for the
Washington Examiner.
BUSINESS
MOORE
Don’t put Uncle Sam
in corporate boardrooms
T
here is nothing worse than the
government bailing out private
industries. I’ve spent a career
opposing corporate welfare
giveaways. When an industry
gets in financial trouble be-
cause of its poor business practices, the
owners/shareholders and executives
should bear the cost, not taxpayers.
The coronavirus crisis is a bit differ-
ent because the government has ordered
many industries to, in effect, shut down
for many months. In the case of the ma-
jor airlines, such as United and Delta, the
government has precluded many passen-
gers from boarding planes and even shut
down many flights. It is why the govern-
ment took steps in the last $2 trillion aid
package to keep these companies out of
bankruptcy. It’s providing grants (a bad
idea) and loans to be repaid (a better way
to provide temporary assistance) to the
tune of up to $50 billion. American Air-
lines, for example, is eligible for up to $12
billion in aid.
None of this is ideal, but for better or
worse, the federal government has decid-
ed that airlines are an essential industry
for America’s economic recovery. Now,
the question is whether it should take
some ownership stake in the airlines in
the form of “warrants.” A warrant allows
the government to have the right to take
stock in the company in the future.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has
supported this form of repayment to make
taxpayers whole when all is said and done.
His motives are good, but this is a bad idea
that would set a dangerous policy prece-
dent. We don’t want the government to
become a shareholder and perhaps even
take a controlling interest in American
companies.
This is the opposite of privatization. It
is government “socialization” of private
industry.
44 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
One can imagine the laundry list of
unprofitable and misguided corporate
policies the government “owner” might
impose on airlines such as green fuel
mandates, subsidized flight paths, “safe
spaces” in every cabin, etc. Green energy
policies could be imposed. How do you
make airplanes that burn jet fuel “car-
bon neutral”?
Congress could mandate that com-
panies have racial and gender quotas on
their boards and require union represen-
tatives or even government officials as
directors. The congressmen could start
dictating how many flights have to leave
from hometown airports, regardless of
profitability. We see this with Congress
mandating Amtrak service through cer-
Not ideal
tain towns, whether they make financial
sense or not.
Government warrants would also
defeat the purpose of the aid package in
the first place, which is to get the airlines
up and flying again and back on the road
to financial self-sufficiency. Warrants
will reduce the value of airline shares
because they dilute shareholder equity.
This makes it harder for airlines to raise
private capital.
The legislation authorizing the aid
already includes fairly strict covenants
prohibiting furloughs and layoffs. Doug-
las Holtz-Eakin, former director of the
Congressional Budget Office, opposes
the warrants and explains that the law
already restricts the companies from
engaging in stock buybacks, executive
bonuses, dividend payouts, and the like.
The government is exacting its pound
of flesh.
Even the airline unions — the pi-
lots, flight attendants, mechanics, and
so on — oppose the warrants, and with
good reason. They said in a letter to
Congress that warrants could “give the
government as much as a 40% stake in
airlines,” which could hurt workers and
the value of their pensions.
Countries such as China, Russia, and
Venezuela allow public ownership and
direction of companies, but America has
smartly adopted a hands-off approach
and rarely allows direct government con-
trol of business management. We keep
government out of boardrooms, which
is one reason American companies so
often out-compete foreign competitors.
The federal government should re-
lease the airlines from these unwise war-
rants, which only chase away the private
investors these companies desperately
need now.
Meanwhile, if the airlines want to
thank taxpayers for their financial assis-
tance during these dire times, perhaps
BERTRAND GUAY/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES
they can give us free frequent flyer miles
through their “loyalty” programs when
they return to profitability. +
Stephen Moore is the finance and
economics columnist of the Washington
Examiner and an economic consultant
with FreedomWorks.
LIFE & ARTS
BOOKS
White Working-
Class Blues
By Gabriel Rossman
T he economists Anne Case and An-
gus Deaton published their article
“Rising morbidity and mortality in mid-
life among white non-Hispanic Ameri-
cans in the 21st century” in 2015, the
same year the journalist Sam Quinones
published Dreamland, his book on the
opiate crisis. Both raised the alarm that
many middle-aged, non-college-educat-
ed white people had lost the will to live,
either committing suicide directly with
guns or by hanging or indirectly through
alcohol and opiate addiction.
But it wasn’t until 2016 that one-
third of the country saw a much more
conspicuous sign that we’ve got a
problem. It came in the form of a Su-
per Bowl ad for Movantik, a drug for
treating opiate-induced constipation.
Anyone watching the Super Bowl could
reasonably infer that opiates were now
so ubiquitous that a company would
spend millions of dollars advertising
a drug to mitigate their side effects.
And of course, nine months later, the
anguished white working class elect-
ed President Trump, whose inaugural
address heavily emphasized Rust Belt
despair.
Case and Deaton’s new book, Deaths
of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,
addresses these themes. Through sim-
ple figures and clear prose, it presents a
huge body of evidence from the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention’s
WONDER database and other sources
that the arc of the white working class’s
fate over the last two decades is long,
but it bends toward nihilism and an ear-
ly grave.
The long-run trend in industrialized
nations is toward increased life expec-
tancy. Over the last two decades, that
trend has held for almost everyone
except non-college-educated white
46 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
Americans, especially those in late For instance, Case and Deaton point
middle age, whose mortality improve- to the effects of the “China shock,” or
ments in other areas have been offset the collapse of American manufactur-
by increased deaths from “accidental ing employment after China joined the
poisoning” (read: drug overdose), sui- World Trade Organization in 2001, but
cide, and alcohol-related diseases such China trades with the whole world, not
as cirrhosis. There have been so many just the U.S. The authors argue that the
of these “deaths of despair” among effects of the shock have been worse
non-college whites between the ages of in America because healthcare is so
45 and 54 that the long-term decrease expensive here, which has inhibited
in mortality for all late-middle-aged growth in take-home pay at the bottom
whites leveled off around 2000 and has of the class structure. But this fails to
not improved since. College-educated explain why black Americans, who also
white people continue to live longer, but face an expensive healthcare system,
the white working class increasingly has have seen different mortality patterns
the demographic profile of a failed state. than non-college whites.
Because mortality (death) is often A better explanation may start by
presaged by morbidity (poor health), disaggregating deaths of despair into
Case and Deaton devote two chapters to suicide mortality, alcohol-related mor-
showing the white working class’s sub- tality, and drug overdose mortality. Cu-
jective experience of health and pain. riously, of all the figures in the book,
Whites without college educations are none of them plots drug, alcohol, and
far more likely than those with college suicide deaths separately. However,
educations to report ill health. Indeed, as Charles Lehman of the Washington
self-reported health for non-college Free Beacon notes, drug overdoses ac-
whites in their 20s is similar to that of count for the great bulk of the growth
college-educated whites in deaths of despair.
in their 70s. They are From 1999 to 2017, al-
more likely to rate as “se- cohol-related mortality
riously distressed” on a and suicide rose by a
measure of depression troubling 58% and 38%,
and anxiety. They report respectively. Fatal drug
more pain. Working-class overdoses rose by a hor-
whites are not only dying rifying 260%. If all three
more than college-edu- causes rose in tandem,
cated whites: They are then the intersection of
also ailing more. race and class would be
Why? As suggested by a good explanation. That
the “future of capitalism” almost all the growth
phrase of their book’s is in drug overdoses
title, Case and Deaton Deaths of Despair suggests a much more
put some of the blame and the Future specific, and specifical-
on the shift over the last of Capitalism ly American, story: The
several decades toward By Anne Case and “pain revolution” in med-
market-oriented reform, Angus Deaton icine, or the massive rise
Princeton University Press
freer trade, and leaner and in prescriptions of opiate
312 pp., $27.95.
meaner corporations that painkillers, created an
outsource ancillary func- opiate crisis.
tions. The problem is that this trend (of- It is interesting that this crisis most-
ten referred to, though not by Case and ly hit working-class whites, just as the
Deaton, as neoliberalism) was a global 1980s crack epidemic disproportionately
trend, and most social scientists date hit working-class blacks, but this mostly
its onset to around 1980. This makes it tells us that drug fads can be demograph-
a poor candidate to explain something ically specific. Occam’s razor suggests
that started in America around 2000 that the white working class is now dy-
and has only really affected America. ing of heroin and fentanyl overdoses be-
Other explanations for rises in cause it first got hooked on OxyContin.
deaths of despair seem plausible look- Case and Deaton end their book with
ing only at the United States but appear the obligatory “What is to be done?”
less so when comparing us to our peers. chapter, but between them completing

their book and me finishing my read of
it, it has become obvious that a better
place to end is: “What’s next?”
I am writing this review from home
rather than my office because like most
Americans, I am under a public health
order to stay home to stem the corona-
virus pandemic. Like many college-ed-
ucated workers, I have it pretty good
in that I can work from home and still
receive my full paycheck. But many
non-college-educated workers have
been laid off, especially those working
in bars or restaurants.
The resulting unemployment and
disruption will hit the working class
particularly hard. But even aside from
these economic problems, the corona-
virus is likely to drive an increase in
deaths of despair. Man is a social an-
imal, which makes social distancing
an unpleasant experience. In theory,
texting and online chatting mean that
physical distance need not imply social
isolation, but if you’re the nonverbal
type whose preferred mode of socializ-
ing is watching a game at the bar, quar-
antine will be a very lonely experience.
And we know that loneliness drives sui-
cide, which is why rural widowers are at
such high risk.
The epidemic also promises to in-
crease deaths related to chemical de-
pendence. If you stockpiled toilet paper,
you are not going to use the toilet com-
pulsively, but if you are an alcoholic who
stockpiled booze, you might find your-
self bingeing, especially if you are bored
and anxious. And consider the opiate
addict who was revived twice last year
but now finds EMTs too busy treating
respiratory failures to administer Nar-
can and emergency rooms too full to
admit an overdose.
Case and Deaton published their
article announcing deaths of despair
in 2015, just as fentanyl-laced heroin
replaced diverted pharmaceuticals as
Americans’ opiate of choice. The result
was an even worse spike in accidental
poisonings than the one documented in
their article. Their book’s March 2020
publication date is likely to prove a sim-
ilarly ill omen — a portent of the social
and economic dislocation caused by the
coronavirus and the deaths of despair
that will follow close behind.
Gabriel Rossman is an associate professor
of sociology at UCLA.
LIFE & ARTS
BOOKS Midwest deserves a word all its own to
describe its vast hunger for a settled,
A Place That temporal home. A word to describe
both the plaintive longing you hear in
Almost Happened the trumpet of Miles Davis (from East
St. Louis) and the heavy silences punc-
By Scott Beauchamp tuating Hemingway’s (from Oak Park,
Illinois) prose.
B eing from the Midwest and having But perhaps this sensibility isn’t
subsequently lived all over the world, enough to connect one Midwestern artist
I never quite know how people will re- to another. What do William Burroughs,
spond when I tell them where I’m from. Iggy Pop, Prince, Madonna, T.S. Eliot,
“Oh, it gets hot there, doesn’t it?” Or Charlie Parker, and Marianne Moore
cold. Tornadoes usually come up. (I’ve have in common other than region of
seen three with my own eyes.) And when origin? If there’s anything definitive to
the topic of weather is exhausted, there be said about them, Christman explains,
are the usual cliches about flatness, bore- it’s that they’re each unique. “Midwest-
dom, provincialism, and humility ,near- ern creativity,” he writes, “feeds on
ly always echoing each other. Mostly, anonymity, on secrecy. It seam-rips at
though, people just shrug. And I shrug normality until it finds strangeness. We
along with them. The Midwest is a cipher see Midwestern artists, then, as singular,
you can project almost anything you not regional.” Midwestern artists want to
want onto. Its geographical borders are be left alone to cultivate idiosyncratic in-
amorphous and difficult to define. And ner worlds. The lack of a regional style or
conceptually, it has the fuzziest of iden- aesthetic is a feature, not a bug. To drive
tities, constantly shifting and supremely the point home, Christman mentions
difficult to get a purchase that infamous interaction
on. My native land leaves between Matt Damon and
me tongue-tied. Prince when Damon said
The writer Phil Christ- to the musician, “I hear
man takes this baffling you live in Minnesota,”
vagueness as his point of to which Prince respond-
departure in the wonder- ed, “I live inside my own
fully rich Midwest Futures, heart, Matt Damon.”
published by Belt Publish- It’s difficult not to see
ing. Toward the beginning this self-creation as mir-
of the book, mulling over roring the intentional and
the name of the region it- inorganic creation of the
self, Christman writes: Midwest itself. Midwest
“ There’s something Futures begins with the
poignant about this folk Midwest Futures Beginning Point of the
etymology, in which the By Phil Christman U.S. Public Lands Survey
Belt Publishing
Midwest is a kind of aban- in East Liverpool, Ohio, a
150 pp., $26.00.
doned frontier. You picture monument roughly mark-
the whole region as a sort ing the spot where, on Aug.
of once-shiny new mall marooned by sub- 20, 1785, “a member of the team tasked
urban sprawl, left to crumble, only a few by the governments of Virginia and
years after opening, in a no-longer-vital Pennsylvania with finding, or naming,
part of town. Such an image might help or inventing, the invisible lines that de-
explain the sense of disappointment that marcate these states from each other …
grips so many of us here, the nostalgia for initiated the mapping of another series
a moment that we can’t quite pinpoint, the of boundaries: between the vast territory
feeling not that things once were definitely to the west and the thirteen states that it
better but that they were once understood might enrich.”
to be on the verge, at least, of getting better. “Enrich” is the correct word. From
A place that almost happened.” the very beginning, Christman tells us,
The Portuguese have saudade, a mel- even as the Midwest was being arbitrari-
ancholy sense of longing. The Turks ly blocked off into townships of 6 square
have huzun, a feeling of nostalgia so miles, which were themselves organized
acute that it induces torpor. Surely, the into large grids of 36-square-mile boxes,
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 47
LIFE & ARTS
the region was seen as “not a place [but]
a fund. Big Eastern land speculators al-
ready eyed these plots.” Novel ways of
making money, from the development
of speculation in futures to the almost
perennially unprofitable railroads, be-
came part of the region’s legacy. These
money-grabbing schemes, foisted on a
usually skeptical public through dizzy-
ing technological prowess or sheer polit-
ical force, had obvious social effects that
reverberated through the entire culture.
“Ford and Fordism,” Christman writes,
referring to the system of assembly-line
factory construction pioneered by Hen-
ry Ford in Detroit, “can be seen as little
more than the mass production of aver-
ageness: a standard workday, a standard
wage, a car that comes in any color as
long as it’s black.”
This is a fantastic book by one of the
most underappreciated writers of my
generation on a topic that isn’t easy to
write about. It’s such a joy that I zipped
through it in a single day. Its weakest
points (heavily diluted by its charming
prose) come when Christman offers us
a few knee-jerk political observations.
When he goes on about citizens being
guilted into thanking “veterans, and
them alone, for the supposed ease of
American life,” we roll our eyes. Stick-
ing it to military patriotism in 2020 feels
empty, if not hackneyed. But much like
the weather in the Midwest, if you don’t
like the sentiment you’re currently read-
ing, just wait a couple of minutes. The
book will reward you.
William Gass, another Midwestern
artist, wrote in his novel In the Heart
of the Heart of the Country: “This Mid-
west, a dissonance of parts and people,
we are a consonance of Towns. Like a
man grown fat in everything but heart,
we overlabor; our outlook never really
urban, never rural either, we enlarge
and linger at the same time, as Alice
both changed and remained in her sto-
ry.” The Midwest continues to change,
but it maintains an eerie atmosphere of
existing in a permanent present — the
past gone, the future always just over
the horizon. In this sense, it really is
America writ small. Stare into it deeply
enough, and you’ll see your own image
clarify.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You
Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77
Photographs. He lives in Maine.
48 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
BOOKS them. Ursula Le Guin commented about
his work, “We are not yet used to hear-
Stranger Than ing that there are things that we don’t
Science Fiction
understand.”
Lem’s novels frequently begin with
relatively relatable scenarios that are
By Anthony Paletta then destabilized by theoretical blows.
We meet the protagonist of Return from
S ynopses may not accomplish much in the Stars, for instance, as he chats with a
explaining the appeal of the works of girl after returning from his space mis-
Stanislaw Lem. A message arrives from sion. She asks how long. 137 years. As he
the stars, and humanity comprehen- aged slowly on his mission, the world he
sively fails to decipher it. An astronaut left behind became unrecognizable. The
returns from a centurylong mission that astronaut attempts to read up on what
we barely hear about. A robotic swarm happened in his absence only to dis-
extinguishes nearly all life on a planet, cover that humanity abandoned space
and a mission can’t figure out anything travel long ago. His whole mission was
to do to counter it. Yet Lem is one of dismissed as pointless decades before it
the few world-renowned science fiction ended. Space was so vast as to foreclose
authors not to have written in English, the possibility of communication: “The
with fans as diverse as Anthony Burgess, questions and answers, then, would miss
Douglas Hofstadter, Carl Sagan, and one another, would suffer hundred-cen-
John Updike. Six of his works have been tury delays, which would nullify and
rereleased by MIT Press this month, all make any exchange of experiences, val-
of them excellent. ues, and ideas impossible.”
Born to a Jewish family in Lwow, Another of the rereleased books,
then in Poland, in 1921, The Invincible, involves
Lem survived World War a mission in pursuit of a
II thanks to forged pa- ship that’s gone silent on
pers and trained as a doc- an unknown planet. The
tor before beginning his planet is barren of life,
writing career. He drifted save, puzzlingly, for deep
into sci-fi in part because in its ocean. The astro-
it was easier to escape nauts discover an aged au-
communist censors — tomaton, which isn’t just
in outer space, he could rusty but covered in lime-
write what he pleased. stone, making it, in anoth-
His sensibilities, howev- er classically destabilizing
er, remained literary: He Lem touch, “at least three
dismissed most sci-fi as hundred thousand years
“empty games.” Good sci- + His Master’s Voice old.” “Life” on this planet
ence fiction, in his view, + Highcastle consists of fly-like swarms
involved “the art of put- + The Invincible that robotically evolved
+ Return from
ting hypothetical premises from early automatons and
the Stars
into the very complicated +Hospital of the became extremely adept at
steam of socio-psycholog- Transfiguration self-preservation without
ical occurrences.” + Memoirs of a any sort of brain or natural
Lem was tremendously Space Traveler instinct. This boggles more
By Stanislaw Lem
skilled at not only dream- than a few minds.
MIT Press
ing up fantastical scenari- His Master’s Voice is set
os but precisely calibrating on a recognizably Cold
them to unsettle our schemes for under- War-era Earth at a Los Alamos-style facil-
standing the world. It’s easier to venture ity where the protagonist has been tasked
beyond the limits of the galaxy than with helping to decipher a transmission
those of our knowledge, and Lem re- from the heavens. It’s no ordinary tele-
peatedly struck at the artificially tidy re- graph but a repeating 416-hour sequence.
lations we impose on reality. He labored Experts from a variety of fields are gath-
strenuously to imagine things we haven’t ered. Scientists aren’t ideal: “Because sci-
seen before and generally foregrounded entists learn to conduct so-called games
protagonists who don’t comprehend with nature, with a nature that is not —

from any permissible point of view — a
personal antagonist, they are unable to
countenance the possibility that behind
the object of investigation there indeed
stands someone.” Nor are linguists, since
their knowledge is so tied to human
beings. A message such as “MOTHER
DEAD FUNERAL WEDNESDAY” can
be translated into any human language,
since all societies have mothers, death,
funerals, and calendars. “But beings that
are unisexual would not know the dis-
tinction between mother and father, and
those that divide like amoebas would be
unable to form the idea even of a unisex-
ual parent.” This alien intelligence lies not
only beyond the stars but beyond all hu-
ALEKSANDER JALOSINSKI/REUTERS/FORUM
man understanding — not a single expert
even knows where to begin.
Several of Lem’s more comic stories,
featuring his recurring hero Ijon Tichy,
are collected in Memoirs of a Space Trav-
eler. Tichy, a picaresque everyman, is a
fount for Lem’s humor. The best of these
stories paints the carnival of litigation
that would inevitably surround legal
personhood for future robots, most of
whom are as depraved as we are, such as
a cybernetic washing machine:
“Murdstone’s washer flagrantly tore his
shirts, ruined radio reception throughout
the neighborhood with static, proposi-
tioned old men and juveniles, telephoned
various individuals and — impersonating
its owner — extorted money from them; it
invited the neighbors’ floor polishers and
washers in to look at postage stamps but
then performed immoral acts upon then;
and in its spare time the machine engaged
in vagrancy and panhandling.”
Lem’s work often ventured outside of
science fiction — for all of the hard sci-
fi he authored, he sits more easily with
Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino than
most genre authors. Perhaps his greatest
metafictional caprice, A Perfect Vacuum
(not among these reprints), consists en-
tirely of reviews of books that don’t exist
(and a review of the book itself, in which
he pans the whole idea). Some of his
work was entirely realistic. His early nov-
el The Hospital of the Transfiguration, ob-
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 49
LIFE & ARTS
Stanislaw Lem
at his home in
Krakow, Poland,
in February 1975.
viously indebted to The Magic Mountain,
presents a filthier and grimmer variant
of Thomas Mann’s epic: A young doctor
goes to work in an asylum after the Ger-
man invasion of Poland in 1939 — a lit-
eral madhouse on the edge of genocide.
The last of these reprints, Highcastle,
is a fascinating memoir of Lem’s youth
in Lwow, both a bittersweet lament for
the passing of youthful possibility and
an extended meditation on the limits of
memory. “Our thoughts,” Lem writes:
“Are like underground tunnels that col-
lapse. Although tight-fisted and indifferent,
memory knows everything and can but will
not help; it is contemptuous, locked in itself,
ignoring the passage of time, independent
of time. And it keeps denying me admit-
tance where I wish to go, letting me in only
elsewhere, and never where I want.”
It’s no wonder a man would fixate on
the limitations of human thought when
he cannot even acquire a firm grasp on
his own past.
Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.
LIFE & ARTS
ON CULTURE
Kiwi Comedy
in America
By Jibran Khan
K iwi comic Rhys Darby is perhaps
best known to American audienc-
es from the two recent Jumanji films
and his show-stealing role on Flight of
the Conchords as the eponymous band’s
well-meaning but hapless manager
Murray Hewitt. Darby returned to the
Washington area the weekend of March
6 to perform a series of stand-up shows
at the Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse.
It feels like a lifetime ago now, after just
a few weeks of social isolation that quite
rightly put the kibosh on such gather-
ings. But as live shows on the eve of
quarantine go, it would have been hard
to do better. Darby was joined by Steve
Wrigley, a fellow U.S.-based Kiwi come-
dian, and Jared Stern, a D.C. area local.
On the screen, I’ve always been
struck by Darby’s perfect comedic tim-
ing. It shines across both his starring
roles, such as on Flight of the Conchords,
and his bit parts, from Hewlett-Packard
commercials to voice acting on popular
animated shows such as Bob’s Burgers.
Flight of the Conchords followed Je-
maine and Bret, two Kiwi musicians
living in New York’s Chinatown who
are trying to make it big with their nov-
elty act. Murray works as the cultural
attache for the New Zealand consulate
and moonlights as the band’s manager,
a role for which he has no background
experience. His management style is
focused on his “band meetings,” during
which he always takes attendance of all
three people “present” in the room. Al-
though these attendance checks recur
in virtually every episode, Darby’s deliv-
ery makes them hilarious beyond their
absurdity and fresh each time.
Murray, as the band’s manager, is
Bret and Jemaine’s link to the world of
music and New York (even though he’s
about as new to both as they are). He
50 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
recounts some of his well-intentioned
yet counterproductive advice in an
early episode: “A lot of New Zealand-
ers come over here, and they come into
my office. I give them reflective vests, a
map, I tell them to stay away from large
crowds by going through back alleys,
yet almost every day, a New Zealander
is mugged!” At the same time, Murray
is the duo’s anchor to New Zealand. He
is the emotional center of the show, and
the character would be impossible with-
out Darby’s performance. Darby is not
Murray Hewitt, of course, but there is
certainly something of Rhys in him.
Seeing Darby perform his particular
brand of stand-up went a long way in
showing where this impeccable timing
is rooted. His set in Arlington, Virgin-
ia, was full of physical comedy, ranging
from a quite accurate approximation
of equestrian dressage and an account
of auditioning for HBO’s Westworld as
a Jetsons-style creaking robot to the
way in which his childhood talent for
producing accurate vocal sound effects
(such as shooting) made him a top per-
former in New Zealand’s military train-
ing. If timing or movement were even
slightly off in those bits, they would
fall flat. But Darby carried them off to
perfection.
Darby’s set abounded in jokes about
New Zealand, but it is a good-natured
form of humor, an affection for the
smallness of home. It is anything but
the sort of disdainful look back some-
times heard from performers who came
from a “small” place before finding fame
in the big city. Rather, it comes across
as an extension of Darby’s self-depre-
cation, a comedic musing on how he,
a New Zealander, came to enjoy Holly-
wood success. There was a large contin-
gent of New Zealanders at the show, and
I got the impression that they are regu-
lars at Darby’s frequent appearances at
the Arlington Drafthouse. Darby riffed
off of them, joking that they were all
shouting out their home towns at once
As live shows on the eve
of quarantine go, it would
have been hard to do better
than Rhys Darby.
to prove New Zealand has more than
one city.
The show was, of course, not for
children, and this was borne out in the
language. All the same, Darby’s form
of comedy is quite wholesome and
family-friendly. His newest project is
a Spotify Studios weekly podcast se-
ries, Aliens Like Us, which looks into
UFO phenomena through news reports
and accounts of sightings and discus-
sions among the hosts. The podcast
includes “Buttons,” Rhys’s co-host on
the long-running podcast The Cryptid
Factor, which takes a similar approach
but is a bit more homebrew and focus-
es on cryptozoology (the study of and
search for unconfirmed animals such as
the sasquatch) with occasional forays
into other paranormal phenomena. The
hosts’ family members often appear as
guests on the show, which speaks to the
friendly, inquisitive atmosphere that
Darby hopes to maintain in his projects.
Darby has also written and drawn
an ongoing children’s book series called
The Top Secret Undercover Notes of But-
tons McGinty, which is formatted as a
12-year-old adventurer’s scrapbook that
needs to be studied and figured out by
the reader, presumably of the same age.
Local comic Jared Stern was the
host for the night and did a small ob-
servational set at the beginning before
announcing the program. The open-
ing act was Steve Wrigley, whose set
ranged from a first principles-level
mockery of cancel culture to everyday
divided-by-a-common-language ab-
surdities of being a Kiwi in the United
States. Both acts were excellent and
perhaps acclimated the American au-
dience to Kiwi mores before Rhys took
the stage.
With releases such as Taika Waiti-
ti’s recent films Thor: Ragnarok and
Jojo Rabbit, a particular brand of New
Zealand comedy is certainly entering
the mainstream. But live performances
are the purest form of comedy, and to
see Rhys Darby live is an opportunity to
watch one of this style’s greatest expo-
nents in action. With live performances
on hold for the pandemic, the podcast
will serve us well in the meantime.
Jibran Khan is a freelance writer and re-
searcher. From 2017 to 2019, he was the
Thomas L. Rhodes fellow at the National
XXXXX
Review Institute.

FILM
Eric Rohmer
at 100
By Peter Tonguette
T hese times may be full of uncer-
tainties, but one thing is for sure:
Quentin Tarantino does not under any
circumstances want to be compared to
Francois Truffaut.
In 1994, Vanity Fair magazine ran a
profile of the Pulp Fiction filmmaker in
which he sounded off on the expect-
ed array of topics — his favorite action
scenes, for instance — before making it
abundantly clear that if he resembled any
director of the French new wave, it was
not Truffaut. Tarantino’s ire was raised
after his Pulp Fiction writing partner,
Roger Avary, insisted that his kinship
was with Jean-Luc Godard while Taran-
tino was closer to Truffaut. “No way,”
Tarantino protested. “I’m more like God-
ard than he is. If anyone’s Truffaut, it’s
Roger. But I’m definitely Godard.”
It’s unfortunate that both Tarantino
and Avary found it necessary to distance
themselves from a filmmaker as humane
and civilized as Truffaut. What’s worse,
though, is that neither even thought of
name-dropping another leading figure of
the new wave: Eric Rohmer.
One wouldn’t expect either Taran-
tino or Avary to emulate Rohmer, but
his name is too often omitted from the
conversation about the new wave. In
fact, in churning out one literate yet
lively comedy-drama after another,
among them such classics as My Night at
Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), and
Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), Rohmer
bequeathed to audiences a record of
accomplishment that arguably eclipses
that of his more famous contemporaries.
To start with, Rohmer was sincere about
his characters’ predicaments without
ever being sentimental, making his films
sharper and starker than the sometimes
treacly Truffaut. His work lacks entirely
the shrill self-consciousness of Godard,
and his lean-and-mean shooting style
is far more timeless than those of such
flashy counterparts as Jacques Demy or
Claude Chabrol.
If Rohmer comes across as the sen-
sible, sensitive big brother of the new
wave, perhaps it is because he was its
senior citizen. Born 100 years ago last
month in Nancy, France, Rohmer was
10 years older than Godard and 12 years
older than Truffaut. In fact, he was late
to the filmmaking game, having spent his
salad days filing film reviews for Cahiers
du Cinema. Rohmer was pushing 40
when he made his first feature film, The
Sign of Leo (1962), and north of 85 when
he embarked on his last, The Romance
of Astrea and Celadon (2007) — a mere
three years before his death, at the age
of 89, in 2010.
Of course, worse than being forgotten
is being flat-out misunderstood. Some-
where along the line, the word spread
that Rohmer’s films were deadly dull.
The ultimate put-down came in Arthur
Penn’s great film noir Night Moves (1975),
when Gene Hackman’s mustachioed
private eye Harry Moseby says, “I saw
a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like
watching paint dry.”
Maybe Rohmer’s wordiness did him
no favors. Or maybe the director invited
such generalizations by lumping batches
of his films together within discrete se-
ries. For example, My Night at Maud’s,
Claire’s Knee, and Chloe in the Afternoon
are entrants in Six Moral Tales. Other
films belong to Comedies and Proverbs
or to Tales of the Four Seasons. Group-
ing films together makes it too easy for
viewers to miss their unique qualities.
Rohmer is too little praised for his tal-
ent in depicting the splendor of nature
and the vivifying effect of a change in
seasons: The snow has a cold heft in My
Night at Maud’s, and surely no filmmak-
er ever presented summer with a greater
sense of wistful anticipation than in one
of the Comedies and Proverbs, The Green
Ray (1986).
In fact, when viewed today, Rohmer’s
films ironically seem more au cou-
rant than those of many of his peers
— perhaps owing to their focus on the
privations of the young and his keen-
ness occasionally to invite his youthful
casts to participate in the creation of
his scripts. Rohmer, who was Catholic,
did not allow his ever-advancing age to
estrange him from the concerns of his
fresh-faced characters, including the
hero of My Night at Maud’s, Jean-Lou-
is (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who naive-
ly but wholeheartedly sets his cap for a
put-together blonde bombshell he sees
at Mass, or the heroine of the remark-
able A Good Marriage (1982), Sabine
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 51
LIFE & ARTS
(Beatrice Romand), who with an equal
combination of guilelessness and reso-
luteness determines to renounce her ex-
istence as a libertine for the life of a wife.
Rohmer also distinguished himself
from his peers by remaining in contact
with eternal themes and ideas. Despite
the film critic milieu from which he
sprang, Rohmer claimed in a 1994 in-
terview with the New York Times to be
inspired by other, older traditions. “I
was very much influenced by ancient
and medieval literature, by Greco-Lat-
in mythology and church dramas and
Shakespeare — more influenced by
literary sources than by film itself,”
said Rohmer, who on several occa-
sions made rich, arcane period piec-
es, including Perceval le Gallois (1978),
adapted from a 12th-century work in
verse by Chretien de Troyers, and The
Romance of Astrea and Celadon, taken
from a 17th-century novel by Honore
d’Urfe. “Western civilization shapes the
content of my films, provides me with
subjects that haven’t been used before.”
In no film did Rohmer’s gifts emerge
with greater richness than A Tale of
Winter (1992), which revolves around
the sometimes comic, frequently
heart-rending patience exhibited by a
young woman named Felicie (Charlotte
Very). Following a carefree dalliance
with Charles (Frederic van den Driess-
che), Felicie fails to provide him with
her proper address — a lapse in concen-
tration that becomes problematic when
Felicie, unexpectedly pregnant, becomes
the mother of Charles’s daughter. Felicie
never wavers in her devotion to the now
long-gone Charles and her belief that
her daughter deserves him as a father.
In an altogether unexpected way, A Tale
of Winter expresses both Rohmer’s tol-
erance of the vagaries of youth and his
Catholicism: The director puts up with
Felicie’s ill-advised behavior because
it is mitigated by her subsequent spiri-
tual rigor: Her watchful waiting for the
reappearance of Charles is akin to a
knight-errant’s quest. Rohmer is a mor-
alist, yes, but never a scold.
It would take stubbornness of the
highest order not to recognize the en-
during power of the new wave’s gentlest
poet, Eric Rohmer.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publica-
tions, including the Wall Street Journal,
National Review, and Humanities.
LIFE & ARTS

TV of the most vilified women in American 1992 flashback. So pervasive is Hillary’s

history,” and an unidentified aide opines I-gotta-be-me posturing, in fact, that it
An Ambitious blandly that Clinton is “the most recog- is left to the press to remind viewers that

Yuppie From Hell

nizable female public figure.”
That such generalities do nothing to
further the audience’s understanding is
By Graham Hillard obvious. What is less clear is why Burstein
felt the need to include them. Had the di-
“what you see” is actually not “what you
get,” despite Clinton nearly shouting that
claim in the documentary’s opening min-
utes. Assessing Hillary’s loss to Obama in
2008, Peter Baker of the New York Times

W hat is the point of Hillary? Offering

viewers neither the election-night
schadenfreude of HBO’s The Final Year
rector approached her work with slightly
less partisan flair, she might have combed
the archives for more quotes of the sort
merely stated what everyone knew when
he remarked that Obama “came across as
authentic to a lot of Democrats.” The con-
nor the dogged specificity of Hillary Clin- provided in the film’s quirkiest moment, trast with Clinton is all the more powerful
ton’s own memoirs, Nanette Burstein’s during which a 1990s newscast declares for being unstated.
four-part Hulu documentary skims along Hillary to be “an ambitious yuppie from Though Burstein does what she can to
the surface of its subject like a hydro- hell.” show viewers the “real” Hillary, none of
plane, occasionally putting down a fish- Instead, and to its great detriment, it convinces — not Clinton’s cartoonish
ing line but rarely getting a nibble. What Hillary seems content to be a four-hour shrieks of frustration in the film’s first
Burstein has assembled is something akin apologia — an inauthentic defense of its interview, not the obnoxious girl-power
to an idiot’s guide — a CliffsNotes Clinton subject’s authenticity that returns to the anthem that plays over the opening cred-
certain to bore friends and enemies alike. theme with wearying regularity. “I just its, and certainly not the silly director’s
Hillary is for Hillary, as decades of expe- couldn’t be anything other than what I trick of rolling the cameras a few seconds
rience have taught us. Hillary is for ... it’s was,” Clinton says of her high-school before Hillary is officially “ready.” (Has
difficult to say. years. “I am who I am,” she insists in a Clinton, in her life, ever assumed that a
Like many a documentary before it,
Burstein’s film combines historical foot-
age with present-day commentary from
its central figure and various others.
Among those who sit for the camera are Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1994.
members of the 2016 campaign staff, Yale
Law School classmates, friendly jour-
nalists, and, of course, Bill Clinton, who
seems fond enough of his wife but is rare-
ly seen in a room with her. As Hillary and
Burstein reconstruct 72 years of Clintoni-
ana in a series of amicable one-on-ones,
the film aids the viewer’s memory with a
string of flashbacks: Hillary as Goldwa-
ter girl, politician’s wife, junior senator,
and secretary of state. Though these in-
terludes are not without their charms,
their cumulative effect is soporific. For
every genuine human moment (such as
Hillary’s threat to her Republican father
that she will “grow up and marry a Demo-
crat”), there are 10 rehashings of old scan-
dals, grudges, and failures of Republicans
to believe the Clinton narrative du jour.
To the extent that a documentary’s
purpose is to get to the core of its subject,
Burstein has chosen perhaps the most
MARK REINSTEIN/CORBIS VIA GET T Y IMAGES

difficult assignment in contemporary

politics. As people long ago concluded,
the former secretary of state and first lady
is a locked box — a message written in a
code we can’t crack. One consequence of
this fact is that even Clinton’s 2016 cam-
paign staff tend to fill their Hillary inter-
views with shallow superlatives: Senior
policy adviser Jake Sullivan calls the can-
didate “one of the most admired and one

52 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020


camera pointed at her was not on?) In-
deed, the only sincere moment in the en-
tire tedious production is a sequence in
the second episode during which Hillary
spitballs with her advisers about how
to spin the results of the Iowa caucus-
es. Here is Clinton at her best: strategic,
amoral, conniving, and briefly fascinating.
Hillary the politician was an abject failure,
as most viewers will concede. Hillary the
campaign consultant might have done in-
credible things.
Like many a victim before her, Clinton
is a person to whom things keep happen-
ing. Thus, the 2016 election unfolded as
it did because “emails blew it all up” or
because “classified information ... ended
up on [a] server,” to quote the telling-
ly worded sound bites of team Hillary.
Without question, the email story rein-
forced existing narratives about Clin-
ton’s untrustworthiness. Yet it’s hard to
believe in the chances of any candidate
who greets small-business owners with
the claim that she just did “a big thing
on small business.” Or who affected for
years a ridiculous corn-pone accent when
addressing Arkansas crowds. In Hillary’s
assessment, her central weakness as a
candidate was her vast knowledge of
policy specifics and her inability, like
George Washington, to tell a lie. (“I think
you should level with people, ... and that
makes me a less-than-ideal politician,”
she confides to Burstein.) The truth,
however, may be closer to something the
candidate says to Kate McKinnon while
rehearsing a Saturday Night Live sketch:
“You do me better than I do me.” Friends,
there’s your election.
If, as seems fair to say, the Clinton who
emerges in Hillary is more disappointed
than embittered by her losses, viewers
can be forgiven for wondering whether
her face suggests otherwise in moments
of privacy. Of course, we’ll never know
— a Hulu documentary certainly can’t
tell us — and so the woman beneath the
focus-grouping and triangulation remains
as obscure as ever: a figure of no great sig-
nificance who believed more than any-
thing in her own electoral destiny and
who must now exit the scene. She will be
little missed. To paraphrase the American
avant-garde composer John Cage, Hillary
had nothing to say, and she has said it.
Graham Hillard teaches English and
creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene
University.
DOWNTIME
Zombies and
Grasshoppers,
Oh My
By Eric Felten
W hat next, for pity’s sake? Is it going
to be zombies or locusts?
Why not both?
Now is the perfect time to make an
apocalypse of zombies or a cloud of grass-
hoppers — and not just because of their
names. These drinks are at the extreme
ends on the scale of cocktail complexity.
The grasshopper is about as simple as a
drink gets, just two ingredients, making it
perfect for those of us for whom working
at home has consumed most of what used
to be downtime. The zombie is notorious-
ly complicated, a kitchen sink of a drink,
and thus perfect to keep those of us who
are furloughed occupied.
Let’s start with the grasshopper. Quite
fashionable in the ‘50s, if by fashionable
we mean popular with Vegas showgirls
trying to look chic, this green concoction
hasn’t caught the retro wave of the last de-
cade. A mixture of two sweet liqueurs, it’s
candy-sweet, lacking the balance that has
been such a salient principle in the cocktail
renaissance. I’ll admit it’s too sweet for me,
but it is cheerful in its faux sophistication.
It remains a semiclassic in need of reviv-
ing, even if with tongue in cheek.
The recipe writes itself: Combine
equal parts green crème de menthe and
clear crème de cacao, shake with ice, and
strain into a small liqueur glass. Pandem-
ics are as good a time as any for a little
minty, chocolaty cheer.
And now, the zombie, one of the two
greatest tiki drinks of the Polynesian Pop
era. The zombie was Don the Beach-
comber’s signature drink just as the mai
tai was Trader Vic’s. They represent a du-
ality typical of American culture. There
are Count Basie and Duke Ellington; Fred
Astaire and Gene Kelly; Ginger and Mary-
Ann: the zombie and the mai tai.
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 53
LIFE & ARTS
Don and Vic went to great lengths to
keep their original recipes secret. The
Beachcomber himself would personal-
ly mix certain components so that not
even his own bartenders knew every in-
gredient. That meant during the original
zombie craze of the ‘30s, bars across the
country were mixing blind, tossing to-
gether whatever tropical juices they had
with a mess of rums. Cocktail books just
winged it too. Trader Vic’s Bartender’s
Guide (1947) offered a recipe, not quite
correct, that called for rums with lemon
juice, orange juice, orange curacao, gren-
adine, and Pernod. Esquire’s Handbook
for Hosts (1949) fessed up that “there’s no
knowing what some zealous mixers may
load into multi-rummed specimens” and
then printed a recipe that included such
nonstarters as papaya nectar and apri-
cot brandy. Charles Baker’s eclectic The
Gentleman’s Companion: Being an Exotic
Drinking Book (1939) suggested coconut
milk, cognac, and maraschino liqueur.
There may be a horde of wrongheaded
zombies, but there is also no one correct
zombie recipe. Tiki drink historian Jeff
Berry has shown that the Beachcomber’s
zombies changed over time. The key se-
cret ingredient turned out to be grapefruit
juice.
In the spirit of zombie improvisation
that gripped the nation some 70-80 years
ago, I have come up with my own varia-
tion, one that is close to the original as
the Beachcomber was said to make them
in 1950. Fill a shaker with finely crushed
ice. Pour into it 1 ounce of each: fresh lime
juice, fresh lemon juice, unsweetened
pineapple juice, grapefruit liqueur, white
rum, gold rum, 151-proof demerara rum.
Add a dash or two of Angostura bitters,
shake, and pour, without straining, into a
tall narrow glass.
Take a little time to decorate your
zombie. Dress the top of the glass with
some pineapple and mint, and put in a
straw or two. (Biodegradable straws of
course — don’t forget the environment,
which will surely return as a crisis once
the pandemic crisis has passed.)
The hallowed hype of the zombie was
that no customer be served more than
two in a sitting, and that is probably not
such a bad idea. The last thing we need in
these perilous times is more zombies than
we can handle.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-win-
ning author of How’s Your Drink?
LIFE & ARTS
LONG LIFE
The Burger KKK
By Rob Long
Y ears ago, the Burger King Corpora-
tion tried to connect with the kids,
which is how I’m sure they put it during
the marketing meeting. “What are we
doing to connect with the kids?” asked a
senior vice president.
“Glad you asked. We have a meeting
scheduled to tackle that,” answered an
executive vice president.
So, a meeting was convened and con-
sultants were hired, and they created
something they called the Burger King
Kids Club, which they stocked with a
fictionalized group of animated children
whose exploits they featured in commer-
cials. It was like a minishow starring a fun
group of cartoon friends that took place
in and around a Burger King franchise.
The children in the real Burger King
Kids Club — and I promise I am not mak-
ing this up — were exactly what you’d ex-
pect from someone making a parody of
the Burger King Kids Club.
There was Kid Vid, a white kid, video
gamer, and tech enthusiast. He was the
leader of the group because, well, I mean,
privilege? Hello?
But wait. There was also diversity.
There was Boomer, a tomboy who loved
sports, and an African American child
named Jaws who loved to eat. Jazz was
an Asian girl who played, yes, a musical
instrument. And well before illegal im-
migration was a hot topic, the marketing
team at Burger King addressed the issue
with Lingo, a bilingual Mexican American
boy. “Lingo,” weirdly, sounds a lot like
the Spanish word for “tongue,” so maybe
they could have spent five more minutes
on that one. And finally, in an effort to be
truly inclusive, there was a boy in a wheel-
chair. His nickname was Wheels.
Just try to calculate, for a moment, the
number of meetings it took to come up with
that concept and those characters. Try, for a
second, to estimate the hours spent in off-
site conferences, brainstorming sessions,
late-night creative meetings with dry-erase
boards and trust falls, focus groups, and
moments when tempers flared.
“Um, guys, you know that ‘Lingo’ in
Spanish sounds like —“
“We don’t have time for your negativ-
ity, Linda! Be constructive!”
54 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
And I’m sure there were triumphant
moments too, such as when someone broke
the tense and defeated silence with an “I got
it! I got it! They call him … Wheels!”
Look, it’s easy to mock. And the truth
is, we should just be grateful they spelled
Kids Club with a K and a C, rather than a
K and a K, like I’m sure they planned to
until someone in one of the offsite brain-
storming sessions, probably that awful
Linda person, noticed that Burger King
Kids Klub looks a lot like Burger KKK.
Different thing entirely. Not so appealing.
The Burger King Kids Club was, by any
show business measure, a hit. The com-
mercials ran for about 10 years, through
several different hairstyle crazes and al-
most all the way to the skinny jean era,
which, in the spirit of full disclosure, is lon-
ger than any television series that I have
ever created has lasted. It’s unclear wheth-
er it connected with the kids, or reposi-
tioned the brand, or did any of the things
it set out to do. That’s always the problem
with creative marketing schemes — you
only really know if they fail disastrously.
Burger King, like most other fran-
chise-based operations, is really two
companies. There’s the main company,
which does the marketing and the brand-
ing and the figuring out how to connect
with the younger generation, and there
are the franchisees, which are mostly run
by local business people. The marketing
people like to come up with creative ideas
that have impact. The local guys, for the
most part, like to keep things simple: fade
in, show the burger, hot and juicy, show the
bottle, droplets of condensation, show the
consumer enjoying the product, fade out.
Boring. But effective.
But no meetings needed. No offsite
retreats, no brainstorming sessions, no
trips to visit the design team in Manhat-
tan, where you can also catch Hamilton
and stay an extra day. No special status
around the office (“Sorry, can’t pitch in
on that. I’m too deep in the Kids Club
Initiative. Ask Linda, she seems to have
more free hours.”) and no fun swag at the
big media launch. You don’t need any of
that if you’re just showing pictures of a
hamburger, glistening heroically against
a white background.
Which is why there will always be,
in pretty much every business, a Burger
King Kids Club. Of one kind or another.
Rob Long is a television writer and produc-
er, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
SPORTS
Quarantine Bod
By Martin Kaufmann
Y our gym is closed. You don’t have any
exercise equipment at home. So how
do you maintain your fitness during the
protracted coronavirus lockdown?
Start by heeding the advice of a cyn-
ical Chicago politician who told us to
“never let a crisis go to waste.” In fitness
terms, that means using the current
shutdown, now extended until at least
April 30, to try new exercises that will
shake up your monotonous workouts
and raise your fitness level when you re-
turn to the gym.
“There are so many people who are
stuck because all they know to do are the
circuit pieces of equipment at the gym,”
said Dr. Greg Rose, who co-founded Ti-
tleist Performance Institute, which has
23,000 certified trainers in 64 countries.
“Most athletes don’t do that anyway.
They use more free weights, body mo-
tion, body control, cable stuff, and rub-
ber bands.”
Like many people, I spent recent
weeks surfing body-weight routines on
YouTube to get some exercise until my
gym reopens. I quickly realized two
things: It’s harder than it looks, and it
should be a cornerstone of my exercise
regimen.
“Typically, in a gym setting, you
should be doing things you’re not good
at, and a majority of the time, that’s
body-weight workouts,” said Carson
Kemp, owner of FSI Scottsdale in Scott-
sdale, Arizona. (FSI stands for flexibility,
stability, and intensity.)
This is something that top trainers
have been preaching to their clients,
from professional athletes to weekend
warriors, for years. Alex Bennett, who
spends much of his time training pro-
fessional golfers at the PGA Tour’s Per-
formance Center in Ponte Vedra Beach,
Florida, estimated that 30% of his ses-
sions involve body-weight routines “be-

cause it’s the only way to teach proper
body control — to use your own weight
as the weight.”
Kemp sets aggressive goals. When he
meets new clients, he tells them that they
should be able to squat comfortably for
six to eight minutes, though he knows
that’s a big ask for people who sit much
of the day and have limited hip strength
and flexibility.
He emphasizes a variety of “founda-
tional movements,” such as pushups,
lunges, and bear crawls.
“We should be able to move our body
weight for very high reps — do 100
squats, do 100 lunges, do 100 pushups,”
Kemp said. “That should be a regular
part of our training because higher-vol-
ume training is great for your joints and
balancing out your body.”
Josh Lyon, director of fitness for 24
Hour Fitness, echoed Kemp’s recom-
mendation and suggested ways to jazz
up the routines at home.
“Don’t discount common items
around your house like a chair for do-
ing dips and pushups at an incline or
decline,” Lyon said. “You can also use
items like water bottles, cans of soup,
and bags of potatoes as weights to add
resistance to your exercises. The key is
to get creative and mix things up to stay
motivated.”
Bennett said he was telling clients to
use the current shutdown to increase
their mobility. Even while watching TV,
he said, you can do a pigeon pose or
other low-intensity yoga movements to
enhance flexibility.
“The biggest thing I preach to every-
one, whether it’s a 70-year-old guy or a
kid, is to get good doing a lot of different
things,” Bennett said. “Don’t just be re-
ally strong with your legs or have a big
upper body and look good at the beach.
It’s more about functionality than looks.”
The coronavirus lockdown isn’t just
changing workout routines; it’s also af-
fecting the way trainers do business.
Today’s innovations are creating tomor-
row’s business opportunities. Kemp, for
example, has been providing online pro-
gramming for his clients via Facebook,
while 24 Hour Fitness has been beefing
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 55
LIFE & ARTS
up the workout content on its 24GO app
and has recently made that content avail-
able for free on YouTube.
“This is a great time to push yourself
outside your comfort zone,” Lyon said.
“If you gravitate toward high-intensity
workouts, try a meditation or yoga class.
It can help you stay grounded and relieve
stress. Or, if you’ve never participated in
a HIIT (high-intensity interval training)
workout, it’s a stimulating change of
pace, but take it slow to avoid injury.”
At TPI, aspiring trainers used to be
required to attend a two-day seminar to
become certified, but on March 25, the
company introduced virtual seminars.
Within minutes of that announcement,
Rose said TPI received registrations
from trainers in two countries, Iran and
Hungary, where it previously had no
presence.
“This could change the way we do
business going forward,” Rose said.
Martin Kaufmann has covered sports for
more than two decades, including 16 years
as senior editor at Golfweek.
the columnists
GURDON
Tiger King and the
coronavirus culture
L
ike millions of others
scratching for something to
entertain themselves during
the lockdown, my family
and I have watched Tiger
King: Murder, Mayhem, and
Madness. For the few of you
who don’t know the show, which
became a national craze, it’s about a
man improbably named Joe Exotic,
who is behind bars (and quarantined)
in Florida for the attempted murder
of Carole Baskin, an activist who
worked to shut down his roadside
zoo, with its hundreds of big cats.
It’s riveting, not least because the
ratio of freak to regular Joe, of weird
to normal, is so skewed toward the
remarkable that it’d be implausible as
fiction. The facts, however, support
the evidence of your lying eyes, and
you’re glued.
The show illuminates an almost
instantaneous change in our behavior
that has taken place since the
coronavirus arrived.
Chad Chronister, sheriff of
Hillsborough County, Florida, himself
a binge Tiger King watcher, has
reopened the cold case of Don Lewis,
a local millionaire who disappeared
23 years ago and who Mr. Exotic says
was murdered and fed to tigers by
“The show
illuminates an almost
instantaneous change
in our behavior that
has taken place since
the coronavirus
arrived.”
56 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
Lewis’s wife, the same Carole Baskin.
(See, I told you there was a lot of
weird.) Tips for the sheriff are sluicing
in from a locked-down public all
watching the same show.
Everyone except the overworked
heroes of the healthcare sector are
living similar lives now. We who
are not doctors, nurses, and other
medical staff have only a few things
left to do, so we are doing them all —
washing our hands, stewing in our
homes, going out for walks, veering
away from oncoming pedestrians,
returning home to experiment with
quarantine cocktails in virtual happy
hours, and eating too much.
On a walk recently, a neighbor
commented to me that the dullness
of life today is a measure of how rich
and varied it used to be eons ago in
February. But there is a profound
irony, which is that we were more
atomized before social distancing
began than we are now. We’re all
holed up and separated from each
other, but we’re all also experiencing
the same things, enduring the same
frustrations, in the same boat. Before
the pandemic whittled our activities
down, there was far less common
ground between us.
We aren’t exactly back to the days
when the whole nation tuned in to
the evening news so Walter Cronkite
could tell us what was happening. But
there is now more of a shared way of
life.
Parents are spending far more time
with children. Out on those walks,
one sees fathers shooting hoops with
sons and daughters in the middle of
the day when they’d normally be at
their offices. Neighbors stop 6 feet or
more apart and ask about each other’s
health. Strangers make way for each
other with a renewed politeness that
germinated in an understanding that
society will function a lot better if we
treat each other considerately.
Some idiot joggers still brush
sweatily by on narrow trails, and a
few shoppers lurch across your face
to snatch the last package of wipes
that you were about to take from
a supermarket shelf. But these are
exceptions that prove the rule of our
new way. More often, runners loop
off the track to give you (not just
them) more space, and shoppers stop
and wait at the end of an aisle until
the only other customer in it has
emerged and left it vacant.
The common culture has curtain-
twitching aspects, an intensified
instinct to peer at what other people
are doing. A common culture with
shared assumptions is also a little
nosier. There is more to watch
outside our windows when neighbors
are at home, more people whose
ordinary behavior is suddenly of
greater interest than it used to
be. Doubtless, there is also more
willingness to report transgressions
to officialdom rather than shrug and
mutter that it is none of our business.
Hence the flood of tips for Sheriff
Chronister.
Like a flash of lightening in the
night, the coronavirus has given us a
glimpse of a way of life half forgotten,
but which we recognize during a
brief moment of illumination. It’s a
narrower life, a slower life, a more
claustrophobic life — and we’ll leave
it behind without regret when the
threat has passed. But it is fascinating
in what it shows about our swift
adaptation, and in how it recalls a
not-so-distant past — as fascinating
as the freaks at the other end of the
spectrum on Tiger King. +
Hugo Gurdon is editor-in-chief of the
Washington Examiner.
BARNES
Trump is right to want to get
the economy started again
P
resident Trump loves to talk
up the roaring economy he
sees arriving sooner than
you might think. “Once we
get rid of the virus, I think
we’ll have a boom economy
… a tremendous rebound,”
he insisted last week. “We’ll be the talk
of the world soon. … We’re going to be
stronger than ever.”
This is more than just the usual
Trump hyperbole. He will be in a
stronger position to free up parts
of the economy from coronavirus
restrictions than in late March, when
he was pressured to back off his plan
to do so by Easter. Trump had to yield
to a superior force: the collusion of the
public health network, both political
parties, and the media. But if there
are indications that the growth in new
coronavirus infections has peaked by
May, the president is poised to argue for
easing constraints on some areas of the
country and boosting the economy.
He would take advantage of the blue
state/red state divide. The coronavirus
has become a plague in urban areas,
which are mostly in blue states. Red
states, though not all of them, are
less infected. Democrats, the blue-
state folks, might object to loosened
regulations, but red-state Republicans
are more likely to favor an end to the
current “lockdown.”
“States are different,” Trump said at
a White House briefing. “You have to
give a little flexibility for every state.”
His idea here is to allow some of the
less infected states to open up their
economies by ending rules such as the
“stay at home” requirement. The effect
would be to hasten the rising economy
that’s forever on the president’s mind.
It makes sense economically and
politically. The longer the economy is
strapped with restrictions, the longer
it will take for it to revive — and the
weaker the economy will be on Election
Day in November.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York
hasn’t endorsed Trump’s strategy. But
he’s not far off. “The smartest way
forward is a modified public health
strategy that dovetails and complements
a get-back-to-work strategy,” Cuomo
said. “Younger people can go back to
work. People who can … show they have
had the virus and resolved can go back
to work. It’s not [that] we’re either going
to do public health or we’re going to do
economic development. We’re going to
do both.”
The sticking point with Trump’s
effort to stir economic activity is the
timetable. It’s clear from his comments
he wants to start revving the economy in
May, a few weeks after Easter.
The New York Times has other ideas.
Keeping people tethered inside for two
months or more doesn’t faze the press
giant. Nor does associating their notion
with historic greatness. “It’s a Marshall
Plan, an Apollo mission and a New Deal
all rolled into one,” declared an opinion
writer for the New York Times. The theme
is that the New York shutdown is good
for everyone: “It increasingly appears
necessary that for the next eight weeks,
and possibly for longer, all nonessential
businesses should be closed, domestic
travel restricted and the ‘shelter in place’
measures being employed by some parts
of the country extended to the rest.”
“A June startup is
awfully late. The
economy has done
more than just come
to a near halt.”
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 57
The New York Times is not alone in
restraining the economy for the time
being. If people are “disciplined about
social distancing and testing increases
… the economy can open back up again
probably in two months,” according
to Bill Gates. Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel
wrote in the New York Times that if the
federal government “acts now … a strong
national response may allow America to
open up sooner — in June, not by Easter
— and do it more safely.”
A June startup is awfully late. The
economy has done more than just come
to a near halt. Fortune 500 companies
continue to pay employees, but the
smaller elements of the economy are
disassembling. The longer the wait for
an economic go-ahead, the harder to
put things back together. Apartment
dwellers have stopped paying their rent.
Mortgage lenders fearing a wave of
unpaid loans want a $40 billion bailout
to cover the next three months.
Democrats are living up to their
reputation for exploiting a crisis for
whatever unrelated bonuses they can
get. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is
seeking to resurrect the deduction of
state and local taxes from federal tax
returns. It would come in the fourth
“relief” measure costing billions. And
would be the biggest tax payoff ever
for the top 1%. But Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell has said no to
spending bill No. 4 and a tax reward the
wealthy.
Trump is on the right track on the
economy. Yes, he has a vested interest
in a strong economy. Nate Silver said,
“A bad economy makes life harder for
the incumbent party.” That’s not all. It
makes life harder still for the American
people. +
Fred Barnes, a Washington Examiner
senior columnist, was a founder and
executive editor of the Weekly Standard.
the columnists
HANNAN
Never forget this wretched moment
S
hall I tell you the worst
thing? I suspect that people
are going to look back, years
from now, with nostalgia.
We are actually going to
miss, or at least imagine that
we miss, the horrors we are
now going through.
It will be like the London Blitz — the
misery forgotten, the “spirit” recalled
and exalted. When we talk about the
events of 2020, we won’t be thinking
about the poverty, the squalor, the petty
restrictions. We will remember, instead,
the mood of national solidarity and
purpose.
Does that strike you as implausible?
Are you, perhaps, reading these words
cooped up in a small apartment with
frazzled children? Are you desperate for
the shops to reopen? Are you badly in
need of a haircut? Are you wondering
whether your business will survive or
whether you will have a job to go to
after all this? Are you worried about
family members stranded far away?
Almost all of us are in at least one or
two of these categories. Yet the human
capacity for adaptation is extraordinary.
Very quickly, we learn to normalize
“Are you, perhaps,
reading these words
cooped up in a small
apartment with
frazzled children?
Are you desperate for
the shops to reopen?
Are you badly in need
of a haircut?”
58 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
and work around restrictions, to focus
on the positive, to take big pleasure in
small things. When we reminisce, it is
often the tiniest things that loom the
largest.
A lot of us, I suspect, have been in
touch with friends and family whom
we don’t usually speak to as often as
we’d like. I chatted through Zoom to
my cousin in Philadelphia this week.
At both ends of the call, small children
were tearing about with the frustrated
energy that comes from closed schools
and locked playgrounds. And yet, we
found ourselves swapping notes almost
merrily about the things we were doing:
family movie nights, treasure hunts for
the children, the novelty of all of us all
sitting down for meals together every
day.
True, my cousin and I are luckier
than most. He and his wife both work
in the academic sector and so are not
faced with the loss of their livelihoods.
I, like most writers, was already largely
working from home. Neither of us is
among the millions who have already
lost their jobs in Britain and the United
States or the many millions more who
will do so if the closures remain in place
beyond Easter. But even those of my
neighbors who are losing everything —
the osteopath in my village, who had
a thriving business until a month ago,
has suddenly gone from 300 patients a
week to zero — are bizarrely sanguine.
Why? Why are we putting up so
cheerfully not only with economic ruin
but with abominable restrictions on our
freedom? In Britain, some police forces
have taken with undisguised glee to the
crisis, ordering people not to travel too
far even for solitary walks, encouraging
neighbors to snitch on each other if
they are outdoors too often.
The answer lies not in the field of
politics but in that of evolutionary
biology. We are tribal creatures,
and at times like this, we elevate
the collective above the individual.
Shutdowns, bans, and the persecution
of dissidents become popular. People
crave the smack of firm government.
No politician loses votes for erring on
the side of caution. No administration
is criticized for acting too firmly. In
Britain, as elsewhere, newspapers were
demanding a “lockdown” (a ghastly
term borrowed from prison) long before
ministers imposed one.
In his brilliant short book Tribe,
Sebastian Junger interviewed a number
of people who had lived through
the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s.
Although, naturally, they were glad
that the war was over, they almost all
also reported a sense of loss. They
missed the feeling of simplicity and
collective endeavor that the conflict had
engendered, the way neighbors ceased
to be strangers and became part of
an extended family, the way everyone
knew what needed to be done. Junger
explained that crises of this kind bring
us closer to our hunter-gatherer nature
than anything we normally experience
in an affluent Western society, where we
live and sleep alone and where personal
autonomy is a supreme value. It is why
cases of depression and suicide actually
fall at times like these.
Still, we should make a point of
remembering the actual, miserable
inconveniences of these days. We should
lodge them firmly in our memories so
that years from now, when people start
enthusing about those innocent times
when the skies were empty of aircraft
and filled with birdsong, when we all
had time to play board games with our
kids and the neighbors looked out for
one another, we recall the real, wretched
experience. +
Daniel J. Hannan is a British Conservative
MEP.
SOLTIS
ANDERSON
Americans are making
huge sacrifices. Make
sure they’re worth it
W
ith last week’s
jaw-dropping
unemployment
figures showing
more than 10 million
Americans applied
for unemployment
benefits in March, it is increasingly
clear just how seriously Americans are
facing abrupt and devastating personal
consequences due to our prudent
and necessary social distancing
measures in the face of the coronavirus
pandemic.
This has led some leaders and
commentators to ask if it is all worth
it or if the cure, in this case, is, in
fact, worse than the disease. We must
balance not letting the illness spread
and not letting it choke our economy,
goes the argument, as if the economy
could thrive with the virus still being
transmitted.
Americans, for now, do believe it
is worth it. They are making changes
to their lives, often at great personal
cost, because of the collective good.
But if measures to fight the coronavirus
are lifted too early, if reopening is
pursued in haste, it puts at risk any
progress being made by virtue of these
sacrifices.
The changes to daily life and
sacrifices being made by people of all
walks of life today are astounding in
scale and devastating in impact.
There are those who have been laid
off, the servers, bartenders, theater
staff, food service workers, and retail
staff, who worry about making rent and
paying bills.
There are those who are in the
healthcare field who face exhausting
and dangerous conditions to keep us
all alive.
There are small business owners
who have poured everything they
have, economically and emotionally,
into their store or restaurant, who now
wonder if it will ever reopen or recover.
There are working parents who have
had to, overnight, become home-school
teachers to their children all while
trying to continue doing their day job.
There are students who will never get
to walk across the stage for graduation,
and worse, will enter a job market where
employers are either furloughing staff or
no longer looking to hire.
This is not “sitting home on the
couch for your country.” This is
massive sacrifice. For now, most people
think it is worth it. But they will not
forgive our leaders if those sacrifices
wind up being all for naught.
And yet, in the face of all of this, our
leaders have received generally positive
marks. President Trump’s job approval
has reached its highest point since he
was first inaugurated, and majorities
approve of the president’s current
response to the crisis. Governors
and government leaders such as Dr.
Anthony Fauci are generally getting
rave reviews from those of both
parties, an astonishing shift from our
generally hyperpartisan climate.
This, despite the fact that people
are nonetheless critical of the initial
“The changes to daily
life and sacrifices
being made by
people of all walks
of life today are
astounding in scale
and devastating in
impact.”
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 59
response from the federal government,
where a majority say that the spread of
the virus would be less if we had acted
faster, with only a third saying nothing
really could have prevented our current
situation. People generally do not think
the response has been perfect, but that
the measures in place at the moment
are necessary and, if anything, ought to
be tighter, with 46% saying they think
Trump is “not taking the outbreak
seriously enough.” Only a quarter of
the country views our current response
as an overreaction, and those people
are among the most likely to take cues
from Trump about what we should and
shouldn’t do.
Thankfully, this weekend Trump
backed off his initial comments that
he had hoped to reopen the economy
by Easter, instead allowing his health
experts to guide him to a later April 30
target and with the important caveat
that the data would guide his future
decisions. This is absolutely right. A
loosening of lockdown measures will
give the disease more opportunity to
spread, reach new communities, and
further exhaust our health system.
Loosening too much too soon can wipe
out any progress that has been made
in these last few weeks, which will only
begin showing up in a leveling off of
numbers weeks down the road.
The pain Americans are feeling now
will only intensify during this time, as
people’s savings begin to dwindle, as
they become more exasperated with
the mental toll of the changes to daily
life, and as the costs to us all become
greater and greater.
These sacrifices should not be
minimized. Instead, they should be
honored — honored by making sure
they were truly worth it. +
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a contributor to
the Washington Examiner.
the columnists
BARONE
Contrast between China and
its neighbors shows communist
regime’s true character
T
here’s no greater contrast
between how countries
have treated the COVID-19
pandemic than that
between nations on both
sides of what might be
called the Asian Iron
Curtain.
It’s a contrast that tells us much
about how to handle the disease, and
how events now in the distant past
can determine the fates of hundreds of
millions of people today.
On one side is the People’s Republic
of China, where the novel coronavirus
apparently transferred from animal to
human hosts. There, the government
deliberately lied about human-to-
human transmission, persecuted to the
point of death doctors who warned of
its dangers, and is still almost certainly
lying about its continued spread.
On the other side of this Iron
Curtain — actually, a virtual barrier
penetrated, until the virus appeared,
by dozens of airline flights every
day — are places which seem to have
responded most successfully to the
pandemic: Taiwan, South Korea,
Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Three of these are ethnically or
culturally Chinese. Each had an
authoritarian government at some
point. Each has (or in Hong Kong’s
case, clearly wants) a rule-of-law
democracy.
It’s a divide as sharp as the one
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
used to show visitors — a photo
of the Korean Peninsula at night
with South Korea lit up brightly and
North Korea almost entirely pitch
black. A one-picture lesson in the
difference between the free market and
communism.
Taiwan intensively screened
passengers flying in from China,
produced and distributed record
60 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
numbers of facial masks, and strictly
enforced quarantines. South Korea
introduced an intensive testing and
contact-tracing program. Hong Kong
reduced land borders crossings from
an average of 300,000 daily to 750
and imposed strict quarantines.
Singapore had mandatory quarantines
for arriving airline passengers and
stringent contract tracing.
All four of these nations have had
relatively low numbers of deaths and
seem to be on track to stopping the
spread of the disease. And all have
done so with a transparency that’s a
vivid contrast with the concealment
and lies that are standard practice in
the People’s Republic of China.
Just as in Donald Rumsfeld’s
Korean Peninsula photo, it’s clear that
regime character makes an enormous
difference. Taiwan, South Korea,
Singapore, and Hong Kong have
shown how people raised in Chinese
or Chinese-influenced cultures of
social cohesion and observation of
rules can perform well in a situation of
unanticipated stress.
It’s hard to avoid reflecting how
much better off East Asia and the
world would be if the billion-plus
people of mainland China lived under
such a regime. But that was foreclosed
when the Red Army led by Mao
Zedong declared victory in the Chinese
civil war and took power more than 70
years ago, in September 1949.
Regret over that unhappy
event has been largely verboten in
American political discourse since the
discrediting of the “who lost China?”
campaigns of Joe McCarthy and others
in the early 1950s. Some even charged
that President Harry Truman and Gen.
George Marshall were pro-communist
for opposing military aid to Chiang
Kai-shek’s nationalist army.
The American diplomats known as
“China hands,” who regarded Mao as a
domestic reformer, were called traitors
and their careers destroyed. They were
wrong about Mao, but they had been
sincere in their beliefs. And Truman
and Marshall were surely correct that
the American public, after just losing
450,000 soldiers in a world war, would
not support involvement in an Asian
civil war.
Two decades later, Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger pioneered a new
policy of strategic engagement with
China, and later presidents welcomed
increasing trade with China, including
normal trade relations in 2000. The
hope, expressed succinctly by Deputy
Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in
2005, was that China would become
a “responsible stakeholder” in the
international system and more
democratic, or observant of human
rights, at home.
Those hopes have been dashed.
The low-priced China manufactures
that Americans have been buying seem
to have carried too high a cost. Xi
Jinping’s China has become markedly
more hostile to human rights at home
and much more menacing abroad.
Despite attempts at a cover-up,
the COVID-19 pandemic has brought
both these aspects of the Communist
regime into full view. The contrast with
the success stories of Taiwan, South
Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore
could not be stronger.
Of course, no one can change
what happened in 1949, and China’s
Communist party, unlike Russia’s,
seems entrenched in power after
threescore and ten years. But we can
at least regret Mao’s victory and hope
that China’s East Asian neighbors, not
China, are the wave of the future. +
Michael Barone is senior political analyst
for the Washington Examiner.
CARNEY
Unemployment insurance is not good
enough. We should be backstopping
every business’s payroll
I
t’s as if every adult in New York
City just got laid off last week,
the week after every adult in Los
Angeles got canned.
The 6.6 million new jobless
claims last week, combined
with the 3.3 million the week
before, means a stunning 10 million
people have been laid off in just two
weeks. That’s 10 times worse than any
previous two-week stretch.
It’s good that Congress has
expanded unemployment insurance to
take care of these 10 million — and the
millions that will lose their jobs in the
coming weeks. But even if these many
millions get enough in unemployment
benefits to pay their bills, America
suffers greatly, both socially and
economically, from the layoffs.
Our government should have acted
to prevent the layoffs rather than simply
“Most tangibly,
people on payroll
will have more
assurance that their
job is still waiting
for them when the
coronavirus and
the shutdown start
to lift. Maybe more
importantly, they
will still belong
to something
important: their
workplace.”
mitigate the effect of the layoffs. They
should now act very quickly to prevent
further layoffs, possibly by passing a
massive bill to cover payroll for every
business whose revenue is harmed
by the coronavirus and the shutdown
(which, yes, would be nearly every
business).
Maybe there’s another solution.
Maybe the CARES Act’s Paycheck
Protection Program can be
implemented in a more direct and
robust way. But the goal of federal
policy these days should be keeping
as many people in their current jobs as
possible.
Why?
Because separating workers from
their employers is bad for both, even if
the government is able to keep money
flowing to both.
People do better when they have a
job, or something akin to a job such as
full-time school or parenting. These
days, many people simply cannot
work because their employers cannot
allow them on-site, or because their
work would be too risky. While some
of us joke about the joys of idleness,
this separation from work will cause
suffering in terms of mental health,
drug abuse, alcohol abuse, weight gain,
and so on.
But the harm from work lost could
be lessened if we could prevent both
the income loss and the employment
loss. That is, idle folks (or crazy-busy
new-homeschooler folks) on payroll
are better off than the same folks on
unemployment.
Most tangibly, people on payroll
will have more assurance that their
job is still waiting for them when the
coronavirus and the shutdown start to
lift. Maybe more importantly, they will
still belong to something important:
their workplace.
Belonging is a key to happiness and
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 61
the good life, and maladies such as
deaths of despair, divorce, depression,
and anxiety are rooted in a lack of
belonging.
Think of it this way: A job
provides work, belonging, and money.
Unemployment insurance can provide
the money. Nothing these days can
provide the work. Subsidizing payrolls,
though, can preserve the belonging.
Employers benefit, too, if they can
afford to keep workers on payroll. Many
of them want to flip the lights back on
as soon as possible. Laying off workers
makes that harder.
“Businesses who lay workers off
will have to incur the cost of recruiting
and retraining new workers,” labor
economist Mike Strain at AEI explains.
“Those costs can be significant,
especially for small businesses where
workers need a lot of job-specific
knowledge. If we can keep workers
on payroll — even if there is little for
them to do — then firms can avoid
those costs. In addition, keeping those
workers on payroll avoids the process
of unemployed workers and employers
finding good matches once the crisis
lifts. The economy could snap back
much more quickly if workers remain
attached to their employers throughout
the crisis.”
The Treasury Department is
supposed to roll out the Paycheck
Protection Program on Friday. It looks
like it may be pretty weak at keeping
people on payrolls. It certainly didn’t
stop the 10 million who already lost
their job.
Whether through better
implementation or a new law, we
need to move quickly to make sure
people who may not have work, at
least have employment. +
Timothy P. Carney is commentary editor
for the Washington Examiner.
the columnists
YORK
The #PresidentCuomo
fantasy
H
ow nervous are some
Democrats about Joe
Biden’s chances against
President Trump this
November? Nervous
enough to entertain
the notion that another
Democrat, New York Gov. Andrew
Cuomo, might swoop in and save the
day.
Cuomo, who has been governor for
nearly a decade and has one of the most
famous names in Democratic politics,
found new prominence when his state
became the epicenter of the coronavirus
crisis in the United States. In February
and March, some New York officials
urged the public to maintain regular
activities even as the virus took hold in
the state, leading to the worst outbreak
in the country. Now, with New York in
crisis, the governor holds daily briefings
that some politicos see as an effective
counterpoint to Trump’s White House
updates.
It did not take long for the hashtag
#PresidentCuomo to appear on
Twitter. And from there came the
dream that perhaps Cuomo might
somehow become the Democratic
standard-bearer.
“I see Cuomo as the Democratic
nominee this year,” entertainer Bill
Maher said recently. “If we could switch
Biden out for him, that’s the winner.”
But how? Among the states and
territories, the Democratic Party will
hold 57 primaries and caucuses this
year. Thirty of them have already been
held, after a campaign that began in the
spring of 2019.
So far, 10,118,114 people have voted
for Biden, while 7,665,794 have voted
for second-place Vermont Sen. Bernie
Sanders. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth
Warren, now out of the race, picked up
2,466,729 votes for third place.
At this point, does someone — Party
62 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020
elders? The chairman of the Democratic
National Committee? — tell the
10,118,114 people who voted for Biden:
“Never mind. Governor Cuomo will be
your candidate now.” Or does someone
tell the 7,665,794 who voted for Sanders:
“Sorry, Biden won’t be the candidate,
but neither will the second-place
finisher.”
Remember the big deal some
Democratic leaders and commentators
made of the fact that the party’s African
American voters had chosen Biden?
Would that be thrown out, too?
Yes, there are some big states among
the 27 that have not yet voted, among
them Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin, Maryland, New Jersey, and
New York. (Cuomo recently announced
that his state’s primary, previously
scheduled for April 28, will now take
place June 23.) But Biden already has
1,215 of the 1,991 delegates required
to clinch the Democratic nomination.
Sanders has 909. There aren’t enough
delegates up for grabs in remaining
primaries for a new candidate to win.
Plus, apart from a write-in campaign,
to allow Democrats in those states to
vote for Cuomo would take throwing
out all the party’s rules — the rules
Biden, Sanders, and the rest played by.
And, of course, voters in the majority of
states and territories that have already
voted would never have the chance to
consider Cuomo. Finally, even if all the
rules were magically changed, the idea
of Cuomo abandoning his current job
at this critical time to run for president
is nuts.
So the only way any Democrat
could seriously hope for Cuomo as
their presidential nominee would be a
convention in which delegates threw out
Biden, and Sanders, and started from
scratch. And that would obliterate the
fundamental principle of the candidate
selection process: The nominee should
be selected by the party’s voters. It is
simple, straightforward, and sacred.
More than anything else, the
Cuomo boomlet is a reflection of some
influential Democrats’ misgivings about
Biden. They have always known that,
at age 77, he has lost a step. Now, they
are seeing him struggle to project any
sense of leadership in the crisis. They
know the rank-and-file Democrats
chose Biden in the primary field, but not
necessarily with any great enthusiasm.
In a new Washington Post-ABC poll,
86% of the people who say they plan to
vote for Trump say they are enthusiastic
about doing so. Just 74% of Biden
supporters say the same thing. The poll
also found that 15% of those Democrats
who currently prefer Sanders would
vote for Trump, not Biden, in the general
election.
“They’re a fractured party,” one
Trump campaign official said in a text
exchange Sunday. “Cuomo coming in
as the ‘savior’ would be viewed with
hostility by the Bernie people. Double
slap in the face.”
Cuomo, who won a third term as
governor in 2018, had his chance to run
for president. He chose not to. He has a
style and personality — largely unseen
in the virus coverage — that can be
difficult, to say the least. Last year, his
job approval rating among New Yorkers
fell into the 30s. There is no guarantee
or even indication that he would wear
well on American voters.
In a recent New York Times interview,
Cuomo said he is not interested in
running for president. “No. I know
presidential politics,” he told the paper.
“I’m at peace with who I am and what
I’m doing.”
Perhaps Cuomo, who is 62, will
reconsider and choose to run in 2024.
But for now, as long as Biden remains
able to run, Democrats seem to be on an
unalterable path to nominating him.
Some are doing so with
extraordinarily low expectations.
Recently, the Atlantic published an
article headlined “Stay Alive, Joe Biden”
that argued, “Democrats need little from
the front-runner beyond his corporeal
presence.” But in any event, Biden is
their man, no matter how much they
might wish for a savior named Andrew
Cuomo. +
Byron York is chief political correspondent
for the Washington Examiner.

Tom Coburn, 1948-2020
A man of his word —
especially the word ‘know’
By Courtney Shadegg
T
om Coburn was possibly the
most influential member of
the U.S. Senate in the past
40 years, but most people
will never know it. And that
would be just fine with Coburn, who
died March 28 at age 72 after a battle
with cancer, because he never sought
credit, praise, or the spotlight. Indeed,
he usually shunned them and taught
those of us who worked for or with
him to shun them as well. The result
was an office dedicated to results and
contemptuous of egotism.
Tom Coburn was born in Casper,
Wyoming, on March 14, 1948. The most
important things in his life were his
wife, Carolyn, his three daughters, his
grandchildren, and his deep faith. He
wanted to ensure his grandchildren had
the same opportunities and the same
freedoms he had, and he was worried
we were spending some of those
freedoms away.
When Coburn arrived in the U.S.
House of Representatives in 1994 and
the Senate in 2005, he had already run
a successful business, beaten cancer,
gone back to medical school in his
30s, and started a successful medical
practice — where over his career, he
estimated he’d delivered over 4,000
babies.
With family and faith as his anchor,
he operated without fear and for a
higher purpose. If doing what was right
cost him his seat, so be it — he imposed
term limits on himself anyway. Plus, he
had plenty of babies to deliver, and they
SUE OGROCKI/AP
cried less than most senators.
That courage earned him the
nickname Dr. No, for his practice of
putting a hold on Senate legislation set
‘Dr. No’
to be passed by unanimous consent,
a tool available to all senators but
infrequently invoked by most. Directly,
at least. In truth, some of Coburn’s
“holds” were on behalf of colleagues
who wanted to delay a bill but were
afraid to do so themselves.
And while the nickname always
amused him, he enjoyed it even more
after receiving two large framed words
in black and white from a constituent
one day. One said “No.” The other,
“Know.” They remained on the wall of
his office until his retirement in 2015.
That other “know” was as central
to his identity and the success of his
agenda as the first “no.” Coburn knew
every single bill he was holding and
why. Many times, he knew more about
a bill than its author.
His war on waste on both sides
of the aisle didn’t make life easy. But
it didn’t stop him from being well-
April 7-April 14, 2020 Washington Examiner 63
OBITUARY
liked. He struck up a friendship with
Barack Obama, and in 2005, when
Coburn took on powerful Alaska
Republican Ted Stevens and his $223
million earmark, dubbed the Bridge
to Nowhere, he could have made
an enemy for life. But that wasn’t
Coburn’s style. He bought Sen. Stevens
a box of cigars and insisted they smoke
them together.
He once flew back to D.C. in the
middle seat in the last row of the plane.
Since senators fly constantly, they
almost always get upgraded to first
class due to their mileage status with
the airline. And once you’ve flown
first class, coach is a tough sell. When
I apologized for the seat assignment,
he replied, “It’s OK. My ego needed a
middle seat, last row. Everyone needs it
now and then.”
His servant’s heart served him well.
It’s why, unlike so many members,
he took the time to mentor his staff.
Every class of interns met with him
for at least an hour. He was given a
biography of every individual who
started in the office. He once remarked
to another senator who didn’t know
his own staffer’s name: “The very least
you could do is learn the names of the
people who work for you.”
Many staffers thought of him as
a father. He saved one of us from an
abusive boyfriend, rescued another
from severe depression — his medical
advice saved my father’s life. He saved
some marriages and careers, and he
saved souls.
It wasn’t just senators he fought on
principle. After receiving two tickets
and a written warning from D.C.
Parking Enforcement informing him
that he had to change his Oklahoma
tags to district tags, Coburn composed
a prompt response. Included in the
packet we mailed to the DMV were
selections from The Federalist Papers
and a pocket Constitution (highlighted
and underlined throughout). We never
heard back. +
Courtney Shadegg, a government and
public relations consultant, is a former
aide to Sen. Tom Coburn.
CROSSWORD

Noise Cancelling 39 Contacting via 25 Fox pundit Ingraham

WhatsApp, say 26 Some chemical suffixes
By Brendan Emmett Quigley 40 Santa ___ , California 27 Ones responsible for
41 0% of the population paper cuts, briefly?
          
42 Come to pass 28 Singapore ___ (gin drink)
    45 Musical Jerome 31 Cacklers of fairy tales
46 Singer Neil’s conch? 32 Tennis legend Borg
   
48 Suffix with effect or text 33 Impart
   49 “I’m With ___” 34 Poky
     
50 Actor Idris 35 Hardly daydreaming
51 Riot in Attica? 36 Horse that isn’t two yet
   55 2020 candidate, and a 37 “While ___ the subject...”
 
phonetic hint to this 39 Pot marker
puzzle’s theme answers 41 Country of fjords
   
56 Kind of nose 42 Didn’t let go
  57 Bygone 43 Monégasque prince
58 Love to bits 44 Gliders and jets
    
59 Prefix with political and 46 Tokyo tender
   science 47 Ted Cruz’s wife
60 Longbow wood 49 Rail-riding bum
  
61 Breath fresheners 52 See in court, say
     53 Number sometimes
represented by candles
  
54 Detail on some tickets
   DOWN 55 Sound of sudden impact
1 “___ man bad” (meme
mocking groupthink)
2 Act nonchalant
ACROSS 23 Soccer score made 3 Reebok competitor
1 “Becoming” author by swindling? 4 Pose SOLUTION TO LAST
6 Certain candidate’s quest 28 Blackthorn fruit 5 Bubblehead WEEK’S CROSSWORD:
9 It makes music louder 29 Raised RRs 6 V.A. concern DON’T GO ANYWHERE
12 Fixes the decor 30 “Biography” channel 7 Querying sound % , 5 ; 6 ( 0 , 6 6 7 $ <
of completely 31 Copywriters’ awards 8 Coolant ( 6 $ , % 5 , 1 * & $ 5 / $
* , * , $ , 0 $ 7 $ ' , 2 6
13 Not just my or your 32 Holiday music? 9 Tennis legend Arthur 6 7 8 * 5 ( ( 1 0 $ 1 3 + ,
14 From ___to nuts 33 Accelerates (with “up”) 10 “The Catcher Was a 6 7 $ 5 6 ( $ 5 + ( $ 5
* ( $ 5 % 2 ; - 8 ' 2
16 Corrosive materials 34 Put down cookie Spy” subject Berg $ * 8 $ ( / . % 8 * / (
17 “Must you really get holders? 11 Boxer’s area 6 2 & , $ / ' , 6 7 $ 1 & , 1 *
6 ( 1 6 ( ' 8 ' $ 9 ( 6
clothes at that chain 37 Unyielding former prime 15 Over-the-hill boxer ( $ 7 6 6 7 $ / ( 6 7
store?” minister Theresa? 18 Italian playing card + ( $ ' + ( / ' + 2 / '

20 Focal point 38 2014 Pitbull/Jennifer 19 ___ v. Ferguson (1896 $

5
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$
7
+
0 (
$ /
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$ 1 9
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$ 3 ( '
21 Dublin’s country: Abbr. Lopez single “We Are segregation case) 6 7 2 & . . ( $ 1 ( 6 7 $ *
22 “___ give you that” One (___)” 24 “Deck the Halls” refrain + 2 / ( $ 5 / ( 6 + 2 0 (

64 Washington Examiner April 7-April 14, 2020