Politics

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is attempting to hold up $50 billion in farm aid during negotiations over a coronavirus stimulus bill, a GOP aide tells The Spectator. Schumer is 'holding hostage' aid given to farmers through the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), a USDA-owned entity, according to the aide. The farm aid is just the latest piece of the stimulus package to which Democrats have raised objections. A potential deal to move forward on a bill failed Sunday after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Schumer said they disagreed with the GOP's approach to bailouts for big businesses. Both claimed the bailouts did not include enough protection for workers.

Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed 'non-essential' businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid spreading the coronavirus, New York governor Andrew Cuomo followed suit. 'This is about saving lives,' Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday. 'If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.' Cuomo’s assertion that saving 'just one life' justifies an economic shutdown raises questions that have not been acknowledged, much less answered, as public officials across the country compete to impose ever more draconian anti-virus measures: Is there any limit to the damage we are willing inflict on the world economy to mitigate the infection?

It’s widely agreed that Bernie Sanders fell short in the Democratic primary because he described himself as a socialist. As a movement, socialism has never had mass appeal in America. Even at its strongest, in 1912, it garnered fewer than one million votes for presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was trounced by Woodrow Wilson. More often, Americans have used the word ‘socialism’ as a synonym for communism, to signify everything America doesn’t stand for. Pundits put Sanders’s failure down to his attempts to give the word a positive spin. On the other hand, a dispassionate glance at American history shows that Uncle Sam has already gone a long way down the road of democratic socialism.

Donald Trump is right now facing easily the biggest test of his presidency. That’s a crazy thought considering Trump was impeached just three months ago, spent his first two-plus years in office battling claims his campaign colluded with Russia, and faced allegations of campaign finance violations that included paying hush money to a porn star. But the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus is totally out of Trump’s wheelhouse. He’s not fighting against a political opponent, the media, or the courts; instead, as the president pointed out on Twitter, he is battling an ‘invisible enemy’ — an unpredictable and deadly illness that’s quickly spread across the globe.

Though neither her supporters and detractors wanted to hear it, Tulsi Gabbard was always clear that she would support the eventual Democratic nominee. Now, with the Democratic primary functionally over, she has endorsed the nominee — Joe Biden. It’s really as simple as that.Tulsi haters loved to invent wild theories about her supposedly sinister motivations, and were always either unwilling or incapable of just listening to her plain-spoken words. Over and over again, she said she would not run as a third-party candidate and would support the eventual nominee. Anyone surprised by her announcement today had no reason to be: it doesn’t contradict anything she’s said in the past; in fact,  it comports entirely with what she always said she would do.

Vermin Supreme has ‘been running for president for over 30 years’. His two most recent bids polled at third and fourth in the 2012 and 2016 New Hampshire Democratic primaries, respectively. But now, the boot-bonneted boomer is running to win.When I spoke to Supreme in January, he had just triumphed in New Hampshire’s Libertarian presidential primary. Now he’s runner-up in the LP’s primaries, with a chance to be on every American’s ballot come November.‘This is my first legitimate, actual, bona fide, real campaign,’ he said. ‘In the past, I ran as a Democrat and was not a Democrat, I ran as a Republican and was not a Republican. Right now, I am a Libertarian and seeking the Libertarian party nomination.

Joe Biden is projected to win all three states that voted in the Democratic primary on Tuesday night, advancing his delegate lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders. Biden won Florida by a wide margin, garnering nearly 62 percent of the vote compared to Sanders’s 23 percent. Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders by a similar margin in 2016. Florida awards 219 delegates proportionally, putting Biden that much closer to the 1,991 delegates required to secure the nomination in the first round of voting at the Democratic National Convention. Poll workers in Florida noted lower turnout than usual due to fears over the coronavirus, a phenomenon that could have hurt Biden due to his popularity among older voters.

Two gentlemen considered at 'high risk' of contracting COVID-19 met tonight in the Washington DC studio of CNN, to pitch themselves to an on-edge nation as the best alternative to Donald Trump. The Sunday night face-off between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders was initially supposed to be in Phoenix, Arizona, as the state votes on Tuesday. But that was in The Before Time. Even the CNN panel was socially distanced before the debate, with panelists spaced six feet apart across two studios, as opposed to the usual eight people crammed behind the desk like a pack of hot dogs. This memo clearly didn't get sent down the hall to where the debate was being held, as Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Univision's Ilia Calderón sat unhealthily close together.

President Trump announced on Friday that the country is now in a state of emergency, due to the rapid pace of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus and its spread. Such a declaration escalates the federal government’s ability to respond to the virus, via the access of billions in funds that can be dispersed to state and local governments in need of additional financial assistance to accommodate robust public health responses. But the declaration was made too late. While we have the ability to contain this outbreak effectively with international coordination, the failures of the Trump administration to respond more quickly is troubling.

Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday over the spread of COVID-19, promising to dedicate $50 billion in funding for states to fight the virus. The order is the latest in a line of actions taken by the administration to try to stem the spread of the virus: major restrictions on travel from China and the European Union, convincing insurance companies to waive copayments on Coronavirus testing, and loosening FDA restrictions on testing, among others. 'We will overcome the threat of the virus,' President Trump said during a news conference in the White House Rose Garden.

Jared Kushner has a lot on his plate. The White House senior adviser was tasked this week with conducting research into the coronavirus to help Trump decide whether to declare a national emergency. According to Politico, Kushner is talking to 'relevant parties' and will 'present his findings to the president'. It appears that one of these 'relevant parties' is an emergency room doctor called Kurt Kloss, father of Jared's sister-in-law Karlie. And Dr Kloss sought the advice of other medical professionals on Kushner's behalf...in a Facebook group with almost 22,000 members. 'If you were in charge of Federal response to the Pandemic what would your recommendation be,' Kloss wrote in the private group Wednesday, according to screenshots passed to The Spectator.

There are no atheists in foxholes, and no libertarians in a pandemic. As the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the United States starts to resemble the exponential outbreaks in countries where the pandemic is more advanced, the American public wants the kind of security that only government can provide. Donald Trump was elected to provide security, whether from the domestic challenge of outsourcing or the foreign challenge of a rising China. In recent days, he has failed in judgment, in leadership and in decision-making. Only after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic did he address the nation and announce the closure of America’s borders.