The Morning Dispatch: George Floyd’s Death Sparks Protests

Happy Thursday! We broke the record for most reader comments on a TMD post yesterday—hats off to you all!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• As of Wednesday night, 1,699,933 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the United States (an increase of 19,020 from yesterday) and we reached a grim but inevitable milestone in terms of the death toll: 100,442 deaths have been attributed to the virus (an increase of 1,526 from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 5.9 percent (the true mortality rate is likely much lower, but it’s impossible to determine precisely due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 15,192,481 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States (285,440 conducted since yesterday), 11.2 percent have come back positive.

• Due to poor weather, SpaceX postponed a historic rocket launch: It would have been NASA’s first launch of a manned flight from American soil since the shuttle program ended in 2011. The next possible launch time is this Saturday at 3:22 p.m. ET.

• President Trump will sign an executive order today born of his frustration with big tech platforms, proposing new federal restrictions on their operations in the name of extending free speech. 

• China has been taking advantage of the distraction caused by the global pandemic to pursue many of its long-standing regional ambitions. Beijing has resumed military operations in the South China Sea, moved thousands of troops to disputed areas along its border with Indian, and—perhaps most notably—passed a new national security law that could be used to encroach on Hong Kong’s beleaguered semi-autonomous democratic system. “No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.

• Citing “continued nuclear escalation,” Pompeo also announced Wednesday that the United States will be eliminating nuclear waivers, which allowed foreign corporations to work at Iran’s civilian nuclear companies. The waivers are a remnant of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which the Trump Administration withdrew from two years ago.

• The Uighur Human Rights Policy Act became the first bill to ever be passed by Congress via proxy voting, although it has yet to be signed into law by President Trump. The legislation, which enjoys widespread bipartisan backing, would sanction Chinese authorities responsible for forced labor camps in the Xinjiang province, where as many as 2 million Uighurs are currently being detained.

• House Democrats postponed a vote on FISA reauthorization after concerns from both Republicans and progressives threatened its passage. “If the FISA Bill is passed tonight on the House floor, I will quickly VETO it,” Trump tweeted.

Protests, Looting Follow Police Killing of George Floyd

Three days ago, George Floyd died in Minneapolis after police officers pinned him to the asphalt in the street for several minutes, with one officer’s knee crushing his neck. Floyd, who’d been arrested on suspicion of forgery and was unarmed, pleaded for the officer to remove his knee, declaring that he couldn’t breathe. His requests were ignored and by the time paramedics arrived, he was dead.

Several bystanders recorded the whole disturbing spectacle and begged the officer to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck, their cries growing more urgent when Floyd stopped struggling and his body went limp. The footage went instantly viral, provoking nationwide outrage. The officer who killed Floyd, identified by local news as Derek Chauvin, was immediately fired, as were the three other officers who took part in the arrest. And Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called on local authorities to charge Chauvin for Floyd’s death.

“Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?” Frey asked at a press conference Wednesday. “If you had done it, or I had done it, we would be behind bars right now… George Floyd deserves justice, his family deserves justice, the black community deserves justice, and our city deserves justice.”

That afternoon, President Trump weighed in, tweeting that he had asked the FBI to investigate Floyd’s “very sad and tragic death.”

“I have asked for this investigation to be expedited and greatly appreciate all of the work done by local law enforcement,” he wrote. “Justice will be served!”

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden also denounced the officers, recalling the eerily similar death of Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold on a New York City sidewalk in 2014.

“Watching his life be taken in the same manner, echoing nearly the same words of Eric Garner more than five years ago — ‘I can’t breathe’ — is a tragic reminder that this was not an isolated incident, but part of an ingrained systemic cycle of injustice that still exists in this country,” Biden said during a virtual event with Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf. “It cuts at the very heart of our sacred beliefs that all Americans are equal in rights and in dignity. And it sends a very clear message to the black community and black lives that are under threat, every single day.”

Protests of the killing sprung up around the country on Wednesday. In Minneapolis, protests around the Third Precinct police headquarters devolved into rioting, with police attempting to disperse the crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets. Although some protesters pleaded for calm, others threw rocks through precinct windows setting fire to local businesses. Journalists posted video online of looters stealing items and vandalizing a local Target store. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the protests resulted in at least one additional death: a pawn shop owner fatally shot someone attempting to loot his store. The fires in Minneapolis burned all night.

In Los Angeles, protestors temporarily halted traffic on a major highway, and surrounded and broke windows on several police cruisers. One man who sat on the hood of a police car was thrown to the ground and seemingly knocked cold as it sped away.

Is a V-Shaped Recovery Still Possible?

Earlier this week, a Politico piece from Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman sent the Acela corridor into a tizzy. Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, predicted “we are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country.”

The concern, apparently, is that this would help President Trump’s reelection campaign. “This is my big worry,” one former Obama White House official told Politico, adding that concern among Democratic elites is “high, high, high, high.”

In a piece for the site, Declan caught up with Furman—now an economics professor at Harvard—to pick his brain on how he sees the recovery playing out, what Congress should be doing to lessen the pain, and whether Democrats are actually rooting for elongated stagnation. Here are a few excerpts.

Is Furman saying the economy can just go back to normal?

No. He likened the country’s current economic emergency partly to a natural disaster, partly to a financial crisis. “The part that’s like a natural disaster will be solved relatively quickly, and the part that’s like a financial crisis will take many years to solve,” he projected. “I expect us to look like we’re on the ‘V’ trajectory, but that ‘V’ will only get us halfway. And so it’ll look like this incredibly rapid decline in the unemployment rate—from say 20 percent to 12 percent—but then the next eight percentage points will take much longer than the first eight percentage points.”

What does this mean for November’s election?

A CBO report expects record GDP contraction in Q2, but forecasts record growth in Q3—23.5 percent on an annualized basis. If the unemployment rate really drops eight points before November, Trump’s electoral prospects may look very different than they do right now. “I think politically and psychologically, there will be something different about a 12 percent unemployment rate if you have come down from 20 versus you have gone up to 12,” Furman said. “It’ll still be very high unemployment rate. It’ll still be an economy in a terrible situation. … It’s just different than just it rising to 12 percent.”

What does Furman think Congress should be doing right now?

State and local aid, extended—but phased down—unemployment insurance, and additional business loans—not grants—from the Federal Reserve.

The CARES Act’s additional $600 per week in unemployment insurance was the “right provision for the time” and necessary to protect consumer demand, he argued, but he advocated for a reduction in benefits when the clause expires at the end of July. “If you continued it at the full $600, I think that would be an issue because it’s a potentially unsustainable level to continue at,” he said, though he noted that the biggest problem in the economy right now is a lack of jobs, not workers to fill them. “Switching to replacement rates, like a 90 percent replacement rate, would be the better way to handle it going forward.”

She’s Loving by Proxy

For the first time in 231 years, the House of Representatives allowed absent members to participate in a floor vote on Wednesday despite a pending lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the new proxy voting rule. The 413-1 vote on the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 called for sanctions against China for its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities.

Last week, the House adopted House Resolution 965 along party lines, authorizing its members to vote by proxy for the next 45 days. As opposed to remote voting, the proxy voting rule allows an absent member of the House to designate a member who is present on the floor to vote on his or her behalf if the absent member sends a signed letter or email to the clerk. Once a member designates a proxy, the member is counted for purposes of quorum and substantive votes. 

According to the rules, only 20 members would be required to show up in person to pass legislation. (The House is made up of 435 members, a simple majority of 218 is needed to pass legislation. A proxy voting member can represent himself and 10 other members, which is 11 votes per proxy member.)

As of Wednesday afternoon, 71 members—all Democrats—had filed proxy voting letters with the clerk.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of 21 Republican members, pointed to language from the U.S. Constitution and examples from history that, in their view, support an in-person voting requirement. The complaint filed with the court argued that “[t]hrough the Civil War; through the burning of the Capitol during the War of 1812 and the terrorist attack on Washington on 9/11; and through the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 and the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, the Congress of the United States has never before flinched from its constitutional duty to assemble at the Nation’s Capital and conduct the People’s business in times of national peril and crisis.”

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that any legislation that passed the House using proxy votes would be invalid. “Whatever the Democrats propose to bring up cannot become law because it is unconstitutional,” he said Wednesday on the steps of the Capitol. He described the new rule as “a dereliction of duty of its members” intended “only to protect and empower a speaker.” And on the other side of the Hill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell referred to the new House rule as “a flat-out lie.”

Not surprisingly, Democratic leadership did not agree. “You have magnified form over substance,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer said during the floor debate, “Our constituents voted for us to vote their interests. And there are many ways we can do that.”

Judge Rudolph Contreras, appointed by President Obama to the D.C. District Court, will hear the case.

Worth Your Time

• A new academic paper published by Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu in the Cambridge University Press has made a stir in some circles by attacking the popular narratives surrounding President Trump’s unusual appeal with the white working class. “A careful examination of the data does not support the simple idea that Trump himself uniquely mobilized the white working class,” the paper argues. Rather, “the white working class’s participation in presidential elections has been slowly and steadily changing over the last two and a half decades in ways that have favored Republican candidates.” Not everyone was convinced by Carnes and Lupu’s hypothesis—in Tuesday’s FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, poll guru Nate Silver said he disagrees “substantially … with almost everything in the paper” because “Trump made gains among white working class voters, and those gains were pivotal to why he won.”

• Playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer passed away at age 84 on Wednesday. The New York Times has a nice piece about his relationship with an unlikely friend. In the late 1980s, Kramer wrote “An Open Letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci” in the San Francisco Examiner, complaining about the Reagan administration’s handling of the burgeoning AIDS crisis. Kramer reached his intended audience. “I thought, ‘This guy, I need to reach out to him,’” Dr. Fauci recalled. “So I did, and we started talking. We realized we had things in common.” It’s a friendship that probably added some years to Kramer’s life. In 2001, Fauci treated Kramer and determined he needed a liver transplant.

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• You’re really going to want to read Jonah’s latest G-File. He makes the case that the Trump campaign is choosing to run against the “media” rather than Joe Biden himself, and then he revisits his various beefs with White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, and questionable right-wing figures Michelle Malkin and Seb Gorka. “After reading all of their arguments and thinking about it a bit,” he writes, “I’ve concluded: They’re all wrong and I was right.”

• Tom Joscelyn’s Wednesday Vital Interests (🔒) examines China’s newly announced national security law for Hong Kong. As a pretext for implementing the law, the Chinese government is promoting a conspiracy that recent protests in Hong Kong were the work of the United States and United Kingdom. “Ominously, China’s foreign ministry claims that the protesters’ ‘activities have posed a grave threat to China’s sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity’ and it is they who have generated ‘a serious challenge to the principle of ‘one country, two systems,’ and presented a real threat to China’s national security.’”

• Trump’s threats to crack down on Twitter and his continued promotion of a wild conspiracy theory, Biden’s “you ain’t black” controversy, and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis—this week’s Dispatch Podcast breaks down all the most current of current events.

• A new Dispatch Fact Check is out, this one exploring claims that President Trump spent Memorial Day golfing. “While Trump did golf over Memorial Day weekend,” Alec writes, “assertions that he did so on Memorial Day itself are incorrect.”

• Also on the site today, Brad Polumbo talks to several economists who push back on the idea that the U.S. should cancel its debt with China in response to its mishandling of the pandemic. “The most obvious implication is that the ability of the U.S. to borrow would evaporate overnight,” said one.

Let Us Know

We want to tell more stories about how the coronavirus pandemic—and the subsequent lockdowns—have affected small businesses across the country. If you—or someone you know—have had to shutter or adapt your store, restaurant, or practice, and you’d be interested in sharing your experience, shoot us a note at replies@thedispatch.com.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), Alec Dent (@Alec_Dent), Nate Hochman (@njhochman), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph of a protester in Minneapolis by Steel Brooks/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.