The Morning Dispatch: It’s General Election Time

Happy Wednesday! And good morning to everyone except for Barbra Weber, who thoroughly beclowned herself on national television last night by refusing to support her son’s quest for love. Peter doesn’t deserve Madison (or Hannah Ann, for that matter), but we here at The Dispatch (Declan) are rooting for their relationship anyways. [Editor’s Note: This season of The Bachelor finally ended last night, so Declan has agreed to shut up about it going forward.]

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Joe Biden extended his delegate lead over Bernie Sanders in Tuesday’s voting, winning the Mississippi, Missouri, Idaho, and Michigan primaries, with North Dakota and Washington too close to call.

• Sanders and Biden both canceled campaign events over coronavirus fears, the first time either campaign has done so.

• Russia’s Vladimir Putin endorsed a constitutional proposal that would eliminate term-limit regulations and allow him to serve two additional six-year terms as president if he so chooses.

• President Trump officially endorsed former college football coach Tommy Tuberville in the Alabama Senate runoff over Jeff Sessions, his former attorney general.

It’s All Over but the Shoutin’

In 2016, Bernie Sanders won 23 contests, including Michigan, North Dakota, and Washington. Hillary Clinton wasn’t able to secure the nomination until June after beating Sanders in California by single digits. But last night, the Sanders’ campaign may have reached an early end. Democrats were openly contemplating how to push him out of the race. And his campaign announced that Sanders would “not speak or appear in public to address tonight’s results.” Over at our website, Sarah Isgur looks at whether “the perceived strength of Bernie’s progressive movement four years ago was always better explained as an anti-Hillary vote.”

Joe Biden, on the other hand, continued his march to the nomination with a bigger delegate lead than he came in with. He won college educated and non-college educated voters. He won black voters and union households. He won women. He secured the endorsement of Andrew Yang on live television. As results started to come in, so did the money. Priorities USA announced their support for Biden with “$150 million, including $70 million in battleground state ads, before the convention to take on Donald Trump.” American Bridge announced a $2.2 million ad buy in Pennsylvania for him. 

Looking forward, Biden is set to face Sanders at the next debate in Arizona on Sunday. Without a realistic path to the nomination, will Democrats allow Sanders to score points against the presumptive nominee and divide their party? Will they debate at all?

A Coronavirus Inflection Point Is Coming

The number of U.S. citizens infected with the novel coronavirus continues to rise, with confirmed cases surging past 1,000 Tuesday. In response, more and more communities across the country are beginning to take major “social distancing” steps to slow the disease’s advance. Some of these moves—like a number of major universities announcing they will switch to online-only classes until the virus is contained—are largely preemptive. Others are attempts to blunt the damage in areas that are already seeing major outbreaks. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday that the state will deploy the National Guard to a three-square-mile “containment area” in Westchester County, where gathering places like schools and churches will be closed for two weeks beginning March 12.

Meanwhile, efforts to play catch-up on testing for the virus continue to encounter problems. In Washington state, which still paces the nation in coronavirus deaths, firefighters who assisted a nursing home afflicted by the disease have had their quarantines extended after a lab was unable to process their test kits in time, and the kits expired.

The extent of our own current ignorance about the scale of our problem is hard to overstate. This graph illustrates the degree to which we’re still flying blind:

And yet the president is still trying to claim things are going well:

At this point, then, we still know little about the total severity of the current situation, except that numbers are likely to rise dramatically—even if no new infections were to occur—as testing ramps up in the coming days.

The one piece of good news: Being a few weeks behind other major countries has allowed the United States to get a sense of what the major dangers to avoid are, and what policies can be effective, if implemented correctly.

On the “cautionary tale” end of the spectrum, there’s the case of Italy, where the disease seemingly spread quietly for some time under the assumption it was pneumonia before its first case was officially reported on February 20. Once the government began testing, cases exploded—from just three on February 28 to more than 1,100 by March 2, to more than 10,000 today. The government tried to respond, instituting heavy travel and gathering restrictions, which may have helped slow the outbreak. But plenty of damage had already been done: Italian hospitals are creaking beneath the strain, and the country’s death rate for the coronavirus has spiked to more than 6 percent. That spike is attributable both to Italy’s elderly population and to the logistical difficulties of treating so many patients at once with so little time to prepare: In a widely shared Facebook post, one Italian doctor painted a grim picture: emergency rooms collapsing and doctors and nurses exhausted as they fight to treat a ceaseless wave of new patients, all with the same disease.

Other countries have been more successful, and none more so than South Korea, where the rate of new infections has already begun to level off. Although more than 7,000 South Koreans have tested positive for the virus, only 50 have died—a testament not only to the state’s medical system, but also to its all-hands-on-deck testing response that ensured even mild cases of the disease were discovered early and tracked. In stark contrast to the current U.S. setup—where figuring out how to get tested can be a challenge even for patients displaying symptoms, and cripplingly expensive for the uninsured—South Korea has bent over backward to make free testing ubiquitous, opening more than 500 testing sites, including drive-thrus.

A Compromise on FISA Reform

With just days to go before the expiration of several provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the House of Representatives finally revealed its second-draft reauthorization bill Tuesday, two weeks after the previous version ran into turbulence in markup. And wouldn’t you know it: The new version seems to be a genuine compromise bill, beefing up some protections for targets of federal surveillance—though not as many as civil liberties advocates had hoped—without substantially damaging law enforcement’s ability to carry out that surveillance in general.  

The updated legislation includes several changes that have been sought by the likes of Rep. Jim Jordan, and are intended to improve oversight of the secret surveillance courts. They include: a provision placing an advocate for the requested target of surveillance in FISA proceedings to ensure that the best possible case against surveilling is also considered by the court; new criminal penalties for officials who make false representations to the court; and a provision stipulating that the attorney general must sign off on proposed surveillance of federal officials or political candidates.

The bill does leave the basic structure of the FISA system intact, to the frustration of some of Congress’ harder-core civil libertarians. Sens. Mike Lee and Rand Paul condemned the bill Tuesday, with Paul calling it “weak sauce” and Lee lamenting that it “doesn’t fix what’s wrong with FISA” and “would not have stopped the spying that occurred” against the president.

Paul’s proposed changes would have essentially cut FISA surveillance off at the knees: prohibiting the court from issuing warrants against U.S. citizens and making FISA-obtained information inadmissible against U.S. citizens in domestic courts. Lee’s were somewhat tamer, but would have substantially raised the bar of proof for obtaining a FISA warrant: making it harder for law enforcement to seek surveillance based on constitutionally protected speech, and requiring a showing of probable cause for terrorism or intelligence-gathering before a warrant would be granted. Neither of these changes made it into the bill.

Nevertheless, it’s hard even for libertarian-minded Americans to be too displeased by Tuesday’s result. Although a sizable minority of lawmakers has always raised a stink about FISA’s capacity for abuse, this year it often seemed that polarized opinions about the president might sink a possibility of bipartisan reform. Democrats were loath to acknowledge that the FBI had behaved badly in obtaining a warrant to surveil former Trump staffer Carter Page, and Republicans remained divided over whether fixing FISA’s problems would require structural changes or whether purging bad actors from the Justice Department was sufficient.

Given those hangups, the resulting legislation comes as a mild surprise. Now it goes to the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will need to rally the troops to get it through to the White House.

Partisanship, Polarization, and Polling

Gallup released a new poll Tuesday showing “[m]ore Americans approve of the job congressional Republicans are doing than of congressional Democrats’ performance” for the first time in nearly 15 years. Not surprisingly, this change was driven almost entirely by partisans: Republicans’ approval of congressional Republicans rose 13 points since October, which coincides with their successful defense of President Trump during the impeachment inquiry and trial.

At the same time, overall partisanship in Congress is also increasing. A recent study from Michigan State University found that “[p]olarization between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress is the worst it’s ever been” noting a “sharp decline in cooperation” when looking at bill co-sponsorship across the aisle. 

But a more polarized and partisan Congress may just reflect an American public that is also becoming more polarized and partisan itself.

Just last week, Pew published a study that found “[f]ar more Americans see ‘very strong’ partisan conflicts now” reflecting “rising partisan antipathy over the last several years, including larger shares in each party associating negative traits with members of the opposing party and rating the opposing partisans negatively.”

This could explain why even though an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that “compromise and common ground should be the goal for political leaders,” nearly as many say they are “tired of leaders compromising my values and ideals” and want leaders “who will stand up to the other side.”

What does this mean moving forward? Partisanship isn’t going anywhere. And as partisan behavior from members is rewarded with higher approval numbers from constituents who increasingly view the other side of the aisle as “immoral,” it is only likely to increase in the near future. 

Worth Your Time

• Bruno Maçães has spent the last few months traveling through Asia, and noticed clear differences in how the people there responded to COVID-19’s spread than in Europe or America. “How notable that we are all together in this, and yet every society seems to deal with the epidemic in its own distinctive way,” he writes in National Review. “One of the main divides was between the developed and the developing world. It explained the seriousness in Asia. If poverty and disease are a daily presence or at most two or three generations behind you, you are predisposed to accept that your world can suddenly collapse. The question that Americans and Europeans ask themselves—How was this allowed to happen?—makes less sense than the question of how to survive and how to protect your loved ones.”

• There have been several cases already of cruise ships becoming breeding grounds for the coronavirus; the close quarters on a boat just aren’t conducive to avoiding a highly contagious illness. And yet, some people apparently don’t care, and are either going forward with already booked cruise vacations or, even crazier, buying tickets now that prices are dropping. The Daily Beast found some of these thrill seekers (ill seekers?) and published their stories, which can be read here.

• The New Yorker has a lengthy exploration of one potential way to regain some privacy in our rapidly growing technological era: stealth streetwear. The clothes that author John Seabrook tests out can do things like prevent your image being picked up by AI surveillance systems (as used by the Chinese government), confuse automatic license plate readers, and hide your face from facial recognition software.

Presented Without Comment

(Now seventh!)

Something Fun

We should all aspire to navigate coronavirus season like Cardinal Dolan.

Toeing the Company Line

• In David’s latest French Press (🔒), he discusses public trust in light of the coronavirus. “Make no mistake, much of the mistrust in the media, the government, and other vital institutions has been richly earned,” he writes. “But distrust can go too far…Americans need to understand that it is in the selfish ideological interests of the most partisan Americans to increase distrust, even in the face of overwhelming contrary facts.” Give the whole thing a read here.

• Jonah had David Bahnsen on The Remnant to discuss his latest book, Elizabeth Warren: How Her Presidency Would Destroy the Middle Class and the American Dream. The timing might not be great—what with Warren suspending her candidacy last week and all—but the Massachusetts senator’s ideas and policies are still very much alive in the Democratic party. Give it a listen.

• Alec has two new Dispatch Fact Checks. Yesterday he wrote on claims—from Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and others—that President Trump cut the CDC budget. Turns out: that “while Trump has attempted to cut funding to the CDC, overall funding to the agency has increased under the Trump administration.” This morning, he has one looking at whether Joe Biden believes Iraq had WMD. It turns out it depends on when you ask him.

Let Us Know

Both parties should have adopted this stance long before COVID-19 came along, but the DNC announced it will be doing away with a live studio audience for Sunday’s debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders due to concerns over the virus. What other long-standing but wrongheaded traditions could the coronavirus help to usher out?

• Going into The Dispatch offices every day—the best reporting is obviously done from the couch!

• People literally never wiping off their phones and/or computers with disinfecting wipes.

• Handshakes as the standard form of interpersonal greeting—elbow bumps are really growing on us!

• Attending live tapings of Dr. Phil’s show.

• Catholics at church opening their mouth and making the Eucharistic minister place communion directly on their tongue.

• Crowds of more than 1,000 people, generally.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images.