The Morning Dispatch: Retail Bounces Back (Some) in May

Happy Wednesday! First things first, there was an error in yesterday’s newsletter regarding the conceptual difference between textualism and originalism; originalists should have been described as “those who attempt to determine what a law’s text was publicly understood to mean at the time it was passed.” Thank you to those who pointed out the mistake, it’s been corrected!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• As of Tuesday night, 2,137,716 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the United States (an increase of 24,228 from yesterday) and 116,962 deaths have been attributed to the virus (an increase of 840 from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 5.5 percent (the true mortality rate is likely much lower, between 0.4 percent and 1.4 percent, but it’s impossible to determine precisely due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 24,449,307 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States (464,715 conducted since yesterday), 8.7 percent have come back positive.

• Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in a clash with Chinese troops on the border between the two countries. Tuesday’s casualties were the first that Indian soldiers had experienced along the border in a clash with Chinese forces since 1975.

• North Korea blew up a liaison office it shared with South Korea in the border city of Kaesong on Tuesday, and threatened to send troops into the demilitarized zone between the two countries.

• President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday encouraging police departments across the country to limit the use of chokeholds and creating a national database of police officers with a history of using excessive force. Senate Republicans are expected to roll out their proposed police reform legislation later this morning.

• The Department of Justice is suing John Bolton—Trump’s former national security adviser—in an attempt to prevent him from publishing his new book describing his time in the White House. The complaint filed by the DoJ claims Bolton’s book contains classified information; President Trump said Monday he considers “every conversation with me as president to be highly classified.”  

• The Nebraska Democratic Party withdrew its support from Chris Janicek—its nominee running against incumbent Sen. Ben Sasse—after Janicek refused to drop out of the race in response to the surfacing of sexually inappropriate text messages he sent regarding a campaign staffer.

• The Senate Ethics Committee has officially closed its investigation into Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler after she had—along with a handful of other senators—been accused of violating Senate rules for dropping stock after being privately briefed about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in January. The Ethics Committee found “no evidence” she had violated any laws.

Is Retail Back In Vogue?

The retail sector has been ravaged in recent months by coronavirus lockdowns and subsequent shifts in consumer behavior, laying the groundwork for what the Department of Commerce announced in its report on Tuesday: a record 17.7 percent month-over-month increase in retail and food service sales from April to May. Stocks rallied in response, and the news certainly is good, but the record growth rate is largely due April’s historically low starting point. Retail spending in May 2020—while significantly better than April—still came in 6.1 percent lower than May 2019.

The CARES Act and other stimulus efforts provided a lifeline to American consumers during the worst months of the pandemic, but economists and company executives fear this rebound may be short-lived if the federal government scales back on aid. Tens of millions of Americans received a stimulus check of up to $1,200, and enhanced unemployment benefits began in April and are set to expire at the end of July.

The coronavirus has dramatically altered consumer spending behavior, altering not only how much Americans are spending on retail, but where they’re spending as well. Many have turned to online shopping splurges to quell boredom and stress, while others have resorted to bulk-buying in fear of shortages. Although the shift to online convenience shopping helped the retail industry stave off utter collapse, countless small- and medium-sized businesses continue to suffer from mandatory closures of most “non-essential” brick-and-mortar retail. The vicious cycle could serve to accelerate an existing move toward online shopping. 

Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, knows the economy remains far from where it needs to be. “The labor market is improving, but it is still in really, really bad shape,” he told James Pethokoukis on Monday. While President Trump recently boasted that his administration “smashed expectations” on the recent jobs report—referring to the new 13 percent unemployment rate as “the greatest comeback in American history, Strain noted that “the peak unemployment rate in the Great Recession was 10 percent.” Unemployment and consumer spending, of course, are deeply intertwined.

Congress and the administration are debating the shape and the necessity of another stimulus package and the White House is reportedly planning to push for $1 trillion in infrastructure spending—but ultimately, the path of our economic recovery will be dictated by the path of the virus. States across the country are still working through reopening plans—and recent surges in new coronavirus cases could cause some to backtrack.

We’ll get more information on July 16—the day of the next retail report—regarding retailers’s ability to weather this crisis.

Trump Signs His Police Reform Executive Order

With activists calling to “defund the police,” President Trump’s newest executive order seems designed to do just the opposite. During Tuesday’s signing ceremony, Trump rolled out his plan to promote police accountability, transparency, and community engagement through a series of financial incentives. He expressed a strong commitment in his address to increasing resources for police departments rather than reducing or dismantling their lines of funding.

Through grants distributed by the executive branch, the order seeks to enforce new standards of policing by encouraging departments across the country to contract independent credentialing bodies as a form of oversight. Among the operational changes those groups will oversee are the banning of chokeholds nationwide (“except in those situations where the use of deadly force is allowed by law”) and the implementation of de-escalation training. 

In addition, the order lays the groundwork for increased transparency by encouraging the exchange of information between departments. The order creates a federal database to track “terminations and de-certifications of law enforcement officers, criminal convictions of law enforcement officers for on-duty conduct, and civil judgments against law enforcement officers for improper use of force.” This database would theoretically prevent out-of-work officers with a history of excessive use of force from simply relocating to another police department unaware of their previous misconduct.

The order also outlines better ways for police officers to interact with the mentally ill, homeless, and individuals struggling with substance abuse. “Because law enforcement officers often encounter such individuals suffering from these conditions in the course of their duties,” it reads, “all officers should be properly trained for such encounters.” The order instructs the attorney general to “provide guidance regarding the development and implementation of co-responder programs” that would pair police officers with social workers or other mental health professionals to more holistically address situations involving the aforementioned groups of people.

Senate Republicans are focused on their own police reform legislation, but gave the administration subdued, but positive marks for its efforts. The executive order “was pretty good as far as it went,” Sen. John Cornyn told Politico. “It’s not the law … but I thought it was fine.”

Democrats, including 2020 presidential nominee Joe Biden, argued the order did not go nearly far enough, preferring the House’s Justice in Policing Act instead. “President Trump issued an insufficient executive order piecing together a few of the recommendations of the Obama-Biden policing task force, but he isn’t delivering the comprehensive policing reform we need,” Biden campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield said in a statement. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the order “weak” and said it “falls sadly and seriously short of what is required to combat the epidemic of racial injustice and police brutality that is murdering hundreds of Black Americans.” The Democrats’ proposal would limit qualified immunity for police officers and end the use of no-knock warrants in drug cases, both considered nonstarters in the GOP.

Senate Republicans are slated to introduce their police reform bill—which reportedly aligns with the president’s executive order in many key respects while going further in others—later this morning.

Worth Your Time

• A New York Times article from Jennifer Steinhauer catalogs the declining support for President Trump within the military community. Gen. James Mattis’s public rebuke of the president did not happen in a vacuum. Although the military generally leans Republican, many within the institution have long harbored a dislike for the president’s erratic behavior. Weaving personal interviews and stories in with a larger commentary on the evolution of the president’s relationship with the military, Steinhauer paints a vivid picture of how a core component of the Trump coalition—60 percent of veterans went for the president in 2016—is in danger of collapsing.

• Sonny Bunch’s Washington Post review of Dave Chappelle’s new standup special—like the special itself—is fantastic. If you haven’t had the chance to check out the show yet, you can find it here. (Fair warning: Like all of Chappelle’s material, it’s filled to the brim with profanities.) Bunch’s review explores Chappelle’s performance, which was largely a commentary on the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, and praises Chappelle for “clear[ing] away so much of the hemming and hawing that distorts these discussions.” Chappelle’s direct, shoot-from-the-hip style is simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and tragically sad, given the subject matter. “As Chappelle hops from killing to killing,” Bunch writes, “from Eric Garner to Philando Castile to John Crawford, you can feel the awfulness of these connections, the way each seems to lead to the other, and to the next, and hooks back to the first. You can feel the crushing weight of death after death, and what that can do to a person who sees himself in each of the victims.”

• For Arc Digital, Sarah Quinlan has a beautiful piece about the link between photography and civil rights. Tracing the connection back to Frederick Douglass—who called photography a “democratic art” and was the most photographed American of his era—Quinlan writes about the deep power of photography and film to change a society’s opinion on issues like race. Douglass consented to being widely photographed because he “sought to refute … inaccurate portrayals of black Americans,” writes Quinlan. “He did so by using photography to portray a black American on his own terms: Dignified, intelligent, proud and serious.” Today’s protests for racial justice were sparked, in many ways, by our ability to capture and widely disseminate videos and photographs of police misbehavior.

• And, finally, from Joaquin Sapien and Joe Sexton of ProPublica, comes an in-depth investigation of Andrew Cuomo’s decision to send COVID-19 positive residents back into nursing homes. The disastrous consequences of that policy have been clear for a while now, but this new report elucidates just how deadly that mandate, sending infected individuals into some of the most vulnerable populations in the country, turned out to be. “In the weeks that followed the March 25 order, COVID-19 tore through New York state’s nursing facilities, killing more than 6,000 people — about 6% of its more than 100,000 nursing home residents.” And it wasn’t just New York. “States that issued orders similar to Cuomo’s recorded comparably grim outcomes. Michigan lost 5% of roughly 38,000 nursing home residents to COVID-19 since the outbreak began. New Jersey lost 12% of its more than 43,000 residents. In Florida, where such transfers were barred, just 1.6% of 73,000 nursing home residents died of the virus. California, after initially moving toward a policy like New York’s, quickly revised it. So far, it has lost 2% of its 103,000 nursing home residents.”

Something Adorable

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• David’s Tuesday French Press(🔒) built on Monday’s Advisory Opinions podcast in breaking down a very busy Monday at the Supreme Court. Was it a “conservative legal Chernobyl?” He argues this week has been yet another reminder that presidential elections do not determine judicial outcomes. “Judges have philosophies, and those philosophies do not always dictate the outcomes that partisans prefer.”

• We just passed the two-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un, and Bruce Klingner, a former top CIA analyst on the Korean Peninsula and a current Heritage Foundation scholar, looks at where relations between the two countries stand. “There has been no progress toward denuclearization nor any degradation of the North Korean military threat to the United States and its allies,” he writes. And meanwhile, the country has increased its nuclear materials and is working on new weapons’ systems.

• Samuel J. Abrams writes about how, unlikely as it seems given our polarization, there is still time for 2020 to be a “realignment’“ election, if a candidate can just take advantage and build a new coalition. “We are seeing a shift in which issues matter, an alteration of the structure or rules of the political system, and a non-trivial swing in the demographic bases of power that typically support political parties.” 

Let Us Know

Have you bought anything online recently just to “quell boredom and stress?” How about stocking up on necessities? What new COVID-19-era shopping habits do you think will stick with us even as this eventually all fades away.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Nate Hochman (@njhochman), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.