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We finally have the coronavirus tamped down, with caseloads dropping and the momentum of the vaccinations on our side. The only thing that might derail this now is if we give the new variants enough oxygen to mount a comeback, as happened in the pandemic of 1918.

Thats what were seeing now in Europe, where cases are surging as the more contagious variants take root. None of these new variants interfere with the vaccine. But future variants might. The danger is that, like the Spanish flu, this novel virus could keep mutating.

It has the potential to wreak havoc again, yes, says Perry Halkitis, Dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health, who compared it to a super-strain of HIV for which many of our medications stopped working.

I think it is a race against time, Dr. Stephen Thomas, SUNY Upstate Medical Universitys chief of infectious disease, just told the New York Times. Every single person that we can get vaccinated or every single person that we can get a mask on is one less opportunity that a variant has.

That means getting the injection as soon as its available to you. This is a community effort; well only achieve the protection we all need if everybody gets the jab. The group posing the biggest challenge is Republican men: 49 percent say they would not be vaccinated, compared to 37 percent of Latinos and 25 percent of Black people.

African American hesitancy is born of a historic distrust, and documented abuses. But Republican men are even more hesitant due to hypermasculinity, Halkitis says a sense of invincibility that interferes with their health. For these guys, its sort of like this anti-authoritarian, screw-the-man emotional life that they live in, where they feel cast aside and put upon, that interferes with their rational decision-making.

They need to understand that they are sabotaging this whole effort. Think of somebody in your life who can get sick and die. Envision that person hooked up to a ventilator, as nurses rush from bed to bed. Picture shuttered businesses, as this virus continues to spread. If you want our economy to get off life support, do your part: Get the shot.

Halkitis thinks of his own father, an immigrant from Greece who died at age 57, because he distrusted doctors and feared seeking out treatment for the stomach pain that turned out to be cancer. I personally think that there should be an accountability and responsibility by the FCC for people spreading false information, he adds. We got all bent out of shape about Janet Jacksons boob on the Super Bowl, but we allow falsehoods to propagate in our society.

That former President Trump did finally advise his supporters to get vaccinated helps. I would recommend it to a lot of people that dont want to get it and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly, he said on Fox News this week. It wasnt helpful, of course, that Trump got his vaccine quietly before leaving the White House, or that Fox News world is still messaging to viewers that rejecting facts from vetted sources about vaccinations is just the mark of an independent thinker.

More than 95 percent of doctors who have been offered the vaccine have gotten it as soon as they can, which speaks volumes about its effectiveness and safety. They know that tens of thousands of people participated in vaccine trials last year, and decades of prior research went into its development. But Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson never mentions that.

The next time he does his quizzical squint and asks, how effective are these vaccines? Are they safe?, and then refuses to answer any of his own questions, remember this: His billionaire employer, Rupert Murdoch, got the Pfizer vaccine the moment it was available to him in December. Theres your answer, folks. And, while youre at it, wear your mask.

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The final barrier to beating this virus: Republican men | Editorial - NJ.com

The Republican National Committeetweeted a call to reopen schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, but the request for in-person education contained a devastating typo.

Or rather, a DEVESTATING one, as the RNC misspelled the word on the official GOP Twitter feed on Sunday. Although the tweet was deleted, images were passed around:

HuffPostGOP Tweet

The CDC last week released new guidelines that should make it easier for schools to reopen, including advice that students can now sit 3 feet apart in classrooms.

Neither the RNC nor its chair, Ronna McDaniel, addressed the typo. But critics on social media took them to school over it:

Experts are still learning about COVID-19. The information in this story is what was known or available as of publication, but guidance can change as scientists discover more about the virus. Pleasecheck the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionfor the most updated recommendations.

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Republican Party Taken To School After Posting Typo-Riddled Tweet About Education - HuffPost

Republican-dominated state legislatures around the country have responded to the cynical calls from Donald Trump for election reform with an array of proposals to restrict voting rights. They include limiting early-voting opportunities, constraining access to vote-by-mail and imposing more voter identification and other requirements to protect against what Mr. Trump falsely claimed to be a level of dishonesty that is not to be believed.

In Washington, congressional Democrats have rallied around H.R. 1, which has already passed in the House and would establish specific voting rules that states would be required to follow for federal elections, empowered by Congresss clear constitutional authority to make or alter state regulations governing the Times, Places and manner of holding such elections.

But as this legislation is pending, the Republican state legislative movement to burden the exercise of voting rights proceeds apace. Iowa has already done so, Georgia is poised to act shortly, and others may follow suit.

Congress should consider a targeted federal law to counter this march of these draconian state laws. And it could be designed in such a way that some Republicans would support it or find it uncomfortable to explain why they wouldnt.

This law would make clear that a state may not revise its rules to restrict voting access in federal elections in specified areas including the withdrawal of existing vote-by-mail opportunities and reductions in early voting unless it is done on a bipartisan basis.

A core objective of this legislation to protect the right to vote from partisan manipulation of the rules would be to enhance public perceptions of the fairness of the political process. With one political party unleashing a national movement to sharply limit access to the franchise, claiming contrary to fact that the presidential election it lost was corrupted by fraud, Congress is well justified in asserting its constitutional authority in federal elections and bringing a halt to it.

Nothing in this approach, targeted at the current wave of partisan state lawmaking initiatives, is inconsistent with passage of H.R. 1, which includes substantive reforms that, in addition to campaign finance and other reform measures, would strengthen voting rights and bolster election infrastructure security. And absent bipartisan support, the states should not be able to enact new restrictions on voting while Congress takes uniform federal rules in a more comprehensive package.

Critics may object that Congress cannot constitutionally commandeer the states to enact, or refrain from enacting, legislation of any kind. But the congressional power to make or alter state voting rules for federal elections is exactly what the Election Clause expressly authorizes. This power encompasses, as the Supreme Court has noted, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes, duties of inspectors and canvassers, and making and publication of election returns.

The states must follow the federal governments requirements for their conduct of elections for federal office, regardless of the choices they make for state and local contests, and they also bear the administrative responsibility and expense of doing so. Where the Supreme Court has applied the anti-commandeering doctrine, it has done so to stop Congress from conscripting the states into the enforcement of federal regulatory programs, as it has done in cases involving the Commerce Clause.

A bipartisanship requirement is a legitimate test of the validity of a state law affecting voting in federal elections. This is the rationale behind the requirements for politically balanced memberships that states have adopted for independent redistricting commissions. In applying a bipartisanship requirement to this proposed measure for restrictive state voting rules, Congress could, for example, provide that a state legislative rule change would have to have the support of at least a third to one-half of the second-largest party of the state legislature.

Why might or should such a law attract some Republican support? For one, after all the charges and countercharges of partisan machinations in the states in the 2020 elections, Republicans would have the opportunity to register support for bipartisan state action or to defend their opposition. Republicans may also be influenced by Republican state officials in charge of elections. For example, the Florida State Senate recently heard testimony about a proposed bill limiting the use of drop boxes and adding other limits on mail voting. Democratic and Republican supervisors of elections testified against the bill. State election law administrators among them many Republicans are very wary of these harshly restrictive measures, which complicate the voting process and, in creating the likelihood of, as one supervisor of elections said, long lines, chaos and confusion, are unpopular with Republican as well as Democratic voters.

Legislation along these lines is certain to be resisted by many Republicans and challenged in court. But Congress must defend its authority in federal elections and call out in clear terms the power play pursued by Republican state legislators. There is no reason to doubt that after the experience of 2020 and the events of Jan. 6, most Americans will respond well to a call for bipartisanship in how the states establish voting rights rules.

Bob Bauer, a former senior adviser to the Biden campaign, is a professor at New York University School of Law and a co-author of After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.

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Opinion | How to Counter the Republican Assault on Voting Rights - The New York Times

During the 2016 primaries, Senator Marco Rubio positioned himself as a candidate for president who would represent a new approach for the GOP. (Drew Angerer / AP)

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As Republican state legislatures launch a new campaign to suppress Democratic votes (cutting back on early voting in Iowa, restricting absentee voting in Georgia), its worth recalling that it was only eight years ago that the GOP had a completely different response to defeat. Republicans had been working to restrict voting for decades, but after Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the RNC concluded that the party had to come to terms with broadening access to voting: Early, absentee, and online voting is here to stay, their election postmortem declared. Republicans needed to alter their strategy and acknowledge the trend as future reality, utilizing new tactics to gain victory on Election Day.

Mitt Romney had gotten 47 percent of the popular votenotably, the same percentage Donald Trump got this time. But the response in 2012 to defeat was not to double down on the Big Lie about Democratic voter fraud. Party leaders instead launched a three-month-long study of how they could become a majority party again. They called it an autopsy. Released in March 2013, the report was bold and uncompromising: The party had reached an ideological cul-de-sac by focusing on older white people. In order to win back a majority of voters, Republican candidates needed to embrace a new brand of conservatism and reach out to young people, women, and ethnic minorities, especially Latinos.

In the aftermath of defeat this time around, the GOP response was completely different. A Republican Party attorney was surprisingly honest when he told the Supreme Court at the beginning of March that Arizona needed to enact new restrictions on voting, because making it easier to vote puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.

The Republicans share of the presidential vote, the 2012 autopsy pointed out, had been declining ever since Reagan, even when they won. Reagan got 59 percent in 1984; George H.W. Bush got 53 in 1988; George W. Bush got 51 in 2004. After that, they never won a majority.Related Article

At its root, the problem was both demographic and ideological. The Reagan base was declining as a proportion of the population; the Democratic majority recruited by Obama was made up of younger people, people of color, and women. The report, issued by RNC chair Reince Priebus, argued that Republicans could win enough of them to regain a majority, while at the same time holding fast to their pro-business, low-tax ideology.

The autopsy proposed reaching out to Latinos by endorsing comprehensive immigration reform. That was what made headlines. It argued also for appealing to Latino small-business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs, promoting opportunity for all, and running Latino candidates.

To appeal to young people, the autopsy argued, the party needed a new openness to gay people and gay marriage, noting that there was a generational difference within the conservative movement about the treatment and the rights of gays. It reported that, for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be.Current Issue

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The report concluded that if our Party is not welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out. Throughout, it proposed encouraging a variety of views rather than requiring 100 percent fidelity to the prevailing Republican positions, especially on social issues. Party leaders from Paul Ryan to Newt Gingrich welcomed it with fanfare, Politico reported.

And the party had a candidate who represented the new breed of younger Latino Republican: Marco Rubio. Forty-one years old in 2012, he personified Latino upward mobility; he endorsed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform; and he condemned discrimination against gays and lesbians. Rubio entered the 2016 primaries with high hopes, coming in first among Republican candidates in eight consecutive early national polls.

But meanwhile, the autopsy aroused a storm of protest from the Republican right, led by Rush Limbaugh. Donald Trump, not yet a candidate when the report appeared, posted a tweet ridiculing comprehensive immigration reform.

Could it have worked? Could Marco Rubio have gotten more votes than Trump did, by running as a moderate against Hillary Clinton? Polls had him slightly ahead of her in January 2016. Nate Silvers Five Thirty-Eight declared, Its Rubio Or Bust For Republicans Who Want To Win, predicting, If Republicans nominate Rubio, they would have an excellent chance to beat Clinton by broadening their partys appeal with moderates, millennials and Latinos.

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But then Trump destroyed him in the debates, dubbing him Little Marco. He responded by saying Trump had small handsand you know what they say about guys with small hands. It didnt work. He failed in the primaries, winning only Minnesota, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. He endorsed Trump and stuck with him even after the Access Hollywood tapes surfaced.

Party officials who proposed after 2012 that Republicans could become a majority party again set up a website: futuremajority.com. It is now defunct. Futuremajority.org is a new site, established in the 2020 election to help win swing states in the Midwest. It funds Democrats.

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The Republicans Road Not Taken - The Nation

In his forthcoming book, The Words That Made Us, the Yale law professor Akhil Amar emphasizes that, unlike the Hutcheson mob, the Boston Tea Party was nonviolent (it did not come close to killing anyone), proportionate (the Sons destroyed no more property than necessary), and public spirited and non-piratic (the Sons dumped tea to make a legal and political point). It was, Amar argues, a stylized, highly regulated political protestthe Sons of Liberty even swept the decks of the ships before departingrather than a violent insurrection. As Kramer notes, they also later compensated one of the ship owners for a padlock they broke to seize the tea.

During and after the Constitutional Convention, those who had endorsed crowd action against the British during the American Revolution argued that violent insurrections against legitimately constituted democratic governments were different. Samuel Adams, a leader of the Boston Tea Party and other crowd actions throughout the Revolution, had become governor of Massachusetts in 1787, and he criticized Shays Rebellion as a Tory effort to thwart the principles of the Revolution. Now that the people were represented in and by the government, Adams and others argued, they no longer needed to apply direct pressure on their democratically elected judges and representatives.

Was this rationale merely self-serving, now that Adams and his allies were the ones in power? That conclusion would discount their entire theory of self-government. The American experiment is an attempt to channel the selfish passions of human beings into legitimate politics by creating institutions that promote thoughtful deliberation over the impulses of the moment. The state and federal constitutions ratified from 1776 to 1787 were designed to give we the people (or at least propertied white men) the opportunity to seek a redress of grievances through peaceful assembly, petition, speech, and representation, without resorting to the brutal force of mob action.

Anne Applebaum: What Trump and his mob taught the world about America

Mob violence became further delegitimized in the years leading up to the Civil War, when it took the form of racist attacks on Black people and white abolitionists. In 1837, a young Abraham Lincoln expressed renewed alarm about violent mobs when he warned that, unless Americans could govern themselves by reason rather than passion, the Constitution would fall to demagogues. Lincolns speech The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions, delivered to the Young Mens Lyceum of Springfield, Ilinois, was responding to mob violence, including a racist murder in St. Louis and the lynching of the abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. In his speech, which denounced mobocracy and mentioned the word mob eight times, Lincoln implicitly blamed the violence on the followers of the populist Andrew Jackson, who was known as King Mob. Like Madison, Lincoln warned that the mobs were being egged on by populist demagogues, men of ambition and talents who continue to spring up amongst us, seeking the ratification of their ruling passion by tearing down the government and the laws, rather than supporting and maintaining the edifice erected by the Founders. The only way for the American people to ensure that support of the Constitution and the laws remained the political religion of the nation, Lincoln concluded, was for them to reaffirm their commitment to personal as well as political self-government, to restrain their irrational passions and hatreds with the cool voice of reason..

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The Whole Point Was to Avoid Mob Violence - The Atlantic