terça-feira, 24 de março de 2020

Can Trump be trusted not to abuse his coronavirus emergency powers? / 'Where's Fauci?' America panics as doctor absent again from White House briefing

“You’re actually sitting too close,” the president told the journalists. “We should probably get rid of about another 75, 80% of you. I have just two or three that I like in this room.”


Can Trump be trusted not to abuse his coronavirus emergency powers?

Even the president’s critics have urged him to use the full power of the federal government to tackle the pandemic but experts warn of potential dangers

Tom McCarthy
 @TeeMcSee  Email
Tue 24 Mar 2020 06.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 24 Mar 2020 06.03 GMT

Standing in the Brady briefing room at the White House last week Donald Trump said that despite new restrictions on the number of journalists allowed in the room, there were still too many reporters around.

“You’re actually sitting too close,” the president told the journalists. “We should probably get rid of about another 75, 80% of you. I have just two or three that I like in this room.”

If it was a joke, the timing was terrible.

As the coronavirus crisis has grown, so too has the power of the president’s whim to shape American life, whether that means choosing which states get emergency medical equipment first, deciding where to deploy troops to build temporary hospitals – or controlling what the public knows about what the government is doing.

In recent weeks, Trump has invoked emergency powers enabling him to waive certain healthcare regulations and direct enormous streams of cash to areas of need. He has also announced that the federal government would use its authority to direct private companies to boost the production of surgical masks, gloves and other equipment, although the status of those efforts was unclear.

For now the risk – the seeming surety – of a national disaster has fostered a willingness in even Trump’s harshest critics for him to aggressively seize the reins of his office and marshal the power of the federal government toward a muscular and decisive response that could save thousands of lives.

But with this widespread desire for action has come related concerns about where, exactly, that power will stop growing, when the emergency crests, and how that power will shrink when the crisis subsides.

Civil society advocates warn the fog of crisis could give Trump cover to grab adjacent powers, not related to the current emergency, that might be difficult to claw back – especially if Congress and the courts failed to check Trump after the fact.

“Ordinarily, that’s not something you’d be worried about, because it would seem kind of unthinkable for a president to exploit a pandemic to arrogate a bunch of power that he doesn’t need,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

“But we have seen that this president is willing to abuse emergency powers, and to use them for political gains. And so we have to worry.”

By invoking the National Emergencies Act on 13 March, Trump gained access to emergency powers in more than 100 other statutes, Goitein said, “and if you look at those authorities, very few of them relate to health crises”. With incremental action, Trump could expand government control of the internet, freeze private assets or change the size and composition of the armed forces.

Other steps Trump has taken in the coronavirus response, such as restricting international borders and imposing mandatory quarantines for certain travelers, do not rely on emergency authorities but could create a legacy of expanded executive power that advocates fear could outlast the virus.

One step Trump did not take after his administration declared a public health emergency on 31 January was to reallocate funds to speed approval for drugs and ramp up the production of coronavirus tests kits. Trump’s failure to deploy that power, the University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck said, may have ironically created a scenario in which he ends up using much broader powers.

“The president’s dilatory use of the powers he has, I think, is going to end up requiring him to use a lot more of that power, in ways that are a lot more controversial and a lot more coercive and a lot more inconsistent,” Vladeck told Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution in a Lawfare podcast about emergency powers and coronavirus.

Concerns that the administration would look for ways to use the crisis to move the lines of the law were sharpened by reports last week that the justice department had asked Congress to pass legislation allowing federal judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies.

But analysts differ in their imaginations of how a dangerous expansion of power by Trump might unfold, with the economy in a tailspin and a presidential election on the horizon.

Under extraordinary powers accessible to Trump after his national emergency declaration, he could declare the coronavirus to be a “foreign threat” and impose financial sanctions on anyone he said was contributing to the threat, such as a media company or a political opponent.

He could announce an interstate travel ban, enforceable by the military, citing a need to stop the spread of the virus. Along similar lines, he could take steps that could make it harder for some people to vote in the presidential election in November – or make it more difficult for legal challenges to such steps to be heard in court.

“It’s not hard to imagine the federal courts in general, and this supreme court in particular, being remarkably deferential to the federal government in a public health crisis like this one,” Vladeck told Wittes.

Or, in what analysts describe as a worst-case scenario, the justice department could move for a federal judge to declare a breakdown of local law enforcement – at which point Trump could theoretically deploy the military in the streets, in a manner breaking with past deployments of active-duty troops for disaster response.

As an ominous reference point, civil liberties advocates point to anti-democratic moves taken by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to close most courts, adjourn parliament and exploit secret cellphone data.

“We have to be on the lookout for any use of these powers that goes beyond what public health experts are recommending as necessary, and that intrude on civil liberties,” Goitein said.

In offhand comments, Trump has occasionally expressed a reticence about the power of his office, which he elsewhere has described as unlimited.

“A lot of executive power, if we don’t have to use it that would be a good thing, not a bad thing,” he said at the White House last week. As late as Wednesday, Trump was resisting calls to invoke the Defense Production Act to get private businesses involved in mask and ventilator production, saying, “We hope we’re not going to need it.”

The Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who crafted legal cover for torture programs in the George W Bush years, took a sanguine view of Trump’s power and its containment.

“There’s not a whole lot more I think that the president can do, unless we saw something much more serious occur such as the breakdown of law and order,” said Yoo in a call-in forum hosted on Friday by the Federalist Society. “Even then the president would need to rely on the request of state governors for assistance before he could intervene.”

But Trump’s track record offers no reason to believe that he will eagerly accede to the contraction of powers that expanded in a time of emergency response, said Goitein, of the Brennan Center.

“If you divorce his emergency orders from the context of every other thing he’s ever said or done, you might be able to believe that,” she said. “But if you put it in the context of a president who has said that article II gives him the power to do anything he wants, and a president who has ordered officials not to comply with congressional subpoenas, and a president who has said that Congress does not have the authority to impeach him – then I think you absolutely have to be worried.”


'Where's Fauci?' America panics as doctor absent again from White House briefing


Infectious disease expert, who has politely sparred with Trump, has become a calming presence in a time of deep uncertainty

Lauren Gambino in Washington
 @laurenegambino
Tue 24 Mar 2020 03.21 GMTLast modified on Tue 24 Mar 2020 04.42 GMT

Moments after Donald Trump approached the lectern to open the daily task force briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, mild panic broke among viewers online.

Where was Dr Anthony Fauci, the 79-year-old infectious disease expert who has become a regular fixture and a calming presence alongside the president?

Fernand R. Amandi
@AmandiOnAir
Will the press in the @WhiteHouse briefing room commit malpractice for the second day in a row by not asking the only question that matters:

WHERE IS DR. FAUCI ??? 🤔🤔#WhereIsDrFauci? #WhereIsFauci?

View image on Twitter
2,418
11:41 PM - Mar 23, 2020 · Miami, FL
Twitter Ads info and privacy
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Robert Gibbs
@Robt_Gibbs
Paging Dr. Fauci...Paging Dr. Anthony Fauci. Please call your office immediately. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fauci-predicts-americans-will-likely-need-stay-home-least-several-n1164701 …

Fauci predicts Americans will likely need to stay home for at least several more weeks
“I cannot see that all of a sudden, next week or two weeks from now it's going to be over. I don't think there's a chance of that," he said.

nbcnews.com
2,204
12:10 AM - Mar 24, 2020

The alarm reflected just how much the nation has come to rely on the wisdom of the straight-talking doctor from New York as the coronavirus pandemic spreads, with the worst yet to come. For many anxious Americans tuning in from the confinement of their homes, Fauci is a a voice of reason in a time of deep uncertainty.

And his absence at yet another briefing raised was cause for concern. Had he been sidelined for contradicting the president? Was he in good health?


Mika Brzezinski
@morningmika
Where is Fauci? Disturbing. “At a certain point, we have to get open. .. we will be doing something very very quickly.. We can do two things at once.”  ...Then the President talks about how the flu and auto accidents can also be deadly.. WOW. That lack of Fauci shows.

5,867
11:55 PM - Mar 23, 2020

Joe Walsh
@WalshFreedom
It’s clear that the coward in the White House can no longer handle having Dr Fauci in the room. That’s very bad news for the American people.

2,179
11:48 PM - Mar 23, 2020

Molly Jong-Fast🏡
@MollyJongFast
The only person I want to hear from is dr. Anthony Fauci.

19.8K
11:33 PM - Mar 23, 2020

Asked about his absence by a Guardian reporter, Trump said: “I was just with him”, explaining that Fauci was “at a task force meeting”. A White House official confirmed Fauci’s attendance at earlier meetings that day and insisted his absence was in keeping with a commitment to rotate speakers “depending on the news of the day”.

Fauci himself attempted to allay concerns about his current status – professionally and physiologically. Reached at his home on Sunday, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told Science magazine that he was “exhausted” but otherwise “good”.

“I mean, I’m not, to my knowledge, coronavirus-infected,” he said, adding with a laugh: “To my knowledge, I haven’t been fired.”

But Fauci went further. He conceded that some of what Trump has said does not “comport” with the facts. Fauci, who has served six US presidents, said he is working with the members of the task force to ensure Trump shares accurate information from the podium about the coronavirus, but admitted that it can be a difficult task.

“But I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” Fauci said. “OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.”

From behind the podium, Trump has repeatedly made inaccurate or misleading claims about the coronavirus outbreak from the availability of testing to the development of a vaccine. And on more than one occasion, it has fallen to Fauci to politely but firmly correct the president – sometimes in real time.

At recent briefings, Trump, acting on instinct, has promoted a widely-available malaria drug as a possible antidote to Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Asked by a reporter if it was true that the drug could prevent the disease, Fauci was blunt.

“The answer is no,” he replied, explaining in his distinctive Brooklyn accent that the science was simply not there yet. “The information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal.”

Later in the briefing, Fauci placed a hand over his face as if to stifle a laugh when Trump interjected and referred to the state department as the “deep state department”. The doctor’s face-palm immediately became an internet meme, even as some noted that he touched his face in violation of public health guidelines.

 ““I don’t want to embarrass him,” Fauci said of his diplomatic approach, in a weekend interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “I don’t want to act like a tough guy, like I stood up to the president. I just want to get the facts out.”

Trump, ever reluctant to share the spotlight, has taken note of Fauci’s heightened national profile – the interviews, the TV appearances and the online following. Inviting him to speak at a press conference last week, Trump remarked: “I think everybody out here knows you pretty well.”

He added: “Tony has been doing a tremendous job working long, long hours. And you’ve seen a lot happen, but this has been – it’s been a great experience, and working with you has been terrific.” That was 13 March.

Ten days later, Trump’s opinion of the doctor appears not to have been dimmed by their disagreements.

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