The New York Times. April 04, 2020

A22 SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2020

N

Before the coronavirus crisis gets better, it will get worse:

more death, more economic pain — and therefore more need
for Congress to adopt relief measures for the American peo-

ple.
But what if the pandemic reaches the point where law-

makers are simply unable to reconvene in Washington be-
cause of a complete shutdown of travel? What if the capital

region becomes so inundated with illness that it makes re-
turn too risky? What if members return and start falling ill,

setting off a domino effect? Already, six lawmakers are
known to have come down with Covid-19. Especially in the

Senate, where nearly half the members are age 65 or older,
the potential for disaster is high.

Hypotheticals aside, it makes no sense for hundreds of
lawmakers and aides to be zipping across the country as

travel restrictions are tightened and Americans are ordered
not to leave their homes. At what point
does it become unacceptably danger-
ous, from a public-health and a public-
duty perspective, for Congress to as-
semble in person during a pandemic?
These sorts of questions have been
driving a growing number of lawmakers
to agitate for an emergency system of
remote voting. With the rest of America
struggling to adapt to the new reality of
social distancing, it is time for Congress

to get serious about the issue.
On March 23, as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Eco-

nomic Security Act was being hammered out, 67 House
Democrats asked the House Rules Committee to issue a

temporary rule change enabling members to vote remotely
during an emergency. This would not only reduce the risk of

contagion, they argued, but it also would allow lawmakers
already in quarantine to participate. Their letter came four

days after Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and
Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, introduced a res-

olution calling for such a system in the upper chamber.

“In times of a national emergency, the Senate must be
able to convene and act expeditiously even if we can’t be to-

gether in person,” Mr. Portman said, announcing the meas-
ure.

But both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell,
the Senate majority leader, have rejected the idea. “That’s

one of the few things that the speaker of the House and I
agree on,” Mr. McConnell said in a March 31 interview with

Fox News Radio.
Ms. Pelosi has expressed operational and constitutional

concerns about setting up such a system, while Mr. McCon-
nell maintains that there is no need to upend the way the

Senate has operated for the past two centuries.
Under pressure from her members, last month Ms.

Pelosi asked the chairman of the House Rules Committee to

study the issue. A March 23 report by the committee’s ma-

jority staff laid out a number of potential challenges to re-

mote voting. Most of them boiled down to: Change is hard.

Objections typically fall into a handful of categories.

Logistics.How would a remote system of debate and

voting work? How would members register their votes?

How could you make sure lawmakers were not under duress

during voting? Advocates of remote voting acknowledge

that many details would need to be hammered out, but

stress that such challenges aren’t insurmountable.

Technology and Security.Citing both hacking and the

potential for glitches, skeptics warn of the unreliability of a

remote system. Robust protections would of course need to

be adopted. The necessary pieces of the technology already

exist, industry experts say, even if it would take time (and

money) to build and battle-test a robust system.

Constitutionality.While there is some discussion about

whether constitutional references to “meeting” and “attend-

ance” could be interpreted to require lawmakers to conduct

business in person, many constitutional scholars have noted

that the founding fathers explicitly left it up to each chamber

to “determine the rules of its proceedings.”

The Slippery Slope.Traditionalists fear that once you

make it possible for lawmakers to conduct vital business re-

motely, it will be hard to herd them back to the Capitol, erod-

ing the deliberative nature of legislating.

In the regular course of affairs, face-to-face negotia-

tions and floor debates are indeed valuable. What is under

discussion now is how to keep Congress functioning in ex-

tremely irregular conditions, when close interaction could

prove dangerous for members and the public. The resolu-

tion from Mr. Portman and Mr. Durbin requires lawmakers

to reauthorize any emergency voting system every 30 days.

Already, state legislatures have begun grappling with

the issue. Pennsylvania lawmakers were early adopters. In

late March, both chambers held sessions in which a majority

of members voted remotely.

The shortcomings of some of the less dramatic alterna-

tives that the Rules Committee cited, such as passing legis-

lation by unanimous consent or a voice vote — neither of

which requires members to gather on the House floor —

were on display during the passage of the phase-three relief

package. A lone Republican, Thomas Massie of Kentucky,

blew up the process by demanding a roll-call vote. This

forced scores of his colleagues to put their lives at risk to re-

turn to Washington and pile into the House chamber to over-

ride his petty stunt. Three days later, one of those members,

Nydia Velázquez, Democrat of New York, announced that

she had received a diagnosis of a “presumed coronavirus in-

fection.”

There has to be a better, safer way for Congress to con-

duct the people’s business under extraordinary conditions.

What if Congress Cannot Assemble?

ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES

As Covid-19
makes social
distancing a
matter of life

and death, a
growing number
of lawmakers
favor remote
voting.

EDITORIAL

TO THE EDITOR:

Re “At Least Trump Hasn’t... ”

(column, April 2):

Gail Collins suggests that Gov.

Ron DeSantis of Florida will be

remembered for allowing

partygoers on the beach during

spring break. The full story has yet

to be written. His stay-at-home

order on Wednesday was not only

too late, but also carved a big

exception for churches and syna-

gogues right before Easter and

Passover. Wait for the community

spread!

BILL TITELMAN, PALM BEACH, FLA.

An Exemption in Florida

TO THE EDITOR:

There are many heroes in the

Covid-19 crisis. In addition to doc-

tors and nurses, there are the

nonprofessional health care work-

ers, first responders, sanitation

workers, postal workers and the

ordinary Americans who are keep-

ing grocery and drugstores open

and stocked, delivering food and

packages, keeping car services,

taxis, mass transit, buses and

airlines running, and doing the

hard, dirty, often low-paid work

that allows the rest of us to work

from home.

Those of us who can work re-

motely should be grateful to those

whose jobs force them to expose

themselves to Covid-19 daily. These

new Americans heroes must get a

bonus — a belated hazard pay

premium — for working despite

the risk.

The Labor Department and the

Occupational Safety and Health

Administration should work to-

gether to create a list of occupa-

tions that deserve this bonus. Such

workers should promptly receive a

bonus payment from the federal

government.

FRANK L. WAGNER, NEW YORK

Hazardous Duty Pay

TO THE EDITOR:

Re “Swapping Whiteboards for

Screens, in a Week” (front page,

March 30):

I was glad to see The Times

focus on one group on the front

lines who have not received as

much recognition as they deserve:

teachers, from kindergarten

through college. They are working

12-hour days trying to develop

lessons so that their students can

continue to learn.

Creating an online course, if it is

done well, is time-consuming and

tedious, and requires a tremendous

amount of thinking through an

idea or a skill. Instructions that are

normally delivered orally must be

extremely detailed. Failing to

provide a step or a detail can cause

students to fail to do something or

not understand an idea. For the

remainder of the semester, teach-

ers are working on the front lines.

CAROLYN BOIARSKY, HAMMOND, IND.

The writer is a professor of English at

Purdue University Northwest-Ham-

mond Campus.

TO THE EDITOR:

Though community college stu-

dents make up nearly half of all

undergraduates in the United

States today, they are often left out

of media coverage, including how

the precipitous move to “distance

learning” will affect their educa-

tions (“Letter Grades Would Fail

Students Whom Crisis Sent Home,”

news article, March 29).

Here’s how some of my students

are faring: One young woman is

being taken back to Russia by her

mother to care for her father, who

lives there and has an underlying

health condition, in the event he

gets Covid-19.

Another industrious young wom-

an shares one laptop and an un-

stable Wi-Fi connection with her

three younger siblings, whose

online education she is now also

supervising, as her parents speak

little English. A young man has

emailed asking for an extension on

the essay, please, as he has been

sick with presumed Covid-19. And

then there is the one-third of the

class who are effectively missing

in action despite repeated efforts

on my part to contact them.

Thus, the move to online educa-

tion for this disadvantaged and

often invisible student population

is very far from ideal and will have

lasting educational and financial

implications.

EMILY SCHNEE, BROOKLYN

The writer is a professor of English at

Kingsborough Community College,

City University of New York.

TO THE EDITOR:

In 2015, Morton Ann Gernsbacher,

a professor at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison, published an

article in the journal Policy In-

sights From the Behavioral and

Brain Sciences entitled, “Video

Captions Benefit Everyone.” She

reviewed more than 100 studies on

the benefits of video captioning

and found that captioning “im-

proves comprehension of, attention

to, and memory for the video” for

people of all ages and hearing

ability.

Those of us with hearing loss

have long understood the benefits

of captioning. What may come as a

surprise to people without hearing

loss is that they would also be

helped. With schools closed be-

cause of the coronavirus, education

at all levels is primarily online with

videos and lectures. This might be

an opportune time for educators to

consider adding captions to these

presentations.

JON TAYLOR, NEW YORK

The writer is vice president of Hearing

Loss Association of America, New York

City Chapter.

TO THE EDITOR:

Re “Crisis Pits Patient Privacy

Against Public’s Need to Know”

(news article, March 30):

Our university’s policy places a

higher priority on privacy than

transparency. University adminis-

tration has instructed us not to

share information about co-work-

ers who have contracted Covid-19

on the grounds that it would vio-

late privacy laws. Why can’t the

time and general location of poten-

tial exposure be announced

promptly while safeguarding indi-

vidual privacy?

Those of us who have learned

through unofficial channels about

colleagues with Covid-19 have been

placed in the untenable position of

harboring a potentially deadly

secret that leaves untold others at

risk and fractures our trust in

university officials.

EMILIE REGNIER

WORTHINGTON, OHIO

The writer is an associate professor at

The Ohio State University.

Trying to Adapt to Remote Learning

LETTERS

MY SISTER, WHOlives in London, has been
passing lockdown time going through old
slides of my father’s, discovered last year.
Every now and then she sends me a
grainy or mildewed photograph, a mes-
sage in a bottle from across the ocean. The
pandemic has prompted a universal time
of reflection. The past, more present, is
the new field of exploration, absent move-
ment.
There we are, my sister and I, still in the
cocoon of innocence, happy, curious, with
my mother mainly, my father occasion-
ally, my grandparents. Everyone but us in
the photographs is now dead. My parents,
all those South African aunts and uncles,
that world, gone.
The dead feel much closer now, along
with all those things they lived, the De-
pression, the war, confinement. Ships
drift around the world with unwanted
people, like the Jewish refugees aboard
the MS St. Louis on its voyage of the
damned during World War II.
The virus teaches something forgotten,
what it is like to be swept away by the gale
of history, what it is for every assumption
to collapse, what is precious in each single
contemplated breath.
It is said the camera never lies. But be-

hind those smiles in my dad’s slides lay

family tragedy. When I researched my

grandparents’ history in Lithuania and

gazed at photographs of the Jewish life

there that would be extinguished I recall

thinking: You, sir, are doomed — and you

on the wagon, and you with a hand on

your horse’s withers. Roland Barthes ob-

served that in every old photograph lurks

catastrophe.

Yet I feel more connection than catas-

trophe. To my family, to everyone out

there looking backward and inward, sift-

ing memories, adjusting priorities. Less

is more. Old recipes revived, old purses

reopened and redolent of a grandmoth-

er’s apartment, old rhythms of life in a

small radius rediscovered.

It’s the end of an era. The virus kills —

to what degree is still unclear. It also

screams, you must change your life.

The world that emerges from this can-

not resemble the old. If this plague that

cares not a whit for the class or status of

its victims cannot teach solidarity over in-

dividualistic excess, nothing will. If this

continent-hopping pathogen cannot dem-

onstrate the precarious interconnected-

ness of the planet, nothing will. Unlike 9/

11, the assault is universal.

Yet the two most powerful men on

earth, President Xi Jinping of China and

President Trump, have responded with

petty national interest that has cost myri-

ad lives. They have failed the world, a

superpower debacle.

China covered up the initial coro-

navirus outbreak in December for several

weeks and then tried to divert attention

from its biological Chernobyl through

trumpeting its success in containing the

illness (the numbers remain dubious), of-

fering international assistance (some in

the form of defective masks and tests),

and propagating the wild conspiracy the-

ory that the plague did not start in Wuhan

but was cooked up in an American mili-

tary lab and delivered by the United

States team attending the Military World

Games in Wuhan last October.

The lesson is not, as China would have

it, that despotic regimes deal more effec-

tively with disaster but that they incubate

the fear that made it impossible for doc-

tors and authorities in Wuhan to commu-

nicate rapidly the scale of the threat. A se-

ries of tweets last month from the Chinese

Embassy in France lauding China’s and

Asia’s superior response to the virus due

to the “sense of community and citizen-

ship that Western democracies lack” was

grotesque. Li Wenliang, who died in Feb-

ruary, and Ai Fen, who appears to have

disappeared, are the whistleblower doc-

tors of Wuhan whom humanity must

never forget.

Trump tweeted on March 29, as Ameri-

cans died, that “President Trump is a rat-

ings hit.” His daily Covid-19 reality TV

show, which he called his “coronavirus

updates,” had “an astounding number” of

viewers, “more akin to the viewership for

a popular prime-time sitcom.”

If you want a quick definition of obscen-

ity, that’s it. This is the mentality, or rather

the mental affliction, that compounded

the Chinese cover-up with a Trump-au-

thored American confabulation that lost

another six weeks in dismissal of the pan-

demic as a hoax.

The world is leaderless. Every country

for itself. Swirling in lies. Schoolyard

petulance, like Mike Pompeo, the worst

American secretary of state in a long

time, insisting on calling this coronavirus

“the Wuhan virus.”

It is hard now, here in New York, every-

where really. Reading the numbers. See-

ing the triage tents and portable morgues.

The millions suddenly without jobs. The

people dying alone. Discarded blue and

white latex gloves on a street. Insomnia.

Choppers over the city at night. The Zoom

gatherings that console but also recall

that touch is beyond technology. The way

people veer away from a passer-by, the

coronavirus swerve. The sirens. The si-

lence that makes the sirens louder.

All this has happened before, not quite

like this, but yes. My sister’s photographs

are also a memento mori. And the world

has come through. Because of people like

Craig Smith, the surgeon in chief at New-

York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital

who wrote of Covid-19 patients in a mov-

ing dispatch to his medical troops, “They

survive because we don’t give up.”

It’s coming apart. Take care of it. We

don’t give up.We are connected to one an-

other and to generations past and future.

There are no strangers here. 0

ROGER COHEN

There Is No Way Out but Through

The world that emerges

from this cannot

resemble the old.