THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2020 Y A
Tracking an Outbreak The 45th President and Capitol Hill
voting would lead to fraud. “De-
lay the Election until people can
properly, securely and safely
vote???”
The most powerful leaders in
Congress immediately shot down
the idea of moving the election,
including the top figures in Mr.
Trump’s own party.
“Never in the history of the
country, through wars, depres-
sions, and the Civil War have we
ever not had a federally sched-
uled election on time, and we’ll
find a way to do that again this
Nov. 3,” Mitch McConnell, the
Senate Majority Leader, said in
an interview with WNKY televi-
sion in Kentucky. “We’ll cope
with whatever the situation is
and have the election on Nov. 3
as already scheduled.”
Mr. Trump’s tweet about delay-
ing the election marked a phase
of his presidency defined not by
the accumulation of executive
power, but by an abdication of
presidential leadership on a
national emergency.
Faced with the kind of eco-
nomic wreckage besieging mil-
lions of Americans, any other
president would be shoulder-
deep in the process of marshal-
ing his top lieutenants and lead-
ers in Congress to form a robust
government response. Instead,
Mr. Trump has been absent this
week from economic-relief talks,
even as a crucial unemployment
benefit is poised to expire and
the Federal Reserve chairman,
Jerome H. Powell, warned pub-
licly that the country’s recovery
is lagging.
And any other president con-
fronted with a virulent viral
outbreak across huge regions of
the country would be at least
trying to deliver a clear and
consistent message about public
safety. Instead, Mr. Trump has
continued to promote a drug of
no proven efficacy, hydroxy-
chloroquine, as a potential mir-
acle cure, and to demand that
schools and businesses reopen
quickly — even as he has also
claimed that it might be impossi-
ble to hold a safe election.
William F. Weld, the former
governor of Massachusetts who
mounted a largely symbolic
challenge to Mr. Trump in the
Republican primaries this year,
said on Thursday that the presi-
dent’s tweet was a sign that Mr.
Trump was panicked and un-
moored. Though Mr. Weld has
argued for years that Mr. Trump
had dictatorial impulses, he said
Thursday that the election-delay
idea was “not a legitimate
threat.”
“So many dead and the econ-
omy in free fall — and what’s his
reaction? Delay the election,” Mr.
Weld said. “It’s a sign of a mind
that’s having a great deal of
difficulty coming to terms with
reality.”
Mr. Trump has attacked the
legitimacy of American elections
before, including the one in 2016
that made him president. Even
after winning the Electoral Col-
lege that year, Mr. Trump cast
doubt on the popular vote and
postulated baselessly that Hilla-
ry Clinton’s substantial lead in
that metric had been tainted by
illegal voting.
With that as precedent, there
has never been much doubt —
certainly among his opponents —
that Mr. Trump would attempt to
undercut the election if it ap-
peared likely he would lose it.While Mr. Trump does not have
the power to shift the date of the
election, there is ample concern
among Democrats that his ap-
pointees in Washington or his
allies in state governments could
make a large-scale effort to snarl
the process of voting.
Given the extreme nature of
Mr. Trump’s suggestion, there
was an odd familiarity to the
response it garnered from politi-
cal leaders in both parties. There
was no immediate call to the
barricades, or renewed push
from Democrats for presidential
impeachment. Opposition lead-
ers expressed outrage, but most
agreed, in public and private,
that Mr. Trump’s outburst should
be treated as a distress call
rather than a real statement of
his governing intentions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
the most powerful Democrat in
government, replied to Mr.
Trump’s tweet simply by posting
on Twitter the language from the
Constitution stating that Con-
gress, not the president, sets the
date of national elections. Repre-
sentative Zoe Lofgren of Califor-
nia, a Democrat who chairs thecongressional committee that
oversees elections, suggested in
no uncertain terms that Mr.
Trump’s tweet was another
symptom of his inability to mas-
ter the coronavirus.
“Only Congress can change
the date of our elections,” Ms.
Lofgren said, “and under no
circumstances will we consider
doing so to accommodate the
President’s inept and haphazard
response to the coronavirus
pandemic, or give credence to
the lies and misinformation he
spreads regarding the manner in
which Americans can safely and
securely cast their ballots.”
Republicans, who typically
answer the president with a
combination of evasion or no
comment, did not rush to become
profiles in courage by thundering
against an out-of-control presi-
dency, and some ducked the
issue entirely when confronted
by reporters. But many others
were blunt in their rejection of
Mr. Trump’s position.
“Make no mistake: the election
will happen in New Hampshire
on November 3rd. End of story,”
Gov. Chris Sununu of NewHampshire, a Republican who is
up for re-election, said on Twitter.
Senator Marco Rubio of Flor-
ida said on Capitol Hill, “Since
1845, we’ve had an election on
the first Tuesday after November
first and we’re going to have one
again this year.”
Representative Kevin McCar-
thy, the House minority leaderand one of Mr. Trump’s staunch-
est allies in Congress, echoed
that position, saying “we should
go forward.”
Others were more equivocal,
following a well-worn Republican
playbook for avoiding direct
conflict with the president over
his wilder pronouncements.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
asked in a Senate hearing
whether he believed it was legal
for a president to delay an elec-tion, said he was “not going to
enter a legal judgment on that on
the fly this morning.” That would
be an assessment, he said, for
the Justice Department.
Even Mr. Trump’s campaign
declined to turn his tweet into a
rallying cry, instead playing
down the notion that it might
have been a policy prescription.
Hogan Gidley, a spokesman for
the campaign, said Mr. Trump
was “just raising a question
about the chaos Democrats have
created with their insistence on
all mail-in voting” — an obvi-
ously false paraphrase of the
president’s tweet, one that min-
imized the gravity of what Mr.
Trump had said.
The timing of Mr. Trump’s
tweet, as much as the content,
highlighted the extent to which
he has become a loud but iso-
lated figure in government, and
in the public life of the country.
In addition to failing to devise a
credible national response to the
coronavirus pandemic, he has
not played the traditional presi-
dential role of calming the coun-
try in moments of fear and sooth-
ing it in moments of grief.
Never was that more apparent
than on Thursday, when Mr.
Trump spent the morning post-
ing a combination of incendiary
and pedestrian tweets, while his
three immediate predecessors —
Barack Obama, George W. Bush
and Bill Clinton — gathered in
Atlanta for the funeral of John
Lewis, the congressman and civil
rights hero.
As mourners assembled at the
Ebenezer Baptist Church, Mr.
Trump had other matters on his
mind, like hypothetical election
fraud and, as it happened, Italian
food.
“Support Patio Pizza and its
wonderful owner, Guy Caligiuri,
in St. James, Long Island (N.Y.).”
the president tweeted, referring
to a restaurateur who said he
faced backlash for supporting
Mr. Trump. “Great Pizza!!!”NEWS ANALYSIS
Surrounded by Crises,
Trump Instead Talks
Of Delaying Election
From Page ATop Republicans and Demo-
crats shot down President
Trump’s suggestion that the
November election could be
put off because of the virus.STEFANI REYNOLDS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESA distress call sent
out by a president
on the ropes.
Representative Louie Gohmert,
a mask-shunning Republican
from Texas, might never have
known he had the coronavirus had
he not had a mandatory rapid test
at the White House in line with its
strict protocols put in place to pro-
tect President Trump.
So when he tested positive this
week, prompting alarm and anger
on Capitol Hill, his case exposed a
dangerous reality that lawmak-
ers, aides and other staff mem-
bers have quietly fretted over for
months: that Congress, which is
tasked with shepherding the na-
tion through the pandemic, itself
lacks consistent procedures for
protecting its members and its
work force.
Like everything else in Con-
gress, arriving at a consensus on
how to guard against the spread of
the virus in the halls of the Capitol
has become a partisan affair, leav-
ing leaders unable or unwilling to
adhere to a common set of rules.
Many conservative Republicans
like Mr. Gohmert, taking their
cues from Mr. Trump, have re-
fused to wear masks, staffed their
offices at near full capacity and
freely glad-handed with one an-
other, their colleagues and top ad-
ministration officials in close
quarters to show the country what
getting back to work looks like.
Other Republicans and most
Democrats, by contrast, have or-
dered a majority of their aides to
work remotely and asked those
who do report to the Capitol com-
plex to wear masks and practice
social distancing.
“The House by its nature is a
hodgepodge, where all 435 offices
have their own policies, and
Speaker Pelosi doesn’t have the
authority to stop dumb members
from doing dumb things,” said
Brendan Buck, a former senior
aide to Nancy Pelosi’s most recent
predecessor as speaker, former
Representative Paul D. Ryan, Re-
publican of Wisconsin. But he ar-
gued the speaker had failed to set
up a reliable system of routine
testing.
Mr. Gohmert’s diagnosis —
which sent at least four lawmak-
ers into quarantine and dozens
more aides, reporters and the at-
torney general scrambling to get
tested — prompted Ms. Pelosi to
put in place the strictest restric-
tions yet late Wednesday. She an-
nounced that lawmakers and their
staff members would be required
to wear masks when on the House
floor or moving through House of-
fice buildings, warning that fail-
ure to do so would be considered a
serious breach worthy of removal
from the premises.
But just hours later, the Repub-
lican-appointed sergeant-at-arms
in the Senate, Michael C. Stenger,
put out guidance of his own saying
that all employees on that side of
the Capitol were explicitly exempt
from orders by the District of Co-
lumbia to wear masks and quar-antine when traveling in from
high-risk areas around the coun-
try.
With reporters and support
staff members darting back and
forth between the two chambers,
often through packed interior
hallways, the noncompliance of
one chamber could easily under-
mine the other.
In addition to the 10 or so law-
makers who have tested positive,
the virus has spread among the
workers who quietly power the
Capitol, with 27 Capitol Police em-
ployees, 33 contractors working
on a construction site and 25 em-
ployees of the Architect of theCapitol testing positive and doz-
ens more going into voluntary iso-
lation because of exposure, ac-
cording to a tally from Republi-
cans on the House Administration
Committee.
Leaders in the House and the
Senate have repeatedly declined
to put in place a campuswide test-
ing program for lawmakers and
their aides. In May, aides with the
House Administration Committee
met with Will Roper, the assistant
secretary of the Air Force, who of-
fered to connect lawmakers to a
Washington-based laboratory
that could process up to 6,
tests a week at no cost to the
House. The White House, too, has
offered to send rapid testing ma-
chines.
Ms. Pelosi and Senator Mitch
McConnell, Republican of Ken-
tucky and the majority leader, de-
murred, arguing publicly that
members of Congress should not
receive special access to testing
when supplies were still scarce for
the public. Privately, they ques-
tioned the feasibility of testing
thousands of people a day.
But the news of Mr. Gohmert’s
diagnosis — and that he had re-
turned to the Capitol to tell his
aides in person of his test results
— unleashed a firestorm of terrorand indignation across the House
as everyone from interns to law-
makers scrambled to try to re-
trace Mr. Gohmert’s steps.
Representative Rodney Davis
of Illinois, the top Republican on
the Administration Committee,
urged his colleagues on Thursday
to follow the House physician’s
recommendations. “Failure to ad-
here to this guidance is at your
own risk,” he wrote in a corre-
sponding memo.
But without any uniform man-
dates, a patchwork of policies and
practices has emerged on Capitol
Hill, where lawmakers are ex-
empt from workplace safety laws
and their employees and interns
do not have the benefit of a tradi-
tional human resources depart-
ment. Congressional offices are
exceedingly hierarchical, making
raising concerns about safety or
discomfort exceedingly difficult.
“The real issue here is that Con-
gress is mandating laws for us to
all live by and they’re still not tak-
ing care of their own people,” said
Audrey Henson, the founder of
College to Congress, a nonprofit
that provides low-income stu-
dents with the resources to take
congressional internships.
In Mr. Gohmert’s office, staffaides were reportedly encouraged
to show up in person to set an ex-
ample for the country.
His office is two doors down
from that of Representative Adam
B. Schiff, Democrat of California,
who has had all but a masked aide
or two occasionally working from
home since March.
Aides for Representative Clay
Higgins, Republican of Louisiana,
have been allowed to “exercise
their individual preferences,” in-
cluding wearing a mask or not. Mr.
Higgins had been among those
pointedly refusing to wear a mask
on the House floor, calling them
“part of the dehumanization of the
children of God.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Higgins
bowed to Ms. Pelosi’s new order.
“ ‘Mask’ is not the hill to die on,” he
wrote in a Facebook post. “Free-
dom is the hill to die on. Fighting
for your freedoms in Congress is
more important than my freedom
to wear or not wear a mask.”
The work of Congress is done in
many cases out of tiny, poorly ven-
tilated offices that have been sub-
divided and subdivided again so
that staff members sit four or six
to an office, and only the most sen-
ior have a closing door. For the
thousands of contractors and sup-port staff members who largely
work out of the basements of the
Capitol complex, the situation is
even more exaggerated and the
options for teleworking fewer.
Conditions in the Senate, a
smaller body with 100 members
spread out on a similar-size cam-
pus, have generally been better
and mask usage is widespread.
But a handful Republican sena-
tors have frequently left their
faces uncovered when moving
through the Capitol and in March,
one of them, Rand Paul of Ken-
tucky, forced several of his col-
leagues into isolation after he
tested positive.
Mr. Davis tried to pin the blame
back on Democrats in an inter-
view Thursday, insisting that a
plan Republicans proposed in
May to regularly test lawmakers
and congressional staff members
could have kept the virus under
control and Congress safely at
work. He noted that House Demo-
crats had already imposed a num-
ber of risk mitigation measures,
like social distancing during votes
on the House floor.
“I don’t think the one diagnosis
yesterday can reflect upon the en-
tire institution like we haven’t
made some changes already,” Mr.
Davis said. “But the one change
we have yet to get done because of
Speaker Pelosi’s resistance is the
same option that Americans have
throughout our communities.”
Ms. Pelosi’s allies vigorously
contest that characterization, not-
ing that lawmakers can get tested
by the attending physician’s office
if they have reason to believe they
could have contracted the virus or
are showing symptoms.
Representative Zoe Lofgren,
Democrat of California and the
chairwoman of the administration
panel, said Republicans’ proposal
was simply unworkable. The Ab-
bott rapid testing machines of-
fered by the Trump administra-
tion have a high rate of false nega-
tives, and it would take multiple
machines running around the
clock to regularly test members of
the House and a small coterie of
aides — not to mention senators
or others coming to work every
day.
“Stop fooling around. Stop try-
ing to make this some political is-
sue,” Ms. Lofgren said. “It’s not.
It’s just a health issue.”
Democrats in May adopted a
package of rules changes to allow
committees to meet remotely and
lawmakers to cast their votes on
the floor from afar using a proxy,
in addition to other cleaning and
social distancing guidelines.
But every Republican but one
has outright refused to use the
proxy system, and party leaders
sued to deem it unconstitutional.A DANGEROUS REALITY
Texas Lawmaker’s Positive Diagnosis Stokes Safety Concerns in Congress
By NICHOLAS FANDOS
and CATIE EDMONDSONThe Capitol Rotunda on Thursday. At least 10 lawmakers have tested positive, as have workers who quietly power the Capitol.ANNA MONEYMAKER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESDozens scramble to
get tested after
possible exposure.
BD