The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-26)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23

TUESDAY Opinion

M

y family recently got a new puppy, a strong-willed and mouthy but ultimately lo vable li ttle nipper. We named him Bernie Sanders. Unfortunately, though, I can’t take Ber- nie out on walks. Here in the capital, we have a puppy killer on the loose, a murder- ous psychopath known as Anthony S. Fauci. “Dr. Anthony Fauci is facing calls from a bipartisan group of legislators to respond to allegations that his National Institutes of Health division provided a grant to a lab in Tunisia to torture and kill dozens of beagle puppies for twisted scientific experiments,” Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post reported Sunday afternoon. “HORROR ‘EXPERIMENTS’: #ArrestFau- ci trending after doc ‘funded research that saw beagles eaten alive & stripped of vocal cords in testing’” Murdoch’s Sun reported. “ ‘Cruel’ Fauci is condemned for... experiments which saw beagles ‘de-barked’ and trapped in cages so flies could eat them alive,” added Britain’s Daily Mail, mention- ing “a Tunisian research lab where beagle puppies were force-fed a new drug.” The monster! What next, Fauci? Setting kittens’ tails on fire? Pulling appendages off daddy longlegs while watching cock fights? Unlikely. As it turns out, the only thing being tortured here is the truth. The epi- sode says more about the right-wing disinformation machine and its crusade against Fauci than it does about research funded by Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and In- fectious Diseases. It turns out that this Tunisian study was erroneously attributed to NIAID. NIAID did, however, fund different research in Tunisia — and the beagles weren’t puppies, they weren’t euthanized, they weren’t “de- barked,” and they weren’t “trapped” so “flies could eat them alive.” The dogs were given an experimental vaccine and allowed to roam. There was a very good reason for this: Dogs are the main reservoir host (and flies the main vector) of the disease that was being studied, which affects half a m il- lion people a y ear, particularly children, and has a 6 percent mortality rate in Tunisia. But right-wing news outlets, through stu- pidity or malice, conflated separate studies funded by NIAID, using documents provided by the White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group with an anti-Fauci bent. Over the past couple of months, Gateway Pundit, National Review, Fox News, the Hill and others have picked up elements of this “story,” with varying degrees of accuracy, and lawmakers have written letters to Fauci based on the misinformation. NIAID re- ceived hundreds of threatening calls Mon- day from people inflamed by the mislead- ing reports. Had right-wing outlets checked with the NIH, they would know that in another study, which didn’t involve Tunisia and didn’t involve flies, NIAID-funded researchers did indeed perform cordectomies on 44 beagle puppies and euthanized them after the study. And here’s why: The Food and Drug Administration requires researchers to experiment on non-rodent mammals for certain classes of HIV-AIDS drugs, and for this study specifically recommended dogs. It is necessary to use young dogs (six to eight months) to assess whether the drugs retard growth. It is mandatory that the dogs be euthanized so researchers can search for damage to organ systems. And it is recommended by the Association for As- sessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care that the dogs undergo cordectomies to reduce anxiety (in dogs) and hear- ing loss (in humans) from barking. (Beagles are used because of their uniform size.) Above all, this is no frivolous pursuit: The drugs under study are promising next- generation antiretrovirals that can be ad- ministered to HIV/AIDS patients less fre- quently — potentially saving countless human lives. No doubt people can find some clunkers in the thousands of studies NIAID funds each year — it has 10,000 active projects — but what’s happening now is an endless game of gotcha by Fauci’s right-wing critics, who are bitter about his aggressive fight against covid-19 and his criticism of the Trump administration’s woeful handling of the pandemic. His foes file Freedom of In- formation Act requests and search for ma- terial that could embarrass him. These foes are barking triumphantly because the NIH last week notified Congress that it had just learned that one of its grant recipients conducted a “limited experiment” with the Wuhan, China, lab testing whether bat coronaviruses could bind to human receptors in mice. It’s not of great consequence — the viruses were “very dis- tant” from the one that causes covid-19, the NIH said — but it appears to contradict Fauci’s claim that no “gain of function” work was funded. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who regularly spars with Fauci, wants him to be pros- ecuted. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tweeted Mon- day that “Anthony Fauci’s NIH funded the Wuhan lab that ‘did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more in- fectious to humans.’ And Fauci’s NIH was involved in torturing puppies. Remind me again how Fauci still has a job???” Here’s how. Millions of people are alive today because of his work against AIDS, covid-19 and more. The anti-science forces of Trump, Murdoch, Paul and Cruz will continue to spew disinformation. But I’m grate- ful for Fauci — and so is my puppy.

DANA MILBANK WASHINGTON SKETCH

Why is Anthony

Fauci trying to

kill my puppy?

BY LIZ THOMSON

I’

m all too familiar with homicide and its causes. The worsening murder rate today feels like a reflection of an alarming trend I have noticed over the past several years: The rage factor in these crimes is rising. When I joined the Albuquerque Po- lice Department as a 40-year-old rookie in 1999, my colleagues referred to me as “Cadet Nana.” You probably couldn’t get away with that today. Over the next 19 years, I moved up through the ranks, learning plenty along the way, and eventually headed our homicide unit. Homicide was a tough assignment. I saw firsthand the scars that each murder leaves on a community, the damage that radiates from a single crime. Every death was a loss to Albuquerque, the city where I grew up and later raised my children. Many of the murders were solved; some were not. Some of the murders prompted intense media coverage; some went almost unremarked. But I kept a list of every victim. By my retirement in 2017, it had grown to 240 names. Putting pen to paper had become a painful ritual: I was writing the names of people who would never write their names again, people killed on my watch. On retiring, I wanted to pay homage to them — all of them. I carried my list to Spain, to the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route across the Iberian Peninsula. There, I walked hundreds of miles, stopping every kilome- ter or so to recite another name from my list. Before cathedrals and vineyards, I called out the names of souls we found lying dead in their own driveways and bodies dumped in the street. I remem- bered. I made a memorial video of it. These people had been erased by crimi- nals, but I wanted them to be recalled in beautiful, unexpected places. I have since returned to the department as a civilian to work on cold cases. When I recently read how the U.S. murder rate has spiked, I wished I could say the FBI’s numbers were a surprise. I can’t. I used to report Albuquerque’s crime data to the feds. Murder stats have stories to tell. Some can mislead; some hold our thorniest truths. A disturbing factor is the pure, irra- tional rage that seems increasingly to drive these grim numbers. Uncontrolla- ble anger has always accounted for some murders, of course, but I’ve been struck in recent years by the greater role it plays in these cases. By August, Albuquerque had already equaled its record for homicides with 81, set in 2019. In recent years, the data showed that inane, petty disputes increasingly sparked killings. People die over absurdities — dibs on a carwash stall, stolen weed, getting cut off in traf fic or beer pong gone wrong. More and more, guns are likely to be involved: Nationally, the firearm homicide rate increased 26 percent between 2010 and 2019. One dark thread winds through murder statistics. In part, it explains when ordinary, everyday irritation or resent- ment might turn to homicidal fury: Killers generally feel powerless over their circumstances. Having lost control over their lives, they may commit violence in an attempt to regain a semblance of it — and the ultimate exercise of control over life is taking someone else’s. The pandemic no doubt exacerbated that sense of helplessness. A dangerous sense of lurking chaos has been in the air. Add to that the contemporary turn toward simple meanness online and in the media, with bullying often admired and nastiness rewarded. Death threats replace debate. Inch by inch, rage be- comes the norm. In that poisonous atmosphere, tragedies are inevitable. There are plenty of solutions peren- nially offered for combating the rise in violent crime: improved education, more opportunity, better social ser- vices. But those are big projects that would take years, decades, to have an impact. They also don’t speak to what individual people can do. One thing each of us can contribute is consciously working to lower the social rage level. Try to make empathy and compassion a reflex and not instant anger at anyone who has offended you online or in the real world. If a rage culture has been created, it can also be rolled back. It would also help if everyone — law enforcement, the helping professions, lawmakers, the media, the general public — looked on every loss of life as a tragedy. Not just the sympathetic victim in a widely publicized case, but also those who lead troubled lives and whose passing is hardly noted. Every victim was somebody’s son or daughter, sister or brother, friend or neighbor. Remember that.

The writer, a retired supervisor of the Albuquerque Police Department’s homicide unit, recently returned to the department as a cold-case investigator.

The rage

in so many

murders

feels new

“I

t’s the greatest assault on voting rights,” President Biden said, “in the history of the United States — for real — since the Civil War.” But Democrats, including the president, are calling the “for real” part into question. After the third Republican filibuster of voting rights legislation in the Senate, Biden announced: “I also think we’re going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster.” So sounds an un- certain trumpet. Imagine Biden as Henry V at Harfleur: “I also think we’re going to have to move to the point where we go once more unto the breach, dear friends.” The situation is even worse in the Senate’s Democratic caucus. So far, it has been negotiating internally to muster the 50 votes required to end or mend the filibuster on voting rights legislation. Given the meager results, the public has every right to wonder if Democrats believe — “for real” — that they are rescuing the republic from ruin. The fact that Republicans are sec- ondary characters in this drama has not prevented them from adding fool- ish commentary. “This is not a federal issue,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) claimed, conveniently forgetting the 15th Amendment and 150 years of states’ efforts to prevent its full application. Other Republicans complain that altering the filibuster for voting rights legislation would be an unprecedented weakening of minority rights in the Senate — leaving out the other 161 times since 1969 that the Senate adopted procedures to prevent a filibuster on specific measures, as count- ed by Molly E. Reynolds of the Brook- ings Institution.

Two other objections to filibuster reform h old a bit more water. First, election laws recently passed by state legislatures are a mixed lot, ranging from meaningless to repug- nant. As of early October, 19 states had passed 33 laws making it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. At least four of the 33 were accompanied by changes that made voting easier in some ways. In only four states — Georgia, Iowa, Texas and Florida — did legislatures pass omni- bus legislation clearly designed to restrict the franchise. The problem with the preceding sentence is the “only.” Any list that includes Texas and Flori- da is not “only” anything. A second objection is more telling. In a r ecent National Affairs essay, political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik make a persuasive case that the level of voter turnout doesn’t help one party or another. “Put simply,” they conclude, “there is no evidence that turnout is correlated with partisan vote choice.” This sounds counterintuitive, but the point is rela- tively noncontroversial among political scientists. There is no good evidence that Republican attempts to restrict the franchise benefit Republi- cans in any predictable way. They certainly intend to cheat, but that doesn’t make them effective cheaters. The challenge for Democrats on voting rights is that the measures they propose are only partially responsive to GOP recklessness. Republicans are not a threat to the republic because they want to ban water distribution in voting lines and drive-through voting. They are a threat to the republic because they have found a potentially fatal weakness in the constitutional order that they are perfectly willing to exploit.

In the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, amid the chaotic carnival of sedition, Trump counsel John East- man and Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark set out elements of a plan for a constitutional coup. The U.S. president, as every schoolchild should know, is chosen by a vote of the electoral college. And the Constitu- tion, as every slimy Trump lawyer seems to know, gives state legislatures the power to determine how electors are chosen. In Trump’s dream world, Republicans would have cried electoral fraud and Republican legislators would have ignored the popular vote in crucial states and certified Trump electors. The whole mess would ultimately have been decided by the ab- surd constitutional device of giving each delegation in the House of Repre- sentatives one vote — which would have exaggerat ed the dominance of red states with small populations even more than the electoral college does. And voilà: reelection. The plan didn’t come close to frui- tion, not least because some Republi- can state of ficials refused to cooperate. Plenty of election experts consider such a maneuver illegal and unconsti- tutional, but few deny its potential to create chaos. And Trump surely sees the last time as a dry run. He has made complicity in electoral lies and fraud the defining test of GOP loyalty. What is the proper response when an authoritarian has found a constitutional self-destruct button and can’t wait to press it? Surely this is a reason for Democrats to find a common ap- proach that not only modifies Senate rules to pass the Freedom to Vote Act but also confronts the antidemocratic lawlessness at the heart of Republican ideology. A l ittle more unity, urgency and clarity, please.

MICHAEL GERSON

Where’s the urgency in today’s

voting rights emergency?

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES People walk past an early-voting site at a YMCA in New York on Monday.

tion integrity unit” allowing people to re port supposed election fraud to an email hotline. And the GOP has been using its one-party rule to pass some of the nation’s most odious pieces of legislation, including attacking the teaching of race and history in schools, effectively banning abortion for women, and target- ing transgender students. But instead of fighting GOP power with power, nearly a year after voters braved covid-19 and long lines to vote, Democrats seem to be pushing the buck onto activists and organizers. In a r eport last week in the Atlantic, voting activists characterized the White House’s response as “we need all of you to help us get the word out that there’s a p roblem with voting rights.” It wasn’t that long ago that the message from the Biden administration was that it hoped people would “out-organize” voter suppression. Now that I am living in a state held in the GOP’s vise grip, it’s clear to me there is no “out- organizing,” or voting rights awareness effort, that can match the power of federal legislation. That means the biggest question on the table is whether Democrats are willing to change Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, a procedural tool that has long been used to block civil rights progress for Black people in particular. I spoke with Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, who represents northeastern Dal- las and its suburbs, to try to gain some hope, any hope, that federal voting rights help is on the way. In August, the congressman, a former voting rights attorney, introduced a bill to protect officials charged with ballot counting, canvassing and certification from intimidation. He also was part of the push to limit arbitrary removals of election officials. The bill was defeated. So what’s the plan now?

DALLAS

O

n voting rights, the Democrats are bringing stuffed animals to a machine gun fight. In July, President Biden called Republican efforts to undercut voting rights across the country a “21st-century Jim Crow assault” and “the most signifi- cant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” “We’ll be asking my Republican friends — in Congress, in states, in cities, in coun- ties — t o stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to under- mine our elections and the sacred right to vote,” he said. “Have you no shame?” So, “asking” was the plan for the party holding the presidency and both houses of Congress, albeit narrowly, in response to a Republican assault on voting and civil rights? That c ertainly seemed to be the battle strategy of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who had one job: persuading 10 Republicans to get behind a compro- mise Freedom to Vote Act that would have expanded vote by mail, made Elec- tion Day a h oliday and established auto- matic voter registration. Predictably, not a single Republican could be persuaded to even allow Manchin’s plan to come to a vote. Forget failing to stand up. Republicans are on their feet and gleefully marching the country backward on voting rights. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, this year 19 states have passed some 33 pieces of legislation making it harder to vote. Here in Texas, Republicans have made it more difficult for people to receive mail-in ballots, limited early voting and imposed harsher voter ID requirements. On top of that, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), a p roponent of former president Donald Trump’s “big lie” of the 2020 stolen election, has created an “elec-

He said the Republicans’ attempt to limit voting were all “terrible things, but we can overcome them.” But for now, the focus for the Biden administration was on getting infrastructure bills passed. Allred said he still feels confident that Texas could soon turn blue at the state- wide level. I w as a skeptical audience of one and told him as such. “Republicans have gone so far to the right, they are not even recognizable as the pro-business party that used to be here,” he said, noting recent races in Texas where Democrats came within striking distance of Republican candi- dates in normally red districts. Districts, I would add, that are being redrawn by Texas Republicans; gerry- mandering is not something anyone can just out-organize, either. And perhaps therein lies the Demo- crats’ wing and a prayer with voting rights — that somehow continuing to highlight shameless Republican obstruc- tion will pay off for them. That somehow Americans will be so enamored with historic government spending on physi- cal infrastructure and the social safety net that red states will be prevented from continuing to limit participation in our democracy. Somehow. It seems like wishful thinking, at best, and fatal apathy at worst. We shouldn’t have to choose between infrastructure and unfettered access to the ballot. And we shouldn’t be subject to a Congress that cares more about pro- tecting a Jim Crow-era procedural rule than the American people. Voting rights are the foundation of the United States’ political infrastructure, and our very lives depend on them. Biden may have asked Republicans if they have any shame, but as voting rights continue to be decimated, it seems apparent that Democrats don ’t have much of a spine.

KAREN ATTIAH

Wishful thinking verging on fatal apathy

The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-26)

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