In Brief: October 4, 2020

Colliding crises shake already chaotic campaign’s last month

NEW YORK — The closing days of the presidential campaign were already dominated by the worst public health crisis in a century, millions of jobless Americans, a reckoning on civil rights, the death of a Supreme Court justice and uncertainty about President Donald Trump’s willingness to accept the election outcome.

And that was before the president woke up in a military hospital on Saturday — the most powerful man in the world unable to escape a virus that has so far killed more than 200,000 Americans.

One month before Election Day and with ballots already being cast in some states, there are few parallels in American history to such a stunning collision of crises in the late stage of a campaign. But beneath the volatility, the broad contours of the 2020 contest are remarkably stable.

The election began as, and remains, a referendum on Trump’s turbulent presidency.

The Republican president has trailed Democratic challenger Joe Biden in polls for most of the year. Trump’s approval ratings barely budge, consistently ranking him as among the weakest first-term presidents in living history. And for five consecutive months, no more than roughly 3 in 10 voters have believed the nation is moving in the right direction.

Pence ordered borders closed after CDC experts refused

NEW YORK — Vice President Mike Pence in March directed the nation’s top disease control agency to use its emergency powers to effectively seal the U.S. borders, overruling the agency’s scientists who said there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus, according to two former health officials. The action has so far caused nearly 150,000 children and adults to be expelled from the country.

The top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor who oversees these types of orders had refused to comply with a Trump administration directive saying there was no valid public health reason to issue it, according to three people with direct knowledge of the doctor’s refusal.

So Pence intervened in early March. The vice president, who had taken over the Trump administration’s response to the growing pandemic, called Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director, and told him to use the agency’s special legal authority in a pandemic anyway.

Also on the phone call were Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. Redfield immediately ordered his senior staff to get it done, according to a former CDC official who was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The CDC’s order covered the U.S. borders with both Mexico and Canada, but has mostly affected the thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants arriving at the southern border. Public health experts had urged the administration to focus on a national mask mandate, enforce social distancing and increase the number of contact tracers to track down people exposed to the virus.

GOP seeks to call off Senate work, but not Barrett hearings

WASHINGTON — The coroniavirus reached further into Republican ranks on Saturday, forcing the Senate to call off lawmaking as a third GOP senator tested positive for COVID-19. Even so, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared he would push President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee toward confirmation in the shadow of the November election.

Trump and Senate Republicans had hoped the confirmation hearings of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s would make the final case to voters of the party’s commitment to remake the court with a muscular conservative majority. But the hospitalization of Trump, and the infection of a trio of GOP senators, shattered any notion of changing the subject entirely from the virus that’s killed more than 205,000 Americans.

So great was the threat posed by COVID-19 that McConnell called off floor proceedings but not Barrett’s hearings, slated to begin Oct. 12. The Kentucky Republican, who is battling to save the GOP majority and running for reelection himself, was not about to give them up.

“The Senate’s floor schedule will not interrupt the thorough, fair and historically supported confirmation process,” McConnell wrote Saturday. Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who like McConnell is running for reelection, added that senators can attend the hearings remotely.

“Certainly,” McConnell said, “all Republican members of the committee will participate in these important hearings.”

Trump’s whirlwind week, disdain for masks, ended with COVID

WASHINGTON — The scene at the White House a week ago was one of normalcy in these most abnormal times: a crowd of revelers gathered in the Rose Garden, a band playing, the mingling of the elite, good cheer everywhere, handshakes and hugs left and right.

Now it’s a suspected petri dish of coronavirus infection, prominent among the numerous occasions over a week or more where President Donald Trump might have caught — or spread — the virus that has now landed him in the hospital

No one knows how, when or from whom Trump became infected. Nor is it established who, if anyone, has contracted the disease from him. But to retrace some of his steps over the last week is to see risk at multiple turns and an abundance of opportunity for infection.

This was the case day after day and right up until a few hours before his positive diagnosis, as he took a contingent to New Jersey for a fundraiser while knowing he’d been close to someone sick with COVID-19.

From wire sources

The result is that one of the most protected people on the planet is now hospitalized, battling a disease that has killed more than 1 million people worldwide, more than 200,000 of them in the United States.

Graham, Harrison both tout bipartisanship in 1st SC matchup

COLUMBIA, S.C. — In their first debate in a race that has shattered fundraising records and become among the more closely watched Senate contests of this cycle, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison drew multiple contrasts between their campaigns but also both portrayed themselves as willing to work across the aisle to achieve legislative progress.

In his pursuit of a fourth term, Graham — chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — also argued the case for his chief congressional goal at the moment: the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s latest Supreme Court nominee.

After Harrison — an associate Democratic National Committee chairman and former lobbyist — said Saturday night that he and his wife were still paying off their student loans, Graham snapped back that, given what he’s seen of Harrison’s income from released tax returns, “You’re a multimillionaire, and you can’t pay off your student loans?”

Harrison described himself as willing to work with Republicans on a variety of issues, describing when, as state Democratic chairman, he became close friends with his GOP counterpart. He also critiqued the longtime lawmaker’s previous support of 12-year term limits and added, “I do believe the ultimate term limit is in the power of the people here in South Carolina.”

In response, Graham promoted himself as a conservative unafraid to work with Democrats, mentioning issues like immigration, and telling voters, “You can limit my term on Nov. 3 if you’d like.”

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Black singer of regional Mexican music sparks buzz, emotion

RIO RANCHO, N.M. — Before clicking the Instagram video, the sight intrigued most. Sarah Palafox, a Black woman, held an iPhone while standing in front of mariachis. When users turned on the volume, they heard a woman belting out a heartbreak interpretation of Jenni Rivera’s “Que Me Vas A Dar” in perfect Spanish of Mexico’s Zacatecas. Instagram users said the short clip made them cry. Others demanded more.

But most wondered: Who was this woman with a voice like the late Tejano star Selena? And what’s her story?

Palafox, an African American woman raised by a Mexican immigrant family, has generated excitement online with her versions of regional Mexican music.

Born in Southern California but raised in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, 23-year-old Palafox, who goes by the stage name Sarah La Morena, has sparked emotions following a series of viral videos on social media. The clip of Palafox singing with mariachis spawned a half of million views on Instagram and another 200,000 on Twitter. Other videos of her singing banda — another form of regional music from Mexico’s southwest coast — also have been shared thousands of times. (She is working on an album.)

However, as Palafox has been stroking a frenzy with her voice, she’s also been to the target of a racist backlash online over her love of Mexican music. A few Black social media users accuse of her being ashamed of her Blackness. Some Latino users sling racist slurs and accused her of appropriation. The insults come in English and Spanish.