United States of America eSeries: Washington counts down to the Memorial Day pause

Sunday May 16, 2021

Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend!
Questions? Comments? what.matters@cnn.com

by Zachary B. Wolf and Paul LeBlanc

: Sunday speed read

Pandemic progress. The US is now averaging 33,860 new coronavirus cases per day, the lowest seven-day average since June 25, 2020, according to data from CNN and Johns Hopkins University.

We're also averaging 599 deaths per day, which is the lowest seven-day average since July 7.

We still have more vaccinating to do. Just over 36% of all Americans are fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and less than half -- almost 47% -- have received one dose.

The attack on voting rights continues. Arizona just became the latest Republican-led battleground to impose new voting restrictions, enacting a law that could purge tens of thousands of voters from the state's early mail-in ballot list.

And in other key states, GOP lawmakers are charging ahead with efforts to change the ground rules for future elections -- with big bills pending in Texas, Michigan and elsewhere.

More GOP dishonesty. A bunch of other Republican legislators made brazen attempts to rewrite the reality of the Capitol insurrection -- even though we saw what happened with our own eyes. CNN's Facts First team has a reality check here.

Domestic extremism watch. A newly released government report on domestic violent extremism warns lone wolf attackers with easily accessible weapons present the greatest terrorism threat to the US and the number of people dying at the hands of racially motivated extremists every year is on the rise since 2017.

Biden faces rift over Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Democrats have a brewing disagreement over how the US should react to violence between Israelis and Palestinians, leading progressives to question Biden's commitment to human rights and demanding he do more to pressure Israel.

: Summer's coming

Congress has just two more weeks to ramp up negotiations on a number of key Biden agenda items before the end of the work period threatens to halt any meaningful progress.

Deliberations over infrastructure, police reform and curbing China's influence are all entering make-or-break moments that will test the President's ability to bring lawmakers together for big-ticket items.

The negotiations will play out against the backdrop of a busy few days for both chambers and the President.

Two key votes to watch:

The House is expected to take up the Senate-passed version of the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act and bring it to the floor for a vote.
The chamber will also bring up legislation to establish the January 6 commission. The top Democrat and Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee struck a deal last week to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the riot.

Tuesday

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing to examine paid leave for working families, focusing on examining access, options and impacts.
Biden will travel to Dearborn, Michigan, to visit the Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center. The company will "preview for him the new F-150 Lightning, which will be built by UAW workers," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

Wednesday

Biden will address the Coast Guard Commencement exercises in New London, Connecticut.

Thursday

The Senate Judiciary Committee meets to consider several nominees for positions on the federal bench.

Friday

The President will welcome South Korean President Moon Jae-In to the White House, his second in-person bilateral meeting as POTUS. "President Moon's visit will highlight the iron clad alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea and the broad and deep ties between our governments, people and economies," Psaki said.

: 'Race Deconstructed'

CNN's Brandon Tensley is starting up a newsletter, Race Deconstructed, which is exciting to hear since Brandon is one my favorite writers at CNN. His recent story -- headlined "A short history of the long conservative assault on Black voting power" -- is particularly good.

Sign up for his Race Deconstructed here.

I talked to Brandon about what's coming in the newsletter and what you can expect from it. Our conversation, conducted via email, is below.

WHAT MATTERS: Brandon, I'm excited to subscribe to your newsletter! What can we expect you to be covering and what are you trying to accomplish with it?
TENSLEY: Thank you! Maybe this sounds vague and meaningless, but: I intend to cover everything that I can. Race is one of the main organizing elements of US society, whether we're talking about politics (voting rights, gun rights, Covid-19) or pop culture (horror movies, sports, even the national anthem), so everything is on the table.

My goal is really just to give a bit of dimension to the ways people think about race -- or if they don't think about race, help them understand the countless ways race permeates US society.

WHAT MATTERS: Your first edition is centered on the idea that a portion of society has essentially become estranged from the law. Explain that. The law, ideally, is supposed to apply to everyone in the same way.

TENSLEY: You're referring to legal estrangement, a concept developed by Monica Bell, a legal scholar and sociologist at Yale. It's essentially a feeling of deep exclusion from US society that people in poor communities of color feel because of the police and other legal institutions.

As Bell argues, legal estrangement is a robust way to view the strained relationship between the police and, for instance, Black communities because it really encourages us to think about the different levels that this relationship operates on.

The level that people tend to latch onto is the individual level -- how an individual police officer treats someone. But there's also group exclusion and structural exclusion. Understanding all these different levels is key to understanding the policing crisis.

WHAT MATTERS: I've written in What Matters this year about politics and voting, Covid, the economy and everything in between. Every single one of these stories has had key racial components. In that regard, I've recently thought, we're all covering (or should be covering) how our society treats different people differently. That's not a question, really. But. I'd love to get your thoughts on it.

TENSLEY: You're getting at my cri de coeur! Which is: If you're not at least considering how race might be affecting the issue you're studying or the beat you're covering -- gender, technology, politics, business, the environment, whatever -- you're probably missing something.

Really everyone should be reporting on race in some fashion because, again, from the very beginning, US society has been organized around race. We can still see the consequences of that organization today.

You mentioned Covid-19. Imagine being a health reporter and not interrogating how, because of a history of racial discrimination in medicine and health care policy, Covid-19 poses a unique threat to Black Americans and other people of color.

Or imagine reporting on voting rights and not fitting Republicans' antidemocratic maneuvering in states such as Georgia and Florida into a larger history of political machinations intended to enshrine power for White men and keep it at a distance for everyone else.

WHAT MATTERS: One thing I've been meaning to do a What Matters edition on is the growing fight over how to teach kids about US history. Specifically, whether federal funds can be used for schools to incorporate things like the 1619 Project. Ultimately, this is a fight over whether we can better tell the story of the history of this country, which likes to preach freedoms, while at the same time denying freedom. It also feeds into the problem of red and blue America acknowledging separate realities. How do you plan to approach this topic?

TENSLEY: That's a topic I absolutely intend to explore in the newsletter. I don't know if I'd say that the goal is to better tell the story of the history of this country, since "better" feels a bit slippery in a way that gets away from the point, which is to more truthfully tell that story.

W. E. B. Du Bois addressed this very challenge in his 1935 book, "Black Reconstruction in America."

"We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans," he wrote in the chapter fittingly called "The Propaganda of History." "But are these reasons of courtesy and philanthropy sufficient for denying Truth?"

One way to approach the controversy over textbooks/etc. is to speak with a historian who can place everything in a wider context: Prevailing historiographies are contested and revised all the time as we get more data -- why the especially loud complaining about The 1619 Project? When have we seen backlash like this before? And what does it reveal about the social and political anxieties of that particular time?

WHAT MATTERS: There's been a lot of writing this year about how the US is in the midst of a 1960's-style change in how we view race and inequality. What does your reporting this year make you think about that?

TENSLEY: I think that we're seeing important similarities today, in that there's also heightened national attention on race, the over-policing of Black people and systemic racism more broadly. That said, I'm always wary of making sweeping comparisons, mostly because on closer examination there are significant distinctions that we don't want to erase and that are worth parsing.

For instance, there's a reason that historians refer to the mid-century struggle for Black liberation as the Second Reconstruction. Key pieces of legislation -- the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (sometimes referred to as the Fair Housing Act) -- came out of the period. You also had landmark US Supreme Court cases, including Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

I'm not saying that what's happening right now isn't consequential, but I think that it's too early to say that we're witnessing a fundamental transformation in the relationship between Black Americans and the world around them.