05 December 20
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Sanders Will Oppose $908B COVID Relief Bill, Must Be 'Significantly Improved'
Jeff Stein, Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Friday announced his opposition to the bipartisan coronavirus relief package gaining momentum in the U.S. Senate, as jockeying intensified among lawmakers eager to cut a deal to provide relief amid renewed signs of economic weakness."
Opposition from former presidential candidate shows that not all liberals will embrace the targeted package
Sanders said he would vote against the $908 billion relief framework that has attracted a flurry of interest from Democrats and Republicans since it was introduced earlier this week. Sanders said he would consider backing it only if it is “significantly” revised. That package, broadly embraced this week by both senior congressional Democrats and more than a half-dozen Republican senators, leaves out some priorities among liberals such as another round of $1,200 stimulus payments.
Led by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), among other centrist lawmakers, the legislative push aims to break months of gridlock in Congress over providing a boost to an economy facing what could prove its most dire stretch of the pandemic.
“Given the enormous economic desperation facing working families in this country today, I will not be able to support the recently announced Manchin-Romney COVID proposal unless it is significantly improved,” Sanders said in a statement, citing the inclusion of a “liability shield” intended to insulate firms from coronavirus-related lawsuits. Sanders added of the absence of stimulus checks in the bill: “Tens of millions of Americans living in desperation today would receive absolutely no financial help from this proposal. That is not acceptable.”
Sanders’s opposition shows the tightrope negotiators are trying to walk as they seek to cobble together a bipartisan coalition with enough votes to pass the measure into law.
The pressure against the deal comes as the bipartisan group worked to turn a one-page outline of an agreement into legislative text that could be signed into law. The U.S. economy also showed signs of slowing down in a jobs report released Friday, with November representing the slowest month for job growth since the spring, and health officials issued stark warnings about a spike in coronavirus cases. Meanwhile, the stock market remained at record levels, suggesting that the inequality issues facing the United States economy are only getting worse.
Lawmakers face a tight schedule to take action as congressional leaders push to include the coronavirus relief effort with the spending bill needed to avert a federal government shutdown after Dec. 11. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) expressed optimism at her news conference Friday that “momentum” was building toward a deal, citing her conversation Thursday with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“The vehicle is leaving the station,” Pelosi said of including coronavirus relief with the government funding deal. “If there’s a vehicle and we can add this — once we see the text — that is what we will be doing.”
She added: “We have the time to do it. … We must get it done. We must get it done before we leave. We cannot leave without it.”
The legislation pushed by the bipartisan group would provide hundreds of billions of dollars to jobless Americans. It would also provide some funding for states and cities hit by declines in revenue amid the pandemic, and offer new funding for struggling small businesses by reauthorizing the Paycheck Protection Program. It would provide smaller amounts of money, in the tens of billions, to a number of other critical needs, including schools; child care; hunger; rental assistance; and other pressing demands.
The effort has been led by Manchin, Collins and Romney, working with Democratic Sens. Mark R. Warner (Va.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), as well as Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Bill Cassidy (La.).
Some conservative lawmakers have also expressed their opposition to the deal, with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) assailing it for devoting almost $200 billion in emergency aid for state and local governments. Conservative advocacy groups have also begun mobilizing to pressure Republican senators into rejecting the bill.
“There’s widespread opposition among conservatives, particularly among our activists who are sick of Congress spending money we don’t have,” said Jason Pye, vice president for legislative affairs for FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group.
Some liberal members of the House, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), also pushed for the deal to include $1,200 stimulus checks, although it was not clear whether they would vote against the package if it came to the House floor without stimulus payments. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) made a similar plea for stimulus payments Friday but is at this point a lone voice among Republicans.
The two most controversial elements of the deal remained assistance for state and local governments, which is widely opposed by conservatives; and the liability shield opposed by liberals and cited by Sanders. The Manchin-Romney-Collins group has worked on reaching a bipartisan consensus on both but has released few details specifying how to do so.
Negotiators said they have an informal Monday deadline for reaching an agreement and releasing legislative text. Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), a co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus that helped spark the negotiations, said an agreement was in reach on funding state and local governments. Negotiators, he said, had agreed that the aid should be distributed according to a formula accounting for a jurisdiction’s loss of revenue, not its population. That could help overcome GOP concerns that federal funds would be used to cover non-coronavirus budget gaps, though Reed said the details are yet to be resolved.
Some congressional aides speculated that Sanders’s opposition might ironically help seal a bipartisan accord, giving Republican senators cover to back a larger package by highlighting the demands inside the Democratic Party for a multitrillion-dollar deal.
Friday’s jobs report may increase pressure on lawmakers to act swiftly. The 245,000 jobs added were the lowest since the rebound began in May, leaving the United States with 9.8 million fewer jobs than it had before the pandemic. The retail sector shed positions, even during the normally bustling holiday season. And the drop in the unemployment rate was more a result of people leaving the labor force than the modest labor market gains.
Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser, told reporters Friday that the administration is working closely with lawmakers on an agreement, but that the direction of discussions was positive. President Trump’s negotiators have largely taken a back seat to stimulus negotiations since the president was defeated in the Nov. 3 presidential election.
“I would say it has a somewhat more optimistic tone,” Kudlow said. Asked whether the president would accept the levels of state and local aid pushed in the bipartisan framework, Kudlow said: “I will let the legislators work that out. … [Trump] doesn’t want to deal with mismanaged states and localities, but I don’t want to comment on it because I will leave that to the negotiations.”
Election workers counting votes. (photo: Patrick Fallon/ZUMA)
Trump's Desperate Effort to Overturn the Election Is Running Out of Time
Zoe Tillman, BuzzFeed
Tillman writes: "One month and dozens of failed election challenges since Nov. 3, President Donald Trump and Republicans have not persuaded any judge to invalidate a significant number of ballots, let alone flip a state that President-elect Joe Biden won - and they're running out of time."
Trump’s own lawyers have acknowledged that a Dec. 8 deadline for states to certify federal election results is “critical” as they push last-ditch challenges in court.
Trump has vowed to press baseless allegations that the election was tainted by widespread fraud — his campaign filed another round of legal challenges in Wisconsin on Thursday — but his own lawyers have acknowledged that they’re up against a narrowing window. A key date in the federal election timeline next week will make it even harder for Trump and his supporters to convince any court to take dramatic steps that would upend Biden’s victory.
Tuesday marks the “safe harbor” deadline — the date when states must certify results if they want protection under federal election law against Congress stepping in to decide which candidate gets their electoral votes. The fact that lawsuits are pending won’t prevent states from getting the benefits of certifying results by that date, according to election law experts. Judges are already wary of injecting legal uncertainty into the election and causing chaos and will be even more reluctant to do so after the deadline passes.
“The doors close significantly after the safe harbor deadline passes,” said Rebecca Green, codirector of the Election Law Program at William & Mary Law School. “It’s going to be a heavy lift to convince a judge to defy federal deadlines. I think it would only happen or be successful if some kind of wild evidence of just unbelievable scale were unearthed that was credible.”
Trump’s campaign has conceded that the Dec. 8 deadline is key to the fate of its legal challenges. It has pushed courts to rush to consider cases by then. In the campaign’s failed constitutional challenge to Biden’s win in Pennsylvania, Trump’s lawyers argued on Nov. 22 that it was “critically important” for a federal appeals court to hear the case before the deadline, which at that point was 16 days away. The court agreed to expedite the case and ruled against Trump in a 3–0 decision just five days later.
Trump’s campaign has focused its attention more recently on Wisconsin. On Dec. 1 — one week before the safe harbor deadline — it attempted to skip the lower courts and bring a challenge to hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots in Milwaukee and Dane counties (the state’s largest and most racially diverse counties) directly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. On Dec. 3, the court ruled 4–3 that the campaign couldn’t jump ahead and had to go through the standard appeal process.
The campaign quickly filed appeals in county circuit courts later that day and sent a letter requesting a fast timeline “to avoid any delay.” Trump’s lawyers wrote that “given the time limitations inherent in the election for President,” they were prepared to submit all briefs and evidence by Dec. 7.
Judges can still rule on election challenges after Dec. 8, or even after Dec. 14, when the Electoral College votes. The federal Electoral Count Act accounts for situations where there are competing slates of electors — if, for instance, a state certified results by the safe harbor deadline, but a court later invalidated those results and ordered a different slate of electors to be sent to Congress.
But election law experts who patiently gamed out for BuzzFeed News all the hypothetical legal paths that Trump and his supporters could pursue between now and Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, stressed that such scenarios were extremely unlikely.
Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School said that for any court to consider the extreme step of invalidating election results at this stage, a case would need to present a “real meaningful question” about whether ballots were invalid and at a scale that would change the outcome. The remaining cases brought by Trump and Republican challengers — which he described as “factually inaccurate,” “grotesquely implausible,” and “fishing expeditions” — did not come close to meeting that bar, he said.
Green said it was a “strong-slash-insurmountable burden” for an election challenger to convince a court to undo results after a state had certified them and the safe harbor deadline passed.
Green said it was possible Trump was hoping to use these court fights to angle for a political solution — for instance, to convince members of Congress to reject slates of electors in states that Biden won. Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks said this week that he would challenge the Electoral College vote, garnering a “thank you” tweet from Trump.
But for that to work, Trump would have to convince both chambers of Congress to reject the results, an extremely unlikely scenario, particularly in the Democrat-controlled House. If the House and Senate split, the Electoral Count Act says that Congress goes with the slate certified by a state’s governor — putting Trump back where he started in the swing states that went for Biden. Even if Trump managed to undermine Biden’s win in one state, he’d have to do that for multiple states to get enough electoral votes to win.
“It’s long shot upon long shot,” Green said.
The latest round of lawsuits filed by Trump’s campaign and, separately, by legal teams led by attorney Sidney Powell (whom the Trump campaign disavowed) are rooted in sweeping, unsupported theories of widespread fraud. Cases raising similar claims have failed so far, either because judges didn’t find the allegations credible or because Trump and GOP challengers failed to satisfy baseline requirements for bringing these cases before they could get to the merits.
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Trump and Republicans lost a flurry of cases in Pennsylvania that didn’t allege fraud and instead challenged specific clusters of absentee ballots — a situation more similar to the recount mess in Florida in 2000 that led the Supreme Court to step in. The one win they scored in those cases failed to make any dent in Biden’s lead in the state.
A federal judge tossed Trump’s constitutional challenge to the results in Pennsylvania, and the campaign failed to convince an appeals court to let them try again. As of publication time they hadn’t filed a petition in the US Supreme Court, notwithstanding pledges by Rudy Giuliani and campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis that the case would end up there.
An effort in state court by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly and other Republican challengers to invalidate Pennsylvania’s results has failed so far, too. In a lawsuit filed weeks after the election, they challenged a law passed by the Pennsylvania legislature in October 2019 that expanded mail-in voting. The state Supreme Court rejected it, finding Kelly and his co-challengers waited too long to file suit. On Dec. 3, the court denied their request to put the ruling on hold so they could go to the US Supreme Court.
Kelly and his co-challengers did petition the US Supreme Court this week to stop state officials from taking any more steps to finalize Biden’s win in advance of the Electoral College vote. On Dec. 3, Justice Samuel Alito ordered the state to respond by Dec. 9, one day after the safe harbor deadline — a scheduling decision that constitutional law scholars took as a sign that the court was not inclined to upend the state’s certification of Biden’s win.
In Michigan, the Trump campaign is appealing the dismissal of a lawsuit that alleged poll watchers in Wayne County, which covers Detroit, were denied access to observe ballot-counting. In a brief filed last week in the Michigan Court of Appeals, the campaign argued for an order declaring that Michigan officials improperly managed the election and that would make clear what’s required in future elections — but not to undo Biden’s win. There’s a separate case pending brought by Republican poll watchers seeking an audit of the results in Wayne County; they’d previously sued, unsuccessfully, to stop the county from certifying its results.
In Wisconsin, the campaign has a case pending in federal court that’s separate from the appeals it filed on Dec. 3 in Milwaukee and Dane counties. The federal lawsuit, filed Dec. 1, accuses state election officials of unconstitutionally going against the wishes of the state legislature in how they managed mail-in voting this year. The campaign is asking the court to declare that the Wisconsin election was unconstitutional, to direct the legislature to decide what to do, and to block “any actions inconsistent with the Court’s declaration and judgment.”
The pending cases in Wisconsin offer examples of how US election law allows for the possibility of legal fights that extend past the safe harbor deadline or the Electoral College vote. If, for instance, Trump’s appeals in Milwaukee and Dane counties didn’t wrap up before Dec. 8, Levitt said that could mean Wisconsin wouldn’t get the benefit of “safe harbor” for the results — a Biden victory — that Gov. Tony Evers already signed off on.
That wouldn’t guarantee Trump would win Wisconsin, however — it would be up to Congress. If the Wisconsin Supreme Court ultimately upheld Biden’s win, he said, it’s unlikely Trump could convince Congress to reject that result. There are already signs that Trump doesn’t have the votes on the Wisconsin court to invalidate ballots. Three justices dissented from the Dec. 3 order kicking the campaign’s challenges to the lower courts, but two of those justices made clear that even if they agreed that Wisconsin election officials violated state law, striking ballots “may be out of reach.”
What exactly state and federal courts would have the power to do after the safe harbor deadline passes or after the Electoral College votes also isn’t clear, since it’s a largely untested area of federal election law. In 2000, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Bush v. Gore on Dec. 12, which was the safe harbor deadline that year. A majority of the justices gave significant weight to the Florida legislature’s intent to meet that deadline and halted a recount that would have gone past it, which meant George W. Bush won the state and the presidency.
Aside from Trump’s federal case in Wisconsin, Powell has lawsuits pending in federal courts in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan on behalf of Trump supporters. Powell joined Giuliani and Ellis at a press conference last month and appeared to be part of the campaign’s legal team, but the campaign later released a statement distancing itself from her. Her lawsuits, all filed in the past week, allege baseless conspiracy theories of vote tampering and fraud on a national scale. No court has ruled on the substance of her cases yet, but judges have identified procedural problems so far and a judge in Georgia did not grant her request for an immediate order to inspect voting machines.
Levitt said that even if Powell could convince a federal judge that the election was tainted by fraud — he repeatedly stressed that he did not think that would happen and described the lawsuits as “garbage” — she would still face an uphill battle to alter Biden’s win if the safe harbor deadline had passed.
If a federal court ruled after the upcoming deadlines that a state violated the law in how it managed the election, it’s unlikely the court would issue an order forcing a state to take a particular action, Levitt said. Instead, the court would likely declare that what state election officials did was unlawful, and it would be up to Congress to decide if that was grounds to reject that state’s slate of electors.
To date, there is no groundswell of Republicans in Congress who have signaled an interest in testing the constitutional limits of the federal election process based on what Trump and his allies have put forward. No Republican state lawmakers have moved to take control of the process of selecting electors; a group of 75 GOP lawmakers in Pennsylvania signed a letter on Friday urging their congressional representatives to object to the results, after declining to take action themselves, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
“Unless credible evidence emerges that is of a scale great enough to change the picture, I really believe that there won’t be enough … people who are willing to risk their reputation, barring real evidence, to change the outcome of the election,” Green said. “It’s not a close election. It’s too great a lead.”
A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: Belga)
America's Failures Have Led to a New Daily Record in Covid-19 Deaths
Dylan Scott, Vox
Scott writes: "On December 2, a staggering 2,885 Americans were reported to have died of Covid-19, according to the New York Times. It was the highest single-day toll of the year."
The number of daily Covid-19 deaths in the US is now about the same as the number of people who died on 9/11.
n December 2, a staggering 2,885 Americans were reported to have died of Covid-19, according to the New York Times. It was the highest single-day toll of the year.
It was nearly the same number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks (2,977). And it was far more than the estimated 1,800 Americans who died over a matter of days when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. During World War II, from the Pearl Harbor attacks in December 1941 to Japan’s surrender, about 300 US soldiers died every day on average (and about 407,000 were dead in total by August 1945).
Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has more in common with a slow-motion tragedy, like a war, than an acute event like 9/11. More than 2,600 deaths were reported on December 1, the day before the US set its new record for daily deaths; the previous high had been 2,752 on April 15. With the number of daily new cases and hospitalizations still rising across the country, public health experts expect new terrible death records will be set over the coming winter.
Coronavirus pandemic metrics are slippery things, however. America was so bad at testing during the first few months of the virus’s spread that there were likely quite a few cases and deaths that were caused by Covid-19 but were not counted as such. Even today, the US positive test rate is so high that experts say the statistics aren’t coming close to capturing every case or death.
According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, the official number of total deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the US is 274,121. But total excess deaths — the number of deaths above what would be expected in a normal year — has reached 345,000, according to the Times. Most, though not all, of those deaths are likely uncounted Covid-19 fatalities.
At a certain point, this is all academic. What’s undeniable is that America is entering a period of mass death unlike anything we’ve seen so far in the pandemic. Cases and hospitalizations have been rising steadily, and deaths always follow. Improvements in treatment have lowered the fatality rate, but a higher number of hospitalized patients will inevitably mean more deaths. And it is older, low-income, and minority Americans who are dying at disproportionate rates from the coronavirus.
The US also set a new single-day record for current hospitalizations on December 2, topping 100,000 for the first time, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Hospitals all across the nation are under tremendous strain.
The US is going to lose a lot more people before the Covid-19 pandemic ends
As hospital beds fill up and staff is stretched thin, the likelihood of losing people who otherwise might have survived under normal circumstances increases.
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, explained the risks in a recent Twitter thread. He started by pointing out that the percentage of new Covid-19 cases who end up in the hospital is actually shrinking. That would suggest people who would have been hospitalized earlier in the year are now being turned away from the emergency room or asked to stay at home because they’re not yet in critical condition.
Some of this is good public health practice — you want to keep beds open for the sickest patients — but it also creates a situation where somebody who’s at the margins could be denied entry to the hospital and their condition might deteriorate more quickly at home.
Full hospitals could also be left without enough room or staff for patients with other serious conditions, and some of those people could die without access to the medical care they need. They may not die of Covid-19, but they would still be victims of the pandemic.
On Twitter, Kari Jerge, a surgeon in Kansas City, Kansas, described recent dilemmas doctors are facing: a non-Covid patient who died because he needed an emergency kidney replacement with a dialysis machine but there were no nurses available to run the machine, and having to turn down a transfer of another patient in critical condition because there were no ICU beds left.
This is likely only going to get worse over the holiday season. Many states and cities still refuse to take the mitigation measures necessary to control the virus, even though none of them meet the benchmarks for safely staying open. Vox’s German Lopez painted the grim picture in his most recent update on how each state is faring in containing the coronavirus:
Across these benchmarks, zero states fare well on all three metrics, suggesting no state has its outbreak under control right now. In fact, no state meets even two of three benchmarks — only Washington, DC, does. (Washington state is excluded due to recent problems with its testing reports.)
One caveat: Because of Thanksgiving, states are likely underreporting Covid-19 tests and cases. So as bad as things may already seem, they’re likely even worse than reported.
America’s outbreaks, reaching from California to Florida, are the result of the public and the country’s leaders never taking the virus seriously enough and, to the extent they did, letting their guard down prematurely. States, with the support of President Donald Trump, moved to reopen — often before they saw sizable drops in daily new Covid-19 cases, and at times so quickly they didn’t have time to see if each phase of their reopening was leading to too many more cases.
The public embraced the reopenings, going out and often not adhering to recommended precautions like physical distancing and wearing a mask.
Even as cases began to fall later in the summer, America’s overall caseload remained very high. And yet many states moved to reopen once again, with much of the public embracing the looser restrictions and subsequently going out.
It’s this mix of government withdrawal and public complacency that experts have cited in explaining why states continue to struggle with getting the coronavirus under control.
There is still time to soften the blow, with states and cities implementing more social distancing restrictions and requiring better mask adherence. But barring a sudden change in public behavior and public policy, America’s outbreak is not going to get better anytime soon.
At this point, we appear to be waiting for the vaccine to be widely distributed to bring the virus under control — something that may not happen for another six months or longer. Prioritizing the most vulnerable populations for vaccination should help reduce the death toll, but there is no avoiding the fact that tens of thousands of Americans are likely to die over the next few months.
CDC Director Robert Redfield said on Wednesday that the US Covid-19 death toll could reach 450,000 by March 1 without better social distancing and mask-wearing. That would mean about 175,000 more deaths between now and then.
In that scenario, the number of Americans who died of Covid-19 would surpass the number of American soldiers who died in all of World War II — and across a much shorter time frame (about one year versus four). In terms of mass-death events in America’s history, the coronavirus pandemic would rank behind only the Civil War and the 1918 flu pandemic.
As other parts of the developed world celebrate the complete eradication of the virus, America is still reaching the worst kind of milestones. And there are more to come.
Brandon Bernard in July 2015. (photo: Brandon Bernard Defense Team)
Trump Prepares to Kill Brandon Bernard Even as Jurors Say His Life Should Be Spared
Liliana Segura, The Intercept
Segura writes: "On a Saturday Morning in November, Gary McClung sat at a picnic table with his wife overlooking a field off the banks of the Duck River in Tennessee. It was sunny and mild. Local vendors sold produce under a pavilion."
At age 18, Bernard was an accomplice to a murder. Now five jurors who sentenced him to death have changed their minds.
In the fall, Centerville River Park, some 60 miles southwest of Nashville, hosts the annual National Banana Pudding Festival, featuring music, face painting, and a cook-off. This year, the event was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The McClungs live in nearby Lobelville, home to an Old Order Christian community that first attracted them to the area. But they’re originally from Texas. It was there that McClung made a decision that has haunted him for two decades. In 2000, he was called as a juror in a federal murder trial. The victims, a young white couple from Iowa named Todd and Stacie Bagley, were visiting Killeen, Texas, when they were carjacked and killed by a group of Black teenagers. Two of the teenagers, 19-year-old Christopher Vialva and 18-year-old Brandon Bernard, would go on trial for their lives. McClung voted to sentence both of them to death.
Afterward, McClung questioned his decision. He was particularly bothered by Bernard’s death sentence. It was Vialva, after all, who’d shot the Bagleys at close range as they lay inside the trunk of their car. Bernard was not even present when the couple was abducted. “Brandon Bernard, during the trial, he seemed to me to be pretty broken, to be very much afraid,” McClung said. He never understood why the two had been tried as a pair.
“There were times that I purposely probably didn’t dwell on it,” McClung said. “But it would come back to mind.” He wondered if there was anything he could do, “somebody to contact and at least put a voice in after the fact,” he said. “But it just seemed too late.”
In 2015, however, McClung got a call from Bernard’s legal team, which was contacting jurors as part of a post-conviction investigation. By then McClung had moved his family to Tennessee, where he was working as a welder. In 2016, two investigators came and interviewed him on tape at his workplace. “I have for a long time wanted, wished for an opportunity like this,” McClung said. He expressed sorrow for the Bagley family. “I can’t imagine what they’ve gone through. I just would not want to see Mr. Bernard, who I don’t believe had any intention of killing anyone, have to die for this.”
McClung’s video statement was accompanied by a declaration that would become part of a clemency petition for Bernard. In 2016, his legal team submitted the petition to the Obama administration. But Obama never acted on it. He commuted only two death sentences before departing the White House. After the Trump administration restarted federal executions with a vengeance after a 17-year hiatus, Vialva became the seventh person killed since July at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The Trump Justice Department is on track to execute 13 people before the end of his presidency — more federal executions than the past 67 years combined. Five more people are set to die before the inauguration of Joe Biden. One of them is Bernard.
Along with Lisa Montgomery — the only woman under a federal death sentence, whose lawyers contracted Covid-19 last month — Bernard’s case has attracted more attention than usual. This is largely thanks to an online campaign launched by his legal team, which includes testimonials, family photographs, and a lengthy clemency petition that highlights numerous problems in his case. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Kim Kardashian West posted a series of tweets calling for Bernard’s life to be spared.
Today, McClung is not the only juror who supports mercy for Bernard. Four other people who served on his jury have signed declarations in favor of a commutation. One of them, Calvin Kruger, was the jury foreman. When I spoke to him earlier this year, he stood by the death sentence for Vialva. But in a declaration last month, he wrote that the evidence “clearly showed” that Bernard was not the ringleader in the crime. “Because of this, I support Bernard’s death sentence being commuted to life without the possibility of parole.”
For his part, McClung said he also now regrets sentencing Vialva to death. This is largely due to his faith, but it’s also informed by his own experiences with the U.S. prison system. For the past few years, his wife has been corresponding with two incarcerated pen pals; the McClungs hope to help the men adapt to the outside world after their release. At the time of Bernard’s trial, McClung had a brother who was in and out of prison — and there was a time in his own life when he could have ended up going down that same road. “If they’ve never been involved in some of those things,” he said of jurors, “it’s probably harder for them to understand what it could be like and that a person could be different, you know, could change.”
The Way the Story Was Told
Before the Trump administration executed Vialva in September, his attorneys, family, and friends tried to describe how he had changed. At 40, he was no longer the same 19-year-old who so callously shot the Bagleys in 1999. Inside the Special Confinement Unit in Terre Haute, where the condemned spend 23 hours a day in their cells, he’d developed a reputation as a stabilizing presence.
Bernard, too, grew up on death row. He turned 40 about a week before the federal executions began in July. His advocates describe him as a “model prisoner with no serious disciplinary write-ups,” who has also tried to help young people on the outside avoid the mistakes that he made. Years ago, he shared his story as part of a youth advocacy project called the Enlightenment Tour, started by twin brothers who knew him in Killeen. “Brandon did this out of his own will,” one of them, Michael Boyd, wrote in a declaration calling for mercy. He “did not expect anything from us except to get his message out to the kids.”
But above all, Bernard’s advocates emphasize what several of his jurors also say: that his role in the crime pales in comparison to the violence committed by the others who have been executed so far. If the death penalty is truly reserved for the “worst of the worst,” he simply does not qualify.
“I was shocked when they set the date for Brandon,” his attorney Rob Owen said. The announcement came on a Friday evening, as Owen was on the phone with his co-counsel. “We were literally just saying we were feeling some hope that Brandon would make it through to January without an execution date. And I was watching my email with one eye as I often do,” he said, when a message came from the Justice Department. “I’m not kidding: We just got a date,” Owen told his colleague. “And it was just like being hit in the head with a two-by-four.”
Owen was already representing another man facing execution at the time: Orlando Hall, who was killed on November 19. The two cases share a number of things in common. Both crimes took place in Texas in the 1990s — a time and place that saw the death penalty at its peak. Both convictions relied on witnesses who themselves were involved in the crime and agreed to testify for the government in exchange for leniency. And both involved unresolved questions of racial bias, particularly in the case of Hall, a Black man tried by an all-white jury.
Yet unlike Hall, who was a lead participant in the abduction, rape, and murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1994, Bernard’s role in the Bagleys’ murder was comparatively small. “One of the things that was so confusing to us at the time was the way the story was told,” recalled Adam Andreassen, who was a youth pastor with the Bernard family’s congregation, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and attended portions of the trial. “It was very, very hard in my opinion to justify why these two individuals were being tried together.”
Perhaps just as important to Andreassen today is Bernard’s age at the time of the crime. After the trial, he became a clinical psychologist; his perspective has been shaped by his professional experience evaluating people behind bars, especially following groundbreaking neurological research that forced the courts to recognize youth as a powerful mitigating factor in even the most violent crimes. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling, Roper v. Simmons, which outlawed death sentences for defendants who committed their crimes before the age of 18.
The decision was based on scientific and sociological research that confirmed what “any parent knows,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: that kids simply do not have the same level of maturity as adults. This makes youths more vulnerable to peer pressure and leads to “impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions,” he wrote. “The personality traits of juveniles are more transitory, less fixed. These differences render suspect any conclusion that a juvenile falls among the worst offenders.”
Although Roper drew the line where the rest of U.S. society measures adulthood, at 18, the science shows that male brain development continues well into one’s 20s. Today it is unlikely that Bernard would be sentenced to die for his role in the crime. “When I look back, I see a lot of those hallmarks, especially due to his youth, his age, his brain development, his judgment,” Andreassen said. “I don’t understand why leniency would not be considered just from that standpoint.”
A Future Danger
The murder of Todd and Stacie Bagley stirred outrage from Texas to Iowa. The couple’s burned bodies were discovered on June 21, 1999, inside the trunk of their old Buick LeSabre. The car had been found on fire on a dirt road inside the perimeter of the Fort Hood military base. Not far away were five teenagers whose car had gotten stuck in a ditch while they tried to drive away. They were Vialva, Bernard, 16-year-old Tony Sparks, and two others, the youngest 15.
Authorities would describe Vialva as the ringleader, a high school dropout “with a chip on his shoulder,” as the Austin American-Statesman reported. Bernard, too, had dropped out of school, but he did not have the same history of run-ins with the law. “He was a non-entity. He’s never at the front of anything,” the Killeen High School principal told the Statesman about Bernard. “He’s one of those people who is almost defined by the group he is with.”
Much of the media coverage focused on the Bagleys’ deep faith and devotion to each other. Georgia Bagley, Todd’s mother, told the Statesman that her son fell for Stacie after watching her sing in the church choir at Grace Christian Center in Killeen. After getting married, the couple moved to Iowa, where they were “truly ideal church members,” according to their pastor, who told the newspaper that “they were constantly out and about and especially ministering to youths.” This included their final moments; before they were shot to death, the couple told their captors that Jesus loved them.
The Bagleys were reportedly considering moving back to Texas when they came to visit. Todd Bagley had weighed plans to become a police officer, which concerned his wife because of the dangers of the job. Instead, they would both be randomly targeted by teens looking for a quick buck.
The plot is described in transcripts from the 2000 trial at the federal courthouse in Waco, although the sequence of events can be hard to follow. The key details were laid out by two teenage witnesses who agreed to testify for the government: Christopher Lewis and Terry Brown. The youths were members of a gang modeled on the Bloods. According to Lewis, who was 15 at the time of the crime, their plan was to “ask somebody for a ride, to get in and then put a gun to them” and collect their ATM cards and PIN numbers.
Bernard was the driver. He also owned one of the two guns used during the carjacking. After the teenagers drove to different shopping areas looking for targets, Lewis approached Todd Bagley at a phone booth outside a Mickey’s convenience store. Bagley agreed to give him a ride. While Lewis, Vialva, and Sparks got into the Bagleys’ car, Bernard stayed behind with 17-year-old Brown. “I used the restroom, and he was playing video games,” Brown testified. “And when we came out of the store … we realized that they were gone.”
Bernard and Brown went to a couple of nearby ATMs to see if they could catch up, Brown said. But later they went off on their own, stopping at a Winn-Dixie to put in job applications. In the meantime, Vialva and the others had pulled a gun on Todd Bagley, demanding his wallet and his wife’s jewelry and forcing them into the trunk of their car. With the couple still in the trunk, they tried to pawn Stacie Bagley’s wedding ring.
By evening, Vialva and the others had gotten back in touch with Bernard and Brown. They needed a ride — and Vialva wanted to destroy the evidence of the crime. According to trial testimony, Bernard purchased lighter fluid and brought it to a remote area of Fort Hood, where Vialva and the others were waiting. It was there that Vialva opened the trunk and shot the couple in the head.
There were some holes in the case against Bernard. Although prosecutors repeatedly stressed that he was the only one in a position to set the car on fire, neither Lewis nor Brown said they saw him do it. Bernard’s lawyers also emphasized the lack of physical evidence linking their client to the fire. Yet they didn’t call any experts who might have questioned the forensic evidence. In fact, they did not call any witnesses during the guilt phase at all.
Any unresolved questions about Bernard’s role in the crime were largely overshadowed by the harrowing descriptions of the scene. “It was just kind of overwhelming,” one crime scene investigator testified, recalling the moment he opened the trunk to find the couple’s remains. In a phone call, a juror who does not support clemency for Bernard remembered the crime scene images as particularly horrific. She sat right in front of the TV monitor, she recalled. “The burnt bodies — I’ll never get that out of my mind.”
Bernard’s death sentence hinged largely on the testimony of a medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Stacie Bagley. She found smoke deposits in her airways and concluded that Stacie had been alive after being shot in the face. She labeled the cause of death a “gunshot wound of the head associated with smoke inhalation and thermal injury.” In his closing statement in the guilt phase, Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Frost stressed this repeatedly. “When Brandon Bernard lit that fire,” he said, “Stacie Bagley was still living.”
On June 1, 2000, the jury convicted both Vialva and Bernard. During the sentencing phase, Bernard’s lawyers called only a handful of witnesses, despite numerous people who would have testified on his behalf. His mother, Thelma, struggled to ask for mercy while acknowledging the suffering the Bagleys endured. “I’m trying to put myself in their position, Stacie and Todd, and it’s — it hurts,” she said. “I picture Todd and Stacie as my children. How would I feel?”
One of the government’s last witnesses was a Bureau of Prisons employee who monitored gang activity inside federal prisons. Although he did not say anything specific about Vialva or Bernard, his testimony cast them as posing a future danger to their surroundings, no matter how restrictive. A person who wants to join a gang “will commit crimes, he will prey on the weak, he will commit assaults, he will traffic drugs, he will sanction hits, if necessary, and carry them out, in order to ‘make bones’ to be a part of that gang,” he said.
As McClung recalls, Bernard’s gang affiliation helped nudge him toward a death sentence. He said he and another juror were wavering when another man — the sole Black juror in the case — told them that he was familiar with the gang. “I remember him saying, ‘I know these boys.’ He said, ‘Ain’t none of them any good.’” On June 13, the jurors recommended death sentences for Vialva and Bernard.
They were the first federal death sentences in the Western District of Texas, U.S. Attorney Bill Blagg announced. In a phone call, Blagg, who is now retired, said he did not remember most of the details. He left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2001 and was unaware that the Trump administration had carried out so many federal executions, including Vialva’s, this year. Yet he specifically remembered the sole Black juror at trial, who has since died. As Blagg recalled it, he was impressed with the juror’s answers during voir dire and decided to allow him on the jury. “A lot of people thought we were crazy for taking a Black juror,” Blagg said. “But he was a real nice man and he voted for a conviction and eventually, well, here we are.”
Blagg did not wish to elaborate on who, exactly, pushed back on selecting a Black juror at the time. But his recollection supports what advocates and attorneys have long argued, particularly in the case of Orlando Hall, whose prosecutor had a history of striking Black jurors: that racism is inextricable from the federal death penalty.
As for the jurors who now say they would like to see clemency for Bernard, Blagg said, “You know, the death penalty is a tricky thing. Over time, people’s minds change about it. … I mean, even my mind has changed about the death penalty a lot over the years. I do still support it in certain cases. But sometimes I think it’s used too often. And I think you have to be very careful.”
Undisclosed Evidence
Bernard had been on death row for more than 10 years when his appellate lawyers sought out a forensic pathologist as part of his post-conviction litigation. Dr. Stephen Pustilnik, the chief medical examiner in Galveston County, Texas, reviewed the autopsy records for Stacie Bagley, along with the testimony about her death at trial. In his opinion, defense attorneys should have hired an expert who could have pushed back on the prosecutors’ insistence that the fire had contributed to her death. “If Mr. Bernard’s attorneys had contacted any reasonably competent pathologist in 1999-2000, that person could have explained to counsel the distinction between medical death and forensic death,” Pustilnik explained in a 2012 declaration.
This distinction was key, he said, since the former would not preclude the presence of the soot found in Stacie Bagley’s airways. “Even if Mrs. Bagley was medically dead after sustaining this gunshot injury, physicochemically driven autonomic functions were taking place for some period of time,” he said. These final stages of respiration have “nothing to do with consciousness or any higher brain function.” Even before the fire was set, Stacie Bagley’s death was a “forgone conclusion.”
Bernard’s lawyers argue that prosecutors misled the jury, fostering the mistaken impression that Stacie Bagley could have survived the gunshot if not for the fire. Indeed, according to one juror who supports clemency for Bernard, the autopsy findings were the main reason he voted for a death sentence. “It stated that Stacie Bagley did not just die from the gunshot wound, but also from smoke inhalation,” he said in a 2016 declaration. “There was no rebuttal to this. Brandon’s attorneys did not do anything to dispute this. … If the information presented in this report had been presented at trial, I would have made a different decision at sentencing.”
The same year that Pustilnik gave his declaration, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling that would lead to the discovery of new evidence in the case. The justices ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life without parole sentences for people who had committed their crimes before the age of 18 were a violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The guiding rationale was much the same as that which led to the 2005 decision in Roper: that teenagers have brains that are less developed than those of adults, making them less culpable for their actions.
Miller eventually led to resentencing hearings for juvenile defendants all over the country. Among them was Tony Sparks, one of the younger teenagers involved in the Bagleys’ death. At the 2018 proceeding, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Frazier, the same prosecutor who sought the death penalty against Vialva and Bernard, introduced a pair of documents that had never been disclosed to defense attorneys at trial. The evidence was presented as proof that Sparks should continue to serve a life sentence despite his age at the time of the crime.
One of the documents was a piece of lined notebook paper depicting a pyramid drawn in pencil by a Killeen High School student, which was obtained by the local police department in 1998. The pyramid appeared to lay out a hierarchy of the members of the gang. Occupying the top several lines were the “enforcers,” among them Sparks. Vialva was below them, seven levels down from the top. “Brandon Bernard, also known as ‘Dip,’ is at the very bottom of the chart,” Killeen Police Department Sgt. Sandra Hunt testified, “about 30 people below Mr. Sparks.”
To Bernard’s lawyers, the revelation was powerful proof that their client had been following the lead not only of Vialva, but also of Sparks. In a new legal filing in 2019, they unsuccessfully argued that Bernard should have an opportunity to litigate the issue based on the fact that this evidence was improperly withheld from Bernard’s trial attorneys, in violation of rules established by Brady v. Maryland, which dictate that such material must be disclosed by the state.
One former federal prosecutor who previously defended Bernard’s conviction agrees. In 2002, Angela Moore left her position as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas. Today, she is a defense attorney and professor. Moore was having lunch in Austin not long after Vialva’s execution when she mentioned the case to her colleague. “He said, ‘You know, Brandon Bernard is up to be executed really soon.’ And I said, ‘No, I had no idea,’” she said. “And so that’s when I started getting involved … because I think it’s a travesty.”
In an op-ed last month, Moore listed the reasons she thinks Bernard deserves clemency. She invoked his youth and the scientific research about brain development. She also cited research finding that “people tend to view Black boys — like Brandon — as more blameworthy than their white counterparts, even where other relevant circumstances are identical. … Black teens like Brandon are systematically denied the ‘benefit’ of their youth, which is outweighed by their race in the eyes of police, prosecutors, judges and jurors.”
In a phone call, Moore said she was especially bothered by the way prosecutors cast Bernard as a future danger. She found it disturbing — and ironic — that the BOP witness did not reveal the hierarchical nature of gangs given how often such gang structures are invoked in prosecuting federal conspiracy cases involving organized crime. Yet in Bernard’s case, “they didn’t want that evidence to come out,” Moore said. “And I think that’s a big problem.”
In a Zoom hearing on December 2, Bernard’s lawyers tried to convince a federal judge to put off his execution date to allow them to litigate the Brady claim. But the judge ruled against them, saying that he had no jurisdiction in the matter. “Brandon Bernard has been seeking relief since we discovered in 2018 that the trial prosecutors withheld critical evidence, yet procedural barriers have prevented him from obtaining a hearing on the merits of his claim,” Owen wrote in a statement. “We will continue to make our case in court that this hidden evidence would have changed the outcome of Brandon’s sentencing. Given that five jurors no longer stand by their death verdict, Brandon must not be executed until the courts have fully addressed the constitutionality of his sentence, and we will continue to vigorously pursue that vitally important goal.”
Together We Waited
On the day before Thanksgiving, I got an email from Bernard. He had spent the last four days visiting with his family. “I’m not going to lie,” he wrote. “First I thought that it was going to be sad … that I was going to have this elephant in the room, but it was the opposite. Every day was a blessing and I cherished every one moment that I was out there. I didn’t even feel like I had a date when I was with them.”
Bernard has two younger siblings, as well as two grown daughters, Kiara and Taneah, who first met each other as teenagers in a visiting room at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute. “I have never been able to hug my dad, but mentally and emotionally he is there for me as much as possible,” Taneah wrote in a declaration when she was 16 years old. “It might not seem like much of a relationship, but it is the best one I have and it is important to me.” The most recent visits were with Bernard’s mother and siblings, one of his aunts, and Kiara. “It was especially great to see my daughter because I don’t ever get to see her,” Bernard wrote. “And seeing how she has grown … I couldn’t stop looking at her.”
Bernard has grown especially close to his sister Quiona, who was only 11 when he was first incarcerated. In a declaration in 2016, she remembered how traumatized her family had been by his arrest. “My mom, my brother Max, and I prayed together all of the time for Brandon and the victims’ families,” she wrote. For a time, they all slept together in the living room because it felt strange to sleep in their rooms while he was incarcerated. “It seemed like a long time before we were able to accept that Brandon was gone and move back into our separate beds.”
In his latest emails, Bernard has expressed gratitude for the growing number of people who have asked for his life be spared. He is hopeful it will make a difference. But he admitted that it was hard not to be discouraged by the Zoom hearing, which he watched from inside the penitentiary. “It feels like all the doors to freedom and life start to close in front of you,” he wrote. Nevertheless, after seeing eight of his neighbors taken to die this year, he said he is trying to stay strong “to show people how to face that which you don’t want to … and not be afraid … not let it break you down … because you can find strength in yourself if you just look.”
Before he was executed, Vialva wrote a goodbye letter to Bernard. He also left him some of his property. “I couldn’t even read the letter for some time,” Bernard said. In an email to his supporters last month, he described the terror of execution nights. He was with Orlando Hall on the death range during Hall’s final days. On November 19, the day he was scheduled to die, Hall got a temporary stay of execution, which he knew would not last. “It was heartbreaking to hear him talk about how hopeful his family was when they heard about the stay and not wanting to tell them to keep their hopes down because it wasn’t guaranteed that it will all work out,” Bernard wrote.
“Together we waited. Every time someone spoke on the radio, or did a round on the range, every time that I heard something move … I thought … this is it … they are coming, but no one came and I dared to hope more,” he said. At one point, prison guards brought some food for Hall in the middle of the night. “He was asleep and I could hear his confusion about being awoken. He didn’t know what they wanted but when he saw it was food I’m sure he was relieved that is all it was.”
Around 10 p.m., Bernard turned on the TV for news but did not find any. Soon after that, “footsteps came down the range and the air became heavy … and I knew they were getting him,” Bernard wrote. “I just listened. … The officer told them in a low voice to open the outer door. I heard the twinkling sound of the handcuffs and leg cuffs being placed on his ankles.”
Through the bars of his cell, Bernard wrote, he told Hall that he loved him. “He told me in a low voice filled with all the emotion one feels at that moment that he loved me too … and he then was gone!”
The rest was like a scene in a movie, he said. The phone rang to give Hall the news that his execution was near, but he was already gone. “They came back afterwards with a cart to clean out his room. When they were done,” Bernard wrote, “I was left on the range alone.”
An elderly woman wearing a protective mask is seen walking on the sidewalk in Manhattan's Chinatown on March 26, 2020, in New York City. (photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
The US's Neglect of the Elderly Has Turned Murderous
Richard Goldstein, Jacobin
Goldstein writes: "The catastrophe that continues to unfold across the US as COVID-19 spreads is disproportionately affecting older people, who are perishing in far greater numbers than any other group."
In a pandemic, our routine neglect of the elderly has turned murderous.
oung people are becoming infected with the coronavirus at an alarming rate, but the disease it causes remains primarily a killer of the aged. In fact, 80 percent of the deaths from COVID-19 have occurred in people over sixty-five. Every decision about preventing and treating this virus is especially fateful for the old. The narrative that “we’re all in this together” ignores the elevated risk for minorities and those with underlying health problems, but the greatest predictor of who will die is age. Even among people of color, most of those who perish from COVID-19 are old.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are now urging states to prioritize vaccinating the elderly, but over much of the past year, there has been a striking reluctance to focus attention on them. It almost seems, given the widespread failure to follow prevention guidelines, that their deaths are regarded as natural. In fact, there is nothing natural about the catastrophic scale of this crisis. It is, to a great extent, the product of decisions that have placed old people in greater danger. Everything from the condition of nursing homes to the premature opening of businesses and the toleration of maskless gatherings has worked against their vital interests. Policy after haphazard policy has made it more difficult for them to avoid infection. The pattern in all these choices is hard to see, but its result is brutally clear.
If present trends continue, researchers predict that, by February, 450,000 Americans could die of COVID-19. If those deaths follow the same pattern as we’ve so far seen, that will mean 360,000 elders gone before the buds appear on trees. We may never know precisely how many of these deaths could have been avoided with an effective national response, but reliable estimates suggest tens of thousands might have been saved.
Just as AIDS revealed that certain groups were subject to a silence which equaled death, this pandemic has exposed another sort of relationship between stigma and risk. It has lifted a rock on the nation, revealing all the maggots wriggling beneath. Ageism is one of them. It is a bias often hidden behind gestures of respect. Yet it shapes the quality of life for nearly all old people, and in this emergency, it is a killer.
A Crisis in Care
The coronavirus could not have found a more suitable Petri dish than nursing homes in America.
Residents and workers at those facilities comprise about 40 percent of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. That should be no surprise, since many nursing homes — around 43 percent, according to a Pro Publica investigation — lacked a legally mandated emergency plan when the pandemic struck. Lax regulation created little impetus to focus on disease prevention, and the chaos was compounded by new guidelines that allowed less training of staff. Some homes failed to inform family members that their parents were ill. Others hid the extent of viral spread.
Despite all this, legal action has been stymied by the exemption of nursing homes in many states from wrongful-death suits. Wrenching images of residents being carted off to the hospital or the morgue cannot convey the systemic nature of this failure. It is nothing less than a culling of the old, and it stems from an indifference to their welfare that belies the pretense of concern. So pervasive — and yet, undetectable — is this dismissive attitude toward the elderly that it rarely seems like a prejudice. The honorific “senior citizen” is deeply ironic, given what has transpired not just in America but all across the Western world.
The problem extends beyond the United States. In some European countries, nursing homes were excluded from planning for the pandemic, and their residents were missing from statistical models that guided the response.
In Belgium, an untold number of those over sixty-five who fell ill from the virus were denied admission to hospitals, though there were enough beds to accommodate them. A New York Times investigation found that this was true even when the sick were likely to benefit from intensive care. Instead, these patients were sent back to their nursing homes, where they were treated with morphine and, as one physician put it, “comforted to death.”
In Sweden, protocols advised the same course of treatment: morphine instead of oxygen. By October, nearly half of Sweden’s coronavirus deaths had occurred in nursing homes. In Spain, more than 4,500 investigations have been opened after the bodies of residents in care homes were found abandoned in their beds.
COVID-19 has exposed the truth about how old people who cannot afford private attendants — that is to say, most old people — are cared for. But they are also placed at risk by government responses that have enabled the virus to spread.
When Sweden decided not to lock down its population, reasoning that the most vulnerable would simply stay home, the death toll was nearly six times higher than in more cautious neighboring states. By some estimates, 90 percent of those fatalities were in people over the age of seventy. When Britain decided to open restaurants and pubs last summer, 88 out of every 100 deaths from COVID-19 were in people older than sixty-five.
In both nations, proud of their public health systems, doctors admit that they sometimes turned nursing-home patients away from the hospital. This is not just poor planning; it is criminal negligence. European Union member nations blurred the line between euthanasia and murder.
In America, death is only part of the suffering inflicted on the elderly during this pandemic. Though recessions generally affect newly hired young workers, in this crisis, older employees have been more vulnerable. Their jobless rate is now the highest it has been since 1948, as strapped companies dismiss senior workers rather than pay higher insurance costs and mandated raises. Age discrimination is illegal, but proving such cases is notoriously difficult. Nor is it easy for unemployed seniors to find jobs. We may soon see millions of people too young to retire and too old to work.
Fatal Neglect
Yet despite a health crisis that offers glaring proof to the contrary, most old people in America don’t think of themselves as victims of a bias. Their ranks span the categories of race and class, and the beneficial effects of Social Security and Medicare strengthen their sense of being valued. The culture colludes in this image of comfort and contentment. Drug ads show the elderly frolicking with puppies and grandchildren. In the sitcom-verse, they are Golden Girls and Sunshine Boys.
There are senior centers in many communities, cosmetic processes for every sag, rounds of applause for nonagenarians who run marathons. Age is no barrier to political success. But the aura of well-being is fragile, dependent largely on wealth and race. When society must choose between reviving the economy and saving lives, the interests of the aged are marginalized. Their need for safety is met with inefficiency or inaction. Disregarding old people is nothing new, but this pandemic is a grim reminder that such obliviousness can be deadly.
The special vulnerability of the old haunts the debate about public policies during the pandemic. Stressing the risk for everyone may be a sound strategy, since it alerts the whole population, but it also diverts attention from the danger that younger people, including those who never develop symptoms, will spread the virus to their elders. The recent spike in cases wasn’t just caused by shoppers without masks and tipplers going bare-faced in bars. The virus was also spread by workers at those businesses, many of whom live in close quarters with multigenerational families.
In Europe, ageism expressed itself in genteel mistreatment; in the United States, it fed a failure to keep the virus at bay in state after Republican-run state. In South Dakota, the governor’s decision to allow massive public events, such as a huge motorcycle rally, produced a surge of cases across the Midwest. In Florida, the governor reopened businesses and beaches before the infection rate was low enough, and he required staff at nursing homes to be tested for the virus only once every two weeks. As a result of these actions, Florida had one of the nation’s highest COVID-19 case rates. A quarter of its residents are elderly, but their safety did not guide the governor’s hand.
In Texas, where there have been more than a million cases, opening businesses prematurely created a special crisis in immigrant communities, where many people work in the service industries. (About 25 percent of restaurant employees in the United States are Latinos.) The state’s lieutenant governor put it bluntly when he told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “there are more important things than living.” There is an unspoken assumption behind this remark: some people can be sacrificed for the greater good. Among the expendable: the aged.
When elder-care facilities in Florida asked FEMA for desperately needed safety equipment, the agency sent shopping-bag gowns and masks made from recycled underwear, with fragile paper straps. As the caseload reached its apex in New York, the state had to compete with the federal government — as well as other states — for extra ventilators. New York governor Andrew Cuomo railed at the inept response from Washington. “Whose grandmother should I kill?” he fumed at the feds.
But Cuomo’s own insistence that nursing homes accept infected patients leaving the hospital may have spiked the death toll in such facilities. Roughly 6,400 New Yorkers perished there, including many grandparents.
This pandemic has provoked the question afresh of how we as a society value life. Which lives are most valuable? If economic activity is the point, younger patients should matter more, since they are likely to work for many years after they recover. Only 16.4 percent of people over sixty-five are still in the labor force, so the survival of the old is less crucial when it comes to productivity.
Preserving their lives is largely a moral imperative, and when a crisis like this strikes, that obligation becomes more tenuous, because the only payback is that they will remain alive. In a society shaped by profit, the aged seem less useful and therefore more disposable. Many euphemisms hide this uncomfortable fact.
Ageism’s most virulent form emerges in times of distress. It masks itself in reason and denial under the pressure of scarcity. This is why the death toll from COVID-19 should not be regarded as a purely medical phenomenon. It must also be seen as a product of bigotry. It has to be said, clearly and angrily, that when the old die in great numbers because they cannot count on their leaders to protect them, it is a crime. Let us call this fatal neglect what it is: geronticide.
The Coming of Age
The first step toward confronting this injustice is to understand that growing old is not just a biological event. It is also a social process.
There is no schedule for senescence: it occurs differently in each person. The loss of strength and stamina that cannot be fully hidden by fitness or botoxed away — these are signs, but not necessarily evidence of incapacity. Yet, at a certain age, one enters the order of the elderly. As Simone de Beauvoir notes in her magisterial work The Coming of Age, “the aged person comes to feel old by means of others.”
Though race and class make an enormous difference, most old people suffer a decline of income and status when they lose their place in the working world. Over time, internalizing society’s judgment leads many retirees to feel useless and powerless in their bodies and minds. This is not so different from what other oppressed groups experience. Yet there is no woke lexicon for the toll that ageism takes. The same culture that plies the old with products to hide their deterioration also pacifies them. For all that they are encouraged to be youthful, enveloped in a nimbus of bright colors and tinted hair, they must accept their marginalization.
COVID-19 has tightened the boundaries that were already drawn around the old. They have always been expected to occupy separate spaces. So why should we shut the economy to maximize their safety? Let them do what they should do anyway: stay out of sight. This dismissive attitude underlies the rationale for refusing to wear a mask.
Of course, different cultures produce distinct responses to aging. Latino communities in the Southwest are more likely than the Anglo communities around them to emphasize protecting their elders; wearing masks is often associated with caring for one’s grandparents. This ethic of familial solidarity has been cited by Pope Francis, who recently issued a strong protest against discarding the aged like “waste material.”
Though his statement does not mention the pandemic, its timing is significant, as is his critique of societies “planned on efficiency, which consequently ignore the elderly.” Such systems, he says, “are perverse.”
A vast industry is dedicated to housing and assisting seniors in dedicated spaces. The real purpose of these institutions is revealed by the fact that reforming them has no political traction. Segregating old people assures that they will not disrupt the flow of normal activity with discomforting reminders that we are all subject to decay. They will not raise intense feelings of pity and disgust that might sour the shopping experience. Personal violence against them may be scandalous, but the collective dimension of neglecting the old is lost in the space between sentimentality and silence.
A heartwarming segment on the CBS Evening News shows teenagers delivering groceries to the homebound elderly. This is a touching tribute to human kindness, but the problem of sustaining old people who cannot wait in mile-long food lines is too massive to be solved by volunteers. To meet their needs requires an organized public response, and the fact that no such effort is being made shows how dispensable they are. We have no idea how many seniors are suffering from malnourishment because they are afraid to go outside; how many have delayed crucial medical procedures or suffered unbearable symptoms of dementia in isolation. No one reminds us that, when Donald Trump says only 1 percent of COVID-19 cases are serious, he is rendering the old invisible.
I have been called a fascist for reminding people to wear a mask. “I’m old,” I said to one man, by way of explaining my insistence. “So stay home,” he replied.
I took it in stride because in New York City, where I live, irritated candor is a way of life. But I also understand that chronic stress unleashes the resentment beneath gentility.
The inequities of capitalism, intensified by this disease, pit the interests of the young against the survival of the old. With jobs disappearing at a stunning rate, it is hard to sacrifice for the benefit of those who are cushioned by pensions, as I am. No wonder the whispered name for COVID-19 is “the boomer remover.”
“Why is your party more important than my life?” I want to shout when I run into a gaggle of maskless revelers. But I don’t, because this is a social question, and it doesn’t really have a personal answer.
Instead, I try to coax them into raising the swaths of fabric dangling decoratively under their chins. If I am unpersuasive, they peer at their phones blankly. I can’t blame them. When I picture myself at twenty-five, keeping a distance from the promise of intimacy — why would I do that, if I didn’t think contracting the virus would be the end of me? My hormones would impel me to conclude that I am giving up urgent joys just to keep some geezer alive. I regard any young person willing to do that as a hero. But at their age, I was less than that. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was my motto in the 1960s. Why should this generation treat me differently?
The answer is leadership. Most of us are an amalgam of moral possibilities, and the behavior we display reflects the values around us. American individualism is often blamed for the mask wars that have engulfed the nation, but that free-bird attitude didn’t prevent us from mobilizing in other times of crisis. The incendiary chaos of today is the product of free-market conservatism. Forty years of dominance by that worldview, even under liberal presidents, have shrunk the sphere of collective action, and when the virus arrived, we were unprepared to deal with it.
Trump exploited this haplessness by conflating it with freedom. He convinced his followers that there was no need for them to worry about a blue-state virus. In this fantasia, the aged are merely collateral damage, but there is nothing incidental about their deaths. Many of these old people are not just casualties of COVID-19. They are also victims of a society with a hierarchical view of whose lives matter.
At the height of the crisis in New York, when the sound of ambulances cut the silence, and a refrigerator truck was parked at the urgent-care clinic up the block, I received a postcard “signed” by the president. “Stay home and away from other people,” it read. That was the extent of his advice to me.
I didn’t need to hear it. I stay home because I never know what I will find in the street. I venture forth now and then in quasi-surgical armor, lurking at the edge of sidewalks, weaving past those too oblivious to keep a distance. I retreat from crowds of people drinking and mingling, like a fretful Puritan fleeing from sin.
Only at home, after vigorous cleansing, do I feel truly safe. As I wring my soapy hands for the time it takes to sing two choruses of “Happy Birthday to You,” I see the querulous man I have become. I fear that he will linger within me even after a vaccine is ready. I will always see the specter of a new virus in an unmasked face.
I try to manage my anxiety with information. I parse Anthony Fauci’s words with Talmudic precision. I have seen the film Contagion three times. I track the progress of the virus map by map, blotches of disease covering the country like a rash. Dealing with terror by devouring data is an attempt to know the unknowable through a surfeit of facts. And reasoning does work in the daylight.
But in the dead of night, images of tubes embedded in every orifice wake me. I gulp a Xanax and glide toward dawn.
Collective Action
Even after the danger ebbs, the reflexes that have set old people apart during this pandemic could become a default position for all sorts of policies. We may be entering an era of age apartheid, in which premodern ideas about what it means to be old are revived. Let them withdraw so the rest of us can thrive. We will treat them if they sicken — up to a point — but we will not sacrifice our economic growth to keep them safe. There are more important things than their lives.
This is a scenario that may never come to pass. But given the threat, the old have no choice but to pursue their interests. They must see through the mirage of respect, since it is killing them. And they must seek allies, because there are many marginalized groups in this pandemic, and many more who care about them.
Health workers could play a central role in advocating for the vulnerable; scientists could devise a humane agenda for survival; young people could demonstrate that there is a different course for their generation than the embrace of selfishness, applying peer pressure to those who act irresponsibly. The Black Lives Matter movement could add health issues to its agenda, since what protects people of color against the virus benefits the old of any race.
By joining with all the groups at risk to demand a fair system of vaccine distribution and medical care, seniors could expand and amplify their influence. They are the largest voting bloc, and skillful organizers could direct that ballot power. A new lobby for the aged, far more militant than the AARP, could emerge from this crisis. In swing states, an alliance of the suffering and their loved ones might very well be decisive. It would be a fitting addition to the fight for social justice.
As for an agenda, first and foremost, it must call the system of biases that has imperiled so many people what Pope Francis did: perverse. It must acknowledge the pain of lost jobs and suspended education while insisting that preserving life is the most important thing. It must demand that the old be front and center in media coverage of the pandemic, not just part of the news mix. It must petition international courts so that the civilized barbarism of states that mistreated the old is punished. And it must be clear that, unless such mistreatment is regarded as a violation of human rights, the young will also be its victims, since old people are what they will eventually become.
Just as my generation came together to oppose an unjust war and struggle for civil rights, now we must unite to preserve our lives. One model for this movement is the activism that arose when AIDS struck. Middle-class gay men who had never been politically aware came to see the links between homophobia and the stigma of drug addiction. Not only did the AIDS movement transform the relationship between patients and researchers; it also demonstrated that people with AIDS were fully human, hastening the advance of addiction services and LGBT rights.
This pandemic resonates with a different set of biases, but the strategy of unity and resistance hasn’t changed. Once again, we must fight for the right to survive.
A migrant family. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Euphemisms of Violence: Child Migrants and the Mexican State
Valentina Glockner and Elisa Sardão Colares, NACLA
Excerpt: "On February 13, 2018, local and national media reported an operation led by military and state security forces had managed to 'locate' and 'rescue' 301 migrants who had been kidnapped in the city of Matamoros, on Mexico's northeastern border."
The Mexican state legitimizes deportations and family separation by veiling these violent interventions as “protection practices."
n February 13, 2018, local and national media reported an operation led by military and state security forces had managed to “locate” and “rescue” 301 migrants who had been kidnapped in the city of Matamoros, on Mexico’s northeastern border. Juan (not his real name) was one of the 229 people held in one of various safe houses while an organized crime group threatened and extorted his family members.
Before being kidnapped, Juan had traveled for 30 hours hidden in the back of a trailer truck, crammed with dozens of migrants trying to cross Mexico en route to the northern border. After the rescue operation, Juan, like the rest of the group, was handed over to authorities. The National Migration Institute (INM) kept him detained without any access to consular services or legal support for about three weeks at the international bridge that connects Matamoros, Tamaulipas to the city of Brownsville, Texas.
While these experiences would be traumatic for anybody, they had an even greater impact on Juan, who at the time was only four years old. Unfortunately, Juan would also have to confront another traumatic experience that only migrant children face. Although Juan traveled accompanied by his father and father’s partner and they had not been separated throughout the entire journey, the state apparatus of migration control categorized Juan as an “unaccompanied migrant minor.” Since his father did not have documentation proving their relationship, the authorities separated them and deported Juan’s father a couple weeks later.
The trauma Juan had suffered during the kidnapping was not a good enough reason to avoid separating him from his father. Mexican immigration authorities determined that his father’s undocumented status put Juan at risk, and they sent Juan to a government shelter for unaccompanied migrant children in Matamoros, where he stayed for six days.
The authorities involved deemed Juan too young to understand what was happening and didn’t even explain to him the decisions they had made. But he understood in his own way and explained the situation very well. One day in the shelter, Juan was playing with soap bubbles. He ran to the window, extended his thin arms outside, and squeezed his cheeks against the metal bars, blowing to send a burst of bubbles outside. During coauthor Elisa Sardão’s doctoral research, she asked Juan if he wanted to instead blow bubbles inside where he could try to catch them. “No,” he said, “because at least these bubbles deserve to go flying out there.”
Juan spent the following days playing with toy cars, pretending that the “police bad guys” were chasing the “other bad guys.” Covering his mouth with his hand as if he were speaking over a radio, Juan repeated: “I don’t care if they’re children, send all of them to jail!” When he wasn’t distracted with toys, Juan was always attentive to the coming and goings of the INM vehicles in the shelter’s parking lot, asking: “Is that my dad coming to pick me up?”
The other children in the shelter said that Juan spent entire nights awake crying and calling out for his father. The next day, he wouldn’t be able to do anything but sleep, and he only wanted to eat chocolate milk. The most significant relationship Juan managed to develop during those days was with the woman responsible for cleaning, who tried to pass as much time with him as possible. She assured Juan that she had spoken to his father and that he had said that he would come the following week to pick Juan up. On one of the beds, Juan built a refuge of plush toys lined up in a circle, where he would lie down and cry when sadness overcame him.
The state apparatus that rescued Juan, separated him from his father, and sent him to a shelter in a foreign country thousands of miles away from his home took these actions in the name of “protecting” him from the possibility that the man he called “dad” while crying inconsolably might be a trafficker. This happened even though Juan’s mother confirmed, via the Honduran consulate, that they were father and son and that she had not been Juan’s primary caregiver for several years. Bureaucratic child migrant protection protocols and the insensitive state apparatus that intervened in Juan’s life in an individual and isolated way were not capable of recognizing this family tie.
State officials were likewise incapable of recognizing that the “groups” of people that the army had “located” as a result of anonymous calls from city residents were, in fact, migrant families. Records show that 128 of the 301 people “rescued” by the military that day were children.
More importantly, the state that intervened to “protect” Juan from his own father is the same state that had been completely absent when Juan irregularly crossed Mexico’s southern border and had to travel for long hours hidden in the darkness of a trailer. The same state that congratulated itself for “locating” and “rescuing” Juan was absent when he and his father had to put their lives in the hands of an organized crime group, when they suffered an accident as the truck they were traveling in tipped and received no help from authorities, and when they were subsequently kidnapped by a rival group of human traffickers. The same state then locked up Juan and his father for three weeks in a detention center—even though Mexico’s Law on Child and Adolescent Rights has prohibited the practice since 2014—only to later separate the two.
In this case, in order to understand how state interventions exercise violence against migrants, it is necessary to first understand the bureaucratic and legal mechanisms through which institutions, agents, and officials decide to intervene and exercise their authority in certain contexts. In some instances, even when migrants’ lives are in danger, these powers are completely absent. Yet in Juan’s case, certain logics and norms enable the state and its authorities to decide that separating a father and his four-year-old son who just suffered a kidnapping—alongside dozens of other families—is an act of protection. In practice, the state manages to legitimize violent and cruel actions as “protection practices,” presenting them as part of “the law” and institutional, bureaucratic procedures. This dynamic normalizes and legitimizes state violence, beginning with the very agents who exercise it.
Furthermore, in Mexico, a number of euphemisms that seek to cover up and erase cruel state interventions against migrants have normalized and legitimized such violence. Immigration authorities call migrant detention operations “rescues” and detention centers “estaciones migratorias” (“migrant stations”), even though conditions in such holding centers are similar or even worse than in prisons. They dub the act of detaining migrant children “security for the purposes of protection,” which sometimes results in family separation, and the act of returning migrants to the places they fled “assisted return.” Although this is a separate legal process, it tends to have the same psychosocial impacts on children and teens as deportation, and many migrants are obligated to sign off on assisted return against their will.
The state’s power to name reality and determine what should be recognized as “truth” has enabled the creation of euphemistic legal and protective categories that systematically violate the rights of child and adolescent migrants who are highly vulnerable and unprotected.
The very category of “unaccompanied child” has become a euphemism, as Juan’s case demonstrates. Although this designation was created with the legitimate and necessary goal of combatting human trafficking, the way immigration authorities interpret and apply the term in a bureaucratic and discretionary way obscures the fact that many of these children were not travelling alone. On the contrary, they are being separated from their fathers, mothers, and other family members by way of state intervention, without the state being held accountable or answering for the violence it perpetrates.
The Mexican state not only does not recognize family separation as a result of its immigration policies, but it uses the principles of the “child’s best interests” and “family reunification” to justify deportation of child migrants, sometimes indiscriminately, with the collusion and complicity of child protection authorities. These justifications obscure the fact that a large majority of child migrants leave home fleeing violence or seeking to reunite with parents in the United States.
In cases like Juan’s, state intervention generates violence, not protection, for three main reasons. First, because intervention is based on guidelines and procedures that bureaucratize protection and prevent agents from recognizing the either the immediate or larger social context in which child migration is situated and must be understood. Second, because the state has failed to develop and apply effective mechanisms to understand and consider the experiences, knowledge, and opinions of child migrants. And third, because state protection protocols for child migrants have never managed to genuinely place the “child’s best interests” above supposed threats to national security and a mandate to maximize detentions and deportations. As long as we fail to recognize these elements and the multiple euphemisms the state uses to detain, hold, separate, and deport children, the protection of migrant children will remain nothing more than fiction—and the gravest euphemism of them all.
The last we had heard from Juan is that he was deported to Honduras by plane, accompanied by a Child Protection Official who delivered him to his mother, who he has not lived with for several years. We may never know how many more times he might try to migrate and find himself up against a state that has built more tools to deport him than to guarantee his right to migrate and seek a different life.
A wildfire in California. (photo: Getty Images)
California Got $1.3 Billion in Wildfire Relief. Victims Have Received Nothing, Prompting Outrage
Liam Dillon, Los Angeles Times
Dillon writes: "After her home in Santa Rosa, Calif., burned down in the Tubbs fire three years ago, Linda Adrain moved into a tiny apartment. She didn't expect to stay long."
Adrain soon learned about plans for a complex for low-income senior citizens on the site of the fire-ravaged mobile home park where she had lived for a quarter-century. She quickly signed up for a two-bedroom apartment.
But before breaking ground, developers were relying on funding from a federal disaster relief package approved by Congress a few months after the fire. They’re still waiting for the money. And so Adrain is still waiting for her new home.
“It’s supposed to be a temporary place, and I’ve been here for three years,” said Adrain, 80. “There’s nowhere for me to go.”
California has received more than $1.3 billion in federal aid to rebuild after the 2017 wine country wildfires, the 2018 Camp fire in Butte County and other disasters from those years. But disaster-affected homeowners and renters have yet to receive a single penny. The cause: years-long federal and state bureaucratic delays.
As a result, renters like Adrain are going without permanent housing while homeowners are unable to cobble together enough money to rebuild their homes. In the Butte County town of Paradise, which was heavily damaged in the Camp fire, disaster victims are still living in cars and recreational vehicles on their properties as they await further financial assistance.
“This was a delay we wished we wouldn’t have had,” said Gustavo Velasquez, director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which is responsible for giving out the money. “Families deserve to have this money out to rebuild their lives.”
More than 4,500 homes were wiped out and 22 people died in the Tubbs fire, which began in Napa County and spread through Santa Rosa in 2017. A year later, the Camp fire killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes, with much of the damage centered on Paradise.
In the wake of the disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began providing temporary housing and other short-term assistance. Congress began approving further aid for California in February 2018 to permanently rebuild and prevent future disasters. About $300 million of that money is for 2017 relief; the remaining $1 billion is for the 2018 wildfires.
More than $300 million of the total is earmarked to finance new housing for low-income renters. An additional $250 million is dedicated to rebuild homeowners’ single-family homes. A third pot of money, more than $400 million, is set aside to repair roads, water systems and other infrastructure and make other public improvements aimed at lessening the effects of future fires.
To get access to the funding, California housing officials have needed to develop spending plans approved by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. But it took nearly two years after the disasters for HUD to sign off on any of the state’s proposals to respond to the 2017 wildfires. Last week, more than two years after the 2018 wildfires, federal officials finally authorized the state’s plans for that year’s relief efforts.
State housing officials expect Congress to OK additional funding for this year’s wildfires as well, which would again trigger the HUD approval process for the new money.
President Trump and California leaders have fought over wildfire prevention, immigration, climate change and numerous other issues, and the president has at times threatened to withhold disaster funding from the state. But there’s no evidence these disputes have held up this money.
Indeed, massive delays have beset disaster relief measures across the country, including dollars earmarked for hurricane-ravaged communities in Texas, Florida and Georgia in 2017. Additionally, Congress has approved more than $20 billion for Puerto Rico to recover from that year’s Hurricane Maria, yet the vast majority remained unspent as of this summer, according to a report from an internal congressional research agency.
The spending problems have attracted condemnation from Democrats and Republicans in Congress, with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), typically an ally of the president, among those accusing the administration of having intentionally stalled the money nationwide. HUD officials have denied that they prevented the dollars from coming out. Instead, they’ve lamented the complicated requirements surrounding the disaster relief program, which include writing new regulations every time the money is authorized.
Legislation to simplify how HUD handles disaster relief has not advanced despite bipartisan support.
“Our federal government’s disaster recovery system is broken,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a Washington-based advocacy group that has tracked the issue. “These problems we run into every single time.”
Nevertheless, not every state is facing the same issues as California.
Hurricane Harvey and resulting floods in 2017 badly damaged at least 197,000 homes in Texas — an even more widespread catastrophe than the California wildfires. Though the pace of federal approval affected Texas’ recovery efforts, state officials have already spent nearly $1 billion of its almost $10-billion allocation as of November, according to state statistics.
In California, around the time the 2017 fires hit, HUD investigators were examining the state housing department’s handling of other federal grants. They found a “systemic failure” in how the department monitored the money it handed out. HUD officials have said the state’s internal oversight issues, which housing officials here did not dispute, contributed to the delays in approving disaster relief plans.
More recently, it took Gov. Gavin Newsom nearly seven months after the previous state housing director resigned to appoint Velasquez to the position in the spring. Velasquez said the gap at the top of the department, which occurred after HUD had approved much of the state’s 2017 disaster spending, further slowed the pace.
“There was a void in leadership,” he said.
In the meantime, those in need are left waiting, sometimes frustrated by deadlines set by other government agencies.
The city of Santa Rosa has a dozen affordable housing complexes in varying stages of development that are in need of funding and could probably take advantage of the relief dollars, said David Gouin, the city’s director of housing and community services. If they’re all built, the projects would add more than 950 new apartments for low-income families.
In Paradise, the town’s largest low-income housing complex burned down during the Camp fire. Its developer, Community Housing Improvement Program, is in the process of rebuilding and would be eligible for disaster relief funding. But the project is getting squeezed by Internal Revenue Service regulations that call for affordable housing projects to be reoccupied within two years after they’re destroyed. Financing for the project remains precarious, said Seana O’Shaughnessy, the developer’s president and chief executive.
The town has allowed homeowners to legally park recreational vehicles and have other temporary housing on their properties through June, already prolonging its original time limit by six months because so few people have been able to gather sufficient money to rebuild.
“There’s no way around wanting to have the assistance sooner so people are not living in tents, living in cars, living in RVs and doing so for years,” said Casey Hatcher, deputy chief administrative officer for Butte County. “The longer that happens, the harder it is to get people out of those situations.”
State housing officials expect that money for 2017 wildfire relief will start flowing in early 2021. And they believe they’re prepared to spend more quickly in the future. In late October, the housing agency tweeted that it’s “urgently hiring” for 18 new jobs to manage disaster relief programs. Velasquez said he hopes to have the workers beginning as the federal government is signing off on the state’s plans for the 2018 disasters.
“Finally, we’re getting to a point where we can say confidently this money is coming out,” Velasquez said.
For Adrain, though, the wait will continue. Even when the senior housing development on the old mobile home park receives its final approval, it could take two more years before it’s finished.
If all remains on schedule, it will be more than five years from when her home burned down until she’ll be able to move into her new apartment. She’s already thinking about the day.
“I’m going to feel like I’m home,” Adrain said. “I’m probably never going to move out of there.”
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