Middleboro Review 2: 11/25/20

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

One sunny day in January 2021.....

1hred

"One sunny day in January 2021 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he'd been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, "I would like to go in and meet with President Trump." The Marine looked at the man and said, "Sir, Mr. Trump is no longer President and no longer resides here." The old man said, “Okay”, and walked away. The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, "I would like to go in and meet with President Trump." The Marine repeated, "Sir, as I told you yesterday, Mr. Trump is no longer President and no longer resides here." The man thanked him and, again, just walked away. The third day, the old man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying again, "I would like to go in and meet with President Trump." The Marine, understandably irritated at this point, looked at the man and said, "Sir, this is the third day in a row you've been here asking to speak to Trump. I've told you each time that he's no longer the President and no longer resides here. Don't you get it?" The old man looked at the Marine and said, "Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it." The Marine snapped to attention and said, "See you tomorrow, Sir."

RSN: FOCUS: Donald Trump Might Want to Think Twice Before Trying to Pardon Himself

25 November 20

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FOCUS: Donald Trump Might Want to Think Twice Before Trying to Pardon Himself

Frank Bowman, Slate
Bowman writes: "Self-pardons are plainly unconstitutional."

he 2020 election results are in. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is the President-Elect of the United States of America. Sometime before January 20, 2021, Donald Trump will recognize the inevitable (even if he may never publicly admit it) and prepare to leave the White House. Given that his tenure in office has been plagued by numerous allegations of private and official misconduct, close observers anticipate that he might try to shield himself, his family, and associates from federal prosecution by liberal use of the pardon power, possibly including issuing a pardon to himself. In anticipation that this moment might arrive, I spent the last few months conducting a comprehensive historical, legal, and political examination of the president’s pardon power. In the forthcoming scholarly article laying out my findings, I conclude (among other things) that, although the question has never been tested, a president may not constitutionally pardon himself. Here’s why.

The idea that President Trump would try to pardon himself is hardly fanciful. Back in 2018, when the Mueller investigation was nearing its end, an apprehensive Trump declared, “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have an absolute right to pardon myself….” The claim of scholarly support was not a complete invention. A few respectable figures have concluded that such an act would be constitutionally permissible. I think they are wrong. Indeed, a presidential self-pardon is antithetical to the language and structure of the Constitution, contrary to the evident intentions of the Founders, and a very real danger to republican government.

All of the arguments favoring a self-pardon rest heavily on the apparently open-ended text of the Constitution’s pardon clause, which reads: “The President … shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” Regardless of any attendant bells and whistles, the pro-self-pardon arguments boil down to the assertion that the words of the clause grant power without limit, and because the words do not expressly say that the President can’t pardon himself, then the opposite must be true — he can.

But even if we were forced to interpret the pardon clause using only the words in the text, those words contain multiple limits. Linguistically, the word “offenses” in the phrase “offenses against the United States” might mean any sort of injury to the country, or at least any sort of violation of the laws of the country, whether civil or criminal. But the Anglo-American history and practice of executive clemency were understood from the beginning to limit “offenses” in this context to crimes. Similarly, the phrase “against the United States” could be read to refer to the country as a whole or any of its constituent states. But from the outset, the pardon clause has been interpreted to cover only federal and not state crimes.

The phrase “grant pardons” contains the same sort of implicit, but well-understood, limitation. Both the etymology of the word “pardon” and our ordinary usage of it necessarily imply two persons. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the English word “pardon” as both a noun and a verb is a borrowing from the French language and derives from two Latin roots: per, meaning “by,” and donum, a gift, or dōnāre, meaning to make a donation or gift. Thus, a pardon is a type of gift, and to pardon is to give such a gift. The act of gift-giving requires both a giver and a recipient. Although we sometimes loosely speak of giving ourselves a gift, in the sense of permitting ourselves an indulgence of some sort, the ordinary sense of the word gift, and thus of the act of pardon, requires two parties.

We scarcely need this etymological excavation to understand the point. In ordinary English, now and for centuries past, if I walk round a corner too quickly and collide with you, I say, “Pardon me,” or, if I am feeling a bit more formal, “I beg your pardon.” This formula (which is very old) acknowledges my fault, to be sure, but so would, “I’m sorry.” To beg the other party’s pardon goes further and asks both for her recognition of my acknowledgement of fault and for the gift of her forgiveness. Asking for pardon necessarily implies two parties and the judgment of one about the conduct of the other.

The word “grant” also implies two persons. In dictionaries known to be owned by the Framers, the verb form of grant is defined as, “To bestow something which cannot be claimed of right,” or “to … give, bestow.” The transactional, two-party character of the noun form of grant is emphasized by the existence of two derivative words—grantor (the person who makes a grant) and grantee (the person who receives it)—which were in common usage at the time of the founding. (All other instances of the word “grant” in the Constitution confirm this understanding.)

More importantly, throughout Anglo-American history from Magna Carta to the time of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, a pardon in law always involved two parties—an executive (or sometimes legislative) grantor and an individual grantee. I have been unable to discover a single instance in which a king, royal governor, or any similar official purported to pardon himself. That is important because both the ordinary usage of the words “grant” and “pardon,” and the universal, invariable, and centuries-old bilateral understanding of the concept of “granting a pardon,” would have informed the way the Framers understood the words they wrote into the Pardon Clause and rendered an exclusion for self-pardon superfluous.

To illustrate the point, imagine the Constitution said, “The President shall have the power to act as a kidney donor.” Those words empower the president to donate a kidney to anyone. Grammatically, they could be construed to permit the president to donate a kidney to himself. But no one would read them that way because that’s not the way kidney donation works. It requires two people—a donor and a recipient. That being so, no sensible person would write the Kidney Donation Clause to say: “The President shall have the power to act as a kidney donor, but may not donate his kidney to himself.” For the Framers, to speak of granting a pardon was necessarily to speak of one person judging and remitting the punishment of another. No explicit exclusion of self-pardon was required because the universal understanding of what it meant to grant a pardon self-evidently excluded such a possibility.

Even more importantly, it is not the language of the Pardon Clause alone, but how the pardon power fits into the Framers’ design of the presidency and the Constitution’s structural limitations on presidential power that should conclusively rule out a self-pardon.

Pardons are not an American invention. Rather, the Framers inherited an English legal tradition of executive clemency rooted in the ancient idea that the will of the king was the source of law, and thus, with a pardon, the king could release a subject from the law’s rigors as an act of royal grace. A corollary of this principle was that the king, as the source of law, was not personally subordinate to law, and thus was immune from either civil or criminal judgments by the courts.

The Framers considered, but explicitly rejected, proposals for an American king. The American constitutional structure was purpose-built with no monarch, and constructed on a theory of separation of powers between an elected executive, elected legislature, and appointed judiciary, combined with interbranch checks and balances. In the Framers’ system, the elected president has no ancestral claim that law is rooted in his will, and thus has neither an inherent right to issue pardons to others nor an inborn personal immunity from the ordinary operation of the law. In the American constitutional order, the presidency is a creation of law, its powers are specified by law, and each temporary occupant of the office is subject to the law. If we knew nothing more about the Constitution and the presidency than this, it would be sufficient to reject the idea of a self-pardon. If a president can pardon himself, he can, by an unreviewable exercise of his own will, render himself effectively immune from the operation of national law. That kind of immunity was a critical attribute of kingship, and it is quite plain that the Framers intended no American king.

Precisely because they were determined that the office of president not be a kingship, the Framers rejected the idea of a president-for-life and opted instead for a president elected to set terms of four years. They also worried that even an elected president could become corrupt or tyrannical, and they rejected the argument that elections alone would be a sufficient remedy in such a case. Therefore, they added two other protections against an egregious presidential malefactor.

First, the Framers provided for removal by impeachment. Impeachment was another inheritance from Great Britain, but American impeachment differs in critical ways from its British ancestor. Parliament could not impeach the monarch, only royal ministers, judges, and lesser fry. American impeachment was consciously designed for removal of a misbehaving chief executive. And to make sure that a president cannot nullify an impeachment threat with a pardon, the Constitution expressly excludes impeachment cases from the pardon power.

Second, the Framers were well aware that British impeachment was a hybrid political and criminal action in which Parliament could impose characteristically criminal penalties, including imprisonment and death. The Framers wrote our impeachment mechanism to be exclusively political by limiting the consequences of conviction to removal and disqualification. But—and this is critical—they expressly provided that additional penalties might be exacted in separate proceeding before ordinary courts. Article I, Section 3, declares:

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgement and Punishment, according to Law.

In short, the Constitution says that Congress may not impose criminal penalties on a president, but the president is nonetheless subject to federal criminal prosecution through the ordinary courts. To my mind, this provision alone is dispositive of the self-pardon question. As a matter of original intention, the implicit threat in Article I of criminal court action against a crooked or tyrannical president would be a nullity if the Framers entertained any notion that a president could pardon himself. Indeed, we have very good evidence that they saw the threat of prosecution as an important constraint on presidential misconduct and never imagined a president could pardon himself out of that threat.

Both during and after the Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and others complained that the pardon language was too broad because it permitted a pardon even for treason, and therefore, as Mason said, it “may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom [the President] had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt.” James Iredell, one of the first justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, responded to Mason, saying, “The probability of the President of the United States committing an act of treason against his country is very slight …. Such a thing is however possible, and accordingly he is not exempt from a trial if he should be guilty or supposed guilty, of that or any other offense.” Notice that both Mason’s complaint and Iredell’s response assume no self-pardon is possible. If it were, the president would not need to pardon others to prevent either his own detection or any subsequent prosecution. He could simply pardon himself out of liability for any crime alleged by others.

But far more important than what the Framers thought is how the availability of self-pardon would affect our contemporary constitutional regime for deterring and redressing presidential crime. Remember, there are only three constitutional mechanisms for dealing with grave presidential misconduct: quadrennial elections, impeachment, and criminal prosecution. In 1788, the Constitution placed no limit on the number of presidential terms. The Founders may have imagined that presidents would keep running indefinitely and would continue to be constrained by fear of the offending the electorate. But at least since 1951, when the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting presidents to two terms was ratified, all second-term presidents have known they will never face voters again. So, for them at least, that constraint is gone. And, as our current circumstances illustrate, a first-term incumbent president who loses a bid for re-election retains the pardon power for two-and-one-half months during which the fear of electoral backlash has been rendered meaningless.

I suspect the Framers imagined impeachment would prove a more meaningful check on presidents than history has shown it to be. In over 230 years, one president, Richard Nixon, left office due to the near-certainty that he would be both impeached and convicted. Only three presidents—Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump—have actually been impeached. All were acquitted. The acquittals of both Presidents Clinton and Trump demonstrate that so long as a president can hold the loyalty of a mere thirty-four senators of his own party, conviction is impossible. And Senator Mitt Romney, by casting the only impeachment vote in American history against a president of his own party, reminded us of how easy it is in an era of extreme two-party polarization for a president to hold that line. To put it in terms the Founders might have used, the power of “faction” has all but erased the legislative weapon of impeachment.

Which leaves the criminal law. So long as the Justice Department maintains the position expressed in memoranda of the Office of Legal Counsel that a sitting president may not be criminally prosecuted, a president will be, practically if perhaps not constitutionally, immune from federal prosecution while in office. If a departing president can issue himself a pardon for all he has done before, then a president really is a creature above the national law, or at least the most important and most powerfully deterrent portions of that law. He could loot the Treasury, bribe judges, steal elections, commit treason itself, and be at no legal risk for any of it. Such a creature would no longer be the president of a free republic, but a dictator in all but name.

So far as I know, in all of Anglo-American history, no monarch, royal governor, president, or other executive officer has tried to pardon himself. The reason, I think, is that the idea of a self-pardon is so antithetical to the constitutional structures of England and the United States, and to the purpose that executive pardon power serves in those structures, that no one has ever had the effrontery to try it. A president who tried to pardon himself would not be relying on some deep, if heretofore unappreciated, reservoir of constitutional authority. He would instead be trying to slither through a heretofore untried loophole. In the case of an ordinary criminal defendant, one might merely shrug at the audacity of the dodge. But a miscreant president is no ordinary malefactor. And permitting presidential self-pardons would not merely allow individual miscarriages of justice, but would erase a structural barrier to tyranny. I do not believe the Supreme Court would countenance that result.

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Stacey Abrams prepares for the GA Senate runoffs: Let’s get it done

Stacey Abrams has some reassuring words for us as we wait to see who will win the Senate races in Georgia and control the Senate: “We have seen what is possible when we work hard and when we work together. We know we can win Georgia. Now let’s get it done, again.”

We know we’re in good hands. After massive voter suppression in Georgia during the 2018 elections, Stacey Abrams stepped to the political forefront to protect every vote across the state with her project Fair Fight. And when Trump tried to “crown himself the winner,” Stacey Abrams and her team continued to fight to ensure every vote would be counted.

After turning Georgia blue in the presidential race, Abrams is preparing for the next fight -- winning control of the Senate. We’re proudly supporting the work Fair Fight and Stacey Abrams are doing to protect our democracy. But today, we need to know where you stand:

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POLITICO NIGHTLY: Reality check on Biden’s national security team

BY ANDREW DESIDERIO

FIRST THE SENATE — Joe Biden this week unveiled a national security team that has vast experience in foreign policy and diplomacy — a group he says will be ready to hit the ground running on Day One. But first, they’ll have to charm skeptical Senate Republicans.

As of today, the president-elect and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have still not spoken since Biden defeated President Donald Trump. McConnell has been (characteristically) mum about all of this. Despite his decades-long working relationship with Biden, McConnell has rarely broken with Trump and wants his help in the Georgia runoffs that will determine Senate control. But in recent days we’ve gotten some hints about how a Republican-controlled Senate would handle Biden’s Cabinet-level nominees if they hold onto the majority.

The reality is that no matter who Biden picks, there will be a consistent cohort of 35 to 40 Republican senators who vote “no” on every nominee. Chief among them will be the several potential 2024 presidential candidates — just as the 2020 Democratic contenders played to their base with a hard line against Trump’s nominees. A few have already spoken out.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said Alejandro Mayorkas is “disqualified” from serving as Homeland Security secretary; Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) branded the entire group “corporatists and war enthusiasts.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was slightly more careful. Without naming names, Rubio said the nominees — which also include Antony Blinken for secretary of State, Avril Haines for director of national intelligence and Linda Thomas-Greenfield for ambassador to the United Nations — “will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.” Not a compliment, but also far from a “hell no,” which is notable because Rubio chairs the Intelligence Committee and will be responsible for shepherding some of Biden’s appointments through his panel.

Indeed, these nominees are fairly mainstream choices and shouldn’t have a ton of trouble getting confirmed. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) acknowledged as much, telling reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday: “I’m glad [Biden is] resisting the far left on most of the picks to date.” Of course, Republicans won’t shy away from hammering the nominees, particularly over their associations with what they see as the disastrous foreign policy of the Obama administration. But only a simple majority is needed for confirmation and a key handful of GOP senators — including Susan Collins, Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski — are already promising to cross party lines to give Biden a Cabinet.

Importantly, both Rubio and Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch (R-Idaho) have acknowledged the presidential transition, a sign of potential cooperation as their committees prep for confirmation hearings for Biden’s national-security picks.

What’s going on here? Yes, it’s a lot of politicking. But even as most Republicans are likely to vote against Biden’s nominees, they’ve also consistently said they value stability above all else at the top of agencies responsible for safeguarding Americans’ safety and the nation’s interests abroad. Someone needs to run the State Department, in other words. On top of that, Republicans have expressed rare public frustration with Trump’s outgoing impulsive moves on personnel and policy in the national-security realm. McConnell was blisteringly critical of Trump’s decision to reduce U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan; Republicans across the spectrum were livid that Trump fired the top cybersecurity official who was debunking his baseless voter fraud claims.

Still, Republicans will have to balance their desire for stability with the political imperative of drawing a stark contrast with the Biden foreign policy doctrine — whatever that shapes up to be — in time for the 2022 and 2024 contests.

Echoing many GOP lawmakers, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) signaled his sheer exasperation with the volatility of Trump’s staffing choices. “It’s the president’s prerogative, but I think it just adds to the confusion and chaos,” he said of the latest purge. “And I’m sure I’m not the only one that would like some return to a little bit more of a — I don’t even know what’s normal anymore.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. We are thankful for each and every one of our Nightly readers. We’ll be off Thursday and Friday but will be back and better than ever Monday. Reach out at adesiderio@politico.com and rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @andrewdesiderio and @renurayasam .

TRACK THE TRANSITION: President-elect Biden has started to form a Cabinet and announce his senior White House staff. The appointments and staffing decisions made in the coming days send clear-cut signals about Biden's priorities. Transition Playbook is the definitive guide to one of the most consequential transfers of power in American history. Written for political insiders, it tracks the appointments, people, and the emerging power centers of the new administration. Track the transition and the first 100 days of the incoming Biden administration. Subscribe today.

TRANSITION 2020

FLYNN PARDONED — After long hinting it was likely, Trump pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn today for lying to FBI agents investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. “It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon,” the president tweeted. “Congratulations to @GenFlynn and his wonderful family, I know you will now have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!”

HOW BIDEN STACKS UP — Biden’s transition team received their first hastily scheduled Operation Warp Speed briefing today, one of the first steps in a monthslong transition process.

Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam reached out to Stephen Hess, who literally wrote the book on organizing a presidency, about how this transition compares with previous ones. Hess, who worked in the White House under Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and was an adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, said that he’s seen a lot of incoming presidents with Washington experience totally screw up the transition, with disastrous consequences. So far, he says, Biden seems to be avoiding that fate — though it’s early yet. This conversation has been edited.

How is the Biden administration doing when it comes to transition planning?

I’ve seen some awful mistakes in my time that presidents have made. It’s sort of a pleasure to look at this one which had so many obstacles, so many opportunities to slip and fall. And frankly, I think they’re doing a brilliant job.

One of the first things you wanna do if you’re coming in is choose your key White House people first. That seems obvious. But Clinton didn’t do it. He finally picked his White House people the day before he took office. It was a mess. Biden has done that. The second rule was to pick your people in clusters. We certainly learned how he was putting together a national security cluster. The next rule would be state your number one priority, so you’re really ready to hit the ground running if you can. And certainly they’ve made it clear that the pandemic is their number one priority.

What are some other mistakes incoming administrations have made during a transition?

Look at Carter, who didn’t have a chief of staff in place. His office became sort of a central waiting room and people wandered in and out.

Nixon was really a perfect example. He had a plan for how his administration was going to be organized, which was a sort of a semi-Cabinet-directed presidency. Exactly the day he took office he instead created a complex in which he had two competing advisors on domestic relations: Pat Moynihan and Arthur Burns. They were going at each other exactly the way experts should go after each other. But the result was that he didn’t have a domestic program until August.

There was considerable confusion after Bush took over the presidency from Reagan, even though he had been vice president for eight years. There was a lot of conflict between people who had been in the Reagan administration who wanted their say, and the Bush people coming in who wanted their own people.

What do you make of the fact that Biden has, so far, picked the type of people that Trump has for years maligned as part of the “deep state?”

If you listen to the comments by the people who express their gratitude for being picked. Wow, if there was ever a pushback against the deep state. They were all talking about the fabulous civil servants they worked with in the past, the diplomats who knew their business and the national intelligence people. They’ve been very subtle, but they certainly have pushed back against, in their argumentation, the things that they don’t like about the way Trump has run the presidency.

Do you see any issue with getting Senate confirmation?

The confirmation of these appointments almost always forms a pattern. Somewhere along the line, the president is going to appoint someone who is going to be in trouble. So there’s almost always one Cabinet office that is going to be a real fight. You slip up and make some mistake. You get into the problem of nanny-gate. You count on that.

Decorations for the Thanksgiving parade are installed outside of Macy’s in Herald Square in New York City. | Getty Images

FIRST IN NIGHTLY

YOU MISSED OUR ANNIVERSARY? Four hundred years ago this month, the Mayflower, carrying more than 100 passengers plus crew, dropped anchor near Cape Cod after a perilous, two-month voyage. Bound originally for Virginia, where they had been invited by local authorities to form their community, the “Pilgrims” experienced trouble navigating the rough currents of the Atlantic and instead made their way to nearby Plymouth, where they first set foot on Dec. 11. The rest is history.

Given the central position the Plymouth landing long played in American public memory, it’s telling that the 400th anniversary has gone by largely unnoticed, POLITICO Magazine contributing editor Joshua Zeitz writes, unlike last year’s 400th anniversary of slavery’s roots in North America.

In some ways, the quiet passing of this event right-sized the role of the Pilgrims. America’s romance with Puritan New England always had more to do with how Americans wanted to remember the nation’s founding than with its real importance to the country’s evolution. Read more as Joshua explains why it’s possible we’ve outgrown the need for this particular myth — and why it’s one of the things we have to be thankful for.

BIDENOLOGY

Welcome to Bidenology, Nightly’s look at the president-elect and what to expect in his administration. Tonight, an excerpt from Biden’s Thanksgiving address on Covid-19. Speaking from Wilmington, the president-elect reemphasized his commitment to fighting the pandemic and urged Americans to stay safe during the holiday.

ASK THE AUDIENCE

Nightly asked you: What are your plans for Thanksgiving this year during the spike in Covid-19 cases? Below are some of your lightly edited responses.

“To quote Nicole Wallace, ‘I’m cooking a ridiculous amount of food for two other human beings and it just is what it is.’” — Michelle Manning, senior clinical research assistant, Olathe, Kan.

“Staying home; we will not travel to see family in a different state. Short-term sacrifice for a long-term goal. We are in the high-risk category due to age, so we’ll see family virtually. We don’t want this to be our last holiday season.” — Judy Day, retired, Silverthorne, Colo.

“I’m going to follow the experts’ advice, and the woman I’m dating and I will make dinner for two with no guests at my Cape Cod house, where we’ve been avoiding the virus since Saint Patrick’s Day.” — Rick Ahearn, political consultant, Alexandria, Va.

“Cross-country ski in the morning, pick up to-go dinner sides from a friend (she will have everything packaged, no going into her home), and have a festive dinner for two at home.” — Julie Hudson, retired, Bend, Ore.

“Outdoors on our heater-assisted screened porch with two neighbors in northern Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Superior. Really. Forecast is for 40 or so. Let’s hope so.” — Dennis McCann, writer, Bayfield, Wis.

“Since we can’t be with our son and grandkids, we rented a small condo at the beach right on the water, about an hour from our home, for four nights. We are going to sous vide our turkey breast, cook a few new side dishes, read a couple good books and walk on the beach.” — SuAnn Stone, retired, Anacortes, Wash.

THE GLOBAL FIGHT

AROUND THE OTHER ATLAS — Trump’s win in 2016 sent American allies and adversaries to a panic, not knowing what to expect when dealing with the U.S. over the next four years. But was his term at the White House as messy as world leaders expected? In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, foreign affairs reporter Nahal Toosi analyzes Trump’s policy with China, Russia and North Korea.

Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast

DON'T MISS THE MILKEN INSTITUTE FUTURE OF HEALTH SUMMIT 2020: POLITICO will feature a special edition Future Pulse newsletter at the Milken Institute Future of Health Summit. The newsletter takes readers inside one of the most influential gatherings of global health industry leaders and innovators determined to confront and conquer the most significant health challenges. Covid-19 has exposed weaknesses across our health systems, particularly in the treatment of our most vulnerable communities, driving the focus of the 2020 conference on the converging crises of public health, economic insecurity, and social justice. Sign up today to receive exclusive coverage from December 7–9.

NIGHTLY NUMBER

778,000

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits last week , according to the Labor Department’s report today. Jobless claims climbed from 748,000 the week before. Before the virus struck hard in mid-March, weekly claims typically amounted to roughly 225,000.

Holiday travelers pass through Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving eve. | Getty Images

PARTING WORDS

WISTFUL WEDNESDAY — As a special Thanksgiving Eve parting from Nightly, today we bring you a double helping of essays on Thanksgivings past and present.

First Joanne Kenen, our newly minted health care editor-at-large, tells us about her holiday plans.

Ever since I was a little girl, I loved Thanksgiving. It used to be a huge extended family affair, at my Great Aunt Lily’s, so many of us crammed into her New York apartment that we didn’t even try to fit around a table. My Great Uncle Herman played the mandolin. My Great Uncle Sam would amuse the children — lots of us — by rolling his eyelids inside out. Not sure why that’s such a vivid memory, but there you have it.

My own Thanksgivings are more sedate. We sit at the table, at my home or at my mom’s. At either house, I miss my Dad. I do all the cooking myself, all the traditional foods, everything from scratch, including both cranberry sauce and cranberry relish. (On particularly busy news years, I have occasionally succumbed to pre-made pie crust.) Me and my husband. Our two sons. My son’s husband. My older son’s sister, her husband and their nine-year-old boy. (We are beyond blended — long story.) Sometimes a few family friends join. Not a big gathering. But one of my favorite days of the year.

Last week, I told my older son not to come home. They had already rented a car; the whole family has gathered only once (safely, this past summer) since pre-pandemic. My younger son, whose college is wholly virtual, is about to fly overseas, Zooming in to his university while resuming a study abroad program truncated by the pandemic in March. But the older one just started a new job, and it’s required him to be out and about, bursting his bubble. He protested that they would get tested before coming home, that it would be fine. Not good enough, I said. Testing shows you didn’t have the virus the day you tested. If you haven’t been isolated, it doesn’t tell you that you don’t have it today, or that you won’t get it tomorrow. My mom is 86. She’s already had one Covid scare — plus an encounter with a rabid bat this year. They’ll stay in New York. She’ll stay in New Jersey. Three of us will be here. Zoom, Zoom, Zoom.

For someone as fiercely maternal as I am, it’s difficult. For someone as immersed in the reality of this virus as I am, it’s inevitable. When my son’s job permits, we will all isolate again, and I’ll see him, here in D.C. or at my mom’s. It saddens me, though, that we won’t all be together until at least next spring. And if my kids think I’m making a second turkey then with all the trimmings — nope. I’m not even roasting a whole turkey this year, none of the crispy skin and tender meat that I’ve perfected over the years. When I finish writing this, I’ll start looking through recipes for a three-pound turkey breast. Then I’ll start on the cranberry sauce, the relish, the maple squash and some pie. I’ll have the food we love. But not the people.

And a lightly edited staff note sent to the POLITICO newsroom today from editor-in-chief Matt Kaminski:

I’ve been thinking back to my first Thanksgiving in 1980. Partly because it’s a formidably round number (40 years) and partly because of the year we’ve just had. My parents and I were recent arrivals in America, a couple months out of what at the time was the wrong side of Europe and adjusting to life in small-town Ohio. Any move, much less exile from home and family, is disorienting. Coming here at 8, I felt both lost and excited to be in a new culture and language. We also, by the way, were often physically lost; as so many immigrants I know, we found maps and American highways hard to navigate, which brought a different kind of excitement.

The dean at the university where my father taught — his name was Hal Williams — invited us over for Thanksgiving. It was formal, suits and ties all around the table. Three or four other families were there. As well as the brother of a semi-notable Hollywood actor, name since forgotten, and a daughter’s boyfriend who clearly wouldn’t have Hal’s blessing. Dinner opened with a prayer, a novelty for me. Then everyone around the table was asked what they were thankful for. “For leaving the People’s Republic,” my dad tells me he said.

We came as spectators and left feeling — well, sure, welcomed. But that wasn’t really new; we were warmly embraced by this Midwestern community from the moment we arrived. What I remember more was the feeling that we had made it safely home, for that evening at least, to a blazing fire and dry turkey after our own recent odyssey.

Thanksgiving is of course about leaving and coming home (and gluttony, too). There’s no more American story than that. Nor, I think, a more quintessentially American holiday. So, after the journey we’ve all been on together in 2020, wherever or whomever with you settle down to a meal this Thursday, I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving.