America's Talking - Episode 75: Republican Governors Ask For End to U.S. Military COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Join The Center Square’s Executive Editor Dan McCaleb and D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper as they discuss Republican governors ask for end to U.S. military COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Polls: Afghanis' suffering has spiked since U.S. troop withdrawal. Inflation rose slightly in October. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the American Focus podcast, powered by the Center Square. American Focus is a production of America's Talking Network. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. To support great podcasts like this one, please donate by clicking the link in the show description. Joining me today is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. How are you, Casey? I'm doing great, Dan. I was just told that we are one of the top 15% podcasts in the world.

I don't know who gets more credit between the two of us, but I'm feeling good. I don't think that was the exact stat. I think we're the top 15% most followed news podcasts in the world. In the world, globally. That's the world, yes. Casey, we're recording this on Friday, December 2nd. I can't believe I'm saying that, but it's December already. Where did 2022 go?

It went into the, it went in every direction. I feel like the news cycle since 2015 has been nonstop. It changes every eight hours between Twitter and all the upheaval there, all the election stuff. Another way to put it in is time flies when you're having fun. And I've spent so much time with you that this year is just flown by. Oh, that's nice. Casey, I was going to say, bomb flies as you get older. Oh, right, right.

I certainly can speak for that myself. All right, a lot of news to talk about this week. Congress stepped in to a voice. a nationwide rail strike, both the House and the Senate, passing bills to enact a contract for rail workers. Tell us what's going on there. Yeah, this has been a pretty interesting story to follow because the implications of this pending rail strike, which was set to take place December 9th, was not small at all. I mean, if, you know, I think 28 percent of U.S. freight goes on rail, it's absolutely fundamental necessary for the economy, not optional, that we have our trains running,

that we have running on time. The way our train system is set up is there's not a lot of room for error, even in meeting deadlines and things. So there has been for a while now this looming December 9th strike deadline, you know, and it's kind of complicated, but, you know, rail workers have been upset about a few things. One of the leading things has been not having enough sick days. Now, the rail employers would say, we don't do sick days because we give you more vacation days so you can just use them as sick days. But, you know, they haven't had sick days and the people that have been fired, they've also

wanted to pay, fired for, you know, being sick and not having days to take. And then they also wanted a pay raise. So Biden brokered a deal to avert a strike earlier this year, right? So it was like, okay, crisis averted. But then afterwards, four out of the 12 unions in. involved in this kind of these big negotiations with all the strike, actually didn't back the deal. And they said, you know what, that's not good enough. And so now Congress has had to get involved and they've passed this deal that gives a pretty significant about a roughly 25%. It's not exactly,

but roughly 25% pay increase. The House also passed a bill that, you know, added more vacation and more sick leave days. So the Senate has taken this up. You know, Biden's looking at it. This isn't across the finish line totally yet. But the Congress has had to step in and broker this deal after, you know, Biden brokered one. Then it kind of fell through. And the stakes are really high. And as you mentioned, if rail workers did go on strike, all of the goods that they transport across the country would not get transported. It would add to the supply chain issues we've experienced the past year, year and a half. Right, right at Christmas time too.

Right. Right. And, you know, if rail, if goods aren't getting transported by rail, that means truck drivers don't have all the goods that they need to transport. So it halts the trucking industry to a certain extent. At that point, as you said, it would have been a big deal. Now, all that said, there are some, many who said Congress should not get involved in private sector union negotiations. In fact, at thecenter square.com, we wrote a story published yesterday,

quoting U.S. Representative Ronnie Davis of Illinois, who said exactly that, that it sets a very bad precedent for Congress to get involved in these private sector labor negotiations. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, to be honest, when I first saw this story developing, my just honest, reaction was, wait a minute, Congress can do that? I didn't know that Congress could get so specific on deciding how many vacation days, employees, you know, employees of a company got. A private sector company. This is not a public sector. Yeah, right. Right. So it's just interesting. I mean, I think, you know, there is, of course, that kind of more strict constitutionalist argument

of just government have the power to do this. I think the other side would say, you know, this is a national security issue. Our whole economy is at stake. I mean, if the rail's shut down for weeks or a few months, it would absolutely grind the country to a halt. You'd have mass shortages of things. I mean, this report from the Association of American Railroads said that it would cost $2 billion per day after the strike.

It would immediately harm every sector. There's about, it said about 7,000 trains per day would be affected and it would just have shortages across retail, manufacturing, any job losses. I mean, I think this is the kind of thing that could instantly put us in a recession. So there is the question about, you know, the role of government and I think the slippery slope argument is valid in this case. Yeah.

But, you know, as we said, that if there is a time to do it, this may have been it. So generally speaking, for the economy, for consumers, this is probably good news. But, yeah, that's that slippery slope argument is, you know, how big. should government be that they're stepping into a private sector matter and essentially telling them, here's how it's going to be, deal with it. Right. And the other thing is, you know, Congress can pass all the bills they want, but nobody can make these workers go to work on December 9th. Right. So, I mean, Congress can step in and say this is what the deal is going to be.

But ultimately, you know, workers could still strike if they don't like the deal. So I think, you know, Congress is, you know, members of Congress, the Biden administration has taking a victory lap on this. But until those workers actually say, we like this deal, and we're going to show up to work, and they do show up to work, you know, no law written on the books in Washington, D.C. can make a guy get up in the morning and show up at the train depot, right? So it's kind of interesting. I mean, the union still really do have to be on board regardless to whatever law is put on the books.

Right. Well, we'll see how this story develops. You can follow all the developments at thecentersquare.com, but let's move on. Casey, as I mentioned up top, it is now December 2020. It is almost 2023, marking a full three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We're going to be heading into our fourth year since COVID hit U.S. shores. Yet there's still all kinds of mandates out there. The federal government has a vaccine mandate in place for a number of workers in the healthcare industry,

but also for the U.S. military. It's caused all kinds of problems. It's led to lawsuits. Now Republican governors have stepped in asking the Biden administration to end this military COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Tell us a little about this. Yeah, this is a really interesting. This is one of the more strict holdouts when it comes to the COVID vaccines. I mean, now, you know, service members do have to get a lot of vaccines.

This is pretty strict on that. They're not optional. So I think it's part of the culture of the military. is that you just, you know, you get the jab of all kinds of jabs, whether you like it or not. There is kind of a surrendering of your rights there. But I think what's happened here is when the vaccine was first rolled out, there was a high level of confidence in it. All the health agencies were saying this thing is great. It prevents COVID transmission.

If you get the vaccine, you won't get COVID. I mean, I think that our listeners probably heard all these things and I've heard the parody and mockery of those comments since, since they pretty much all turned out to not be true. So the vaccine rolled out super efficient. And it wasn't efficiently rolled out, but it was said to be super effective. And so because of that, a lot of places made a lot of mandates. There was federal worker mandates. There was all kinds of mandates, state, local, even local level sometimes, and federal level. And now as time has gone on, concern about COVID has declined a lot, of course.

Lockdowns are over for almost entirely in the U.S. You know, there was a one point talk about a vaccine mandate for people, you know, traveling in the U.S. or to travel, you know, overseas, but now that doesn't apply to U.S. citizens. So these mandates have slowly been walked back. But the one place where the COVID vaccine mandates haven't been rolled back is the military. They've really held on to this mandate since the beginning, even as other, you know, parts of the government had there struck down or taken away. And so I think that's why you're seeing such a strong challenge.

or this is not a new battle. This has been mounting. A lot of actually Navy SEALs have had to leave. And Navy SEALs, I mean, there's not that many of them. They're very highly trained and it's very expensive to train them. So there is a lawsuit amongst Navy SEALs. Over this, they were saying their religious exemption requests were not being taken seriously. You're supposed to individually consider each religious exemption request.

And the Navy SEALs basically said they were just giving us a blanket no without even really taken our individual request. seriously. They were just telling everyone no in the same way for the same reason. So they weren't taking that tailored response. So this has been going on for a while. What were you going to say something, Dan? Yeah, I was just going to say, the Republican government sent a letter this week to congressional leaders asking them to step in. It's the Biden administration that has the Department of Defense that has issued these vaccine mandates. And one of the things they note in their letter to congressional leaders is that the Army has missed its recruitment goal. by 25% falling 15,000 recruits short of its target.

The National Guard across the country has missed its recruitment target by more than 10%. So it's definitely impacting our national defense. I think it is. I think we're actually on the verge of some kind of crisis and recruitment. This is an un-talked-about story. But if we keep putting these kind of mandates on people, if we keep talking about how any kind of masculinity and aggression is, toxic. And if we keep, you know, doing some of these really aggressive critical race theory and

gender policies in the military, I think it's going to, it is going to lead to less recruitment. And even on top of that, if, although it seems unlikely now, if student loans get forgiven, I think we all know that one of the biggest drivers for people to sign up for the military is free education. The military will pay for your college and for your training, but you've got to give them X number of years, right? And it's a pretty good deal, especially if you come from a I'm a poor family. So I think we are on the verge of really having some trouble recruiting, not to mention a lot of studies show that so many Americans actually aren't healthy enough to join the military because of America's obesity problem. So it's kind of an interesting

storm brewing here, I think, with military and military recruitment. But this effort against vaccines is the latest of it. Like you said, the governors and members of Congress are fighting it. Whether they can get enough momentum politically, you know, remains to be seen. I think, Ron DeSantis, we talked a lot about whether he's going to run for president. He has hammered this issue and made it a campaign issue. And if these kinds of things don't get addressed, I think he's going to ride these kind of issues all the way to 2024. I think people are really sympathetic to the Navy SEAL who wants to serve his country but doesn't like the vaccine. I don't think that's a winning political issue.

And plus, there's been legal challenges to this mandate pretty much for all military branches. And the Biden administration is losing just about every step of the way. This week, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, unanimously upheld a class-wide injunction, which essentially protects unvaccinated U.S. Air Force personnel from being disciplined, including being dismissed from the airports over this vaccine mandate. time and time again, the courts are saying this mandate is illegal. It's unconstitutional. At what point does the Biden administration get the message and give up and move on? Well, I think, you know, so much of the Democratic playbook is about virtue signaling and not always just like having to get the perfect policy in place. And so I think that Biden has done that on a few different issues. You know, he did the eviction moratorium. It said you can't kick people out for not paying rent. And even, you know, know, the White House admitted that that probably was not constitutional. And then, of course,

the Supreme Court later struck it down. But by doing that, Biden got to be the guy who tried to help, you know, people out. And then the mean old Supreme Court stopped him. But we've seen that pattern play out again and again, where he tried to do what he feels like his base wants, knowing that the court won't allow it. But he gets to be the guy who tried. And so that happened with the viction moratoriumium. I think it's happening now with student loans. And I think eventually we'll see it play out with these vaccine mandates. But by then, then, you know, people will have given, and Biden's base will have given him credit for it. And it will have intimidated many people into getting the vaccine, which I think was the goal of these mandates in the first place.

Right. All right. I want to move on to another story here, Casey. Probably not the most important news story of the week, but it is one of my favorite news stories of the week. President Joe Biden was last night, as a matter of fact, Thursday, all day yesterday, hosted France's president, Macron. And they had a state dinner last night where they flew in 200 lobsters from Maine and Biden got criticism from his own party over it. What's that about? Yeah, this was quite the Ritzie dinner. I mean, he got more criticism.

Again, he was a lot of what people on Twitter call it, quote, unquote, liberal elites. It was kind of a who's who event with the French president, you know, French president, Emmanuel Macron. And like you said, all these lobsters were flown in, 200 lobsters. Now, you might say, oh, what's the big deal? The president, you know, we have to impress world leaders. If they want to eat fancy dinners, I mean, if we can't eat them at the White House, where can we eat them? And I think, you know, fair enough. But the difference here is that one Democrat member of the House is not a Republican, a Democrat in Congress, you know, he raised, I'll say he raised this as an issue on Twitter pointing out.

I'll just read his tweet. He said, if the Biden White House can prioritize purchasing 200 main lobsters for a fancy dinner, Podus should also take time to meet with the Maine Lopsterman. His administration is currently regulating out of business. I think you're pretty familiar with this issue, Dan, so I'll let you speak to it. But what I think is happening here is Biden administration in one hand has backed a lot of policies that made it really tough on, you know, lobstermen in Maine, while at the same time, you know, helping themselves to quite a lot of them when it comes time to impress the elites around the

Yeah, essentially the Biden administration has bowed to pressure from environmental groups who say the U.S. lobster industry, particularly the main lobster industry, poses threats to various wildlife, other wildlife, including Atlantic right whales. And the environmental groups have been pressuring, for example, Whole Foods recently announced that it was going to remove Maine lobsters from its shells. across hundreds of stores across the country. And it's because of pressure from these environmental groups that Biden has placed more regulations. The Biden administration has placed more regulations on the industry. So essentially, Representative Golden is calling Biden out for what he sees as hypocrisy.

Yet you can enjoy 200 lobsters while you're hosting the French president, but many across the country can't because of the strict regulations you put in place on the industry. Yeah, I mean, so Dan, just as a reporter, I'm not really in that lobster for dinner tax bracket, but I love to hear from you, a managing editor, if you've noticed some kind of change in the lobster market. I know you're having that a couple times a week. I wish because I do enjoy lobster, but probably, you see, I don't know that I've had lobster since the pandemic began, not necessarily by choice. I just don't eat it that often.

Just don't eat it. Okay. All right, fair enough. All right. Just caviar for you. Got it. Let's move on. Let's leave it.

Yeah, save that. We've got to keep this appropriate then. It's been more than a year since President Biden withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of war this year. New poll came out that shows that Afghani citizens have suffered significantly. since that troop withdrawal. Tell us about this. Yeah, this is a really kind of sad story.

Of course, August marked the one-year anniversary of the chaotic and deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. I mean, there was a bomb that killed 13 U.S. service members. If you watched the footage of that withdrawal, I mean, it was pretty horrifying. You saw mothers literally just passing babies over the crowd to try to get them to Marines

as if the Marines could somehow help. I mean, women even threw their babies over barbed wire, I mean, this really happened if you listen to the interviews with troops who were there on the ground. The country was falling in a disarray. Billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment was left behind. And the Taliban really filled the void almost immediately as the U.S. left, which I think was really demoralizing for a lot of Americans, a lot of troops, and raise the question of like, what did we accomplish if we were going to leave in that fashion? And Biden, of course, took a lot of flag for it. And if you look at Biden's approval numbers, the Afghanistan withdrawal is when they began to really drop.

I mean, he's had, you know, he's had some recovery and the different things since then, but the steady decline of Biden's approved numbers really started with that withdrawal. So this Gallup survey data, they interviewed a lot of Afghani residents. And what they saw is that, you know, hopelessness and economic woes and really pessimism about the future of the country have only spiked since the U.S. left and all that went down. So of those Afghani surveyed, only 11 percent say that children have the odds. opportunity to learn and grow. 11%. Only 27% say children are treated with respect. They were really negative views by the education system.

Of course, you know, women going to school and getting educated as a big problem with the Taliban there. Now, basically three million young girls were banned from getting secondary education because of the Taliban takeover. When it comes to the economy, 92% say it's difficult or very difficult to get by on their household income. So you've seen a lot of negative statistics. I won't belabor them all. But, you know, this last one here, I'll read the United Nations. About 24.4 million Afghanis are in need of humanitarian assistance. And that's well over half of the population needs humanitarian assistance.

So it's really in shambles. And honestly, I think, you know, we share a lot of the blame for that. Yeah. Well, there's no doubt now more than a year after we withdrew our troops, that there just wasn't a good plan in place for that. and sadly the Afghani people are suffering because of it. Casey, we're almost out of time. Time for one more story because it wouldn't be the American Focus podcast if we didn't talk about inflation.

Everyone's favorite topic. Briefly, new inflation report out this week. Tell us. Yeah, so new inflation report and jobs numbers, inflation rose slightly in October. It was 0.3%. This is according to the PCE, which is a Bureau of Economic. analysis indicator that the Federal Reserve really likes. Of course, food prices and energy prices have been some of the biggest increases. Other things didn't increase as much. We have seen

decreases in a few goods. I'll say that this increase, although it did increase in October, this is a good sign for the economy. It shows, you know, a little bit of inflation increase and it's not too bad. So compared to what we were seeing, you know, nine, months ago, these numbers are encouraging, but I don't think we're out of the woods yet. Agreed. Inflation still infecting households across the U.S., as you've written about. A survey show that many Americans have had to cut back on certain things, are sticking to a generic brand, not going out to eat. That continues, even if inflationary price increases are slowing somewhat. It's good news, certainly, but still a factor. Casey, as always, thank you for your

insight that that's all the time we have this week. A reminder to our listeners, you can find all of the Center Squares podcast at America's Talking.com. Take a look. Please subscribe. There is no cost. This has been the America in Focus podcast for Casey Harper. I'm Dan McAidob. We'll talk to you next week.