What A Day - Take On Amy

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

Yesterday was day two of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, when members of the Senate Judiciary Committee got their first public chance to directly question the nominee. There were a lot of questions, but there weren’t many answers.Safety concerns led Johnson & Johnson to pause a large clinical trial of its COVID vaccine candidate and Eli Lilly to pause trials of their antibody drug. A new study found a person in Nevada was infected twice with COVID within a period of six weeks, which is the first confirmed case of reinfection in the US. And in headlines: the Supreme Court rules to halt the census, Trump vs. Fauci, and a tourist in Peru waits 7 months to visit Machu Picchu.

It's Wednesday, October 14th. I'm Gideon Resnick. And I'm Erin Ryan, filling in for Akilah Hughes. And this is What A Day, where we are following Mitt Romney's advice and making today's podcast kind, good-natured, and civil. Mitt Romney angrily whispers into an empty jar of mayonnaise, be nice, America, and then throws it into his closet. You know, I thought I was the only person who saw that on his Instagram live, but I'm really glad somebody else did.

On today's show, trials for a COVID vaccine and an antibody treatment get paused, then some headlines. But first, the latest. Yesterday was day two of the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings when members of the Senate Judiciary Committee got their first public chance to directly question the nominee. Each senator got 30 minutes. So Erin, can you give us a rundown of what happened? So Tuesday's hearing involved much less yelling about beer than Brett Kavanaugh's, but it was still disturbing for its

own uniquely horrible reasons. Because while there were a lot of questions, there weren't many answers as Coney Barrett spent the whole hearing dodging seemingly straightforward asks about simple issues. But before we get to that, I want to take a moment to appreciate this little nugget from Utah Republican Mike Lee, who, as far as I can tell, is not being ironic. A purpose of government is to protect life. That's what it's about. Oh boy, just to refresh. Mike Lee, who was not wearing a mask as he screamed about life, was recently infected and could still be infected with COVID-19, which he probably caught at the Amy Coney Barrett

nomination ceremony-turned-super-spreading event in the Rose Garden. He's also a staunch defender of a president whose lax response to a preventable but deadly disease has led to the deaths of over 215,000 Americans, a president who himself contracted the disease despite taking no precautions and was subsequently treated with an experimental therapy developed using fetal tissue, which is something Mike Lee called, quote, unethical and counterproductive back in April before President Trump needed it to not die of COVID. Fetal tissue research, by the way, is also something a staunchly anti-abortion judge who believes that life begins at conception, like, say, Amy Coney Barrett would also probably oppose. My head is doing the mind-blown gif right now, and I'm picking up my little brain pieces off

the floor. But back to the idea of non-answers from Amy Coney Barrett, let's explain that a little bit more here. So by that, I mean that Amy Coney Barrett would refuse to answer very simple questions, which didn't make her seem stoic and above politics. It just made her seem kind of evasive. She was also picky about which Supreme Court precedents she'd adhere to. Here's one of the Democrats' stronger moments of the day from Senator Amy Klobuchar. You wrote in your 2013 Texas Law Review article that you tend to agree with the view that when a justice's best understanding of the Constitution conflicts with Supreme Court precedent or case law, it is, quote, more legitimate for her to follow her preferred view rather than apply the precedent.

And I want to run through a few examples. So Brown v. Board of Education, as we know, that holds that the 14th Amendment prohibits states from segregating schools on the basis of race. So is that precedent? That can't be overruled? Well, that is precedent. And as I think I said in that same article, it's super precedent. People consider it to be on that very small list of things that are so widely established and agreed upon by everyone. Calls for its overruling simply don't exist. Moments later, when Klobuchar asked Coney Barrett if Roe v. Wade was also super precedent, meaning it should not be overturned by the Supreme Court if challenged,

Coney Barrett asked Klobuchar to define a term Coney Barrett had used in her article for her. Here's how that went. Is Roe a super precedent? How would you define super precedent? I actually, I might have thought someday I'd be sitting in that chair. I'm not. I'm up here, so I'm asking you. Well, people use super precedent differently. Okay.

The way that it's used in the scholarship and the way that I was using it in the article that you're reading from was to define cases that are so well settled that no political actors and no people seriously push for their overruling. And I'm answering a lot of questions about Roe, which I think indicates that Roe doesn't fall in that category. And scholars across the spectrum say that doesn't mean that Roe should be overruled. But descriptively, it does mean that it's not a case that everyone has accepted and doesn't call for its overruling. Wow. So here, Barrett is saying that Roe is not settled because she's getting questions about it during her hearing. Coney Barrett has invoked what she actually calls the Ginsburg rule, which she claims dictates judicial nominees don't go into their views about anything. Nevermind the fact that Ginsburg herself didn't follow that rule

and stated during her confirmation hearing in 1993 that the law supported a woman's right to choose. Whatever. Facts don't matter to these people. Luckily, Klobuchar didn't let up. She also asked the nominee if it was illegal to intimidate voters at the polls, and when Coney Barrett refused to answer, Klobuchar read her the federal law that makes voter intimidation illegal. Yeah, this whole Amy versus Amy showdown did not disappoint throughout the day. And we should say that it's somewhat normal for judges in this process not to weigh in on the cases or issues they might encounter on the court, but Barrett took that really far in the hearings. What other simple questions did she

avoid here? Gideon, a lot. There's this from ranking member Senator Dianne Feinstein. Does the Constitution give the President of the United States the authority to unilaterally delay a general election under any circumstances? Does federal law? Well, Senator, if that question ever came before me, I would need to hear arguments from the litigants and read briefs and consult with my law clerks and talk to my colleagues and go through the opinion writing process. But it's in the Constitution. The president can't move the election. Only Congress can move it. Oh, it gets worse.

When Senator Cory Booker asked if presidents should commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Coney Barrett refused to answer. She also deflected when asked whether LGBTQ Americans deserve the right to marry, whether she'd recuse herself from an election dispute, or whether she believes that in vitro fertilization is manslaughter, which is actually a thing that a lot of pro-life people believe. Man. Okay. So while she was evading Democrats' questions, did we learn anything from the questions from Republicans here? We learned that Republicans aren't interested in asking many questions of substance because,

like we discussed yesterday, Coney Barrett could armpit fart her way through the hearing and Republicans would still waver through. Ted Cruz, for example, spent almost all of his time prattling on about how Citizens United is good and taking guns away is bad. And then he wrapped it up like this. Judge Barrett, do you speak any foreign languages? Once upon a time, I could speak French, but I have fallen woefully out of practice, so please don't ask me to do that right now.

You can be assured of that, because I had two years of high school French, and I suspect yours remains much better than mine. How about music? Do you play any instruments? The piano. Do you? How long have you played the piano? Well, I played the piano growing up for 10 years. What? What the fuck? The other Texas Senator John Cornyn used his time to marvel at the fact that Amy Cooney Barrett's notebook was blank. Seriously, that was his whole point. I do have to respect the logic, though, of having no notes if your plan is to not really say much of anything. She'll probably need that notebook of nothing to not answer even

more questions today as Republicans' half-assed democracy cosplay drags on. So a frustrating day for sure on the whole, and we'll talk more about what options Democrats have as this process goes on. Moving on to another ongoing nightmare, the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers and scientists have been moving at lightning speed to develop treatments and ultimately a vaccine that can start the process of returning life to some semblance of normal. But as these trials progress, there are sometimes pauses due to safety concerns. We saw that happen again in the past day or two. So Gideon, what's the latest there?

Right, so first on Monday, Johnson & Johnson had to pause a large clinical trial of its COVID vaccine candidate due to a quote, unexplained illness in one of the volunteers. That news was first reported by the website Stat, and it wasn't clear whether the individual received the placebo in the trial or the experimental vaccine.

There are dozens of companies in a race to have the first viable vaccine out the door, but Johnson & Johnson was comparatively behind in the process. Though the company is working on a vaccine that does not need to be frozen, which can make distribution and storage easier, it only requires one dose and not two, and they were hoping to be the biggest trial with 60,000 participants. It's not the first vaccine trial, though, to have to pause due to safety issues. AstraZeneca had to suspend trials twice after two participants became seriously ill, and those trials have not resumed in the U.S. yet. Experts consistently say that these pauses are good, showing that the companies are investigating what went wrong and how to fix it, and that they are somewhat expected, especially when you're working on something that is going to be for extremely broad use. Yeah, Gideon, on one hand, it's good that they're actually taking into consideration the fact that sometimes these things are unsafe in early trials,

but this also speaks to the fact that this process can't be rushed or conveniently wrapped up before some arbitrary date like, I don't know, November 3rd. Right. Just any arbitrary date like that. Yeah. So that's vaccines. But on the COVID treatment front, a similar pause was put in place for an antibody drug being developed by the company Eli Lilly, according to reports yesterday. The trial was paused because of a, quote, potential safety concern, and that trial reportedly was testing the company's antibody therapy on hundreds of patients hospitalized with COVID-19, and the enrollment process was sponsored

by parts of the National Institutes of Health. According to the New York Times, the news broke after there were a number of officials who cautioned against adding more participants to the trial on Tuesday, so that is two separate trials that we learned were put on hold in just two days. And this Eli Lilly drug, it's an antibody treatment,

the kind of treatment the president has been touting as a cure and saying will be freely available soon. You bet it is. He had the antibody therapy from Regeneron, a different company, which I guess combined with steroid treatments led him to talk about kissing people

in the crowd of a rally this week and doing a strange shimmy to YMCA by the village people. Very strong David Lynch, like season one Twin Peaks vibes in that, by the way. 100%. He's in the red room and he's having the time of his life. Black Lodge. Yes, the Eli Lilly treatment effectively does the same thing as the Regeneron one, using monoclonal antibodies to fight the virus. And after Trump got the treatment, both companies applied for emergency use from the FDA, with Lilly seeking it for mild to moderate cases as opposed to the trial, which focused on hospitalized patients.

So there have been promising results for both treatments so far in trials, but this pause would help figure out if there are major issues or side effects with the treatment for other folks. On the other point about how widespread these treatments could be, if found safe and effective, Regeneron has said that at the moment it only has enough supply to treat 50,000 patients and hopes to be able to get up to 300,000 in the next few months. To put this into a sense of scale here, right now there are an estimated 36,000 patients currently hospitalized with COVID. Also, in real world examples that counter Trump claims, he's been saying that he's immune now that he's had the virus. But just this week, we got information on another person who's been reinfected. Yeah, so this story came out almost exactly at the same time as Trump was saying that

he was immune to a rally audience in Florida. Sometimes it works that way. There was a case study published in the medical journal The Lancet on Monday that found that a 25-year-old patient in Nevada was infected twice with COVID six weeks apart. It is believed to be the first confirmed instance of a reinfection in the U.S. and the fifth worldwide. The study's authors also claimed that the second infection was more severe and the individual ended up being hospitalized. So experts say it's hard to know how often this sort of reinfection can occur, because according to NPR, you need to have the nasal swabs from both positive tests to compare the virus strains to see that they are in fact different and not just a continuous infection of the same strain. There are a lot of other outstanding questions about

this. Does the amount of the virus exposure play a role? How strong was the immune response the first time, etc.? While we don't know all the answers, the reinfection case is a reminder to keep practicing good public health measures. We'll keep track of all of that, but that Squad, and for today's temp check, we are doing one of our classic astrology check-ins. So Mercury is in retrograde right now, which means it seems to be moving backwards across the sky, and it can lead to communication breakdowns, technology working badly, and other bad things if you choose to subscribe to this belief. Anyway, this Mercury retrograde is interesting because it ends on

Election Day, November 3rd. I personally am just hoping all the planets just be chill and take it easy. So, Erin, horoscopes aside, are there things about the election that make you superstitious? Well, Gideon, I try not to be like a superstitious person, but I keep thinking back to 2016 and I bought tickets for my mother and I to see the opera at the Metropolitan Opera at the Opera La Boheme. And it was going to be like my Christmas present to her from like the previous year. And I deliberately had like our tickets the weekend after the election because I thought it would be like me and my mom celebrating together. The fact that there was a woman president didn't work out that way. Less festive than I thought. I think we ended up getting like blackout drunk on champagne at my apartment before we even went. And it was still a great production.

But I'm just not making any celebratory plans. And I'm not going to plan on anything feeling like a release until I actually until it's in the bag. You know, how about you? What's the same same question for you? I wouldn't call it superstition as much as like, why would I bother to predict life when I can't when you know when we had the year that we had it just seems it seems like a fool's errand now I am very confident in some of the like statistical stuff when I read it and even when I talk about it of course but then getting to a point of of feeling like um you know that moment is over and it and it's now time to like live in a world where we know that the election is over feels like a fool's errand to be doing until it's done. Until like three weeks afterwards where we have the opportunity to do Zoom Thanksgivings and argue about, you know, naked ballots with

one of our uncles. Just like that. We have checked our temps. We hope that they are not going to be in retrograde forever. Stay safe. We'll be back with some headlines. Headlines. Getting away from the bad future of the Supreme Court and back to its bad present. The court ruled yesterday that the Trump administration could shut down the 2020 census count ahead of schedule. Thank you. vulnerable communities before the original deadline. Trump's administration pushed back against this ruling, arguing that the count needs to be done ASAP so they could have a final count of the country's population by the end of the year. Yesterday's ruling halted that count. In her dissent, your new RBG, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote that she feared shortening the timeline would produce inaccurate results. I think that fear seems right.

The election is right around the corner, which for conservatives means it's crunch time for voter suppression. In Texas, a federal appeals court upheld a directive from Governor Greg Abbott late Monday night, which says the state can block counties from providing more than one ballot box. So to put this into perspective, Harris County had intended to install 12 ballot boxes for their more than 2 million voters, who are mostly Black and Latinx. Now they will only have one. Then in Virginia, the state's online voter registration system was shut down for six hours yesterday, which was the last day people could register.

This happened after a construction project accidentally cut what was arguably the most important fiber optic cable in the state yesterday. I'm not going to say which cable it is because I don't want anybody to mess with it. The site later came back online. The Democrats, voting advocates and Governor Ralph Northam called for an extension for the deadline to register. OK, Gideon, the story of the Virginia cable being cut is the most ridiculous Looney Tunes slapstick thing I've ever heard.

Like I'm picturing some like worker in a ditch with a mallet, an Acme mallet, severing a tether to democracy for people. It is, I did not expect the death of democracy to be so silly. I think that's how we should go, though, you know, if we have to go one way. Yeah, I guess. We can play some classical piano music to accompany it so it's fun okay uh trump is now fighting the pandemic by fighting with the guy who actually understands it dr anthony fauci he and dr fauci haven't always

seen eye to eye with fauci's eye focused on science and trump's eye dripping with hydroxychloroquine that is so gross I'm so grossed out that I had to read those words. But the last few days have been particularly bad for their relationship. It all started when Trump aired a campaign ad that made it look like Dr. Fauci endorsed him. That led the nation's top infectious disease expert to go on a news circuit tear, dropping bombs like this one on CNN on Monday. It's so clear that I'm not a political person, and I have never either directly or indirectly endorsed a political candidate. And to take a completely out-of-context statement and put it in,

which is obviously a political campaign ad, I thought was really very disappointing. Side note, Dr. Anthony Fauci should be the one teaching American children to talk because that accent rules. These are harsh words. They sound more like the Dr. Fauci I used to know who was a streetwise kid in Brooklyn called Tony the Voice. Tony. Tony the Voice. Anyway, Trump responded yesterday with a tweet making fun of how Fauci, who is 79, threw the first pitch at a baseball game. By the way, Donald Trump doesn't get invited to throw pitches at baseball games.

Dr. Fauci has described Trump's choice to air the ads without his permission as harassment. But he says he will not leave his position no matter how bad it gets. Like we say around here, mess with the Fauci, you get the ouchie. Lockdown has taught us all a lot about ourselves. In one case, it taught a tourist from Japan that he was absolutely obsessed with Machu Picchu. Jesse Katayama was in Peru and prepared to visit the famous 15th century Inca citadel in March, but his plans changed when the pandemic led Peru to close all tourism sites. Most casual fans of Machu Picchu would have taken the L and hopped on the first emergency flight out of the country.

But Katayama took the road less traveled staying in Peru for a full seven months until the government took note of his commitment and let him be the first tourist to visit Machu Picchu since lockdown began. The term I want to use here is Peacher's pet, but I say that with no judgment and deep regret. And frankly, we'd all be lucky to have someone in our lives who cares as much about us as this man cares about ruins on a beautiful mountain. Apart from a few guides, Katayama got to be alone on Machu Picchu, which is rad. And those are the headlines. That's all for today.

If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, protect your town's cables for Christ's sake, and tell your friends to listen. And if you are into reading and not just horoscopes like me, that's rude. That is rude writing. What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Erin Ryan. I'm Gideon Resnick.

And stay gold, Tony the Voice. Tony, what's the matter with you? That's somebody who was getting mad at Tony when he was young. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein and our executive producers are Katie Long, Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.