A rising star has fallen. New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose daily news briefing on the coronavirus has made him popular with people of all persuasions in New York State as well as elsewhere, will never live down his ridiculously stupid comments made April 20, 2020 about COVID-19 and nursing homes.
When asked whether elderly patients are brought back to their nursing home residences after being tested positive for the virus, Gov. Cuomo said to all media "I don't know" (See video)
It seems that Cuomo did not look into this disaster. And his Health Commissioner Howard Zucker didn't either, as you can see from his comment in the same news briefing. This is truly outrageous. Howard Zucker should be fired immediately, and Andrew - well, it did not take long for your true colors to show, did it?.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo revealed he was unaware of a state policy that permits nursing home residents to be readmitted to their institutions, even after testing positive for coronavirus.
Governor Cuomo said, 'That's a good question, I don't know,' when asked about New York state's policy on admitting or readmitting people to nursing homes who had tested positive for the virus.
The question was redirected to New York health commissioner Howard Zucker who appeared to defend the policy, saying positive-testing people 'should be admitted back'.
The startling revelation comes after the state disclosed last week at least 3,316 people in nursing and adult care facilities died with the virus while at their residences or in hospital.
Ron Kim
Assemblyman Ron Kim, representative of the 40th District, Queens, said nursing home workers and their residents lacked adequate protective equipment, including masks, when the pandemic hit.
US authorities have mandated nursing homes inform residents, their families and the federal government about cases of the virus. Under the policy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will collate the information.
Governor Cuomo was probed about New York state's attitude to allowing those who had tested positive for coronavirus to enter or re-enter nursing homes, during a daily press briefing, in Albany, on Monday.
He appeared unsure in repeating the question back to the reporter: 'If you are tested positive for the virus, are you allowed to be admitted to a nursing home, is the question?'
'Or readmitted,' the reporter said.
'Or readmitted? That's a good question, I don't know,' replied Governor Cuomo.
He turned to New York health commissioner Howard Zucker for clarification, who said: 'I think the policy is that if you are positive, you should be admitted back to a nursing home.'
'The necessary precautions will be taken to protect the other residents there,' Zucker said while clearing his throat.
Neither men seemed 100% certain of the policy.
This came after the New York Health Department revealed on Friday a troubling tally of elderly people dying in a number of facilities across the state.
It estimated some 3,316 people in nursing homes had died of COVID-19, with 2,056 deaths in New York City.
A Cobble Hill resident prepped for hospital, about to be loaded into an ambulance by medical staff
However, experts have suggested the tally is 'likely an undercount,' according to the New York Post.
Statistics out on Monday raised that figure to 3,448 as of Sunday, with 2,105 in the city.
Cobble Hill Health Center in Brownstone Brooklyn revealed 55 patients died during the pandemic — the highest toll in New York state.
In The Bronx, 45 people passed at the Kings Harbor Multicare Center.
Another 44 died at both the Franklin Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Queens and the Carmel Richmond facility on Staten Island, according to the NY Post report.
Records also show 40 people at the Holliswood Center for Rehabilitation, in Queens, have died.
And 35 perished at the Plaza Rehab and Nursing Center in The Bronx, while 34 passed at the Bensonhurst Center for Rehabilitation, in Brooklyn, the report also says.
The partial report only includes 72 homes across New York state that reported more than five fatalities. Of those, 42 reported at least 10 dead.
There are over 600 nursing homes in the state of New York.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo revealed he was unaware of a state policy that permits nursing home residents to be readmitted to their institutions, even after testing positive for coronavirus.
Governor Cuomo said, 'That's a good question, I don't know,' when asked about New York state's policy on admitting or readmitting people to nursing homes who had tested positive for the virus.
The question was redirected to New York health commissioner Howard Zucker who appeared to defend the policy, saying positive-testing people 'should be admitted back'.
The startling revelation comes after the state disclosed last week at least 3,316 people in nursing and adult care facilities died with the virus while at their residences or in hospital.
Assemblyman Ron Kim, representative of the 40th District, Queens, said nursing home workers and their residents lacked adequate protective equipment, including masks, when the pandemic hit.
US authorities have mandated nursing homes inform residents, their families and the federal government about cases of the virus. Under the policy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will collate the information.
Governor Cuomo was probed about New York state's attitude to allowing those who had tested positive for coronavirus to enter or re-enter nursing homes, during a daily press briefing, in Albany, on Monday.
He appeared unsure in repeating the question back to the reporter: 'If you are tested positive for the virus, are you allowed to be admitted to a nursing home, is the question?'
'Or readmitted,' the reporter said.
'Or readmitted? That's a good question, I don't know,' replied Governor Cuomo.
He turned to New York health commissioner Howard Zucker for clarification, who said: 'I think the policy is that if you are positive, you should be admitted back to a nursing home.'
'The necessary precautions will be taken to protect the other residents there,' Zucker said while clearing his throat.
Wisconsin’s Decision to Have an Election This Month Was Unjust, But Was it Also Unconstitutional? Why the Plaintiffs (Rightly) Lost in the Supreme Court
In spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that the Supreme Court’s per curiam opinion two weeks ago in the Wisconsin election case, Republican National Committee (RNC) v. Democratic National Committee (DNC), ran fewer than four pages, the 5-4 ruling has engendered a great deal of commentary and criticism about what the justices did. Namely, on the literal eve of Wisconsin’s April 7 contest, the Court effectively removed and rewrote some parts of the injunctive order that a district court judge had imposed on state election officials just a handful of days earlier. A column by Fellow Verdict columnist Michael Dorf last week highlights a main point of attack (and one shared by other critics): that the Court distorted and misapplied the considerations that govern the kinds of remedies that are appropriate for federal courts to provide, and along the way may also have misinterpreted (if not made up out of whole cloth) Wisconsin state law requirements. All this in order to adhere to what Professor Dorf calls “petty sticklerism”—a “commitment to wooden and heartless interpretation of rules.”
While we appreciate some of the points critics raise (and certainly agree with them that the Supreme Court’s reasoning was not well explained), we have a different take on the matter. Rather than concentrate on whether the district court’s injunctive remedy, and the Supreme Court’s trimming back on it, complied with the principles that ought to inform permissible federal court relief, we focus our attention on whether there was any plausible violation of federal law for the federal courts to redress in the first place. All federal judicial remedies are inappropriate if there is no legal violation to prevent or undo. Our concern is that critics of the RNC case, and (for that matter) the Justices themselves, have put the remedial cart before the substantive-law horse. And after more careful examination of the merits of the plaintiffs’ federal claims in the federal district court in Wisconsin, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the lower court looks correct as to result, even if poorly executed as a matter of judicial craft.
What was the federal claim on which the district court granted the relief in question? (We note here that in this setting only claims based on federal law provide a basis for suing in federal court; misconstruction or misapplication of state election law, unless that misapplication itself constitutes a federal law violation, is generally none of the business of federal courts, even if federal judges technically may have “supplemental” jurisdiction over some state law claims; in the Wisconsin case, plaintiffs pressed only federal causes of action.) In brief, the plaintiffs asserted their federal constitutional rights to vote were being violated because they didn’t have time to obtain and return their absentee ballots early enough for those ballots to be tallied and counted under Wisconsin law (which required that all ballots, whether cast in person or returned by mail, be received by the end of the day on Election Day), and because the plaintiffs couldn’t easily vote in person on Election Day itself on account of the health risk presented by the coronavirus pandemic.
As the district court put it: “[E]ven the most diligent voter may be unable to return his or her ballot in time to be counted. Wisconsin clerks are facing a record number of absentee ballot requests [because of the COVID-19 pandemic], and despite diligent efforts, as of [five days before the election], they [were] still working on sending out a backlog of [several thousand] absentee ballot applications. [As a result] ‘[t]here is no practical way that a person [timely] submitting a request for an absentee ballot . . . [would] have the time to receive, vote and return their ballot by Election Day.’” And as to the possibility of simply voting in person on Election Day, it goes without saying that being out in public presents some individual and public health risk even if election officials work hard—as they did in Wisconsin—to respect and enforce social-distance guidelines.
Applying a very open-ended balancing test that the Supreme Court has used in some but not all cases alleging violations of the federal constitutional right to vote, the district court found the “burden placed on absentee voters” in their efforts to have their preferences taken into account to be “severe,” and the state’s interest in enforcing its requirement that all ballots be received by the end of the day on Election Day insufficient to justify this extreme burden voters faced: “The state’s general interest in the absentee receipt deadline is not so compelling as to overcome the burden faced by voters who, through no fault of their own, will be disenfranchised by the enforcement of the law.” Accordingly, the district court found the plaintiffs would likely succeed on their claim of violation of the fundamental constitutional right to vote, and the judge ordered (among other things) that Wisconsin allow people to submit (and have counted) absentee ballots after Election Day. To prevent people from casting ballots after they already knew the provisional results on Election Day itself, the district court enjoined also state officials from releasing election-tally results for several extra days after Election Day night, during which period absentee ballots could be cast. Yet the plaintiffs did not get everything they sought. In particular, even though the district court also agreed that the plaintiffs had demonstrated a likelihood of success on their related claim that (in light of the impact of COVID-19) holding the in-person election as scheduled would also violate the rights of voters, the judge, citing the state’s interests in an orderly electoral process, the risk of voter confusion, and principles of federalism, declined to issue a remedy requiring the state to postpone the election entirely.
The Supreme Court overturned part of the district court order, and in effect freed the state from having to count absentee ballots that were submitted (either by postmark or by in-person dropoff) after Election Day. Before the justices, much of the fight seemed to be over whether the district court had violated the so-called Purcell principle (from a case of the same name), that “lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” Professor Dorf (along with the dissenting justices at the Court) argues that the principle doesn’t (and can’t) apply just to lower federal courts, and that the Supreme Court majority was itself violating the principle by overturning (parts of) the district court’s order precisely on the day before Election Day.
Our view is that Purcell may overstate the appropriate limitations on federal courts. Where there is a strong and imminent likelihood of a federal violation (constitutional or statutory), a federal court should frequently be empowered to prevent it. (Indeed, fashioning after-the-fact remedies is often more problematic than enjoining violations beforehand.) And, arguably, the Purcell considerations should apply, albeit in a narrower manner, to the Supreme Court in addition to lower federal courts. Nonetheless, if a federal district judge wrongly enjoins an imminent state election, the Supreme Court cannot be powerless to undo that mistake merely because the Supreme Court’s correction (necessarily) occurs even closer in time to the contest. Surely it can’t be the rule that the Court cannot fix a Purcell error because doing so violates Purcell; if so, then lower courts could ignore Purcell with impunity.
But we want to set aside Purcell, and its emphasis on remedial latitude, to examine a much more fundamental question: was there, to use the language we do above, “a strong and imminent likelihood of a federal violation (constitutional or statutory)” for the district judge in Wisconsin to provide any remedy concerning absentee voters? If the answer to that question is “no,” then the Supreme Court’s ruling was correct. This is true regardless of whether (as critics of the Court’s ruling point out) not all the defendants appealed the district court’s ruling and not all aspects of the district court’s order were challenged on appeal. Parties need not challenge on appeal everything a lower court has done but are free to focus on what they consider the most objectionable part(s) of a ruling. Here, then, the RNC’s choice to focus its case in the Supreme Court on the district court’s extension of time to cast absentee ballots did not prevent the RNC from arguing, as its more general basis for reversal by the Court, that the district court lacked power to provide any judicial remedy at all because there was, on the merits, no imminent federal rights violation.
It is remarkable how little attention the district court devoted to the merits of the claim concerning the asserted difficulties of the absentee voters. The court spent only a little more (or less, depending on how you count) than one page of its opinion explaining why the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their constitutional challenge in this respect. The district court’s legal discussion consisted basically of its citation to two Supreme Court cases laying out a general test of burden-on-voter vs. justification-by-state, and then one district court case (which is obviously not binding) from another state affording relief in arguably similar circumstances. However, the two cases from the Supreme Court involved not election administration but ballot access by candidates, and so are not particularly relevant to evaluating the challenge brought against the Wisconsin election rules. Indeed, more generally, the cases in which the Court has over the decades rigorously demanded substantial state justifications and careful tailoring in the voting arena involve primarily (perhaps almost exclusively) rules that: (1) concern requirements for voter or candidate eligibility; (2) weigh ballots that are cast unequally; (3) reflect intentional or practical discrimination on account of race; or (4) implicate congressional statutes prescribing particular requirements for elections of federal officials.
The Wisconsin dispute involved none of these issues but instead centered on the mechanics of how a state administers its elections on the ground. (Notably, the Wisconsin election this month was devoted almost entirely to issues of state government, including, importantly, who should serve on the state’s Supreme Court and its appellate courts. To be sure, there was a presidential primary, but under Article II of the Constitution states don’t even have to hold elections to pick presidential electors, just as they don’t have to hold elections for state judges. And while there was in parts of the state one congressional primary – and states do have an obligation to hold elections for members of Congress – there was no claim that it ran afoul of any federal election laws regulating congressional contests.)
The U.S. Supreme Court case in recent times that focuses most squarely on the logistics and administration of state elections is Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. That case involved an unsuccessful challenge in 2008 to Indiana’s requirement that voters demonstrate their identity to vote. In rejecting the challengers’ claims, six justices (including Justice Stevens) agreed that, at the very least, “even-handed restrictions” promoting the “integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself” satisfy constitutional standards.
Wisconsin’s own requirement that ballots be received (and its corollary implicit requirement that they be cast) by Election Day is certainly “even-handed.” And no one could easily deny that the goals of securing election results as soon as possible and avoiding unnecessary risk that some people might vote after knowing provisional election results go to the “integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself.”
The district court spent no time analyzing Marion County, or indeed even trying to figure out which category of voting cases from within the Supreme Court’s voting rights jurisprudence was the most appropriate from which to draw guidance. Instead the court simply laid out an unguided balancing test from cases involving voter qualifications and ballot access and determined that Wisconsin could ignore its state-law requirements without losing too much. To repeat the court’s language: “The state’s general interest in the absentee receipt deadline is not so compelling as to overcome the burden faced by voters who, through no fault of their own, will be disenfranchised by the enforcement of the law.”
The district court also failed to analyze carefully what its reasoning would mean for state election law generally. For example, what if a state simply chose not to provide for absentee ballots? As far as we know, the Supreme Court has never suggested that voters must have the option of casting their ballots by mail. If the Constitution imposed such a requirement then wouldn’t the procedures of “caucus” states, where people must attend and participate in person to have their input counted, be problematic? And putting aside the caucus device, if a state decided not to permit absentee (or any other mail-in) ballots (except perhaps as required by federal statute) and instead required in-person voting for all, wouldn’t enforcement of its law also “disenfranchise” many people who for whatever reason can’t vote in person?
Or consider a “normal” (non-COVID-19) election year in Wisconsin. There are always some people who, “through no fault of their own” (to use the district court’s words) submit a timely request for an absentee ballot but who (because of poor mail delivery or other reasons) don’t get their ballots in time to return them by mail early enough to have them counted but who can’t – say, for family or work reasons –vote in person on Election Day. Have those folks also been unconstitutionally “disenfranchised” by Wisconsin’s rule that ballots be received by Election Day? If the answer is “no” (as it has to be), then why is there an unconstitutional disenfranchisement this year?
The distinction surely can’t be that in a normal year people could have planned better and sought absentee ballots earlier. If anything, the need this year for advance planning should have been even more obvious: by early (and certainly mid-) March, the health benefits of social distancing were plain. The President announced national social-distancing guidelines/recommendations against unnecessary group gatherings (of more than 10 persons) on March 16, and the Wisconsin Governor’s stay-at-home directive (which exempted voting from its restrictions) was itself issued on March 24th. And other states were well ahead of that. But even if a voter requested an absentee ballot on March 25th, there very likely would have been time to receive and return the ballot by mail and have it counted. The Wisconsin election website also advises voters more generally that given possible delays in mail delivery they should request and complete absentee ballots well in advance of the state deadline.
If the distinction this year is simply that more people were likely to be involved, it is well to ask why a few hundred folks being unable to vote is permissible but a few thousand is not—and, more generally, to wonder: where is the line? One individual’s constitutional rights don’t become more or less strong depending on the number of other people asserting a violation. The unusual circumstances this year did (as we suggest below) argue in favor of a legislative rescheduling of the election itself, but whether this year has implicated constitutional rights in a way that other years have not is a very different matter.
Indeed, the district court decision itself would seem to rest on an expectation that, even at the end of its own contemplated process this year, some significant number of voters would still be unfairly prevented from casting a ballot. Recall that the district court’s overarching concern was that some Wisconsin voters who had requested absentee ballots would not receive the ballots in time to return them, in person or by putting them back in the mail, by Election Day. But play this out. On Election Day itself, some voters (not having yet even received their absentee ballots) would have to decide whether to show up at the polls (possibly risking their health) or to wait for the requested ballots to arrive in the ensuing days—and hope that they would come quickly enough so that they could be sent back for counting before the expiration of the extended timeline the district court had prescribed. If the mail were slow (plaintiffs argued that in-state delivery could take several days), no vote could be cast and counted for these unlucky folks. Perhaps the thought is that the district court’s order allowed for more rather than fewer absentee ballots to be cast and tallied than would otherwise be the case, and that this is a better outcome. But again, if the state procedures violated the Constitution and required a remedy, how can some individuals’ rights be ignored because the mail, for them, was particularly slow, even if others were lucky enough to have better postal service?
More generally, consider the essential nature of the plaintiffs’ claims. Wisconsin law’s receipt deadline may be a but-for cause of many voters’ problems, but certainly the proximate cause is the COVID-19 pandemic. Should Wisconsin officials themselves have postponed the election? Of course. It is disgraceful that they didn’t. And plaintiffs are understandably angered by the state’s inaction. But an awful failure to act does not mean Wisconsin’s extant regime is unlawful (at least not under the federal Constitution). In essence, what the plaintiffs objected to was not Wisconsin’s decision to have a ballot-receipt deadline, but Wisconsin’s failure to accommodate voters who had trouble with that deadline in 2020. But there are all kinds of real-world constraints on people’s ability to cast their ballots every year that would benefit from accommodation. Moving Election Day from Tuesday to Saturday would facilitate voter turnout. So would making Election Day a holiday. Or providing day care for would-be voters. Or transportation to the polls. Or moving more generally to a vote-by-mail system. But none of these accommodations (some of which we think might be very good ideas) is, under current doctrine, constitutionally required. What that means is that failing to adopt them isn’t actionable. So why was Wisconsin’s failure to accommodate this month of a different kind, constitutionally speaking?
Election Day deadlines for absentee voting are common. Wisconsin’s rules applied evenly to everyone. Large numbers of Wisconsinites were able to request, receive, and timely return absentee ballots (and Wisconsin election officials had agreed to count ballots up to six days after the election provided the ballots were postmarked by Election Day). That others may have been unable to vote does not mean the state was in violation of the Constitution such that a federal remedy was warranted. In a variety of contexts, the Supreme Court has cautioned against displacing state power to administer orderly elections. In so doing the Court has emphasized the relationship between adherence to settled rules and democracy itself. Representative of the Court’s treatment of election mechanics is the formulation the Court used in 1974 in Storer v. Brown: “[A]s a practical matter,” the Court there said, “there must be a substantial regulation of elections if they are to be fair and honest and if some sort of order, rather than chaos, is to accompany the democratic processes.”
We are not suggesting that the district court (and critics of the Supreme Court’s ruling) might not have comebacks to some of the challenging questions we flag. We are doubtful there are compelling responses, but our primary point today is that we shouldn’t be talking about remedies until we have a better sense of what, precisely, violations of federal law need to be remedied. Absent substantial (and not just minimally non-trivial) federal questions, federal courts ought not to be in this game at all. And there has been thus far very little discussion (by the justices or the commentators) of the merits of the plaintiffs’ federal constitutional assertions in the Wisconsin matter.
That brings us to the observation that federal law is not the only game in town. Perhaps there might have been a remedy of accommodation mandated under Wisconsin state law. But we’ll never know when challengers jump to federal court even when the better recourse is under state law. (The quick resort to federal court is also an answer to the argument that the Supreme Court misinterpreted Wisconsin law’s apparent, categorical preference that no votes be cast after Election Day; if that be a misconstruction of the values embodied in Wisconsin law, it is because plaintiffs forced the Supreme Court to make some, perhaps underinformed, judgments about state law by pressing their claims in federal rather than state court.)
To be sure, state courts are not always fair brokers. But where there is no firm and independent federal constitutional or statutory claim, state court manipulation of its own law would have to be severe to implicate the federal Constitution; only if state law is being distorted by state actors in a way that is patently designed to discriminate invidiously should state law (mis)interpretations give rise to federal constitutional violations. Otherwise, states are free to misread their own law, and are subject to state political remedies. (It bears noting that Democrats won big in Wisconsin’s election two weeks ago). This is the reason both of us objected strenuously to the Supreme Court’s intervention in Bush v. Gore: the Court’s decision in that case represented a contrived conversion of state-law issues into newfangled federal constitutional claims. Call us old-fashioned, but just as we deeply lament Bush v. Gore, we are glad the Court didn’t repeat the same mistake this month; having federal courts stick to substantial federal claims doesn’t strike us as “petty sticklerism.” And that’s true even if it lets stand the shameful decision by the Wisconsin legislature requiring people to needlessly risk their lives to effect change in Wisconsin on Election Day.
by Alexandra Desanctis, National Review April 17, 2020
Overhyping sexual-assault allegations against Kavanaugh but downplaying those against Biden undermines the #MeToo movement’s promise.
In October 2017, reporters publicized the stories of women who claimed to have been sexually harassed and assaulted by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Since then, our country has been in the grips of a reckoning. The outpouring of similar tales in the months following the Weinstein story seemed as if it would never end; every other day we heard about yet another celebrity accused of using his fame to mistreat the women around him.
It was the birth of a movement, #MeToo, which at its worst has been captured by those who insist we must believe every woman who claims to have been assaulted. For centuries, these advocates say, women’s stories have been disbelieved, and now it’s time to tip the balance of power and believe them all, no matter what.
But at its best, the #MeToo movement represented a promise, to men and women alike: Fear and raw power would no longer derail justice. For the first time, women — and, much less frequently, men — who had been abused would have society’s backing to tell their stories publicly and, if they presented enough evidence, to expect that the men responsible would face consequences.
When Christine Blasey Ford came forward in 2018 with the claim that a teenaged Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her, progressives revealed their unwillingness to accept a #MeToo movement that didn’t “believe all women.” Her story deserved investigation, but when all was said and done, it was problematic in several key aspects, among them that Ford couldn’t produce anyone to affirm she and Kavanaugh had ever met, that she had told no one about the alleged assault for decades, and that she later gave conflicting accounts of what she believed had happened.
None of those facts perturbed Kavanaugh’s ideological opponents in the Democratic Party and the media. Armed with a fresh reason to take down a man they were already determined to reject, Senate Democrats put him through the wringer. Their journalistic allies helped them along by doing little to vet Ford’s claims and giving air time to far less credible accounts of his alleged sexual misconduct.
Consider the New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, telling the story of Deborah Ramirez, who claimed that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her at a party when he was a freshman at Yale University. The reporters were unable to find a single eyewitness to confirm that Kavanaugh had been at the party Ramirez described or anyone who had ever heard Ramirez recount this accusation.
One friend of Ramirez’s told The New Yorker, “This is a woman I was best friends with. We shared intimate details of our lives. And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening.”
Farrow and Mayer noted, too, that “in her initial conversations with The New Yorker, [Ramirez] was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty.” In fact, she was willing to go on the record only “after six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney,” at which point “she felt confident enough of her recollections.” Inexplicably, the article was published anyway.
Even worse, media outlets lent credibility to the outlandish tale of Julie Swetnick, who, again without corroboration, alleged that Kavanaugh had “spiked” drinks at parties in high school to facilitate gang rape. Not only did outlets report on this claim despite the lack of evidence, but they purposely withheld evidence that a woman identified by Swetnick as a witness denied ever having witnessed Kavanaugh’s alleged misconduct.
By publicizing accusations that lacked the most basic aspects needed for credibility, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee jettisoned their responsibility to seek the truth and instead used vulnerable women as pawns in an effort to tarnish a political enemy. In doing so, they made it less likely that subsequent women who publicized their credible accusations would be believed.
A year and a half later, Democrats and the media are again undermining the principles of #MeToo, this time by ignoring and downplaying sexual-assault allegations against Joe Biden. While Biden himself has said in the past that we must believe every woman who alleges assault, he has since changed his tune. Now, he and his prominent backers — including one of Kavanaugh’s most vigorous critics, #MeToo celebrity advocate Alyssa Milano — have begun singing the praises of due process.
Meanwhile, reporting on Tara Reade’s accusation against Biden has ranged from nonexistent to shoddy. Almost unbelievably, Biden himself has yet to be asked about the allegation, nor have the many Democratic politicians who have endorsed him.
The New York Times waited 19 days to report on the subject, and, after publishing the piece, later removed a crucial line: “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.” There was no editor’s note explaining the deletion.
Later still, the Times Twitter account deleted its tweet that had included this line, noting that it had been removed because of “imprecise language.” Times executive editor Dean Baquet, in a subsequent interview with the paper’s media columnist, Ben Smith, said, “Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper, I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct.”
Baquet further told Smith that differences between the paper’s reporting on the Biden allegation and on the Kavanaugh allegations were because “Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation.” As Dan McLaughlin has pointed out on NRO, it is clear that the Times is comfortable dissecting its opponents while coddling its allies — and the latter are apparently given editorial control over what the paper publishes.
And it isn’t just the Times. A search for “Tara Reade” on CNN’s website, for instance, returns zero results. Columnists at leading papers have further (inadvertently) exposed the double standard. At the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus wrote a column in October 2018 with the headline, “Does it matter what Kavanaugh did in high school? Well, yes.” She has written an entire book around her conclusion that Ford told the truth about Kavanaugh. Her recent column on the Biden allegation, titled “Assessing Tara Reade’s allegations,” concludes, “My gut says that what Reade alleges did not happen.”
Two columns by Joan Walsh in The Nation are also ripe for contrast. In September 2018, her piece was called “The Heart-Wrenching Trauma of the Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh Hearings,” with the subtitle, “It’s difficult. It hurts. It’s unfair. But women will keep telling our stories.” This time around, her tone has changed from melodrama to nuance: “The Troublesome Tara Reade Story” and “Left- and right-wing Biden haters demand that the media investigate her sexual assault charge. It did — and uncovered many reasons to doubt.”
Michelle Goldberg, columnist at the Times, did much the same thing. Her piece on Reade is called “What to Do With Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden?” and the subheading, “A sexual assault accusation against the presumptive Democratic nominee is being used to troll the #MeToo movement.” Her reflection on Kavanaugh bears the much more provocative title, “Pigs All the Way Down,” with the subtitle, “Kavanaugh and our rotten ruling class.”
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None of this is to say that Reade’s story ought to be believed outright, though she does have one key fact in her favor that Ford did not: She can establish that she personally knew the man she is accusing. But contrasting the coverage of this claim with the coverage Kavanaugh received reveals that far too many in the media care far more about weaponizing sexual-misconduct claims against conservatives than they do about uncovering the truth.
Our feckless media establishment weakens our political process, to be sure, but it also undermines what #MeToo, at its best, stood for: the idea that wronged women could tell their stories and guilty men would be punished. That promise means nothing when a man’s guilt is determined by his political views rather than by the evidence, and when a woman is ignored or derided if she claims to have been the victim of the Democratic Party’s man.
Ms. Reade, a former Senate aide, has accused Mr. Biden of assaulting her in 1993 and says she told others about it. A Biden spokeswoman said the allegation is false, and former Senate office staff members do not recall such an incident.
WASHINGTON — A former Senate aide who last year accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of inappropriate touching has made an allegation of sexual assault against the former vice president, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee this fall.
The former aide, Tara Reade, who briefly worked as a staff assistant in Mr. Biden’s Senate office, told The New York Times that in 1993, Mr. Biden pinned her to a wall in a Senate building, reached under her clothing and penetrated her with his fingers. A friend said that Ms. Reade told her the details of the allegation at the time. Another friend and a brother of Ms. Reade’s said she told them over the years about a traumatic sexual incident involving Mr. Biden.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Biden said the allegation was false. In interviews, several people who worked in the Senate office with Ms. Reade said they did not recall any talk of such an incident or similar behavior by Mr. Biden toward her or any women. Two office interns who worked directly with Ms. Reade said they were unaware of the allegation or any treatment that troubled her.
Last year, Ms. Reade and seven other women came forward to accuse Mr. Biden of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Ms. Reade told The Times then that Mr. Biden had publicly stroked her neck, wrapped his fingers in her hair and touched her in ways that made her uncomfortable.
Soon after Ms. Reade made the new allegation, in a podcast interview released on March 25, The Times began reporting on her account and seeking corroboration through interviews, documents and other sources. The Times interviewed Ms. Reade on multiple days over hours, as well as those she told about Mr. Biden’s behavior and other friends. The Times has also interviewed lawyers who spoke to Ms. Reade about her allegation; nearly two dozen people who worked with Mr. Biden during the early 1990s, including many who worked with Ms. Reade; and the other seven women who criticized Mr. Biden last year, to discuss their experiences with him.
No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.
On Thursday, Ms. Reade filed a report with the Washington, D.C., police, saying she was the victim of a sexual assault in 1993; the public incident report, provided to The Times by Ms. Reade and the police, does not mention Mr. Biden by name, but she said the complaint was about him. Ms. Reade said she filed the report to give herself an additional degree of safety from potential threats. Filing a false police report may be punishable by a fine and imprisonment.
Ms. Reade, who worked as a staff assistant helping manage the office interns, said she also filed a complaint with the Senate in 1993 about Mr. Biden; she said she did not have a copy of it, and such paperwork has not been located. The Biden campaign said it did not have a complaint. The Times reviewed an official copy of her employment history from the Senate that she provided showing she was hired in December 1992 and paid by Mr. Biden’s office until August 1993.
The seven other women who had complained about Mr. Biden told the Times this month that they did not have any new information about their experiences to add, but several said they believed Ms. Reade’s account.
In response to Ms. Reade’s allegation, Kate Bedingfield, a deputy Biden campaign manager, said in a statement: “Vice President Biden has dedicated his public life to changing the culture and the laws around violence against women. He authored and fought for the passage and reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act. He firmly believes that women have a right to be heard — and heard respectfully. Such claims should also be diligently reviewed by an independent press. What is clear about this claim: It is untrue. This absolutely did not happen.”
Ms. Reade made her new allegation public as Mr. Biden was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination after winning a string of primaries against his chief rival, Senator Bernie Sanders. Ms. Reade, who describes herself as a “third-generation Democrat,” said she originally favored Marianne Williamson and Senator Elizabeth Warren in the race but voted for Mr. Sanders in the California primary last month. She said her decision to come forward had nothing to do with politics or helping Mr. Sanders, and said neither his campaign nor the Trump campaign had encouraged her to make her allegation.
President Trump has been accused of sexualassault and misconduct by more than a dozen women, who have described a pattern of behavior that went far beyond the accusations against Mr. Biden. The president also directed illegal payments, including $130,000 to a pornographic film actress, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election to silence women about alleged affairs with Mr. Trump, according to federal prosecutors.
Mr. Trump has even boasted about his mistreatment of women; in a 2005 recording, he described pushing himself on women and said he would “grab them by the pussy,” bragging that he could get away with “anything” because of his celebrity.
Even so, Mr. Trump has at times attacked opponents over their treatment of women. The president has not mentioned Ms. Reade’s allegation, which has circulated on social media and in liberal and conservative news outlets.
Ms. Reade, 56, told The Times that the assault happened in the spring of 1993. She said she had tracked down Mr. Biden to deliver an athletic bag when he pushed her against a cold wall, started kissing her neck and hair and propositioned her. He slid his hand up her cream-colored blouse, she said, and used his knee to part her bare legs before reaching under her skirt.
“It happened at once. He’s talking to me and his hands are everywhere and everything is happening very quickly,” she recalled. “He was kissing me and he said, very low, ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’”
Ms. Reade said she pulled away and Mr. Biden stopped.
“He looked at me kind of almost puzzled or shocked,” she said. “He said, ‘Come on, man, I heard you liked me.’”
At the time, Ms. Reade said she worried whether she had done something wrong to encourage his advances.
“He pointed his finger at me and he just goes: ‘You’re nothing to me. Nothing,’” she said. “Then, he took my shoulders and said, ‘You’re OK, you’re fine.’”
Mr. Biden walked down the hallway, Ms. Reade said, and she cleaned up in a restroom, made her way home and, sobbing, called her mother, who encouraged her to immediately file a police report.
Instead, Ms. Reade said, she complained to Marianne Baker, Mr. Biden’s executive assistant, as well as to two top aides, Dennis Toner and Ted Kaufman, about harassment by Mr. Biden — not mentioning the alleged assault.
The staff declined to take action, Ms. Reade said, after which she filed a written complaint with a Senate personnel office. She said office staff took away most of her duties, including supervising the interns; assigned her a windowless office; and made the work environment uncomfortable for her.
She said Mr. Kaufman later told her she was not a good fit in the office, giving her a month to look for a job. Ms. Reade never secured another position in Washington.
In an interview, Mr. Kaufman, a longtime friend of Mr. Biden’s who was his chief of staff at the time, said: “I did not know her. She did not come to me. If she had, I would have remembered her.”
Mr. Toner, who worked for Mr. Biden for over three decades, said the allegation was out of character for Mr. Biden. Other senators and office staffs had reputations for harassing women at work and partying after hours, according to those who worked in the office at the time. Mr. Biden was known for racing to catch the train to get home to Wilmington, Del., every night.
“It’s just so preposterous that Senator Biden would be faced with these allegations,” said Mr. Toner, who was deputy chief of staff when Ms. Reade worked in the office. “I don’t remember her. I don’t remember this conversation. And I would remember this conversation.”
The Biden campaign issued a statement from Ms. Baker, Mr. Biden’s executive assistant from 1982 to 2000.
“I never once witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate conduct, period — not from Ms. Reade, not from anyone,” she said. “I have absolutely no knowledge or memory of Ms. Reade’s accounting of events, which would have left a searing impression on me as a woman professional, and as a manager.”
Melissa Lefko, a former staff assistant for Mr. Biden from 1992 to 1993, said she did not remember Ms. Reade. But she recalled that Mr. Biden’s office was a “very supportive environment for women” and said she had never experienced any kind of harassment there.
“When you work on the Hill, everyone knows who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and Biden was a good guy,” she said.
Ms. Reade said that she could not remember the exact time, date or location of the assault but that it occurred in a “semiprivate” place in the Senate office complex.
A friend said that Ms. Reade told her about the alleged assault at the time, in 1993. A second friend recalled Ms. Reade telling her in 2008 that Mr. Biden had touched her inappropriately and that she’d had a traumatic experience while working in his office. Both friends agreed to speak to The Times on the condition of anonymity to protect the privacy of their families and their self-owned businesses.
Ms. Reade said she also told her brother, who has confirmed parts of her account publicly but who did not speak to The Times, and her mother, who has since died.
Differing recollections
At the time of the alleged assault, Ms. Reade said she was responsible for coordinating the interns in the office. Two former interns who worked with her said they never heard her describe any inappropriate conduct by Mr. Biden or saw her directly interact with him in any capacity but recalled that she abruptly stopped supervising them in April, before the end of their internship. Others who worked in the office at the time said they remembered Ms. Reade but not any inappropriate behavior.
Friends and former co-workers describe Ms. Reade as friendly, caring, compassionate and trustworthy, though perhaps a bit naïve. A single mother, she changed her name for protection after leaving an abusive marriage in the late 1990s and put herself through law school in Seattle. After leaving Mr. Biden’s office, she eventually returned to the West Coast, where she worked for a state senator; as an advocate for domestic violence survivors, testifying as an expert witness in court; and for animal rescue organizations.
During her time in Mr. Biden’s office, he was working to pass the Violence Against Women Act, which Mr. Biden has described as his “proudest legislative accomplishment.” In 2017, Ms. Reade retweeted praise for Mr. Biden and his work combating sexual assault. In more recent months, her feed has featured support for Mr. Sanders and criticism of Mr. Biden.
Ms. Reade said she did not disclose the sexual assault allegation last year when she spoke out because she was scared. After her initial complaints were reported last year by a local California newspaper, Ms. Reade said she faced a wave of criticism and death threats, as well as accusations that she was a Russian agent because of Medium posts and tweets, several of which are now deleted, she had written praising President Vladimir Putin.
Ms. Reade said that she was not working for Russia and did not support Mr. Putin, and that her comments were pulled out of context from a novel she was writing at the time.
“It was trying to smear me and distract from what happened, but it won’t change the facts of what happened in 1993,” she said.
As it has for thousands of people who have contacted the group, the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which does not represent clients, gave her a list of lawyers with expertise in such cases. She said she contacted every single one but none took her case. Two lawyers confirmed speaking to Ms. Reade but declined to comment on the record about her or the allegation.
SKDKnickerbocker, the political consulting firm where Mr. Biden’s chief strategist, Anita Dunn, works as a managing director, has a contract with the Time’s Up legal defense fund. Ms. Dunn has never worked with the fund and her firm was not told of Ms. Reade’s request, according to officials at the fund.
Ms. Reade also contacted at least one of the women who spoke out along with her last year about Mr. Biden’s penchant for physical contact.
Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state assemblywoman who accused Mr. Biden of making her uncomfortable by kissing and touching her during a 2014 campaign event, exchanged a few emails last year with Ms. Reade but said Ms. Reade did not share her full story.
“Biden is not just a hugger,” Ms. Flores said. “Biden very clearly was invading women’s spaces without their consent in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. Does he potentially have the capacity to go beyond that? That’s the answer everyone is trying to get at.”
