Michigan Rep. Justin Amash is really taking this whole Independence Day thing to heart. The congressman announced in a Washington Post op-ed Thursday that he is leaving the GOP to become an independent.
"Today, I am declaring my independence and leaving the Republican Party," Amash, a libertarian, wrote in a column that denounces the two-party system as an "existential threat to American principles and institutions." He said party loyalty has eclipsed Congress' true purpose of serving the American people, and called upon readers to "join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us."
Amash's departure from the GOP was "nearly a decade in the making," says HuffPost's Matt Fuller. Indeed, Amash has been at odds with the party for some time. He remains the only congressional Republican to call for President Trump's impeachment following the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report detailing Trump's possible obstruction of justice. He has frequently joined Democrats in various votes against Trump's initiatives, like the border wall. In June, he resigned from the House Freedom Caucus that he co-founded in 2015 and faces a formal censure from that body.
Recently, CNN dubbed Amash "the loneliest member of Congress," and Amash himself told Vox that "a lot of the people who once stood with me are no longer there."
So, what does his departure mean? As Reason notes, Amash was facing a tough upcoming primary challenge for Michigan's third congressional district. His new affiliation means he can try to run for re-election as an independent. But there's also lingering speculation that he could launch a 2020 challenge against Trump. Unless or until he rules this out, Reason writes, the coming months "will be a festival of guessing, gamesmanship, and gossip." Oh, goodie. Jessica Hullinger
Reopening schools doesn't seem to be a major contributor to coronavirus community spread, data from random testing in the U.S. and Britain reveals. That's especially true of elementary schools, the data shows.
Children, even young ones, can and have been infected with COVID-19 and can transmit the virus to adults. But even as coronavirus surges once again across the U.S. and Britain, random testing data shows young children aren't the ones causing coronavirus spikes, experts who've seen the data say. "The more and more data that I see, the more comfortable I am that children are not, in fact, driving transmission, especially in school settings,” Brooke Nichols, an infectious disease modeler at the Boston University School of Public Health, told The New York Times.
The risks among children in middle and high schools are less clear, experts acknowledge. But they believe "these schools may be able to contain the coronavirus, provided the community prevalence is low and the schools take abundant precautions," the Times reports. It all led Dr. David Rubin, a pediatrician and infectious disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania, to conclude it's worth at least reopening elementary schools in lower-risk areas. "I think there’s a pretty good base of evidence now that schools can open safely in the presence of strong safety plans, and even at higher levels of case incidence than we had suspected,” he said. Kathryn Krawczyk
Developers will start rolling out their COVID-19 vaccines in the coming months, leaving U.S. health officials to test their long-term safety. But that won't be easy, especially given that the Trump administration quietly shut down the office responsible for ensuring the safety of vaccines last year, The New York Times reports.
Before the late 1980s, vaccine safety relied on parents, doctors, vaccine makers, and hospitals to step forward and report symptoms they feared were connected to a vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention then worked out a new system that sought out clusters of symptoms among people who receive a vaccine, and expanded that oversight during the H1N1 epidemic of 2009. This system helped the U.S. figure out which symptoms actually popped up long after a vaccine was injected, and which were just coincidental.
But in 2019, the National Vaccine Program Office was shut down in an effort to cut costs and "eliminate program redundancies," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar wrote at the time. The shortsightedness of that shutdown has come into clear view amid the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who who was assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS during the 2009 pandemic. FDA and CDC staffers have reportedly been meeting up on their own time to cobble some safety projects together. "There's no sort of active coordination to bring all the information together," Lurie told the Times.
Other vaccine experts and political scientists have their own concerns: foreign disinformation campaigns, a lack of transparency, proper communications to clear up health issues unrelated to vaccines, to name a few. A coordinated vaccine office would be tasked with handling all of that. Read more at The New York Times. Kathryn Krawczyk
A far-right extremist has been accused of opening fire on Minneapolis' third police precinct and sparking violence during May's George Floyd protests.
Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old from Texas, was charged Friday with one count of interstate travel to participate in a riot. An admitted member of the "Boogaloo Bois," Hunter opened fire on the precinct and later looted it and helped set it on fire, the FBI said in a sworn affidavit released Friday.
The Minneapolis police's third precinct was just a block from where Floyd was killed, and became the center of protests against police violence that devolved into the destruction of the precinct and buildings around it. Hunter is one of several far-right extremists accused of intentionally ramping up that violence. Armed with a mask and tactical gear, Hunter fired 13 rounds at the precinct while officers were inside and ran away shouting "Justice for Floyd," the FBI alleges. He later bragged about "help[ing] the community burn down that police station" on Facebook.
Hunter admitted he was member of the Boogaloo movement, a collection of far-right, anti-government extremists intent on sparking a second civil war. He was in contact with other self-described Boogaloo Bois who arranged a trip to Minneapolis. He also texted with Steven Carrillo, another Boogaloo member who later shot and killed a sheriff's deputy in California. Kathryn Krawczyk