Posted on 10/18/2021 3:04:58 PM PDT by lightman
Some governors have noted President Joe Biden’s lack of engagement with states regarding the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic. His administration continues the practice of weekly conference calls with governors, which started under President Donald Trump, but Biden himself has yet to attend. His vice president, Kamala Harris, has only briefly attended one call and took no questions, according to several governors.
The lack of engagement has disappointed some governors, who said they can’t even tell if their feedback, questions, and requests are reaching the president or not. Some have stopped attending the calls, considering them no longer useful.
The office of one governor praised the calls under the Biden administration for providing clear federal direction.
The calls, hosted by the National Governors Association (NGA), have been a mainstay since early on in the pandemic. During the Trump administration, Vice President Mike Pence was in charge of the anti-pandemic effort and attended most of the calls. Trump joined eight of them. They served as an opportunity to share best practices of fighting the virus from different states, update the administration on the situations and issues in different parts of the country, as well as raise questions and requests directly to the president or vice president.
The calls would sometimes last for hours, with Pence answering questions, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts told The Epoch Times.
Pence “would muster the resources that governors needed” and “got high marks from both Republicans and Democrats about how fairly he treated everybody,” he said.
“It really demonstrated the level of engagement that the Trump administration had with regard to the pandemic that is lacking with the Biden administration.” Epoch Times Photo An Oregon National Guardsman works with hospital staff at an intake station at Three Rivers Asante Medical Center in Grants Pass, Oregon, on Sept. 9, 2021. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
Under Biden, the White House is represented during the calls by Jeffrey Zients, former head of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council and Biden’s coordinator of the anti-pandemic effort.
“In general, these calls often felt more like a chance for the Biden Administration to tell governors about decisions that had already been made, rather than asking for input from governors on major decisions that impact states,” said spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Christina Pushaw.
“Because of this approach from the Biden Administration, these group calls have fallen far short of what they could and should be: a constructive dialogue between governors and the president or vice president.”
DeSantis’s office only participated in some of the calls this year, she told The Epoch Times via email.
“We felt that the dialogue was skewed and unnecessarily politicized, especially with then-Governor Andrew Cuomo serving as NGA Chair through July 2021.”
The former New York governor resigned in disgrace in August after several accusations of improper behavior toward staffers and amid an ongoing scandal over his forcing nursing homes to accept recovering COVID-19 patients early on in the pandemic, which appeared to have exacerbated the high COVID-19 mortality in nursing homes.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A White House official previously told Real Clear Politics that Cuomo was put in charge of the calls because the pandemic response reached a different stage, change was needed, and after feedback from governors.
The administration has medical experts rather than politicians attend the calls, which are “not the sole mechanism” for talking to governors, the official said, also noting that, unlike Pence, Harris is not charged with managing the pandemic response but rather with addressing the “root causes” of the southern border crisis, the official said.
Ricketts pointed out, though, that there is value in addressing White House leaders directly.
“As an executive, I know that it is important for me to hear directly from people, to get a first-hand knowledge,” he said.
With Pence, he said, there was a chance to “solve problems directly, because somebody at the top was taking a personal interest in it.”
That sense has evaporated under Biden, according to some governors.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem quit the calls back in March because they were “a waste of time,” according to her spokesman, Ian Fury.
“By then it had become clear that POTUS and VPOTUS weren’t interested in participating,” he told The Epoch Times via email.
Dissatisfaction with the calls has been, at least to some degree, bipartisan, according to Ricketts.
“These are Republican and Democrat governors. They’re asking questions and seeking answers and sometimes there’s a high-level frustration with the lack of responsiveness from the administration,” he said.
On the other side of the aisle, Mike Faulk, spokesman for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, acknowledged that no “inter-governmental relationship comes without the potential for communications issues,” but expressed preference for the Biden administration’s approach to the calls over those under Trump.
“What states need from these calls is reliable, consistent, and candid information about the direction of the federal government, how that helps states and how we can collaborate as partners,” he told The Epoch Times via email. “We are getting that hand over fist compared to the Trump administration.”
He said Trump joined the calls to “praise himself, demand praise from others, and deride those who were serious about the business of defeating this pandemic.”
Pence was “engaged early in this process at the direction of the president,” but “as the pandemic dragged on, Pence was slow to provide clarity on the government’s direction and was increasingly absent from these calls,” he said.
According to Pushaw, Pence attended at least 40 of the 49 calls under Trump.
Faulk characterized Trump’s response to the pandemic as “counterproductive, short-sighted, strategically-adrift,” and “profoundly inadequate.” He praised Biden’s response, saying that outside of the calls, there’s been “a number of meetings with governors hosted by President Biden and Vice President Harris on COVID response that are well-documented in media reports over the last year.”
Pushaw questioned Biden’s engagement outside of the calls.
“If this is indeed the case, our office has not been informed of all these meetings,” she said. “Could it be that the Biden Administration is only interested in dialogue with governors who agree with their heavy-handed, coercive, ineffectual COVID-19 policies?”
The Epoch Times was able to find two meetings between Biden and Governors, one in February with at least four from Arkansas, Maryland, New York, New Mexico; and one in May with those from Ohio, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Mexico.
As Ricketts sees it, the administration could benefit from more state feedback.
“I don’t believe the president or the vice president really know what’s going on with regard to the pandemic and I think this is demonstrated by some of the things that the president says,” he said.
As an example, he mentioned Biden’s school reopening comments, which set the benchmark so low it likely would have been achieved by doing nothing, as well as Biden’s remarks that Americans could possibly get together to celebrate Independence Day earlier this year if efforts to curb the pandemic went well.
“We were doing that a year ago,” Ricketts noted.
In his view, Biden “doesn’t really understand how different parts of the country have different experiences with regard to this pandemic.”
The result is a “one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter” COVID policy coming out of the White House, he said.
If Biden, for instance, directly engaged with the governors on vaccine rollout, “it could have been more effective,” he said.
The White House could have also approached differently its decision to increase federal control over monoclonal antibody treatment if he heard about its impact directly from states, he said.
This particular issue was highlighted by Noem’s office as well.
“It is clear that the Biden White House does not care about concerns that states have,” Fury said.
The NGA and 45 other governors didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Spokeswoman for Republican Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb said via email she would “have to look in to this,” without providing further information.
This shows willful negligance from the president.
However, even when Trump was president, I thought weekly updates were too frequent. Science doesn’t generally change it’s pattern every few days. Twice a month would have sufficed, unless the meetings were being headed and managed by the Surgeon General vs the President.
Cadavers cannot stand upright for extended periods.
Why would he? He’d be uninformed going in, unable to be
productive during the meeting, unless raising one or perhaps
two fingers, and after the event, he wouldn’t know he had
been there.
Waste of time...
Save resourceless for another project.
How many different ways can you say “coerce your population to get the jab by any means necassary” before it gets unnecessarily repetitive?
An absentee President. Such a sham.
‘He’d be uninformed going in, unable to be
productive during the meeting,’
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
It’s Obama’s mani-pedi time...he’s not a available to stick his arm up Sock Puppet’s @$$.
I am thinking that he attends very few meetings outside of those with his handlers when they are coaching him up for a 5 minute no questions press statements.
Dementia is one of those things that only ever gets worse.
Ideally I think there should be a Covid liaison with the states who should then be a consultant at Cabinet Meetings. This would show that Covid needs to be balanced with the country issues as a whole. But then I understand Biden doesn’t hold Cabinet Meetings either.
Biden is not at fault here. This is the fault of the governors. They did not provide for even one of Biden’s three favorite activities:
- enjoying ice cream
- eating pudding cups
- sniffing the hair of young girls
Seriously, who can blame Biden for taking a pass?
The “science” thingie is BS and overused. It’s all about conditioning, control and MONEY. Flu vaccines are a cash cow for big pharma and we taxpayers are the ones paying. COVID vaccines will be another annual “requirement.” If it were up to me, the public would pay for the shots.
not up to a phone call...
“Joe, if you stay focused through the phone call you can smell Kamela’s hair”.
In the next meeting announce that you have ordered a Full Criminal Investigation in to the CDC the NIH and All Employee’s for the Thousands of needless deaths caused by Making Fraudulent and Deliberate False Statements that led to those deaths.
See India Bar Association
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