Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, which makes him the third in line of succession to the presidency, revealed Tuesday that he has contracted the coronavirus.
“I’ve tested positive for coronavirus,” he tweeted. “I’ll be following my doctors’ orders/CDC guidelines & continue to quarantine. I’m feeling good + will keep up on my work for the ppl of Iowa from home. I appreciate everyone’s well wishes + prayers &look fwd to resuming my normal schedule soon.”
Grassley (R-Iowa), 87, announced earlier in the day that he would be quarantining after finding out he had been exposed to someone who tested positive for the virus.
The senator was at the Capitol on Monday and spoke on the Senate floor, taking off his mask to do so.
Grassley’s illness follows news late last week that fellow octogenarian Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska,) the dean of the House as the longest-consecutive-serving member, was diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Warning of a predicted increase in hospitalizations and deaths, Philadelphia officials on Monday imposed new rules that ban indoor gatherings, close gyms, museums and other venues, and shut down indoor dining in the city’s first coronavirus clampdown since June.
Without changes, the fall-winter surge could be on track to cause about 1,700 deaths in the city before it ends, as many as occurred in the spring, said Health Commissioner Thomas Farley, citing statistical modeling as he announced the restrictions.
“If we don’t do something to change the trajectory of this epidemic, the hospitals will become full, we’ll have difficulty treating people, and we’ll have between 700 and more than 1,000 deaths just by the end of this year,” Farley said, saying hospitalizations could exceed the first wave.
New Jersey, too, announced tighter restrictions on indoor and outdoor crowds Monday as the number of daily COVID-19 infections continued to soar.
Philadelphia and New Jersey join a handful of cities and states nationwide imposing new restrictions in response to the COVID-19 surge. Pennsylvania’s health secretary, meanwhile, said Monday that commonwealth officials have no plans to go back to “red, yellow, green, or any other type of schema” of coronavirus restrictions.
However, the state Department of Health is evaluating hospital capacity and anticipates “making further announcements this week,” a spokesperson told The Inquirer.
Philadelphia’s new guidance bans private and public indoor gatherings and also prohibits serving food and drink at outdoor gatherings, amounting to a ban on Thanksgiving celebrations in either setting for any group larger than a single household.
New Jersey is limiting all indoor gatherings to 10 people, and officials urged residents to keep Thanksgiving dinners as small as possible. Pennsylvania’s health secretary also asked residents to celebrate within their households.
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Marsha Jackson didn’t go to the mountain. The mountain came to her.
From her home in south Dallas, she watched it grow until it towered at 60 feet tall and spread all the way to her backyard, “a few feet from my bedroom.”
The mountain is human-made — an environmental nightmare of discarded roofing shingles stretching more than a city block. Even though it’s an illegal toxic waste dump on the edge of a neighborhood, it took months of pressure to get city officials to even acknowledge its existence and finally make plans to take it down.
Shingle Mountain didn’t just appear from out of nowhere. It formed just south of a section of Dallas settled by formerly enslaved people, an area that for more than a century has been zoned for everything White citizens didn’t want in their neighborhoods: industrial rail yards, chemical plants, concrete mixing facilities, warehouses that lure up to 100 diesel trucks per day and a massive landfill.
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And now, even as Dallas is currently more than 60 percent Latino and African American, with a Black city manager and mayor and a diverse city council, redlining and other historic land-use decisions by White leaders and planners who are long gone continue to have a lasting negative impact.
Jackson spent months fighting against the mountain of shingles in her back yard
When two White business partners looked at the area in 2017, they figured it was an ideal place to start a dump. They redirected truckers hauling shingles to the landfill and charged them a fee to unload their cargo on their vacant land instead. One of the partners set up an illegal recycling operation that ground black shingles into dust, a process that spewed toxins and fine particulate matter into the air around Jackson and about 100 of her neighbors.
With so much industry already in south Dallas, city officials didn’t notice even when it reached the height of a six-story building. Over the course of seven months starting in January 2018, Jackson complained to the city, and no one answered.
Jackson, 62, is certain that particulate matter from the shingles is in the air she and her 12-year-old granddaughter have been breathing for two years. Her voice comes and goes, she says, because “it gets up in my throat.”
Recent studies have shown that minority residents in Dallas breathe more polluted air than White residents and have a significantly shorter life expectancy.
That finding fits with a reality nationwide reflected in other studies. Black and Latino residents in the United States are far more likely than White people to live near landfills, power plants, concrete mixing facilities and other sources of emissions that foul the air.
And they are far more likely than White people to die from exposure to pollution.
“It could not be more crystal clear,” said Chris Dowdy, the vice president for academic affairs at Paul Quinn College, a historically Black university in south Dallas that participated in a study called “Poisoned by Zip Code.” “You can draw a straight line from where Black folks gathered after emancipation to the redlining maps, to where you’re more likely to be poisoned because of zoning, and where people die earlier.”
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President-elect Joe Biden waves as he departs after Mass Sunday in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
By Dino Grandoni with Alexandra Ellerbeck, Washington Post’s The Energy 202 blog
Unwinding President Trump’s rollbacks of anti-pollution rules is going to take a lot of work. And much of it is going to fall on whomever Joe Biden chooses as his main deputies on environmental issues. Just a week after victory and without a formal concession of defeat from Trump, the president-elect is forging ahead with building a Cabinet that will have to contend with multiple crises at once — including climate change.
Biden must balance many considerations. He has promised to assemble a diverse Cabinet — one that both racially reflects the country itself and that satisfies the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic Party. And crucially, many of the Democrat’s high-level choices must be approved by a sharply divided Senate. Democrats must win two runoff elections in Georgia in January to gain control of the chamber. Otherwise, Republicans will retain a thin Senate majority that may prove to be a roadblock for Biden appointments seen as too left-leaning. Caveats abound: The transition team itself is tight-lipped about the process, and any individual could be pulled from or put into consideration at any moment. The names below emerged as possible picks in conversations my colleagues Juliet Eilperin, Steven Mufson and I have had in recent weeks with those in Democratic circles who have worked on energy and environmental issues.
Environmental Protection Agency California Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Mary Nichols: Over the past four years, the California Air Resources Board head has been central to the state’s fight with the Trump administration over environmental rollbacks. When the EPA undid tougher air pollution rules for new cars implemented under President Barack Obama, Nichols helped forge an agreement with four major automakers to maintain the more-stringent standards in California. During her 13-year tenure running the California agency, she has helped put in place the state’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. Collin O’Mara: Unlike the leaders of other some environmental groups, O’Mara, head of the National Wildlife Federation, has worked with both Democrats and Republicans to advance habitat conservation efforts in Congress. He also, crucially, has ties to Biden’s home state; O’Mara is said to have been the nation’s youngest state Cabinet official in 2009 when he ran the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. That happens to be same Cabinet in which Biden’s late son Beau served as attorney general. Mustafa Santiago Ali: Also an executive at the National Wildlife Federation, Ali made headlines shortly after Trump took office for resigning from his post as an EPA assistant associate administrator. He left with more than two decades of experience at the EPA, having worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations and helped create the agency’s environmental justice office in the early 1990s. Environmentalists say picking him makes sense for an administration aiming to tackle the disproportionate impact poor and minority communities face from air and water pollution. Heather McTeer Toney: Besides running the EPA’s Southeast office under Obama, she was also the first female and African-American mayor of Greenville, Miss. Now a senior director at the Moms Clean Air Force, she has spoken out against the Trump administration’s rejection of stricter air quality standards during the pandemic in which the coronavirus attacks the lungs. Richard Revesz: The New York University law professor is considered one of the foremost legal minds in environmental law. Originally from Argentina, he has spent most of his career in academia. But he has managing experience, having served as dean of the NYU law school from 2002 to 2013. Daniel Esty: Though now an academic with appointments at Yale’s forestry, law and business schools, Esty once served as commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. There he helped launch a first-in-the-nation “green bank” for promoting clean energy. Biden has proposed creating a similar institution nationwide.
Other names that may be considered for high-level EPA positions are Ian Bowles, the well-regarded former head of energy and environmental affairs in Massachusetts, and Jared Blumenfeld, California’s secretary for environmental protection. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) may also be considered for a role at the EPA or elsewhere. But taking a job in the federal government would mean he would have to leave the West Coast’s Washington — where he was just reelected to a third term.
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The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will meet this week to consider the nominations of Allison Clements and Mark Christie to become FERC commissioners — nominations that have been on hold for weeks as the White House reconfigured the makeup of the energy regulator before the Biden administration takes over.
But even if the nominees move forward this week, the Senate only has a handful of weeks left to confirm them before Joe Biden takes office.
If the nominees don’t receive a full Senate confirmation, it would be up to Biden to decide whether to renominate Clements and Christie next year.
Should the Senate install both nominees before then, it would give the regulatory agency a full quorum of five members — three Republicans and two Democrats. Biden would likely elevate one of the Democrats to the chairmanship, but they would be in the minority, which would give them limited room to maneuver.
The Trump administration demoted Neil Chatterjee from the FERC chairmanship earlier this month and named Commissioner James Danly as chair — a move by White House officials who were angered by Chatterjee’s moves to help renewable power and allow energy markets to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, sources told POLITICO
