To me, the most striking part about the press conference is the following interaction, as articulated by the Atlantic:
It's especially striking since he has thus far disavowed testing to see whether he may possibly have COVID-19 himself. I can't imagine how quickly those folks raced to scrub their hands and use hand sanitizer...
Setting the crossfire aside, one other striking aspect of today's emergency declaration is what the Stafford Act permits the government. Quoting the statutory language, the act precludes liability "for any claim based upon the exercise or performance of or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a Federal agency." 42 U.S.C. § 5148.
I'm not familiar enough with laws and regs that covered testing and treatment in ordinary times, but one thing's for sure, it's going to be a lot harder to hold the government accountable for errors now. This same liability exclusion was extensively relied on by the Government to make post-Katrina-related claims go away. I'm sure there are other nuggets of sovereign power in relevant provisions of the Stafford Act that we may want to look out for down the road, as the Atlantic also presaged over a year ago.
Quote:A series of CEOs came to the microphone to describe what their companies were doing to speed testing or help out in other ways. Trump caught the first three or four of them unawares, by shaking their hands as they moved away from the podium. All seemed startled, as you can see in the video.
Then the other CEOs began to catch on, and a following group of them scuttled away from the podium before Trump could grab them for a handshake, or held their own hands clenched together, in a protective prayer-style grasp.
Finally, (at 1:06 in the video) you can see Bruce Greenstein, of the LHC group, surprise Trump with an elbow-bump rather than a hand shake. Trump himself seemed completely oblivious to the idea of social distancing. It was also notable that one speaker after another touched and moved around the same microphone, and put his her hands on the sides of the same podium.
It's especially striking since he has thus far disavowed testing to see whether he may possibly have COVID-19 himself. I can't imagine how quickly those folks raced to scrub their hands and use hand sanitizer...
Setting the crossfire aside, one other striking aspect of today's emergency declaration is what the Stafford Act permits the government. Quoting the statutory language, the act precludes liability "for any claim based upon the exercise or performance of or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a Federal agency." 42 U.S.C. § 5148.
I'm not familiar enough with laws and regs that covered testing and treatment in ordinary times, but one thing's for sure, it's going to be a lot harder to hold the government accountable for errors now. This same liability exclusion was extensively relied on by the Government to make post-Katrina-related claims go away. I'm sure there are other nuggets of sovereign power in relevant provisions of the Stafford Act that we may want to look out for down the road, as the Atlantic also presaged over a year ago.