White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre sharply denounced a conspiracy theory floated by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that Covid-19 was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, calling the longshot Democratic candidate’s remarks “false” and “vile.”
“The claims made on that tape is false,” she said during a Monday press briefing about a video published over the weekend. “It is vile, and they put our fellow Americans in danger.”
In the video, Kennedy suggests that Covid was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people.” He later added that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Kennedy has defended himself on Twitter, disputing the New York Post’s initial reporting of his comments, insisting he was just relaying others’ research, and denying that he said the virus was made to “spare Jews.” But after the video emerged, his remarks prompted condemnation across the Democratic Party and even from members of his own family.
“I STRONGLY condemn my brother's deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” wrote Kennedy’s sister, Kerry, on Twitter.
Jean-Pierre declined to discuss Kennedy directly, citing the legal constraints on the administration’s ability to address campaign matters. But she warned that Kennedy’s remarks amounted to encouraging racist theories around the virus.
“If you think about the racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories that come out of saying those type of things, it’s an attack on our fellow citizens,” Jean-Pierre said. “And so it’s important that we essentially speak out when we hear those claims more broadly.”
Jean-Pierre also cited a statement from the American Jewish Committee that called Kennedy’s claims “deeply offensive” and reflective of “some of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history.”
"This is something that this president, and this whole administration, is going to stand against," she added.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama Republicans, under orders of the U.S. Supreme Court to redraw congressional districts to give minority voters a greater voice in elections, rejected calls Monday to craft a second majority-Black district and proposed a map testing the judges’ directive.
Lawmakers must adopt a new map by Friday after the high court in June affirmed a three-judge panel's ruling that Alabama’s existing congressional map — with a single Black district out of seven statewide — likely violated the Voting Rights Act.
In a state where more than one in four residents is Black, the lower court panel had ruled in 2022 that Alabama should have another majority-Black congressional district or something "close to it" so Black voters have the opportunity to “elect a representative of their choice.”
Republicans, long resistant to creating a second Democratic-leaning district, proposed a map that would increase the percentage of Black voters in the 2nd congressional district from about 30% to nearly 42.5%, wagering that would satisfy the court — or that the state will prevail in a second round of appeals.
House Speaker Pro Tempore Chris Pringle, who serves as co-chairman of the state redistricting committee, said the numbers are sufficient to provide an opportunity for an African American candidate to get elected. He said the plan satisfies the court's instruction to give Black voters a greater opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.
"We took in consideration what the court asked us to do which was to provide an opportunity district that complied with Section 2 (of the Voting Rights Act,)" Pringle said.
The Permanent Legislative Committee on Reapportionment approved the proposal in a 14-6 vote that fell along party lines. The proposal will be introduced as legislation Monday afternoon as lawmakers convene a special session to adopt a new map by a Friday deadline set by the three-judge panel.
The National Redistricting Foundation, one of the groups that backed challenges to the Alabama map, called the proposal “shameful” and said it would be challenged
“It is clear that Alabama Republicans are not serious about doing their job and passing a compliant map, even in light of a landmark Supreme Court decision,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation.
She called that a pattern seen throughout the state's history "where a predominately white and Republican legislature has never done the right thing on its own, but rather has had to be forced to do so by a court."
Democrats accused Republicans of rushing the process and thwarting the court's directive.
Sen. Vivian Davis Figures, a Democrat from Mobile, said the court was clear that the state should create a second majority-Black district or something close to it.
“Forty-two percent is not close to 50. In my opinion 48, 49 is close to 50," Sen. Vivian Davis Figures, a Democrat from Mobile, said after the meeting. Figures had urged colleagues to adopt a proposal by the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case that would make the 2nd district 50% Black.
Rep. Chris England, a Democrat from Tuscaloosa, said he also doesn't think the GOP proposal would satisfy the court's directive. He said Republican lawmakers pushed through there proposal without a public hearing or producing a voter analysis of how the district will perform and how if it is a red, blue or swing district. Pringle said that information will be available Tuesday.
“The map that we adopted, nobody had any input on. There was no public input on it, not subject to a public hearing and now it's going to be the map of choice,” England said.
Deuel Ross, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said lawmakers have yet to provide the information “necessary to evaluate whether these plans will in fact provide Black voters with opportunities to elect their candidates of choice in two districts.”
“Any plan with a low Black voting age population does not appear to comply with the Court’s instruction,” Ross wrote in an email.
Joe Reed, chairman of the Alabama Democratic Conference — the state’s oldest Black political organization —told urged lawmakers that the district will not elect a Black candidate to Congress unless it is a majority Black district.
Partisan politics underlies the looming redistricting fight. A higher percentage of Black voters increases the chances that a the seat will switch from GOP to Democratic control.
Pollster Zac McCrary said predicting a district's partisan leanings depends on a number of metrics, but “getting a district too far below the mid 40s in terms of Black voter composition could certainly open the door for Republicans.”
The Biden administration is steeling itself for potential Chinese government reprisals for U.S. transit stops by Taiwan’s Vice President Lai Ching-te as he travels to and from Paraguay’s presidential inauguration next month.
Taiwan’s Presidential Office confirmed on Monday that Lai will transit in the U.S. to and from the August 15 inauguration of Paraguayan President-elect Santiago Peña.
Beijing “should not use as a pretext any transit by Vice President Lai for brazen coercion or other provocative activities [and] should not be a pretext for interference in Taiwan's election either,” said a senior administration official Sunday, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.
Lai’s profile is doubly problematic for Beijing because he is vying to replace outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen in the self-governing island’s January 2024 elections. He has reinforced his pro-Taiwan independence credentials by declaring in January that Taiwan “ is already an independent and sovereign nation.” And with an eye to a possible election victory — polling last month put Lai, the Democratic Progressive Party candidate, as the front-runner — he said last week that elected leaders of Taiwan should be welcomed to the White House.
Lai’s upcoming transit “ is routine given the distances involved” between Taiwan and Paraguay and will be “unofficial in keeping with our U.S. One-China policy,” said the official. “We've had 10 Vice Presidential transits in the last 20 years — all have occurred without incident,” the official said.
The Biden administration’s problem: Chinese officials have already warned of negative consequences of a possible transit stop by Lai. Any such visit “would further impact China-U.S. relations,” Minister Jing Quan at the Chinese Embassy in Washington told POLITICO last week. Taipei’s confirmation of Lai’s upcoming U.S. transit reaped anger in Beijing. "We firmly oppose any visit by Taiwan separatists to the U.S. in any name or under whatever pretext, and we firmly oppose the U.S.' conniving and supporting of Taiwan separatists and their separatism activities in any form," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Monday.
Even worse: Lai’s U.S. transit plan announcement comes in the middle of Biden climate envoy John Kerry’s four-day trip to Beijing to try to restart bilateral climate cooperation that the Chinese government suspended in August 2022 in reprisal for then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit.
Kerry is the third senior official to travel to Beijing in the past month, following in the footsteps of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. That outreach aims to generate goodwill necessary for a productive meeting between Biden and Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in San Francisco in November.
Biden’s Taiwan transit visit headaches won’t end with Lai’s Paraguay stopover. The presidential candidate for Taiwan’s opposition KMT or Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), Hou You-yi — currently mayor of New Taipei City — will visit the U.S. “sometime in the early fall,” the official said. “We don't see any reason for Beijing to make an issue over Mayor Hou’s visit or, frankly, Vice President Lai’s either — both will be keeping with past precedent.”
But past precedent suggests that that both Lai and Hou’s presence in the U.S. will be magnets for the attention of U.S. lawmakers seeking to publicly affirm their support for Taiwan and to criticize Beijing’s saber-rattling at the island. During Lai’s previous a transit stop in the U.S. in January 2022, he held video meetings from his Los Angeles hotel with at least 17 U.S. lawmakers. Beijing responded by lodging a “solemn representation” with the U.S. government that included a demand that the Biden administration “stop the erroneous acts of having official exchanges with Taiwan.”
