What do these four governors have in common? They’re Democrats and they’ve criticized Trump’s COVID-19 response.
The devastation underscores a truth we have known for years: Institutions separated from the mainstream of society—nursing homes, long-term care facilities, psychiatric hospitals, or jails and prisons—cause intense harm to the people who are confined there. They rigidly control the lives of their residents, limiting such mundane daily liberties as the choice of when to turn out the light at night or with whom to eat dinner.
Government investigations of the poor conditions at congregate institutions—and efforts to promote community-based alternatives so that individuals would not be forced to live in those facilities—would be very welcome. The coronavirus pandemic makes the need for such action especially acute. That is not, however, what the DOJ’s actions were about. Instead, the department is acting in a transparently political manner. Throughout the pandemic, the DOJ has failed to take key steps to use CRIPA to protect residents of congregate facilities. Last week’s letters, aimed at governors who have vocally criticized President Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic, and timed amid the Republican National Convention, will do nothing meaningful to protect those residents.
Nursing homes are key locations for the spread of COVID-19, but the DOJ’s authority under CRIPA extends to only a tiny slice of those facilities. The statute applies only to institutions that are operated by state or local governments. But the overwhelming majority of people in nursing homes are in privately operated facilities. In, for example, only 28 out of the state’s more than 600 nursing homes are public.
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