Important news from this week:
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We reflected this week on the life and service of Supreme
Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg brought decency,
intelligence and principle to the Supreme Court. Her life inspired
many Americans, especially young women. Her service to our country
deserves great respect.
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The United States Senate confirmed three of President
Trump’s nominees for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC). The EEOC is charged with the important job of protecting employees
from discrimination at work by investigating allegations of
discrimination. With the confirmation of these three nominees, the EEOC now has a
full slate of members – three Republicans and two
Democrats.
The
U.S. Senate should consider President Trump’s Supreme Court
nominee
No one should be
surprised that a Republican Senate majority would vote on a Republican
President’s Supreme Court nomination, even during a
presidential election year. The Constitution gives senators the
power to do it. The voters who elected them expect it. Going back
to George Washington, the Senate has confirmed many nominees to the
Supreme Court during a presidential election year. It has refused to
confirm several when the President and Senate majority were of different
parties. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is only doing what
Democrat leaders have said they would do if the shoe were on the other
foot. I have voted to confirm Justices Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor,
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh based upon their intelligence, character and
temperament. I will apply the same standard when I consider President
Trump’s nomination to replace Justice Ginsburg.
Trump Administration’s vaccine
program on track to be an unprecedented sprint to
success
It was good to talk with
Trump Administration officials Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Admiral Brett
Giroir, Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services, Dr. Stephen Hahn, Commissioner of the Food and Drug
Administration, and Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention at my health committee hearing this
week.
In what was likely my
final hearing as Chairman of the Senate health committee, we learned
from the Trump Administration how the federal government is continuing to
respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration officials who
testified at this hearing highlighted several success stories that will
play an important role in fighting this virus, one of which is the
development of a vaccine. The Trump Administration’s program to
develop and deploy a vaccine that will protect against COVID-19 is on
track to be an unprecedented sprint to success. The program to develop
this vaccine, called Operation Warp Speed, will save lives without
cutting corners on safety and efficacy. The secret to this success is that
the government – in partnership with private industry –
is, for the first time, developing and manufacturing a vaccine in
parallel. In other words, the Operation Warp Speed plan is to manufacture
tens of millions of doses of the six vaccine candidates at the same time
the clinical trials are ongoing and the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) works to determine whether they are safe and effective. If the
FDA does not approve the vaccine, it will not be distributed. So the
risk is to taxpayer money, not the safety and efficacy of the
vaccines.
The message
is clear – children need to be in
school
Governor Bill Lee and some national researchers
have completed a study of the learning loss for
reading and math proficiency from Tennessee children who were not in
school from March through the summer. Now, you always have learning loss
in the summer, but in March through summer, this is what they found:
preliminary data projects an estimated 50 percent decrease in
proficiency rates in third grade reading and a projected 65 percent decrease in
proficiency in math. That, in the governor's words, is a dramatic
decrease and shows that the vast majority of students learn in person with
their teacher.
The good news is
that, according to the governor, 1,800 schools in Tennessee are open, in
person, and only seven of those schools have any sort of closure
incident today. So this problem hopefully won't be as pronounced this
semester in Tennessee, because except in Memphis and Nashville, almost all
of our schools are open in-person to some degree. The governor went on
to say that the March through summer school closings produced a
learning deficiency that's expected to be 2.5 times that of a normal summer
rate. He also said the learning loss impacts early grades greater
than later grades, placing those students further behind in the learning
trajectory. Students with lower proficiency rates are also
disproportionately impacted by learning loss. In other words, students who are
already behind fell behind even further as a result of leaving school in
March.
The message is clear: that
children, especially young children who are further behind already,
need to be in school so they can be taught in-person so their learning
loss is less dramatic.
Below are a few news articles I thought you
might enjoy:
Elizabethton Star: Column by Sen. Alexander:
Compensating student athletes has nothing to do with
education
The Tennessean: Sen. Lamar Alexander: Ruth Bader Ginsburg
brought 'decency' to Supreme Court
If you want to
enjoy the game, sit in the stands, not the president’s
box.
#251 in Lamar
Alexander’s Little Plaid Book
