Break Glass In Case of Emergency

I burned up my fifteen minutes of fame early in life: I was the toddler who pulled the fire alarm at a nursing home in West Frankfort, IL. I have no recollection of this event or of the chaos that ensued or of my grandfather running around trying to convince the residents that it wasn’t a real emergency.

Many decades later, though, I found myself in the midst of an actual emergency when I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. So I knew exactly what was on the line in 2017 when Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives were poised to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and replace it with the American Health Care Act (AHCA) – a terrible bill that AARP dubbed the “Unaffordable Health Care Act.” I knew this was another emergency. A real one. The “break glass” kind.

But my Representative David Schweikert wasn’t too concerned. In fact, he claimed we didn’t need the ACA because everyone gets free care in the ER. Now, existing law does prevent hospitals from dumping ER patients without first screening and stabilizing them. But the law doesn’t mean that you can walk into the ER and ask for the Complimentary Cancer Care Department or the Free Physical Therapy Wing or the All-You-Can-Eat Prescription Medication Buffet.

Rep. Schweikert voted for the AHCA anyway – without even waiting for a final score from the Congressional Budget Office. We later learned the bill was projected to leave over 23 million more Americans uninsured by 2026. Definitely an emergency. The “break glass” kind.

Rep. Schweikert, though, is incapable of recognizing a true emergency. In a Feb. 2017 interview with Arizona Horizon, he recounted the story of meeting with a “very liberal couple in Scottsdale” who were concerned about a Donald Trump presidency. He told them they needed a “wider distribution of news sources” – specifically suggesting CNBC and Bloomberg. OK, I just hopped over to Bloomberg and CNBC. The lede (opening sentence) on one of the featured stories at Bloomberg is: “President Donald Trump said Thursday that he couldn’t disavow QAnon because he didn’t know enough about it, but said he did endorse adherents of the conspiracy theory’s efforts to fight pedophilia.” Yikes. And over on CNBC: “Daily new U.S. cases of the coronavirus, as a seven-day average, have been growing since Oct. 5 and topped 53,405 as of Thursday, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data.”

Wow. That’s…an emergency, right?

Rep. Schweikert suggested during that same Arizona Horizon interview that the concerns regarding Russian ties to the Trump Campaign were “hyperbolic noise” from people “desperately trying to find a scapegoat for losing the election”. But he was silent when the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee’s fifth and final reportwas released last August and called former campaign chair Paul Manafort’s deep ties to Russian and Ukrainian Oligarchs – and to former Russian Intelligence Offer Konstantin Kilimnik – “a grave counterintelligence threat.”

We should probably break that glass now.

So what is Rep. Schweikert’s idea of a break-glass emergency? Constituents wanting to talk in a public setting. On two occasions, members of my local Indivisible group were trying to speak with Rep. Schweikert when Scottsdale PD was called to the scene. (OK, we did paper his office windows with colorful Post-it notes one time, so maybe he was still mad about that. But we weren’t armed with Post-its on either of these occasions.) Another Schweikert emergency? Antifa. In June, as the terrifying plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was in its early stages, Rep. Schweikert and his Republican colleagues were writing to Attorney General William Barr, demanding that he “investigate the funding mechanisms” behind Antifa. He’s never acknowledged the threat of domestic terrorism originating from the far right wing of his own party, which is a real emergency. The “break glass” kind.

Another emergency that Rep. Schweikert has failed to recognize is the lack of transparency from President Donald Trump. Who holds the $300 million in debt that’s coming due in the next four years? And what if they need a “favor”? Rep. Schweikert claims that POTUS has a “moral obligation” to release his tax returns, yet as a member of the Ways & Means Committee, voted against obtaining the returns. That “moral obligation” is currently tied up in court – where it will likely remain until after the election. And while Rep. Schweikert was providing cover to the POTUS on his tax returns, he knew there was a long history of sketchy transactions in his own campaign finances.

When reports surfaced in 2018 of an ethics investigation, Schweikert wrote off the issue as a “bookkeeping error.” Two years later, he settled the investigation by admitting to 11 ethics violations. The final report from the Committee on Ethics noted that some of Rep. Schweikert’s statements were “squarely inconsistent with the record the ISC obtained” and that he “lacked candor at times.” In non-Congressional speak, we call those “lies”. The Committee also noted that Schweikert’s own “vague or misleading statements” allowed him to run out the clock on some of the more serious campaign finance charges.

Fortunately, the sixth Congressional district has an excellent candidate in Dr. Hiral Tipirneni. She knows her way around an actual emergency, having worked as an ER doctor. Dr. Tipirneni understands the emergency posed by COVID-19. She has given up traditional campaign activities like canvassing in order to ensure public safety and to set a good example. This is in stark contrast to Rep. Schweikert, who has not only posted non-masked, non-socially distant photos of himself and his supporters on Facebook, but has also refused to call out colleagues and supporters who are spreading misinformation about this deadly disease.

Our country now faces a number of real emergencies. COVID-19. Saving the ACA. Gun violence prevention. Racial justice. Climate change. Education. Reproductive rights. We can tackle these emergencies together, but first, we need to break the glass – and vote for Dr. Hiral Tipirneni.