We no longer live in a pandemic. Americans know this. The signs are all around them. Businesses are open, crowds gather again, social distancing has vanished, and masks are becoming a rarer sight. Vaccines and treatments have dramatically lowered the rates of death and serious illness.
False dawns have come before in the Covid-19 pandemic, but this time, there is every reason to believe that we have transitioned from a pandemic disease to a merely endemic one, which will be with us in its current form for the rest of our lives. In both 2020 and 2021, deaths associated with Covid spiked in the fall and winter, the prime season for respiratory infections in the temperate parts of the country. That is not repeating this year at anything like the prior scale.
Per CDC data, Covid deaths made up 10 percent or more of all weekly deaths in the United States every week from late October 2020 through early March 2021, and again from early August 2021 through late February 2022. We have not seen a week above 6 percent since March 2022. The spread of both vaccination and natural immunity, combined with better treatments for the infected, have ended all reason to see Covid as a basis to suspend normal life in the United States.
This reality is so obvious that even the president has noticed it. “The pandemic is over,” Joe Biden told 60 Minutes in September. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” That was nearly three months ago.
The problem for Biden is that he needs the pandemic to be an ongoing national emergency in order for him to exercise “emergency” authorities that otherwise would be universally recognized as extralegal powers. Even after the Supreme Court struck down his efforts to act as the national arbiter of vaccination and apartment leases, he claimed the power to spend hundreds of billions of dollars without congressional appropriations on forgiving student loans. Even as that remains in litigation, he continues to extend payment holidays. Few claims of presidential authority would have more alarmed the Framers of the Constitution, familiar as they were with the English reaction to Charles II trying to rule without revenue raised by Parliament, than an executive asserting the authority to spend vast sums without legislative consent.
Biden’s action is illegal anyway — as Nancy Pelosi warned him until he did it — but he will continue attempting to exert powers inconsistent with a constitutional republic so long as he can point to some statute saying that the president has vast additional authority in an emergency. There is no valid reason why Congress should not pass, on a bipartisan basis, a legislative end to this “state of emergency” and compel the president to act within the ordinary law. There is no reason why Republicans in Congress should not demand, immediately, that this be done.
We would recommend a broader effort by Congress to review and restrict presidential emergency powers of open-ended duration, especially in domestic affairs but extending as well to practically permanent states of war. But first things first. The simple truth is that the Covid national emergency is over. Congress should say so.