Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Newsroom
Dr. Benjamin Linas Discusses Losing Patience with Teachers' Unions that Refuse to Return to In-Person Teaching; Historians Take Apart Nikki Haley's George Washington Tweet; Sam DeMarco, Allegheny County Republican Committee Chair, Discusses Why It's a Mistake to Censure Pat Toomey over Impeachment Vote. Aired 2:30-3p ET
Aired February 16, 2021 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:30:00]
DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Because it will lift the veil on all of the indignities that have been done to people throughout the history of people in this country, starting with the original sin of people in this country, and that is racism.
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Yes, racism and slavery.
Don, I love having you on. You apologized for your tangent. I live for your tangents.
(LAUGHTER)
KEILAR: Thank you.
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: Thank you for coming on.
LEMON: You know what we have to stop doing? What you and I do. People say these conversations are very difficult. We have to have these tough conversations.
These aren't tough conversations. These conversations are actually quite easy.
KEILAR: Yes.
LEMON: The way you do it, just start talking about them, right? You just --
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: With an open heart, I think, right, yes?
(CROSSTALK)
LEMON: There you go, yes.
KEILAR: It's great to have you on, Don. Thank you very much. And, of course, you can see Don tonight. He will be on at 10:00
Eastern. So check him out.
Don, thanks again.
LEMON: Thank you.
KEILAR: Oh, wait, oh, you got a book.
Don has a book, a new book, "This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends about Racism."
And that's what we're talking about, Don, where you say having these conversations. I think it's such an important -- it's a conversation about a conversation. It's hugely important right now.
So thank you. I'm looking forward to reading that.
LEMON: Thank you, Brianna. Good to see you.
KEILAR: All right. Have a good day.
Next, Dr. Fauci now saying it will likely be summer before we all have access to a vaccine. So what do we do about schools now? I will be joined by a doctor who says he's losing patience with teachers' unions who refuse to return to in-person teaching.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:36:10]
KEILAR: Dr. Anthony Fauci now says it could be late May or even June until the general public has the opportunity to get vaccines. And that news comes as teachers are insisting on vaccines before they are willing to return in person.
Positions like that have led my next guest to grow increasingly frustrated.
Dr. Benjamin Linas is an infectious disease doctor. He's an associate professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine.
And he wrote an article titled "I'm an Epidemiologist, Father. Here's Why I'm Losing Patience with Teachers' Unions."
Dr. Linas, you mentioned you've also volunteered to be on the advisory board for your district at Brooklyn Mass.
What do you think the teachers' unions are getting wrong?
DR. BENJAMIN LINAS, INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: Thank you for having me today.
I want to be clear that, actually, I think that at the same time I'm growing frustrated, I have immense respect for what teachers are doing now.
I just want to say that at the offset that I think every parent in America has likely had the experience of seeing their kids' teacher on Zoom.
And the chills down the spine that I sometimes get when I see someone who clearly is so devoted to my child and working so hard in such difficult circumstances.
But at the collective level, I also think we've gotten to a point now where we have data to observe and see that it's possible to mitigate COVID transmission in school buildings.
And given that and given the growing education gaps and growing mental health crisis amongst our kids, I think we need to start taking seriously the risk/benefit of going back to school.
The going back I in person because I think the data are quite strong that the risk is not zero but we can mitigate it and make it so low. And the benefits to getting back to in-person schooling are so huge for everyone involved, kids, parents, everyone in our society.
In that sense, I'm really urging educators to embrace the data and start to use facts to fight the fear because I think that's exactly the strategy we should be taking right now.
KEILAR: I think what we are hearing from teachers -- and we've spoken to teachers' unions on the show. So I want to be clear, we're just trying to explore this from all angles.
LINAS: Yes.
KEILAR: Is they feel like they're bearing -- obviously, look, they don't want to be teaching this way. It's pretty clear they don't like it either.
LINAS: Yes.
KEILAR: But they're certainly concerned about the risk. They're concerned, if they're older and have underlying conditions or concerned if they have people at home.
And a lot of them want to be vaccinated. We have these new variants that are kind of creating this question mark. And I think this anxiety about, yes, there's research but also the state of coronavirus is a bit of a moving target.
Talk to me about that. Because a lot of folks have said: Why don't you just vaccinate teachers? Why is that not a good requirement? But that's not something that you necessarily support, as you write about.
LINAS: Right. I think there are two points to that question. One is on vaccine priorities. I think that -- in my piece, actually, I argue that teachers should be prioritized for vaccine.
KEILAR: Yes, you do. LINAS: And, but I also think, to be fair, it's important for us to get
started. It's going to get started by going back into school buildings.
And if it's going to take until June until everybody is vaccinated, I don't think that's the right timeline. And we need to start before a vaccine comes.
And the reason I think is because we've had schools open in the United States and all across the world without vaccines.
And we now have data to show, empirically, when they have schools open, even when there is COVID-19, it's possible to mitigate the transmission.
And so we've done it thus far without vaccines. Clearly, we should be trying to vaccine everyone.
I agree that teachers should be one of our highest priority groups. But I just think we need to make a decision today. And we need to start acting now.
And COVID is a moving target but COVID will always be a moving target. And there's a saying that a decision has to be made. We have to do something today with the best data that we have available today.
The best data we have available today says we can mitigate COVID transmission into school buildings.
[14:40:03]
It's important that we remain attuned to the data and be ready to change if the message changes.
But doing nothing and not reopening our buildings, that's a decision, too, but that's a decision that's made without data. It's made based on fears.
And I think now is the time to start using the data and using the facts to start to assuage the fear.
KEILAR: It is -- Dr. Linas, it's such an important conversation. I really appreciate you joining us for it.
LINAS: Yes. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
KEILAR: All right, thank you for coming on, sir.
Next, a Republican woman, who may have her sights on a presidential bid in 2024, gives her presidential history -- gets her presidential history all wrong. Why Nikki Haley's attempt to summon George Washington in a tweet was incorrect.
Plus, I will speak to a Republican leader in Pennsylvania who says it would be a mistake to censure Senator Pat Toomey over his impeachment vote. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KEILAR: Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations and a potential GOP candidate for president in 2024, is getting heat from historians for a tweet that she sent out on Presidents' Day, attempting to pay tribute to the America's first president.
[14:44:57]
Haley wrote this: "George Washington turned an army of rag-tag troops into an unstoppable force that defeated the British and secured America's independence. As president, he oversaw the creation of our Constitution and showed the world what it looks like to govern by the people and for the people."
Only problem is, that's not at all how things went down.
And presidential historian, Alexis Coe, called her out own it. She co- wrote a biography of George Washington called, "You Never Forget Your First."
And she's with us now to talk about this.
Just fact-check the tweet for us.
ALEXIS COE, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN & AUTHOR: I mean, it's hard to know where to begin. It's 280 characters and a whole lot of errors.
So from the very beginning, the Continental Army was not unstoppable. As we know, it was almost eight years of fight the Revolution. And the British had the most powerful navy in the entire world. We barely had some boats.
There were many times we looked like we were going to lose. We were definitely not unstoppable.
Then she said George Washington was president and oversaw the Constitution. That's simply not true.
The Constitution created the presidency. And then Washington was, of course, our first president. The Constitutional Convention was 1787, the presidency in 1789.
And then, the kicker, the way she ends by quoting "by the people, for the people," Washington has been dead for many decades by the time Abraham Lincoln says that in the Gettysburg Address.
KEILAR: Alexis, that was amazing.
(LAUGHTER)
KEILAR: Thank you just for walking us through that and fact-checking us. It's quite the tweet and it's quite the fact-check.
Alexis Coe, thank you very much.
COE: Thank you.
KEILAR: Next, after Senator Pat Toomey voted to convict Donald Trump, one state Republican in Pennsylvania says he didn't send Toomey to Washington to, quote, "do the right thing."
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:50:33]
KEILAR: There's fierce backlash within the Republican Party against the seven Republican Senators who voted to convict former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.
Senator Pat Toomey is one of the seven. Pennsylvania Republicans will meet in the coming weeks to decide what to do, if anything.
But several counties are not waiting. And they have already voted to censure Toomey.
My next guest disagrees with that.
Sam DeMarco is the chairman of the Republican Committee of Allegheny County.
Sam, thanks so much for being with us.
You've gotten a lot of attention for this. You've not gone along with what many of your fellow GOP county chairs in Pennsylvania have wanted to proceed with.
Why have you decided that?
SAM DEMARCO, CHAIRMAN, ALLEGHENY COUNTY, PA, REPUBLICAN COMMITTEE: I've tried to take a thoughtful approach to this as opposed to a reflexive approach.
My belief is that the impeachment of President Trump was designed with two objectives in mind. One was to prevent him from running from office in the future and the other was to create fissures and splits within the Republican Party.
On the first objective, they failed. On the second objective, the jury is still out based upon how we take and react and move forward.
And I believe that our focus is best focused on the future and not on the past.
We got the result that we wanted last Saturday when the president was acquitted. So why are our folks so angry and looking to punish someone?
And I worry about the message that it sends to voters out there, the people who would want to be part of the Republican Party but are worried that, if they don't agree with everyone 100 percent of the time, that there's not space for them.
KEILAR: Sam --
(CROSSTALK)
DEMARCO: And we're a big tent and have a lot of room for everybody.
KEILAR: You say this is -- you know, you want to look to the future of the Republican Party. Isn't this about the future of the Republican Party and a disagreement about whether it is a Trumpian Republican Party or not?
DEMARCO: No. This particular resolution here or censure motion would be about telling Senator Toomey that folks are unhappy with the decision he made.
I did not support the vote that he made. I would have voted no. I thought the process was unconstitutional.
But I was not there on January 6th. I didn't live through it. He's entitled to his opinion.
And I believe that the future of our party is bright when we're able to show folks that we welcome people that may agree with us only 70 percent of the time or 80 percent of the time. It doesn't have to be 100 percent of the time.
And I fear, as we go down this path of group think or cancel culture, where if you don't believe or you don't agree with someone all of the time, they look to personally destroy you, I don't see that helping or benefiting our party or our country.
KEILAR: I want you to listen to what the Pennsylvania GOP chair of Washington County said about why they censured Senator Toomey.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAVE BALL, CHAIRMAN, WASHINGTON COUNTY, PA, REPUBLICAN COMMITTEE: We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: What do you say to that?
DEMARCO: Well, the chairman of the Washington County Republican Party is a good friend of mine, and he's a good man. He might want to have that sound byte back. I don't know.
But I would say that everyone -- you reported on this as well as all the other major stations here.
The Republicans were having problems in the suburbs. And some of that may be that folks don't believe that if they don't agree with us on 100 percent of the things that they would be welcome.
I can tell you I've heard -- I get a lot of e-mails and I've had folks that want me to censure the Senator.
But I've had people reaching out saying they appreciate a sensible approach and they don't want me to censure the Senator because they believe -- I don't necessarily agree with him -- but they believe he did the right thing.
So they are entitled to their opinion, he's entitled to his opinion and I'm entitled to mine.
I just believe my job, as a county chair, is to grow this party. Politics is a numbers game. We only win when we bring more people into the tent.
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: Let me ask you about that.
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: It's clear your party is contracting with Donald Trump as its central figure. Do you see him as the central figure of the Republican future?
DEMARCO: Well, I would disagree with your premise as far as contracting. Since January 6th, yes, we've had approximately 140,000 people, Republicans, across this nation that have changed their voter registrations.
But --
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: He lost the election, Sam.
[14:54:59]
DEMARCO: Absolutely. But you're talking about the party contracting. We're not talking about the election. I was responding to your comment there.
KEILAR: Yes. No, I hear what you're saying. I'm just saying that, you know, obviously, he lost support as well there.
Sam, I have so much more to talk to you about. We're out of time.
Sam DeMarco, thank you so much for joining us.
We are back in just a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[15:00:00]
