The COVID-19 horror show returns to D.C.

WASHINGTON—On the Washington subway system, you can often spot Republican congressional staffers. They’re typically in their 20s and dressed like they’re going to an uncle’s retirement party at the country club. But what makes them conspicuous is that they’re virtually the only people not wearing COVID-19 masks.

Signs in the stations and in every car remind people of the ongoing requirement to wear masks on public transit, and compliance remains near universal — except among those smiling young political operatives, who file out at Capitol South station and into the staff entrances of the House office buildings.

This even as the U.S. government pulled a U-turn on its COVID-19 guidelines this week, and is now recommending masks for fully vaccinated people in high-spread areas, reimposing mask mandates inside the Capitol, and making renewed, ever-more-frantic pleas for the unvaccinated to get their shots.

Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy called this the work of “liberal government officials who want to live in a perpetual pandemic state,” and a bunch of those young Republican staffers staged an unmasked party in the halls of a congressional building, apparently as a sort of protest.

Yet the fear about a COVID-19 resurgence wasn’t entirely partisan: Donald Trump’s former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made pleas for the public to get vaccinated. President Joe Biden publicly commended McConnell for doing so — one of two rare moments this week in which Biden and McConnell found themselves rowing in the same direction. (More on the other one shortly.)

The reason officials were so spooked became clear when new research circulating in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) became public. The COVID-19 Delta variant appears to be more contagious than ebola or the common cold — possibly as much so as chickenpox. What’s more, fully vaccinated people who get breakthrough infections may be as contagious as unvaccinated people. Hence the updated mask guidance.

It’s probably important to emphasize, as many medical and epidemiological experts have, that this doesn’t mean vaccines are ineffective. Vaccinated people remain dramatically less likely to get the virus, and even more dramatically less likely to suffer serious illness if they do. “So bottom line? Yeah, Delta variant is bad. Like really bad.

Our vaccines are good. Like really good,” Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University concluded after reading the CDC documents. “If enough people get the shot, the pandemic does come to an end.”

This revival of the COVID-19 horror show overshadowed the other major Washington political dramas on this week, one of which underlined the creeping bipartisanship displayed in the Senate, while the other put an exclamation point on the bitter political divide still embodied in the House of Representatives.

During Trump’s presidency, saying it was “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke — Trump was always promising an impending day when he’d rally the two parties to build roads and bridges. This week, it seemed infrastructure week finally arrived, when the Senate voted to start debate on a bipartisan bill.

It’s a pared-down version of the agreement Biden announced a month ago, which itself was a pared-down version of what he initially proposed. But moving it beyond filibuster territory got 17 Republican votes, including one from McConnell. That’s nearing a spike-the-football moment for Biden, for whom bipartisanship is an ideology, and for the tiny, powerful middle-of-the-aisle caucus in the Senate.

Of course, the “former guy,” as Biden calls him, freaked out. “The RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) in the Senate are delivering a big win by caving to the Radical Democrats on infrastructure,” began one of five statements on the topic this week from Trump.

If you’re tempted to interpret that as a sign of Trump’s waning influence on Capitol Hill, the scene around the hearings into the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt might cure you of the notion. On Tuesday, while police who were injured by rioters trying to overthrow the government in Trump’s name testified, a handful of Trump’s most loyal Republican supporters in Congress were holding news conferences calling those arrested in the siege “political prisoners.”

“We suspect there is a twotiered justice system in the United States for Trump supporters that are charged for Jan. 6,” Rep. Marjorie TaylorGreene said in defence of the Capitol rioters, “and it’s basically catch and release for Antifa and (Black Lives Matter) rioters.”

Rep. Paul Gosar tweeted a photo of himself wearing a bracelet in memory of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot during the riot when she climbed through a broken window to try to rush past a police line toward members of Congress. Gosar has been joined in his campaign to portray Babbitt as a martyr by none other than Trump himself, who’s spoken of her as an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman” unjustly killed because she supported him.

McCarthy and the bulk of House Republicans haven’t gone that far, but in their own news conference denouncing the investigation as a partisan attack, they suggested Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was somehow responsible for the violence on Jan. 6.

Only two Republicans sit on the investigation committee, invited to join by Pelosi as a gesture to the cross-party unity that would be so useful in addressing nation-defining tasks like infrastructure, a raging pandemic, and an attack on U.S. democracy.

One of those Republicans, Rep. Liz Cheney, asked at the hearing, “Will we be so blinded by partisanship that we throw away the miracle of America?”

This week’s evidence on the answer to that question was mixed. Which may actually be a sign of improvement.