CNN's Louis Slams GOP for 'Pure Negativity' in Opposing Biden Policies

Cross posted to the MRC's NewsBusters blog

On Tuesday's New Day on CNN, as the show started to catch up with covering the scandal currently hitting Governor Andrew Cuomo, CNN political commentator Errol Louis was spinning hard to downplay the significance of the New York Democrat sending COVID patients into hundreds of nursing homes last March, endangering the most vulnerable residents of his state.

The former left-wing politician-turned journalist also went negative on the Republican party, suggesting that they are incapable of taking part in governing, and are merely practicing "pure negativism."

In the first hour of the show, Camerota brought on Louis -- who is also a reporter for Spectrum News in New York -- to discuss the possibility of congressional Republicans working with President Joe Biden on economic relief. After Camerota recalled that the percentage of Americans reporting that they are hungry is about the same as it was a year ago, she declared that "something has to happen, like, now," and then went to Louis for his reaction.

Louis -- a regular on the show for several years -- immediately went negative on Republicans:

Well, that's right, but you're thinking rationally, and you're thinking from the point of view of what will help the people. Politicians, of course, think very differently. And in this case, you've got Republicans on sort of this kind of downward spiral into pure negativism, you know. I mean, this is what we saw after the mortgage crash in 2008 and 2009 where in the absence of any kind of a positive program, they simply say, "No," right? So acting as the party of "no," they delayed stimulus back then.

He then suggested that ObamaCare would have been more popular if Republicans had supported it:

They're going to do it again. Back then, they got in the way of what would have been an otherwise really popular, according to all polls, Affordable Care Act. And they fought and they fought and they fought and they fought. They tried to shut down the government over it. This is where we are.

By contrast, when congressional Democrats were opposing Donald Trump administration policies --like improving border security -- no one on CNN ever suggested that his policies would be more popular if Democrats would support their President.

The former left-wing politician -- who has a history of running for the New York City Council decades ago, sometimes as a Green and sometimes as a Democrat -- then suggested that Republicans are incapable of contributing anything useful toward governing:

And, frankly, Alisyn, this is the true crisis within the Republican party. They've got a lot of problems over there. They've got a lot of problems that involve Donald Trump -- we often get distracted by that -- but at the core of it, the problem is there's no governing philosophy that enables you to take something like a pandemic, an ice storm, climate change, infrastructure needs, mass hunger, mass unemployment -- they don't have any way to deal with it. They go right back to the same talking points, which is always "cut government" and attack anything the Democrats attempt to do. It's not a very sound policy.

During the third hour of the show, during a discussion of revelations that Governor Cuomo's administration withheld the total number COVID patients who died after contracting the illness in nursing homes, Louis argued that the matter does not deserve to be described as a "cover-up" as he declared:

Cover-up might be too strong of a word, Alisyn, but it wasn't a void. "Void" is certainly the wrong word. There was deliberate confusion. There was information that was not conveyed clearly. There was a misrepresentation of the situation that was going on, and it was, you know, tragically unnecessary. The most important thing is that the policy changed fairly quickly. The governor made a mistake -- the state health department, they made, they issued an order that, in the early hectic days of the pandemic, what might have seemed reasonable but did not work out well.

He then went on to argue that it was difficult to know how many nursing home residents contracted COVID as a result of COVID patients being transferred there as opposed to catching it from staff or visitors.

This episode of CNN's New Day was sponsored in part by Liberty Mutual. Their contact information is linked.

Transcripts follow:

CNN

New Day

February 16, 2021

6:19 a.m. Eastern

ALISYN CAMEROTA: I don't know, Errol. It's not like fewer Americans are suffering now. I mean, you know, I certainly understand the debate about whether to put the minimum wage in there and whether it should be $15. There's obviously debate on both sides of those. But in terms of Americans, the food scarcity, the food lines at food banks that we have seen wrapping around. I mean, here is where we are, okay. So 11.2 (percent) of adults in households went hungry in the last seven days, okay, compared to October that was 12 percent, and in August it was 10 percent. Nothing has changed. So something has to happen now, like, now.

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, that's right, but you're thinking rationally, and you're thinking from the point of view of what will help the people. Politicians, of course, think very differently. And in this case, you've got Republicans on sort of this kind of downward spiral into pure negativism, you know. I mean, this is what we saw after the mortgage crash in 2008 and 2009 where in the absence of any kind of a positive program, they simply say, "No," right? So acting as the party of "no," they delayed stimulus back then. They're going to do it again. Back then, they got in the way of what would have been an otherwise really popular, according to all polls, Affordable Care Act. And they fought and they fought and they fought and they fought. They tried to shut down the government over it. This is where we are.

And, frankly, Alisyn, this is the true crisis within the Republican party. They've got a lot of problems over there. They've got a lot of problems that involve Donald Trump -- we often get distracted by that -- but at the core of it, the problem is there's no governing philosophy that enables you to take something like a pandemic, an ice storm, climate change, infrastructure needs, mass hunger, mass unemployment -- they don't have any way to deal with it. They go right back to the same talking points, which is always "cut government" and attack anything the Democrats attempt to do. It's not a very sound policy. That's why, in the last two years, they lost control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

(...)

8:30 a.m.

CAMEROTA: Errol, let me just start with you, Is there a cover-up here? Was there a cover-up?

LOUIS: Cover-up might be too strong of a word, Alisyn, but it wasn't a void. "Void" is certainly the wrong word. There was deliberate confusion. There was information that was not conveyed clearly. There was a misrepresentation of the situation that was going on, and it was, you know, tragically unnecessary. The most important thing is that the policy changed fairly quickly. The governor made a mistake -- the state health department, they made, they issued an order that, in the early hectic days of the pandemic, what might have seemed reasonable but did not work out well. 

The fact that we've had a number of deaths that were then sort of merged or portrayed in a way that was confusing, made it hard to perceive exactly what was going on and that's just not right. So this is not a cover-up in the sense that, you know, people were fired or files were destroyed or anything like that. The information was out there -- or at least the administration had it -- they just refused to tell the public what it had a right to know.

(...)

CAMEROTA: Errol, it was hard to follow along with some of the minutia that the governor talked about yesterday in his long press conference, but what he seemed to be saying was here were the numbers. So he was talking about yesterday, in terms of the coronavirus patients who were released from hospitals back to nursing homes, he basically was trying to say it didn't change the outcome. So here's that moment.

GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO (D-NY): So there are 1,300 nursing homes in the state -- 365 received a person from a hospital. Of the 365 that received a person from this March 25th guidance, which was then superseded in May, 98 percent of those 365 already had covid in their facility.

CAMEROTA: What about that, Errol? Could something have been done differently? Did what he decided to do change the outcome?

LOUIS: Well, that's the thing that we can't really be sure of. Even with that spate of numbers that you just reran. Look. Here's the problem. If people were coming from a hospital and they had COVID and they were going into a nursing home and it wasn't clear who in that nursing home had COVID, you can't necessarily attribute it to that one move. All you can do is try and get a sense of what's going on by looking at all of the numbers. And that is what people were so desperate to try and find out. That's why press organizations kept asking for the data from the administration.

That's why the administration really needed to release that information so that, collectively, all of us could put our heads together. We could put some data scientists on it -- we could try and figure out what might be going on, and, most importantly, we could tell families how to make the best decision possible about whether to remove a loved one from a nursing home and maybe try a different alternative to try and keep that person safe. We can't know what would have happened. We can't know what should have happened. But we do know that we didn't