The Department of Justice is home to what critics see as a politically motivated investigation into coronavirus deaths in state nursing homes.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating whether four Democratic-led states violated the civil rights of nursing home citizens by demanding that homes do not reject the readmission of other citizens with COVID-19.
All four states had issued regulations to ensure that citizens of coVID-19 nursing homes that were not enough to remain in hospitals were readmitted to their homes.
Care House advocates and former Justice Department officials have criticized the investigation as an openly partisan attack on Democratic governors. He intended to embarrass Democratic governors,” said Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Bar Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and the department of human rights under the Obama administration, said of the investigation.
The Secretary of Auxiliary Justice of the Civil Rights Division, Eric Dreiband, sent letters last week to four Democratic governments. Andrew Cuomo Andrew Cuomo NYT’s editorial board reminds Ginsburg: she ‘will always have two relics’ in New York City to honor Ginsburg with a statue in Brooklyn Bus Driver of New York stunned through passenger Told her to wear an OVER New York mask, Phil Murphy of New Jersey Pennsylvania Court extends barr postal voting deadline : The coronavirus blocks the biggest intrusion into civil liberties since slavery The Hill’s Morning Report – Sponsored through The Air Line Pilots Association – Trump, Biden could no longer be another climate replacement PLUS Pennsylvania and resident Gretchen Whitmer Gretchen WhitmerMichigan puts on the lawn with the sign ‘Put mail on the ballots here’ ‘Sunday shows a preview Judge Ginsburg dies, triggering a partisan war over the pre-election vacuum that requests documents and data on how public retirement homes in his states have responded to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Protecting the rights of some of the most vulnerable members of society, adding up to the older citizens of retirement homes, is one of our country’s top obligations,” Dreiband said in a statement.
The firm said it was “evaluating whether to open an investigation,” meaning it hadn’t initiated an investigation.
Smith said it was up to the firm to publish an initial investigation.
Usually, “this would be resolved at a much, much quieter point of decline, because you’re much more likely to get the data you’re looking for and use it if there’s a challenge that justifies an investigation or not,” Smith said.
The DOJ said it plans to open an investigation under the Institutional Civil Rights Act, a 40-year federal law for Americans in government establishments such as prisons, prisons, state-owned intellectual fitness services, and nursing homes.
However, 6% of all nursing homes in the country are publicly run, raising questions about the scope of any prospective investigation.
The time for the announcement, which came in the middle of the Republican National Convention and just over two months before Election Day, also raised considerations that the Justice Department armed for political purposes.
“It’s an abuse of power. It intends to be an apolitical state of civil rights . . . and what the symptoms imply is that it’s being used to embarrass the president’s political opponents,” said Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan. who was the head of the civil rights official in former President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security.
Supporters of nursing home industry reform have said nursing services are under study.
The four states that obtained letters from the Department of Justice issued questionable orders at the beginning of the pandemic that nursing homes cannot reject patients who tested positive for COVID-19, as long as they are medically stable. These adjustments were meant to alleviate the overcrowded hospitals, that sent patients to help build capacity.
How specific he has been criticized for his policy, which was eventually rescinded in May.
Health advocates, nursing home citizens and their families, and nursing home operators said the policy was wrong and had helped spread the virus among the state’s most vulnerable citizens.
The pandemic “revealed the general situation we show for the lives of others living in nursing homes, service apartments, and other adult care facilities. And this has been reproduced, I think, largely through Cuomo, and to some extent also through [other governors], said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long-Term Community Care Coalition.
“These citizens were simply not vital at all,” Mollot added.
Nursing homes were decimated through COVID-19, once the virus is installed in a nursing home, it can pass on to citizens and staff. Citizens of nursing homes account for about 35-40% of all coronavirus deaths in the United States.
According to the COVID Monitoring Project, more than 6,600 people died from COVID-19 in nursing homes and other long-term care services in New York City, representing 26% of deaths in the state. This number may simply be higher because New York does not count the deaths of citizens transferred to hospitals.
Cuomo defended politics, saying he followed the federal rules and citizens of long-term care services against discrimination. He called the complaint politically motivated and brazen it as a “political massacre. “
Together with Whitmer, they rejected the Justice Department’s request, calling it “openly partisan misappropriation. “
In Congress, house majority leader James Clyburn (DS. C. ), president of the organization overseeing the federal reaction to coronavirus, presented a wide- outreach investigation into the country’s five largest for-profit retirement home companies, but also called the DOJ a “politically based investigation” into a The Hill.
Lawyers said some Democratic governors should not be blamed.
“One component of the challenge is that the federal government has taken a step back from the outset in publishing specific express guidelines, whether for nursing homes and states, so they left it to states,” Mollot said.
“And the states did, for better or worse, what they could. And I think some of the policies that were adopted, for example in New York and New Jersey, reflected that,” Mollot said.
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