Garcia Tweets Concept of Nat'l COVID Memorial As If It's His Idea, But It's Not; Fed'l Bill Proposed It In July, NPR Article Detailed Concept In Early December

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(December 27, 2020, 3:20 p.m.) -- On December 26, 2020, Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia (passed over by President-elect Biden for a cabinet position and by Gov. Gavin Newsom for a U.S. Senate appointment) wrote that he'd "been thinking a lot about the over 330,000 Americans that have died and the tens of thousands more that we are likely to lose before this is all over. The United States must build a national remembrance memorial. And I’m looking forward to helping anyway I can."

I've been thinking a lot about the over 330,000 Americans that have died and the tens of thousands more that we are likely to lose before this is all over.

The United States must build a national remembrance memorial. And I’m looking forward to helping anyway I can.
— Robert Garcia (@RobertGarcia) December 26, 2020

What Garcia omitted from his Dec. 26 Tweet (inviting readers to attribute the idea to him) was that on Dec. 8, NPR published a story detailing in positive terms the concept of a national COVID-19 memorial

And the NPR story omitted something else: on July 16, 2020, Congressman Adriano Espaillat [D, NY) 3ntroduced HR 7629 proposing to create a Commission to examine the possibility of creating a National COVID-19 memorial in the Bronx, New York. (House Dem leadership referred HR 7629 to the House Committee on Natural Resources.which sent it to its Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands; it held no hearings on the bill meaning it will die when the current Congress ends in January 2021.)

HR 7629, dubbed the "COVID-19 National Memorial Act".proposed to create a 15 member Commission (including the Nat'l Park Service Director and 14 members chosen by the Secretary [presumably Secretary of the Interior.].to within three years submit "a report containing recommendations for the planning, design, construction, and long-term management of a permanent memorial and the boundaries of the memorial site..."

But there's no reason why other proposals -- on a COVID-19 memorial's location and how to implement the concept -- have to follow that model. Other proposals could be very different.

The idea (given mainstream momentum by NPR) could easily advance in the new Congress or elsewhere. With his Dec. 26, Tweet, Mayor Garcia has quietly positioned himself to advance the idea further.

Mayor Garcia is already a prominent media presence in national coverage of COVID-19, with outlets frequently noting that his mother and step-father perished from COVID-19.

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