Silly protests and political cheap shots by KY GOP won’t get the economy open any sooner
That we will get through this together is true up to a point.
That point, I guess, is when the opposing political party decides it just can’t take any more laudatory national stories about Kentucky’s Mr. Rogers and how well he’s handling the pandemic. So they start hitting him with spurious accusations of this and that, a painfully obvious attempt to win back the news cycle.
First it was Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul nattering on about religious freedom because Beshear asked people not to spread the virus on Easter Sunday. Mitch must still be smarting from the NYT bestseller “Mitch, Please” and a Jane Mayer takedown in the New Yorker that revealed even his own daughters don’t like his politics. And Elf King Rand Paul, the guy who wandered around the Senate as he waited for COVID-19 test results, is now telling Beshear to “take a step back?’
Then the Republican constitutional officers criticized Beshear for criticizing the Legislature for coming back to Frankfort to override his vetoes. Then the state Republican Party said Beshear isn’t doing enough to reopen the economy and Republican legislators offered up their own plan to do so. (It didn’t pass in the last hours of the Senate.) Lo and behold, by Wednesday afternoon, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce introduced their “Restart” plan, which is vague, based as it is on nudging the governor, rather than actual steps.
Then there was the goon squad that showed up at the Capitol Wednesday, squawking about liberty and abortion and business as Beshear announced how many Kentuckians had died the day before. They crowded each other without face masks, while yelling nonsense, which might be some kind of Darwinian exercise. We’ll find out in about two weeks. They planned more protests for Friday.
Here is the thing. It’s lovely to talk about reopening the economy, but it can’t happen until there is much more personal protective equipment for everyone and much more testing to see who has the virus and who doesn’t.
“Key to avoiding a second round of infections, death and social distancing is robust testing for the virus, so that public health authorities can quickly identify any new flare-ups and contain them before they spread,” said a Bloomberg News story titled: “Trump’s Ambition to Reopen U.S. Hinges on Elusive Testing.”
In other words, we need widespread testing to gauge how many people have already had the virus or how many people are sick, and we need more PPE so there’s enough for both frontline hospital workers and your family dentist. As many people predicted, when social distancing works and death rates are low, people say it was an overreaction. That may be what’s happening now, but ease up too soon, and you’ll get another curve. I’m going to trust the public health officials on this.
So what have these fearless leaders been doing to help the governor secure these materials? Secretary of State Michael Adams is too busy making sure poor people won’t be able to vote while Attorney General Daniel Cameron is too busy trying to block women from getting abortions.
In the Legislature, Sen. Ralph Alvarado is a doctor employed by nursing homes, which are currently major COVID-19 hotspots around the state. Is he working to get them more protective gear? No, he was holding forth on the Senate floor how the most dangerous place to be right now is “inside a mother’s womb,” because Beshear has allowed the only two abortion clinics in the state to stay open.
Let’s turn instead to Somerset, where Mayor Alan Keck is less interested in political posturing than in getting something done. (The mayor is a non-partisan position, but he’s a registered Republican.) He’s hearing from people who are just as worried about their livelihoods as getting COVID-19. He thinks the governor could make some very strategic decisions to let some businesses reopen carefully. For example, he said, one person going to the chiropractor could not be more dangerous than hitting Lowe’s on Saturday afternoon.
“Let’s be strategic and systematic, but we can’t wait forever in terms of risk elimination,” Keck said. “We have to have bold risk mitigation strategies ... phasing in common sense solutions but already carry less risk than things already open.”
He’s right. We have to weigh whether we sit inside until a vaccine is developed, probably at least a year out, or figure out some ways to get back to normalcy. But what we don’t want is to throw the doors open, hit a COVID surge, and start all over again.
But Keck is also right that it has to happen with planning and pragmatism, not political cheap shots. On Wednesday, Beshear announced he’s in discussions for a regional reopening plan with a consortium of states that include Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan. He also, to his credit, said he had “maybe underestimated” how much people want to hear about the next steps. He needs to get even more specific about plans to assuage his very antsy constituents across the state.
I’m sure it must be very very difficult for the GOP to watch Beshear, who squeaked into office with 5,000 votes just because the other guy was such a jerk, now commanding laudatory state and national headlines for his virus wrangling. That must be galling. But please do better than this empty grandstanding. What most people would like to see is that we really are in this together.
This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 9:55 AM.
