After special session, Ky GOP owns COVID crisis. Let’s see how they do.
In the end, Kentucky’s special legislative session on COVID-19 could have been worse.
The mostly unmasked Kentucky Republican leadership held what was for them a middle ground and kept us from turning into Florida. That’s a low bar, I realize, but it’s all we’ve got right now. On the education bill, they ended the state mask mandate but also gave educators some of the funding and attendance flexibility they needed. They deftly thwarted Republican Sen. Matt Castlen’s end run to stop any and all mask mandates at the local level. They ignored the blathering of Sen. Adrienne Southworth, R-Lawrenceburg, whose tether to reality looks increasingly frayed, and her bill advocating horse dewormer as a COVID treatment. They stopped the Rogue Caucus in the House from hijacking the whole proceeding.
Republican leaders also banned any future statewide mask mandates and made statewide attempts to fight COVID much more scattershot and confusing. They made Gov. Andy Beshear’s job much harder, which may have been the underlying intent all along.
“They could have done what Florida has done, which is say local school boards can’t require masks,” said Alicia Sells, director of innovation at Ohio Valley Cooperative and longtime educational lobbyist. “They dealt with their frustration with statewide mandates — they tried to push it back to the local level. Everything is as much about local control as anything they could do.”
Many educators are hoping that local schools boards will develop their own matrixes that require masks when COVID cases go up and loosen the rules when they go down. Otherwise, things are going to get even scarier for children and the people who teach them in this state.
Even Fayette Republicans like Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr and Rep. Killian Timoney voted against the final House bill on schools.
“I believe any action to compromise any COVID mitigation strategy when the Delta variant is ravaging the state would not be appropriate and is ill-timed,” said Timoney, a former teacher who oversees the physical plant for the Fayette County Public Schools. “My ultimate concern is saving as many lives as possible.”
It was particularly maddening to see Senate President Robert Stivers and Sen. Ralph Alvarado, R-Winchester, complaining about Beshear and how it’s somehow his fault that people don’t want to get vaccinated because he asks them to all the time. Nine months after the vaccine appeared, we now have Stivers and company handing out free pizza and encouragement from local officials, something that health departments have been doing all this time.
They now own the COVID crisis. Let’s see if they can do better.
As for Alvarado, who is a real medical doctor, his anything-but-the-vaccine diatribes and pushes for monoclonal treatments and a resolution that equates a COVID infection with the same protection as the vaccine, will surely confuse an already confused population. Why would a doctor only advocate for the treatment of a disease that’s already killed 8,000 Kentuckians so far rather than the things that can prevent it?
Sadly, the only true bipartisanship came when the Democrats and Republicans agreed to hand out millions of taxpayer dollars to possibly lure new companies to Hardin County. Yes, economic incentives worked out well with Toyota almost 40 years ago. Today, economic incentives allow companies to play states off each other in a high-stakes poker game. The incentives are also a way to lose money as we did by investing $15 million of taxpayer dollars in a company that planned to build a new aluminum plant but never did. You know what is a surefire way to attract big companies? A healthy, well-educated workforce and a tax code that makes sense.
It was particularly disturbing to hear legislators say in floor speeches that they had signed nondisclosure agreements and could not discuss exactly what they were about to vote on.
Hey, it’s all a mystery these days. We have a higher positivity rate right now than at any point during the last year, but lots of places are going to get rid of masks in schools, and just ... hope for the best?
This story was originally published September 10, 2021 at 12:11 PM.
