It’s a bizarre situation that America’s governors, abandoned by the Trump administration, find themselves in during this pandemic crisis. Life-saving medical equipment is being denied them by a federal response that commandeers their own purchases, whose cost is already driven sky high by a profiteering cabal.

Govs. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts have been obliged to secretly fly personal protective equipment, masks and other life-saving materiel directly into their respective states from China to avoid confiscation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The governor of Alaska conspired with Baker to help.

Meanwhile, governors are organizing themselves to protect their own states and others from administration arm twisting, attempting to cajole them into dangerously too soon “reopening” their economies, which could potentially bring about a cataclysmic Malthusian resurgence of infections and deaths, further endangering first responders.

Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the president’s re-election campaign (advisers to Betsy DeVos and family among them) gin up protests at the state mansions by gun-wielding, anti-stay-at-home order MAGA devotees illegally ignoring social distancing and face covering. Federalist ideologues Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham resist governors’ pleas for appropriations for state and local governments’ depleted coffers to fund their hospitals and first responders savaged by the pandemic. They fear states and municipalities will become (as Politico put it) “disincentivized” to reopen their ravaged economies sooner than is safe.

Let me repeat – sooner than governors and medical experts consider safe! Gov. Mills, stay the course!

Jon St.Laurent

Portland


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