Republicans have been clearing the way for the coronavirus since early April 2020, when they found that COVID-19 seemed to be hitting Democratic cities and states hardest, with Black and Latino frontline workers particularly vulnerable in the early days of the pandemic.
Donald Trump and his minions apparently calculated the virus would kill more Democrats than Republicans in the election year, so the White House canceled plans to send cloth masks to every US household, which would have protected against transmission of the virus, in April 2020. By January, 400,000 Americans had perished, the economy had fallen off the cliff and Trump was out of a job.
After Joe Biden became president, he found the Trump administration had not developed a system to deliver to the American people the vaccines that were becoming available. Biden’s first priority was to organize the distribution of the vaccines, free of charge, across the country.
The pandemic had peaked in January 2021, when an average of more than 3,100 people died from COVID-19 every day. More than 246,000 new cases were reported daily in the week before Jan. 8. As the Biden administration rolled out the vaccines, the pace of shots grew to more than four million on some days in April. By July more than half the US population had received at least one dose of vaccine and new daily cases had dropped below 12,000 in June and early July, raising hopes that a return to normalcy was possible.
Meanwhile, right-wing media, led by Fox “News,” amplified concerns that the vaccines were rushed into production and masking requirements violated civil rights. Vaccines were welcomed in the “blue” Democratic cities but treated with relative indifference in “red” Republican areas. As numbers of COVID cases and deaths declined in the summer, Republican governors, with a few exceptions, continued to follow Trump’s lead in playing down the usefulness of getting the shots and wearing masks to prevent the infection of others, and the vaccination rates trailed those of states governed by Democrats.
When the Delta variant emerged in July and caused a surge of COVID infections the month before schools reopened, Republicans doubled down on resistance to anti-COVID measures, denying schools and businesses the authority to require employees or customers to be vaccinated, or to require teachers, staff and students to be vaccinated or wear masks to prevent transmission of COVID.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, who faces Republican primary challengers from the right next year, asked hospitals to halt non-emergency medical procedures as COVID-19 patients strained wards already struggling with a shortage of nurses. But he still banned local governments from implementing mask and vaccine mandates.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to defund school districts that defied his executive order prohibiting mask mandates for students — while the state saw its rates of hospitalization from COVID surge past the worst levels of 2020.
And in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem welcomed an estimated 525,000 mainly unmasked revelers to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally again Aug. 6-15. Last year the rally was credited with helping spread the virus throughout the Midwest. In the weeks after this year’s rally, COVID cases rose dramatically, from an average of 54 new cases per day in early August to 440 new cases per day in early September.
Republicans tripled down after President Biden, in response to the Delta surge filling hospital ICUs with COVID patients, issued an executive order on Sept. 9 to force businesses with more than 100 employees to provide a safe workplace by requiring employee to be vaccinated (or be tested weekly for COVID). He also threatened to withhold federal funding from hospitals and nursing homes; as well as federal contractors. More than 100 million workers would be affected by Biden’s order.
Republicans complained that Biden’s initiative was unacceptable. They continue to oppose government efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic, which by that time had killed more than 650,000 Americans. Republican governors vowed to sue the administration to block the requirements.
Biden replied, “Have at it.” He added, “I am so disappointed, particularly that some of the Republican governors have been so cavalier with the health of these kids, so cavalier with the health of their communities.”
The authority of governments to impose vaccines has been established since at least 1905, when the Supreme Court issued a 7-to-2 ruling, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, that Cambridge, Mass., could require all adults to be vaccinated against smallpox.
It is questionable whether the president could require all Americans to get shots. But the president can use the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to require that companies maintain safe workplaces with vaccination, under the federal government’s well-established constitutional power to regulate commerce.
Republicans argue that Biden’s plan is a big-government attack on states’ rights, private business and personal choice, reflecting their appeal to neo-Confederate and neo-fascist voters that Trump brought into the party, and who now hold the balance of power in Republican primaries.
Texas Gov. Abbott, for whom 60,000 COVID deaths was no cause for alarm, called Biden’s actions an “assault on private businesses.” Abbott issued an order protecting Texans’ “right to choose” whether or not they would be vaccinated, an ironic turn of phrase given the controversial new Texas law to remove women’s right to choose abortion. “Texas is already working to halt this power grab,” Abbott wrote, referring to the federal public health requirements.
Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, whose state has 19,187 COVID deaths so far, wrote, “The Biden-Harris administration is hammering down on private businesses and individual freedoms in an unprecedented and dangerous way.” He questioned how many workers would be displaced, businesses fined, and children kept out of the classroom because of the mandates, and he vowed to push back.
In a fund-raising email, Florida Gov. DeSantis, with 48,772 deaths, wrote, “Joe Biden has declared war on constitutional government, the rule of law, and the jobs and livelihoods of millions of Americans.”
The Republican Governors Association hopes to use the anti-COVID policies as a wedge issue against vulnerable Democratic governors up for re-election in 2022. “Let’s see who Democrat governors side with: Joe Biden or the families and businesses they were elected to represent,” the group said in a Sept. 9 statement.
If Republicans want to be known as the pro-COVID party, so be it. Recent polls suggest that a solid majority of Americans support vaccinations and, at least in schools, they support mask mandates for staff and children to protect those who can’t get vaccinations.
Republicans are completing their rebrand from the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Trump, and from the Grand Old Party (GOP) to the Grand Sociopathic Party (GSP) and the Big Lie Party (BLP). They scorn masks as a sign of their resistance to public health requirements. They appear willing to die on that hill (or, to be more accurate, let their supporters die, as most Republican “leaders,” and all the Fox “News” hosts, have been vaccinated).
The rest of us can thank science that we can take the vaccine to protect ourselves and wear a mask in public to protect our neighbors from what has become the Republican Flu. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2021
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