[[waves from a responsible social distance]]
Congrats on almost making through another week of … this.
You know who also deserves congratulations?
Tennessee state Sen. Katrina Robinson, an intensive care nurse who donned her scrubs and traveled to New York City to help treat coronavirus patients.
Her home state finally implemented its own stay-at-home order at the end of March.
But some states still haven’t done so.
The New York Times has a great tracker, but I’ll save you a click.
Campaign Action
The states whose governors, as of this writing, still haven’t issued statewide stay-at-home orders are
- Arkansas
- Iowa
- Nebraska
- North Dakota
- Oklahoma
- South Dakota
- Utah
- Wyoming
Guess what all these states also have in common?
- They’re run by Republicans. GOP governors, GOP-controlled legislatures.
Kansas happens to be one of the states with a Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature.
- A few weeks back in this space, I wrote about the Sunflower State GOP’s unwillingness to give Gov. Laura Kelly broad authority to use emergency powers to combat the spread of the virus.
- On March 19, lawmakers passed a resolution to extend her emergency powers through May 1.
- The legislature is empowered to reauthorize those powers every 30 days thereafter.
- ... but Republicans also gave themselves the authority to review and revoke some of the ways she uses her emergency powers.
- The measure extending her authority prevents Kelly from taking Kansans’ ammunition (something she’s never given any indication whatsoever she was interested in doing) and gives the GOP-controlled legislature the power to revoke any orders she gives commandeering private property or limiting movement.
- Fast-forward to this week, when Gov. Kelly issued an executive order expanding an earlier one that banned gatherings of more than 10 people to end an exemption for religious gatherings and funerals.
- For those who observe, Easter—a pretty big to-do—is this Sunday.
- And if my own childhood experience is any indicator, if you go to church just once a year, you go on Easter.
- So yeah, this was a smart move ...
- … made smarter by the fact that at least three instances of coronavirus community spread in the state are attributable to church services—a quarter of the known COVID-19 clusters in the state.
- Enter the GOP, who might be taking the whole rising-from-the-dead thing a little too literally, since they clearly have no problem putting Kansans at risk of coronavirus exposure in the name of religion.
- On Thursday, Gov. Kelly filed a lawsuit with the Kansas Supreme Court challenging the LCC’s authority to overturn executive orders.
- Also on Thursday, coronavirus cases in Kansas jumped to 1,106, and deaths from COVID-19 went from 38 to 42.
We all have a lot on our minds and on our plates right now, so it’s totally understandable that you may have missed the voting debacle in Wisconsin this week.
But OH was it a disaster.
- On Tuesday, Wisconsinites were scheduled to cast ballots in both the presidential primary election and in a crucial state Supreme Court race.
- One of these contests, Republicans couldn’t care less about.
- But the stakes for that Supreme Court contest were high.
You see, while these judicial elections are ostensibly nonpartisan, conservatives currently enjoy a 5-2 majority.
- A loss on Tuesday would make the court 4-3 and give progressives a chance to take the majority when the next seat is up in three years.
Enter a deadly worldwide pandemic that’s incredibly communicable.
- Democrats in the state (except the governor, for some reason) clamored for weeks to delay the election and/or broadly expand vote-by-mail.
- Finally, the day before the election was scheduled to be held, Gov. Tony Evers issued an executive order barring in-person voting.
- … an order the Wisconsin Supreme Court promptly overturned (even with the guy on the ballot recusing himself, conservatives still have that 4-2 advantage).
- Republican lawmakers, who have spent the entire last decade eroding democracy in the state via voting restrictions, gerrymandering, and effectively ending campaign finance and ethics oversight, know full well their interests are better served when fewer voters cast ballots.
- So of course they ignored the governor’s pleas to delay the election.
The result?
- Fewer polling places in the most populated areas because poll workers feared for their health too much to staff them.
- Voters standing in hours-long lines and unwillingly coming within six feet of other people during a national health crisis.
- Confusion as many voters who requested absentee ballots but never received them showed up to cast their votes in person.
And we still don’t even know who won.
- Legal wrangling in the days preceding the election resulted in part of one ruling being upheld—a part that extends the deadline for the day by which absentee ballots must be received to April 13.
- And then the count will begin.
- And we’ll be reminded all over again that Republicans are more than willing to use this deadly pandemic as a voter suppression tactic.
Oh, and while Republican lawmakers were extremely busy not postponing the election or taking other steps to make casting ballots safer for Wisconsinites, they were able to make some time to pen a letter to Gov. Evers on a truly crucial matter.
Finally, a bit of non-coronavirus related news.
- Late last year, I wrote about how ousted Republican Gov. Matt Bevin gave Kentucky a huge helping of “screw you guys, I’m going home” on his way out the door in the form of 161 pardons and 419 commutations (though over 300 of those were for people serving time for solely drug-related offenses).
- Really, though, it wasn’t the number of pardons and commutations—it’s some of the folks who received them.
- Take, for instance, Patrick Baker, who was convicted of reckless homicide in 2017 and had served just two years of his 19-year sentence.
- Members of Baker’s family were nice enough to hold a fundraiser for Bevin, and they donated to his gubernatorial campaigns.
- I’m sure you’re shocked to learn that Bevin did not see fit to also pardon Baker’s co-defendants.
- But then there’s Blake Walker, convicted of killing his parents in 2003.
- Or Kurt Smith, found guilty of murdering his six-week-old son.
- Or Delmar Partin, convicted of beheading a woman and stuffing her in a barrel.
- Or Kathy Ann Harless, who left her newborn in an outhouse to die.
- Or Dayton Jones, convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old in 2016
- Or Micah Schoettle, sentenced to 23 years in prison last year for raping a child.
- In fact, when asked in a radio interview in December why he didn’t leave the child rapist case for his successor to consider, Bevin was forced to ask for clarification:
Well, I’m sure you’ll be just shocked to learn that one of the predators whose sentence Bevin commuted is back in jail.
- This week, Dayton Jones was arrested on federal child pornography charges.
- These charges stem from the same 2014 sexual assault for which he was serving 15 years before he was sprung by the outgoing Republican governor.
- Bevin said that he commuted Jones’ sentence because he believed there was “zero” evidence linking him to the assault in question except for the “testimony of kids who were getting a better deal by throwing [him] under the bus.”
Whoops.
… okay so that was not the most uplifting note to end on, but at least you weren’t thinking about coronavirus for half a minute, maybe?
But yeah, it’s quite understandably pretty much all we’re thinking about now.
If you’re wondering action might be afoot in your own statehouse to take on the spread of COVID-19 or to mitigate its effects, economic and otherwise, don’t sleep on this handy NCSL resource of coronavirus-related legislation broken down by state and fully searchable.
Whatever’s going on in your state and locality, take good care of yourself out there. It can be easy to forget when we’re all stuck in our own homes, but we’re actually all in this together.
And right now, someone is looking forward to seeing you. Or talking to you. Or they’re relying on you. Or you’re relying on them. Or they’ve thrown all their pants away because we’re in the throes of a pandemic which sounds an awful lot like a PANTSdemic and you just can’t be too careful these days.