Yesterday, Rep. Louie Gohmert tested positive for COVID-19. While Gohmert, long celebrated around these parts and elsewhere as assuredly America's Dumbest Congressman, bizarrely tried to blame his infection on "wearing a mask so much in the last 10 days or so," reporters quickly began to receive reports from angry-but-anonymous Republican staffers complaining about their Republican bosses mocking masks and ordering offices to remain staffed despite the virus' known presence in the Capitol.
Politico reports that "people who work in the building" are "furious" at Congress' lack of precautions. "Our office has been required to be fully staffed" since June, reported one Republican staffer. "Ridiculing people for wearing masks is also not uncommon," said another. Republican staffers are frustrated that they're not being allowed to take basic precautions for ideological reasons. You know what? Good.
Politico's writeup is full of Republican staffers anonymously angry that their bosses are hostile to mask wearing, are demanding full office staffing, and that taking precautions or "saying anything critical" could lead to "retaliation."
This is absolute self-serving bullshit. These are staffers who have been openly assisting their Republican bosses in inflicting exactly those conditions on everyone else in the country. But they're angry that they are finding themselves in the same boat?
Seriously? These jackasses aren't joking? Piss off.
While Republican staff members are being ordered in to work, the lawmakers they work for are demanding that businesses be fully immunized from liability if they expose workers to COVID-19 due to their own lack of precaution. The demand is that employers be allowed to force employees to work, allowed to fire them if they do not comply, and allowed to ignore pandemic dangers and protocols as desired; the rhetoric is that states not "reopening" quickly enough are doing so for partisan reasons and are violating Our Freedoms.
While Republican staff members are complaining that they cannot wear masks in their offices because their lawmaker bosses will mock them or retaliate against them for going against the party's preferred pandemic stance, those same Republicans have intentionally made mask-wearing a partisan choice throughout America, and for no better reason than to support the egregiously stupid Donald Trump and his plan of ignoring the virus out of existence.
While Republican staff members are complaining that they cannot get tested despite being exposed to, for example, Louie Gohmert, their Republican bosses are standing with Trump to dismiss the need for expansive nationwide testing, to support Trump's decision to wash federal government hands of testing efforts, and in mockingly suggesting that the same massive testing protocols successfully used in other nations could not possibly be accomplished by this one.
This is the Republican Party pandemic platform. Masks are partisan; it's time to "reopen" regardless of virus exposures; testing is unnecessary. Republican staffers have spent the past six months helping their individual lawmakers inflict these catastrophic notions on all of America, but are annoyed that they themselves are facing the consequences of their own broadcasted ideology?
Sympathy is in low supply these days. It seems unwise to waste any here.
The same day Rep. Gohmert announced that he tested positive for the potentially deadly virus, possibly due to wearing masks "so much," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi instituted a new masks-required policy on the House floor. Republican staffers and lawmakers will be required to wear masks or face removal. That will not, however, prevent Republican lawmakers from discouraging mask usage in their own offices.
If Republican staffers have a problem with that, they need to non-anonymously take it up with the lawmakers currently demanding employers be allowed to kill off all the rest of us.