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Governor Ducey, Stop the Petty Tyrants
Republican governors have been successfully panicked into letting the same local thugs, who reveled in the powers granted to them during the Great Lockdown, now order American citizens to cover their faces, some with as much legal force as the Saudi religious police. Governor Abbott of Texas at least had the wisdom to forbid any criminal penalties under this exercise in bodily control over every free person. Governor Doug Ducey has not been so bright, and so will rightly accrue state-wide blame against the Republican Party. He must immediately amend his latest executive order, number 2020-40, to prohibit anything more than a parking ticket sort of civil penalty for mask non-compliance.
Mesa, Arizona, is muddling through a middle route, requiring masks in most public indoor settings but not while eating or drinking. They will levy civil fines for persistent non-compliance, limited to $50, following Maricopa County.
Mesa issued its mask order Monday, June 22. It was published as a non-text enabled PDF image file. The city council notably exempted schools, a sane decision. Their order really amounts to requiring mask use in interacting with people indoors. Exceptions include working out in a gym or swimming, as well as sitting at a bar or a restaurant table when served food or drink. There are medical and religious exemptions that may be invoked without challenge.
Maricopa County, which contains the largest Arizona cities, has set a maximum fine of $50 for the second and subsequent violations. Queen Creek had intended to treat its citizens as its masters and as fully enfranchised adults but noted Maricopa County’s order. And then there is Scottsdale.
Scottsdale’s government let their fascist flag fly free, including patronizing language about this all being what is best for you subjects:
Continued failure to comply with an emergency proclamation is a misdemeanor.
Think about that. They had a choice of civil penalties, but they want to put their shiny leather boot firmly on your neck. In the intervening days, they have dug in on their un-Arizona tyranny, reflecting California Democrat ideological contamination.
Governor Ducey has had days to survey local government responses. He should now modify his order, limiting from local government and setting the statewide maximum penalty to mirror the Maricopa County order.
Ducey could use verbiage about the uncertainty of the science, changing official opinions, and the enormous burden placed on Arizona families by government responses to the pandemic. He should rehearse the public policy movement against criminalizing behavior, noting this falls unevenly on those with fewer resources to contest police and prosecutors’ actions.
Each local order cites to and relies upon the governor’s executive order to get at emergency powers. It appears that state law likely limits local orders to the bounds of the governor’s order. Indeed, Governor Ducey gave local governments the green light expressly in his order, while covering with weak verbiage about the focus on educating people into compliance. The relevant statutory language is:
26-307. Power of counties, cities, towns and state agencies designated by the governor to make orders, rules and regulations; procedure
A. State agencies when designated by the governor, and counties, cities and towns may make, amend and rescind orders, rules and regulations necessary for emergency functions but such shall not be inconsistent with orders, rules and regulations promulgated by the governor.
It is an outrage that any government would dare to impose criminal penalties for such an invasive imposition on individual bodily liberty. I had thought we were in a moment of criminal law reform. Since when should any local government be allowed to threaten criminal records for dissent from edicts so poorly supported by “science” or “public health,” with flip-flops at every level of supposed expertise and medical authority?
Ducey, do right! The eyes of Arizona are upon you.
Published in Domestic Policy
No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even come close. Sigh.
May I suggest a fishnet stocking? Hehe . . .
The problem in Scottsdale is the Scottsdale bar scene, where there is a need to get the attention of the young immortals. A simple fine would not be enough for some of those knuckleheads.
I’ll not defend the Scottsdale young and beautiful crowd, but in terms of this disease, they are almost invulnerable to death. So, the real issue is how much interaction they have outside their age cohort with the elderly and health compromised. Not much, I suspect.
Panicking over “cases” rather than death rates seems poor leadership, but may be the leadership necessary to a public dumbed down by years of conditioning in school and all forms of media. Applying civil fines allows officials to say and show they are “doing something.”
And the latest news is this: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott closes bars, dials back restaurants to half-capacity, shuts river rafting
I haven’t received an update on the numbers since June 24th, two days ago. Not sure why one didn’t come through yesterday. Maybe one will come through later today.
Thanks for the Texas updates. Is this the source?
https://dshs.texas.gov/coronavirus/TexasCOVID19DailyCountyFatalityCountData.xlsx
As of June 25, the Texas death toll attributed to COVID-19 is 2296.
Yavapai County, just north of Maricopa, has not had a significant problem with Covid-19. The last I heard, because Gov. Ducey did not make mask-wearing mandatory statewide (unlike Gov. Dimslee here in WA), the mayors of the larger towns in Yavapai County are now taking heat for not imposing their own diktats. Yes, hospital admissions for COVID are up there too, but the hospitals are by no means overwhelmed. (I’m only interested in the hospital admissions, ICU capacity, and death rates in terms of the virus. The rest is just noise.)
The local mayors asked their citizens to be personally responsible and take action to protect themselves and others. Seems like a good conservative approach to me. We’ll see if they get bullied or cave to pressure.
https://www.dcourier.com/news/2020/jun/26/covid-19-update-yavapai-county-reports-46-more-cov/
Note: When I was there a couple of weeks ago, the hospitals only had 1 or 2 cases of Covid-19. On a percentage basis, they’re way up. On a total population basis, it’s a rounding error.
My actual source for the numbers is simply an email that shows up in my inbox from the local paper The Dallas Morning News. The email provides a link to this interactive map and says that the sources for the numbers are the Texas Department of State Health Services and The COVID Tracking Project. So yeah, I would guess at least some of the data comes from that source.
So approximately 30 extra deaths in a day. Thanks for looking that up!
Or it may just be that Abbott has to make some difficult decisions in the midst of uncertainty and in a situation that is not static. There was a day on which New York only had 2,269 deaths. The question isn’t what the data is now but trying, in a time of rapid increase, to figure out where things are going and what steps are appropriate. He may be right or he may be wrong but it is silly to reduce this to a question of whether someone is frightened or not. A younger infected cohort means less hospitalization and less mortality as a percentage but absolute numbers can overwhelm the system. In Maricopa a month ago we had 3,341 cases of those between 20-44 since the start with a hospitalization rate of 6%. Today we have 20,396 in that bracket with a hospitalization rate of only 3% but the absolute number of those hospitalized in the age bracket has almost tripled and cases in that age group are increasing 7-8% per day. We now are facing hospital overload if this continues.
I’ve noticed our local newspaper tries to emphasize coronvirus deaths when they involve young people or people without a serious medical condition. My guess is they want to keep the level of fear up and downplay the fact it’s mostly us already ailing geezers that get the COVID shaft . . .
If they covered influenza this way it would have much the same result.