Governor of Texas Greg Abbott talks with Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, not pictured, before a briefing on border security Wednesday February 1, 2017 at the Texas Department of Public Safety regional headquarters in Weslaco, Texas. Secretary Kelly and Abbott toured the Texas border with Mexico in a helicopter following the briefing. (photo by Nathan Lambrecht/Pool)
Governor Greg Abbot has outlined how Texas will lead America’s reopening. John Daniel Davidson outlines Abbot’s plan in The Federalist:
In what could be the beginning of America’s resurgence from the coronavirus pandemic, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Monday he will let the state’s stay-at-home order expire at the end of the month and allow some businesses to reopen Friday, with restrictions. It marks the boldest loosening of pandemic restrictions since states began issuing lockdown orders last month, and could mark a path ahead for reopening the rest of the country.
A second phase of reopening could come as soon as May 18, Abbott said, so long as Texas sees “two weeks of data to confirm no flare-up of COVID-19.” The governor’s order supersedes local orders by mayors and county commissioners, so if all goes well most businesses in Texas could be open by June.
Simply put, Americans have to get back to work. A nation of 330 million people cannot subsist on debt-financed government handouts for very long, and now that evidence is emerging that the virus is not as deadly as we all feared it would be, it’s time for governors to get real.
What Texas and Georgia and Oklahoma have in common is that they have not seen a coronavirus outbreak on the scale of New York or New Jersey.
There are of course some governors who don’t seem to get it.
Over the weekend, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers ( Democrat) extended his stay-at-home order ( simply an anti -Trump stunt)another month, prompting thousands of angry Wisconsinites to descend on the state capitol in protest and others to flood his office with complaints. For context, Wisconsin has had fewer than 6,000 cases and only 266 deaths from COVID-19. If Texas can reopen—with appropriate precautions in place—then surely Wisconsin can.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist.
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