States in best position to make call on opening up
By Froma Harrop / syndicated columnist
You’d think that even a president who claimed “absolute authority” would step aside as groups of West Coast and East Coast governors devise strategies for reopening their economies without causing a spike in coronavirus cases. They know their hot zones and travel patterns across state borders. A president committed to the public weal might even ask the governors, “How may I help?”
But that’s not the president we have. Trump commandeered the national conversation with that ridiculous assertion; and then backed down the next day.
In a Monday tweet, he likened the governors to crew members in “Mutiny on the Bounty” and himself to the captain. In the movie, a group of sailors wrest control of the ship from the sadistic Captain Bligh. Trump may have missed the part when Bligh gets sent off in a rowboat; and the ship sails on. The tweet also refers to “Democrat Governors.” Let the record note that one of the “mutineers,” Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, is a Republican.
Given the rising death toll from the pandemic, this should seem a poor time for Hollywood flippancy. But the stuff about “absolute authority” demanded a serious answer. You could not find a respected constitutional scholar on the left or the right to back that claim. The 10th Amendment states that any powers not listed in the Constitution as belonging to the federal government belong to the states or to the American people. It does not say that state governors have the awful job of closing down their economies and finding scarce ventilators while the president alone has the pleasant task of telling people they can go out again.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/harrop-states-in-best-position-to-make-call-on-opening-up/
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