After Wisconsin court ruling, crowds liberated and thirsty descend on bars. 'We're the Wild West,' [View all]

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May 14, 2020 at 6:24 a.m. CDT

On Wednesday night in the heart of downtown Platteville, Wis., just hours after the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the state’s stay-at-home order, Nick’s on 2nd was packed wall to wall, standing room only.

It was sometime after 10 p.m. when “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” by The Hollies came over the loud speaker and a bartender took out his camera. In a Twitter broadcast, he surveyed the room of maskless patrons crammed together, partying like it was 2019. A few were pounding on the bar to the beat. Some were clapping their hands in the air and some were fist-pumping, a scene so joyous they could have been celebrating the end of the worst pandemic in a century.

Instead, as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) knew, they were just celebrating the apparent end of his power over them — at least for now. Chaos it was.

Right after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a 4-3 ruling, invalidating the extension of the stay-at-home order issued by Evers’s appointed state health chief, the Tavern League of Wisconsin instructed its members to feel free to “OPEN IMMEDIATELY!”

With Evers’s statewide orders kaput, local health authorities scrambled to issue or extend city- or countywide stay-at-home orders, creating a hodgepodge of rules and regulations all across the state that are bound to cause confusion, not to mention some traffic across county lines. It’s a situation unlike any in the United States as the pandemic rages on. But most of all, Evers feared that the court’s order would cause the one thing he was trying to prevent: more death.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/14/wisconsin-bars-reopen-evers/