The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.
Six governors from a string of contiguous eastern seaboard states stretching from Rhode Island to Delaware announced that they would form a working group to cooperate on reopening businesses in the region. This kind of state-level coordination is much needed. The federal government hasn’t taken the lead in ordering coronavirus lockdowns, and so it won’t take the lead in reopening economies.
But the composition of the working group is also a little worrisome — because it reveals the potential effects of partisan politics in efforts to fight Covid-19. The original group included Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in
addition to Rhode Island and Delaware. But why weren’t Massachusetts and New Hampshire to the immediate north initially included, or Maryland to the immediate south? What about Vermont, which adjoins New York, or Ohio and West Virginia, which adjoin Pennsylvania? It’s not because they don’t share common challenges and interests in fighting the coronavirus.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s because the initially excluded states all have Republican governors. The six states in the original working group all have Democratic governors. (Three West coast states that formed their own regional group also all have Democratic governors, and Massachusetts, which subsequently joined the East Coast coalition, has a governor — Charlie Baker — who is effectively a Republican in name only.)
Coordination — and by extension, non-coordination — seems likely to have been at least somewhat shaped by partisanship.
The place to begin making sense of this extremely strange situation is the peculiar system of US federalism. In nearly all countries, central government authorities are understood to be the right actors to address crises that cross internal borders. It is a quirk of the late 18th century that the US system reserves to the states what constitutional lawyers call “police powers,†including ordering public health and safety measures like stay-in-place orders and quarantines.
Under the US Constitution as it’s been interpreted for the last 70-plus years, Congress does have the constitutional authority to take public health measures. But Congress hasn’t exercised that authority by enacting legislation that would allow the CDC or some other part of the executive branch to order in-state shutdowns or block the uninfected from traveling between states.
The upshot is that, although President Donald Trump could be doing a lot more than he is to guide the pandemic response at the national level, he doesn’t have the power to order lockdowns. He may claim that his power over reopening is “total,†but the truth is that his “decision†will basically take the form of advice to the states, not a genuine order.
—Bloomberg