Southern Mayors Pushed GOP Governors to Take Action on Coronavirus. Governors Push Back
( Criminal )
Matt Sledge
April 9 2020, 6:00 a.m.
In January, as the president insisted the novel coronavirus posed no threat to the United States, Tupelo, Mississippi, Mayor Jason Shelton nervously eyed the grim reports filtering out of Wuhan, China. Shelton had planned a spring vacation in Europe with his pregnant wife. “A babymoon,” the second-term mayor said recently. “The new, trendy thing.” But Shelton and his wife, a nurse practitioner, didn’t like the news from China. They decided the risk of a pandemic spreading to Europe was too great and canceled the trip.
Since then, Shelton has placed Tupelo, population 38,000, in the vanguard of the fight against Covid-19. There were only a few dozen cases in the U.S. when he penned his first executive order in late February, appointing his fire chief to monitor the risk, and on March 22 he issued a decree ordering people to stay home.
Shelton badgered Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves to follow suit for days. When the governor first acted, he classified almost all the state’s businesses as “essential” in an order that threatened to override tighter local rules — until Reeves “clarified” under criticism that local orders could stand.
Throughout the South, Republican governors have followed President Donald Trump’s lead in resisting economic restrictions and orders to stay home. Meanwhile, mayors and local leaders, most of them Democrats, have heeded warnings from public health experts — and in Shelton’s case, his wife — to shut their cities down anyways. As case counts grew, governors tussled with mayors over the extent of local authority, sometimes reversing city orders and even reopening churches.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/09/coronavirus-south-mayors-governors/
