INDIANAPOLIS — President Trump, Vice President Pence and Gov. Holcomb face the most daunting policy dilemma so far this century, which is how and when do they reopen the economy?
I publish the Howey Politics Indiana Daily Wire, a news aggregation service, and here were the top headlines on Wednesday:
Governor sees gradual rolling reopening;
Dr. Box ‘cautiously optimistic’ on surge;
Holcomb preparing for fall virus breakout;
Pence says economy will reopen at ‘responsible’ moment;
Spike in people dying in their homes;
Rep. Hollingsworth says reopening economy worth risking death;
Historic fall for U.S. retail;
Banking execs tell Trump more testing needed for public confidence;
Conferences tell Pence football can’t happen until campuses reopen.
In the Daily Wire’s “Nation” section, there were stories of “hundreds” of protesters against Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and “thousands” rallying against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay at home orders. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told CNN that sports and concerts in Tinseltown would not return until 2021. “Nothing I’ve heard would indicate that we’ll be in those large, thousands-of-people gatherings anytime soon, and probably not for the rest of this year,” Mayor Garcetti said. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said this was the “new normal,” adding, “The notion that we’re going to go back to some sort of, let’s just turn the clock back to three months ago, I just don’t see it.”
All of this for the COVID-19 virus that has sickened less than 1% of the population, killing a fraction of those. But this virus has swamped emergency rooms, killing nurses, first responders and nursing home workers. It will continue to spook the population until there’s a vaccine, which could be 12 to 18 months away.
Red states like Nebraska and South Dakota, where Republican governors resisted stay at home orders, are now dealing with virus hot spots that are impacting the food chain.
Last Saturday, President Trump said he would use “facts and instincts” to make a recommendation. By Monday, he declared, “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. The governors know that. The president of the United States calls the shots.” Not so, according to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But Trump will wield considerable influence.
On Wednesday, Gov. Eric Holcomb described a gradual “rolling” economic reopening, adding that he, Trump and Pence are seeing the same data. Just minutes before, Indiana Health Commissioner Kristina Box said the governor’s stay at home order was working. “We may be seeing that peak flattened and that kind of plateauing effect,” she said. The number of cases and deaths during the virus surge are not as high as some models predicted.
Holcomb explained, “We’re letting the data drive our decision. We’re looking at the cases and the deaths. We’re also contemplating how we’re going to be able to track former positives and how they recovered and what stage they are in.” He vowed the state will hire an “army” to perform testing and contact tracing vital to reopening the economy. But that will take time.
“In terms of how we will reopen or reengage on an economic front, it will be a rolling reopen,” Holcomb continued. “It won’t be all at once. It won’t be flipping a light switch. We’re working with our business community. We want to make sure employees have a very high level of confidence about the workplace. We’ll be looking at our testing ability and our tracing ability. I’ve been in touch with the governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, I’ve also reached out to the governor of Illinois and the governor of Michigan. I want to make sure we all know, because we’re neighborly and share a border. We’re not going to act alone in this. We’re all in this together.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Trey Hollingsworth told WIBC, “We are going to have to look Americans in the eye say ‘We are making the best decisions for the most Americans possible’ and the answer to that is, unequivocally, get Americans back to work.”
Asked about potential deaths, Hollingsworth responded, “There is no zero-harm choice here. Both of these decisions will lead to harm for individuals, whether that’s dramatic economic harm or that’s the loss of life. It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say ‘It is the lesser of these two evils. And it is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these evils and we intend to move forward with that direction.”
The danger of reopening too soon is that it could stoke a resurgence of cases. The political consequences for Trump and Pence, should that happen, could be calamitous. Not reopening soon enough will mean the collapse of tens of thousands of small businesses, and other individual health crises like stress, heart attacks and suicides.
Ultimately it will be consumers who will make the final call. If you don’t feel safe, you’re not going to go to your neighborhood bar, the ballgame, the shopping mall or school. If there’s a virus resurge, the economy shuts down again, with unknown consequences.
Thus, we face the most daunting dilemma of our lives, with no easy answers.
The columnist is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com. Find Howey on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol.
