Throughout the season of the pandemic, governors and local leaders have bickered, at times fiercely, over the best way to safeguard the public health. But perhaps no place has seen these disputes break out into hostility quite like Georgia this week, which culminated in the governor filing a lawsuit against the mayor of the state’s capital and economic engine.
On Friday, a day after suing the mayor of Atlanta for mandating virus-fighting rules that were stricter than his own, Gov. Brian Kemp said he would not stand down as the mayor’s “disastrous policies threaten the lives and livelihood of our citizens.” Mr. Kemp, a Republican, stood by his decision to sue Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and City Council members over their move to require masks and revert the city to the most restrictive reopening phase.
Ms. Bottoms, a Democrat who has tested positive for the virus herself, responded on Friday by welcoming the fight.
“We’ll see him in court,” she said on NBC’s “Today” show, claiming the governor had “overstepped his bounds” by challenging her order.
The fighting words were exchanged as virus cases in Georgia reached higher than ever this week, with an average of more than 3,100 cases announced each day. About 1,100 of those, on average, are being identified in the Atlanta area, across four of the state’s most populous counties. Deaths in the state are also rising again after weeks of improvement.
There have been feuds in other states over masks and restrictive measures meant to stamp out the virus, but in Georgia the clash between Mr. Kemp and Ms. Bottoms has come at what may be the worst possible time, when state residents are falling ill at record numbers and are looking to their leaders for guidance.
Mr. Kemp has claimed the legal authority to set the rules statewide, while Ms. Bottoms has insisted she is following the guidance of public health experts, an assertion backed up by a report distributed by the White House coronavirus task force that explicitly recommended Georgia “mandate statewide wearing of cloth face coverings outside the home.” Ms. Bottoms may have the upper hand politically in this particular fight, given polls that have routinely shown broad support for aggressive approaches to containing the virus, whether going slowly in re-opening or requiring masks.
“Governor Kemp is making a legal argument that is correct,” said Brian Robinson, who was a spokesman for Nathan Deal, the former Republican governor. “It’s much trickier to determine, long term, who is making the right political calculation. Maybe they’re both playing to their bases.”
While Mr. Kemp has pursued a response to the virus that has been championed by some on the right, he has faced a more skeptical reception by the general public. His decision to reopen large swathes of the Georgia economy in April was widely condemned — even President Trump said it was “too soon”— though there were indications that Georgians had grown less opposed in the weeks that followed.
Last week, Ms. Bottoms ordered Atlanta to return to Phase One of its reopening plan and required face masks in public. The governor quickly countered that Ms. Bottoms’s order was only a recommendation.
Mr. Kemp’s first statewide executive order in April explicitly overrode any local restrictions that strayed from the state’s guidelines. The issue of mask mandates went unmentioned in that initial order, and cities around the state had issued face-covering requirements in recent weeks.
But when the governor extended his executive order on Wednesday, he included specific language suspending any local mandate relating to face masks that was stricter than a strong recommendation that Georgians wear them.
This applied to mask orders in at least a dozen different cities around the state. But while city officials in Savannah, Athens and elsewhere in Georgia insisted that their local orders remained in place, Mr. Kemp on Thursday filed suit against the mayor and council members of one city alone: Atlanta.
Mr. Kemp stressed at a news conference on Friday that people in Georgia should wear masks — he wore one of his own before and after stepping up to the podium — but that he did not want to force anyone to do so.
“While we all agree that wearing a mask is effective, I’m confident that Georgians don’t need a mandate to do the right thing,” he said, later adding that he had a “grave concern” about people, particularly young people, relying too much on the government to tell them what to do.
The roots of the conflict between the governor and mayor may run deeper than a debate over masks.
While Ms. Bottoms and Mr. Kemp have had to overcome political differences common to governors and big city mayors, in the last few turbulent weeks and months, with an unfolding pandemic and protests in the streets, these tensions grew considerably. The national profile of Ms. Bottoms, who has been in contention as a potential Democratic vice-presidential candidate, has grown considerably as well.
“All of the mayors together haven’t been on television as much as she has,” said Shirley Franklin, who was mayor of Atlanta from 2002 to 2010. “And yet here you have a governor who’s in a red state, who barely won his election.”
“It sounds like pure politics to me,” Ms. Franklin said.
The relationship between Atlanta mayors and Georgia governors has always been complicated, even tense at times, but common ground has often been found in less incendiary issues like economic development. This transactional camaraderie was particularly notable with Ms. Bottoms’s predecessor, Kasim Reed, a Black Democrat, who had a chummy relationship with Gov. Nathan Deal, a white Republican.
The era of polarization has made these kinds of relationships more difficult. Mr. Kemp, who narrowly won the governorship with a strong performance among white rural voters, is the first lifelong Republican to be elected governor of Georgia in over a century. And unlike Mr. Reed, who worked for years alongside Republicans in the state legislature, Ms. Bottoms has spent her political career in city government.
Still, there were signs of a healthy relationship once Mr. Kemp took office; in perhaps his most significant gesture of support, the governor conspicuously declined to lend his support to a Republican plan to take over the city’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, legislation that city leaders saw as a grab for its crown jewel. The plan failed.
But that partnership seemed to fray as the pandemic raged and unrest broke out in Atlanta streets, particularly after a white police officer shot a 27-year-old Black man, Rayshard Brooks, in June. Ms. Bottoms publicly criticized the governor for lifting shelter-in-place orders statewide in April and for mobilizing the National Guard in Atlanta after a violent Fourth of July weekend.
Earlier this week, President Trump visited the city and was shown at the airport without a mask, which Ms. Bottoms said in a CNN interview “did violate law in the city.” The governor’s order suspending local mask mandates followed that evening.
For Georgians trying to stay alive in a deadly season, the conflict is little more than an ill-advised distraction.
Tre Perry, the owner of Buzz Coffee and Winehouse in southwest Atlanta, said he thought the governor should spend more time focusing on keeping Georgians safe than picking a fight with the mayor over masks.
After all, Mr. Perry, 44, has been enforcing a mask requirement at his own coffee shop for weeks since it reopened last month. If someone comes in without a mask, an employee politely hands them one. If a customer were to refuse, Mr. Perry said he would ask them to leave.
“We want to make sure that our customers are safe and our employees are safe,” he said. “I will forgo sales if I have to turn someone away if they don’t have a mask on.”
Mitch Smith contributed reporting.
"block" - Google News
July 18, 2020 at 06:25AM
https://ift.tt/2Wzkl3s
While Virus Surges, Georgia Governor Sues Atlanta Mayor to Block Mask Rules - The New York Times
"block" - Google News
https://ift.tt/309gigV
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "While Virus Surges, Georgia Governor Sues Atlanta Mayor to Block Mask Rules - The New York Times"
Post a Comment