Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz was a moderate Democrat when he served in the House of Representatives, but veered to the left during his two terms as governor. He referred socialism as synonymous with good neighborliness, sought an extremely progressive government agendaand won a f from the Cato Institute on fiscal policy.
Another notable thing about Walz is that he served as governor during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is therefore possible to analyze his approach to the virus – and this record is extremely disturbing. In fact, Walz’s coronavirus policies have been extremely strict and restrictive; Under his leadership, the state has weathered the pandemic in a fundamentally anti-libertarian way.
When the coronavirus first spread, Walz was an enthusiastic promoter of social distancing rules. He described crowds in outdoor public spaces as “a little too big.” He even defended Minnesota ridiculous hotline for COVID-19 tipsters. That’s right: Walz’s government maintained a method for people to report their neighbors for not following social distancing rules. waltz insisted in a recent interview that “one person’s socialism is another’s neighborliness”; denouncing neighbors as insufficiently loyal to government policies is a fundamental aspect of socialismhowever.
When asked by Republicans to take down the hotline, Walz responded, “We are not going to take away a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe.”
And although Walz instructed the police to just issuing citations to people caught violating stay-at-home orders — which is still bad enough — he also maintained the right, via executive order, issue $1,000 fines and send violators to prison for 90 days. His government maintained that private indoor gatherings should be limited to 10 people. Outdoor gatherings were arbitrarily limited to 25 people. On July 23, 2020, Walz declared a statewide mask mandate for most indoor spaces and even some outdoor spaces.
“If we can achieve 90 to 95% compliance, as we have seen the science show, we can drastically reduce infection rates, which slows the spread and breaks that chain,” Walz said at the time. “This is the cheapest and most effective way to open our businesses, get our kids back to school, keep our grandparents healthy and get back that life we all miss. very.”
What followed was the implementation of one of the stupidest COVID-19 rules: restaurant patrons had to wear masks while walking to their table and moving around the establishment, but were allowed to walk without a mask while eating and drinking.
Later in November and December 2020, Walz orders issued and extended for restaurants, gyms and other businesses to close. That included open air meal service for food establishments. More than 150 businesses formed the Reopen Minnesota Coalition and urged the governor to relent, but Walz was unmoved.
In spring 2021, vaccines were widely available to the highest risk groups and people who wanted to protect themselves from the risk of serious illness and death were able to exercise that option. It was only at this point that Walz partially relented and allowed a widespread reopening; however, he maintained capacity limits in place for many companies.
These absurd policies – whose effectiveness is now doubted by top US health officials – are not unique to Minnesota; in fact, they were common in blue states. But Walz was as vigorous an enforcer of them as any of his Democratic peers.
He was also a leading proponent of a monstrous COVID-19 policy choice: sending sick, elderly patients back to nursing homes, where the infection often spreads to other vulnerable people, causing a disproportionate number of coronavirus deaths in those homes. environments. A cover-up of deaths in nursing homes in New York put an end to the political ambitions of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who lied about his involvement in this policy. But Walz was a fellow practitioner; in fact, Walz he said that it was “not a mistake” to return sick people to nursing homes. That statement alone reflects judgment poor enough to be disqualifying from holding higher positions.
Pandemic politics are not as salient today as they were two years ago, and so it remains to be seen whether Walz’s record here matters much to voters. But for those who feel that COVID-19 restrictions have been “the greatest attack on our freedoms in our lifetime”, Walz’s vice presidential candidacy was supposed to be a failure.
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