Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) insisted that no one wants to relitigate her COVID-19 pandemic lockdown restrictions and that everyone did the “best” they could have done with the information they had. But we should revisit those decisions because if they were the best Whitmer could have done, she shouldn’t be making decisions as a member of any government anymore.
Whitmer was pressed on this in a recent podcast by Caleb Hammer, who asked about restaurant restrictions. “But if I was allowed to be inside outside, why couldn’t I just be inside inside?” he asked. Whitmer said it was because people were only with their small groups, but when Hammer pointed out that restaurant employees were intermingling with all those groups, Whitmer tried to punt the matter away. “Listen, Caleb, none of us wants to go back and relive that. We were doing the best we could with very little or very bad information,” she said.
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This is not true. We should all want to revisit Democratic COVID-19 authoritarianism, particularly from a top offender such as Whitmer, who is also considered a big part of the Democratic Party‘s future. Whitmer didn’t just shut down schools and businesses; she closed the gardening sections of stores. Her rules had no rhyme or reason. As Kaylee McGee White wrote for the Washington Examiner in April 2020, “A friend of mine went to test this out, first at Lowe’s, then at Walmart. At Lowe’s, he was prevented from buying a can of paint, but he was allowed to purchase caulk. At Walmart, he was not allowed to buy a couch, but he could buy a brand-new, flat-screen television.”
Whitmer was also one of a handful of Democratic governors who ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-19-positive patients. Whitmer not only tried to micromanage how people could spend their time during the pandemic, but she also needlessly put elderly people’s lives in danger in a pandemic that we knew early on was particularly dangerous for the elderly.
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What’s more, if this was Whitmer “doing the best” she could, then she is clearly not cut out for governing. Govs. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Brian Kemp (R-GA) led the way for reopenings, putting children back in school before the fall 2020 semester and avoiding the year and a half of lockdowns that Democratic states, such as Whitmer’s Michigan, imposed. Those Republicans did a far better job of focusing their actions on protecting vulnerable populations and not disrupting the lives of most people than Whitmer did. If this was her “best,” she clearly has no business running a lemonade stand, let alone a state.
It should not be forgotten what incompetent governors, such as Whitmer, did during the pandemic. There is a reason she and other Democrats don’t want to relitigate that time period. It’s because they know that the terrible, anti-science decisions that led to excessive lockdowns and restrictions were the “best” that they were capable of, while Republican governors ran circles around them.