What Happened When the Georgia Governor Tried to Open the State?

From the Brownstone Institute

The journalists have fallen down on the job. To say the least.

Three years ago, all normal rights and liberties of the people were trampled on by governments everywhere. It was all for naught. The virus came and became endemic as it always would in any case. And as societies opened up gradually, we were left with unbearable carnage: economic, cultural, and public health. The damages continue to hammer the world in the form of health and economic losses, and now we face a growing financial and banking crisis.

One might assume that professional journalists would be all over this, digging into every nook and cranny to discover precisely how all this came to be. Alas, there is a weird game of pretend going on in the mainstream press: pretend lockdowns were fine, pretend the shots worked, and pretend that today’s shattered politics and economics have nothing to do with the outrageous actions that were perpetuated on people the world over.

As a result of this tremendously odd conspiracy of silence, the journalistic duty has fallen to people independent of the mainstream, writing for Brownstone, Substack, and a handful of other venues.

And yet, every once in a while, something does leak through in a large venue. That happened this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. The opinion page editor James Taranto took a trip to Georgia to talk with Governor Brian Kemp. The result is “Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior.”

The thesis is that Kemp has been battling woke culture longer than anyone else while rarely getting the credit.

That’s interesting but not the real revelation of the piece. What it really does is dig deeply into the most interesting aspect of the last three years: how it came to be that Georgia was the first state to open following lockdowns and how the White House responded. On this subject, the piece absolutely breaks new ground, so much so that it is worth quoting the relevant passages here.

In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”

The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.

That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:

“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”

Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”

“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”

“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”

Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”

The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’ ”

At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”

Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”

What’s utterly remarkable here is that readers gain an inside look into the difficult spot into which Trump’s White House had placed Republican governors. The whole machinery of DC had been marshaled with Trump’s approval. The order read: “indoor and outdoor venues where people can congregate should be closed.” He issued this order on March 16 and expected full compliance, and then lobbied for trillions in welfare to the states to make sure they stayed locked down.

Only South Dakota with Kristy Noem refused. And for that she was dragged through the mud of media lies for two years because she allowed motorcyclists, for example, to organize and ride in her state. The fake studies coming out about the Sturgis bike rallies set a new low standard for real-time science.

Georgia is important because it was the first state to open. Trump tweeted his opposition to this move both in general and then, two weeks later, in opposition to Kemp’s opening.

Every bit of documentation absolutely contradicts Trump’s claim that he “left that decision up to the Governors” as a matter of his own intention. It was his intention to achieve what he later bragged he had done, which is “turned it off.”

I won’t belabor this anymore because we’ve covered this in more detail here and here.

And yet for weeks now, Trump has been telling visitors to Mar-a-Lago, and his coterie has backed him up, that he never locked down and only people like Kemp and DeSantis did this over his objections. Daily I get calls from people who are stunned that this outright attempt to falsify history is happening. But these days, it is just part of public life, I suppose.

This is why we must be grateful for people like Taranto for digging more deeply into the actual history of what happened in those fateful months from 2020 when life itself was completely upended by dreadful decision-making from the White House. If we had more journalists interested in what actually happened, rather than just pretending that either what happened was perfectly normal or that it didn’t happen at all, we would be far closer to getting to the truth, and making sure that such a calamity never repeats itself.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

When politicians gamble, taxpayers lose

Environment / 11 hours ago

Climate Alarmists Want To Fight The Sun. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

International / 12 hours ago

U.S. birth rate hit record low last year, signaling surge in childlessness

COVID-19

Canada’s COVID vaccine injury program has paid out just 6% of claims so far

Published on May 1, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Data from Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program shows that to date, only 138 of the 2,233 claims have been approved by a medical board for a payout.

Canada’s program for those injured by the COVID vaccines, which the federal government still insists are safe, has only paid out 6 percent of the claims made.

A look at the data from the nation’s Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) shows that to date, only 138 of the 2,233 claims made to the program have been approved by a medical board for payout.

Some 2,069 claims have had an “administrative review completed” with 1,825 being deemed “admissible,” but remain in the process of “being depersonalized and prepared to move forward to a preliminary medical review.” Some 620 claims have been assessed by the Medical Review Board but are still under review.

Total payouts so far stand around $11.2 million, with the number of people filing claims to the program growing steadily.

LifeSiteNews recently reported that the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recently tabled 2024 budget earmarked an extra $36 million for the program.

Some people who were successful in getting payouts from VISP have said that the compensation awarded was insufficient considering the injuries sustained from the COVID shots.

As reported by LifeSiteNews last year, 42-year-old Ross Wightman from British Columbia launched a lawsuit against AstraZeneca, the federal government of Canada, the government of his province, and the pharmacy at which he was injected after receiving what he considers inadequate compensation from VISP.  

He was one of the first citizens in Canada to receive federal financial compensation due to a COVID vaccine injury under VISP. Wightman received the AstraZeneca shot in April 2021 and shortly after became totally paralyzed. He was subsequently diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome.  

Whitman was given a one-time payout of $250,000 and about $90,000 per year in income replacement, but noted, as per a recent True North report, that he does not even know if those dollar amounts “would ease the pain.”

All Canadian provinces except Quebec are covered by VISP, who has its own vaccine compensation program that also appears to be slow at paying out to applicants.

Yesterday, LifeSiteNews reported about a 30-year-old Quebec man who developed a severe skin condition after taking Moderna’s mRNA experimental COVID-19 shot. He still has not heard anything from the provincial government regarding compensation through its vaccine injury program despite the debilitating nature of his condition. 

Despite the need for a federal program to address those injured by the vaccines once mandated by the Trudeau government, Health Canada still says “[I]t’s safe to receive a COVID-19 vaccine following infection with the virus that causes COVID-19. Vaccination is very important, even if you’ve had COVID-19.” 

The federal government is also continuing to purchase COVID jabs despite the fact the government’s own data shows that most Canadians are flat-out refusing a COVID booster injection.

Indeed, records show the federal government has spent approximately $9.9 million on social media advertising to promote the

COVID-19

States move to oppose WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty,’ assert states’ rights

Published on April 30, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Michael Nevradakis Ph. D.,

Utah and Florida passed laws intended to prevent the WHO from overriding states’ authority on matters of public health policy, and Louisiana and Oklahoma have legislation set to take effect soon pending final votes.

Two states have passed laws – and two states have bills pending – intended to prevent the World Health Organization (WHO) from overriding states’ authority on matters of public health policy.

Utah and Florida passed laws and Louisiana and Oklahoma have legislation set to take effect soon pending final votes. Several other states are considering similar bills.

The WHO member states will convene next month at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, to vote on two proposals – the so-called “pandemic accord” or “pandemic treaty,” and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) – that would give the WHO sweeping new pandemic powers.

The Biden administration supports the two WHO proposals, but opposition is growing at the state level.

Proponents of the WHO’s proposals say they are vital for preparing humanity against the “next pandemic,” perhaps caused by a yet-unknown “Disease X.”

But the bills passed by state legislatures reflect frequently voiced criticisms that the WHO’s proposals imperil national sovereignty, medical and bodily sovereignty and personal liberties, and may lead to global vaccine mandates.

Critics also argue the WHO proposals may open the door to global digital “health passports” and global censorship targeting alleged “misinformation.”

Such criticisms are behind state legislative initiatives to oppose the WHO, on the basis that states’ rights are protected under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Under the 10th Amendment, all powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states. Such powers, critics say, include public health policy.

It is encouraging to see states like Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Utah pass resolutions to clarify that the WHO has no power to determine health policy in their states. Historically, health has been the purview of state and local government, not the U.S. federal government.

There is no legitimate constitutional basis for the federal government to outsource health decision-making on pandemics to an international body. As state legislatures become aware of the WHO’s agenda, they are pushing back to assert their autonomy – and this is welcome.

Internist Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom, told The Defender that, contrary to arguments that the drafters of the constitution could not foresee future public health needs, vaccines, doctors, and medicine were all in existence at the time the 10th Amendment was written. They were “deliberately left out,” she said.

READ: Thousands of protesters rally in Tokyo against proposed WHO pandemic treaty

This has implications for the federal government’s efforts in support of the WHO’s proposals, according to Nass. “The government doesn’t have the authority to give the WHO powers for which it lacks authority,” she said.

Tennessee state Rep. Bud Hulsey (R-Sullivan County) told The Epoch Times, “We’re almost to a place in this country that the federal government has trampled on the sovereignty of states for so long that in peoples’ minds, they have no options.”

“It’s like whatever the federal government says is the supreme law of the land, and it’s not. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land,” he added.

Utah, Florida laws passed

On January 31, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) signed Senate Bill 57, the “Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act,” into law. It does not mention the WHO, but prohibits “enforcement of a federal directive within the state by government officers if the Legislature determines the federal directive violates the principles of state sovereignty.”

In May 2023, Florida passed Senate Bill 252 (SB 252), a bill for “Protection from Discrimination Based on Health Care Choices.” Among other clauses, it prohibits businesses and public entities from requiring proof of vaccination or prophylaxis for the purposes of employment, receipt of services, or gaining entry to such entities.

According to Section 3 of SB 252:

A governmental entity as defined… or an educational institution… may not adopt, implement, or enforce an international health organization’s public health policies or guidelines unless authorized to do so under state law, rule, or executive order issued by the Governor.

Nass told The Defender that Florida’s legislation offers a back door through which the state can implement WHO policies because it allows a state law, rule, or executive order by the governor to override the bill. According to Nass, efforts to strengthen the bill have been unsuccessful.

SB 252 was one of four bills Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed in May 2023 in support of medical freedom. The other bills were House Bill 1387, banning gain-of-function research, Senate Bill 1580, protecting physicians’ freedom of speech, and Senate Bill 238, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of people’s medical choices.

Louisiana, Oklahoma also push back against the WHO

The Louisiana Senate on March 26 voted unanimously to pass Senate Law No. 133, barring the WHO, United Nations (U.N.) and World Economic Forum from wielding influence over the state.

According to the legislation:

No rule, regulation, fee, tax, policy, or mandate of any kind of the World Health Organization, United Nations, and the World Economic Forum shall be enforced or implemented by the state of Louisiana or any agency, department, board, commission, political subdivision, governmental entity of the state, parish, municipality, or any other political entity.

The bill is now pending Louisiana House of Representatives approval and if passed, is set to take effect August 1.

On April 24, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 426 (SB 426), which states, “The World Health Organization, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum shall have no jurisdiction in the State of Oklahoma.”

READ: Lawmakers, conservatives blast WHO plan for ‘global governance’ on future pandemics

According to the bill:

Any mandates, recommendations, instructions, communications or guidance issued by the World Health Organization, the United Nations or the World Economic Forum shall not be used in this state as a basis for action, nor to direct, order or otherwise impose, contrary to the constitution and laws of the State of Oklahoma any requirements whatsoever, including those for masks, vaccines or medical testing, or gather any public or private information about the state’s citizens or residents, and shall have no force or effect in the State of Oklahoma.

According to Door to Freedom, the bill was first introduced last year and unanimously passed the Senate. An amended version will return to the Senate for a new vote, and if passed, the law will take effect June 1.

Legislative push continues in states where bills opposing the WHO failed

Legislative initiatives opposing the WHO in other states have so far been unsuccessful.

In Tennessee, lawmakers proposed three bills opposing the WHO, but “none of them made it over the finish line,” said Bernadette Pajer of the CHD Tennessee Chapter.

“Many Tennessee legislators are concerned about the WHO and three of them filed resolutions to protect our sovereignty,” Pajer said. “Our legislature runs on a biennium, and this was the second year, so those three bills have died. But I do expect new ones will be filed next session.”

The proposed bills were:

House Joint Resolution 820(HJR 820), passed in the Tennessee House of Representatives. The bill called on the federal government to “end taxpayer funding” of the WHO and reject the WHO’s two proposals.
House Joint Resolution 1359(HJR 1359) stalled in the Delayed Bills Committee. It proposed that “neither the World Health Organization, United Nations, nor the World Economic Forum shall have any jurisdiction or power within the State of Tennessee.”
Senate Joint Resolution 1135(SJR 1135) opposed “the United States’ participation in the World Health Organization (WHO) Pandemic Prevention Preparedness and Response Accord (PPPRA) and urges the Biden Administration to withdraw our nation from the PPPRA.”

Amy Miller, a registered lobbyist for Reform Pharma, told The Defender she “supported these resolutions, especially HJR 1359. She said the bill “went to a committee where the sponsor didn’t think it would come out since a unanimous vote was needed and one of the three members was a Democrat.”

Tennessee’s HJR 820 came the closest to being enacted. According to Nass, this bill was “flawed,” as it “did not assert state sovereignty or the 10th Amendment.”

Another Tennessee bill, House Bill 2795 and Senate Bill 2775, “establishes processes by which the general assembly [of the state of Tennessee] may nullify an unconstitutional federal statute, regulation, agency order, or executive order.”

According to The Epoch Times, this would give Tennessee residents “the right to demand that state legislators vote on whether or not to enforce regulations or executive orders that violate citizens’ rights under the federal or state constitutions.” The bill is tabled for “summer study” in the Senate.

In May 2023, Tennessee passed legislation opposing “net zero” proposals and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals – which have been connected to “green” policies and the implementation of digital ID for newborn babies and for which the U.N. has set a target date of 2030 for implementation.

According to The Epoch Times, “Maine state Rep. Heidi Sampson attempted to get a ‘joint order’ passed in support of personal autonomy and against compliance with the WHO agreements, but it garnered little interest in the Democrat supermajority legislature.”

In Alabama, the Senate passed House Joint Resolution 113 opposing the WHO. The bill was reported out of committee but, according to Nass, it stalled.

Other states where similar legislation was proposed in the 2024 session or is pending include Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Wyoming.

Recent Supreme Court ruling may curtail federal government’s powers

While opponents of the WHO’s proposed “pandemic agreement” and IHR amendments point to the states’ rights provision of the 10th Amendment, others argue that a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council allowed federal agencies to assert more authority to make laws.

The tide may be turning, however. According to The Epoch Times, “The current Supreme Court has taken some steps to rein in the administrative state, including the landmark decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, ruling that federal agencies can’t assume powers that Congress didn’t explicitly give them.”

Nass said that even in states where lawmakers have not yet proposed bills to oppose the WHO, citizens can take action, by contacting the office of their state governor, who can issue an executive order, or their attorney general, who can issue a legal opinion.

Door to Freedom has also developed a model resolution that state legislative bodies can use as the basis for their own legislation.

“It’s important for people to realize that if the federal government imposes something on the people, the people can go through their state’s powers to overturn it,” Nass said.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.