Pushback Against Arizona Public Illness Law Looks Too Easy to Overcome

 

Last month I blogged about Governor Doug Ducey's latest asshatery. It was an executive order banning elementary and secondary schools from requiring masks in their classrooms. 

Prior to that he issued an order preventing universities from implementing, basically, any mandatory mitigation measures. His executive orders became law when Republicans attached them to a  budget bill they passed last month.

We are finally seeing some major pushback. School districts are unwilling to endanger children in their care as the number of kids hospitalized with COVID-19 doubled in July. Several of them are ignoring the ban and requiring masks for students.

Now a group—including the Arizona School Boards Association, Children's Action Alliance, the Arizona Education Association, Arizona Advocacy Network, and a dozen other individuals—is taking things a step further. They have filed a lawsuit against the state.

The filing claims that attaching the public illness measures to the budget bill violates the Arizona constitution's requirements that bills cover only one subject, and that their contents must be properly noticed in the title of the bill. I'm no lawyer but it sounds like a pretty good argument.

On the university front, ASU has identified a loophole in the executive order and subsequent law, finding that they only prohibit measures that discriminate against unvaccinated people. So they are requiring masks for everybody, vaccinated or not. The state's other universities and community colleges are following ASU's lead. There is a letter people can sign onto thanking the university presidents and Board of Regents for making this move.

I applaud all these efforts to protect students. But alas, both the lawsuit and the loophole are based on technicalities. If the state loses, the governor could call a special session of the legislature where his extremist colleagues can pass the same reckless and dangerous restrictions, sans loophole, in a properly executed bill.

And they probably will. These politicians have zero interest in protecting public health, and 100% interest in cynical political maneuvering. The governor is burnishing his MAGA credentials by endangering the people he's supposed to be protecting. His wingnut Republican colleagues are paying homage to their orange hero at the expense of the health of their constituents. Fuck all of them.

"Copper Dome, AZ State Capital Building" by cobalt123 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

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