https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/u...ronavirus.html
May 14th 2020
It was a stunning rebuke by a governor.
As resistance to lockdown orders flares around the country, often with a partisan overtone, Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, reached for a military metaphor to accuse Republican officials of desertion in the battle against the pandemic.
“To those politicians who decide to cave in to this coronavirus,” Mr. Wolf
said on Monday, addressing county lawmakers who have defied his stay-at-home directives, “they need to understand the consequences of their cowardly act.”
The normally mild-mannered governor’s comments turned up the temperature of a national debate over the health emergency, one fanned by
President Trump as he eggs on protesters at state capitols, including in Harrisburg, and by lawmakers in Congress, where the government’s top health officials warned this week of dire consequences if the economy reopens too soon.
On Thursday, the president visited Pennsylvania, one of several battleground states crucial to his re-election, where the political combat over limiting the virus’s death toll or easing its economic devastation could have weighty consequences in November. While
26 percent of the state’s work force has filed for unemployment, the governor is relying on metrics about the virus’s spread to keep many people in their homes and all but “life-sustaining” businesses in populous regions closed.
“We have to get your governor of Pennsylvania to start opening up a little bit,” Mr. Trump said after a tour of a distribution center for masks and other medical supplies. “You have areas of Pennsylvania that are barely affected and they want to keep them closed. Can’t do that.”
Republicans, sensing a gut-level anger in exurban and rural areas after nearly two months of restrictions, see an issue with the potential to drive turnout by voters in a state where Mr. Trump, as elsewhere in the industrial and Midwest region, needs a surge of support to repeat his narrow victory of 2016. In Wisconsin, also a swing state, the State Supreme Court sided with Republicans on Wednesday and
threw out the stay-at-home order of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.
In Texas, armed men have shown up to support businesses defying government orders to stay closed, an extreme sign of the politicizing of social distancing rules.
At the same time, polls show that Mr. Wolf, like other governors moving cautiously and heeding scientific benchmarks to reopen, is enjoying record support, including among many Republicans.
The governor’s accusation of cowardice was directed at officials in half a dozen Republican-led counties that have said they would defy his timeline for reopening businesses. Mr. Wolf has partly lifted restrictions on
37 counties, mainly in rural regions where community spread of the virus is more easily contained...