With every passing week of the coronavirus pandemic, Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey is acting more and more like a duke than the elected executive of the people.
Memory loss is apparently a symptom of COVID-adjacent terror, so as a refresher, this is how representative democracy works: The elected legislative body writes and passes laws and the chief executive — the governor in this case — signs them into law. On a local level, municipal councils and county boards of supervisors write and approve laws as a collective body.
Democracies are not supposed to invest all their legislative and executive power jointly into single individuals — that is how despots, tyrants and dictators are created.
Framers of representative nation-states from Athens to the Continental Congress knew that power must be broken up lest tyrants act on their whims to the detriment of us all.
Yet this is how Ducey has decided to govern. Once a week, he holds a press conference, not on public television nor on the governor’s own website, but tucked away on the Twitter feed of the Arizona Department of Health Services.
And once a week, he pronounces new closures or rules, or reopenings or polices — all declared via executive order rather than by law, which 7.189 million Arizonans must suddenly follow, not because their legislature approved them but because Ducey — still gunning hard for that 2022 U.S. Senate seat he’s certainly going to lose — said it’s the law now.
He also gives no warning. Last month, he announced spas and gyms could open immediately, which sounds great for those with gym memberships. However, gym owners and employees didn’t know that was coming and spent weeks getting up to speed, calling back staff who had been on unemployment rolls, preparing their buildings and working out how to allow clients to safely return. Last week, also with no warning, he closed them all. Back to unemployment, y’all.
Likewise, Ducey announced last week all bars had to close — and close in less than four hours — because news coverage of maskless bar patrons in Scottsdale made Ducey look bad.
For hundreds of bartenders, bar owners and employees who weren’t glued to the rollercoaster of excitement that is the AZDHS Twitter feed, their first indication that their bars had to close was when local police arrived to shut them down like it was the first day of Prohibition.
Ducey somehow thinks closing bars from Scottsdale to Heber to Cottonwood should be uniform statewide, yet masks are local decisions?
Yavapai County has 1.47% the number of cases as Maricopa County but we have 5.32% the population, which means a Phoenician is 3.6 times more likely to catch COVID-19 in Tempe or Glendale than Uptown or Old Town Cottonwood. Daily new cases regularly top 3,000 per day, more than 10 times what they were during the statewide shutdown in April, when they ranged from 200 to 400. Ergo, there are two ways to look at the data to determine what Ducey should have done then or should be doing now:
· Either cases are so high now that Ducey should shut the state down like he did in April because conditions are so much worse.
· Or the state numbers might be really high now but because he’s not shutting down the state, then probably he never should have shut them in April to begin with.
If Ducey was really following the math, then depending on whether you think the state should be opened or closed, logic dictates either he messed up in May or he’s messing up now. Regardless of what side of that coin you’re on, Ducey has done neither, instead careening like a drunken frat boy down the slide at a water park, you know, one of the things he shut down last week, just because. Pools, though? Pools can stay open but water parks can’t? Both use giant tubs of water filled with toxic chlorine and other chemicals that kill everything from bacteria to viruses. That’s why we chlorinate — to kill bad stuff that might make us sick.
Water parks aren’t any more inherently dangerous than pools, but Ducey’s knee-jerk stupidity comes from Phoenix area news outlets that showed images of people filling Phoenix area parks, which looks bad for the governor.
And Salt River tubing, even though it’s impossible to stay within six feet for most of the outdoor trip, was closed because of news pictures, not science.
Now bars, gyms and theaters, all of which just opened in the last month are suddenly closed with no warning, putting thousands of people who just got their jobs back out of work again. The decision about whether to close bars required immediate state-level action? Sure, because Ducey gets applause. But the decision to mandate masks, which is far more personally intrusive, should be left up to local councils who rely on gut feelings and impulse and don’t have their own public health departments for advice?
All that did was localize the hate toward local leaders and away from Ducey’s office … oh, that was the point. Masks had nothing to do with health, just politics and public relations.
Unless the legislature is willing to convene, Ducey will continue to mismanage the pandemic and the response, wrecking our economy in the process.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
