Opinion By Mike Hobson
Our beloved Governor Ivey is running a campaign commercial where she says “nothing” for about 60 seconds. She drums her fingers on her desk and looks around the room and ends the commercial with a reference to President Joe Biden and offers a “blessing of his heart”. She says her mother taught her to say nothing about a person unless she could be kind.
While her campaign advertisement is catchy & humorous we won’t be able to take her mother’s advice today and let the opportunity pass to comment on the Governor’s tactic to convince us to ignore her own management style of government for the past two years.
The Governor now wants to leap to the front of the parade to end mask mandates across the school systems in Alabama. On this past Friday she called for the remaining schools and universities that have such requirements to end forced mask-wearing.[1]
The governor pointed to the state’s COVID-19 data, which she said indicated that mask mandates were no longer necessary for students.
“I applaud the Alabama schools and universities who have made the decision to end mask mandates,” stated Ivey. “Given the health data we’ve seen in Alabama and across the country, I encourage all schools to continue removing these mandates — we don’t need them in Alabama.”
Ivey asserted that parents should have the final say for their children in the mask debate and touched on the state’s successful legal fight against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 mandates.
She added, “As a former teacher, I know well that parents should be in charge of making the best decisions for their kids, not government. That’s why here in Alabama, we don’t have covid state government mandates — we sued President Biden over his mandates, and we won. I believe in the good people of our state and will always protect their freedoms.”
Those are admirable remarks to be making…..she just should have made them a lot sooner. Now that we are in a campaign season she won’t sway many voters with these untimely backward looking declarations.
Just a few months ago she was head majorette at the front of the parade to enforce mandates, close small businesses, and over ride parental decision making rights. Has anybody forgotten her overuse of executive authority and emergency powers given to herself by proclamation during the Covid era?
Beginning in March 2020 [2] parade master Ivey declared a public health emergency and empowered the State Director of the Department of Health to make decisions to rule our lives. She extended her emergency powers 26 times without consent or consultation with the legislature. [3] She finally ended the State of Emergency Declaration on July 6, 2021. [4]
The Governor has a pet name for this kind of executive authority. She calls it “cutting the red tape”. You might be a fan of “cutting the red tape”. In the political world it all depends on whose “ox is being gored”. During the pandemic most of the voters were also the oxen.
Alas, our GOP controlled legislative body should have taken up a bill in the current legislative session to stop that kind of over reach of executive power from ever happening again but we have not heard a whisper of consideration for reigning in that authority.
If you wonder why this is important enough to write about now as the pandemic wanes, consider what is going on in Canada today. And if you don’t know what is happening in Canada today you do really need to turn on your television and watch the national news. If you tune in to a news channel that tells you that the truck drivers in Canada are terrorists and anarchists then you probably need to add other channels to your news feed. Checks and balances are essential to our form of government.
When a state legislature passes an emergency authorization act that allows a governor to invoke and self renew the act without the consent of the legislature they have made one colossal misstep. No chief executive of a state, country, county, or municipality should ever be awarded unrestrained power under our system of government. To usurp that kind of authority requires an abuse of power.
And as for kind hearted, finger drumming, no red tape, Governor Kay. We won’t say anything bad about you. But Alabama voters won’t forget choices our political leaders made during the pandemic either.
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR ALONE AND DO NOT EXPRESS THE VIEWS OF THE CENTREVILLE PRESS, BIBB COMMUNITY MEDIA, ITS PUBLISHERS OR EDITORS. YOUR COMMENTS ARE WELCOMED.
[1] https://www.alreporter.com/2022/02/18/gov-kay-ivey-applauds-schools-for-dropping-face-mask-orders/
[2] https://governor.alabama.gov/newsroom/2020/03/state-of-emergency-coronavirus-covid-19/
[3] https://governor.alabama.gov/newsroom/2020/03/fourth-supplemental-state-of-emergency-coronavirus-covid-19/
[4] https://governor.alabama.gov/newsroom/2021/07/termination-of-state-of-emergency-coronavirus-covid-19/
