Some counties in Texas have temporarily won the legal battle against Governor Greg Abbott's ban on mask mandates, but the governor is vowing to fight back against any officials that impose a mandate regardless of the circumstances.
Abbott is vowing to file lawsuits against local governments and school officials who impose mandates.
Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott escalated the fight over his ban on local face mask rules, vowing along with his attorney general Wednesday to drag into court “any school district, public university or local government official that decides to defy” the governor. [...]
“This isn’t the first time we have dealt with activist characters,” [Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton] said, referring to elected officials in two of his state’s biggest cities. “Attention-grabbing judges and mayors have defied executive orders before, when the pandemic first started, and the courts ruled on our side -- the law.”
In closely related news, children's hospitals across the south are filling up and running out of beds.
Nearly 1,600 kids with Covid-19 were hospitalized last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a new seven-day record and a 27 percent increase from the week before. Tennessee’s health commissioner expects the state’s children’s hospitals to be full by the week’s end. Louisiana reached that point more than a week ago. And Arkansas’ only children’s hospital has just two ICU beds remaining.
“We’ve got problems pretty uniformly everywhere,” said Mark Wietecha, CEO of the Children’s Hospital Association. “Most of our children's hospital intensive care units, if they're not near capacity, they're at capacity. We have kids in the emergency department on gurneys.”
I've often said you should not vote for people who want you dead, but you especially should not vote for people who want your kids dead.
Children may have escaped the original wave and strain of the coronavirus relatively unscathed compared to American adults, but things have changed. Children were the last people to be approved for coronavirus vaccines which means the fewest number of them are vaccinated. Moreover, American conservatives have spent the last year telling themselves that kids are immune even if it's not true.
There was only one pediatric flu death in the entire country during the last flu season because kids were either at home or wearing a mask in school. Child deaths from both the coronavirus and the seasonal flu will be higher this year because of Republican policies.
They will kill kids in the name of freedom.