Mask mandates still needed
In the meantime, let there be masks.
It didn’t take long for governmental entities to take advantage of a judge’s ruling and mandate masks.
Pine Bluff Mayor Shirley Washington sent out an announcement on Monday that masks would be required inside buildings the city owns or operates. William Fells, a spokesman, said it was the mayor’s understanding that she had the authority to make the move.
But it would appear that, before last Friday, she would not have had that authority. That’s when Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox ruled that Act 1002, passed and signed in April, was unconstitutional. Fox’s ruling was a temporary injunction and was put in place to stop the enforcement of the law. He said his ruling will most likely be appealed and that he would hurry the trial process along so the case would quickly get to the Supreme Court, where the ultimate decision would be made.
Act 1002 bars most governmental entities from requiring masks. But when it was passed and signed, covid was becoming less serious and was still weeks away from being supercharged by the delta variant. Now, that altered version of the virus is creating dire situations in the state, with daily cases, hospitalizations and ICU demand higher than when the original covid-19 was peaking.
Oh, and school is starting in less than a week. That was the reason Gov. Asa Hutchinson called a special session of the legislature. He wanted to try to amend Act 1002 to allow, under special circumstances, educators to require masks. His rationale — well, he said it was a mistake to have signed the bill but that he knew his veto would have been easily overridden — was that masks needed to be allowed in schools in order to protect students under 12 who can’t get the vaccine.
That argument, however, got him absolutely nowhere. So he’s back to traveling around the state urging people to get vaccinated, an effort that, combined with an abundance of other similar urgings, has had marginal success.
Later on Monday night, at the Watson Chapel School Board meeting, the board gave Superintendent Andrew Curry permission to require masks, although he said he was going to monitor the situation and that, for now, he was going to have an “expectation” that masks would be worn. We expect that other governmental entities will follow suit.
This means that the Republicans who pushed for and passed what became Act 1002 are seeing their worst nightmares become reality: An informed mayor and superintendent, making executive decisions about the well-being of the people in the universe they control and doing what they can to protect them from harm.
The audacity.