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Dear Editor:
Your decision to sue Governor Evers over his decision to extend the Safer at Home order until adequate virus testing and contact tracing plans are in place, is attempted murder by public policy. Worse, your drunk-with-power tactics have tried to bypass the normal judicial processes to do it.
You are playing Russian roulette with our lives to get the economy opened as soon as possible because your personal 401Ks and stock portfolios have taken a gut punch and the quickest way to recoup your losses is to immediately reopen the economy. If people die as a result of this ill-advised action, so be it - that's just the risk of doing business in a profit motive economy, where you have good health insurance and workers often don't.
Sadly, this isn't the entire story regarding your self-interest driven, gross mismanagement of this life-threatening crisis. Other evidence includes:
• Claiming to be pro-life, yet promoting actions that purposely expose people to a deadly, life-threatening virus. Republicans can't claim all lives matter yet ignore grandma, who is in a care facility where workers don't have access to enough PPE or adequate testing. Republican action has exposed our most vulnerable citizens to a deadly virus and turned care facilities into death traps.
• Opposition to safer voting by mail. Republicans oppose voting by mail b/c whenever voter turnout is high, they risk losing elections, and mail-in voting significantly increases the likelihood that citizens will vote.
Tampering with our election process. Republicans made Wisconsin the laughingstock of the nation when they forced citizens into a choice between protecting their own health or exercising their constitutional right to vote. Fortunately, it backfired.
• National mismanagement of the pandemic. American leadership is a world-wide joke. Rational people and trustworthy leadership do not favor premature easing of social distancing guidelines that save lives. Any Republican who is not speaking out against the current administration's lethal actions is perpetuating its deadly insanity.
• Thinking we will eventually forget that our loved ones died alone during this pandemic; that our friends' cancer worsened b/c their treatment became unavailable; that our older relatives lived in isolation without family support; and that thousands heroically risked their own lives to save others in spite of not having enough PPE or medical testing available. We won't ever forget.
We will always remember 2020 as the year the Republican Party became the Death Party, when Republicans in Wisconsin, and across the country, blindly favored greed, hunches, and denial politics over expert opinion, proven scientific facts, and common sense. Thousands have died because of you.
Paula vW. Dáil,PhD
Emerita Professor of Social
Welfare and Public Policy
Spring Green, WI