“This is the one I’m worried about,” he told reporters recently, talking about the bill that allows county councils to, in effect, overrule their public health directors. “Public health is not politics. It is helping people.”
In Missouri and in many other red states, those true words fall on deaf ears to Republican leaders these days. So, when Khan issues his order, the Republicans on the council will hem and haw and claim with zero evidence that this is some plot by County Executive Sam Page to control the world, their supporters will come to a council meeting and spew angry lies that will get the meeting’s recording kicked off the YouTube platform for spreading false information about the pandemic, and, if the Democrats hold together and, this time, support the health order, Schmitt will run to court and Fox News, not necessarily in that order.
Because the council’s Democratic majority already passed a resolution recently supporting the concept of a new mask mandate, I suspect they’ll have the votes to do so again. And a new order is just what the judge in the ongoing lawsuit over the past disputed order requested in her most recent ruling.
So the order will, perhaps, stand.
But what will happen? Some of us who live in the county will duly don our masks when we enter the grocery store or restaurant, or sporting event, and others will pretend that nothing has changed because in the current environment, it doesn’t matter how many times the votes in Arizona are counted to prove that Joe Biden is the president and Donald Trump is not, some people will never believe the truth.
