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| Cuomo, Lamont fishing for votes |
The Lamont
announcement appeared in CTMirror
on June 25: “Lamont visited the
Windsor Locks airport to promote new signs around the airport urging travelers
coming from high-infection states to self-quarantine for two weeks.” The signs
cautioned, “Your cooperation is expected,” and travelers were urged to “check
the governor’s website for
quarantine guidelines.”
According to a story published by NBC News on June 25, coincident
with the Lamont announcement of the quarantine on the same date, “The
U.S. is not China': Proposed quarantine could be unconstitutional, experts say”,
public health and policing experts “said that the order is unenforceable and that it borders on the
unconstitutional, and one pundit suggested that it smacked of political payback
against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had required New Yorkers to
self-quarantine for two weeks back in March when Coronavirus cases were spiking
in the state.”
Is the triumvirate’s
quarantine a political campaign ploy rather than a serious attempt to stop
Coronavirus from re-penetrating the northeast? This could be the case, given
that a) the quarantine may be unconstitutional and unenforceable.
There are sound
reasons to believe that the quarantine may not be enforceable, some of them
explored in a piece in Connecticut Commentary titled “Lamont And The Red Death”. State and national elections are coming
round the bend very shortly. In fact, campaigning, which is a process of
selling a political product that will reap a rich harvest of votes, is already
underway, both in Connecticut and nationally.
The political rally
held by President Donald Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma is generally regarded as a
kickoff to the Trump 2020 presidential campaign. Likely Democrat presidential
nominee Joe Biden is waging his own campaign from a Coronavirus bunker, and
polls show him in the lead despite his much fewer public campaign appearances
and interviews. It may be too early to read much into the polling popularity of
the invisible Biden. The national and state response to the Coronavirus outbreak
– the imposition of the first politically caused recession in US history – has decimated
Trump job gains prior to the infestation.
A journalist for
Oklahoma Watch was a casualty of the Trump Tulsa rally, the
Hill reported: “A journalist
who covered President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Okla., last week announced
Friday he has tested positive for the coronavirus.” The journalist is expected
to survive.
Following the
northeast triumvirate’s announcement of a quarantine, Brian Higgins, an expert
on crowd management security at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New
York City, said the order was unenforceable: “I don't know how you enforce
something like this. People are always going back and forth between states like
New York and Florida, and if they're not flying, they're driving.”
Oops! – cars, the
fly in the Lamont-Murphy-Cuomo ointment.
Cuomo, beating the
bushes for votes, insists that the quarantine is necessary to consolidate northeast
gains against a Coronavirus second wave: “It's only for the simple reason that
we worked very hard to lower the infection rate, and we want to keep it down."
He plans to deploy sanctions against violators of the quarantine: “You
violate the quarantine, you will then have to do a mandatory quarantine, and
you'll be fined." The fines are substantial, $2,000 to $10,000 to be
imposed on violators, assuming the miscreants can be found and charged.
Lamont, a more modest political braggart than Cuomo, who twiddled
his thumbs while 60 percent of New Yorkers lethally affected with Coronavirus
were dropping like flies in sequestered nursing homes ill provided with
necessary resources, seemed, according to the NBC news story, “somewhat vaguer
about how the order would be enforced.” Unsurprisingly, the percentage of
deaths in Connecticut nursing home charnel houses is equivalent to those in New
York and New Jersey.
In every single airport throughout our region, Lamont told
Fox News, “people will be noticed (sic) that these are the rules, you must
self-quarantine if you haven't had a test within 72 hours, something like that.
We are going to notify hotels and Airbnbs that these are the rules so that
people will know what the rules of the road are and they'll follow them."
It might be wiser to post such signs in the targeted quarantine
states, though that seems impossible. If the quarantine is by some miracle successful, scofflaws from the quarantined
states would not likely see the signs posted in the Bradley Field airport in
Windsor Locks. The signs are chiefly political statements that will have served their purpose if they convince northeast
voters that governors whose rank incompetence led to the deaths of nursing home
residents in their states really ought to be reelected to office.
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