In a Monday interview with “Fox & Friends,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich weighed in on the stay-at-home orders amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as some state leaders begin to consider plans to reopen.
With governors holding the power to reopen their states, Gingrich acknowledged that not every state or every city within the same state has the same situation. He also discussed his recent Fox News op-ed in which he bashed leaders during the crisis coming to believe “they have god-like decision-making capacity.”
“I think that some of the governors have shown their ideological bias so that one governor, for example, said it was OK for Planned Parenthood to stay open for abortions, but it wasn’t OK for churches to stay open for services,” Gingrich outlined. “Well, that’s clearly just an ideological abuse of the emergency, and I think that’s part of what has people with their teeth on edge because they’re watching people abuse their power.”
After noting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) list of mandates of what people can and cannot buy and an Illinois mayor deciding who gets food and who does not, Gingrich stressed the importance of taking back “power from the politicians” who have come to think they are “petty gods.”
“You look around the country, one of the major responsibilities right after defeating the virus and restarting the economy, the third big effort is going to be take power back from the politicians because you cannot allow them to decide that they’re little petty gods who get to factor life and death for all the rest of us,” he concluded.
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