Gov. Tate Reeves Signals Mississippi Wouldn’t Comply with a Biden National Lockdown

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) on Thursday signaled that his state would not comply with a mandatory six-week national quarantine if former Vice President Joe Biden wins the presidential election.

“We’re not going to participate in a nation-wide lockdown,” Reeves stated during a coronavirus update in reference to a Biden adviser’s proclaimed that a national lockdown could help combat the virus.

Reeves lampooned the idea of a lockdown as “totally and completely beyond reasonableness” and warned it would cause economic damage.

“That’s not the way the economy works,” the governor said.

Reeves then explained that Biden would lack the constitutional authority to force states to abide by a shutdown, saying: “We will certainly fight that if necessary.”

On Tuesday, Dr. Michael Osterholm, who sits on Biden’s coronavirus task force, suggested the idea of a nationwide lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Osterholm told MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “In the first week of August, Neel Kashkari, the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, and I wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times that basically said we need to, in a sense, lock down to drive this infection level to a place where we can actually control it with testing and tracing and follow-up that way, just like the Asian countries have done. And I’m talking about everything from Australia to New Zealand, all the way right up through China, Japan. All of those countries have done it already.”

Osterholm added: “Really, to deal with the pain and suffering economically is what we basically proposed was because the savings rate in this country has gone out of the roof, since the pandemic,” he continued. “We have gone from 8% to over 22%. We can borrow the money from ourselves at historically low interest rates. We can pay people to lose their job. We can pay small business. We can take care of city, state and county governments if we’re elected to do that. If Washington could get together and make that happen. That would be a very different kind of lockdown where people wouldn’t suffer, and we can get this virus under control.”