New Mexico Republican Party Chairman Steve Pearce blasted Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, for failing to open up the state despite low instances of coronavirus on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday, hosted by Breitbart News Washington Political Editor Matt Boyle.
“There are Democratic governors across the country in contravention of the science keeping their states unnecessarily under serious lockdown, and one of those states is New Mexico. Joining us now to talk about this is the New Mexico GOP Chairman Steve Pearce,” Boyle noted.
“Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, she’s a Democrat, has eased a couple of restrictions in the state, but she’s made even more restrictions in other areas,” Boyle said, then asked Pearce for his reaction.
“We as the Republican Party of New Mexico have been speaking for small businesses for the past six or seven weeks, saying that you’ve gotta have the same rules for everybody. The big box stores are wide open, the traffic is just crammed in there because they don’t have any other choices. Meanwhile, the small mom and pops that make New Mexico work remain closed and the easing of the restriction laws . . . now the mom and pops can take things out to the curb, who’s going to buy clothes at the curb? They’re going to go into Walmart where they can try them on, feel them, look at them in different colors. It’s just totally unfair,” Pearce, the 2018 Republican nominee for governor and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, told Boyle.
“You did mention that a couple of restrictions got eased, but the same day she did that, she sent six or seven uniformed State Police in to deliver a $60,000 fine to a small business that was just opened up in Grants, New Mexico. Gallup is right down the road from Grants, moving west, right on the Arizona border, and that is locked down. The Navajo Nation is very hard hit, so that could be understandable, why they’re trying to really limit travel in and out of that area. The Navajo Nation is asking for pretty severe restrictions. The mayor of Gallup. But the rest of New Mexico, we’ve got counties that are not even effected at all with cases. She’s requiring people to drive out of those counties into the big metropolitan areas to do their shopping because all the businesses have been closed down,” Pearce said.
“You know, that $60,000 fine, that was a veteran. He’s now disabled. He and his wife just eking out a living, $60,000 it takes you years to get that kind of actual cash in the bank. There’s just no way that a small business has got it, so another small business in New Mexico is going to go broke because of the governor’s orders,” he went on to say.
“We published a big breakdown of the actual data in the state of New Mexico with regards to cases and tests and hospitalizations,” Boyle noted, then read this excerpt from that Breitbart story published on Friday:
To date, just five percent of those who have been tested in the state have been confirmed as positive (3,411 out of 67,869 tested, according to the COVID Tracking Project as of May 1. Late Monday the New Mexico Department of Health announced that there are now 3,513 cases of coronavirus in the state.) This is far less than the national average of 16 percent of those who were tested that were positive as of May 1 (1,068,892 out of 6,322,ooo million tested). Only 172 coronavirus patients are currently hospitalized in the state.
“That means that New Mexico meets the gating criteria from the White House has put forward as a federal guidance to begin Phase One reopening. That being said, Gov. Lujan Grisham has not cited any data or science in her announcement,” Boyle noted and asked Pearce for his comments on the governor’s failure to rely on science and actual data.
“It appears from the very first days of her administration she was tagging in to the national Democrat philosph, whatever that would be, whether it’s pro-the attempt to take away guns, pro-the attempts to expand abortion. She is seeming to do that in this coronavirus issue, that as long as they can keep things closed … it appears that there is an effort to do that,” Pearce responded.
“And she doesn’t quote any science at all,” Pearce added.
“She simply says that it’s for the good and the safety of the people of New Mexico, and like you said, your figures are correct, but understand, that one area of the Navajo Nation has got maybe 30 percent [positive] cases so they’ve got a far higher percent, which means the rest of New Mexico is less than five percent, so it argues that a lot of New Mexico is ready to open,” he said.
“The drive from southeast New Mexico to the hotspot Navajo Nation is probably a ten hour drive, maybe 11 hours, something like that. You have tremendous distances out here, low population density, and a lot of the corners of the state could and should be open. But instead, a lot of the people are having to drive across the state lines into Texas and Colorado to get essential things. Colorado has opened up. Texas is opening up,” he added.
“So it’s just that our [Democrat] governor is saying that you all don’t know good enough to protect yourselves, so we’re just going to lock everybody down, regardless of what the situation is,” Pearce concluded.
You can listen to the complete program here:
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