While many in Michigan are signing petitions urging Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to leave office, Rep. Elissa Slotkin said she believes the governor should be rewarded for her tough action on combating the coronavirus pandemic.
Whitmer outraged some when she used her executive authority to ban the sale of nonessential goods, such as gardening equipment, paint, and car seats, along with a ban on travel between residences because of the coronavirus. During an interview on Fox News, Slotkin commended Whitmer for her response to the virus.
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“I think that there will be people who are alive in a few months because of the aggressive action that our governor took,” the Michigan Democrat explained. “There’s always going to be Monday morning quarterbacking. Whenever you’re in a crisis and you have a leader making decisions, it’s going to draw criticism. No one likes that we can’t go up north, and, in Michigan, everybody goes up north. No one likes that we can’t go to our lawn and garden stores, but we didn’t do that in an arbitrary way.”
She continued, “We say you can’t go up north because, if you happen to have the virus, we don’t want to spread it to our communities up north. There’s a medical reason for much of this. Now, it’s not that we don’t want people buying paint, it’s that the place where they congregate and buy paint allows for more transmission. And we all want to get back to work — that is everything we are talking about right now — but we have to let the medical piece guide us.”
The congresswoman argued that Whitmer’s critics were wrong, saying, “I know she’s taken some hits. Obviously, she’s gained in prominence, and so she’s going to be an easy target, but, when you’re a leader, your taking aggressive action should be rewarded.”
Slotkin is a freshman congresswoman coming off a career in the Pentagon and the CIA. Given her background, host Ed Henry asked whether she believed Whitmer was violating the Constitution by stripping the people of Michigan of their ability to travel or buy goods deemed nonessential. Slotkin said that Whitmer was acting within her authority.
“It doesn’t violate their constitutional rights to be forward-thinking about public health,” she said. “Think of the human beings that we are trying to help here, not just the people who get sick, but the people working on the front lines, literally, of America’s latest war, in those healthcare communities, in the hospitals. We’re trying to make sure those hospitals aren’t overrun and support what we can, our front-line workers.”
Slotkin recently introduced legislation that would mandate a certain percentage of medical equipment, such as N95 masks, be produced in the United States so that the country is not dependent on China or other nations in the future. Elected in 2018, Slotkin is one of a few Democratic members of Congress representing a district President Trump won in 2016.
