Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is a big believer that wearing masks is an effective weapon against the coronavirus but adamantly opposes government mandates, arguing that forcing people to don face coverings is counterproductive.
Lee, tapped by the National Governors Association to serve as the Republican chairman of the bipartisan group’s coronavirus response task force, regularly urges Tennesseans to wear masks. The science, said the governor in a telephone interview with the Washington Examiner, clearly supports that recommendation. Lee has even gone so far as to spend taxpayer dollars to make masks available to every resident of his state who wants one.
But the first-term governor, 61, refuses to claim executive authority to mandate their use, a position he has taken since the onset of the pandemic. Lee, who admittedly never felt comfortable assuming such powers, says he ultimately concluded that more Tennesseans would wear masks more often if he asked, rather than told, them to do so.
“I’ve been very clear in and telling the people of our state: ‘Hey, look, masks work, and we need to wear them,’” Lee said Monday. “But mask mandates are not what works.”
Lee’s comments come as President Biden signed an executive order mandating that passengers wear masks on airliners, trains, and buses — a 180-degree shift from former President Donald Trump’s resistance to both wearing face coverings or recommending their use, never mind mandating them. On the issue of masks, Lee is unique among Republicans in that he has staked out a middle ground, neither dismissing the science behind them nor enforcing their use through executive fiat.
However, on the issue of economic lockdowns and business closures, as well as limiting in-person church attendance, Lee is firmly opposed.
The governor refuses to dictate to Tennesseans how they should worship on religious liberty grounds. His commitment to keeping businesses open is another matter. Lee embraced lockdowns for a limited period last spring, explaining that little was known about the coronavirus early in the pandemic. Months later, armed with more knowledge about the virus and aware of the collateral economic damage caused by the lockdowns, the governor said that there was no justification for continuing them.
Some states have “closed indoor and outdoor and everything and yet their COVID numbers surge while their people are going bankrupt and losing their life savings,” he said. “It’s a tragedy to lose both lives and livelihoods when it appears that the mitigation efforts of shutting down economies do not have the desired effect of stopping the pandemic.”
It is this insight, plus his approach to opening nearly all public schools for regular on-campus instruction beginning this past fall, that Lee plans to relay to colleagues in other states through his work at the NGA. The governor plans to run for reelection in 2022 and should be a shoo-in in his red state. He has no interest in running for president in 2024. The following interview is edited for length and clarity.
Washington Examiner: Talk about your outlook regarding what you believe is the best way to deal with the pandemic.
Bill Lee: The government has a certain role in this. I tend to believe that we trust people in a situation like this more than we trust government, but the government does have some specific responsibility roles here. For me, those were things like testing. I’m an engineer, so I have a real belief that you ought to follow information and data. And early on, I saw that other countries that were testing at a great level, other countries around the world were having better outcomes. So, we decided early to be a heavily tested state. We were one of the early top-tested states in the pandemic. We made a decision, for example, the first state to announce that we were going to test every nursing home resident. Same with vaccines, we knew that was our responsibility. We could do it. We could control it. And now, we’re one of the most efficient distributors of vaccines.
But the thing we’ve tried not to do is to [do] arbitrary mandates. People don’t trust you when that happens. They don’t trust that you are making decisions based on information. They think you’re just making them based on what either other people are doing or what experts that don’t have experience are doing. I just think arbitrary mandates are a problem. And I actually think it’s what contributed to a lot of COVID fatigue around the country, which is why you saw heavily mandated states with enormous surges late in the pandemic. Now, we had a big surge late in the pandemic, Christmas.
But our response to that was not to impose restrictions and mandates. I went on TV. I told the people at the state, hey, if you aren’t aware, we’re in a really bad spot here. Our hospitals are filling up. We have the highest case count in the country. I need you to do Christmas and New Year’s differently. And I ask folks to gather differently. And we, unlike a lot of other states, we did not have a post-holiday surge. And our case counts are 60% below what they were a month ago. Our hospitalizations are 40% down, and people responded to that. And I think it’s in part because they weren’t mandated to death for a year. And then, when the governor said, “Hey, we got a problem,” they actually believed me, and they responded.
Washington Examiner: It sounds like your argument about masks is not that they are ineffective, but that if you mandate them, fewer people will wear them, which is the opposite of what you want.
Bill Lee: I’ve been very clear in and telling the people of our state, “Hey, look, masks work, and we need to wear them.” We sent 5 million masks to our citizens free of charge early in the pandemic. We made them available to any Tennessean. And so, masks work. But mask mandates are not what works. There’s a lot of debate about whether mandates will have people wearing masks more or not. I tend to believe that No. 1, the further you can push decision-making to a local level, the better off it is.
If a county mayor wants to impose a mask requirement, they can do that. But I genuinely believe that when people are given information, then they will make the decision that’s in their best interest, and telling them to wear a mask may, in fact, have just the opposite effect that you want — which is to have the most number of people wearing them. I’m trying to think of which survey it was, but 80% of Tennesseans reported wearing their mask most or all of the time. Our people are wearing masks. And it’s not because we mandated it. It’s because we communicated with them that it was the right thing to do and that it would help mitigate the spread of the virus.
Washington Examiner: How productive are economic shutdowns, given that we’ve now been going in and out of this for almost a year?
Bill Lee: I have not shut businesses down since [the spring] and haven’t restricted businesses since — and won’t do it because I think it’s the multifaceted component of this crisis does include businesses and business owners and job creation and economic prosperity. And, look, this thing is a year old, and people early on, including all of us, did not know what we were dealing with. Decisions had to be made with an absence of information, that public had to make decisions, that governments had to make decisions, businesses, churches, people had to make decisions without really knowing what we’re dealing with. We are a year into this. Everyone knows exactly what we’re dealing with. Companies know how to operate safely. People know whether or not they want to go into a business that they believe is safe or not. So, I don’t think we ought to shut down businesses anymore.
Washington Examiner: Does that include gathering limits as well?
Bill Lee: We took our gathering limits off back in the summer. And then, we had this huge surge. We were No. 1 in the country. We had 10,000 cases a day. Everyone gets their light in the hot sun in this. Every state gets their moment in the hot sun in this pandemic, and ours was the week before Christmas. And so, when I went on TV statewide, I said, “You know what, we haven’t been mandating. We haven’t closed this state down, but we need to do something. So, we’re going to make a targeted response.” We did a gathering limit, which has already been lifted. Public gatherings — that is, not personal, not in anyone’s homes, it was public gatherings. And then, we did a restriction: high school, indoor sports. So, we decided basketball, winter packed gyms, and Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve parties were probably something we didn’t need to be doing for the next 30 days. So, I think they were appropriate at the right time. And the right time for us was when we had the worst surge in the entire pandemic.
Washington Examiner: For the purposes of saving lives or mitigating the virus, the one thing you seem to have concluded is that economic lockdowns don’t make a difference.
Bill Lee: That’s right. I think that economic shutdowns are not effective. They haven’t proven to be effective and cause additional damage on the already challenging health crisis that we have. I mean, we saw that in some of our states that were, and still are frankly, completely shut down, economically. They’ve closed indoor and outdoor and everything, and yet, their COVID numbers surge while their people are going bankrupt and people are losing their life savings, their businesses they’ve built for years. It’s a tragedy to lose both lives and livelihoods when it appears that the mitigation efforts of shutting down economies do not have the desired effect of stopping the pandemic.
Washington Examiner: Your thoughts on the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic and what you have seen so far from the Biden administration?
Bill Lee: I really don’t have any complaints about the way the Trump administration operated. And I’m not just being gracious. We ask for things from the federal government; we got them. We interacted with them as little as we could, but when we needed them, we reached out, and we had the right response. I have been on a couple of calls with the Biden team, they’ve been very cooperative, and they’ve got ideas about how they can improve this process. But it’s much too early to tell whether there’s going to be any substantive difference in the way the administrations operate from my perspective.
Washington Examiner: Are your public schools open for on-campus instruction, and what has [your] approach been to this topic, which has been fraught with controversy?
Bill Lee: We were one of the first states, frankly, to have our students back in the classroom in the fall. One hundred and forty-five out of 147 of our districts are open for in-person option. So, every parent in Tennessee has an option. They can put their kids online or not. The vast majority of them are in schools in-person because most parents want their kids to be. When we opened, we said, “Hey, we’re going to be safe.” We’re not ignoring the safety of our teachers or our children. We sent 80,000 [personal protective equipment] packets — one to every classroom in the state. And we send them every month. So, our schools are filled with PPE.
Washington Examiner: Which districts are outstanding, and what are you doing to try and bring them around?
Bill Lee: It is Nashville and Memphis. And we’re actually working on that issue right now. We had a special session last week that I called for our legislature to address learning loss and to address accountability, really testing, learning loss, how we’re going to address the challenges to education going forward. And when people were railing at me for opening schools because kids were going to die in the school buildings, and we did it anyway because the science didn’t indicate that, and certainly, it hasn’t happened.
So, we’ve been open in-person for the most part since school opened in August. And we are pushing the large districts to open as well because we think that’s really important. Pressure is a very important component here. That’s the reason I got up and really just called those school districts out publicly because here’s the thing: Parents want their kids to be at school. And the saddest part from my perspective is that Memphis is the biggest school district that we have. It also has the most number of low-income children who get the greatest negative impacts from being out of the classroom. I mean, these are the kids that have the least access to technology. They have the least resources, the family structures, oftentimes — they’re not there to support the needs of them. And so, these are the kids that are sitting at home, and the negative impacts on these children is staggering. Calling that out, publicly talking about why parents want their kids to be in school, has already begun.
