After changing his position a second, third, and fourth time, Joe Biden reached the conclusion on Monday night that mask mandates would need to be a decision made by state governors.
This just happens to be the position President Trump held, and was criticized for, all along.
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The president does not have the authority to impose a mask mandate beyond federal property, so Biden said he would “go out and talk to all the governors, and call them all to the White House — some of them probably wouldn’t come. And I’d call all of the governors and I’d say to all the mayors as well as the county executives: ‘Take responsibility and lay out the guidelines.’”
“Look, folks, one of the problems is that President Trump went out and said, ‘I take no responsibility,’” Biden continued. “Literally. ‘It’s not my responsibility.’ Well, the president should take responsibility, and the federal government has an obligation to lay out basic guidelines.”
The Trump administration did, in fact, lay out basic guidelines. It created the framework for the reopening process. Each state moved through that process differently because each state had a different number of coronavirus cases, different rates of hospitalization, and different expectations. Trump’s hands-off approach allowed both Democratic and Republican governors to set the pace of reopening as they saw fit.
Biden would have done the same thing had he been president. Sure, he might have been more proactive about pushing governors to implement mask mandates, but he would have discovered shortly thereafter that bossing around states trying to deal with a massive health crisis would not have accomplished much. With Republican states especially, Biden would have just created more conflict.
That’s why Trump, to his credit, has allowed Democratic-controlled states to reimpose restrictions, even though he personally opposes a continued shutdown. Not that presidents possess such power to impose their will — I can’t imagine New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or California Gov. Gavin Newsom would have responded well, had Trump called them up and told them what to do.
In practice, Biden’s coronavirus strategy is no different from Trump’s. All of the policies Biden has proposed, such as the national mask mandate, have been reactions to something Trump has said or done, but few of them would pass legal muster if implemented. He, like Trump, would have allowed the states to lead the charge against this virus because that is how our constitutional system is designed to work.
But Biden can’t exactly admit this, because it would constitute an admission that perhaps Trump got a few things right. And that’s a line Democrats will never cross.
