The intraparty warfare in Ohio is part of a growing rebellion by Republicans who say closures are smothering the economy and violating rights.
In the early days of the pandemic, Mike DeWine, the mild-mannered Republican governor of Ohio, gained a national profile for moving quickly to shut down his state while other leaders hesitated. The rates of infection in Ohio have stayed lower than elsewhere in the Midwest.
But as the state enters the tricky phase of reopening businesses, Mr. DeWine has found himself facing an open revolt from members of his own party.
Republicans have accused his administration of goosing coronavirus statistics to scare Ohioans. One state senator attacked Mr. DeWine for “micromanaging” residents and having no faith in them. On Wednesday, Republican lawmakers in the Ohio House of Representatives voted to limit the authority of the state’s health director, Dr. Amy Acton, who appears at Mr. DeWine’s daily news briefings. The governor said he would veto the bill if it came to him.
The intraparty warfare in Ohio is part of a growing rebellion by Republican legislators across the country against their governors — both Democratic and Republican — who are arguing that stay-at-home orders and nonessential business closures are smothering the economy and violating rights.
Republicans in Pennsylvania tried in April to overturn the Democratic governor’s stay-at-home order. In Louisiana, Republicans are moving to strip the governor, a Democrat, of his administration’s ability to penalize businesses for violating such an order. In Wisconsin and Michigan, Republican lawmakers sued the governors outright.
While the economic pain from the virus and its response grows more intense by the day — in Ohio alone more than 1.1 million people have filed for unemployment over the past two months — surveys have shown broad support for stay-at-home policies, and even concern about the prospect of things opening up too quickly. Governors who have issued sweeping stay-at-home orders, including Mr. DeWine, have enjoyed soaring approval numbers.
On Thursday, Mr. DeWine announced that “virtually all retail,” including businesses like barbershops and nail salons, would be allowed to open by May 15 as long as they adhered to certain guidelines like wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. Restaurants would be able to open for indoor dining on May 21, he said. Describing the plan as a “high risk operation,” he clarified that other orders, including bans on large gatherings, had not been lifted.
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For many who have lost their jobs in Ohio, the desire to return to work is mixed with an unrelenting fear of the virus. Their situations are not as clear-cut as the discussions in the halls of government, where politicians describe a binary choice between health and economic well-being.
Taniesha Head, 33, has been without a job since mid-March and has still not been able to reach anyone in the state’s unemployment office. The bills are piling up — water, sewer, lights, gas, telephone, car payment — and the children have to be fed.
Still, Ms Head said, “people are consistently dying of this virus and there is no cure right now. How do you sit back and tell somebody go ahead and risk all of this? You mean to tell me you want me to choose the dollar bill over my life?”
For weeks, Republican lawmakers in Ohio have been growing restive about the governor’s public health measures, with some joining the hundreds of protesters decrying stay-at-home orders at the State Capitol. One state senator backed up his wife’s comments that Dr. Acton, the health director, was trying to turn the state into Nazi Germany.
A number of Republican lawmakers said they were paying attention to the public health impacts of an extended economic downturn — a rise in suicides, for instance — that were getting scant attention compared with the threat posed by the coronavirus.
And in public statements and interviews, the most vocal opponents of business closures and stay-at-home orders consistently talk of long-held conservative principles: “The government,” said Ohio State Representative Paul Zeltwanger, a Republican, “has to get out of the way.”
Mr. Zeltwanger is the head of coronavirus-dedicated task force in the Ohio House, whose meetings have become a venting session for business owners bristling under the stay-at-home orders. The invited speakers have described the growing losses in their industries, asking whether workers will come back given the federal expansion of unemployment benefits and criticizing the state’s policies as ruinous for small businesses while sparing many major retailers.
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In an interview, Mr. Zeltwanger, who last week issued a plan to immediately reopen all Ohio business, said he viewed the governor’s announcement on Thursday as “progress, but not fast enough.”
The virus still presented risks, Mr. Zeltwanger said, but “business owners and business people are used to managing risk every day.”
Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and a Republican, who has known Mr. DeWine since they were freshman members of Congress, sees virtue in these conservative principles. But he is baffled as to why lawmakers in Ohio and elsewhere are citing them as grounds to block public health orders in the middle of a pandemic.
“I appreciate in theory maybe what they are saying,” he said in an interview, “but ‘in theory’ doesn’t work if you’re going to put the broader population at risk.”
None of this is theoretical to Rodney Shelton, 40, a janitor who was furloughed from an Ohio steel mill.
“I want to be safe,” Mr. Shelton said. He drives his 72-year-old father to dialysis appointments three mornings a week, and cannot stand the thought of unwittingly bringing the virus along on those car rides. “At the same time,” he said, “the bills and stuff are still coming. I’ve got to get the money rolling.”
Like Ms. Head, Mr. Shelton has been unable to reach an unemployment agent. And like her, he is unsure how much longer he can go without some money coming in. He wants to go to work. But if he is invited back to the mill, how could he trust it to be sanitized? After all, he has not been cleaning it.
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“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s tough, right?”
Some of the conflict between governors and lawmakers is a basic power struggle over how to respond to a crisis. In Ohio, Larry Householder, the speaker of the state’s House of Representatives and a Republican, said the governor had “disrespected” the Legislature’s concerns about the effect of the orders on small businesses.
Even in deep-red Mississippi, the Legislature voted just shy of unanimously to wrest control of federal stimulus dollars from the Republican governor, Tate Reeves.
“It’s a terrible tragedy,” Mr. Reeves said in a recent appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” accusing lawmakers of trying to conduct a “power grab during the middle of an emergency.”
Rick Rojas and Mitch Smith contributed reporting.
