Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear is calling a special session of the General Assembly in order for Republicans who control the state House and Senate completely to deal with the state's runaway COVID-19 delta variant pandemic, as the same KY GOP legislature stripped Gov. Beshear of almost all emergency powers relating to health and safety executive orders earlier this spring.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is calling for a special session of the General Assembly to address the commonwealth's alarming rise in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
The session will begin Tuesday at 10 a.m. at the state Capitol in Frankfort.
Beshear's call comes two weeks after the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled a lower court was wrong to block new laws limiting the scope of the governor's emergency powers, giving the Republicans' legislative supermajority a substantial say over any new policy measures to address the pandemic.
The governor's call for a special session follows more than a week of negotiations with Republican leaders over the scope of a potential session and what pandemic-related legislation both could support.
Beshear began Saturday's announcement with a warning about the severity of the current surge in cases and hospitalizations due to the delta variant.
"In previous surges, the governor — me — was empowered to act. To do what is necessary to stop the spike, to flatten the curve, to save lives. But a recent state Supreme Court decision has changed that," he said. "Now that burden will fall in large part on the General Assembly.
"They'll have to carry much of that weight. To confront unpopular choices and to make decisions that balance many things, including the lives and the possible deaths of our citizens."
Under the Kentucky constitution, the governor has the exclusive power to both call a special session and set the agenda of any legislation it considers.
So, the good news is that the KY GOP can't add a Texas-style abortion ban to the special session, or any other nonsense that Beshear hasn't specifically asked the General Assembly to take up, as that's a state constitutional provision of the governor's power.
The bad news is the KY GOP will almost certainly do nothing substantive to stop the pandemic, other than to force the state to offer livestock dewormer and other non-COVID medicines to those who want to use it as a "treatment".
That is unfortunate, as especially in rural counties, schools are now unraveling under entire districts flooded with thousands of kids and educators sick with COVID delta.
About a fifth of Kentucky’s school districts have had to temporarily close since classes began last month because of coronavirus infections, an indication of the dire impact the most recent wave of the virus has had on the state.
Kentucky has recently reached its highest levels of cases and hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic, largely because of the highly infectious Delta variant. Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, and Governor Andy Beshear said on Thursday he was deploying the National Guard to help medical professionals.
The rise in cases has also affected Kentucky’s schoolchildren, hundreds of thousands of whom are under 12 and so not eligible for vaccination. “More kids are getting Covid right now than we ever thought imaginable,” Mr. Beshear said at a news conference on Monday.
As of Friday, 34 of the state’s 171 school districts had closed at some point during the new school year because of infections and quarantines, said Josh Shoulta, a spokesman for the Kentucky School Boards Association.
The emergency COVID orders that Beshear put into place all expire on Friday, but that means everything from that point on is on KY Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne.
Don't expect much from these two clowns.
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