For the second time, Senator Torrey Westrom (R-Elbow Lake) and the Minnesota Senate voted today to end Governor Tim Walz’s peacetime emergency powers relative to the COVID pandemic. If the House agrees, it would end the state’s longest peacetime emergency in history. Gov. Walz first put the state under emergency powers on March 13, 2020, more than four months ago, to prepare healthcare facilities and flatten the curve. That mission has been accomplished.
“It is time for the governor to end the emergency and work with the legislature. The virus caught everyone by surprise in March, so most of us understood when the governor activated his emergency powers. However, those powers were never intended to exclude the legislature. They were never intended to allow one person to maintain a long-term iron grip on power. They were never intended to be a new way of life. Yet, that is precisely what is happening.
“We are meeting almost every single one of the governor’s dial-back measurements. We have enough resources, enough beds, enough PPE, and enough daily testing capacity – more than doubling the benchmark of 5,000 tests per day the Governor set on April 13th as criteria to reopen our state. Key indicators like hospitalizations and percentage of positive tests are down significantly from their peaks. If the governor won’t end his emergency powers now, what will it take?
“Lifting these emergency powers would also ensure that school districts would return this fall and decide locally how to best reopen, because educating our children is essential.”
The vote to end the governor’s peacetime emergency powers was 36-31, with one Democrat joining all 35 Republicans supporting the resolution.