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Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) caused a stir Monday night by going on Fox News and suggesting older people like him needed to take a chance with their lives in the name of reopening the economy during the coronavirus outbreak.

The man in charge of making that decision in Texas, though, has a very different take. As he confronts imposing even stricter measures for the Lone Star State, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) responded Tuesday to a question about Patricks comments.

I will base my decision as governor of the state of Texas on what physicians say, Abbott said. If the goal is to get the economy going, the best thing we can do to get the economy going is to get covid-19 behind us.

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President Trump has leaned hard into the idea of reopening the economy in recent days, but as has been noted, he only has so much power to do so. Its the governors who issue stay-at-home orders and decide what opens and what doesnt in their states.

Few of them are echoing Trump right now, which suggests that even if Trump decides he wants to reopen things on Tuesday, he set a target date of Easter, April 12 he wont be able to do it in any large measure.

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Another Republican governor, Marylands Larry Hogan, had some choice words for Trumps idea on Tuesday, referring to an imaginary clock.

We dont think that were going to be in any way ready to be out of this in five or six days, or whenever this 15 days is up from the time that they started this imaginary clock, Hogan said on CNN. Most people think that were weeks away from the peak, if not months.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), whose state matches the description of less-affected areas that Trump has suggested could see reopenings in relatively short order, also indicated that shes looking at a longer time frame.

This situation is not going to be over in a week, said Noem, whose state has just over two dozen cases. We have another eight weeks until we see our peak infection rate.

She added, Any changes we make for how we conduct our daily lives have to be sustained.

Democrats had even more choice words for Trumps proposal, with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker saying Trump was not taking into account the true damage that this will do to our country if we see truly millions of people die. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Trumps off-the-cuff statements are really going to undermine our ability to protect people. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he and Trump are clearly operating under a different set of assumptions.

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said: If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then its no contest. No American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life. Job one has to be save lives. That has to be the priority.

But plenty of Republicans also made their differences rather clear.

The truth is that protecting people and protecting the economy is not mutually exclusive, said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R). In fact, one depends upon the other. The fact is we save our economy by first saving lives, and we have to do it in that order.

DeWine added, When people are dying, when people dont feel safe, this economy is not coming back.

DeWine, though, maintained that he was generally aligned with Trump on coronavirus, and he wasnt the only one declining to completely distance himself from the president. Democratic Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said she felt she understood Trumps inclination.

I am not interested in unnecessarily closing down businesses and taking jobs if we dont need to do that, said Brown, who issued tough restrictions on Monday. The goal of my executive order was to balance those competing demands. While I dont agree with what the president said and how he said it, I think thats what he was trying to say.

Brown added: When I was on the phone with him earlier this week, he clearly said that these difficult decisions are in the hands of governors. So I would expect that it to stay that way.

Thats the key takeaway. However much Trump wants to reopen the country, hell need governors to cooperate with that. The governors listed above represent five of the seven biggest states and more than 40 percent of the U.S. population, and theyre just the ones who have weighed in so far. Most of the other biggest states are also run by Democrats, who wouldnt be as inclined to align themselves with Trump on a controversial proposal.

As president, Trump can change the federal guidance, but its just that: guidance. Experts say he doesnt have many legal tools to override the precautions taken by state and local officials.

These governors also have to deal with problems on a more micro level and are more directly held responsible for what happens in their states. Any of them who would begin opening things up would put themselves in line for whatever criticism might follow from the fallout, and it would be much easier to readily quantify the effects of those decisions in their states particularly if they can be compared with other states that took tougher stances.

If Trump truly wants to set the ball in motion on this, hes got about 50 people he should be talking to about it. Right now, they seem pretty skeptical.

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Trump needs governors to reopen the economy. Even Republican ones aren't on board. - msnNOW

In 2016, Longwell opposed Trump in the Republican primaries but recognized the potency of his fear-and-anger platform. How could she not? It was as if he were working from Bermans playbook. During the campaign, Longwell happened to be the incoming board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans; she was the first woman to hold the post since the group was founded, in the late seventies, to advocate for gay and lesbian Republicans. The board felt intense pressure to endorse Trump, despite his selection of Mike Pence, an openly homophobic evangelical Christian, as his running mate. Longwell told me that she basically lay on the tracks to stop the group from backing Trump. Mostly, though, she watched the election unfold with dismay.

For me, the world changed in 2016, Longwell said. That summer, her first son was born. My wifes water broke the night of Melanias speech at the Convention, and a few nights later, after their sons birth, she watched on television at the hospital as Trump accepted the Republican nomination. I remember just how bad he made me feel, she said. Thats what I remember. I remember holding a new baby and feeling like this cant be whats happening. On Election Night, she was at a party in Washington, texting with another anti-Trump operative, Tim Miller, the former spokesperson for Jeb Bushs short-lived Presidential campaign. Hes going to win, Miller wrote to her. As the news sank in, she went outside and bummed a cigarette, although she no longer smoked.

Many people who opposed Trump in 2016 have their version of this story: the Election Night disbelief and shock, the litany of outrages that followed. But, unlike many others in Republican Washington, Longwell did not make her accommodations, political and moral, with the new President. When, on his second weekend in office, Trump issued an executive order banning entry into the U.S. for citizens of seven majority-Muslim nations, Longwell decided that Trump really was a danger to the country. I started thinking about: What can I do? she recalled. How can I get involved?

In the fall of 2017, Longwell was invited to a session of the Meeting of the Concerned, a semi-secret group of disaffected Republicans that had started gathering every other Tuesday in a basement conference room near Capitol Hill. The Never Trumpers were hardly a real movement, less an organized cabal than a cable-news-savvy alliance. Among them were longtime Party operatives, such as Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, who became regulars on liberal-leaning TV shows, and public intellectuals, such as Eliot Cohen, a former Bush Administration official who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, and Max Boot, of the Council on Foreign Relations, who stopped writing for the Wall Street Journals increasingly pro-Trump editorial page and went to the Washington Post. With the exception of Senator John McCain, most Republican elected officials already either supported Trump or kept their mouths shut about him. Inside the Administration, some had qualms about the President, but they soon were fired or marginalized, or quit. The official Party apparatus had been taken over by the President, and Republican lobbyists, consultants, political operatives, congressional staffers, right-wing media commentators, and government job seekers quickly identified where their interests lay.

Jerry Taylor, who helped found the Meeting of the Concerned and the Niskanen Center, the think tank that hosts it, told me about the first time Longwell showed up. Sarah didnt know anyone in the group, he said. She had never really travelled in those circles before. Many of the attendees were well-known denizens of Washingtons TV greenrooms, who bonded over their disillusionment with the Party and saw the election of Donald Trump as just the thin blue line between us and the abyss, as Taylor put it. Longwell wanted more than this talky self-styled resistance. She told me, Everybody was sitting around having a conversation that I had heard lots of versions of at that point, which is: What happened to the Republican Party? When Bill Kristol, a Republican pundit and the founder of The Weekly Standard, spoke up, Longwell recalled, she interrupted him: Why dont we do something about it? And he was kind of, like, Well, what would we do? And I was, like, I dont know, but youre famous. Youre Bill Kristol.

Kristol has been a leader of the hawkish neoconservative wing of the Party since arriving in Washington, as a member of the Reagan Administration. In 2016, he made a well-publicized attempt to recruit a last-ditch independent candidate to run against Trump. Having failed to find anyone of stature, Kristol settled on an obscure former C.I.A. officer and congressional staffer named Evan McMullin, whose candidacy never rose above the level of obscurity. After their initial meeting, Kristol and Longwell went out for coffee, and she urged him to take action again. They started brainstorming regularly at the Madison Hotel.

Then Mueller happened, Longwell said, and the idea for their group, Republicans for the Rule of Law, was born. Trumps firing of the F.B.I. director James Comey, in the spring of 2017, had set off the first major crisis of his Presidency, leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. Longwell and Kristol decided that their group would try to insure that Trump did not fire Mueller or block the investigation; to do this they would pressure Republican officials in the capital. I did think someone needed to fight the fight within the Republican Party, that you cant just give up even though its a long shot against a Republican President, Kristol told me. Sarah agreed.

In February, 2018, as Trump was publicly attacking Mueller, Longwell set up Defending Democracy Together, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that could accept donations without having to disclose donors. Defending Democracy Together became the umbrella organization for Republicans for the Rule of Law and other like-minded projects that sought to combat Trumps policies. Longwell and Kristol worked his contacts and raised substantial sums of money, including from liberal donors such as Pierre Omidyar, the tech billionaire who funds the left-wing Web site the Intercept.

Starting that March, whenever Trump threatened Mueller or opened a new front in his fight against the Russia hoax, the group ran TV ads defending the investigation, many of them featuring quickly produced clips of news footage or Trumps latest tweet, with urgent pleas to members of Congress to stop the President. All told, before the Mueller investigation was over, Republicans for the Rule of Law had run more than a hundred ads, aimed at a narrow but important segment of persuadable Republicans in key states, seeking to convince Party leaders that even Trumps base would not go along with his firing of the special counsel. In the hope of getting directly to the President, Longwell also ran the ads in Washington on Fox News, which Trump watches addictively.

In 2018, at a session of the Meeting of the Concerned, Longwell met George Conway, the husband of Trumps White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway. A prominent conservative attorney, he had accepted, then declined, a senior position in Trumps Justice Department. Earlier that year, Conway had started tweeting his dismay about Trump, thus setting off a marital-political drama worthy of a reality-TV Presidency. Like Longwell, Conway was invited into the capitals Never Trump circle, but he, too, decided that the meetings were often frustrating exercises in therapy. He craved action. (Look, theres a lot of benefit just to catharsis, Jerry Taylor joked to me, especially given that the alternative is to become an alcoholic, which is easy to do in this town now.)

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The Trials of a Never Trump Republican - The New Yorker

That the parties are coming together at all on major legislation is, of itself, a remarkable turn from the intransigence that has defined Washington since Trump won election in 2016 and Democrats regained control of the House two years later. Joe Lieberman, the former Connecticut senator, described the current landscape in Washington as an extremely partisan time, ideologically divided time in our government worse than 2008 and 2009 by far, Im afraid.

Still, Republicans and Democrats are coming together to get things done, he said, adding that if it works which I hope and believe it will, if they do enough quickly enough maybe there wont be a dominant counter-reaction among Democrats or Republicans left or right.

Yet already, the pandemic has emboldened Democrats calls for more comprehensive health care and employee benefits, with the crisis laying bare not only shortcomings within the nations health care system, but the precariousness of Americans financial condition. Retirement accounts have been ravaged and unemployment claims are soaring.

David Pepper, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said the pandemic has exposed just that the current state of affairs just leaves so many Americans living right on the edge of disaster, and wed heard these studies for years.

This just bears this out, he said. It tells you what an unstable status quo were living in to start That is something that might reframe politics for a long time.

Progressive Democrats, anticipating a recession and high rates of unemployment, are preparing to use the coronavirus pandemic to draw their party to the left on economic policy, attempting to broaden support for a Green New Deal as a way to spur employment while decarbonizing the economy. And they are watching party leaders closely in negotiations for the rescue package and demanding constraints on corporations that receive federal aid, as well as guarantees for the working class.

Charles Chamberlain, chairman of the liberal political action committee Democracy for America, said Were in a moment right now where obviously one of the long-term impacts of the coronavirus is likely to be a complete restructure of our economy.

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'Extraordinary change': How coronavirus is rewiring the Republican and Democratic parties - POLITICO

Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said on Monday that Sen. Richard Burr has received unfairly favorable treatment in retaining his powerful position when compared to former Rep. Katie Hill, who resigned after having an inappropriate affair with a staffer.

Burr, a North Carolina Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was revealed last week to have sold up to $1.7 million in stocks last month just days ahead of the sharp market decline stemming from the novel coronavirus pandemic. He has asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate and has not stepped away from any of his roles.

.@KatieHill4CA gets run out of Congress for screwing a campaign staffer absent any complaint, Gaetz tweeted. @SenatorBurr stays as Intelligence Chairman after screwing all Americans by falsely reassuring us w opeds on #COVID while he dumped his stock portfolio early. This is not fair.

A week before his stock sell-off, Burr co-wrote an op-ed, titled Coronavirus prevention steps the U.S. government is taking to protect you, asserting that the US was better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus. Burr said Friday that he did not base his sales on any information he received as chairman of the Intelligence Committee and requested that an ethics investigation be opened into the trades.

A source familiar with the matter told CNN that the committee did not receive briefings on the virus the week of Burrs stock sales.

Burr refused to answer CNNs questions earlier on Monday about the controversial stock sales. When asked whether he could see that there would be an optics problem with the chairman of the intelligence committee making such sales, Burr replied, Ill leave that up the Ethics Committee.

Gaetzs tweet said that treament was not fair compared to the backlash Hill faced.

In October, the one-term California Democrat resigned from Congress days after she admitted to having an inappropriate relationship with a campaign staffer before coming into office.

The House Committee on Ethics had previously announced that it was opening an investigation into allegations Hill engaged in an improper relationship with a congressional staffer in possible violation of House rules banning relationships between members and their staff. The probe was announced after a conservative blog had released intimate photos of Hill, alleging she and her husband had a separate relationship with an unnamed female campaign staffer.

When the Ethics Committee announced its investigation, Gaetz defended Hill, writing in a tweet, Who among us would look perfect if every ex leaked every photo/text? Katie isnt being investigated by Ethics or maligned because she hurt anyone it is because she is different.

Hill was the first openly bisexual member of Congress from California.

Hill said that Kenny Heslep, her estranged husband of nine years, was trying to humiliate her by sharing the photographs after the couple filed for divorce. She expressed feelings of frustration over a double standard in her final speech on the House floor as a member of Congress.

I am leaving now because of a double standard, Hill said. I am leaving because I no longer want to be used as a bargaining chip. I am leaving because I didnt want to be peddled by papers and blogs and websites, used by shameless operatives for the dirtiest gutter politics that Ive ever seen.

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Republican congressman thinks Burr is getting a better deal than ex-lawmaker who resigned: 'This is not fair' - KRDO

Aaron E. Carroll and Ashish Jha: This is how we can beat the coronavirus

The disparity between the parties was underscored Thursday afternoon when Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Governor Gavin Newsom, both Democrats, issued rapid-fire orders closing down all non-essential businesses, first in the city and then in the entire state, a jurisdiction of 39.5 million people.

This divergence reflects not only ideological but also geographic realities. So far, the greatest clusters of the disease, and the most aggressive responses to it, have indeed been centered in a few large, Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas, including Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and Boston. At Thursdays White House press briefing, Deborah Birx, the administrations response coordinator, said half of the nations cases so far are located in just 10 counties. The outbreaks eventual political effects may vary significantly depending on how extensively it spreads beyond these initial beachheads.

If the virus never becomes pervasive beyond big cities, that could reinforce the sense among many Republican voters and office-holders that the threat has been overstated. It could also fuel the kind of xenophobia that Trump and other GOP leaders, such as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have encouraged by labeling the disease the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus.

Theres a long history of conservatives demonizing the cities as sources of disease to threaten the pure heartland, says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the director of political studies at the libertarian Niskanen Center and the author of Rule and Ruin, a history of the modern Republican Party. Thats an old theme. So that could be how it goes down.

David Frum: No empathy, only anger

Conversely, the charge that Trump failed to move quickly enough may cut more deeply if the burden of the disease is heavily felt in the smaller communities where his support is deepest. Most medical experts believe that, eventually, the outbreak will reach all corners of the country, including the mostly Republican-leaning small towns and rural areas that are now less visibly affected.

Theres no reason to think that smaller communities will be protected from it, Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. It may take longer for it to get there, but as long as there are people coming and going the virus will eventually find its way to rural communities as well.

Still, some experts believe that, throughout the outbreak, the greatest effects will remain localized in large urban centers. The bottom line is, every epidemic is local, and the social networks and the physical infrastructure in any specific geographic area will determine the spread of the epidemic, Jeffrey D. Klausner, a professor of medicine and public health at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told me. Particularly, respiratory viruses are dependent on close social networks and are going to spread much more efficiently in crowded, densely populated urban areas.

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Red and Blue America Arent Experiencing the Same Pandemic - The Atlantic