The governor is trying to have it both ways by defending her lousy lockdown record.
The governor is trying to have it both ways by defending her lousy lockdown record.
I t’s been three years since governors across the country closed schools and issued stay-at-home orders in response to Covid-19. Few lockdowns were as controversial as Michigan’s, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer created, seemingly out of thin air, confused and contradictory rules. Having won reelection in 2022, and hoping to boost her national profile, Whitmer is now trying to rewrite her lockdown legacy.
Whitmer faced few hard questions from the press about these unprecedented policies at the time. But, last week, she finally got one — sort of. She was interviewed by CNN’s Chris Wallace, with whom she had shared a stage at the University of Michigan (a safe space for her) a few days earlier. But Wallace pressed the governor in this interview, asking if she thought her lockdown was an overreaction. Whitmer admitted that some of her decisions did not “make a lot of sense” and that “maybe it was a little more than we needed to do.”
She also tried to rewrite history. Whitmer mentioned her forcing big-box stores such as Walmart, Kroger, and Meijer to close off their gardening and nursery sections. This was supposedly to keep people from “congregating around the gardening supplies.” She then tried to defend the decision — and contradicted her previous statement — by claiming that this wasn’t a big deal because no one plants in February.
Whitmer’s gardening ban was instituted in April 2020, not February. This is the high season for nurseries and gardening stores, when they typically record 60 percent to 80 percent of their annual sales. The governor’s initial lockdown order on March 23 declared local nurseries and gardening-supply shops nonessential and forced them to close. Their big-box competitors, however, who also sell groceries, were deemed to be essential and remained open. This presented an existential threat to many small businesses.
The Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association pointed this out in a letter to the governor on March 31. It was a “grave injustice” that their businesses were shuttered “while corporate mass-retailers are being allowed to operate.” The letter noted that Michigan was one of the few states to forbid nurseries and garden centers from doing business. A second letter, sent three days later, alerted Whitmer that Governor Mike DeWine in Ohio was allowing nurseries to operate.
Whitmer then tightened the screws on her lockdown. On April 9, she prohibited big-box stores from selling gardening supplies, presumably to eliminate the unfair competitive advantage her orders had given them. This was cold comfort for local nurseries, as the order also extended their closure by more than two weeks. The Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association called it a “horrible blow to our industry.”
Eight days later, five of these businesses filed a class-action lawsuit against the governor in federal court, calling Whitmer’s order “the most extreme and unnecessarily broad . . . order in the country.” A week later, Whitmer backtracked, declaring nurseries and gardening centers essential businesses and allowing big-box retailers to once again sell gardening products. The ban had lasted just 15 days.
Inane rules such as these were par for the course during Whitmer’s lockdown. She outlawed golfing until the Golf Association of Michigan explained how easy it is to keep one’s distance from others on a golf course. The governor then said yes to golf but no to golf carts — until golfers sent her a letter pointing out how vital carts are for many people to enjoy the sport. She changed the rules a week later. Similar scenarios played out with boating and high-school sports: Whitmer banned them until public pressure built up against her rules, and then she suddenly reversed course.
This is not the first time the governor has tried to rewrite her pandemic-response history. Whitmer claimed in a debate last year that children only missed three months of school as a result of her Covid policies. The reality is that most Michigan students had to endure virtual learning for three months in 2020 and for the better part of the 2020–21 school year. Whitmer shut down high schools for three weeks in November 2020 and put monthslong restrictions on sports. The governor did not recommend that schools reopen until March 2021, almost a full year after she had closed them.
Throughout the Covid pandemic, Whitmer and other governors who experimented with lockdowns claimed to have been guided by the best available data and by scientific expertise. Their actions repeatedly suggested otherwise. Even now, they refuse to admit that they were flying by the seat of their pants and making decisions based, at least in part, on political considerations. As the fog of war over state governments’ foolish all-out battle against a coronavirus slowly lifts, we must keep an accurate accounting of their unprecedented restrictions of some of our basic civil rights.