Republican politicians once defended a “hands-off” approach to local government and entrepreneurship. Local governmental units like school boards knew how best to educate and protect local kids without meddling from distant capitals, went the thinking, just as private businesses knew best how to make their own workplace policies.
That’s apparently out the window with today’s GOP in places like Missouri, where Attorney General Eric Schmitt is suing school districts to prohibit mask mandates, and Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has decreed that businesses may not impose vaccination requirements on their employees.
As if to pile on even more hypocrisy, Schmitt, Abbott and other Republicans are lambasting the Biden administration’s call for vaccine mandates as an infringement on — you guessed it — the autonomy of local governments and businesses. Do they even hear themselves?
