What was the first order of business for the State Legislature in Utah? A Joint resolution was proposed and passed both houses that overturned mask mandates in Summit and Salt Lake County. Both had imposed them, but the Legislature overruled those orders, and they can no longer be enforced.
Reformatted.
The Utah House of Representatives voted Friday to overturn mask mandates in Salt Lake and Summit counties. The joint resolution to terminate the mask orders, including the student mask mandate in Salt Lake City, passed by a 45-29 vote.
SJR3 passed the Senate with a 22-5 vote on Tuesday, the first day of the Utah Legislature’s 2022 general session.
Because it’s a joint resolution, it does not need Gov. Spencer Cox’s signature to become law, and Cox does not have the power to veto it. The Utah Legislature gave itself the ability to overturn local health orders by joint resolution in SB195, also known as Utah’s COVID-19 “endgame” bill, which was signed into law last year.
Writing on Substack el gato malo adds,
i heard from some friends in the area that park city teachers were literally crying and claiming they were going to die because the kids would no longer have to be masked.
this is a truly frightening decent into performative histrionics. the evidence is and has been overwhelming that masks in schools do nothing to stop covid. masks do not stop covid. not even N95’s. this is 100 years of settled science. it has not changed. it was ignored.
masks are a made up epidemiological cosplay cargo cult.
Crying liberal teachers makes perfect sense to me. They are all indoctrinated, stewing in two years of fear. Denied access or interest in mounds of research, including how teachers are not more susceptible to unmasked kids. To even suggest such a thing would be so far outside the approved narratives of their peers.
To suggest consideration of any peer-reviewed science that falls outside the dogma of the COVID domestic terror plantation could result in shunning, bullying, perhaps even termination.
No need for an unelected board to threaten your license, though that might also be an option.
One more point, and it may be the best takeaway because it’s universal. The Left, which lives and dies to centralize control and command, is complaining that the legislature is interfering with local control. We’ve heard that here from Republicans like Governor Sununu, who have no interest in protecting citizens from mandates of any sort, public or private, again care of el gato malo, “what could be more local than the ability to control oneself?”
What could be more local than the ability to control oneself?
This is, literally, the foundation of our Republic—the basis of understanding for and the defense of individual liberty.
By the way, New Hampshire has pending legislation along the lines of what just went down in Utah (sort of). We can’t just propose a resolution and make mask mandates disappear, but we can use the legislative process via our elected representatives.
They can’t reverse West Running Brook Middle School’s mask mandate with a simple majority of both Houses. But HB 1131, if passed and signed into law, will “prohibit school boards and accredited nonpublic schools from adopting, enforcing, or implementing a policy that requires students or members of the public to wear a facial covering.”
Masks in public school buildings statewide would be optional. That means the Karens can make their kids wear them until the COVID cows come home (or maybe ‘Chickens to roost?’) but not other people’s kids.
There is a public hearing for HB1131 on 01/27/2022 at 10:30 a.m. LOB205-207. Complete, I suspect, with teachers “crying and claiming they were going to die.”
That has to be worth your time.
