Article from For Liberty by Norm Leahy.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) is locked in a fight with several counties that have declared themselves open for business, defying Wolf’s phased reopening plan.

Wolf chastised local officials:

“The politicians who are encouraging the people they were elected to lead to quit the fight are acting in a most cowardly way,” said Wolf, asserting they are “choosing to desert in the face of the enemy.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Wolf went further than name-calling, threatening that the half-dozen non-compliant counties… 

…could face consequences, including withholding federal stimulus funds, and that businesses could lose liquor licenses and Department of Health licenses.

Elsewhere, legal challenges to the extended duration of some states’ shutdown orders are moving through local courts:

Lockdown resisters are testing that hypothesis in state courts, arguing that the public health emergencies governors cited when they ordered businesses to close and told people to stay at home no longer exist. An Illinois lawsuit made that case based on a statute that limits the length of a governor’s emergency declarations—an argument that last month persuaded a judge to issue a temporary restraining order. A New Hampshire lawsuit filed this week claims new circumstances have eliminated the statutory rationale for that state’s lockdown.

Even as these lawsuits move forward, some jurisdictions are opting for even longer periods in shutdown, including Washington, D.C. (through June 8) and Los Angeles, which said to be all but certain to extend its stay-at-home order through July.

Image Credit: By Cellofellow (Gadsden_flag.svg) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons