Here & Now

Rep. Steineke on COVID-19 Response Legislation

Frederica Freyberg:

Some people are unhappy with long-term “stay at home” orders, especially because of the impact on closed businesses and job loss. This week, we checked in with Wisconsin Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke for his take. Representative Steineke, thanks very much for joining us.

Jim Steineke:

Absolutely. Good to be here.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what is your reaction to the extension of the “safer at home” order?

Jim Steineke:

Disappointed and, frankly, confused, because we’ve seen other states that are preparing to relax some of these regulations come May first, including some of our surrounding states. And then you look at New York, who did an extension of their “safer at home” restrictions, but they only went to May 15. Governor Evers deciding on May 26, we just don’t understand where he got that date from and what he’s using as his basis to make that decision, because it seems to fly in the face of what other states are doing, including other states like Michigan and New York that have much more serious problems than what we do.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what would you like to see happen?

Jim Steineke:

I’d like to see a much more measured approach. He has the authority under the emergency declaration until May 12. I would have preferred to see the extension go, you know, to May 12, if that. You know, going forward, obviously, we have to look at the data and make sure we’re making decisions that are in the best interest of the health of our citizens. But I don’t think there’s any reason, given the fact that, like in the Fox Valley, there’s seven cases, seven people hospitalized with this virus in 13 hospitals. So other areas of the state outside of Milwaukee and maybe Madison aren’t seeing as big of an issue and to relax regulations in those places seems to make a little bit more sense.

Frederica Freyberg:

You and the majority, I understand, are going to pursue legal and legislative options. On what basis?

Jim Steineke:

Well, again, the emergency declaration is good for 60 days. That goes until May 12. What the governor is using as his basis to extend this is authority that they say that the secretary of the DHS has to extend this indefinitely. I don’t know how, if the statutes give the Legislature the ability to end an emergency declaration or, in the absence of ending it, not extending it, how an appointee of the governor then can just unilaterally extend it for as long as she wants. That flies in the face, I think, of what the law says as far as the Legislature’s capability.

Frederica Freyberg:

Have you yet filed or formulated your remedies?

Jim Steineke:

No, we haven’t. We’re still working through that. I’m still hopeful that the governor will actually come to us with a plan. I think the thing that Wisconsinites are really frustrated by is that the governor has never aligned — laid out the criteria that he’s using to make these decisions. So when he says we need more PPE, well, what does that look like? What number do we have to hit? How many weeks of PPE do we need? He says, we need more testing. Okay. What does that look like? How many tests do we have to be able to do per day or per week to hit that benchmark? He’s kind of patting everybody on the head saying, “Hey, you’re doing a great job. Just keep going for another month.” While we have businesses throughout the state that are failing now. Many more that are going to be failing over the next week or two. And this is a serious problem that we have to try to address and have to give some people some idea of when this is going to end.

Frederica Freyberg:

What about the models from the Department of Health Services that say without the “safer at home” order, somewhere between 300 and 1400 lives would already have been lost to coronavirus?

Jim Steineke:

Well, I think the models have been consistently off. So I think that’s a big part of the problem. And I get it. You know, modeling something like this, a virus that we’ve never seen before, is very difficult, very difficult to understand the impacts. I mean we saw nationally the model said even with restrictions, we were going to see hundreds of thousands of people die. We now know that that’s not likely to be the case. So we have to make decisions based on the data from the medical professionals, but we also have to make sure in areas where this isn’t as big of an issue that we can start to relax the regulations here pretty soon so businesses can survive and people can get back to work.

Frederica Freyberg:

How do you, though, how do you possibly reconcile lost businesses and jobs with loss of life?

Jim Steineke:

It’s a great question. And that’s something that we obviously struggle with. But this was always about bending the curve, right? Slowing the spread. It was never about getting down to zero. The medical professionals aren’t saying that we’re somehow going to stay safer at home until we’re down to zero infections. That’s never been the case. This is about making sure that the hospitals are prepared and have adequate resources to help deal with the patients that are coming in. And as we see across the state, hospitals by and large are empty. They are hemorrhaging tens and hundreds of millions of dollars right now because they have now cancelled all elective procedures waiting for this influx of patients that hasn’t come in the vast majority of the state.

Frederica Freyberg:

Representative Jim Steineke, we need to leave it there. Thanks very much.

Jim Steineke:

Thank you.