Huckabee: Small businesses right to be angry over unjust reopening guidelines
Mike Huckabee discusses how blue state lockdowns may impact to small businesses versus big box stores
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Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee pointed out on “Outnumbered Overtime” Tuesday that amid the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans are having trouble making sense of the restrictions on business owners.
“What doesn't make sense to most people is that boutiques have been ordered closed, but the big box stores can be open," the Fox News contributor said.
"Americans basically want a sense of fairness, of justice, of equality," he later added. "They're not seeing it, and I think that's was causing people to be angry and rightfully so."
Huckabee made the comments as states begin to reopen after stay-at-home orders were implemented in mid-March and businesses deemed nonessential were forced to temporarily close in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. His statements were in reaction to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal titled: “The Blue State Lockdown Blues.”
"Economic recovery will be especially painful in Democratic states that stay locked down longer and where businesses were struggling before the pandemic due to high rents, taxes, and government labor mandates,” the editorial board wrote. “Democrats are begging Congress for budget relief, but they’re still planning to raise taxes to finance worker pensions that they won't reform."
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After host Harris Faulkner brought up the Wall Street Journal editorial she said that “it's important to note that those states have been hit hardest by the pandemic, so you got that on one lane and you've got pre-pandemic level problems financially in the other.”
In response, Huckabee explained what he thinks “doesn't make sense to most people.”
He said, “Ask yourself, why would a boutique with only three or four customers at a time that’s fairly easy to monitor and sanitize somehow be very dangerous, but going to a big box store, a Walmart or a supermarket, with hundreds of total strangers, and so many people coming and going, there’s no way to adequately sanitize it. Why is that safe?”
Huckabee went on to say that “nobody has been able to describe that."
"So when these governments are putting very strict guidelines on the small business operator, the ones that has to cover the rent and pay the employees, doesn't have a corporate giant with big cash reserves to take care of them, when they’re going under, I think a lot of people are beginning to scratch their head and say, ‘This isn't right. This isn't the same rule being applied to everyone,'” he continued.
This month, more than a dozen states, including Alabama, Florida and Mississippi, eased strict lockdown measures that shuttered businesses and brought the daily lives of millions of Americans to a halt for weeks.
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Some governors, including New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, have said restrictions will not fully be lifted until a vaccine or treatment for the disease is available — a timeline that could take a year or more.
Fox News’ Stephen Sorace and Tyler Olson contributed to this report.
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