Decision making is hard. It's so hard we invented committees to avoid making decisions all together.
That kind of works until there's an emergency. Then somebody has to take charge. You don't wait for a committee when the house is on fire.
What that basically describes is government in the United States. We have committees in the form of legislatures, fiscal courts, city councils and we have somebody to make hard decisions in presidents, governors and mayors.
There's another branch made up of courts that decide later if what the committee or the decision maker did were legal.
And that leads us to where we are today in Kentucky.
The state's big committees are dominated by a party that wants to rule all branches of government, not only the committees and the courts. They want to be the decision maker, too.
But nobody liked their last guy because he was a jerk who made terrible decisions. So we elected the guy from the other party to be decision maker.
Then came Covid-19. The decision maker recognized the emergency and responded by making decisions based on what was known at the time. He proceeded to do that for a year to handle the real public health emergency.
Now here's where it gets complicated. The decision maker was making tough decisions that weren't wildly popular, but he was supported by the majority of Kentuckians and the state was not being hit as hard as surrounding states. His popularity grew during the pandemic.
This infuriated the majority party in the committees who proceeded to enact laws that didn't do anything to protect the well being of the citizens, but everything to make the majority party the only party in government now and forever.
They weren't going to have one of those other guys looking good on their watch. One of the laws they enacted took decision making in times of emergency out of the decision maker's hands and into the committee's realm.
Where no decisions are made.
So, as I write this, Pikeville Medical Center is getting national guard support to face the onslaught of Delta variant Covid cases. The state set its record yesterday for most Covid hospitalizations and ICU beds. The state positivity rate is 13.66% and incidence rate is 90 cases per 100,000 people.
Both of those numbers are much higher in Pike county and the rest of eastern Kentucky where some counties have incidence rates over 200. Schools across the state, including Pike, are shutting down because this time, young people are catching Covid faster than the older population.
In other words, the house is on fire.
Today, while governors across the country are making hard decisions to put out the fire, ours is forced to wait while the committee tries to decide if the smoke's real. Some of those committee members don't think there's a fire at all. If Covid is a hoax, why come together?
If they do gather, it's far more likely they'll vote to mandate a day to pray Covid away than mandate masks in schools. That's a committee for you.