Leo Knepper of the Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania (CAP) says his organization is launching a petition in order to ensure people's voices are heard with regards to state-level mask and vaccine mandates.
"Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA), despite having his emergency powers greatly curtailed by voters in the last election, has continued to issue sweeping mandates," Knepper accounts.
Earlier this year, for example, Gov. Wolf indicated he would give local school boards the freedom to determine whether or not they would institute mandatory masking for their schools, and a majority of them decided against that.
"The governor did not like that decision, and so he had his secretary of health override the local school boards," the CAP spokesman reports. "What we're attempting to do is to get enough signatures and submit them to the state House and Senate."
Knepper says such mandates essentially rob people of any bodily autonomy they might have.
"Folks, whether you want to look at it this way or not, are being told that the state is really the one who controls their body versus them," laments Knepper. "For us as an organization that typically focuses on things like economics and fiscal policy to see something like this, that is such a trampling of individual liberty; it wasn't something that we could just sit back and not do anything about."
In contrast to Gov. Wolf, Nebraska's Republican governor is speaking out against President Biden's mandate for private sector workers to get COVID shots or face regular testing.
"If this is allowed to stand, any administration would be able to declare emergency, publish OSHA rules, and make private businesses become enforcers of federal policy," Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) recently told the "Washington Watch with Tony Perkins" program. "That is a huge overreach of federal government and absolutely not within their constitutional purview."
Ricketts encourages people to choose getting vaccinated, but he does not want government forcing the shots on people.
"We encourage people to get vaccines," said Ricketts. "Vaccines help create the antibodies; they will help you fight off the virus and avoid going to the hospital or even death. So we … want people to get the comfort level that they need in order to get the vaccine, but to have the federal government mandate -- this is just a huge overreach of federal power that should make all of us concerned."
Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) said as much during a recent appearance on American Family Radio's "Today's Issues" program.
"If the president of the United States has this power, what power does one man that holds the presidency not have," Gov. Reeves posed. "That's what should scare people, regardless of how you feel about vaccines and regardless of how you feel about politics."
Earlier this month, President Biden said that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would be adopting a rule developed by the Department of Labor to "require all employers with 100 or more employees … to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week."
