Tax day 2020—the day that the Michigan Conservative Coalition started a movement to push back on draconian lockdown measures put in place by overreaching governors. On April 15, over 15,000 Michiganders drove vehicles to Lansing, MI to demand Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer allow them to go back to work and take control of their own lives. Governor Whitmer’s response was to mock the protesters and threaten to extend her shut down order.

The Michigan protest spurred citizens from across the United States to fight back in their states against overreaching governors,                                                                     who are destroying businesses with drastic shutdown measures over the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, one U.S. Congressman is threatening he’ll push for withholding federal bailout funds from state and local governments who continue to lock down commerce. 

The Federalist reports – No dime of bailout money should go to state or local governments that continue “to lock down commerce,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy told The Federalist Radio Hour in a far-reaching Friday interview now available in its entirety.

“Frankly, I’ve got to think about [giving money] at all, but if we think it’s appropriate to help them from losing some of their tax base, I sure as hell don’t want money to [state and local governments] who are continuing to lock down commerce,” Roy said. “We need local governments and state governments to get the hell out of the way of the American citizen and give their country back to them. And I’m not interested in any federal bailouts of state and local government, at least until we have free, open commerce, free-flowing in the states in question.”

Congressman Roy isn’t alone in his pushback on state or local governments who push back on commerce.

Roy has been a vocal critic of the shortcomings of the Paycheck Protection Program while “holding [his] nose voting for” it, particularly in its failure to address the needs of Main Street restaurants and other similarly sized businesses that have been closed by state and local governments. He has been a vocal proponent of governors letting workers and entrepreneurs get back to their jobs and businesses if their state’s medical conditions allow it.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told radio host, Hugh Hewitt, he’d “be in favor of allowing states to use the [currently unavailable] bankruptcy route” in a Wednesday interview. “I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated,” McConnell said. “There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”

“What the Senate majority leader was really doing there,” Roy told The Federalist Radio Hour, “was shooting a shot across the bow, saying, ‘Hey states, don’t think you can just keep running back to the feds to figure out how to backstop your decision making.’ … But what I do know is a lot of the states — whether they’re as big as New York or small — they’re making decisions about shutdown and lockdown and there are consequences to those decisions and they can’t just come back to Washington and say, ‘Oh, by the way, we shut everything down and our economy got decimated and now we don’t have any tax revenue, we cant pay for firefighters and everything else, can you all go borrow us some more freaking money so we can pay off our bills?’ That can’t be how we operate. Federalism is a two-way street. I’m a big believer in federalism, big believer in letting states decide.”