CNN "The Lead with Jake Tapper" - Interview with Laura Kelly

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Governor Kelly, thanks so much for joining us.

Kansas House Speaker Ron Ryckman told "The Washington Post" he and his colleagues would support your order, even calling it a good public policy if you could assure them that no one would face criminal penalties for violating the order.

What would your response be to that?

GOV. LAURA KELLY (D-NE): Well, you know, when I originally issued my first executive order, my stay-home order, we did exempt churches. Everybody else was under this 10-person limit, socially distanced. And if there were any enforcement, it would be a class "A" misdemeanor.

So what happened, though, was we saw what went on in Kentucky, what went on in Louisiana, around church services. And then, we had actually four clusters here in the state of Kansas and four deaths that have resulted as -- from church gatherings. So I felt it important to make it clear that churches would be included in the limit of ten with the social distancing.

When I did that, I had talked to all of our faith leaders all across the state, all denominations.

[16:40:05]

All of them were on board with that.

After the Legislative Coordinating Council revoked my executive order, I again talked to the faith leaders. They were still supportive of that. And they continue to be.

We -- we took this thing to the Supreme Court not so much because we want to argue with the Legislative Coordinating Council on criminalization or non-criminalization, but the fact is the Coordinating Council really doesn't even have the authority to revoke this order. Only the full legislature can do that.

But when I think about the criminalization -- you know, I compare it to, you know, we've got a world famous basketball team here with KU, and if the coach of that team were to say, you know what, a KU basketball game, you know, trumps public safety, and pile people into Allen Fieldhouse at the University of Kansas, would we stand for that or would we want that coach brought up and charged?

Probably brought up and charged, for putting so many people's health and safety at risk.

TAPPER: So --

KELLY: What would be the difference in a church setting?

TAPPER: So, I mean, I guess one of the arguments might be, just for me to play devil's advocate here, is there's no constitutional right to basketball, but our freedom of religion is in the Bill of Rights, and people might say that, you know, that right is one that should make any lawmaker wary of imposing any sort of guideline or restriction on people gathering for reasons of faith.

I certainly understand your motivation, but that might be what somebody would say in response, and what would you say back?

KELLY: Well, I would just tell them in Kansas, many people see basketball as a religion, so there's that.

But it's also because we're -- you know, this is not an effort to take the right to practice one's religion away. This is really all about the health and safety of Kansans. And I don't care what religion they are, I want them all to be safe. And that was the only reason that we went ahead and pulled the exemption for churches.

TAPPER: Governor Kelly, there are more than 1,000 confirmed cases in your state, and obviously, there are a number of individuals, more than 50, who have died as a result of it. Do you think that people in Kansas are not taking the threat of coronavirus seriously enough? Or is it just a handful of people? How do you think Kansans are responding?

KELLY: No, I think Kansans have responded extraordinarily well to this. You know, we acted pretty aggressively, pretty quickly. You know, we shut our school buildings down for the entire year. We put the stay-at-home order in place.

And we're actually seeing Kansans really abiding by the instructions. We're seeing the reduction in movement, which is the indicator of how much people are abiding by the stay-at-home laws. And so, we're very pleased with what they're doing.

You know, what we've -- what we have experienced here are somewhat what happened in Washington state with -- in the nursing home. We've had some clusters in our nursing facilities. We had the four clusters in the church facility that we talked about.

And, you know, Kansans are Kansans, people are people. We're going to have spread, like we've had every place else. But we think we've really been able to manage to mitigate it and to -- and to keep the curve, you know, from peaking too high as we go forward.

So we're comfortable. We don't think we've reached the peak. We think it will continue to rise for the next week or two. But we expect that we'll get to that point, and then we'll start to come on down.

But we're -- we're very comfortable with how Kansans have reacted to this, they've been very responsible, everybody across the board including our faith leaders.

TAPPER: All right. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, thank you so much.

Stay in touch with us. Let us know if there's something you need that you're not getting enough of from the federal government or from anyone else, and we can help shine a light on it. And God bless and good luck to you and the good people of Kansas on this Easter weekend.

KELLY: Thank you very much. Take care.

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