New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy plans to issue guidance later Tuesday for residents looking to hold large outdoor gatherings, he said on POLITICO Playbook Live, easing a core element of the state’s lockdown.
“Today, later this afternoon,” Murphy said after being asked when residents can expect guidance on large events such as weddings and parties.
“How’s that for an answer?”With the exception of New York, no state has been hit harder by Covid-19 than New Jersey, which has been virtually shut down since Murphy’s March 21 executive order that instructed residents to stay home, closed nonessential retail businesses and barred most indoor and outdoor gatherings.
Murphy, a progressive Democrat and former NAACP board member, made waves over the weekend when he defied his own stay-at-home order to march with demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd and other people of color who have been killed in encounters with law enforcement.
While elements of the stay-at-home order have been loosened over the last two months, the governor’s 25-person limit for outdoor gatherings has been regularly tested by the public’s outrage over Floyd’s death and the country’s current reckoning with racially targeted police violence.
“People are angry, they’re outraged, they’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. And who can blame them,” said Murphy, whose state has seen more than 164,000 cases of Covid-19 and 12,214 deaths. “I don’t take any of this lightly. … This region’s been crushed."
“We’re finally, for the past several weeks, in a meaningfully better place and we want to keep it that way,” Murphy, who heads the Democratic Governors Association, told POLITICO Playbook Live.
“While I know this is not a clear cut answer, the fact of the matter is people are angry and deserve to be heard.”While he touted recent and ongoing reforms instituted by his administration and state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, who’s reassessing New Jersey‘s use-of-force guidelines, Murphy declined to take a position on the ongoing push by some progressives to defund police departments.
“The only thing I would say about defund [is] it’s not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question,” he said. “This is a lot more complicated.”
Republican leaders in New Jersey have hammered Murphy for his appearance at the protests, his first non-coronavirus-related public outings since undergoing surgery for kidney cancer on March 4. The GOP, along with some of New Jersey’s elected Democrats, have fought for a faster timeline for the state’s economic revival.
For months, Murphy has said public health data on new cases, hospitalizations and transmission rates would determine how and when the state’s businesses can reopen.
“They’re getting better, and because they’re getting better, we’re able to take more steps [to reopen the state],” he said.
Murphy is scheduled to hold his daily coronavirus press briefing in Trenton at 1 p.m.