Evidently, the Attorney General’s Office in Mississippi does not have enough to do these days, so it is having to invent work that is mostly designed to curry political favor.
So it is with the announcement this week by Lynn Fitch that she is going to file suit against the Chinese government to recover Mississippi’s costs and damages to fight the new coronavirus.
The Chinese must be quaking in their boots.
If there is a legal dispute here, neither Mississippi nor Missouri, which earlier filed a similar suit, is going to prevail. Foreign governments have sovereign immunity from being sued in U.S. courts. Even if Congress were to try to carve an exception out of that immunity for the outbreak of COVID-19, as some Republicans are advocating, international law would most likely block the effort from having any practical impact.
Besides, the facts are not on Mississippi’s side.
Certainly, the Chinese government attempted at first to keep the outbreak of COVID-19 quiet and downplay its severity. That strategy, however, lasted only a couple of weeks. The new coronavirus proved pretty quickly it was not to be silenced, even by an authoritarian government.
Yet, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, waiting for his lead from the nation’s mercurial president, did not take his first official action until early March. You can’t blame the Chinese for that delay.
What this lawsuit is all about is promoting what has become the Republican narrative for COVID-19: Blame it on the Chinese.
Even though Donald Trump downplayed the disease initially, even though he praised the Chinese at first for their response in dealing with it, he now has decided that, if he is going to win reelection in November, he must deflect the blame for the tens of thousands of deaths and the blowing up of the U.S. economy on someone other than himself.
Fitch, who licked Trump’s boots while she was successfully running for attorney general, is trying to ingratiate herself further with him. Maybe that’s good for getting more federal help for Mississippi, since the president has a habit of directing assistance he controls to those states that genuflect to him. Perhaps this lawsuit will strengthen Fitch’s standing in the Republican Party’s ultraconservative base.
But as a legal exercise, it is a waste of time and taxpayers’ money.
