Opinion: What GOP lawmakers who refused to wear masks during Capitol lockdown need now

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. “I am angry that the attack on the Capitol and my subsequent illness have the same cause: my Republican colleagues’ inability to accept facts,” Coleman wrote in the Washington Post. Another, Rep. Brad Schneider, said in a statement that he is “now in strict isolation, worried that I have risked my wife’s health and angry at the selfishness and arrogance of the anti-maskers who put their own contempt and disregard for decency ahead of the health and safety of their colleagues and our staff.” And Rep. Pramila Jayapal told New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister last week that she feared she had been exposed in “a superspreader event” because, when members of Congress were brought to a secured room during the attack, “there were over 100 people and many were Republicans not wearing masks.” In an interview with McClatchy news service Friday, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that the US Capitol riot, broadly speaking, was likely a coronavirus “surge event” and “is going to have public health consequences.” In a statement after she tested positive for the virus, Jayapal said: “Only hours after President Trump incited a deadly assault on our Capitol, our country, and our democracy, many Republicans still refused to take the bare minimum Covid-19 precaution and simply wear a damn mask in a crowded room during a pandemic – creating a superspreader event on top of a domestic terrorist attack.” She called for “serious fines to be immediately levied on every single Member who refuses to wear a mask in the Capitol” and for “any Member who refuses to wear a mask be immediately removed from the floor by the Sergeant at Arms.” House Democrats are now pushing for a rule that would fine any member $500 the first time they don’t wear a mask on the House floor, and $2,500 for any subsequent offense. We don’t know how many more members of Congress will test positive for Covid-19, just as it’s impossible to tally the number of Americans who would have avoided illness or death had all Republican leaders encouraged public health best practices.