Lawsuits over Cooper’s COVID closures move ahead. Will they be a campaign issue?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- N.C. Supreme Court rulings allow bar lawsuits over COVID closures to proceed.
- Lawsuits could influence 2026 Senate race between Roy Cooper and Michael Whatley.
- Bar owners argue pandemic restrictions violated rights and caused financial harm.
Two recent rulings by the N.C. Supreme Court will allow lawsuits filed five years ago by several North Carolina bars over the state’s COVID-19 lockdown orders to move forward with trials that could become an issue in next year’s highly anticipated U.S. Senate election.
The decisions handed down by the high court’s Republican majority Aug. 22 came in two cases in which different groups of bars challenged COVID-19 restrictions imposed by then-Gov. Roy Cooper that they said unfairly limited or prevented them from reopening and resuming operations, and subjected them to different rules than restaurants, hotels, breweries, and other businesses that serve alcohol.
The court’s decisions allow both cases to return to trial courts and keep doors open for the bars, which are seeking financial damages, to potentially receive favorable court decisions in their cases in the future. The cases heading back to trial could also renew debate over the public health restrictions Cooper put into place during the pandemic and the effect they had on businesses, now that the former Democratic governor is running for U.S. Senate.
The campaign of Michael Whatley, the former head of the N.C. Republican Party who is the favorite to secure the GOP nomination after an endorsement from President Donald Trump, signaled it would attack Cooper on the issue, slamming him for imposing “tyrannical mandates” and arguing he “has never stood with Main Street North Carolina.”
“Roy Cooper shut down small businesses, crushed livelihoods, and completely ignored North Carolinians who pleaded for relief from his tyrannical mandates,” Whatley campaign senior advisor Danielle Alvarez said in a statement. “Typical behavior from a career politician who couldn’t care less about the concerns of the hardworking North Carolinians who keep our state running.”
A spokesperson for Cooper’s campaign said in response: “Governor Cooper added more than 640,000 jobs in counties and cities all across our state and you can’t trust a D.C. insider and big oil lobbyist like Michael Whatley to lower costs for North Carolinians, especially when he supports bills in D.C. that will make life more expensive for people.”
Cooper has defended state’s implementation of pandemic restrictions
The N.C. Bar and Tavern Association, one of the groups that sued Cooper over the restrictions in 2020, said the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the lawsuit to move forward was an “important step toward justice” for bar owners whose businesses suffered during the pandemic.
“From the beginning, we never asked for special treatment, only equal treatment,” Zack Medford, the NCBATA’s president and a bar owner, said in a statement. “This ruling is a clear message that hardworking small-business owners cannot be shut out of their livelihoods without accountability. Today the Court made it clear: the right to earn a living is fundamental in North Carolina.”
Former Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican who served from 2012 to 2016 and lost his bid for reelection in a tightly contested race against Cooper, also predicted that the issue of COVID-19 restrictions, and how Cooper’s administration applied them, would come up in the election.
“He said he was following science, and the media gave him a free ride on that,” McCrory said. “Well, his science was closing the bars but keeping the breweries open, like COVID knew the difference between a brewery and a bar.”
Attorneys and aides for Cooper have defended the restrictions, saying that they were based on information and data available at the time.
After the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled last year that while Cooper had the authority as governor to shut down some businesses in the interest of public health, his decision to begin reopening restaurants but not bars violated the rights of bar owners, Cooper’s office defended the manner in which the state gradually allowed businesses to reopen.
That case began when a group of nearly 200 bar owners sued Cooper for leaving them out of part of the state’s reopening plan, arguing that the distinction between bars and restaurants was arbitrary.
“The balanced and necessary actions the state took in consultation with health officials early in the pandemic followed the law, saved lives and saved jobs,” Mary Scott Winstead, communications director for Cooper’s office, said at the time. “When this action was taken almost four years ago, hospitals were overflowing, thousands of people were dying, protective equipment was in short supply and vaccines and treatments were nonexistent.”
COVID-19 mortality data reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, North Carolina had the 12th lowest age-adjusted death rate among all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In 2021, the state’s death rate was the 21st highest in the country. In 2022, it was the 18th highest.
What the NC Supreme Court said in its rulings
Authoring the majority’s opinion in one of the rulings, N.C. Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, wrote that the high court acknowledged “that the COVID-19 pandemic was a chaotic period of time.”
“It is important to remember, however, that the Governor was not the only person facing uncertainty,” Newby wrote. “Small business owners across the state dutifully shuttered their doors and scaled back operations without knowing exactly when they could open or operate fully again. They, too, did not know what the future held and were without the benefit of hindsight. Many were compelled to lay off employees, deplete cash reserves, take out unwanted loans, or close for good.”
Justice Anita Earls, one of two Democrats on the court who dissented in both rulings, wrote in her opinion that courts reviewing challenges to pandemic-era public health restrictions “after the dust has settled must remember what the government knew then, not what we know now.”
“Reasonableness in a crisis cannot mean perfection proved later—it must reflect the uncertainty, urgency, and limited knowledge that marked the moment,” Earls wrote. “Judging an emergency measure solely by its later-proven effectiveness is to weigh yesterday’s choices on golden scales, with all the clarity of hindsight and none of the pressures of the moment.”
Earls went on to add: “The majority’s vague standard thus thinly veils its ultimate objective: superintending the state’s response to the pandemic from its comfortable perch as a Monday morning quarterback.”
Reporter Kyle Ingram contributed.
