Republicans in control of the Arizona House voted 31-28 on Wednesday to let businesses ignore mask mandates to stem COVID-19 spread partly by absurdly arguing they weren’t needed decades ago to stop the spread of AIDS.
On a party-line vote, the Republican-controlled House approved legislation that says business owners need not enforce any state, city, town or county requirement for people to wear a mask.
The measure now goes to the GOP-controlled Senate. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Joseph Chaplik, a first-term Republican legislator from Scottsdale, said his House Bill 2770 would give businesses the choice of whether to enforce the mandates that many communities already adopted. “It’s about the individual rights of these business owners as