"Why doesn't Joe Biden shut down the entire country?" has the same answer as "Why doesn't Joe Biden destroy the coronavirus with his mind?"

IANAL (and also, I am not a lawyer) but I think the Constitutional basis would be iffy at best, and more importantly in my mind the backlash would make a lot more conservatives think kindly of insurrection. https://twitter.com/InscrutableJane/status/1353477217536368643

Like, any scenario in which Joe Biden is setting up roadblocks and checkpoints that impede interstate travel... I don't see that going well or ending well, even if it would arguably help.

Here's the real hard, sad truth: we are not getting out of this pandemic without massive cooperation from Republicans at all levels of government, which requires them to:

1. Accept reality.
2. Want to fix it.
3. Want to fix it when a Democrat will get the credit.

Like, even if they fully understand the science and fully understand what the solution is and what the cost of ignoring the solution is, their calculation will be, "Is it worth paying the price of showing the peons that the government can solve things?"

And for the Republican Party, the worst case scenario isn't "millions of people dead", the worst case scenario is "the little people find out that the government can prevent millions of people from dying".

They've got a lot of people convinced that masks don't work, but the thought process that *drives* that is that it doesn't matter if masks work, it's not worth the "price" in "freedom" of wearing something because the government said it was necessary.