A week and a half after Republican Assemblymembers brought the legislature to a standstill over the statehouse’s vaccine-or-test mandate, Gov. Phil Murphy said today that an investigation is underway into how the breakdown of order occurred.
“State Police are conducting a full investigation of what happened, and we’re not going to be commenting further while the investigation is ongoing,” Murphy said. “When it is complete, we’ll make the findings public as appropriate. The public does deserve a right to hear.”
On December 2, the second day of the statehouse complex’s requirement that visitors and legislators show proof of vaccination or a negative test, noncompliant Assembly Republicans were blocked from entering the Assembly chambers by state troopers.
A short while into the standoff, however, the legislators realized that the state troopers would not physically restrain them from entering, and they pushed their way through. The initial confrontation, as well as the troopers’ inability to successfully evict the Republicans once they had made their way into the chambers, prompted questions of what directives State Police were following and how they intended to enforce the mandate.
Murphy declined to answer those questions last week, saying that he wouldn’t be commenting on “security matters” but still calling the actions of the Republican lawmakers “unforgivable.”
As Murphy briefly commented today on the ongoing investigation, the legislature itself was conducting business with little fanfare.
Last Friday, an appellate judge declined to block the mandate from going into effect until the case is heard in April, meaning it will likely remain the law of the capitol for at least four months. Instead of arriving to once again challenge the policy today, Assembly Republicans instead opted to vote remotely as their Democratic counterparts held committee hearings in-person.