Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), who contracted the coronavirus just last week, compared Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lockdown measures to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 executive order that sent Japanese people to internment camps. “This governor’s response—set aside whether it was the right thing to do—was illegally done. She did not use the legislature and the legislative powers the way they were supposed to be used,” Huizenga said during a virtual debate Thursday. “It’s a little like when FDR decided to throw all Japanese citizens into internment camps to keep everybody safe. That should have been illegal. It was immoral. And it was not constitutional.”

In October, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Whitmer unlawfully continued a state of emergency beyond April 30 without the legislature’s approval. The court also ruled that her orders were an abuse of power. “We aren’t going to respond to this gutter attack,” Whitmer’s spokesperson Tiffany Brown said. Her office called the comparison “utterly shameless and beyond the pale.” Huizenga’s chairman for re-election, Jim Barry, clarified saying that, “the analogy was about executive actions being taken unilaterally in the name of safety that violate the Constitution.”