Civics 101 is brought to you in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hey all, Hannah here.

Nick here.

We hope you're all holding up out there.

Here at the show we've been leaning hard into responding to all of your wants and needs

as best we can. And you know when we first started Civics 101 way back in the day when it was

a very different show, it was in part in response to a flood of questions we were getting at the

station after the 2016 election.

Yeah, and those questions included a lot of, can this person do that? Is this addressed in the

Constitution? How does that job work anyway? And unsurprisingly, those questions have researched

in a big way in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic. John Rayby, a history teacher at Thornton Academy

in Maine, wanted to know whether governors have the constitutional authority to close their borders.

As governors across the nation continue to impose restrictive measures to stem the spread of

COVID-19, is there a chance that one of them will just close the castle gates? And while we're at

it, I figured we should understand how governors have the authority to do any of what they're doing

right now. So I called up someone who knows. My name is Alan Greenblood. I'm a reporter with

governing where I cover state and local government issues.

Governing is a news site and source on state and local government.

Alan also happens to have written a textbook on state and local governance.

And before we get to how governors are using their powers right now,

let's get the role of governor out of the way. Well, governors are, of course, the lead

political actors in their states. And they set the agenda. So that takes a lot of different forms.

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