by Karen Lugo, GATESTONE INSTITUTE
- Once freedoms were surrendered, [Chief Justice William] Rehnquist warned, they would be even easier to take away when a future crisis or greater good came calling.
- The very orders that citizens across this land were protesting have been delivered wrapped in lack of transparency: forbidding only some assemblies; preferring big box stores; shutting down churches and gun stores but not liquor or cannabis stores; motor-boating prohibited but sailing is not; vacation rentals banned but not lodges; among many more disparities.
- It is vital that “We the people” keep on overseeing this process to ensure that the attempted power grabs — for instance by those who would use this crisis to “restructure things to fit our vision” — continue to be judged as intolerable acts.
This spring, Americans have been enrolled in a “flatten the curve” regime, but when the government’s justification for home confinement shifted to some vague prescription for safety, the constitutional supports for unreasonable confinement dissolved. (Image source: iStock)<
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Shutting down America has caused many to ask who suspended the Bill of Rights. The re-opening of this country would do well to include close attention to righting wrongs that may — deliberately or inadvertently — have been inflicted on the US Constitution.
At the end of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s life, one of his great concerns was the government’s use of crisis power at the expense of civil liberties, a concern he shared with law students during his last summer constitutional survey course in Cambridge, England.
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It seems to me that requiring people to stay inside their homes when they have not been convicted of a crime and are not awaiting trial is a denial of “liberty.” Requiring anyone to do anything, or forbidding them to do anything, without clear stutory authority is clealy unconstitutional. Executive orders are not laws, and no citizen should be punished for violating them, unless they are clearly grounded in statutes passed by the legislative branch. This is not the case with the executive orders issued by governors and mayors in this pandemic panic.
A good case can be made that shting businesses down when they are not doing anything wrong, is an illegal seizure of property, for which the business owners deserve full compensation from the government.
The alleged health crisis has provided an excuse for arbitrary and capricious government by decree–something that the framers of our constitution and Bill of Rights strictly forbade.
Our constitution does privilege lierty even over public safety. For example, our courts have always freed many dangerous criminals because they found that guilt had not been established “beyond reasonable doubt,” or because some right or alleged right of the defendant was violated in the course of the legal process–even when the defendant is manifestly guilty and this has been proven beyond reasonable doubt. If the public safety was the only consideration in our criminal justice system, hundreds of thousands of people now running free and in a position to committ crimes, including rape and murder, would either be in prison or would have been executed years ago.
Obviously, imprisoning people in their own homes, and restricting their freedom movement without any evidence at all that they have broken the law, and without their having been charged with a crime, and without habeas corpus, is illegal and unconstitutional.
Where are the courts?
Where are the so called libertarians?
The Adm state (federal & several states) FAILED the American people.
Many politicians FAILED the American people.
But both Adm and politicians want more power!!!