THE COLUMN: To Save America, Repeal the 19th Amendment

With Jacinda Ardern's welcome exit from the ranks of world political leaders, leaving a shambles of constitutional freedom and human rights in her wake, now is perhaps an opportune time to reconsider the passage of the 19th amendment in American politics as part of our ongoing series of "To Save America" modest proposals advocating repeal of the most destructive tamperings with the original Constitution. We've already made the arguments for the repeal of the 16th, 17th, 18th (done!), and 26th amendments, so now it's time for the women's suffrage movement to take its turn in the barrel.

Oops.

Start with this: there is no intrinsic, enumerated right to vote in the Constitution; eligibility was left up to each state. Voting therefore is neither a civil right nor a God-given natural right (as history clearly shows), but an earned privilege to be granted under certain circumstances or after an individual had satisfied various specified criteria such as attaining the age of his majority, being a male, a property owner, etc.

This was an outgrowth of the original conception of the United States as a voluntary alliance of hitherto sovereign states, each of which ceded some portion of its autonomy to the new federal government, but which reserved all other rights to itself. Indeed, the Tenth amendment makes this explicit: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In other words, the federal government did not create the states, they created the federal government.

In no previous historical iteration of either a Republic or a Democracy was universal suffrage allowed or even contemplated. The Greeks and the Romans had a quaint notion that only productive male citizens, especially those who put their lives, honor, and sacred fortunes on the line for their city, nation-state or empire (and who bought their own weapons and armor) could earn the right to vote. While this strikes us as both "sexist" and "racist" today, such considerations were unthought of; and while slaves could win the vote via manumission, women were never considered worthy of the vote. They were too emotional, too devious in their machinations, and certainly too weak to fight: in other words, too "unmanly," which is definitionally correct.

Besides, what Rome needed most from the time of the Punic Wars right up to the end was neither educated (although some were) nor liberated women, but mothers by whom the legions could be readily replenished, and wives who could patch up their warriors and send them back into battle. Thus, Rome could survive near-catastrophic defeats by Hannibal at Trebia, Lake Trasemine and Cannae and quickly bounce back by replacing the lost legions. A woman's job, therefore, was not to fight but to breed and nurture future citizens of the Republic; you could be a citizen without having a vote.

At Cannae, dead Romans everywhere.

One of the foundational myths of early Rome is the Abduction of the Sabine Women (often mistranslated as the Rape of the Sabines). The Romans under Romulus, new arrivals in Latium, found themselves severely lacking in women and sent embassies to the  neighboring tribes requesting the right of intermarriage. This being roundly refused, the Roman invited the Sabines to a religious feast, whereupon they fell upon the Sabine women and carried them off while expelling the Sabine men. When, some time later, the Sabine men returned and attacked the Romans to get their women back—well, let Livy tell the tale:

Then it was that the Sabine women, whose wrongs had led to the war, throwing off all womanish fears in their distress, went boldly into the midst of the flying missiles with dishevelled hair and rent garments. Running across the space between the two armies they tried to stop any further fighting and calm the excited passions by appealing to their fathers in the one army and their husbands in the other not to bring upon themselves a curse by staining their hands with the blood of a father-in-law or a son-in-law, nor upon their posterity the taint of parricide.

It's all right there in Livy. And Giambologna.

`If,' they cried, ` you are weary of these ties of kindred, these marriage-bonds, then turn your anger upon us; it is we who are the cause of the war, it is we who have wounded and slain our husbands and fathers. Better for us to perish rather than live without one or the other of you, as widows or as orphans.' The armies and their leaders were alike moved by this appeal. There was a sudden hush and silence. Then the generals advanced to arrange the terms of a treaty. It was not only peace that was made, the two nations were united into one State, the royal power was shared between them, and the seat of government for both nations was Rome.

This may sound warm and fuzzy, but one of the lessons the Romans derived from this episode was the fickleness and malleability of women. Far from being happy that their former countrymen had come to rescue them from domestic slavery to the Romans (as males would be), the Sabine women were appalled at the slaughter and sought a compromise—which ended with the effective disappearance of the Sabines from history and ensured the survival of the Eternal City.

What has all this history got to do with women's suffrage or Jacinda Ardern? If you've read my book Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost, you will know that I believe the human animal doesn't change very much, and no amount of wish-casting can alter reality. To take Ardern as an example, her reaction to a single case of the imaginary disease known as "Covid-19" was quintessentially female and maternal: she immediately shut down her entire country, then instituted a breathtaking regime of ruthless totalitarianism involving lockdowns and forcible "vaccinations." (She had previously displayed these same panicky instincts in the wake of the 2019 mosque shootings, when she almost instantly imposed a draconian anti-gun policy nationwide.) In other words, she acted according to stereotype, her policies not the product of calm thinking and reasoned judgment but of inflamed emotions absent any rational thought. After which she walked away from the chaos complaining of burnout.

But as the western democracies matured, such elemental considerations came to seem outmoded, and so the push for women's suffrage began in earnest. In the U.S., women first got the vote at the state level, in frontier Wyoming, in 1869; by 1920, when the 19th amendment was ratified, they had the vote nationwide. A "long march" that began with the suffragette movement in the mid-19th century had come to fruition. But was it wise?

One signal that it might not be was its abandonment during the Civil War when, oddly enough, the country had more important things on its mind, such as the survival of the nation; clearly, women's suffrage was not deemed important enough, a luxury to be considered once the life of the nation was no longer on the line. Nor did it come up for a vote until after the First World War was over; and in neither case did anyone advocate for putting women in the fighting military in order to win the right to vote, especially women.

Any port in a storm.

Another is that its moment came practically simultaneously with the Four Progressive Amendments (income tax, direct election of senators, prohibition) and in fact there is considerable resemblance between the 18th and 19th in their back story. Both came about in a long-delayed backlash against the great wave of immigration, which was soon to be ended  with the Immigration Act of 1924, that effectively shut it down until 1965. Prohibition, a midwestern Protestant idea pushed by women, was meant to target the men of suspect ethnic groups (Irish, Italians, Germans) whose fondness for grape, hops, and grain was legendary, as well as the merchant urban Jews who readily sold it to them. While the 18th amendment was simply punitive, the 19th was passive-aggressive: since the immigrants were largely single men, who quickly became voters, the WASP ascendency could avoid being out-voted, at least in the short term, but doubling its vote to include its wives. 

(There is no comparison between the extension of the franchise to African-Americans via the the 15th amendment and women's suffrage. Once legal slavery was abolished there was no philosophical or historical reason not to allow black men to vote; many of them had, after all, fought heroically for their freedom in the Union Army. By contrast, there was no historical precedent for allowing women to vote.)

Further, many women themselves were against suffrage. They rejected the facile arguments offered by Jane Addams and others—"I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance"—by deciding they didn't want to give women the chance to make things even worse than they already were. There was even a National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.

Summing up the arguments against suffrance with barely disguised contempt, one Alison Lange, Ph.D., wrote:

Anti-suffragists argued that most women did not want the vote. Because they took care of the home and children, they said women did not have time to vote or stay updated on politics. Some argued women lacked the expertise or mental capacity to offer a useful opinion about political issues. Others asserted that women’s votes would simply double the electorate; voting would cost more without adding any new value.

That last argument has proven spectacularly wrong, but not in the way Lange clearly meant. The electorate has doubled but it has also become widely skewed, adding new value via the phenomenon known as the Single Woke Female—unmarried, exploited women of a certain age who fell for the siren song of "feminism" and the "sexual revolution" and are now approaching retirement from a pointless career who go home in the evening to their cats, bust out the ice cream and the white wine, and nurse their grudge against males for their barren, empty, childless lives. Foolishly seduced by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy into providing easy sexual access to their bodies in the name of "empowerment" and by the feminists who lied that they could "have it all," they now in their anger and resentment vote the straight Democrat ticket, looking to the federal government to be a surrogate lover, husband, and father. It's Obama's "Life of Julia" writ large.

Even some lefties laughed at the "Life of Julia" when it first appeared—they even "fact-checked" it—but who's laughing now? Government, most especially including the federal government, is now not only the employer of last resort for the otherwise unemployable, it's now the sugar daddy of first resort. And so the Left has hit another milestone in its goal of destabilizing the United States by using its weapons and its weaknesses ("tolerance," "compassion," purposeless egalitarianism) against it.

What even purported good has the destruction of the nuclear family accomplished? We're in the middle of a vicious, feninized cycle that includes an ineffective military, a police force that cuts and runs at the first encounter with a raging street madman after "negotiation" fails, and raging misandry from "fourth wave" feminists the ancients would have called by their real names: harpies.

Men, especially younger men, have not only dropped out of academe and the work force after realizing that the deck is stacked against them but are also withdrawing from society into a virtual mom's basement of video games, drugs, and porn, punctuated by occasional outbursts of random, horrific violence as the anomie becomes unendurable and rule by regiments of women becomes intolerable. History shows that disempowered, castrated men eventually take to the streets, and female cops shaped like Schmoos will be powerless to stop them.

From Romulus to the fall of Constantinople, Rome lasted 2,000 years without ever offering women the vote. How long will America last as it makes one last attempt to prove that history is, in fact, bunk? Men are Romans, women are Sabines. The only iron law of history is that imbalances will be corrected, sometimes violently. Based on current voting patterns, if women didn't vote, there would never be another Democrat president. Now, who wouldn't make that trade? Come on, ladies, do your duty to God and country, and give it up for America. Otherwise, a Jacinda Ardern looms in your future, too. 

CCCP Redux -- Who Will Stop Them?

As we daily slip further under the yoke of illegal, unconstitutional, authoritarian – but so far unopposed – Democrat usurpation of liberty and law via their unconstitutional Covid-CRT-Climate Party (CCCP) power grab, it's important to remember America's history. We've been here before.

If one were to define "slavery" objectively, the issue that kicked off our bloodiest war when Democrat slaveholders attacked free America (600,000+ Americans dead), that definition of slavery would include human beings -- Americans -- being forced to:

No difference exists between the above objective description of slavery and government today by the CCCP Democrats. Democrats are the party of slavery. They always have been. They always will be. It's the core of their ideology. It is what authoritarianism is about. It is what “rule by experts” is about, which is what Progressivism is. Democrats are "true believers" in slavery now, slavery forever.

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Democrat voters either a) agree with and are comfortable with slavery, or b) are ignorant of America as it exists today and thus  supporting “Progressive” slavery out of intentional ignorance; they don't want to know. Knowing would get in the way of their un-examined ideology. There is no "option c."

The difference between now and 1861? Today, the slave owners own the government and are using all the powers of the government - judicial, legislative, executive, law enforcement, medical, military to enslave Americans.

The similarity? Free states & governors can, in fact within their job descriptions, their superior role under our Constitution, and their constitutional duty, must resist slavery, as did free Americans waging war against Democrats 160 years ago.

Then, slavery was based on race; today it is based on the chimera of “climate change,” the racism of CRT, and the Covid-19 house arrest across the West and “unwise,” unconstitutionally-mandated “vaccines,” crushing the hopes, dreams and livelihoods of tens of millions, all the while contributing to massive and unexpected increases in non-Covid hospitalization and excess deaths, child abuse, suicide, spousal abuse, and massive decreases in education of our youth, our economy and prosperity, and our free future.

The effect of these policies is the destruction of the Western middle class which, at this point, can only be seen by those paying attention as the goal of the Progressive globalists enforcing this neo-slavery. These people aren’t dumb; what they are doing to us is intentional.

The question is: will Americans take any and all actions necessary to end slavery - again - in America? Is liberty, law, government of the people by the people and for the people, still worth fighting for, for ourselves and our posterity? Or will you really, as the globalist elites say, be “happy owning nothing,” not even yourself? The clock is ticking.

The New CCCP

The consequences of the actions of the ruling Covid-CRT-Climate Party (CCCP), unsupported by the Constitution through which the sovereign States created the federal government (Article 7, “Establishment of this Constitution between the States”) to do specific things for the States as their servantlikely are existential.

Using the phantasm of a “vaccine,” the ahistorical “1619 project” and Marxist Critical Race Theory to indoctrinate our children, and the hoax of Climate Change as the basis of CCCP governance, our health, our prosperity, and our future as a free nation intentionally are being destroyed.

Western governments are proving power-mad, simultaneously anti-data and anti-science, and seem to have decided to bend us to their will when they exist only to serve ours. In America, the Biden presidency “wildly” contravenes our Constitution and laws, destroying our liberty, education and prosperity in the massive fundamental transformation promised by his predecessor.

Did somebody say "handlers"?

Rarely mentioned in the unprecedented number of articles from all sides about the conflicts between the administration and the country regarding Covid, CRT racism, and Climate is the increasingly-common, entirely new construct: “Biden’s handlers."

While clear to thinking people that Joe Biden is not in charge of the federal government, people from across the spectrum don‘t find it at all alarming that the world’s most powerful economic and military nation has no widely accepted chief executive; indeed, is being run by a junta elected by no one, visible to no one, accountable to no one, and doing the bidding of who-knows-whom-but-certainly-not-the-People, while wreaking untold and generational damage on our prosperity, freedom and liberty. That this is not supposed to be how America works is obvious to the citizens who care about America’s future.

This anti-American junta has led, predictably, to the emergence of columns and books about secession. Since we have nothing in common any longer, why pretend that we do, or that we still have a nation in any form but geographic? While secession may be the answer, it ought not be the go-to argument for those supporting the Constitution, the rule of law, and what has come to be called “legacy” (i.e. as-founded) America. This is true for an abundance of reasons. Two stand out:

The first of these is that, as with immigration law (the fourth major area of divisiveness after Covid, CRT, and Climate), it is not correct to say that what is not being tried is “broken.” (How would we know?) And what is not being tried is the enforcement of “the supreme law of the land,” the Constitution. How do we fix this? Simple, really – get governors to recognize that they are not in Triple-A ball awaiting a callup to The Show in D.C.; they – the governors – are The Show.

The States as superior to the federal government; this is how the country was designed to work. It ought to be no surprise that when the nation is not working as designed… it’s not working. And it is not working in executive decrees about climate, Covid, education, immigration, transportation, bathrooms – and a host of other things. A host in which the federal government has neither legal nor Constitutional authority for involvement, yet which is being allowed by our governors.

Look to the statehouses, comrade.

For those worried about five unelected persons in black robes – they are a part of that same federal government specifically limited by the States. Did the States, when creating the federal government, grant authority over marriage? Bathrooms? Medical jabs? Nope. When the SCOTUS branch of the federal government colors outside the lines by taking and ruling on cases outside their authority, the legal and Constitutionally-expected action of governors is: ignore them.

Can we fix this? Do we have governors willing to step-up? More importantly, have we citizens and voters willing to reject the overreach of the feds by electing governors putting their state above federal usurpation, as per the Ninth and Tenth amendments to the Constitution?

Based on the Virginia election, the answer is, “Yes.” Governors of eighteen States have said “No” to Biden's unconstitutional "vaccine mandates," suing that the mandate is a violation of federal law. Arizona, the nineteenth State suing the feds has sued the mandate as a violation of the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection clause. Why? Because the federal government has neither the authority nor the legal power to make or enforce rules or laws (or mandates) outside its enumerated powers.

These 19 governors are doing their jobs pretty much as the Founders designed, and as currently accepted. Exactly as designed would be to ignore the mandate and SCOTUS. Asking permission for a right already theirs has no upside; it implies a willingness to accept a negative answer the Court lacks authority to give, as well as making it more difficult to exercise that right in the court of public opinion. States are beginning to take back their reserved powers – and it is about time.

Diversity is our strength.

Let’s use immigration law as the example for the second reason.

The difference between authority and responsibility is that the former can be delegated while the latter cannot. The States delegated the authority to the federal government to deal with immigration. Because America is a union of sovereign States, the responsibility for immigration remains with those who made that delegation: the States. The federal government refusing delegated authority does not remove the responsibility from the States to deal with the issue. In SCOTUS’ ruling on Arizona v. United States, the federal government mistook (by an ahistorical, false assumption that the federal government is superior to the States that created it) its delegated authority for responsibility and unconstitutionally usurped the latter; the States retain the responsibility for immigration and should so act.

If governors followed the Constitution, the fact of a barely-sentient president with incontinence issues. would not matter, nor would a Supreme Court making up whatever it wants. Because they don’t, these do.

If California voters want to die of thirst as they go bankrupt in the dark – that’s their choice. If Blue states want to increase their infection rates, they can vax to their heart’s myocarditis content. If adult states recognize that it is better to treat patients using therapeutic drugs successfully all over the world (and which is how herd immunity is achieved) than to deny therapies, they should use ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and monoclonal antibody all they want.

Only governors can make America work again. Virginia is the 20th State to say, “Enough!” and begin working as designed again. Let’s hope we have more to come.

The Court Steps in to the War on Greenhouse Gases

What’s a g,reenhouse gas and who and how can regulate it? The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases in a quartet of appeals from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Their decision could spell the end of the administrative agencies' hitherto unbounded, extra-legal ability to "regulate" U.S. business.

The matter begins with then-President Obama’s  Clean Power Plan of 2015. That plan established guidelines for states to limit carbon dioxide emissions.  The essential features of the plan, which was designed to boost renewable energy sources in place of fossil-fuel generated power, set standards to reduce CO2 emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030. It required each state to submit plans to the EPA for reaching those goals and gave them until 2022 to comply with the approved plans. This grand plan was short-lived. Two years later under President Trump the head of the EPA proposed a rule repealing the plan Subsequently, after a review, the EPA did repeal the Plan.

Barry's brainchild.

Administration action was not the sole block to enforcement of the Plan --  industry groups and twenty-seven states filed legal challenges to the Obama plan:

because the E.P.A. assumed utilities could reduce emissions at individual plants by taking actions outside of those plants — say, by replacing coal plants with wind farms elsewhere. Industry groups and more than two dozen states challenged this move in court, arguing that the EPA can look only at cleanup measures that can be undertaken at the plants themselves.

The states argued that the Clean Air Act under which the EPA was acting never gave the agency the power to regulate CO2 emissions and the Supreme Court held enforcement of the plan in abeyance until the court challenges could be resolved.

It's unprecedented for the Supreme Court to step in and block a federal regulation like this, before review by an appeals court. None of the justices gave any explanation for the move. The justices voting to block the rule were Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy.

In January of this year after lengthy hearings on the issue the U.S.  Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the effort to repeal the Obama emissions plan. That Court remanded the matter to the EPA to craft regulations on power plant CO2 emissions.

The Court noted that the Clean Air Act grants the federal agencies the power to regulate air pollution. Significantly, however, the Court did not direct the EPA to readopt the Obama plan that Trump had repealed. That means EPA has to start over, and the latest  Supreme Court action means the EPA cannot even begin the process until sometime in the middle or late 2022 after the Court decides the case it just decided to hear. So none of the EPA regulations in this area are operable now. To me, it’s a stretch  to consider CO2 a pollutant. Nevertheless, as the D.C. Court observes in its opinion the Supreme Court has held that CO2 is a pollutant:

It was not until the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, however, that the Court confirmed that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions constituted “air pollutant[s]” covered by the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court explained that the Clean Air Act’s “sweeping definition of ‘air pollutant’ includes ‘any air pollution agent or combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical . . . substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air...'  On its face, the definition embraces all airborne compounds of whatever stripe, and underscores that intent through the repeated use of the word ‘any.’ Given that statutory command, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA “can avoid taking further action” to regulate such pollution “only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change” or offers some reasonable explanation for not resolving that question.

You can practically smell the absence of CO2.

At no point to my knowledge has Congress held that it considers C02 a pollutant. The closest statutory language I can find is in the 1987  Global Climate Protection Act which found that “manmade pollution[,]” including “the release of carbon dioxide... may be producing a long-term and substantial increase in the average temperature on Earth[.]”

The  four cases which are joined in the matter  in which the Supreme Court just granted certiorari  cover a variety of related issues including the scope of the Clean Air Act  whether regulations must be based on existing technologies and methods at existing sources (that is, individual plants) and not industry-wide ones, and whether  the EPA usurped state regulatory powers.

In 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d), an ancillary provision of the Clean Air Act, did Congress constitutionally authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to issue significant rules—including those capable of reshaping the nation's electricity grids and unilaterally decarbonizing virtually any sector of the economy—without any limits on what the agency can require so long as it considers cost, non-air impacts, and energy requirements?

Whether 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d), which authorizes the EPA to impose standards "for any existing source" based on limits "achievable through the application of the best system of emission reduction" that has been "adequately demonstrated," grants the EPA authority not only to impose standards based on technology and methods that can be applied at and achieved by that existing source, but also allows the agency to develop industry-wide systems such as cap-and-trade regimes.

Whether 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d) clearly authorizes EPA to decide such matters of vast economic and political significance as whether and how to restructure the nation's energy system... Can EPA promulgate regulations for existing stationary sources that require States to apply binding nationwide "performance standards" at a generation-sector-wide level, instead of at the individual source level, and can those regulations deprive States of all implementation and decision making power in creating their Section 111(d) plans?

Can EPA promulgate regulations for existing stationary sources that require States to apply binding nationwide "performance standards" at a generation-sector-wide level, instead of at the individual source level, and can those regulations deprive States of all implementation and decision making power in creating their Section 111(d) plans?

Professor Jonathan Adler offers up the most valuable of the commentaries on these matters I can find.

This case could be tremendously significant beyond the question of the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases because (as detailed below) the questions presented encompass both the immediate question of what authority the EPA has under Section 7411 of the Clean Air Act, but also the broader question of how prescriptive Congress must be when delegating broad regulatory authority to federal agencies. This gives the Court room to refine and expand the "major questions" doctrine (as I have suggested it might want to do), as well as to perhaps identify some of the outer limits on delegation more generally.

Thanks, Nixon!

It’s peculiar, as Adler also observes, that the Court took up the case now as the Biden Administration has not even proposed its own regulations. Four of the justices had to agree to hear theses cases for the writ of certiorari to be granted. To Adler, and me, the fact that at least four justices are concerned about the broad grant of administrative power to the EPA hints at some effort to require Congress to be more “prescriptive” to regulatory authority to administrative agencies. Perhaps the days of Congress leaving to the executive branch to fill in broad empty provisions in legislation will be coming to an end. Perhaps , as well, the Court is rethinking its decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA on CO2 emissions as pollutants.

However, this case is resolved -- and I dare not predict these days -- it will have far reaching implications for environmental law. As well, it may set new boundaries on the interactions between Congress and the executive branch and whether the administrative agencies’ powers, so long given very broad reach, will be clipped and Congress forced to exercise its constitutional responsibilities.

Regarding Covid-19, Public Policy v. Panic

Nothing has better demonstrated to me the impossible clash of true science -- the constant search for and the skeptical sifting and winnowing of empirical evidence -- with public policy than the worldwide response to the Covid-19 virus about which so little was known  when it first appeared.

Science, like the Western legal advocacy system, depends on proponents and opponents clashing and presenting their best relevant arguments for us to decide an issue, but the search in science on any issue must be ongoing, and in law and public policy there are practical and procedural time limits. It would be wonderful if there were some alternative responsible forum to quickly test the assumptions of policy makers (often contradictory and based on little or poor evidence), but there isn’t much leeway to my knowledge.

The Western court systems are generally a reasonable way to test the validity of fact but the timing problems make it almost impossible to do so rapidly enough to matter when it comes to this disease. Good public policy on scientific issues should be made with far greater humility than it presently is, and perhaps the only way to get around the normal strictures is to create a rapid response team of experts critical of the public policy gurus who can file affidavits in support of their findings and persuade courts to issue temporary injunctions pending full expedited hearings. Absent that, the only way to deal with this overreaching is resistance, and -- down the road -- the ballot box. When it's often too late.

The face of the medical bureaucracy: Rochelle Walensky

This week the  CDC announced new guidelines suggesting fully vaccinated people should again mask. Among other things,"It added a recommendation for fully vaccinated people to wear a mask in public indoor settings in areas of substantial or high transmission."

The CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to schools, regardless of vaccination status. Director Rochelle Walensky stated this week that “fully vaccinated people have just as much viral load as the unvaccinated, making it possible for them to spread the virus to others,” so school children should be masked. She should be ignored if it her claim is not supported by equally sound research -- and it isn't. It's based instead on data from a single study in India, where different vaccines were in use, and was so deficient it was rejected in peer review.

She’s not alone, however. There has been a drumbeat to reinstate some of the most loathsome and freedom-destroying diktats we’ve just come out from under. Organizations and businesses are demanding employees be fully vaccinated and some even requiring vaccinated persons to mask. How do these square with the feminist slogan, “my body, my choice,” and the concept of privacy of medical information in HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)? How are these requirements that you prove you’ve taken the vaccine even constitutional?

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On July 18  a U.S. District Court decided preliminarily the first test case I know of against the new restrictions, Klassen v. Trustees of Indiana University. Law Professor Eugene Volokh , a legal scholar worth respect, explains why the Court denied a preliminary injunction sought by the students against being forced to mask, social distance and  vaccinate or qualify for an exemption on religious or medical reasons. 

Under guiding principles of federalism, our Constitution preserves the power of the States, within constitutional limits, to adopt laws to provide for public health and safety. Twice the United States Supreme Court has upheld state authority to compel reasonable  vaccinations. [The court is referring here to Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) and Zucht v. King (1922). -EV] The States don't have arbitrary power, but they have discretion to act reasonably in protecting the public's health.

Students at Indiana University have a significant liberty protected by the Constitution—refusing unwanted medical treatment based on bodily autonomy. The Fourteenth Amendment says no state may "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." U.S. Const. amend. XIV § 1. Given this due process protection of liberty, longstanding constitutional law prevents a public university—an arm of the State—from mandating a vaccine for its students unless it has rationally pursued a legitimate interest in public health for its campus community.

Does this mean that it’s constitutional for the university to issue such a mandate? Not exactly. The students sought injunctive relief, not a final decision on the merits. As Volokh notes, the injunctive relief “requires a strong showing that they will likely succeed on the merits of their claims, that they will sustain irreparable harm, and that the balance of harms and public interest favor such a remedy.”

You can always transfer, kids.

But the students have other options which the court had to balance -- they could apply for a medical deferral, take the semester off (the mandate applies only for the coming semester), attend another university or attend online. (In this respect the students have more options and may have had a weaker case for injunctive relief than might some other litigants covered by similar mandates.) And in a request for injunctive relief there is usually no opportunity to fully flesh out that these directives are unnecessary in the public interest, unreasonable, and therefore unconstitutional .

In a nutshell here’s the legal problem: testing the reasonableness of the state action would take a great deal of time, given the number of conflicting expert opinions on a scientific matter -- one on which we have so little empirical evidence  and where the evidence seems to be so quickly changing. Adding to that is that the mandates tend -- as here -- to be of short duration so that by the time the issue would be resolved it would likely be moot.

It would be wonderful if it were easier. It would be even more wonderful if the mass media and social media which combined in the Trusted News Initiative  to restrict information contrary to the official public health directives and the latter unable to hide behind the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 to restrict diverse views on these mandates. More open discussion might improve state decisions and lessen the impact of scare accounts on judicial reviewers of those decisions. 

In any hearing on the merits here’s some of the evidence I expect the opponents of these mandates would produce;

  1. The mortality rate from Covid-19 in the U.S. has been low (affecting mostly the elderly and those with co-morbidities) and is now at the lowest point .Even the new bugaboo about cases from a new "delta" variant is overblown as the  “cases” are asymptomatic or very mild. Harvard Medical School Professor Martin Kulldorff pointed this out on Twitter, writing that “In [the] USA, COVID mortality is now the lowest since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.” He reports: "Far more people were dying from COVID-19 months ago as we were winding down restrictions than are dying today as some call to reinstate them." With mortality so low, it’s hard to argue that reinstatement of Covid restrictions is reasonable.
  2. Government restrictions ignore the fact that most of the U.S. has natural immunity to the virus. Some 80percent of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64 percent have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection. There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed. Only around 10 percent of Americans have had confirmed positive Covid tests, but four to six times as many have likely had the infection.
  3. At this point we know enough about treatment so that Covid 19 or its variants are easily treatable at home. It should be engaged in its early stages, not when hospitalization is required because no treatment has been received.
  4. Like every other drug or vaccine the Covid vaccinations are toxic at some level in some percent of people as Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the technology behind the mRNA gene therapy (the Covid vaccinations) indicates at the link.
  5.  There is already a cheap, effective, fast treatment in the early stages of Covid-19: Ivermectin.  “The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works both for treating and preventing the disease.”

So, on one hand we have reputable scientists confirming low Covid mortality, broad natural immunity to the virus, easy rapid treatability of the disease at home and seemingly deliberate  underreporting of vaccine toxicity by public health officials. The problem remains how to bring this information to judicial fora in time override the unconstitutional--because unnecessary and unreasonable -- restrictions on liberty.

   

Why Can't We Go to the Hairdresser?

The cynic in me thinks the press will urge a nationwide lockdown unless and until a Democrat sits in the White House at which time they will take a harder look at the diminishing Covid-19 fatalities and the increasing cost of the lockdowns. In the meantime frustrated, increasingly broke Americans are asking what happened to such rights as free speech, assembly,  worship, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, right to bear arms, right to due process in criminal cases and privacy.

Fundamentally, why can’t we go to the hairdresser or the gym, make routine visits to the doctor, the dentist, get elective surgeries, visit our families and friends, shop without looking like masked bandits?  The answer is not that complicated. Unless the state governments, which have imposed these often-draconian measures, can justify them in court, you can. But you have to get them judicially enforced by civil suit or in defending a criminal action against you. Your rights are not self-enforcing.

Yesterday, for example, a circuit court judge in Clay County, Ill., found that Governor J.B. Pritzker's extension of a previous stay-at-home order was illegal, handing at least a temporary, narrow victory to Republican state representative Darrin Bailey with a restraining order -- which, however, only applies to Bailey himself. Pritzker vowed a swift appeal in a higher state court.

There are other means, of course.  If you want your fundamental constitutional rights back sooner you can move to those states run by Republican governors who did not mandate a lockdown, or  you can work to make your state legislatures to rein in your governor’s dictates. Short of that there is only judicial redress.Some states have never issued mandatory stay at home orders: Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. Meanwhile, Georgia, Oklahoma, Alaska, and South Carolina have allowed some business openings and plan to relax more rules this  week; Maryland’s governor Hogan announced he anticipates a gradual reopening beginning in May.

Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis says he will allow hair salons, barbershops, and tattoo parlors to reopen on Friday and has permitted curbside pickups at retail stores. Florida’s GOP governor DeSantis has opened some beaches and some have reopened in California, but not in Los Angeles. In some states-- to add to the confusing disparities -- city mayors have issued their own rules about what is permissible.

The most draconian rules of all were those issued by Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) which, inter alia, banned state residents travel to in-state vacation homes, prohibited the selling of seeds and gardening tools, home improvement materials, baby care seats and the use of motorized boats. Last week the Michigan state senate passed two bills to curb her emergency powers. She’s threatened to veto any such attempts and it’s unclear whether this legislative effort will be successful unless Democratic voters in the state are angry enough to support the move to clip her wings.

Who Can Exercise Power in a National Emergency?

The Emergency Powers of the President and Executive Branch are extensive. The Brennan center has prepared a 42-page compendium of their powers and legal basis. In addition to these, under the Tenth Amendment, state governors have substantial powers to issue mandates once an emergency is declared. The extent of the powers of a governor is determined by the constitutions of the various states and any applicable state law. But under the Fourteenth Amendment, per substantial case law for almost 100 years, most of the rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights are applicable to the states (the "incorporation doctrine"). The question is whether the rights you have in normal times apply in an emergency.

Short of cases dealing with known methods of preventing a disease (smallpox vaccinations) or short-term emergencies such as hurricanes, we have few legal cases dealing with Covid-19 restrictions. Covid-19, after all is new, and we do not have conclusive studies of its transmissibility, treatment, or prevention. Instead we have conflicting reports about what works. Unlike with smallpox or polio we have no vaccine yet and, if one is to ever be developed it will take a long time to fashion and test it before we could compel people to vaccinate.

Further, we have no idea if reinfection is possible or likely after recovery. Nor have we any notion how many of us are or were infected, or are immune. Infection, hospitalization and morbidity rates are subject to manipulation and seem to have been jiggered but credible accounts indicate that the elderly and those with comorbidities have poor survival chances should they catch it, while the rest of us are almost certain (percentage wise) to survive it. We do know the cost to the nation and the world, not to speak of private sector workers and businesses is substantial and mounting.

Which Tests Should Courts Use in Cases Challenging Governor’s  Emergency Orders?

There have been few cases testing the power of the Governors to interfere with normal civil liberties. The best legal arguments on balancing the rights of citizens in emergency litigation can be found here by Lindsey Wiley and Steve Vladeck: COVID-19 Reinforces the Argument for “Regular” Judicial Review—Not Suspension of Civil Liberties—In Times of Crisis.

The authors review two of the first cases where the power to restrict civil liberties in the Covid-19 emergency was tested  and a minimal level of scrutiny was applied. That is if there was some factual basis and the restrictions were made in good faith, the courts let them stand.

In one of the first challenges to a coronavirus emergency order, New Hampshire defended Governor Christopher Sununu’s emergency order banning gatherings by arguing that “[a] court should only interfere” with “[a]n executive’s decision to exercise emergency powers in the face of a rapidly evolving public health crisis. . . . when the executive’s actions were not taken in good faith or if there is no factual basis for the executive to believe that a restriction he imposed was necessary.” Relying on Smith v. Avino (a widely cited Eleventh Circuit decision arising out of Hurricane Andrew), the state’s argument, in essence, is that the heightened judicial scrutiny that such invasions of civil liberties would usually provoke should be “suspended” for the duration of the emergency. The trial court agreed—upholding the group gathering ban because it met the very low bar of “good faith/some factual basis.”

Somewhat more controversially, the Fifth Circuit took a similar approach just this Tuesday in upholding Texas’s application of a coronavirus emergency order postponing “non-essential” medical procedures to abortions. Describing the Supreme Court’s 1905 ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusettsas imposing “the controlling standards, established by the Supreme Court over a century ago, for adjudging the validity of emergency measures,” the majority set aside Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey’s familiar (and far more recent) undue burden test in favor of a rule that “the scope of judicial authority to review rights-claims” during “a public health crisis” is limited to cases where “a statute purporting to have been enacted to protect the public health, the public morals, or the public safety, has no real or substantial relation to those objects, or is, beyond all question, a plain, palpable invasion of rights secured by the fundamental law.” Moreover, the court suggested that in a crisis, this minimal level of scrutiny applies equally to “one’s right to peaceably assemble, to publicly worship, to travel, and even to leave one’s home.”

Their conclusion?

As a country, we thus find ourselves in uncharted waters. But the debate over the proper judicial role in such novel and extraordinary circumstances is not a new one; rather, it dates to the earliest years of the Republic. As D.C. Circuit Chief Judge (and John Adams’ nephew) William Cranch wrote in 1807, “The constitution was made for times of commotion. . . . Dangerous precedents occur in dangerous times. It then becomes the duty of the judiciary calmly to poise the scales of justice, unmoved by the arm of power, undisturbed by the clamor of the multitude.” 213 years later, we aim to demonstrate how the coronavirus pandemic — and the governmental reactions thereto — undermine the suspension model, and, in the process, prove Cranch right.

While in my opinion the authors take too optimistically the time involved in developing and testing an appropriate vaccine, I agree with their view that what is called the “suspension power” -- that is, it takes minimal evidence to uphold the restrictions while the emergency exists -- is unsuitable.  This emergency is different, as it has no reasonably foreseeable outcome and  generally agreed upon termination. Therefore, the ordinary emergency order review is insufficient for Covid-19  orders. Think about it. A dictatorial government could in the same often mind-bogglingly arbitrary manner in which many have delineated between essential and non-essential businesses, decide the emergency will continue until everyone is tested or a vaccine is found, or there’s no longer anyone hospitalized with the virus, or we have definitive proof that recovered patients cannot reinfect.

Wiley and Vladek also argue, persuasively in my opinion, that the restrictions imposed should be subject to review of government restrictions of civil liberties in non-emergency situations. Are rules less restrictive of liberties options available? If there are, then the restrictions should fail.

So many of the restrictions, it seems to me, require defending in transparently open court proceedings. Does the requirement we wear masks really prevent the spread of the disease? Expert opinion is divided. Is it wise, in fact, to restrict movement of citizens or should we allow greater mingling to build herd immunity? Again expert opinion is divided. Is it better to prevent people from using parks and beaches, or is the sunlight, exercise and fresh air a better antidote to the spread of the virus or at least its virility? Our courts deal with such issues every day. Let’s have the governors defend their actions instead of blindly following along or listening to one set of “experts” and ignoring conflicting views.

So many of the restrictions seem ill considered and incomprehensible, if not totally indefensible. Let the state persuade a court that its perfectly reasonable to shut down my dentist’s and doctor’s enterprises even though both can and do sanitize all surfaces and can arrange it so patients will be notified by mobile phone of readiness to see them so that patients will not enter their offices and have to sit with others in the waiting room. Let the states defend arresting a surfer, far from anyone else, while permitting shopping in big box stores.  Let Michigan defend refusing to permit Detroit residents from going to their vacation homes in rural areas less densely populated, or permitting kayaking but not motorboating. Waiting to see any defense of actions like arresting a father for playing in a deserted park with his two children or worshippers praying in a church parking lot while sitting in their cars with the windows up.

Go ahead, make my day.