The Blog

2020-

2020-12-10 a
THE COVID-CON I
“It is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.”

It’s Time For Mass Civil Disobedience Against Lawless Lockdown Orders

For too long, mayors and governors and health officials across the country have overstepped their authority. Time to ignore them.

By now it should be obvious that elected state and local officials issuing COVID-19 lockdown and stay-at-home orders are just making things up as they go along.

Too often, their edicts aren’t based on science or data, but on a grotesque understanding of their own authority and infallibility. In the face of a worsening pandemic, they want to be seen doing something, taking bold action to stop the spread of the virus—that is, so long as it doesn’t hurt certain favored special interests.

That’s why Americans living under arbitrary and unconstitutional lockdown orders should simply ignore them, en masse, as an act of civil disobedience.

How else are ordinary people to push back against the capricious rules of politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti? On November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, Garcetti and county health officials banned outdoor dining at bars and restaurants for three weeks. Because of the spread of the virus, they said, it’s just too dangerous, so we all have to do our part and make sacrifices.

But then they gave a carve-out for certain kinds of outdoor dining, like film and television crew’s catering sites. In Garcetti’s town, a massive film crew eating outside is safe but a small restaurant or bar with outdoor, socially distanced seating is too dangerous to remain open. Got it?

Then last week, L.A. County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant called out the mayor and county health officials on this arbitrary exercise of power, ordering them to produce scientific evidence to justify the outdoor dining ban. “You have to do a risk-benefit analysis for public health. You don’t just talk about the risk of spreading disease. You have to talk about the benefit of keeping restaurants open,” Chalfant said.

Exactly right. Chalfant is also requiring the county to provide data on hospital and ICU capacity to justify the claim that the health-care system would be overwhelmed without the outdoor dining ban. County health officials are scheduled to appear in Chalfant’s courtroom Tuesday to give whatever evidence they were able to cobble together since last week.

The lawsuit, brought by an attorney who also owns a downtown L.A. restaurant, captures the dynamic of pandemic governance in a microcosm. Health officials, based on nothing but their opinions about what might be safe or not, have put tens of thousands of people in America’s second-largest city out of work right before the holiday season.

This pattern has played out all across the country this year. Elected officials, often Democratic mayors or governors, promulgate rules, curfews, capacity limits, and outright shutdowns that betray either animosity or indifference toward certain groups while protecting other, favored groups.

... A terrible injustice is being perpetrated against ordinary working people by elected officials who believe they can shutter entire industries and destroy people’s livelihoods with the stroke of a pen. (read more)

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