In Florida on April 3, a bill in the state legislature to rein in the claimed executive power of individual elected officials to impose far-reaching social restrictions on American citizens in the name of fighting public health emergencies passed out of committee.
The reasoning behind the legislation is simple. “I promised my constituents that if I were elected, I would make it harder for one person to ever lock down their home, their school, their office or their church,” its sponsor, Republican state Rep. Dr. Joel Rudman, who won his seat in 2022, said, The Orlando Weekly reported. “This bill does exactly that.”
Rudman is, of course, referring to the draconian social curbs imposed on Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. With criticism of what has been termed the “political weaponization” of the federal government and US judicial system at the forefront of conservative opposition to Joe Biden’s administration these days, it’s rather remarkable that not even two years removed from the height of the pandemic frenzy, more attention isn’t given to how mayors and governors throughout the nation suspended the personal liberties of the citizens of the republic.
It is the “how” that is most important here, for it directly affects what is happening today. The promiscuous issuance of the executive order allowed these officials to rule by personal decree, and the stated notion that a large segment of the American public posed a “domestic threat” to the general health of the citizenry at large justified it all. The result: an alarming expansion of unchecked governing power from on high free from legislative assent.
This messaging came from the White House itself. In a stunning Oct. 7, 2021 speech, President Biden painted unjabbed Americans as biological agents of destruction to defend his sweeping series of federal vaccine mandates. Note how he defined the domestic threat posed by individual Americans to justify the executive order:
“The fact is, this has been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, overrunning emergency rooms and intensive care units … The unvaccinated also put our economy at risk because people are reluctant to go out … I’ve tried everything in my power to get people vaccinated … [W]e gave everyone ample time and information to deal with their concerns … My administration is now requiring federal workers to be vaccinated. We’ve also required federal contractors to be vaccinated. If you have a contract with the federal government, working for the federal government, you have to be vaccinated. We’re requiring active duty military to be vaccinated. We’re making sure healthcare workers are vaccinated … ”
Biden openly proclaimed his singular authority of executive power to deprive Americans of their livelihoods in the name of the supposed greater good. “More lives are being saved,” he declared. “Let’s be clear: When you see headlines and reports of ‘mass firings’ and ‘hundreds’ of people losing their jobs, look at the bigger story.”
This corrosive mindset was also on full display in governor’s mansions around the country.
Tony Evers (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
In May 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down a “safer at home” lockdown executive order unilaterally imposed by Democrat Gov. Tony Evers and enacted via his appointed Department of Health Services chief Andrea Palm. “However well-intentioned, the secretary-designee of the Department of Health Services exceeded her powers by ordering the people of Wisconsin to follow her commands or face imprisonment for noncompliance,” Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley wrote. “In issuing her order, she arrogated unto herself the power to make the law and the power to execute it, excluding the people from the lawmaking process altogether.”
How politicized was Evers’ Department of Health Services? Palm chose a former Planned Parenthood executive to be her assistant deputy secretary, with an eye on fighting abortion political wars. Now consider this. The Wisconsin Supreme Court curtailed Palm on a narrow 4-3 ruling. At the time, conservatives held a majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court. Just last week, on April 4, in a crucial vote that has been called “the most important election of 2023,” progressives captured a seat on the court, and now hold the majority.
Also in May 2020, the Texas Supreme Court weighed in on executive power fiat when making a procedural ruling on a challenge to coronavirus social curbs on the business community. Justice James D. Blacklock quoted an earlier court decision in his ruling. “‘The Constitution is not suspended when the government declares a state of disaster’ [In re Abbott],” Blacklock wrote. “All government power in this country, no matter how well-intentioned, derives only from the state and federal constitutions. Government power cannot be exercised in conflict with these constitutions, even in a pandemic.”
This strikes at the heart of the matter. The coronavirus pandemic social curbs coerced Americans to comply with what they were told they should do with no regard for what they had the right to decide to do or not do. This marked a profound sea change in how citizens view their relationship to government.
It is even more crucial to point this out today when it has become transparently obvious that what it is claimed Americans “should do” has been fully tethered to a loaded political agenda rather than pure, impartial empirical fact. That “what you should do” became “what you must do” during the coronavirus hysteria is all the more frightening to contemplate with the realization that the people who unilaterally imposed that social tyranny feel exactly the same about the urgent necessity to craft gun control and climate change regimens as they do about vaccines.