On the homepage today, I note that Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico is insisting that she is allowed to suspend both state statutes and enumerated constitutional rights at will, and I ask why, if this is true, she could not be thrown in jail without a trial? The answer, usually, is “the law.” But if we have no law . . . ?

To continue that thought experiment, I might ask a related question: Namely, whether Lujan Grisham and those defending her have thought through what would happen elsewhere if this behavior were to become the norm. There is, of course, no reason whatsoever that a different governor in a different state couldn’t obtain precisely the opposite policy outcome atop the precise same set of “emergency” claims. Governor Lujan Grisham believes that the rise in crime in Albuquerque is the fault of lax gun-control measures. Okay. But a Republican governor elsewhere might draw the conclusion that this is backwards, and, having declared unilaterally that a rise in crime was being caused by overly strict gun-control measures, suspend the those measures without legislative acquiescence. Is that what Lujan Grisham wants? If so, does she think that the United States will end up with more states whose executive-amended gun laws look like New Mexico’s or more states whose executive-amended gun laws look like Alabama’s?

If this how things work now, the possibilities are endless. Sometimes, Florida has terrible hurricanes that require a massive and unified response from the state. Could the governor here make it a crime to criticize him for the duration of the emergency? What about taxes? Sometimes, the economy is terrible. If unemployment were to hit 10 percent, could the governor declare an emergency and stop collecting corporation and sales taxes without legislative approval? Does the rule go for Washington D.C., too? Lujan Grisham says that her oath was not “intended to be absolute.” Would it be legitimate if the next Republican president took the same view, declared a “debt emergency,” and stopped sending out Social Security checks for a month?

It remains amazing to me that some people seem to require counterexamples before they are able to grasp why it is that we have legislatures, written laws, and enumerated constitutional rights, but, apparently, some people seem to require counterexamples before they are able to grasp why it is that we have legislatures, written laws, and enumerated constitutional rights. Usually, though, those people aren’t called “governor.”