Suspending the Constitution

What’s the big deal of having Supreme Court justices who base their decisions on the Constitution?

Your rights are protected by the Supreme Court. Not the politicians. The Founding Fathers had seen tyrannical governments and that’s why they created our freedoms as God given, not granted by politicians who are concerned with their own power.

You have the right of peaceful assembly which is essential to the other rights but stands alone. You have the right to free speech, free press, religious freedom, etc.

No one would think about suspending our Constitution or our Constitutional rights until 2020. There are lawsuits being fought and won across the U.S. including Pennsylvania, Michigan and California. Our governor will be in court on Oct. 21 where his powers will be challenged.

A divided Michigan Supreme Court voided emergency health orders issued by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in response to a lawsuit filed by the Republican-controlled Michigan Legislature that sought to clarify the legality of Whitmer’s actions taken under the Emergency Powers of Governor Act of 1945 to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.

The ruling came after the high court found on Oct. 2 that the 75-year-old emergency powers act is incompatible with the Michigan Constitution because it unlawfully delegated legislative power to the executive branch. The court also responded to a certified question from the federal court to confirm Whitmer did not have authority past April 30 to make any restrictive orders related to the COVID-19 pandemic without the approval of the legislative branch.

“Executive orders issued under that act are of no continuing legal effect. This order is effective upon entry,”

Last month we reported on a Pennsylvania judge who recognized their governor’s lockdown as unconstitutional. These decisions will be coming down across the country. This is why we need judges who are constitutional where evidence is examined and cross examined. What the Pennsylvania judge found is that there wasn’t good reason for the lockdowns.

Is it ok to go to WalMart but shutter mom and pop stores? It’s safe to go to a casino but not a church? The state was not able to prove that gatherings had been super spreaders.

Across the country, our state and federal courts were turning a blind eye, but this judge pointed out that there was no evidence for the lockdowns and in our history we had never suspended our constitution for any reason.

The evidence produced by the state was weak to non-existent, internally contradictory and didn’t make sense, while the counter evidence was overwhelming. The mitigation didn’t make sense and seemed more like a theoretical white paper being imposed on the people of Pennsylvania. Then there was the policy of forcing people back into nursing homes to infect the rest which was deadly.

The judge pointed out a quarantine is supposed to be specific for people who are actually sick, or mentally ill.

What was the state of Pennsylvania’s defense? They argued that there is no fundamental right for residents to make a living to support families or themselves. What happened to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Thank goodness the judge based his decision on the Constitution.

He ruled there is a right to make a living and assemble, to work and residents did have rights that could not be suspended in the name of an emergency or declared invalid by the branch of any government.

He further stated, “The liberties protected by the Constitution are not fair weathered freedoms. The Constitution cannot accept a new normal where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to emergency mitigation measures. The Constitution sets lines and these actions cross those lines.”

Why is this important? Our Governor Newsom will be in court on Oct. 21 as well. His emergency powers were supposed to end after about 40 days, not go indefinitely, according to our California Office of Emergency Services. The lawsuit filed by two Republican Senators claims he’s overstepped his boundaries and is acting as a monarch rather than a governor.

Rep. Kiley claims Newsome has made one emergency declaration which has lasted months, rather than days, issued 46 executive orders and changed over 400 laws – overriding local districts, ignoring the Legislature, and obviating many more laws.

Kiley wrote, “Of the 400 laws he’s amended, suspended, or overhauled since declaring a State of Emergency on March 4, each one was duly enacted through the legislative process set out in the Constitution. And each one was undone by Newsom with the stroke of a pen.

He’s also created countless new laws out of whole cloth – something not even the Emergency Services Act allows.

Our constitution was founded in the middle of crisis and survived seven different smallpox epidemics, the Spanish Flu, the Asian Flu, the Swine Flu, Civil War, WWI and WWII and throughout all of them we never suspended our constitutional rights or liberties until 2020.

Mayors and governors across the country suspended for the first time in history our rights and banned peaceful assembly and declared assembly itself illegal whether it was for school, business, church, redress of government, etc..

How did we get here?

According to attorney Robert Barnes of Barnes Law, LLP, there were three court cases between 1905 and 1945 where the U.S. Supreme Court left some seeds of these ideas looking to a time when we would need to “suspend the Constitution.”

The seeds of problems of current jurisprudence, according to Blake, start with Jacobsen vs. Massachusetts in 1905, where an immigrant argued that before a vaccine was forced on him as a prerequisite for citizenship, it should be tested by scientific evidence at trial before he was forced to take it.

The court deferred to the executive branch and the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state.

Two decades later that decision was used in the Buck decision in the south where it was used to force sterilization on women across the south to force eugenics. We have a constitution. We don’t defer to people in lab coats.

Then there was the disastrous Korematsu decision.

Fred Korematsu refused to obey the wartime order to leave his home and report to a relocation camp for Japanese Americans. He was arrested and convicted. After losing in the Court of Appeals, he appealed to the United States Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the deportation order.

Their rights were suspended, their jobs taken from them and their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness gone. They lost their Constitutional rights based on their ancestry. Now Korematsu has been spread across the entire country.

Another example overseas was the great Weimar Republic of Germany, which was celebrated as one of the great constitutions of European history. However, it failed because there was a clause that allowed them to suspend their Constituion during an emergency, which was how Nazi Germany was birthed and WWII.

Those ideas of suspending the constitution have proven disastrous.

There are lawsuits happening across the country, as it should be. This is the proper way to handle problems and arguments. Not riots, not looting.

Also, there have been tens of thousands of doctors, epidemiologists and scientists that have been organizing and speaking out against the “science.” They believe the lockdowns are detrimental not only to our health but also the collateral damage is devastating and we will be dealing with more cancer and hunger that will fall disproportionately on the poor around the world.

This was first talked about in our state by some local doctors and then a larger group of doctors who were made fun of and banned from YouTube and Facebook. Now even an official from the World Health Organization has come out this week against lockdowns.

Then there is the Great Barrington Declaration, started by top epidemiologists from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard with over 24,000 doctors, over 9000 scientists and public health officials and over 400,000 concerned citizens signing it around the world in just a few days.

There is another group of European Union doctors who have the backing of thousands of doctors and scientists as well based out of Germany that we reported on last month.

This isn’t going away. It is common to label anyone who questions authority or the status quo as a conspiracy theorist or a long list of other pejoratives, but the tide is turning and it is important to listen to a variety of voices and not shut people out based on preconceived ideas, narratives and ideologies.

And above all else, we need to stick to the Constitution and not give politicians permission to suspend our Constitutional rights.