Nor from what I’ve seen.<\/p>\n
Will COVID-19 kill the Constitution<\/a><\/p>\n Jacob Sullum After Newsom ordered \u201cnonessential\u201d businesses to close in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, he let local sheriffs decide whether that category included gun dealers. Newsom\u2019s decision, which allowed Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva to unilaterally ban the sale of firearms and ammunition, illustrates how readily politicians ignore constitutional rights in the very circumstances where they matter most.<\/p>\n Villanueva\u2019s ban, which several gun rights groups challenged in a federal lawsuit last Friday, was inconsistent with recent guidance from the Department of Homeland Security as well as the Second Amendment. In an advisory published on Saturday, the department added firearm retailers to its definition of the \u201cessential critical infrastructure workforce,\u201d which Newsom explicitly exempted from his order.<\/p>\n On Monday, Villanueva, who describes himself as \u201ca supporter of the Second Amendment\u201d but also suggests that keeping guns for self-protection is irresponsible, rescinded his ban, citing the new federal guidelines. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, whose business closure order initially covered gun stores, likewise recognized them as \u201cessential\u201d after seeing the federal advisory.<\/p>\n Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf also deigned to allow firearm sales, but only after three members of the state Supreme Court said that \u201cit is incumbent upon the Governor to make some manner of allowance for our citizens to continue to exercise this constitutional right.\u201d Notably, that rebuke came in a dissent from a March 22 decision summarily denying a challenge to Wolf\u2019s violation of the Second Amendment.<\/p>\n The reversals by Murphy and Wolf, who are now allowing firearm sales by appointment and in compliance with social distancing rules, show that shutting down gun stores was never necessary to curtail transmission of COVID-19. But their reluctance to respect the Second Amendment and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court\u2019s unwillingness to intervene do not bode well for civil liberties at a time when many people seem to think that fighting the pandemic trumps all other concerns.<\/p>\n To \u201csave the nation\u201d from COVID-19, Cornell law professor Michael Dorf argued two weeks ago, Congress should suspend the writ of habeas corpus, an ancient common-law right that allows people detained by the government to demand a justification. Yet the Constitution says that \u201cthe privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.\u201d<\/p>\n Although neither of those circumstances applies, Dorf suggested that the spread of the COVID-19 virus from other countries to the United States could be construed as an invasion. While \u201cno one knows\u201d whether the courts would accept that interpretation, since \u201cCongress has only ever suspended habeas in wartime,\u201d Dorf said, \u201cthere is reason to think that the courts would dismiss a habeas case following nearly any congressional suspension.\u201d<\/p>\n In a recent survey of 3,000 Americans, the University of Chicago\u2019s Adam Chilton and three other law professors found bipartisan agreement that \u201cnow is the time to violate the Constitution,\u201d as they put it. The survey asked whether the respondents would support various constitutionally dubious policy responses to the epidemic.<\/p>\n Sizable majorities of both Democrats and Republicans favored confining people to their homes, detaining sick people in government facilities, banning U.S. citizens from entering the country, government takeovers of businesses, conscription of health care workers, suspension of religious services and even criminalizing the spread of \u201cmisinformation\u201d about the virus. \u201cEven when we explicitly told half of our sample that the policies may violate the Constitution,\u201d Chilton et al. report, \u201cthe majority supported all eight of them,\u201d including the speech restrictions.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter the threat has subsided,\u201d the law professors conclude, \u201cAmericans must recognize any constitutional violations for what they were, lest they become the new normal.\u201d By then, it may be too late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nor from what I’ve seen. Will COVID-19 kill the Constitution Jacob Sullum The great American jurist St. George Tucker, writing at the beginning of the 19th century, called the right to armed self-defense \u201cthe true palladium of liberty\u201d and \u201cthe first law of nature.\u201d But California Gov. Gavin Newsom thinks that right, guaranteed by the … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-o-the-day","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47282,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47281\/revisions\/47282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe great American jurist St. George Tucker, writing at the beginning of the 19th century, called the right to armed self-defense \u201cthe true palladium of liberty\u201d and \u201cthe first law of nature.\u201d But California Gov. Gavin Newsom thinks that right, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, is optional.<\/p>\n