No one is arguing whether the virus is on our clock. The argument is whether we’ve granted our governments the right to indefinitely extend their emergency authorizations.
“After X days responsibility should transfer from the executive branch to the legislative” is completely different from “the governments ability to take X measures to stop a pandemic should be limited to Y days”. I am only responding to the latter.
My fear about the former is the implicit assumption that the legislature won’t also close gyms, bars, and other businesses that a vocal minority want re opened immediately.
That's the risk and price of democracy and freedom, the people (or their representatives) aren't supposed to do what's best, they're supposed to do what the public wants
First of all, we’re a representative democracy. We do not elect people to implement our exact will, we elect people who we expect to use their best judgement to use the powers vested in them. If the expectation was that elected members do exactly what their constituents wanted, we would be a direct democracy instead.
Second, I find the notion that “the price of freedom is the risk of just not bothering to solve a pandemic” to be a serious insult to democracy. I question the legitimacy of any democratic system that would just ... not bother to protect citizens.
And finally, calls to return to normal represent a narrow minority of the population. In fact a majority of Americans are worried about the virus, a majority wants schools to remain closed, and a majority think we opened back up too soon. If we’re talking about “popular will”, then we would be talking about extending shut downs, not ending them.
Do you have a source for those numbers?
Its interesting because Gallup has shown remarkable consistency in people self isolating. The percentage of the population visiting restaurants, bars, and their friends homes remains down in the mid 20s. Only 34% of Americans have returned to the office, only 5-6% of Americans are going to their place of worship. 5% of Americans have returned to a gym.
People are by and large self enforcing the lock down. According to Gallup the percentage of Americans who would return to normal “right now” is 28%. The vast majority of Americans want at least to see case numbers fall first, with sizable groups expecting no new cases in their state (28%) or a vaccine (23%) before returning to normal. 67% of Americans say they will enforce social distancing “for as long as necessary” before their mental health begins to suffer, up 13% since April.
The groups shouting about ending the lock down and returning to normal are about 28-30% of the population, according to Gallup.
And the legal justification by which those measures apply to a situation that is going on half a year is dubious at best. The legality of those measures themselves is also generally dubious from a constitutional law perspective. Most of them have never been meaningfully challenged because they've mostly been used for short term emergencies at this point. The legislatures need to nut up and to their damn jobs. They've had nearly 6mo at this point.
That's a key phrase and begs some questions:
- Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective?
- Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective than doing nothing?
- Has anyone announced what metrics we're even tracking to determine "effective"?
- How long does something have to persist until it's no longer an "extraordinary situation"?
- Are the "extraordinary measures" persistent or limited by time, risk, etc?
Asking for the War on Poverty, Drugs, Terror, etc, etc.
> - Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective?
That's how it's been handled here. We went through a phase of virtually absolute lockdown this spring, loosened restrictions this summer, and locked a few things back down again (bars were especially bad). The governor also ramped up mask mandates as we learned more about their effectiveness.
> Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective than doing nothing?
Not sure exactly what you mean here, but the regions that have done nothing have seen worse results.
> Has anyone announced what metrics we're even tracking to determine "effective"?
Number of confirmed cases, number of tests administered, percentage of tests being positive, number of deaths. The last metric is the one we really care about the most, but we can mitigate it by tracking leading indicators. Nothing more than statistical theory at play here.
> How long does something have to persist until it's no longer an "extraordinary situation"? > Are the "extraordinary measures" persistent or limited by time, risk, etc?
Michigan has a phased approach based on various metrics and indicators: https://www.michigan.gov/documents/whitmer/MI_SAFE_START_PLA...
I would love to see this sort of prudence for other crises.
And if such a bill can't be passed - i.e. the person holding emergency powers is using them to do things our elected representatives aren't willing to sign off on - surely that proves how important it is that the powers be limited.
(Of course, if you believe our elected representatives would risk killing people to make the other side look bad, or would stuff unrelated pork into the must-pass bill, you might not follow this line of reasoning)