When will people learn that government is always to be distrusted, most of all in times of crisis?
Half the people I've ever engaged with because (for example) they expressed skepticism about mask efficacy rather rapidly turned out to also hold a host of much less reputable ideas - including borderline-qanon and plandemic bullshit. And the other half seen to think that premature certainty in the face of incomplete evidence makes them "scientific".
The general level of rational debate about covid has been poor all round.
“Deadly disease is always the bigger risk” is a naive and dangerous response, in my opinion. The epidemiologists seem to have nothing to say about comparative risks from delayed stroke treatments, cancer screenings, and heart bypasses, or indeed the risks from totalitarianism and outright war. Those refusing to wear masks are not all doing so because they are idiots who don’t listen to their betters, many are refusing because they have some actual perspective, unlike far too many in our professional class, it seems.
For the record, I don’t give businesses a hard time over their mask rules, but I do like to put a piece of duct tape on the front of the mask to prompt people to think about it a little.
wearing masks in public is safety theater in most cases, because they're only effective at the margins where the atmospheric viral concentration is static enough and high enough to make them matter, and they're only potentially static & high enough in relatively rare places like the space between a dentist and a patient, not in a supermarket or a even a restaurant (though crowded bars likely cross that threshold). simple distancing is plenty mitigation in most public spaces.
the 'rules' are broken and spread happens largely in (semi-)private spaces. instead of worrying about the trivialities of masks in public, a complicity signal, worry about social gatherings, a serious transmission vector. the etiquette and impetus of social gathering is diametrically opposed to mitigation, and that's the much thornier real, core issue that we try to elide by collectively diverting our attention to masks.
And yet, Justice Thomas is the lone voice in using this clause correctly, while the others largely prefer to leave it in its neutered state and distort the equal protection clause to fill gaps where necessary and create some bogus guarantee of fairness. See Timbs v. Indiana for an example of just how ridiculous this particular area has gotten. There is some hope that Gorsuch may come around to Thomas' view, as he wrote a similar concurrence.
It is certainly a privilege of a citizen of the United States to run his business as normal. Police powers cannot overrule that. I fear that the precedent has already been set, however. The court system is too slow to work these things out while they're happening, and a ruling against an action is little solace once it's already happened. There must be significant punitive action against any state or municipality that attempts to do so.
I'd like to see Dillon's Rule states threaten to dissolve and re-constitute any municipal government that instituted any lockdown order at all. It would also nice to see criminal prosecution of those who threatened citizens who simply wished to go about their lives in violation of the constitution. A government official who does something of that sort without authority is acting as an autocratic thug and any physical enforcement of such directives is assault and must be prosecuted as such.
the states have police power via the 10th amendment, which reserves all powers not delegated to the fed to the states (didn't know about dillon's rule until now, although that was my general understanding of where power lies, in states not municipalities). and it sounds like a narrowly-interpreted privileges or immunities clause of the 14th amendment further allows states to use police power as long as it doesn't infringe due process or equal protection.
one question is how much the feds can compel state actions in this regard (seems like not much, but feds can use their own forces if need be), and another is how much states can act independent of the feds (seems like feds can delegate the response to states)?
can states simply compel lockdowns by police power, other than hoping no one notices and sues? apparently Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) allows for compulsory vaccinations by states for general health and welfare.
regardless of the legal basis, to me, it's pretty clear that our governments (especially CA) poorly and blindly targeting its efforts for maximal political (and media) gain rather than for health and safety.
if it had been for the latter, the first highly visible thing we'd have done was immediately quarantined senior care facilities, super-PPE'ed all their workers, paying whatever it took to create a tight bubble around each facility, to protect seniors. that would have targeted 60+% of potential mortalities (and yes, we knew that was a core threat back in february). then we could address other specific threats and beefed up medical facilities as needed. and lastly, we'd have singularly messaged the heightened dangers of social gatherings and the effectiveness of distancing, along with an educational campaign on the mechanism of spread, co-morbidities, the age stratification of risk, and such, not masks and its complicity-signalling value.
then residents could make informed choices on how to protect themselves. some would choose to isolate, but many would just distance where necessary and avoid large gathering of strangers. we then wouldn't need to worry so much about legal precedent, and we wouldn't be dividing into stupid political camps lobbing vicious tweets (and sometimes more) at each other.
"Should a governor or president have the unilateral authority to declare X an "emergency" under which they now have unlimited authority to force businesses closed and people into their home for an indeterminate amount of time until they (the governor or president ) solely choose that an emergency is no longer present"
A policy or law such as that is found in a dictatorship not in a free republic
With the influx of populists and political outsiders or other non-establishment types who (correctly) recognize that convention isn't binding, we see that governmental systems choke and come to a halt. I'm Canadian and our government as an institution is just about wholly incompetent, being carried on the tired shoulders of a few upstanding individuals who are either blissfully ignorant of the massive corruption and idiocy around them, or else determined to plod on through the sea of mediocrity.
Either way, as much as we like to rag on the US, one of the really nice things about their government is that it's designed with less inherent trust that ours. A majority government here in Canada is basically an elected dictatorship. It feels good to say you trust the government when they happen to wear the same colours as your preferred ideology but trusting government to do the right thing is a recipe for disappointment in my opinion.
The founders of the US trusted no one, not even themselves or the public. that is why there are layers upon layers of checks built in to the system to check no only the government but the people as well.
Most of the problem in the US system today are down to erosion of that distrust combined with a strong desire to adopt more direct democracy...