Note that I said "without due process". If a restaurant owner is accused of a crime, the police must seek a warrant from a judge, must present that warrant to the owner before they are allowed to search the premises, and there can be no punishment at all until after a fair trial. In the case of a failed health inspection the process is not so involved. The closure can only last until specific named sanitation failures are fixed, the closure can be appealed or even taken to trial if the owner wants. All of this is to protect the rights of individuals, not to make the process more efficient.
Meanwhile we have a governor announcing that all outdoor dining facilities are to be closed starting next week, with no specific allegations against specific establishments, no appeal, no evidence, and absolutely no due process. Oh, but essential businesses, like the film industry, are exempt:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/los-angeles-bar-owner-rips-garcet...
> A Los Angeles bar owner was fighting back tears Friday, claiming Mayor Eric Garcetti
> had shut down the outdoor patio at her business — while letting a Hollywood movie crew
> set up an outdoor dining area just a short distance away.
The 14th amendment states:
> No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or
> immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any
> person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to
> any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This is simply unconstitutional, and I suspect that you haven't thought it through merely because your business wasn't closed down.
>> It's unconstitutional for the executive branch to make arbitrary decisions without
>> representative input,
> No it isn’t. This just isn’t true. For starters the decision is obviously not
> arbitrary. And “representative input” - Jesus. You can’t just make up stuff that
> isn’t in the constitution and claim that something you don’t like is therefore
> unconstitutional.
I recommend reading the judgement of William S. Stickman IV in a recent case in Pennsylvania: https://princelaw.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/15717588218.pd.... Again it comes down to due process.
I'll quote a summary:
> The Business Plaintiffs further argue that the business closure orders
> violated the Due Process Clause. The Order states, in relevant part:
> "[n]o person or entity shall operate a place of business in the
> Commonwealth that is not a life-sustaining business regardless of
> whether the business is open to members of the public." (ECF No. 42-3,
> Section 1). The Order attached a list of "life-sustaining" businesses
> that were permitted to stay open. Defendants also set up a waiver
> system, whereby a business deemed to be "non-life-sustaining" could
> request permission to continue operations. (ECF No. 38, p. 2)
> Defendants decided to close the waiver process on April 3, 2020,
> largely because of an overwhelming number of requests. (ECF No. 38,
> p. 4; ECF No. 75, pp. 227-31). The record shows that Defendants never
> had a set definition in writing for what constituted a
> "life-sustaining" business. Rather, their view of what was, or was
> not, "life-sustaining" remained in flux. (ECF No. 75,
> pp. 97-98). Finally, the record shows that the definitino of
> "life-sustaining" continued to change, even after the waiver process
> closed.
And from the conclusion:
> The record shows that the Governor's advisory team, which designated
> the Business Plaintiffs and countless other business thoughout the
> Commonwealth as "non-life-sustaining" and, thereby, closing them, did
> so with no set policy as to the designation and, indeed, without ever
> formulating a set definition for "life-sustaining" and, conversely
> "non-life-sustaining." The terms "life-sustaining" and
> "non-life-sustaining" relative to businesses are not defined in any
> Pennsylvania statue or regulation. […]
>
> The record demonstrates that the policy team's unilateral
> determination as to which classes of businesses would be classified as
> "life-sustaining" was never formalized and the team never settled on a
> specific definition of "life-sustaining":
>
> Q: Well, Id' ask you if you'd do me a favor. Would you please tell me
> where I could find the definition of "life-sustaining?" […]
>
> A: I believe that it's driven by the categorization and the
> determiniation − I'm not sure that we wrote down anywhere what
> "life-sustaining" meant. It was policy decisions that were made by our
> team as to whether they considered, you know, an energy production
> location or utility or supermarket to be life-sustaining as
> distinguished from others that they did not believe. We didn't I
> believe, write down a definition specifically but just translated the
> sort of common understanding of life sustaining or not into that
> business list.
(any typos are my own, of course)
This is exactly the kind of arbitrary and capricious government behavior that the 14th amendment protects us from. If the state congress of Pennsylvania had sat down in session and debated a law that divided businesses into the categories "life-sustaining" and "non-life-sustaining" and gave the governor the power to shut down one or the other category, then that would be fine. That would give the citizens of Pennsylvania their right to due process, because the law could be amended or repealed. But that's not what happened. The actions of the governor of California bear substantial similarity to those of the governor of Pennsylvania, so I say that they are similarly unconstitutional.
>> It's not legal to confine the majority of people in a state to their homes,
> whether they've been diagnosed with a transmissible disease or not.
> Again this just isn’t true and has never been true.
If you think it's right for the governor of California to confine you to your house without making specific allegations against you and without giving you any due process, then you are lost. There's no other word for it; you've given up your rights. You no longer believe that they exist, or that you deserve them.