When do we get to vote on the lockdowns, democracy man?
That you don't like it does not mean the majority of civil society doesn't like it, and the price you pay to have civil society is having laws not every single person likes at all times. But the mechanism is there to pursue change.
If you, as a citizen, are unaware of public laws passed by your legislature, then you cannot blame the governor for using them during an emergency. It's your fault for not knowing the law, which in probably every case, has been public knowledge for decades.
I know in the states near me, MI, IN, OH, all the states have various powers granted to the governors, and I have known about them and the powers granted for two of the states for over a decade.
When you get surprised by things you didn't know but could have easily known beforehand, don't get so upset that someone is tricking you. They are not.
The publicity of a law among tens of thousands of other laws is irrelevant. Government authority comes from the consent of the governed. Citizens do not give consent to something just because its on the books. People have jobs and real things to get done in their lives. They cannot and should not be expected to waste their time crawling through hundreds of thousands of pages of legislation, let alone have the legal background to interpret all of it. Imagine how much of an asshole you sound like right now: "Oh, your family business went bankrupt because of lockdowns? You have no right to complain, you should have studied § 46.2-872. Didn't know about it? Too bad!"
Public polling and widespread non-compliance suggests that governors lack the lockdown orders lack the consent of the governed.
You vote for a governor because you believe they will make a decision you generally agree with when presented with facts. Your vote says that for the next little while you think this person would represent your interests, no matter what happens. Some governors have mild terms, others have catastrophes they have to navigate.
Acrobatic_Road makes a reasonable point that they don't feel they were given the proper means to express their policy preferences, and reasonably calls it 'undemocratic'.
After all the reason we want democracy in the first place is so that ordinary citizens can influence the policy.
Chillwaves reasonably points out that America is a representative democracy and so you vote for candidates whom you trust to vote in accordance to your policy preferences.
That's two great points! We should be able to have an interesting discussion right? For example we could discuss ways in which the US system of representative democracy is failing Acrobatic_Road. We could also discuss why we might like it despite its failings.
But for some reason, online debate seemingly always end up in an inane discussion debating definitions with one side claiming X is not truly Y while the other side claims X lives up to standard definition of Y.
Nobody is any smarter. We entirely failed to learn anything from each others perspective.
We can be better than this :(
>The crowd is intensely stupid (as a vote on lockdown would certainly reveal)
Oh, thanks for admitting that lockdowns are undemocratic.