COVID-19 has shined some important light on the tendency of government to do as Founding Fathers warned — stretch and reach and overreach, and tread into places it doesn’t belong. And as the executive orders come fast and furious from governors’ mansions around the nation, it’s high time for a reminder: Orders are not laws.
They should be challenged by the people. They should be held to constitutional muster. They should be challenged and debated and fought over because they threaten the very foundation of America’s free society.
America is not a kingdom but rather a system of limited government where rule of law, meaning, the Constitution, guides — not mob mentality, or worse, fear — and public servants are just that: beholden to the citizenry.
Executive orders bypass that system. They are not duly passed laws by elected representatives of the people. They are not pieces of legislation that are openly debated and discussed and voted upon in ways that keep the elected accountable to the people.
They don’t give the voter the chance to express yay or nay; they don’t allow the people to hold the ultimate power.
Truly, really, if viewed through the lens of Founding Father intents with the Constitution, they hold little legal weight — in fact, they are outright blots to this system of limited government America is supposed to represent.
And guess what: Nobody knows that better than the very government sources issuing these orders. The whole executive order system relies on a complicit and cowed citizenry being too blowed over by government to question, challenge or fight.
Take the face mask orders that have been issued with rising frequency by state officials and private businesses alike.
These orders are based on President Donald Trump’s declaration of national emergency under four statutes — two under the Stafford Act, two under the National Emergencies Act — as well as on his invoking of national emergency powers through the Defense Production Act. Governors in the varying states subsequently issued their own declarations of emergencies, invoking their own special and specific executive powers in the process.
All this emergency declaration doesn’t suspend the Constitution, however.
And that’s been kind of the forgotten caveat among the political fallout from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
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