Rights!

We have always been fighting for our human rights but now a new group is saying that their rights are being infringed. They want the right to infect other people with a deadly disease.

These headlines say it all!
Michigan Protesters Defy Social Distancing Rules, Demanding End to Quarantine

JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/GETTY

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Trump Advisor Compares Conservative Anti-Quarantine Protesters to Rosa Parks

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The backlash against the quarantine has begun in Pennsylvania, with anti-shutdown rally Monday in Harrisburg

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COVID Thursday update: Petition urges governor to lift state of emergency order, outbreak identified in Concord

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STATE REP. TO JOIN ANTI-LOCKDOWN PROTEST IN FRONT OF MAINE GOVERNOR MANSION

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And today here in Connecticut...
Protests planned as push continues to reopen the state

Lawsuit Calls Connecticut Executive Order Requiring Face Covers To Slow Spread Of Coronavirus ‘Unconstitutional’

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So what stirred up the hornet’s nest?

Trump set down guidelines for opening up the country after the plague, he set certain conditions that had to be met before the “stay-at-home” order and the closing of businesses is lifted.

However, right after he said that it is up to the states to lift the bans he tweeted inflammatory tweets calling for the states to be “LIBERATE” and his rabble-rouser base answered the call. Complete with Confederate flags, Tea Party flags, and assault rifles.

Who is financing this?

Well at least in Michigan it is Betsy DeVos the Secretary of Education trough her Michigan Freedom Fund

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They claim that the states do not have the right to shutdown businesses and issue “stay-at-home” orders, but that is settled law. The Supreme Court in the Jacobson v. Massachusetts case.

Jacobson v Massachusetts: It’s Not Your Great-Great-Grandfather’s Public Health Law
PubMed
Am J Public Health. 2005 April; 95(4): 581–590.
By Wendy K. Mariner, JD, LLM, MPH, George J. Annas, JD, MPH, and Leonard H. Glantz, JD

Jacobson v Massachusetts, a 1905 US Supreme Court decision, raised questions about the power of state government to protect the public’s health and the Constitution’s protection of personal liberty. We examined conceptions about state power and personal liberty in Jacobson and later cases that expanded, superseded, or even ignored those ideas.

Public health and constitutional law have evolved to better protect both health and human rights. States’ sovereign power to make laws of all kinds has not changed in the past century. What has changed is the Court’s recognition of the importance of individual liberty and how it limits that power. Preserving the public’s health in the 21st century requires preserving respect for personal liberty.
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ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in Jacobson v Massachusetts, the US Supreme Court upheld the Cambridge, Mass, Board of Health’s authority to require vaccination against smallpox during a smallpox epidemic.2 Jacobson was one of the few Supreme Court cases before 1960 in which a citizen challenged the state’s authority to impose mandatory restrictions on personal liberty for public health purposes. What might such a case teach us today? First, it raises timeless questions about the power of state government to take specific action to protect the public’s health and the Constitution’s protection of personal liberty. What limits state power? What does constitutionally protected liberty include? Second, answers to these questions can change as scientific knowledge, social institutions, and constitutional jurisprudence progress. A comparison of answers to these questions 100 years ago and today shows how public health and constitutional law have evolved to better protect both health and human rights.
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The states’ sovereign power to make laws of all kinds has not changed during the past century. What has changed is the US Supreme Court’s recognition of the importance of individual liberty and how it limits that power. Additionally, states have changed how they use their power and what they regulate as new health problems and solutions emerge. In this article, we discuss these changes by examining (1) the conceptions of state power and personal liberty discussed in Jacobson and (2) 20th-century cases that expanded, superseded, or even ignored those concepts. Finally, we speculate about how challenges to analogous public health laws would be decided today in light of the evolution of science and constitutional law.

Then in a case in the 1824 of Gibbons v. Ogden…

Constitutional powers and issues during a quarantine situation
Constitution Daily
By Scott Bomboy
March 13, 2020

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In 2014, the Congressional Research Service wrote about quarantines and the federal Constitution when there were concerns about the Ebola virus. In general, the Research Service said the power to take quarantine measures is reserved to the states under the 10th Amendment. In 1824, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden drew a clear line between the federal government and the state governments when it came to regulating activities within and between states.

Marshall’s reasoning set the precedent that police powers are reserved to states for activities within their borders (with some exceptions). Those police powers include the ability to impose isolation and quarantine conditions. Marshall wrote that quarantine laws “form a portion of that immense mass of legislation which embraces everything within the territory of a State not surrendered to the General Government.”

The question now is will today’s conservative Supreme Court see it the same way?

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Then with rights comes with responsibility;