3:18:23
“New York is rapidly competing with California to become Hell on Earth. It’s practically sprinting there. Earlier this week, Brownstone ran an article headlined, “Governor Hochul Files Appeal in Quarantine Camp Lawsuit.”
On Monday, after waiting months, and just hours before the final deadline expired, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed an appeal trying to overturn a successful July 2022 lawsuit that struck down New York Governor Hochul’s unconstitutional “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” regulation. The winning lawsuit was filed and argued by courageous small-firm lawyer Bobbie Anne Flower Cox:
Where, oh where, has the ACLU gone? Where, oh where could it be? Is it with Little Bo-Peep’s lost sheep? Did it see a spider and run away with Miss Muffet? For that matter, where are any of the myriad of so-called “civil rights” groups whose mission statements glowingly boast of standing up for the disabled, and who all live off government grants and taxpayer largesse?
Why must small-firm, solo attorney Cox carry this burden, when there are all these well-heeled, well-staffed institutional guarantors of freedom? Suddenly, when we need them the most, they are all missing in action, AWOL. Not one of them appeared in the case. Every single one of these well-funded civil rights law firms are loathsome shirkers and deserters, deserving scorn and ridicule from all right-thinking citizens. Shame on them.
The New York Department of Health’s “emergency regulation” lets the agency arbitrarily pick citizens to lock up or lock down, with no proof needed that the citizen was ever even exposed to (let alone actually sick with) a long laundry list of communicable diseases. They only need to SUSPECT the citizen has the disease. The regulation would lock citizens down in their homes or forcibly remove them to a state quarantine facility, with no avenue of appeal for release.
You’d be stuck there until THEY decide you can leave.
On February 19, 1942, arguably the most liberal democrat President in history, Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed anti-democratic Executive Order 9066, which made racism the official policy of the United States government, by authorizing the forced removal of “resident enemy aliens” from any parts of the West vaguely designated by the government as “military areas.” Japanese immigrants and their descendants, regardless of American citizenship status or length of residence, were systematically “evacuated” to government prison camps.
Hundreds or thousands of American citizens lost jobs, businesses, homes, and property, all in service to democrat party fear-mongering and politics.
Now the democrats are doing it again. New York’s arguably most liberal democrat Governor in history is attempting to do the EXACT SAME THING, except that instead of citizens with “Japanese ancestry,” Hochul’s anti-democratic health regulation would apply to people the State government deems “unclean,” regardless of whether there is any actual evidence (much less proof) that an “unclean citizen” was even sick.
The courts are not necessarily reliable safeguards of Americans’ Constitutional liberties. In the shameful case of Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court — having been frighted into compliance by FDR’s court-packing threat — upheld FDR’s reprehensible Executive Order 9066, by characterizing the despicable order as an “emergency” wartime necessity. The Court explained that the collective need to protect against espionage and sabotage by Japanese Americans on the West Coast outweighed the individual rights of Japanese Americans.
Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson penned an eloquent — and prophetic — dissent in Korematsu:
“The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes. All who observe the work of courts are familiar with what Judge Cardozo described as ‘the tendency of a principle to expand itself to the limit of its logic.’ A military commander may overstep the bounds of constitutionality, and it is an incident. But if we review and approve, that passing incident becomes the doctrine of the Constitution. There it has a generative power of its own, and all that it creates will be in its own image. Nothing better illustrates the folly of this invention than the manner in which it has been hurried through this Court with such impetuosity and in the absence of any adequate expression of views.”
Korematsu has never been overruled. But it has been widely criticized — mostly by hypocritical democrats, who created, cheered-on, and enforced the interment order.
Executive orders and agency regulations — like New York’s “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” — are inherently anti-democratic, because they are ordered by bureaucrats and not debated or approved by citizens’ elected lawmakers. As American writer and poet Charles Bukowski quipped, the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.
I’m not saying the democrats’ “Isolation and Quarantine” regulation is all bad. I could get behind it if it were modified just a little, by replacing “unclean citizens” with “Kathy Hochul.” Put Hochul into forced quarantine! For safety! She IS a witch, after all. And since it’s an emergency and whatnot.
Win-Win!
Anyway, we’ll do whatever’s necessary to help Attorney Cox stop the Wicked Witch of the East. Maybe a house will fall on the Governor.”
-Coffee and Covid, March 18, 2023
