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[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Subjugation of the Deplorables: They know it’s illegal. They just don’t care.

Never mind that, a year and a half after the commencement of the March 2020 lockdowns, and in the face of mounting inflation, Americans have stubbornly managed to stabilize the economy. Never mind that myriad struggling mom-and-pop landlords are irreparably harmed by an arbitrary, zero-sum handout to tenants at the expense of landlords. And never mind that, as constitutional scholar Eugene Kontorovich wrote last month, the Biden administration was “clearly using a public health emergency as a substitute for economic legislation—and this is what the moratorium always was.”

As Kontorovich concluded, the eviction moratorium—both in its initial decree and its lingering vitality—was always a quintessential example of Rahm Emanuel’s injunction to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” But the COVID era has furnished countless examples of progressive governance-by-crisis, from the local or municipal level to the state and national level.

Everywhere one looks, going back to those first two weeks of “15 days to slow the spread,” COVID has legally emboldened a pan-institutional ruling class that was already champing at the bit to consolidate its ideologically monolithic rule and subjugate all free-thinking “deplorables” who so much as seemed hesitant to advance it.

As the 2021-2022 school year begins, this subjugation can be expected to rapidly accelerate and metastasize. Ron DeSantis, stalwart governor of my new adopted home state, Florida, now finds himself in the midst of intense litigation for the right to—wait for it—leave masking decisions for elementary school-age children in the hands of parents, not the left-wing public school foot soldiers. This, notwithstanding the rudimentary truism of our federalist constitutional structure that sovereignty below the federal level inheres in states and not their various municipalities, let alone those municipalities’ public school bureaucrats. That basic principle did not stop Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper, whose ruling had to be stayed by Florida’s First District Court of Appeals.

But why should it? None of this is actually about the rule of law. It is about two things: power tout court, and preferential allocation of scarce, zero-sum resources so as to benefit the Left’s favored groups (such as aggrieved tenants and teachers unions) and punish the Left’s disfavored groups (such as landlords and parents skeptical of the benefits of forcing their young children to wear a face diaper in school all day). That is what matters to folks like President Biden and Judge Cooper.