Barr the liberator
The Justice Department will consider taking legal action against governors who continue to impose stringent rules for dealing with the coronavirus that infringe on constitutional rights once the crisis subsides in their states, Attorney General William Barr said.
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“We have to give businesses more freedom to operate in a way that’s reasonably safe,” Barr said. “To the extent that governors don’t and impinge on either civil rights or on the national commerce — our common market that we have here — then we’ll have to address that.”
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Trump tweeted over the weekend that his supporters should “liberate” Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia — three states with Democratic governors and strict stay-at-home orders.
And now here’s Barr backing him up, in less inflammatory language.
“These are very, very burdensome impingements on liberty, and we adopted them, we have to remember, for the limited purpose of slowing down the spread, that is bending the curve,” Barr said. “We didn’t adopt them as the comprehensive way of dealing with this disease.”
They are very burdensome impingements on liberty, but you know what else is a very burdensome impingement on liberty? Death. You know another very burdensome impingement on liberty? Being on a ventilator. You know another? Reduced lung capacity, which is one outcome of the virus.
I dislike Barr quite a lot.
As an asthmatic, I can attest to that. This past week, burns in Kansas have drifted into my shut-down region, and into my house. It has impinged my ability to breathe. Farmers in Kansas were asked (asked, not told) by their government to voluntarily suspend burns this year; from what I am hearing the number suspending is few to zero. So reduced lung capacity? Yeah. My doctor is having to increase my medicine just to keep me alive. That is impinging on my freedom to spend money on other things, like food and payments, because I have to buy more medicine.
And I don’t even have COVID. That would impinge my liberty even more.
Barr is an ass. He’s an ass standing in shit. He’s an ass standing in shit and slinging it on everybody.
Can you imagine the outrage that would have ensued had the US launched the same sort of rigourous testing and contact tracing that Korea, Taiwan and other countries used to halt the spread? There would have been stories of nasal swabs being used as cover for implating mind-control chips, and “contact tracing” just sounds un-American and would have been a non-starter.
We’ll have to see if Barr actually follows through on anything, or if this is another instance where the Trump Administration says “we’re looking into that very strongly” but means “we’re going to say this to piss off the libs and rally our base but never actually follow through.”
But I wouldn’t be surprised if Barr regards such action as a win-win proposition. Either he succeeds in expanding Trump’s power to do whatever nonsense he wants, or he loses in court in a decision (probably authored by Roberts) that expounds at length upon the importance of the sovereign dignity of the states, which will then be used as precedent for all sorts of future “state’s rights” mischief so desired by the conservative legal community.
So if social distancing doesn’t completely cure the disease, we abandon it before the threat is over? Interesting logic, very reminiscent of the right’s usual argument against firearm control: it won’t completely solve the issue of firearm deaths, so why do it at all?