{"id":361,"date":"2021-09-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-06T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/?p=361"},"modified":"2023-03-19T14:24:26","modified_gmt":"2023-03-19T18:24:26","slug":"covid-19-and-emergency-powers-ii-not-much-has-changed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/2021\/09\/06\/covid-19-and-emergency-powers-ii-not-much-has-changed\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 and Emergency Powers II – Not Much Has Changed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

About four months ago I wrote a post entitled COVID-19 and Emergency Powers<\/em> <\/a>in which I commented on the tendency of the nation’s governors to seize upon the COVID-19 pandemic to exercise emergency powers. I said<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

attempts to rein in the use of emergency powers have been viewed through the prism of politics or the perceived merits of the action taken rather than process considerations or the constitutional separation of powers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Nothing has changed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent article, Kentucky gov suffers legal defeat in combating COVID surge<\/em><\/a>, ABCNews.com reported on a ruling<\/a> of the Kentucky Supreme Court ordering the dissolution of an injunction against legislation which limited the governor’s emergency powers. The ABC News article seems to imply that only governors can aggressively and correctly decide what’s best for the rest of us to combat COVID.((Unless of course the governor wants to prohibit mask and vaccine mandates, in which case local control becomes more important.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Governors, like the President, exercise executive authority.1<\/a><\/sup> State legislatures may have delegated to their respective governors some portion of their legislative power to exercise when necessitated by an emergency. In the absence of a specific state constitutional provision, why shouldn’t the same legislature be able to exercise its law-making power to act as a check on this delegation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVID has been with us for a year and a half. True, there always seem to be developments, but it is no longer something new that justifies allowing one person to be the sole decider of each state’s response. Every exercise of emergency power to avoid the inefficiencies of the legislative process makes it that much easier to see the next event as an emergency .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jay Bohn
September 6, 2021<\/p>\n

  1. The extent to which they share this authority with other officials not subordinate to them is a matter of the constitutional law of the specific state. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    About four months ago I wrote a post entitled COVID-19 and Emergency Powers in which I commented on the tendency of the nation’s governors to seize upon the COVID-19 pandemic to exercise emergency powers. I said attempts to rein in the use of emergency powers have been viewed through the prism of politics or the … Continue reading “COVID-19 and Emergency Powers II – Not Much Has Changed”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4,9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid-19","category-government","category-journalism","category-judicial-decisions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":985,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions\/985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bohn.org\/wpmocha\/peanutgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}