The Constitutional Police Power, In And After An Emergency

Walter OlsonThe framers of American government were only too well aware of epidemics as a danger to human life (here ’s a list of more than 30 such outbreaks that occurred between 1763 and 1783; Alexander Hamilton and his wife Elizabeth, after both contracting yellow fever and surviving,then underwent quarantine). And American constitutional law has from the outset recognized and countenanced a “police power” in state government during true emergencies to intercept the sorts of otherwise harmless movements and actions that can turn well‐​meaning individuals into vectors of physical harm to follow citizens. At the same time, as they also knew, freedom would count for little were the se emergency powers to set the measure for what government can do to citizens in circumstances short of that dire urgency.I ’m grateful to Ingrid Jacques of the Detroit News forquoting me in her column on this subject yesterday:“’We have no collective memory of going through this kind of thing,’ says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute ’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. ‘It’s an invasion of rights we normally wouldn’t let the government get away with.’“We’re all getting a crash course on what exactly the government can do in times of crisis. It turns out, it ’s a lot ….“… Once the virus subsides, limited‐​government champions should watch whether all the regulations in effect during the threat go ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs