“Republicans believe that states are in charge of elections. … I’m having a hard time figuring out the basis for that lawsuit.” ~Sen. Lamar Alexander, Meet the Press, Dec. 13, 2020
So Republicans plan to ignore every illegal court ruling overturning state voter integrity laws in the future, right?
In recent years, the federal courts have waded into every political issue imaginable. They have prevented states from enforcing federal immigration law, while not only greenlighting states to criminalize federal law, but preventing the federal government from cutting off funding to sanctuary states. They have prevented states from defining marriage, upholding basic sexuality, or placing commonsense health regulations on abortion clinics. They have prevented states from cleaning out homeless encampments and from simply declining to fund castration “surgery” in prison or through Medicaid funding. They have also prevented states from requiring able-bodied Medicaid recipients attempt to seek employment.
For a while, it appeared there was nothing a state (and even the feds) could do without a federal court violating the rules of standing to give some straw-man third-party organization (often on behalf of illegal aliens) standing to sue to overturn the outcome of a fundamentally political issue and decide it with finality.
However, those same courts have no problem when states thumb their noses at federal immigration law or when they violate every individual right known to man in under the guise of fighting coronavirus.
Elkhart County (Indiana) Sheriff Jeff Siegel won’t get his deputies involved in enforcing the recent COVID-19 mask fine ordinance.
Here’s his post on the issue:
On December 2, Elkhart followed St. Joseph County (Indiana) in passing an ordinance that would issue fines to businesses who fail to enforce the county mask ordinance. The fines apply to both customers and employees. The business can be fined for the actions of both parties.
Mask ordinances, particularly those with fines, have real constitutional issues. Many legal and constitutional experts have weighed in on this in recent months. Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill also believes there are constitutional issues.
Beyond the legal arguments, issuing fines for violating mask ordinances has proven completely ineffective everywhere in the United States. For example, New Mexico has had a state mandate to wear masks since May. Mandatory fines were announced on July 1, 2020. Since then, the daily cumulative number of COVID-19 cases in the state has gone from about 12,000 a day to 108,000 a day. The mandate and the fines haven’t worked at all.
Quite literally, all the fines do is piss people off and cause tension between citizens and government officials. It’s more ‘busy work’ for politicians to make it seem like they are trying everything they can to control the virus. In politics, if you can’t fix a problem, you blame someone else for making it impossible for you to fix it. That sums up our entire COVID response and strategy right now. In reality, there’s nothing they can do. There’s nothing any of us can do, except take solace in the fact that the overwhelming majority of us aren’t at serious risk from the virus, and try to protect those who are as best we can.
Mask fines haven’t worked throughout the US because mask mandates haven’t worked in the US or anywhere else in the world for that matter. The same goes for Michiana. Not because people aren’t wearing their mask, but because masks don’t work against an airborne virus. I’ve proven this for months with peer-reviewed science on the issue going back to 2009.
People in Elkhart are wearing their masks. Very few don’t. The virus is still spreading. Just as it’s still spreading everywhere in the world where people wear their masks all the time without fail.
The government, however, has no answer on how to make things better. So they blame a fictional boogeyman … the non-mask wearer in order to avert public outcry directed at them. ‘If only those three people would wear a mask!’
The Sheriff doesn’t want his deputies in the middle of a political fight with cult-like dogma being hurled in every direction. I don’t blame him.
Beyond that, not allowing his department to become the Thinkpol of Oceania should settle citizen worries of police abuse, at least in the county.
