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Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

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Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#131

The Republicans who brought the lawsuit argue that, in part, continuing the lock down isn't appropriate because deaths from covid19 are going down. They don't connect the declining deaths to being locked down. You would think they would notice.

The question is, if deaths going down isn't the end condition, what is? Surely there has to be some point soon where the legislature gets to determine the laws of the state again.

Why are deaths going down?

If everyone goes out will deaths keep going up or down?

What sorts of preventive measures can we put in place to be safe when going back out again?

A lot of answers are still missing

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#132
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of Civil Rights rulings in force in 1905 were overturned in the century since. See my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173737

There weren't any "Civil Rights" rulings (note capital letters) prior to the mid-1960s, as the legislation and legal system supporting it didn't exist prior to that.[0] Modern "Civil Rights" is a parallel legal system in the US that overrides the former Anglo-derived legal system (though both are still on the books) whenever they conflict. That's why you get people on the Right muttering about "muh Constitution" wond…

Not a downvoter, but you may have missed nearly a century of US history. The first Civil Rights Act (note the capital letters) was enacted in 1866 and there is loads of caselaw prior to the 20th century dealing with Civil Rights. Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, is one of the many landmark fuckups where the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation, for example. It is cases like this that the prior comment is addressing, I imagine.

edit: mild clarity

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#133
post #3

What we should do is one thing. Saying the government can make us do it is something else entirely.

When our actions can harm others, the government absolutely has the right—and the obligation—to step in.

1.6+ million deaths YEARLY are directly caused by diabetes[1]. According to your logic, shouldn't the government mandate that all restaurants only be allowed to sell healthy foods? Better yet, let's have Google and Apple build an app that tracks everyone's blood glucose, so we can only purchase foods that keep us below our daily blood glucose allotment. And while we're at it, let's have Twitter/Facebook/Google/Etc censor any searches for cheeseburgers/milkshakes/butterfingers. Oh and Bill Gates wants to help, so he's working on a sugar vaccine (but will require 50% of the vaccine patent royalties paid in advance).

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/diabetes

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the legislature resists, or the court doesn't grant the stay, that sucks, the bars and restaurants will open, people will get sick and die. Or maybe the Republicans will turn out correct and everything is fine. This assertion needs a citation. If this should be true either hospitalization must be so high that it overwhelms the health system, which was the original justification for the lockdown, or death rate mu…

1 in 400 New Yorkers have died from this in the past 2 months. The flu doesn’t do that.

But we’re talking about Wisconsin, not New York. The death rate in Wisconsin is 1 in 14,000. Flu is about 1 in 4,000-5,000 in a typical year. New York is such an outlier in terms of death rates that it should be a totally separate conversation.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#136

This is where culture really matters. Almost every jurisdiction in the western world has faced this issue. Governments are issuing orders that, when push comes to shove, might not be 100% legitimate in the eyes of a court. In most countries that hasn't mattered. People acknowledge the covid problem and are obeying the "orders" despite them, perhaps, not having legal teeth. This requires trust. Like the current politi…

Nonsense. You say that as if the 50 States' legislatures have been wiped out by covid-19 and can't convene (or be convened, as the case may be) and pass laws.

In the U.S. executive orders simply don't and can't have the force of law without the support of statutory law, not relative to civilians[0]. If you want a law, it needs to be passed as a statute by the appropriate legislature and must become law via all the usual mechanisms.

It's not that hard to pass emergency laws with sunsets in the very near future. So even if a given State's legislature is skeptical of covid-19's severity, they might nonetheless be amenable to a brief grant of emergency powers and see what happens.

Governors or the President acting alone to impose emergency statute-like law? That's not well received in the U.S., whether by people or courts, and there are very strong precedents in this regard[0].

That has nothing to do with corruption or taxes, and everything to do with long-established, well-thought-out, constitutional law. Yes, we're talking about constitutional law based on past skepticism of government, but that does not imply current skepticism (though it's true there's plenty of it). Also, the U.S. Constitution's requirement that State governments be (small-r) republican almost certainly extends the constraints on the President's EO power to the States' Governors. (Though, admittedly, the Supreme Court has ruled the Republican Government Guarantee clause non-justiciable, that was during the 19th century in a case that was clearly for Congress to decide, and the Court erred in saying that the clause was simply non-justiciable as opposed to certain cases not being justiciable. In a case about the validity and enforcability of gubernatorial EOs, the Court might well rule that the clause does mean that Governors cannot impose emergency rules without statutory support. Certainly that seems like a reasonable interpretation.)

> ... the people will never respect those in charge. ...

This was a decision by a court, not a question of whether the people support their governments. This state high court decision tells you practically nothing about how the people of Wisconsin feel about the measures that the Court struck down.

[0] E.g., the Truman era steel cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co._... https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/constitutional-law/const...

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#137
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There weren't any "Civil Rights" rulings (note capital letters) prior to the mid-1960s, as the legislation and legal system supporting it didn't exist prior to that.[0] Modern "Civil Rights" is a parallel legal system in the US that overrides the former Anglo-derived legal system (though both are still on the books) whenever they conflict. That's why you get people on the Right muttering about "muh Constitution" wond…

Not a downvoter, but you may have missed nearly a century of US history. The first Civil Rights Act (note the capital letters) was enacted in 1866 and there is loads of caselaw prior to the 20th century dealing with Civil Rights. Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, is one of the many landmark fuckups where the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation, for example. It is cases like this that the prior comment is addre…

> The first Civil Rights Act (note the capital letters)

Title Case :P. I stand by the idea that modern "Civil Rights" began in earnest after WW2 and was primarily encoded in legislation in the mid-1960s (though some decisions were earlier—Brown v. Board of Education for example), and that modern Civil Rights (as a broad concept) supersedes the Anglo-derived legal system the US was founded on and replaces it with a different (and at times conflicting) set of principles.

Do you actually disagree with any of that? I'm genuinely curious to find someone who thinks that the law didn't fundamentally change in favor of modern Civil Rights after WW2, vs. what came before…

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to EuroMOMO, Sweden's excess mortality rate this year is "high", France's is "low" and Ireland's is "no excess". https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Sweden is doing better than NYC without the catastrophic economic consequences NYC is experiencing https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/sweden...

Sweden benefits from being very moderate in density compared to NYC. Stockholm is comparable in size and density to Washington, DC. The death rate in Stockholm is about 5 times higher than DC.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One member of the court had just left the court, could have easily been 4-4 or another combination The incumbent (Kelly) was voted out of office about a month ago, and the winning challenger (Karofsky) won't fill the seat until August 1, 2020. Kelly sided with the majority opinion in this decision.

I don't understand that when the incumbent has been voted out, why does he/she still have powers to make decisions? Shouldn't they be some sort of stand-in and only take care of routine / bureaucratic tasks? It's a system that is ripe for making these already out people do stuff that is ideological and hardline, while the voters obviously don't want it.

After Walker lost, the GOP assembly, senate, and lame duck Governor passed a bunch of bills to nerf the Governor’s power.

Kelly voting with the majority is quite tame.

Re: Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

#140
post #95

“If a forest fire breaks out, there is no time for debate. Action is needed. The governor could declare an emergency and respond accordingly. But in the case of a pandemic, which lasts month after month, the governor cannot rely on emergency powers indefinitely,” Roggensack wrote for the majority. Refreshing to see some pressure for democracy to resume.

Democracy to resume?? By striking down a democratically elected officials order?
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