Hopefully, many of the things that lie heavy upon the nation right now will be in our collective rearview mirror in the near future.  These things include constant mention of pandemic and crisis — hourly radio reports and TV news reports of coronavirus infections and deaths, face masks, the pronouncements of "experts" like the little gnome man and the scarf lady, and ubiquitous signs and messages that implore us to stay home and stay safe (OBEY!). 

All of this is aimed at creating and reinforcing a state of fear and panic because scared people are easier to manipulate.

What will not, and must not, fade from our memory and consciousness is the stench of the actions of state governors and state officials who acted with little regard for the constitutional rights of their citizens.  They imposed state-of-emergency edicts that were arbitrary, illogical, capricious, and inconsistent and had little, if any, effect in controlling the virus "crisis."  It is hard to fathom why small businesses have had to close while Costco, Target, Home Depot, Lowe's, and other giant stores were allowed to stay open.  Small businesses, whose owners have invested their lives and fortunes, were ordered closed in a fiat that jeopardized their very existence.  These businesses were declared "non-essential," but they are quite essential to their owners and very often their customers!  The effect of this business shut-down by state officials has been incredibly costly and as effective as medieval blood-draining.  The social costs haven't even begun to be known.

All of the state governors and state officials who have imposed tyrannical shutdown orders have taken oaths of office to support the U.S. Constitution.  What they have done to their citizens may have been a bid to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, but they got the curve-flattening they wanted, and the hospitals have not been overwhelmed — they are actually experiencing layoffs, based on "non-essential" surgeries being placed on hold and genuinely necessary procedures, such as chemotherapy, being placed on hold, too.  What's obvious now is that these draconian measures — extended again and again, like moving goal posts — have has not been in support of the Constitution. because it's growing increasingly obvious that other political objectives are in play.  Some of these include damaging the economy to harm President Trump, upsetting election schedules, preventing Trump rallies, getting mail-in voting, manipulating federal funding by manipulating COVID-19 numbers, getting rid of costly old people to beef up state finances, obtaining bailouts for unrelated fiscal mismanagement, and making people afraid and uneasy.  The longer they can drag things out, the better, they calculate.  

People who have such disdain for the U.S. Constitution must not be elected to public office!

It is obvious that political leftists have discovered a new tool in the state-of-emergency gambit.  What's next, climate emergencies?  Annual flu epidemic emergencies?  Vaccine tyranny?  This COVID-19 "crisis" has paved the way for future infringement of citizens' constitutional rights.  Isn't it interesting that the most egregious examples of state totalitarian attacks on citizens' civil and constitutional rights have been in states controlled by Democrats?  Constitutional rights are absolute, and they are not limited by predictions of what could happen in the future made by a handful of people who have computer models that are always coming up wrong.  Any rights restrictions must be made on the basis of clear, present, and obvious threats.  The role of government should be to inform the public of the situation, the issues, and the risks and make recommendations for individual actions.  The rest, the actual decisions, should be left up to each individual consistent with his constitutional rights.  Of course, the obvious limitations apply for real emergencies like tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, etc. 

It is interesting (appalling, actually) to do a ballpark estimate of the unnecessary cost impact to our nation associated with the COVID-19 death toll.  Add $3 trillion (helicopter money-for-everyone stimulus) to $3 trillion (GDP reduction for the economic shutdown — a guess) and divide by 100,000 (approximate number of deaths as of 5-25-2020).  The result is $60 million per death!  This is just a crude estimate — the real cost per death is much higher because the total cost doesn't include questionable federal loans, more helicopter money to come, social costs for the economic shutdown, etc.  This is the first massive economic shutdown in our nation's history despite all the epidemics that we have endured.  The cost of hysteria is high.  We are adding COVID-19 federal expenditures to our huge national debt; right now it is approximately $25 trillion.  The interest cost for this debt is over $600 billion per year.  We have to borrow more every year to pay this.  We certainly don't need the added and unnecessary cost of COVID-19 hysteria.

After weeks and months of this panic-demic and the atrocious, totalitarian actions by some state governments, it is apparent that there aren't enough safeguards in our legal system or that things just aren't working well enough to protect people from run-amok public officials.  To protect people's God-given constitutional rights, it seems that something is needed. Perhaps that something is a federal law that requires any state declaring a state-of-emergency that infringes, restricts, minimizes or impairs any constitutional right especially those defined by the first, second, fourth, and 14th amendments, to file a statement, signed by the governor, with the federal government no later than three days after the declaration. This statement must define the reasoning, rationale, logic, time limits and objectives for limiting citizens rights. Having all this documented in a federal filing statement would provide state citizens with the basis for filing suit in federal court if what's been filed by the state doesn't make any sense or is insufficient justification for depriving people of their constitutional rights. Honest federal judges could then order injunctions to stop the runaway state officials. Abridging citizen's rights must face a very high bar and the federal government has a strong stake in this. A big part of the problem has been the unwillingness of many state officials to provide meaningful or any justification for why they are ordering stupid actions like closing churches, hair salons, barber shops and other small businesses and why the shutdown is going on for so long. A federal law like this could help serve as a circuit breaker to disconnect run-amok state government officials. The insanity that we have been seeing just can't go on and on. There must be some mechanism to better protect people's rights now and in the future. Something...is...needed!  

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of TopPng public domain image.