Bravo!
On Sept. 14, in Butler v. Wolf, a federal district court in Western Pennsylvania held that certain Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) mitigation measures ordered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania were unconstitutional. Conceding the efforts were a “well-intentioned effort to protect Pennsylvanians from the virus,” Judge William S. Stickman, IV nevertheless held that the portion of orders issued by Gov. Tom Wolf and Secretary of Health Rachel Levine violated the First Amendment as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court found:
- Limits on gatherings of certain sizes – up to 25 people indoors and 250 outdoors – violated the First Amendment;
- Orders closing “non-life-sustaining” businesses – violated both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses as applied; and
- A stay-at-home order as implemented violated the Due Process Clause.
The Commonwealth has announced it will appeal the decision. If it stands, the ruling will require the Commonwealth to adopt more narrowly tailored, specific standards and then, once adopted, to apply those standards uniformly within similarly situated geographic areas.
Go here to read this brilliant decision of Judge Michael Stickman. My favorite part:
Need I mention that the Judge is a Trump appointee?
Of course he’s a Trump appointee. As a result, the rule of law is slowly returning to our judicial system. Thank God for President Trump!
Yes, thank God for President Trump and Judge William S. Stickman, IV.
The entire reaction to Covid “solution” was overdone and its extension and application was cynical, capricious and obviously political. Common sense has prevailed at last.
Hopefully, this madness will end soon and the culprits punished by the voters.
Now if we could just get the the Michigan Supreme Court to issue a ruling overturning Whitmer
Hopefully, this madness will end soon and the culprits punished by the voters.
Pretty sure the plan is for the beatings to continue until morale improves.
You will be made to care, and all that.
The Stickman decision is a much needed corrective. Between the pandemic lock downs and the largely unfettered looting and rioting the common citizen has been treated like a serf. Way too much overreach.
I think our governments were bound to make mistakes, and we were caught flat-footed at the beginning due to deficient supplies of protective equipment. The thing is, when they had the data, they were slow to make course corrections. We knew shortly that the people under threat from this were people over 60 and people over 50 carrying excess weight. Once we learned that, the stay-at-home orders and the cash relief should have been precisely targeted and the rest of the population might have resumed normal life while minding some p’s and q’s.
DJH +1
As PA residents, rural and senior (me, 90.6, but no comorbidities, good lady, 85.4, and two comorbidities) we have not been disturbed by the lockdowns, other than the bad one of not being able to go to Mass (or, as late we could, but have decided it might be risky).
Nevertheless, small business owners, school kids, college kids and families have been really hurt. And the people running the show–the governor and his secretary of health affairs–don’t seem to know what is effective and what is not.
We knew shortly that the people under threat from this were people over 60 and people over 50 carrying excess weight.
Actually, we knew that people with serious existing conditions are at higher risk.
Both of those qualifications just catch a higher than average number of “people with serious existing conditions,” and once you get into the 90s, it’s basically everybody. Even then, the death rate didn’t justify the lockdown, going off of information we had in February.
Part of the pain of this whole mess is that when the information we had suggested lockdowns– we were being called racists for avoiding situations with a risk of infections originating in Asia.
AFTER we got the cruise ship data, AFTER it became known that Italy got overwhelmed every year, AFTER it became clear China had lied.
Shortly after our “two weeks”– the one that’s still ongoing, some hundred days later– started, an Italian official even explained that their “covid deaths” were less than a fifth of what was reported.
The data has been going in the opposite direction of how folks respond to it since bleepin’ near January.
Hey, whatever it takes to get rid of Trump.
Cindy McCain says it’s the patriotic thing to do!