Lady in Blue has a few legal questions:
I’ll answer them. For me, though, the real questions are why Trump is trying to cause so much trouble and what he hopes to accomplish.
First: Can Trump override the governors?
A: No.
If the citizens of a state think that their governor is infringing their first amendment rights, that’s between the citizens and their governors, and possibly the courts (Courts decide constitutional questions.)
Trump has nothing to do with it because of the 10th Amendment.
The irony here is that the entire libertarian movement and states’ rights thing is based on the tenth amendment. (They take an extreme view in how the tenth amendment should be applied. See this post.) Some even call themselves “tenth amendment purists.”
One interesting aspect of the Trump administration is how it brings out the hypocrisy of far right wing positions. They never actually cared about the tenth amendment or states’ rights. They wanted a justification for slavery, Jim Crow, and the ability to cheat and steal.
This brings us to the constitutional freedom of religion (or freedom of assembly) which, in a pandemic, comes into conflict with the constitutional right of the government to make laws for the public welfare.
We often have competing rights, which must be weighed and balanced. No rights are absolute. You have the right to free speech, but you don’t have the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater, defame your neighbors, or go up to a bank teller and say, “Give me all your money.”
One problem with going to church in a pandemic is that people get sick, go to the hospital, and infect the health care workers.
Health care workers have a constitutional right to their own lives. And they are dying right now because they are caring for infected people.
You have a right to swing your fist, but not if it hits my nose (I think that analogy works, right?)
That’s why the “promote the general welfare” clause of the constitution’s preamble allows governments to pass laws that, well, promote the general welfare. Preventing mass deaths would definitely qualify as promoting the general welfare.
Question: What happens if there is a conflict between competing constitutional rights that the people and governors can’t work out themselves?
Answer: Courts resolve constitutional disputes.
Of course there’s no time for this to work its way through the courts. So as a practical matter, the issue is between the citizens of states and their governors.
For me, the question really is: Why is Trump trying so hard to cause trouble? It makes no logical sense because the people most likely to die are his own supporters. (I did a three-part series on why the GOP base will risk death if Trump tells them to, beginning here.)
Heather Cox Richardson (professor at Boston College) wisely suggests that Trump is talking about forcing governors to open churches because he needs to turn out his evangelical base.
If he loses his evangelical base, he really has nothing, because the election will be won based on turn out.
Yeah, I know. They can’t vote if they’re dead.
Causing death among his own supporters is obviously not a winning strategy, but — given the fact that he cares only about trying to hold power—it’s the better of his two options.
His two options are:
🔹Try to be a “normal” (i.e. democratic/ fairness) president or
🔹Continue with the leadership cult crazy stuff which will kill lots of his followers (and others).
If he tries to be “normal,” (meaning care about whether people die) he has absolutely no chance to win, and he knows it. If he tries to be “normal,” he’ll lose most of his base because the leadership cult crazies will lose interest in him, and he’ll never be able to do “normal” as well as Biden, who actually is normal.
He already lost the voters who want a normal (democratic / rule of law) president and he’ll never get them back.
So he has no choice but to play to the crazies, even though that means they will die in large numbers.
Cultivating crazy and pushing death cult stuff has a second advantage for him: Every time he says something crazy (like he will override the governors and allow churches to open) he sends us all down what-if rabbit holes, asking questions like “Can the President DO that?”
His method of governing is to set people against each other. It’s a method of government used by fascists and would-be fascists as described by Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley.
The governing philosophy boils down to: Get the fighters fighting and keep them fighting. Would-be oligarchs create spectacle instead of creating policies that help people.
If we’re busy asking, “Can Trump do that?” and fighting we may not notice that he and his pals are robbing us blind, and maneuvering to take as much wealth with them in Jan 2021 as they can. Mostly he hopes we won’t notice what the Trump-GOP Corruption Machine is doing. For would-be oligarchs, it’s about protecting their corruption machine.
He hopes, for example, that we won’t have time or energy to think about stuff like this:
He also wants to “take” his base with him. Remember when he thought he’d lose in 2016, his goal was to paint himself as the victim of Hillary’s corruption, and open a media network to compete against Fox?
That’s the game again. When he insists that vote by mail means rampant voter fraud, what he’s doing is conditioning his “base” to believe that—when he’s ousted in January 2021— its was because of voter fraud.
He’ll have 1/3 of the country believing he was a victim
Exactly. We’re conditioned hyperfocus and overestimate what Trump can do. He wants to be overestimated. It raises his esteem in the eyes of his followers, who want a “strongman.” It causes others to panic and say ‘it’s all over,’ which enables totalitarianism.
Things will get crazier before January. Remember: Take care of yourselves. Stay safe. Focus on getting absentee ballots into as many hands as possible. Do what you can to help vulnerable members of the community through this.
Take breaks from the news cycle.
