Help, Officer… I’m Being Murdered by an Unmasked Gunman

American Thinker;

By Clarice Feldman

We have rather taken for granted the constitutional guarantees of certainty, rule of law, and due process in recent years. We ignored the water drip torture of prosecutorial misconduct (the Trayvon Martin, Lewis Libby, Ted Stevens cases) and government overreaching (ObamaCare, the Kelo case),  but  in the past few weeks more of us — from surfers and skateboarders to doctors, dentists, hospitals, and small shopkeepers — have been forced to realize what life without these protections is like. And we don’t like it, any more than we like how the government lied, ignored the law quite clearly for purely partisan political purposes, and set up General Mike Flynn for an expensive criminal proceeding. Reminding us that we have important rights that we should demand be respected is a good thing.

Of course, these restrictions set by the governors, and sometimes mayors or county chairmen, do violate our constitutional rights to free speech, assembly, due process, religion, and against takings. In the past, courts have permitted some limits in exigent circumstances, but for limited periods of time and when the government could prove after a hearing which afforded due process (testing the evidence) that no other, less restrictive means were available to deal with an emergency. Things like hurricanes (short term) or smallpox (for which there was already in place a viable vaccine). That is not the case with COVID-19. There is no vaccine and likely won’t be one any time soon enough to avoid further crashing the economy. There is no agreed-upon end point: Will the restrictions vanish only when there is no longer a single case, when everyone has been tested, when the Democrats retake the White House?  Moreover, as I will show, the restrictions have often gone far beyond what is justifiable under the Bill of Rights. 

We now have demonstrated means to limit mortality from the virus. This means that the fear of millions of deaths seems no longer likely. When this began, we were uncertain if the disease was treatable or how.  Now we do know. Mortality figures are far lower than predicted and will further diminish as known treatments are more widely employed. more here