National Review Institute Senior Fellow Andrew McCarthy and Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg discussed on Tuesday how Wisconsin and the country are reopening in the wake of COVID-19. It was a Zoom event with questions from the audience.
Esenberg started the discussion with the results of the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision ending Governor Tony Evers’ Safer at Home order extension by the state’s Department of Health Services.
“Wisconsin became the first state to move out of lockdown by litigation, by court order,” Esenberg said. “But the decision in Wisconsin Legislature vs. Palm was not the individual constitutional liberty claim that we would normally associate with litigation challenging stay-at-home orders. It was a decision that was concerned, not with individual freedom, but with structural limitations on the power of government.”
Esenberg added the structural limitations are the “liberty enhancers” that our Founding Fathers envisioned.
“The Legislature did not argue that the extension of the stay-at-home order was unconstitutional,” Esenberg said. “What they said was that to interpret the law in this broad manner in a way that gave that much authority to a single executive officer would raise constitutional questions.”
You can watch the entire exchange between Esenberg and McCarthy, including a discussion of the federal issues of a Coronavirus lockdown, mandatory vaccinations, and even the powers of local governments, at the video link above.
