U.S. Federal Judge Shoots Down Stay-At-Home Orders

Federal Judge: Pennsylvania's Stay-at-Home Order Is an Assault on Human Rights

Ryan McMaken

A federal judge on Monday ruled that Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf’s covid-19 stay-at-home orders and forced business closures were unconstitutional.

US district judge William Stickman IV of the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled that Wolf’s orders violated the Constitution in three ways. They violated the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly, and they violated both the due process and equal protections clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

I have no confidence that the US Supreme Court will side with Stickman if this case makes it to the Supreme Court. After all, Justice Roberts has already signaled that he is quite comfortable with states violating basic human rights so long as it is done for the sake of “public safety.”

But whatever is the ultimate fate of this ruling, there’s no denying that Stickman’s ruling offers a quite compelling and thorough takedown of the ruinous, cynical, and morally repugnant set of “laws” that are the state’s covid-19 restrictions.

Stickman starts off introducing his ruling with some basic and solid conclusions about rights in general. He writes:

In an emergency, even a vigilant public may let down its guard over its constitutional liberties only to find that liberties, once relinquished, are hard to recoup and that restrictions—while expedient in the face of an emergency situation—may persist long after immediate danger has passed.

It’s hard to dispute this, based not just on the current situation, but on countless other “crises” that have come and gone while the regime’s powers and prerogatives have proliferated.

Stickman then summarizes how the Pennsylvania decrees and orders came about. The “process” employed by Governor Wolf and his buddies is surprisingly corrupt and contemptuous of the public, even to an old cynic like me.

As Stickman notes, the “committee” which Wolf slapped together to write all his new executive orders was essentially secret. The members were not made public, the meetings were secret and closed to the public, and no minutes were kept. Stickman also points out that no members of the group “possess a medical background or are experts in infection control.”

Stickman also has a problem with the permanence of the decrees and orders. The governor and his ruling junta insist that their decrees are permanent, and even as stay-at-home orders are scaled back, these restrictions are only “suspended.” The default position is total lockdown. That is, in the minds of the Wolf cadre, we are to assume that stay-at-home orders are the rule and that anything less than a full shutdown is an exception. Moreover, Stickman points out that the regime doesn’t even have a plan for fully abandoning its emergency powers. Ever. The lowest “setting” on lockdown orders is nonetheless still a partial lockdown. The regime can’t even envision—and has provided no legal pathway whatsoever—to returning to a “normal” situation. Understandably, Stickman views this as a big red flag.

So, what we have in Pennsylvania is basically a small secret ruling committee which fancies itself the new permanent ruling authority of Pennsylvania indefinitely. There is no end date, no public rule-making process, and no transparency at all.

Clearly, nothing like this has been seen in any state government in the United States since the seventeenth century. The notion that this could be considered constitutional by any historical or established legal standard ought to strike one as absurd.

Moreover, the restrictions imposed by Wolf’s junta are unprecedented in their extreme nature. Stickman writes:

The stay-at-home components of Defendant’s orders were and are unconstitutional. Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional unless the government can truly demonstrate that they burden no more liberty than is reasonably necessary to achieve an important government end. The draconian nature of lockdown may render this a high bar, indeed.

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