Wisconsin High Court Strikes Down Stay at Home | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: This post appears here courtesy of the LifeZette, and written by Polizette Staff.

    A local Fox affiliate reports that the Wisconsin State Supreme Court on Friday struck down liberal Democrat Governor Tony Evers' attempt to keep his state closed for business.

    Fox: "The 4-3 ruling essentially reopens the state, lifting caps on the size of gatherings, allowing people to travel as they please and allowing shuttered businesses to reopen, including bars and restaurants. Local governments can still impose their own health restrictions, however. Dane County officials issued a local order minutes after the ruling came down imposing a mandate identical to now-invalidated state stay-at-home order."

    Fox continues: "Evers issued a stay-at-home order in March that closed schools and nonessential businesses. The closures battered the state economy, but Evers argued they were necessary to slow the virus' spread. The order was supposed to lift April 24, but Health and Human Services Secretary Andrea Palm, an Evers appointee, extended it to May 26."

    Fox concludes: "Evers' administration faced an uphill battle in convincing the court to keep the order in place. Conservative-leaning justices hold a 5-2 majority. Four conservative justices joined on the majority opinion. The fifth, Brian Hagedorn, joined with liberal justices Ann Walsh Bradley and Rebecca Dallet in dissent."

    Wisconsin Justice Pat Roggensack wrote for the majority that the order amounts to an emergency rule. They decided that Wisconsin HHS Secretary Palm has no authority to create a criminal penalty for violating a stay at home order, "Rule-making exists precisely to ensure that kind of controlling, subjective judgement asserted by one unelected official, Palm, is not imposed in Wisconsin," Roggensack wrote.

    Justice Justice Rebecca Bradley had written earlier, "Isn't it the very definition of tyranny for one person to order people to be imprisoned for going to work, among other ordinarily lawful activities? The people never consented to a single individual having that kind of power."

    Bradley added, "I'll direct your attention to another time in history, in the Korematsu decision, where the court said the need for action is great and time is short, and that justified 'assembling together and placing under guard all those of Japanese ancestry' in assembly centers during World War II." The 1944 Korematsu decision approved the F.D. Roosevelt administration's use of Japanese internment camps.

    Cheryl Chumley of The Washington Times also had comment, "The Wisconsin Supreme Court just struck down the state's stay-at-home orders, saying in a scathing 4-3 ruling that the heath secretary has no right to use the coronavirus as justification to confine free citizens to their residences — that the order was 'unlawful, invalid and unenforceable.' Finally. A moment of sanity among the barrage of insane unconstitutional acts that have swept this nation. Executive orders are not laws."

    The national implications for this decision are obvious. Liberal Democrat states and their governors have done all they can to extend stay at home orders because they like the power of restricting the movement of residents and the operation of businesses. But now this state high court ruling, which could go higher up the legal ziggurat, tells them in no uncertain terms that they have overstepped their power in these edicts. Americans want to go back to work. Liberal politicians should get out of the way.