Back on April 13, President Trump made an amazing declaration, even for him, and he’s made some doozies. You may remember that this was the instruction at which he showed an odd campaign-style video including compliments from Democratic officials, which had clearly been motivated by a very comparable compilation revealed the night before on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, already a de facto Trump event hour.
It was likewise the appearance in which he consistently made the claim that he had “overall authority” to reopen the federal government and blathered on about how he ‘d saved numerous thousands of lives when he allegedly “closed” the nation in the very first place.
Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked him a concern I think all of us were wondering at that point:
You said, “When somebody is president of the United States, their authority is total.” That is not true. Who– who informed you that?
Trump didn’t address.
When Collins asked him that concern I was pretty sure I knew who informed him that.
Barr made an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s program recently– I wrote about it here — and made some comments at the time which offer us a hint about how he sees the president’s authority in this circumstance. Ingraham went on a tear about requiring churches to close throughout the pandemic and Barr properly mentioned that unless the state was singling out religious organizations for closure while enabling other large events, the First Change had actually not been broken.
What came next because discussion exposes Barr’s genuine program, nevertheless, and possibly that of all the other schemers in the administration. At the time of the interview, the very first rumblings from the astroturf groups in various swing states with Democratic governors were starting to be heard. Barr was on it already:
I believe we have to be really mindful to make certain this is– you know, that the severe steps that are being embraced are completely justified, and there are not alternative ways of safeguarding individuals. And I think, you understand, when this– when this time period is– at the end of April expires, I believe we have to permit people to adapt more than we have and not simply tell individuals to go home and hide under the bed, but allow them to use other ways– social distancing and other ways– to protect themselves.
Since then we have actually had heavily-covered little protests like this around the nation demanding that guvs rescind their stay-at-home orders:
https://twitter.com/
At least they were wearing masks.
On Tuesday, Barr appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s program and explained that if anybody believed the top law enforcement officer in the country might discover armed protests against public health procedures to be a danger to public order, they required to reconsider. He reiterated his belief that the states have actually imposed unnecessary and oppressive measures and implicitly backed the demonstrations, calling stay-at-home orders “disturbingly close to house arrest.”
The legal issues he thinks are prominent are civil liberties and something unclear to do with interstate commerce. If I needed to think, I ‘d recommend that Barr means to argue that states that are not open for service are in some way striking other states’ rights to carry out organisation across state lines. Either that, or he expects that there truly will be checkpoints on the highways as contaminated individuals from Trump states choose to come down upon others. In any case, he announced that the federal government will sign up with private claims to force states to open, whatever the task force guidelines endorsed by Vice President Pence might state.
According to the Detroit News, Barr has the support of the male who was widely considered the worst chief law officer of recent history, Reagan administration stalwart Ed Meese. Obviously, Meese and some other right-wing extremists wrote to Barr earlier today, implicating the states of “rampant abuses of civil liberties and civil liberties” and exhorting him “to carry out an instant review of all the orders that have actually been provided by the states and city governments across the country.”
Is it possible that these people are unaware that these steps are being taken all over the world to include a deadly virus?
It’s hard to know how extensively Barr plans to use Department of Justice levers to require Americans to risk their lives for Donald Trump. But he is certainly determining methods to assist make that happen.
For a male without a medical degree or any other appropriate knowledge, he seems confident that he understands more than the public health professionals about how to handle a lethal pandemic:
You can’t just keep on feeding the patient chemotherapy and say well, we’re eliminating the cancer, due to the fact that we were getting to the point where we’re eliminating the client. And now is the time that we have to begin looking ahead and getting used to more targeted treatments.
If there is a worse analogy for what we’re going through, I haven’t heard it.
There is no “targeted therapy,” metaphorical or otherwise.
