America’s governors and the vagueness doctrine

If we have learned anything over the last few months it is that emergencies, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.

The ruling elites have been as shifty and duplicitous about what justifies enacting emergency powers as the FBI has been about what warrants investigating angry parents at school board meetings (and before them, Trump campaign operatives for their Russian ‘collusion’.)

One feature of all these police-state excursions into unbridled power never changes — vagueness. It is so much easier to move the goal posts when there are no lines drawn on the field.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as the all-encompassing key to unlocking ’emergency powers’ for politicians and unelected government bureaucrats.

What event, if any, would now need to occur for our betters to relinquish their unprecedented control? Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to abdicate their powers. After all, the petty tyrants are having far too much fun. And it’s for our own good! ‘Of all tyrannies,’ C.S. Lewis once wrote, ‘a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive… Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’

Take California governor Gavin Newsom, whose recent political near-death experience in the recall election has unfortunately given him a renewed joie de vivre.

If almost becoming an ex-governor taught Newsom anything, it is that when it comes to destroying California, he can’t take a minute for granted.

Last week he announced that school children in grades K-12 would be required to get vaccinated against the virus. This came on the heels of Pfizer’s request that the FDA authorize its COVID-19 vaccine for — you guessed it — emergency use among kids ages five to 11.

Newsom’s mandate will roll out in two phases. CNBC wrote, ‘The mandate will first take effect for students ages 12 and over after the FDA grants full approval to that entire age group.’

Always determined to keep the panic alive, Newsom somberly told a crowd at a local middle school, ‘We’re all left wondering as we move through the summer surge. What lies ahead of us in the winter and the spring…There’s still a struggle to get to where we need to go.’

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. In 2021, the only thing the ruling class has to offer is fear itself.

The governor knows he does not need to present persuasive arguments or CDC-approved science to convince his constituents that he’s making the right decisions on their behalf. All he needs is hair gel, a microphone and a healthy dose of panic porn, eagerly promoted by his ever credulous, fear-mongering allies in the mainstream media and Big Tech.

Newsom’s vague, trite hectoring begs several questions. He mentions getting ‘to where we need to go’, but where is that exactly? And when will this ‘struggle’ he speaks of, end? Lastly, if this ‘struggle’ to get ‘where we need to go’ is so dire — why are teachers in the Golden State exempt from this mandate?

All evidence suggests that if any group should be exempt from taking the vaccine it would be children. They tend get milder symptoms from COVID-19 and also have a much lower chance of dying from the virus.

But this is where the media always rides to the rescue. Last week, the New York Times breathlessly reported that 900,000 American children had been hospitalized with COVID-19. The next day, the Times had to run a small correction. The actual number wasn’t 900,000, it was 63,000. And those are the CDC’s numbers, so…caveat emptor even on those figures.

While the kids have the science and numbers on their side, unlike California teachers, they don’t have the unions and the New York Times.

Newsom and other governors treat this virus like a five-alarm fire when they are dealing with groups they think they can bully and control. But the gravity of the emergency wanes significantly when the same politicians find themselves dealing with unions’ collective bargaining agreements, celebrity award shows or dinners with fat-cat Silicon Valley donors and hospital lobbyists at the French Laundry.

As tempting as it is to solely pick on Newsom, this addiction to unbridled authority has spread to other governors across our country.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul was more than happy to fire healthcare workers who refused the vaccine and replace them with members of the National Guard.

Gov. Charlie Baker in Massachusetts is battling his own state troopers and prison guards who refuse to bow to his jab mandate. Oddly, just five months ago, in May, the governor was singing a very different tune.

‘The idea that I would kick somebody out of a job — especially in a kind of economy we have now — because quote, unquote “they wouldn’t get vaccinated right away” on an [Emergency Use Authorization]-approved vaccine? No, I’m not going to play that game.’

Alas, he has done just that. What changed Charlie?

Perhaps Baker noticed all of his fellow governors power-tripping on mandates and diktats long after the initial lockdowns ended and it was just too difficult to go cold turkey. Lord Acton would certainly have understood.

These emergency powers, like masks, booster shots and Dr Fauci, are not going away anytime soon. The governors have been introduced to a new level of power and they obviously find the authority intoxicating. Can we really expect these egomaniacs to go back to the way things used to be? As the famous song asked at the end of World War One, ‘How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?’

I’m sure being a governor seems like small potatoes when you’ve grown accustomed to playing God.