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The Constitution, Bill of Rights, and various state declarations of rights don’t change. They are fixed forever under all circumstances and are of nobody’s private interpretation.

Over the weekend, we have seen a San Diego woman subject to criminal misdemeanor charges for organizing a rally protesting the California lockdown. We’ve witnessed residents of San Mateo County, California, issued citations for traveling more than five miles away from their homes. We all watched horrified as police (in brown shirts!) arrested a peaceful man for walking on a closed beach, defying the basic science of how viruses spread as well as the Constitution.

It’s as if the faultier the science behind the lockdown, the more our governments continue doubling down on unconstitutional enforcement.

Through all the important questions about science, we are failing to ask the most salient public policy question: What authority does a governor or county official have to suspend all personal liberty and property rights of even healthy individuals and business owners indefinitely without due process? The answer is, of course, that absolutely no such authority exists.

There is no greater right than the ability to move freely without restriction. We’ve never experienced a time in our 400 years on this continent, even under King George, when the movement of the entire people of a state was restricted this severely for this long, especially without due process. While the people who form a society give up certain powers in order to empower a government to protect public safety, this core freedom has never been ceded.

John Locke explained the origin of this liberty as follows: “To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”

That’s it. A government has no power to indefinitely restrict movement and our ability to earn a living beyond certain narrowly tailored regulations. These core liberties have never been ceded even during times of war or danger. In expressing one of the core tenets of natural law, my home state constitution of Maryland states: “That the provisions of the Constitution of the United States, and of this State, apply, as well in time of war, as in time of peace; and any departure therefrom, or violation thereof, under the plea of necessity, or any other plea, is subversive of good Government, and tends to anarchy and despotism.” (Art. 44, Maryland Declaration of Rights.)

Governor Larry “Lockdown” Hogan, who, as chairman of the National Governors Association, is one of the national leaders promoting martial law, would be well advised to read the 47 articles of this document, which contains the self-evident truths of natural law and just government understood by all of the governments of the original 13 colonies in 1776. There is no exception to life, liberty, and property rights. They must be preserved and cannot be infringed upon without due process. Some have made comparisons to wartime, where there is an imperative to govern with a heavier hand, but those rights never go away even during wars.

One of those provisions in the Maryland Constitution (Art. 32) is that “no person except regular soldiers, marines, and mariners in the service of this State, or militia, when in actual service, ought, in any case, to be subject to, or punishable by Martial Law.” There is no public health crisis exception to the rule of martial law, as clearly expressed in Article 44 of the Declaration of Rights.

Justice Robert Jackson observed the same thing about the federal Constitution and that the Founders deliberately omitted emergency exceptions to fundamental rights because they “knew the pressures they engender for authoritative action, knew, too, how they afford a ready pretext for usurpation.”

Yes, the courts have ruled in the past that a state has quarantine powers, but they cannot be used in an “arbitrary, unreasonable manner, or might go so far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public” (Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905)).

Moreover, fundamentally, what the governments are doing now is not quarantine, which is defined as isolating the sick from the general population. In this case, for the first time in history, they are confining the general population. As a New York court ruled in The People vs. Peter W. Roff, a quarantine law can’t sentence “all persons, well or sick, whether exposed to infection or not, to an unlimited imprisonment.”

read more here: https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-authority-governor-suspend-civil-rights-indefinitely/?fbclid=IwAR0h70oYwaAq-iq3WlGfYgdAvV1BGc-P5Q-CId_XmYwqCQEgSzyASQ1nZUU