据说一些州长在考虑封州了

http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/Military/56463431.html

发信人: toddler (toad), 信区: Military
标  题: 据说一些州长在考虑封州了
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Sat Mar 28 19:47:54 2020, 美东)

Governors are starting to close their borders. The implications are
staggering.
The coronavirus pandemic is testing the very notion that the United States
are united.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed an executive order on Thursday that would
require travelers from some coronavirus hotspots to self-quarantine: It
provides that "every person" who flies into Texas from "New York, New
Jersey, Connecticut, or the City of New Orleans, or in any other state or
city as may be proclaimed hereafter, shall be subject to mandatory self-
quarantine for a period of 14 days from the time of entry into Texas or the
duration of the person's presence in Texas, whichever is shorter."
Other states have imposed similar orders. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R)
imposed an order on Tuesday that requires anyone flying from New York, New
Jersey, or Connecticut to self-isolate for 14 days. Alaska and Hawaii also
imposed self-quarantine orders on people traveling from other states.
These orders implicate one of the fundamental premises of the union among
the 50 states: the right of American citizens to travel among them freely.
As the Supreme Court recognized more than 170 years ago, "we are one people
with one common country. We are all citizens of the United States, and as
members of the same community must have the right to pass and repass through
every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own states."
The right of all US citizens to travel freely among the states, the Court
later explained in United States v. Guest (1966), "was conceived from the
beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger union the
Constitution created."
If states can decide that some US citizens are not welcome within their
borders, it may cease to be a union at all. This right to travel is implicit
in the notion that citizens are Americans, and not simply Texans or New
Yorkers.
But should that principle hold during a pandemic? Does the Constitution
forbid states from taking drastic actions to slow the spread of a
potentially deadly disease within their own borders?
Gov. Abbott's order, at the very least, is probably carefully drafted
enough to survive constitutional scrutiny. That order applies to "every
person" who flies into Texas from the designated areas, regardless of
whether that person is a resident of Texas or some other state. Read in that
light, it does not discriminate against non-Texans.
But orders like Gov. Abbott's do raise troubling constitutional questions.
And they cut against the concept of a union of states that has prevailed in
this country, especially since the New Deal.
The modern notion that every US citizen has the same rights, no matter where
they travel within the nation, is rooted in a notion of nationwide
solidarity that depends on a strong and competent federal government. And
the Trump administration is not holding up its end of that bargain.
The three faces of the constitutional right to travel
As the Supreme Court explained in Saenz v. Roe (1999), the right of citizens
to travel freely among the states has three separate components.
The Constitution "protects the right of a citizen of one State to enter and
to leave another State, the right to be treated as a welcome visitor rather
than an unfriendly alien when temporarily present in the second State, and,
for those travelers who elect to become permanent residents, the right to
be treated like other citizens of that State."
Abbott's order largely implicates the second condition: "the right to be
treated as a welcome visitor." He does not actually attempt to bar
residents of other states from entering Texas entirely.
That right, the Court explained in Saenz, flows from Article IV of the
Constitution, which provides that "the Citizens of each State shall be
entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.
" Yet Saenz also concluded that these "privileges and immunities" are not
absolute. Rather, Article IV bars "discrimination against citizens of
other States where there is no substantial reason for the discrimination
beyond the mere fact that they are citizens of other States."
Thus, there are two potential reasons why Abbott's order may be legitimate.
The first is that it applies to Texans and non-Texans alike ― a Houston
resident who returns home from a trip to Newark will spend two weeks in
isolation, just like a New York resident who travels to Dallas to visit a
family member. The second is that Abbott has a "substantial reason" for
imposing this order. He believes that it will reduce the number of people
who enter Texas carrying a terrible disease.
To be clear, that does not mean Abbott's decision to single out four parts
of the country is ideal policy. It may be the case, for example, that New
York is simply testing more infected people to determine if they have
coronavirus ― and the virus may be quietly spreading just as rapidly in
other parts of the country. Lawyers might also challenge Abbott's order by
arguing that states lack the power to interfere with interstate commerce by
trying to prevent travel among the states.
But courts tend to defer to elected officials and the military during real
or perceived national security crises. And they are likely to show similar
deference to public health officials during the coronavirus emergency. Cases
like Saenz suggest that states need to be careful when drafting interstate
travel bans ― if Abbott had exempted Texas residents, his order would be
much more likely to be struck down ― but so long as state officials receive
competent legal advice, such bans are likely to be upheld.
The union is still failing
But even if such travel bans are legal, they are still indicative of a
greater rot within our constitutional system. The premise of our
Constitution is that the states gave up some of their sovereign authority to
the federal government, in return for mutual benefits such as collective
national defense and free trade among the states. The premise of the post-
New Deal order is that the federal government must take on additional
obligations, including providing a basic social safety net.
And the evolution of the right to travel played a significant role in
establishing this new order. The right to travel is fundamentally tied to
our conception of what it means to be a citizen of a nation. We've spent
most of the last century fleshing out our understanding of what obligations
our nation owes to its citizens.
Many modern-day right to travel cases, including Saenz, involve state laws
targeting poor people from other states. Saenz, for example, struck down a
state law that provided less generous welfare benefits to California
residents who recently moved to the state. The modern era of the
constitutional right to travel was inaugurated by Edwards v. California (
1941), an opinion that is imbued with the morality of the New Deal ― and
that also involved an effort to discourage poor Americans from entering
California.
Prior to Edwards, the Supreme Court had typically allowed states to enact "
precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds,
and possibly convicts." Acting under this power, California enacted a law
that made it a crime to bring into the state "any indigent person who is
not a resident of the State, knowing him to be an indigent person."
But Edwards, written by Justice Jimmy Byrnes, struck this law down. And, in
doing so, it rejected the very idea that the primary burden of caring for
the poor should rest on state or local communities. "In an industrial
society," Byrnes wrote, "the task of providing assistance to the needy has
ceased to be local in character":
In a nation with a weak or miserly federal government, it may have made
sense to allow states to lock out poor residents of other states so that
they would have more resources to spend on their own poor. But state travel
bans targeting the unfortunate no longer made sense in a society with a
national safety net.
Byrnes was arguably the single most influential figure in President Franklin
Roosevelt's inner circle and he was a proud advocate for the New Deal.
Indeed, Byrnes was so trusted by Roosevelt that Byrnes left the Supreme
Court after only 15 months ― to take on a White House job wielding such
immense power that he was often labeled the "assistant president." (It
should be noted Byrnes was also a committed racist who would go on to defend
segregation as governor of South Carolina ― sometimes moral righteousness
and great evil live in the same man at the same time).
So it's no surprise that Byrnes's opinion in Edwards was a tribute to the
New Deal social safety net. Indeed, Edwards paints the New Deal as the
culmination of the union itself. For the first time, an American who fell
upon unfortunate times could travel anywhere in the nation, knowing that the
federal government would lift them up wherever they settled down. At long
last, we were truly one people, and one nation.
All of this highlights why the stakes are so high for President Trump's
botched federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The premise of Edwards ― indeed, the premise of the post-New Deal order ―
is that the federal government would provide a baseline of health,
prosperity, and security to the nation as a whole. In return, the states
would give up their role as the sole providers of "assistance to the needy,
" and with it their power to close their borders to poor Americans.
The United States was one collective community, not 50 insular communities.
But Trump is slashing the safety net that holds this national community
together. He spent much of the first three years of his presidency
dismantling the federal government's permanent infrastructure, that his
predecessors set up to deal with a pandemic ― including ordering the White
House National Security Council's (NSC) entire global health security arm
shut down. He's repeatedly proposed budgets making sharp cuts to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of
Health.
Trump abdicates his role as the custodian of a nationwide safety net. Indeed
, he recently told a group of governors who needed ventilators to deal with
the rise of coronavirus cases to "try getting it yourselves."
Thursday night, after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) requested tens of
thousands of ventilators to protect the lives of infected New Yorkers, Trump
dismissed this request in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity. "I
don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators," Trump claimed. "You
go into major hospitals sometimes, and they'll have two ventilators. And
now, all of a sudden, they're saying, 'Can we order 30,000 ventilators?'"
Nor is Cuomo the only governor frustrated by the federal government's
inaction. After Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) sought much needed medical
gear and equipment to protect the people in his state, the federal
government provided only a fraction of what his state needed.
Moreover, as Pritzker wrote on Twitter, Trump's inaction forces governors
to compete with each other ― potentially even pushing them into a bidding
war. "I have medical professionals and first responders begging for the
things they need to keep them safe―but so does" Cuomo. So does Ohio Gov.
Mike DeWine (R). So does Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D).
Trump, meanwhile, was extraordinarily slow to use the Defense Production Act
, a federal law that would allow the federal government to coordinate a
national response among state and private industry. As Pritzker writes, "it
's the federal government's job to make sure that a nurse being properly
equipped in Illinois doesn't come at the cost of a doctor being ready for
work in California."
If the Trump administration is unwilling or unable to uphold its end of the
post-New Deal bargain, the implications are staggering. Trump's inaction
does not simply threaten to exacerbate a pandemic. It threatens the very
concept of what it means to be the United States of America.
News moves fast.
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