April 16, 2020 “It was a political rally that is going to endanger peoples’ lives, because this is precisely how COVID-19 spreads.”
On Wednesday, thousands of protestors rallied on foot and by car in Lansing, Michigan’s capital to express their discontent with Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s decision to extend the state’s stay-at-home order to help fight the spread of coronavirus. Michigan is one of the hardest-hit states by the coronavirus in the United States with the fifth-highest death rate per capita.
Protestors could be seen flying American flags and many donned ‘Make America Great Again’ hats. A group of armed protestors also demonstrated on the steps of the capitol building. Protestors also repeated common Trump refrains including “lock her up” chants directed at Whitmer and opening up the economy.
“It was a political rally that is going to endanger peoples’ lives, because this is precisely how COVID-19 spreads,” said Governor Whitmer on the protests. “This is the kind of behavior that extends the needs for stay-at-home orders.”
The demonstration was dubbed Operation Gridlock on Facebook as motorists clogged the streets surrounding the capitol building. The Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund played a large role in the organization of the protest. The Michigan Freedom Fund is fronted by an employee of Dick Devos, husband of Secretary of Education Betsy Devos.
The protests come as tensions between the federal and state governments are heating up with President Trump claiming “total authority” to reopen the economy while state governors begin to collaborate on an ‘exit strategy’ coronavirus policy.
Trump has been increasingly hostile to Democratic governors who he views as bucking his rhetoric and advice. On Tuesday, he tweeted, “tell the Democrat Governors that “Mutiny On The Bounty” was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”
Protestors in Michigan mimicked many of Trump’s concerns and made requests for the state to open back up. Videos of protestors’ demands ranged from being able to get a haircut to facing unemployment with bills to pay. One demonstrator nearly broke into tears explaining that he could no longer buy paint or lawn fertilizer.
While the demonstrations in Lansing are a manifestation of political squabbles and hardening rhetoric form national and local officials, it also points to another divide the coronavirus could worsen. Who is Falling Ill?
The coronavirus is impartial to who it infects, with high-profile celebrities and politicians amongst the growing number of confirmed cases. But some groups are overrepresented in those who fall ill.
Early reporting showed black Americans are disproportionately coming down with the coronavirus and dying to due complications from contracting it. And this trend holds in Michigan where 40% of the state’s coronavirus deaths have been African-American when only 14% of the state is African-American.
The startling numbers were not a concern for the mostly white crowd which took to the streets in Lansing. With pictures of a man flying a Confederate flag at Wednesday’s event and organizing groups sharing racist photos, the protests point to racial divides in Michigan and the country.
Many pointed to the irony of demonstrations about the state reopening non-essential business during a public health crisis in the same state as Flint where residents have been subject to a 6-year water crisis. Benton Harbor Mayor Marcus Muhammad tweeted, “I wish that the same energy in Lansing to protest @GovWhitmer would have been garnered to stop Flint from being poisoned.”
April 16, 2020 "For the past 40-plus years, a group of “conservative” billionaires have been working as hard as they can to reshape our federal government from one that provides education, health care, housing, food and other necessities into one that does nothing more than run the military and fight wars. It’s time to give them what they’ve worked so hard to get."
The coronavirus crisis is highlighting how dysfunctional states run by Republicans are. This is a feature of GOP rule, not a bug.
For the past 40-plus years, a group of “conservative” billionaires have been working as hard as they can to reshape our federal government from one that provides education, health care, housing, food and other necessities into one that does nothing more than run the military and fight wars.
It’s time to give them what they’ve worked so hard to get.
In the process, “blue states” can continue to flower and prosper, while “red states” go back to their pre-Civil War poverty and local oligarchies. All it’ll take is a small tweak to our federal system, something that the billionaires have been pushing for since the 1970s.
First, end the federal income tax, as David Koch called for when he ran for vice president in 1980. Most billionaires don’t pay much (if anything) into it anyway; as economists have documented and the New York Times (among others) reported, in 2019 billionaires paid a lower federal tax rate than anybody—including the working poor, the bottom 50 percent of American households.
The federal income tax has become a massive annual transfer of wealth from blue states to red states. Just let it go, so the states can raise their own taxes to take care of their citizens without having to subsidize other states.
“Taker” Mississippi, for example, gets about 40 percent of its total budget in federal funds taken from “maker” blue states, with fully 24 percent of its residents being fed via the federal food stamp program (compared to 10 percent of Californians). If they’re so gung-ho about “states’ rights” when it comes to denying citizens the right to vote or to get a safe abortion, or putting limits on carrying assault weapons, why not give them the “right” to pay for their own social programs?
Education, housing, food stamps, health care, and pretty much every other program funded by the income tax (Social Security has its own separate tax and fund) can be picked up by the states. Ending the federal income tax (and leaving the federal government with tariffs and fees to pay for the military, as we did from the founding of the republic up until World War I) would give the states lots of elbow room.
Take away the 30 percent or 40 percent (for the top income brackets; or, before Reagan, even 91 percent to 70 percent on a progressive sliding scale) federal tax rate, and the states can then raise their state income taxes to those levels. Blue states, no longer having to subsidize red states via the federal government, can easily pick up all the social safety net costs and have enough money left over to build a multi-state world-class coronavirus-resistant nonprofit hospital system.
To make things easier, the blue states need to enter into a compact like several New England and Mid-Atlantic states did to control greenhouse gases, a move emulated by California, Oregon and Washington.
For a project this large, though (particularly if it includes a single-payer health care system), it’ll take all of the blue states: an interstate compact including the New England and Mid-Atlantic states, the West Coast states, and the few remaining blue states in the Midwest like Illinois and Minnesota. And with their “pact” to decide when and how to open their states after the coronavirus crisis ends, numerous blue states have already laid the foundation for exactly this.
America’s wealthiest billionaires, including Walmart’s Walton family, the Kochs, and Jeff Bezos, have famously worked to gut the right of workers to form unions; fine, let them have their federal “right to work for less” law. But don’t forbid the blue states from enforcing union rights; they’re the key to the prosperous middle class America had between the 1940s and Reagan’s election in 1980, and blue states are all about prosperity.
When the red states start to collapse or see a mass exodus of their people to blue states, let them join the compact but, as with the European Union, only if they agree to the terms of the Blue State Compact: higher taxes and fully funded health, education and welfare programs, as well as high-functioning infrastructure to support modern business activity.
Pick your metric: Livability, family-friendliness, quality of health care, quality and availability of education, “personal freedom,” economic strength, job growth, business climate, worker rights… in nearly every case, blue states outrank red states, and often by a huge margin.
While the variation in GDP growth between the world’s top 20 economies averages around 1.75 percent, America’s blue states have grown 3.5 percent more than red states since the Great Recession. Blue states can definitely take care of themselves.
As part of their interstate compact, blue states could even define their own regulatory programs to keep their air and water clean and their food and drugs safe, as California has done for years with auto emissions. Without their taxes being sucked away to red states, the Compact can afford to create its own versions of the FDA, EPA, USDA and OSHA.
Ending the federal income tax (or dialing it back to functional meaninglessness) and creating an interstate compact like this would require a few steps, but they’ve been followed numerous times in American history.
The federal income tax, authorized in 1913 by the 16th Amendment, has been raised and lowered repeatedly in the more than 100 years since its inception. It’s been as low as a single-digit percent and as high as 91 percent. Given that the GOP has been begging for years to cut it as much as possible, if the Democrats in Congress were to offer to cut it to 1 percent or whatever minimum would, along with tariffs and fees, provide for the core functions of government (Army, Congress, SCOTUS, White House, etc.), it’s hard to imagine that the Republicans could say no.
Similarly, although Section 10 of Article I of the Constitution says, “No state shall, without the consent of Congress, … enter into any agreement or compact with another state,” that consent hasn’t been routinely withheld when interstate compacts were formed to do everything from controlling pollution to disposing of nuclear waste. This should be a viable idea.
Speaking to a group of 450 billionaires and multimillionaires, Charles Koch, in 2015, compared their struggle to that, according to the Washington Post, of “Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” Not to mention George Washington.
“Look at the American revolution,” Koch said, “the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement. All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome an injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”
A staple argument among America’s conservative uber-rich, going all the way back to their reaction to Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s, has been that the federal government needs to stop interfering with states, and that federal regulations and subsidies are distorting markets and holding back “the magic of the free market.”
They tried their experiments with Chile and Russia, “libertarianizing” those nations’ economies, and the results were less than spectacular. Perhaps they can do better with the states they already control (via Charles Koch’s ALEC, for example) once those states are unencumbered by federal taxes, regulations or the “stifling” effect of federal welfare and subsidy programs.
The right-wing billionaire definition of “freedom” includes the right to poverty, the right to die without health care, the right to be uneducated and illiterate, and the right to be hungry and homeless. Red states seem to like this, since they repeatedly vote for it; we should let them have it.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
This article first appeared on Citizen Truth and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
April 15, 2020 MintPress News spoke to a number of people on the front lines attempting to keep America fed during the worst pandemic in a century.
(By: Alan MacLeod, Mintpress News) At least 10,000 cars line up in an orderly fashion in San Antonio, all full of hungry, increasingly desperate people. Thousands already arrived the night before just to get a chance to eat. “We just can’t feed this many,”said the CEO of the local food bank that Texans have descended upon.
It is a scene playing out across the country;1,300 cars swamped the drive-thru Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank. The United Center, home to the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks, has beentransformed into a huge food warehouse, as COVID-19 has driven a wedge through the cracks in American society, where tens of millions of people now face unemployment and hunger.
Some have claimed that the food lines are a glimpse into what a future American socialist state would look like. However, this is not a hypothetical society but a very real present. It is Breadline 2020, today’s America. Existing food banks are struggling to cope; one worker of a food bank in Baton Rouge, LA,claimed that the current situation is worse than after Hurricane Katrina.
— 🕊️ Pandemic Survivors USA 🇺🇲 (@PndmcSrvvrsUSA) April 8, 2020
MintPress News spoke to a number of people on the front lines attempting to keep America fed during the worst pandemic in a century. “Needs have skyrocketed not just here but around the country,” said Eleanor Goldfield, a creative activist, and journalist.
One man who called us here atD.C. Mutual Aid to request help said that he had walked several miles the day before in order to get to a local food bank only to find that they were closed. He said he was completely out of food and didn’t understand how they could just shut down operations like that.”
Along withGuayaquil, Ecuador, the New York-New Jersey metro area is one of the world epicenters of the coronavirus pandemic. Authorities have barely any idea about how many people have died; New York State’s estimate for the New York City death toll isover 1,000 more than the city’s own count – an indication of just how badly overwhelmed the system is. Over one percent of all retirees are currently in hospital with COVID-19. “People are dying left and right, no exaggeration,” Derrick Smith, a local certified registered nurse anesthetist,told us last week, “I’ve never imagined or seen our healthcare system take such a beating before.” Makeshift morgues – cooled trailers full of bodies – are a feature of most hospitals in the area now, andmass graves are being dug on an uninhabited island in the Long Island Sound.
“New York City is facing a crisis unlike anything we’ve seen. As the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic continues, more New Yorkers are facing food insecurity,”said the Food Bank for New York City. It estimates that it will have to provide 15 million meals over the next 90 days.
This is what I saw. Blistering heat. Folks in line since 7pm the night before. To get food. Hundreds of volunteers busting it to serve, so families could go home (probably to pass some out to their neighbors too) & get the nourishment they need.
“We have seen a significant increase in demand for food, about 30-40 percent higher,” said Karla Bardinas ofFulfill, formerly the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, New Jersey.
These meals are on top of what we were already serving as a direct result of schools and businesses being closed and people losing their jobs.”
Workers on the frontline not only have to deal with increased demand but also the very real risk of death. “We recently lost a colleague, Diana Tennant, age 51, from complications of the coronavirus…so of course, it has been difficult. But we all have a commitment to feeding our neighbors who are food insecure, and now, more than ever, people need our help to put food on their tables, so we are inspired to work hard to continue our mission,” Bardinas told MintPress.
Even taking the maximum precautions possible, critical workers are putting themselves on the line every day. That is one thing when you are a medical worker like Smith, knowing before you sign up that exposure to infection is always a risk. It is quite another for low paid workers in retail. Last week a 27-year-old grocery store worker at Giant Foods in Maryland died after contracting the virus. Her mother claimed that the store refused to provide protective equipment. She was given her last paycheck: $20.64. “My baby’s gone because of $20.64. You know what using the proper PPE could’ve done for my baby?” sheasked MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle. Both Bardinas and Goldfield said their organizations are taking strict safety precautions in an attempt to limit the spread of COVID-19.
Like with so much else, it is the poor that are being hit hardest by the coronavirus. 1.5 million New Yorkers are food insecure at the best of times. The South Bronx has the highest rates of hunger –37 percent – of any community in the United States. In the Bronx, the poorest borough of New York, people are dying at overtwice the rate as they are in Manhattan. While the rich have the means to shelter in place and use their savings during a crisis, that option is not available to the poor, not least because of the anemic response from the government, who have been quick to bail out industry, but much slower to help the people. Nearly half of America was already broke before the pandemic. Furthermore,32 percent of Bronx residents work in caring professions (nurses, care workers, teachers, etc) and simply cannot work from home as others can.
It is a similar story the world over. InBrazil, residents of urban shantytowns cannot safely self-isolate, as their houses lack private rooms and do not have the ability to store large quantities of food. Furthermore, few have piped water, making washing hands and other sanitary practices impossible. InIndia, the government has declared a generalized three-week lockdown, offering 2,000 rupees (around $26) to all citizens to get them through. But locals complain this is far from enough to sustain themselves and that the poor, who live semi-communally, lack the equipment to cook at home, thus putting them at greater risk.
Back in D.C., Goldfield is putting a brave face on it, but it is clear food banks around the country are struggling to keep up with demand. “We’re doing the best we can. Mutual aid is powerful in that it rolls with what comes – fluid but never flimsy,” she said, “we’ve been making our own masks and hand sanitizer. We now have more delivery days set up, and are expanding our network to access produce, bread, meat and cheese from local and environmentally conscious producers.” In New Jersey, Bardinas says Fulfill has had serious problems acquiring certain products but is currently rising to the challenge. “But our expenses are exorbitant meeting the increase in demand. We could use monetary donations that will give us the flexibility to immediately meet the needs of our community atfulfillNJ.org.” Virtually every food bank across the country is in a similarly difficult position.
“It is powerful and heavy working here right now…this is the first time I’ve been in D.C. for such a long stretch of time. But right now, everywhere is the frontline. Everywhere is crushed by the horrific failings of our oppressive capitalist system,” said Goldfield, adding:
Mutual aid is how we fight, and how we build. It’s horrible to see how fragile the construct of our society is, how easily it disposes of the most marginalized. Yet, it would be far worse to ignore that reality than to see it and act upon it. I’m hopeful that this work will not only see us through this crisis but create the foundations of what is to come, after the storm is over.”
The great author and activist Arundhati Roy recently wrote that the current pandemic is a portal to the future: “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” The storm might far be over, but there is the possibility to use the crisis to build a fairer society, one where the need for food banks will be relegated to the pages of history books.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has prompted a major question about leadership in a time of crisis: how to balance the importance of public health with the respecting of individual liberty? The virus respects no borders. It cares little for how nations are run, whether through democratic governance or authoritarianism. But democratic governments have already used the virus to crack down on freedoms, while those regimes that were authoritarian to begin with have used the pandemic to grab even more power. Meanwhile in countries like the United States, the notion of freedom is being used to undermine public health. But freedom and public health are not mutually exclusive.
Hungary’s right-wing government offers perhaps the most striking example of how a crisis of public health has been used to further authoritarianism. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has cited the virus spread to cancel all elections and remain in power indefinitely. He has invoked broad powers to limit air travel and individual movements. But there is no end date to the restrictions, nor any parliamentary review of his actions. For as long as Orban’s emergency orders are in place, he has claimed the right to rule by decree. Likening the virus to the sort of “foreign influence” he has railed against, Orban said, “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
In Serbia, President Aleksandar Vucic has pushed for similarly extreme measures and relied on heavily armed police patrols to enforce his edicts. He too has undermined parliamentary oversight of his actions and assumed the right to rule by decree.
A spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe explained the framework for what the pandemic requires from governments: “A state of emergency—wherever it is declared and for whatever reason—must be proportionate to its aim, and only remain in place for as long as absolutely necessary.” But history is replete with examples of governments seizing power during moments of crisis and refusing to voluntarily relinquish them.
In India, the world’s largest democracy and second most populous country, the authoritarian Hindu fundamentalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has imposed the strictest lockdown in the world. Announced with almost no notice, Modi upended life for more than a billion people with a mandatory 21-day lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus. With hundreds of millions of people surviving on a hand-to-mouth existence, many homeless or displaced, such a draconian order did more harm than good. Tens of thousands gathered into crowded buses, trains, and streets desperate to return to their villages as their source of incomes were cut off. Nearly two dozen people have died en route from Indian cities, including an 11-year-old who simply starved to death.
China, a nation whose authoritarian streak was already under international scrutiny, expanded its surveillance power under cover of the virus. Public transportation will now deploy facial recognition and temperature scanning technology to keep tabs on citizens with no oversight on how the data will be used, and no end date on data gathering.
Israel has taken it a step further, openly surveilling all residents using their cell phone data to track those who have tested positive for COVID-19 and determining who has come into contact with them. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waived parliamentary oversight on using such “anti-terrorism” measures to tackle the pandemic.
In the United States, the emergence of COVID-19 initially provoked almost no actions from the government. President Donald Trump was briefed about the devastating potential of the disease to take half a million lives in January, but he was more deeply concerned about the health of the economy than that of American lives and repeatedly claimed, “No one saw this coming.” Trump watched the stock market gains under his presidency unravel and prematurely urged a return to normalcy, hoping to see “packed churches” by Easter and worrying that the “cure” for the virus would be “worse than the problem itself.” An administration that has based its power on undermining science and courting right-wing religious fundamentalists, gun-owners, and self-avowed libertarians has used the notion of “individual freedoms” to justify its dangerous inaction.
Numerous U.S. officials are carving out exemptions for religious gatherings in spite of the clear need for strict quarantining to stop the spread of the disease. Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University refused to respect quarantine recommendations and reopened after Spring Break, endangering students. The pastor of a megachurch in Florida also flouted public health warnings and assembled his congregation.
Perhaps the best symbol of “libertarian” idiocy is Ammon Bundy, the leader of the failed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon who is leading a “liberty rebellion” in Idaho—a state that has more cases of the virus per capita than California. Bundy has even wished the illness upon himself, saying, “I want the virus now.” But he ought to consider the case of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson who also spent weeks refusing to take action against the virus and claimed he was seeking “herd immunity” for a large percentage of the population. Johnson has now contracted the virus and sought intensive care at a hospital. Like others, he has realized an aversion to scientific facts doesn’t make you immune to the virus.
A crisis such as the one we are facing demands decisive action tempered with an abundance of caution about infringements of people’s rights. Nations such as New Zealand are showing it can be done. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has acted decisively but emphasized government transparency in decision-making over a virus-lockdown. She has issued clear messages about the government’s strategy and goals for eliminating the virus’ spread and made herself available to the instruments of accountability in a democracy—namely the press. Her approach stands in contrast to the United States where President Trump has upped the ferocity of his attacks on reporters.
South Korea also took quick action to tackle the virus after it first exploded into view. President Moon Jae-in ordered widespread testing, imposed emergency measures on the epicenter of the outbreak, and isolated and treated patients swiftly. Communicating clearly and often with the public, the government effectively turned around a public health crisis without resorting to heavy-handed or autocratic measures. Unlike the United States and UK, President Moon relied on sound scientific advice and wasted no time in ordering tests and protective equipment.
New Zealand and South Korea offer models for how governments can navigate unprecedented crises such as this. The coronavirus is not just a threat to our personal and collective health; it is a threat to our democratic institutions as well. We need to protect lives and democracies.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
This article first appeared on Citizen Truth and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
April 14, 2020 “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total.”
President Donald Trump alone has the power to reopen the US economy, he declared at his Monday evening briefing, according to the New York Times.
“The president of he United States calls the shots. [Governors] can’t do anything without the approval of the president of the United States.”
Trump has been anxious to see life return to normal; a few weeks ago he even said the target date for a nationwide reopening was Easter weekend. Yet Easter Sunday came to pass and the COVID-19 death toll has surpassed 25,000 people in the US. Everyone — from Trump to doctors and unemployed Americans — desires a return to the status quo ante bellum, but no one can predict when that will happen, nor when the tide will turn.
The desire to reopen the US must also be balanced with the risk of a second wave of infections, like China experienced. Trump formed advisory committees on Monday to put forward proposals on when and how the US can safely move forward. However, Trump’s ambitions and desire to control the process is running at odds with some governors.
On both coasts, 10 states have banded together by forming pacts to reopen together. On the West Coast, California, Washington, and Oregon created the Western States Pact. On the opposite side of America, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey created a similar alliance for the same purpose: limiting the spread of the coronavirus and safely reopening their economies, according to Foreign Policy. ‘Decision by Me’
Leaving the decision to reopen up to individual governors hasn’t set well with Trump.
“For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect….” Trump tweeted Monday. "....It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!”
However, governors were the power behind the economic shutdown in America. As Trump waited to declare a national emergency, Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California took the first gambles and decided to shutter businesses and schools.
Throughout the pandemic, Trump has at various stages left handling the crisis up to individual governors and recently tweeted that they should “get your states testing programs & apparatus perfected. Be ready, big things are happening. No excuses!”
“You want to now say the federal government is in charge?” Cuomo said on MSNBC. “Which by the way is a shift because the federal government didn’t close down the economy, right? They left it to the states. It was state by state, it was a whole hodgepodge, the governors had to close the economy, which was not politically easy to do, but now the federal government says it can open it? Well then, why didn’t you close it if you can open it?”
Cuomo also rejected the idea that Trump has total authority.
“I don’t know what the president is talking about. We have a constitution…we don’t have a king…the president doesn’t have total authority,” Cuomo said in an NBC interview.
For Cuomo, the reopening process must be phased and should start with the states. Most critically, testing levels have to be increased, something that is not happening at the present time, he said according to The Guardian. Unfounded Power
Trump’s idea that he has total authority and that the governors cannot act without his approval, is unfounded in the Constitution and Supreme Court precedents. Legal scholars wasted no time to weigh in on the issue, USA Today reported.
“It's so plain and obvious it's not even debatable," said Kathleen Bergin, a law professor at Cornell University. "Trump has no authority to ease social distancing, or to open schools or private businesses. These are matters for states to decide under their power to promote public health and welfare, a power guaranteed by the 10th Amendment to the Constitution."
The 10th amendment reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Charles Fried, professor at Harvard Law School, disputed that the 10th amendment is at play in the issue, but still argued that “The president can’t just say, ‘I am the boss.’”
Finally, without any powers imbued by the Constitution or through Congress, a president could try to make a case based on past Supreme Court rulings, which often shape the powers vested in the office. However, as Fried noted, former President Harry Truman lost a court challenge when he unsuccessfully attempted to force steel mills to open amid a labor strike in 1952.
This article first appeared on Citizen Truth and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
