One Nation Under House Arrest: How Do COVID-19 Mandates Impact Our Freedoms?

“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our
liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of
citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late
Revolution. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power
had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in
precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and
they avoided the consequences by denying the principle.”—James
Madison

We have become one nation under house arrest.

You think we’re any different from the Kentucky couple fitted
out with ankle monitoring bracelets and forced to quarantine at
home?

We’re not.

Consider what happened to Elizabeth and Isaiah Linscott.

Elizabeth took a precautionary diagnostic COVID-19 test before
traveling to visit her parents and grandparents in Michigan. It
came back positive: Elizabeth was asymptomatic for the novel
coronavirus but had no symptoms.
Her husband and infant daughter tested negative for the
virus.

Now in a country where freedom actually means something, the
Linscotts would have the right to determine for themselves how to
proceed responsibly, but in the American Police State, we’ve only
got as much freedom as the government allows.

That’s not saying much.

Indeed, it’s a dangerous time for anyone who still clings to
the idea that freedom means the right to think for yourself and act
responsibly according to your best judgment.

In that regard, the Linscotts are a little old-school in their
thinking. When Elizabeth was asked to sign a self-quarantine order
agreeing to check in daily with the health department and not to
travel anywhere without prior approval,
she refused.

“I
shouldn’t have to ask for consent because I’m an adult who can
make that decision. And as a citizen of the United States of
America, that is my right to make that decision without having to
disclose that to somebody else,” said Elizabeth. “So, no, I
wouldn’t wear a mask. I would do everything that I could to make
sure that I wouldn’t come in contact with other people because of
the fear that’s spreading with this. But no, I would have just
stayed home, take care of my child.”

Instead of signing the blanket statement,
Elizabeth submitted her own written declaration:

I will do my best to stay home, as I do every other time I get
sick. But I cannot comply to having to call the public health
department everytime that I need to go out and do something. It’s
my right and freedoms to go where I please and not have to answer
to anyone for it. There is no pandemic and with a survival rate of
99.9998% I’m fine. I will continue to avoid the elderly, just
like PRIOR guidelines state, try to stay home, get rest, get
medicine, and get better.
I decline.

A few days after being informed that Elizabeth’s case was
being escalated and referred to law enforcement, the Linscotts
reportedly found their home
surrounded by multiple government vehicles, government personnel
and the county sheriff armed with a court order and ankle
monitors.

“We didn’t rob a store,” Linscott said. “We
didn’t steal something. We didn’t hit and run. We didn’t
do anything wrong.”

That’s the point, of course.

In an age of overcriminalization—when the law is wielded like
a hammer to force compliance to the government’s dictates
whatever they might be—you don’t have to do anything wrong to
be fined, arrested or subjected to raids and seizures and
surveillance.

Watch and see: just as it did in China, this pandemic is about
to afford the government the perfect excuse for expanding its
surveillance and data collection powers at our expense.

On a daily basis, Americans are already relinquishing (in many
cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—their
biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics
(facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans,
etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly
technologically-enabled world.

COVID-19, however, takes the surveillance state to the next
level.

There’s already been talk of
mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints,
contact tracing,
immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the
virus to move around more freely, and
snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the
authorities.

As Reuters
reports:

As the United States begins reopening its economy,
some state officials are weighing whether house arrest monitoring
technology – including ankle bracelets or location-tracking apps
– could be used to police quarantines imposed on coronavirus
carriers. But while the tech has been used sporadically for
U.S. quarantine enforcement over the past few weeks, large scale
rollouts have so far been held back by a big legal question: Can
officials impose electronic monitoring without an offense or a
court order?

More to the point, as the head of one tech company asked,
“Can
you actually constitutionally monitor someone who’s innocent?
It’s uncharted territory.”

Except this isn’t exactly uncharted territory, is it?

It follows much the same pattern as every other state of
emergency in recent years—legitimate or manufactured—that has
empowered the government to add to its arsenal of technologies and
powers.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal
immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school
safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out
as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become
weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s
hands.

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It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might
be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic
collapse,loss
of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic
resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and
catastrophic natural and human disastersâ€â€”as long as it allows
the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the
so-called name of national security.

It’s hard to know who to trust anymore.

Certainly, in this highly partisan age, when everything from the
COVID-19 pandemic to police brutality to football is being recast
in light of one’s political leanings, it can be incredibly
difficult to separate what constitutes a genuine safety concern
versus what is hyper-politicized propaganda.

Take the mask mandates, for example.

Currently,
19 states have not issued mask mandates in response to rising
COVID-19 infection numbers. More than
30 states have enacted some form of mask requirement. A growing
number of retailers, including Walmart, Target and CVS,  are also
joining
the mask mandate bandwagon. Georgia’s governor, in a
challenge to mask requirements by local governing bodies, filed a
lawsuit
challenging Atlanta’s dictate that masks be worn within city
limits.

In some states, such as Indiana, where
masks are required but there are no penalties for
non-compliance, government officials are urging people to
protect themselves but not to get into confrontations over masks or
turn into snitches.

In other states, such as Virginia, the Nanny State is using more
strong-handed tactics to force compliance with mask mandates,

including the threat of fines, jail time, surprise inspections of
businesses, and complaint hotlines that
encourage citizens to snitch on each other. Officials in Las
Vegas
deployed 100 “compliance ambassadors†to help educate and
enhance enforcement of the state’s mask mandate. One couple in
Knoxville, Tenn., took mask-shaming to new heights when they
created a
Facebook page to track compliance by businesses, employees and
customers.

In Miami, “residents now risk a legal penalty if they venture
into public without a face mask. The city has assigned at least 39
police officers to make sure that residents are following the
city’s mandatory mask ordinance. Offenders will be warned but, if
they refuse to comply, they will be fined.
The first offense will cost $100 and the second another $100. With
a third — God forbid — the offender will be
arrested.â€

These conflicting and, in some cases, heavy-handed approaches to
a pandemic that has locked down the nation for close to six months
is turning this health crisis into an unnecessarily politicized,
bureaucratic tug-of-war with no clear-cut winners to be found.

Certainly, this is not the first crisis to pit security concerns
against freedom principles.

In this post-9/11 world, we have been indoctrinated into fearing
and mistrusting one another instead of fearing and mistrusting the
government. As a result, we’ve been forced to travel this road
many, many times with lamentably predictable results each time:
without fail, when asked to choose between safety and liberty,
Americans historically tend to choose safety.

Failing to read the fine print on such devil’s bargains, “we
the people†find ourselves repeatedly on the losing end as the
government uses each crisis as a means of expanding its powers at
taxpayer expense.

Whatever these mask mandates might be—authoritarian strong-arm
tactics or health necessities to prevent further spread of the
virus—they have thus far
proven to be uphill legal battles for those hoping to challenge
them in the courts as unconstitutional restrictions on their right
to liberty, bodily autonomy, privacy and health.

In fact,
Florida courts have upheld the mask ordinances, ruling that
they do not infringe on constitutional rights and that “there is
no reasonable expectation of privacy as to whether one covers their
nose and mouth in public places, which are the only places to which
the mask ordinance applies.â€

Declaring that there is no constitutional right to infect
others, Circuit Court Judge John Kastrenakes concluded that
“the
right to be ‘free from governmental intrusion’ does not
automatically or completely shield an individual’s conduct from
regulation.†Moreover, wrote Kastrenakes, constitutional
rights and the ideals of limited government “do
not absolve a citizen from the real-world consequences of their
individual choices, or otherwise allow them to wholly skirt
their social obligation to their fellow Americans or to society as
a whole. This is particularly true when one’s individual choices
can result in drastic, costly, and sometimes deadly, consequences
to others.â€

Virginia courts have also
upheld mask mandates.

These court decisions take their cue from a
1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts
in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce
compulsory vaccination laws.

In other words, the courts have concluded that the government
has a compelling interest in requiring masks to fight COVID-19
infections that overrides individual freedoms.

Generally, the government has to show a so-called compelling
state interest before it can override certain critical rights such
as free speech, assembly, press, privacy, search and seizure, etc.
Most of the time, the government lacks that compelling state
interest, but it still manages to violate those rights, setting
itself up for legal battles further down the road.

We can spend time debating the mask mandates. However,
criticizing those who rightly fear these restrictions to be a
slippery slope to further police state tactics will not restore the
freedoms that have been willingly sacrificed on the altar of
national security by Americans of all political stripes over the
years.

As I’ve warned, this is a test to see whether the
Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in
the Bill of Rights—can survive a national crisis and true state
of emergency.

It must be remembered that James Madison, the “father†of
the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the fourth
president of the United States, advised that we should “take
alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

Whether or not you consider these COVID-19 restrictions to be
cause for alarm, they are far from the first experiment on our
liberties. Indeed, whether or not you concede that the pandemic
itself is cause for alarm, we should all be alarmed by the
government’s response to this pandemic.

By government, I’m not referring to one particular politician
or administration but to the entire apparatus at every level that
conspires to keep “we the people†fearful of one another and
under virtual house arrest.

This is what we’ve all been reduced to: prisoners in our skin,
prisoners in our homes, prisoners in our communities—forced to
comply with the government’s shifting mandates about how to
navigate this pandemic or else.

Right now, COVID-19 is the perfect excuse for the government to
wreak havoc on our freedoms in the name of safety and security, but
as I make clear in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American People, don’t
believe for a minute that our safety is the police state’s
primary concern.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder
and president of The
Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People  is available at
www.amazon.com.
Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

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