From the beginning of this series, a year and a half ago, we noted, "The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas. But Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health." To repeat the bill of particulars from last month: "Tax policies were inducing businesses to leave long before the corona tyranny began. The crime and underperforming schools in Chicago are so notoriously bad that people of African extraction with the means to do so are leaving. Residents and businesses get a dose of the green new deal every day, particularly on mornings when the sun doesn't shine and the wind isn't blowing." There's a heat wave on offer for later this week. We'll see how high the spot price of electricity goes. The only saving grace might be that because people can subscribe to interruptible service on their air conditioners in return for a monthly rebate from the power company, we might be spared rolling blackouts.
The governor has issued another ukase, extending his corona emergency powers. "Beyond ridiculous," notes Wirepoints's Mark Glennon, who continues,
Why wouldn’t his administration go through normal legislative process for any of the COVID matters that still legitimately need attention?Let's hope that the resentment leads to accountability in the election. Mr Glennon continues (and I'm quoting at length because the message is important),
The General Assembly would no doubt authorize things still reasonably needed — and there are some, which have been in recent emergency orders. They include uncontroversial things like relaxed telehealth rules, healthcare worker background checks and daycare vaccination/testing requirements. Masking is still required in healthcare and congregate care settings. You can see a list of prior emergency orders that have been extended under the latest emergency order which was issued with the Disaster Proclamation.
All that could easily be authorized by the General Assembly, making emergency powers unnecessary. The supermajority Pritzker’s party holds could easily pass a single bill covering everything in the orders, with or without expiration dates.
Continued reliance on emergency power therefore seems like an unnecessary provocation. Illinois is becoming an outlier and fueling further resentment to one-person rule.
First, Illinois’ ruling class probably doesn’t care about perceptions of one-person rule. It appears they’ve concluded they can shrug off as “right wingers” anybody who complains about autocracy.It's worse than that, dear reader. There was a clarifying moment in the Illinois Republican primary last week.
They’re probably right about that in Illinois since the press now ignores it.
Second, you have to wonder if they are thinking just like at Anthony Fauci recently admitted to, which is that the establishment’s primary concern is to firmly cement the political and legal precedent for vast, unilateral administrative power. It’s about hoarding power, in other words.
Fauci last week said that the mask mandate for air travel wasn’t so much about health safety as it was about preserving power. It’s “less about mandates on the plane than it is about who has the right and the authority and the capability of making public health decisions,” Fauci said. “And I believe that the Department of Justice is operating on the principle that decisions that are public health decisions belong with the public health agency — in this case, the CDC. So it’s more of a matter of principle of where the authority lies than it is about whether or not there’s ‘gonna be a mandate on a plane or not.”
Whether deliberate or not, the power-hoarding precedent is indeed being set — a broad and dangerous precedent. Recent emergency orders include claims to authority that are very broad and would be controversial if enforced. Some earlier COVID emergency orders, for example, included power to set price controls, which has gotten little attention. Despite inflation exceeding 12%, price increases are prohibited for goods and services related to COVID treatment. Price controls obviously should not be set by a governor unilaterally.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Jesse Sullivan, who called on the Democratic incumbent to issue a disaster declaration in Chicago and deploy the National Guard to help quell the city’s violence.No. The point of electing a governor is to govern according to constitutional principles. It does no good to exchange one dictator for another, just because the new dictator might issue ukases you like better. In case Mr Glennon wasn't emphatic enough, here's Reason's J. D. Tuccille, elaborating.
“Somehow, 28 months in (to the pandemic), J.B. Pritzker is still signing monthly COVID disaster proclamations, but he is unwilling or unable to act on an even more pressing crisis — the senseless violence ravaging the streets of Chicago,” Sullivan, a venture capitalist from Petersburg, said in a statement. “If Pritzker says that COVID is still an emergency but police shootings aren’t, he needs to open his eyes.”
We can again dine indoors, walk unmasked in public, and go to the gym through the front door instead of sneaking in the back in defiance of lockdown rules. But there's a sense that the powers-that-be don't want us to get accustomed to free movement and uncovered faces.The Illinois gubernatorial primary is shaping up as an unedifying missed opportunity for the Republicans. I'll likely grouse about that in the next few days.
"We're going to be dealing with this virus on a chronic basis," Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor, recently commented in the tone of an official who is having trouble surrendering his moment in the limelight. "We are not going to eradicate this."
But while "the pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented withdrawal of civil liberties among developed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike," in the words of The Economist's Democracy Index 2021, American officials still have limited power when people push back. At some point, they have to loosen their grip or else get sued, voted out of office, or ignored. Areas where they exercise relatively unchecked power, such as government schools and ports of entry, are windows into what officialdom would like to do if they had a free hand. But even when they get their way, that doesn't mean there's no escape. Just watch families flee public schools.
On to the effects of the corona tyranny in Illinois.
A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways. With local, state, and federal governments in the United States changing the way they count infections (and they might be rethinking how they classify deaths) I'm not sure how valid any numbers, even from a service consistently used from month to month, is.
The latest report from Sweden counts 2,510,930 infections, up by 6,036 from last month, and 19,016 deaths, a change of 152 from that report.
The latest report from Illinois counts 3,352,983 infections, an increase of 126,786 over last month and 38,311 deaths, adding 298 to the Pritzker Body Count in one month. I see no news of hospitals being overstressed.
As of this afternoon, the state counts around 28 million doses of the various vaccines administered; they've updated their tally to disaggregate among finished and partial vaccinations. The state no longer counts the scary variants. The current mix of infections is almost all strains of Omicron.
These posts will continue, less frequently, as long as update information is available.
Let me go on record right now, if the potbellied dictator and the rest of the Combine are returned to office in November, Illinoisans can expect no sympathy from me when the retail taxes go back on, and go up, and the power goes off.
At Syttende Mai, the governor trailed by 19,149.
At Patriots Day, the governor trailed by 19,243.
At St. Patrick's Day, the governor trailed by 19,580.
At Valentine's Day, the governor trailed by 19,533.
At the National Day of Service, the governor trailed by 17,062.
Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week was growing by less, that is, until the ukases went back into effect. The details for earlier in 2021 and the end of 2020 are on page 2. It's scant consolation that one governor issuing ukases smokes out a candidate who aspires to issue ukases of a different kind.
2021 ...
At Beethoven's birthday, the governor trailed by 14,796.
At Veterans Day, the governor trailed by 13,981.
At Leif Erikson Day, the governor trailed by 13,101.
At the start of the professional football season, the governor trailed by 12,307.
At Roller Coaster Day, the governor trailed by 11,502.
As of 7 June, 10,887.
As of 1 June, 10,810.
As of 24 May, 10,645.
As of 17 May, 10,520.
As of 10 May, 10,417.
As of 3 May, 10,310.
As of 26 April, 10,216.
As of 19 April, 10,167.
As of 12 April, 10,169.
As of 5 April, 10,167.
As of 29 March, 10,125.
As of 22 March, 10.095.
As of 15 March, 10.070.
As of 8 March, 10,017.
As of 1 March, 9,933.
As of 22 February, 9,857.
As of 15 February, 9,693.
As of 8 February, 9,623.
As of 1 February, 9,662.
As of 25 January, 9,739.
As of 18 January, 9,727.
As of 11 January, 9, 860.
As of 4 January, 9,595.
2020 ...
As of 28 December, 9,057.
As of 21 December, 8,414.
As of 14 December, 7,815.
No comments:
Post a Comment