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An extension of this is the notion of emergency authorities and people’s perception of the weight they carry. An emergency is an emergent situation, which must

An extension of this is the notion of emergency authorities and people’s perception of the weight they carry. An emergency is an emergent situation, which must be new, evolving, and carry the risk of serious harm. Emergency orders are based upon the idea that executive authority must be wielded to quickly mitigate an emergency situation. But a key attribute of an emergency (by definition) is “new” - if emergency powers are extended month after month then they are based on a situation that is no longer an emergency. Now before you get angry, consider that we can agree that COVID-19 is a serious threat that requires government action _without_ it necessarily being an emergency or emergent situation. The threat has long since emerged. Now we have a lot of governors issuing decrees based on emergency authorities that they’ve been using for six months. This is quite simply a conflict with our basic notion of democracy. We do not have rulers, yet our governors are issuing rules purportedly carrying the weight of law with no oversight from legislature. Whether or not you agree with the orders, I think it’s intuitively likely that you can see how this is essentially a disruption in the relationship between people and their government, and as such it’s at least understandable how many people would feel these orders carry no moral weight (even if they’re not thinking from a legal perspective). And so the existence of gray market gyms and parties is at least understandable, even if we don’t condone such behavior.

dx87 6y ago
> Now we have a lot of governors issuing decrees based on emergency authorities that they’ve been using for six months. This is quite simply a conflict with our basic notion of democracy. We do not have rulers, yet our governors are issuing rules purportedly carrying the weight of law with no oversight from legislature. That was my biggest issue with the whole situation in the USA. All of these emergency measures were done without any mention of timelines, all the while a vocal part of the population was saying "fuck your freedoms", and "millions of people will die if they lift the lockdown". It's like everyone forgot about the Patriot Act overnight, and doesn't realize that the government doesn't like giving up control after whatever "emergency" situation happens. Something needed to be done, but this whole situation made me lose a lot of faith in the government and my fellow Americans.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I have never understood the demand for timelines. Pandemics do not care about calendars, and expecting our response to a pandemic to have an expiration date struck me as both folly and hubris of a lethal variety. Now if we expected our government to set conditions of the lock down ending, that would be better. Something based around the pandemic itself, such as new infections per day and test positivity would probably be best. But time? That’s not how this works.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Timelines can have milestones instead of dates, as you say. It's still a "timeline" because it's a sequence of events ordered by (indeterminate amounts of) time.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >I have never understood the demand for timelines. Pandemics do not care about calendars, and expecting our response to a pandemic to have an expiration date struck me as both folly and hubris of a lethal variety. I'm sure the legislature will have no problem forgoing a game of golf with lobbyists in order to vote to extend a bill that gives government more power. They have no problem doing that every time the Patriot Act comes back up. There's no good reason emergency measures can't have sunset clauses.
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      Pray tell, what powerful special interests have long-term incentives to force people to wear masks and stay out of restaurants? Like, are you actually suggesting that Big Mask and Big Pre-Cooked Meal Co. are going to take mayors or lawmakers golfing? I genuinely don't understand this theory.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        I don't think you interpreted my comment correctly. I was insulting the legislature by pointing out that they have no problem showing up and voting to curtail people's freedoms for nefarious reasons without a pandemic so there's no good reason they can't vote every few months on whether or not to continue to curtail people's freedoms to mitigate a pandemic.
kbenson 6y ago
> But a key attribute of an emergency (by definition) is “new” I think perhaps a better attribute for what you are going for is temporary, and temporary is relative. The changes due to the emergency of COVID-19 are temporary, but longer lasting that some other emergencies, like a fire for example. Although I've now gotten used to fire emergencies lasting weeks, which is entirely new as of the last few years.
gizmo686 6y ago
Covid strikes me as a unique situation that doesn't come up that often. It is a longer term threat than most "emergencies", but still fundamentally a temporary concern. One way or another, it will be resolved within a few years (hopefully sooner); and the facts on the ground still change relatively quickly. It may last for a longer term than most emergencies; but still operates on a smaller timeline than legislatures are used to operating. The only analogous situation I can think of is wars, and those are already given special treatment (and have seen a steady growth in executive authority over the past decades). Additionally, I am not aware of any executive (within the US) that has suspended or directly contradicted the legislative branch. If your issue is that the situation has gone on for too long to be dealt with using emergency authority, then your complaint is with the legislatures that have failed to either issue the rules themselves, or override the executive orders. I could see an arguement for updating the various authorizations for executive orders to allow them to be repealed by a simple majority vote not subject to veto; or even by a minority vote. However, as far as I am aware, there has not been a major conflict at the state level where these powers would be relevant.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  Michigan Rs are working to revoke the governor's authorities. https://apnews.com/b59e940736457cd98d73436be1a1d68a https://apnews.com/b59e940736457cd98d73436be1a1d68a
  - pageld 6y ago
    They're doing that in Minnesota too. But that's it. Just removing the emergency declaration. No other solutions to what to do are being proposed, just removing the declaration.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Covid strikes me as a unique situation that doesn't come up that often. It is a longer term threat than most "emergencies", but still fundamentally a temporary concern. Right now it's unclear if COVID-19 will behave like the 1918-19 Spanish flu and disappear after Winter 2021 because most everyone subceptible will have gotten it, or of it will be more like Picardy Fever, which hung around for two centuries.
roywiggins 6y ago
State legislatures can probably pull back these authorities if they want. The emergency measures by governors are usually based on provisions of state law, and can be revoked by law. Michigan has a procedure that may let the legislature do exactly this without even worrying about a veto: https://apnews.com/b59e940736457cd98d73436be1a1d68a https://apnews.com/b59e940736457cd98d73436be1a1d68a
clairity 6y ago
> "...the existence of gray market gyms and parties is at least understandable..." much of what you say is reasonable, but those two examples are actually quite different, and it's important to be careful with generalized pronouncements because of those important differences. folks going to a gym can still distance properly, and so can still reasonably curtail transmission. the primary purpose of the gym is a personal workout, not sharing indoor airspace with others for prolonged amounts of time with abandon. most (large) parties on the other hand are willfully defiant and reckless, with no intention of containing transmission. gyms are fine, small get-togethers are likely fine, all-night ragers are overwhelmingly unlikely to be fine.
dredmorbius 6y ago
There can be long emergencies. There is also the sense of an ongoing crises, in the sense of a threat in which there is a very real likelihood of either a very bad, or very positive outcome. The Covid situation strongly resembles this. Too there is the situation that even after the immediate onset of some emergency has passed, dealing with consequential effects carries great significance. To call on one of my preferred nonmedical disaster scenarios, in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure (China), 170,000 people ultimately lost their lives. "Only" 25,000 or so drowned in the initial deluge. Over 150,000 perished due to an inadequate, ineffective, or incompetent rescue, recovery, and relief operation, due to starvation and disease. Historical epidemics, even within the past century and certainly prior to it, have lasted years to decades. Come to think of it, the HIV/AIDS, TB (including TDR variants), MRSA, and hepatitis outbreaks also match this description. The notion that six months is an excessively long response window fails any experiential comparison. It does howevee reflect failures of education, communication, leadership, and comprehension.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Ongoing crises are not emergencies. If it lasts for long enough, it becomes normal, and must be dealt with by your normal planning. If your planning can't deal with it, it must be adapted, there is no reason to keep creating exceptional actions for something that is there every day. That said, it's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep exceptional procedures for an year. That's the minimum planning granularity they use. The GP's 6 months limit does not seem reasonable.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    What are they then? What are appropriate and/or inappropriate responses? What happens where a long-term crisis endures requiring rapid decisionmaking, faster than legislative deliberative practice allows?
    - lmm 6y ago
      > What happens where a long-term crisis endures requiring rapid decisionmaking, faster than legislative deliberative practice allows? The point is that that's impossible. If the crisis is ongoing for months then there is ipso facto enough time for the normal legislative process to apply. Applying some emergency decisionmaking process that bypasses the normal checks and balance is only justifiable for novel events.
JackFr 6y ago
On of the problems with the lockdown orders was that to a large extent they were arbitrary with respect to what was essential and open ended with respect to time. Such a prohibition could be effective if the public trusted the people or process which led to the lock downs, but the people showed themselves scarcely worthy of our trust and there really was no process. "We believe in science" is a fine mantra, though it doesn't directly lead to "liquor stores are essential". Our political elites were unable to resist politicizing every decision, gloating over others' misery and/or misrepresenting outcomes for political gain. So, yeah, basically now it seems like many people are deciding for themselves.
- curryst 6y ago
  I think some of the "essential" businesses were more essential to people maintaining their sanity than essential for people to survive. It was a "bread and circuses" play. Liquor stores and dispensaries are on that list; if you're going to lock everyone down for an extended period of time, they're going to get bored. Bored people get unhappy, and unrest increases. Letting people have their booze and weed increases the amount of time they can cope with the cabin fever (although there are certainly downsides).
  - tacocataco 6y ago
    Severe alcoholics will die without booze, but you're still right.

dx87 6y ago

> Now we have a lot of governors issuing decrees based on emergency authorities that they’ve been using for six months. This is quite simply a conflict with our basic notion of democracy. We do not have rulers, yet our governors are issuing rules purportedly carrying the weight of law with no oversight from legislature. That was my biggest issue with the whole situation in the USA. All of these emergency measures were done without any mention of timelines, all the while a vocal part of the population was saying "fuck your freedoms", and "millions of people will die if they lift the lockdown". It's like everyone forgot about the Patriot Act overnight, and doesn't realize that the government doesn't like giving up control after whatever "emergency" situation happens. Something needed to be done, but this whole situation made me lose a lot of faith in the government and my fellow Americans.

ashtonkem 6y ago
I have never understood the demand for timelines. Pandemics do not care about calendars, and expecting our response to a pandemic to have an expiration date struck me as both folly and hubris of a lethal variety. Now if we expected our government to set conditions of the lock down ending, that would be better. Something based around the pandemic itself, such as new infections per day and test positivity would probably be best. But time? That’s not how this works.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Timelines can have milestones instead of dates, as you say. It's still a "timeline" because it's a sequence of events ordered by (indeterminate amounts of) time.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >I have never understood the demand for timelines. Pandemics do not care about calendars, and expecting our response to a pandemic to have an expiration date struck me as both folly and hubris of a lethal variety. I'm sure the legislature will have no problem forgoing a game of golf with lobbyists in order to vote to extend a bill that gives government more power. They have no problem doing that every time the Patriot Act comes back up. There's no good reason emergency measures can't have sunset clauses.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Pray tell, what powerful special interests have long-term incentives to force people to wear masks and stay out of restaurants? Like, are you actually suggesting that Big Mask and Big Pre-Cooked Meal Co. are going to take mayors or lawmakers golfing? I genuinely don't understand this theory.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      I don't think you interpreted my comment correctly. I was insulting the legislature by pointing out that they have no problem showing up and voting to curtail people's freedoms for nefarious reasons without a pandemic so there's no good reason they can't vote every few months on whether or not to continue to curtail people's freedoms to mitigate a pandemic.

kbenson 6y ago

> But a key attribute of an emergency (by definition) is “new” I think perhaps a better attribute for what you are going for is temporary, and temporary is relative. The changes due to the emergency of COVID-19 are temporary, but longer lasting that some other emergencies, like a fire for example. Although I've now gotten used to fire emergencies lasting weeks, which is entirely new as of the last few years.

gizmo686 6y ago

Covid strikes me as a unique situation that doesn't come up that often. It is a longer term threat than most "emergencies", but still fundamentally a temporary concern. One way or another, it will be resolved within a few years (hopefully sooner); and the facts on the ground still change relatively quickly. It may last for a longer term than most emergencies; but still operates on a smaller timeline than legislatures are used to operating. The only analogous situation I can think of is wars, and those are already given special treatment (and have seen a steady growth in executive authority over the past decades). Additionally, I am not aware of any executive (within the US) that has suspended or directly contradicted the legislative branch. If your issue is that the situation has gone on for too long to be dealt with using emergency authority, then your complaint is with the legislatures that have failed to either issue the rules themselves, or override the executive orders. I could see an arguement for updating the various authorizations for executive orders to allow them to be repealed by a simple majority vote not subject to veto; or even by a minority vote. However, as far as I am aware, there has not been a major conflict at the state level where these powers would be relevant.

roywiggins 6y ago
Michigan Rs are working to revoke the governor's authorities. https://apnews.com/b59e940736457cd98d73436be1a1d68a https://apnews.com/b59e940736457cd98d73436be1a1d68a
- pageld 6y ago
  They're doing that in Minnesota too. But that's it. Just removing the emergency declaration. No other solutions to what to do are being proposed, just removing the declaration.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Covid strikes me as a unique situation that doesn't come up that often. It is a longer term threat than most "emergencies", but still fundamentally a temporary concern. Right now it's unclear if COVID-19 will behave like the 1918-19 Spanish flu and disappear after Winter 2021 because most everyone subceptible will have gotten it, or of it will be more like Picardy Fever, which hung around for two centuries.

roywiggins 6y ago

State legislatures can probably pull back these authorities if they want. The emergency measures by governors are usually based on provisions of state law, and can be revoked by law. Michigan has a procedure that may let the legislature do exactly this without even worrying about a veto: https://apnews.com/b59e940736457cd98d73436be1a1d68a https://apnews.com/b59e940736457cd98d73436be1a1d68a

clairity 6y ago

> "...the existence of gray market gyms and parties is at least understandable..." much of what you say is reasonable, but those two examples are actually quite different, and it's important to be careful with generalized pronouncements because of those important differences. folks going to a gym can still distance properly, and so can still reasonably curtail transmission. the primary purpose of the gym is a personal workout, not sharing indoor airspace with others for prolonged amounts of time with abandon. most (large) parties on the other hand are willfully defiant and reckless, with no intention of containing transmission. gyms are fine, small get-togethers are likely fine, all-night ragers are overwhelmingly unlikely to be fine.

dredmorbius 6y ago

There can be long emergencies. There is also the sense of an ongoing crises, in the sense of a threat in which there is a very real likelihood of either a very bad, or very positive outcome. The Covid situation strongly resembles this. Too there is the situation that even after the immediate onset of some emergency has passed, dealing with consequential effects carries great significance. To call on one of my preferred nonmedical disaster scenarios, in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure (China), 170,000 people ultimately lost their lives. "Only" 25,000 or so drowned in the initial deluge. Over 150,000 perished due to an inadequate, ineffective, or incompetent rescue, recovery, and relief operation, due to starvation and disease. Historical epidemics, even within the past century and certainly prior to it, have lasted years to decades. Come to think of it, the HIV/AIDS, TB (including TDR variants), MRSA, and hepatitis outbreaks also match this description. The notion that six months is an excessively long response window fails any experiential comparison. It does howevee reflect failures of education, communication, leadership, and comprehension.

marcosdumay 6y ago
Ongoing crises are not emergencies. If it lasts for long enough, it becomes normal, and must be dealt with by your normal planning. If your planning can't deal with it, it must be adapted, there is no reason to keep creating exceptional actions for something that is there every day. That said, it's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep exceptional procedures for an year. That's the minimum planning granularity they use. The GP's 6 months limit does not seem reasonable.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  What are they then? What are appropriate and/or inappropriate responses? What happens where a long-term crisis endures requiring rapid decisionmaking, faster than legislative deliberative practice allows?
  - lmm 6y ago
    > What happens where a long-term crisis endures requiring rapid decisionmaking, faster than legislative deliberative practice allows? The point is that that's impossible. If the crisis is ongoing for months then there is ipso facto enough time for the normal legislative process to apply. Applying some emergency decisionmaking process that bypasses the normal checks and balance is only justifiable for novel events.

JackFr 6y ago

On of the problems with the lockdown orders was that to a large extent they were arbitrary with respect to what was essential and open ended with respect to time. Such a prohibition could be effective if the public trusted the people or process which led to the lock downs, but the people showed themselves scarcely worthy of our trust and there really was no process. "We believe in science" is a fine mantra, though it doesn't directly lead to "liquor stores are essential". Our political elites were unable to resist politicizing every decision, gloating over others' misery and/or misrepresenting outcomes for political gain. So, yeah, basically now it seems like many people are deciding for themselves.

curryst 6y ago
I think some of the "essential" businesses were more essential to people maintaining their sanity than essential for people to survive. It was a "bread and circuses" play. Liquor stores and dispensaries are on that list; if you're going to lock everyone down for an extended period of time, they're going to get bored. Bored people get unhappy, and unrest increases. Letting people have their booze and weed increases the amount of time they can cope with the cabin fever (although there are certainly downsides).
- tacocataco 6y ago
  Severe alcoholics will die without booze, but you're still right.