By David B. Rivkin Jr. and James Taranto

May 18, 2021, in the Wall Street Journal

Why do we have to wear face masks? The official answer changes from week to week. “It’s a patriotic responsibility, for God’s sake,” President Biden said when asked on April 30 why he still did despite being vaccinated against Covid-19. But last week he recast mask mandates as a coercive sanction against the unvaccinated. “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do,” he tweeted Thursday.

In fact, no rule had changed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention merely issued “guidance” that if you’re fully vaccinated, “you can resume activities without wearing a mask . . . except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations.” Within days, many states relaxed their mask edicts, and Washington followed on Monday by applying its decrees only to unvaccinated people on most federal property. But California officials said they’d stand pat until June 15, and the White House and CDC still require universal masking on public transportation and at transit hubs, including airports.

Critics argue that masking has become a form of virtue signaling. Mr. Biden reinforced that claim with his appeals to patriotism, which began during last year’s campaign as a rebuttal to the mask-resistant President Trump. But if wearing a mask conveys a political message, mandating it is constitutionally suspect. “No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein,” Justice Robert Jackson wrote in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which held that forcing schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance violated their freedom of speech.

To wear a mask in public is to affirm a viewpoint no less powerful than the Pledge of Allegiance: that Covid poses a crisis so dire as to demand unprecedented government control of our lives and a transformation of the norms of interpersonal behavior. Ubiquitous mask mandates make assent impossible to avoid except by breaking the law or staying home.

Officials would argue that they are regulating conduct, not expression, and that they are doing so to protect public health. A few months ago that defense almost certainly would have prevailed. The pandemic’s severity, coupled with the lack of effective means to control it, would have persuaded most judges to defer to the government’s contention that the danger of infection outweighed the right to dissent or any other rights (such as bodily autonomy) that plaintiffs might assert.

Now the facts have changed. The pandemic has receded rapidly, with the number of daily U.S. infections down 88% since its January peak and still declining. Since mid-April vaccines have been available free of charge to any adult in America. Almost 124 million Americans—including more than 47% of adults and nearly 73% of the vulnerable 65-and-over population—have been vaccinated fully. The CDC acknowledges implicitly with its latest guidance that vaccinated people are at trivial risk of contracting the virus or transmitting it to others.

All this would be relevant to a court considering a First Amendment challenge to a mask mandate. To defend content-based limits on speech, the government must satisfy a standard known as strict scrutiny. It has three elements, all of which must be met: The government has to demonstrate that the restriction furthers a “compelling interest,” that it is “narrowly tailored” to fulfill its objective, and that it is the “least restrictive means” of doing so.

The government undoubtedly has a compelling interest in preventing infectious disease. But that doesn’t necessarily imply a compelling need for mask mandates. If it did, they could be justified in perpetuity. Universal masking would reduce spread of the flu, the common cold and other infections, but that has never been thought to justify mandating it except during a pandemic.

Widespread vaccination makes mask mandates far too broad to be a properly tailored remedy. Selective enforcement against the unvaccinated is impracticably cumbersome, so authorities have to rely on what CDC Director Rochelle Walensky calls “the honor system”—which presumably is why the CDC hasn’t relaxed its own order requiring universal masking in transportation facilities. Many of the relaxed mandates arbitrarily apply to the 32 million Americans with natural immunity from prior infection unless they are also vaccinated. And if selective enforcement were possible, it would compound the First Amendment violation with an intrusion into medical privacy by effectively requiring the disclosure of vaccination status as a condition of going out in public.

Some mandates still apply outdoors—including Mr. Biden’s in national parks until Monday—despite scientific evidence that open-air transmission of Covid is vanishingly rare. The University of Massachusetts Amherst suspended three students for not wearing masks at an outdoor off-campus party last month. It barred them even from online classes, making clear the action was punitive, not preventive.

Mask mandates are ill-tailored for another reason: Practical limits on their application make them underinclusive. For obvious reasons they exclude restaurants, or at least seated customers. But if a restaurant is safe enough to operate without masks, other similarly or less crowded public places should be too. Nor do mandates apply in private homes, where Covid spread is “common,” according to the CDC.

Most important, mask mandates have ceased to be the least restrictive means of stopping viral spread. For several months, Washington and state governments have made a determined effort to encourage vaccination. That measure has involved almost no coercion, making it much less restrictive than mask mandates.

It has also proved far more effective. Nationwide infections rose more or less steadily in the fall and early winter—including in states that had strong mask mandates—before peaking in January as vaccination got under way. Infections declined sharply until mid-February, dropped more slowly into late March, then rose a bit before resuming their decline in mid-April, right around the time vaccines became available to all adults. The decline has continued even as some states, including Texas and Florida, lifted mask mandates.

In 2009 a reporter asked President Obama why he wasn’t wearing an American flag pin on his lapel. “Right after 9/11, I had a pin,” Mr. Obama answered. “Shortly after 9/11—particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security—I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.”

With the nationwide pandemic over or nearly so, there is no reason to deny any American the freedom to make the same decision about that mask on his face.

Mr. Rivkin practices appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/face-masks-and-the-first-amendment-11621356093

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

Nov. 27, 2020, in the Wall Street Journal

The Covid-19 pandemic “has served as a sort of constitutional stress test,” Justice Samuel Alito observed this month. “The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” The setting underscored the point: Justice Alito made his remarks in an online speech that ordinarily would have been delivered in a cavernous hall, before a crowd of hundreds gathered for the Federalist Society’s annual dinner.

A public-health emergency may justify curtailments of liberty that would be unacceptable in normal times. But even in an emergency, America’s government doesn’t wield unlimited powers. Measures taken to deal with this pandemic have imposed severe restrictions on the most basic rights and liberties, often with little consideration of their legal basis. The U.S. Constitution prohibits many of the most draconian measures taken or under consideration.

Joe Biden has implicitly acknowledged the point. Accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in August, the former vice president declared: “We’ll have a national mandate to wear a mask—not as a burden, but to protect each other. It’s a patriotic duty.” But his transition website promises only to “implement mask mandates nationwide by working with governors and mayors.”

A federal mask mandate is a nonstarter because it would have to be grounded in one of Congress’s constitutionally enumerated powers, all of which have limits. The go-to section to justify federal regulation is the clause granting lawmakers the power “to regulate commerce . . . among the several states.” As the Supreme Court held in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), which involved the ObamaCare mandate to buy medical insurance, individuals must be engaged in commercial activity before Congress can regulate them. Congress cannot impose requirements on the citizenry “precisely because they are doing nothing,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

The same is true of other prospective federal anti-Covid measures, such as a national “stay at home” order or an overall economic lockdown. Congress does have broad authority to regulate business, which it could use to impose workplace safety rules, including mask mandates. But nationwide lockdowns are a dubious legal proposition. Congress has never attempted to eliminate all or most economic activity. Any such requirement, even if supportable under the Commerce Clause, would raise significant concerns about the constitutional rights of people prevented from earning a living.

State and local mandates pose a more complicated question. Unlike the federal government, states have a general “police power” that permits them to enact public-health regulations. State and local mask mandates will likely survive judicial scrutiny, as the burden is relatively small. But quarantine requirements imposed on otherwise healthy people, and especially stay-at-home orders and shutdowns of economic activity, are another matter.

Courts have generally upheld quarantines as proper exercises of state police power. But they have traditionally required the involuntary seclusion only of infected individuals and those exposed to them. Quarantines for travelers may survive constitutional challenges. They are generally limited to 14 days or less and arguably supported by the states’ interest in limiting the potential to spread the infection from viral “hot spots.”

But states have no constitutional authority to discriminate against out-of-state persons, goods or services or to burden interstate commerce unduly. It would be hard to justify restrictions that draw arbitrary distinctions between intra- and interstate travelers or among states. New York’s current rules, for instance, exempt travelers within New York and from adjacent states while ordering quarantine for those from distant states with lower Covid rates.

Universal, open-ended stay-at-home mandates and general economic shutdowns are unprecedented in America. The former amount to the imposition of house arrest on vast numbers of people without due process or any provision for basic needs. They raise important constitutional issues involving freedom of assembly, due process and equal protection.

Mandating how many individuals can meet in one’s home, as some states did in time for Thanksgiving, is particularly difficult to justify. If the government can regulate your dinner guests, what can’t it do? Although the government has imposed location-specific curfews in times of war and civil disorder to address specific public-safety concerns, protracted populationwide curfews directed at more-nebulous threats will be difficult to justify.

Some of these issues will doubtless reach the Supreme Court, but lower courts are already wrestling with them. In County of Butler v. Wolf, William S. Stickman IV, a federal district judge in Pittsburgh, struck down Pennsylvania’s most draconian anti-Covid-19 measures. These included strict limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings, stay-at-home requirements, and the lockdown of businesses that aren’t “life-sustaining.” Judge Stickman found these measures wanting on First Amendment, due-process and equal-protection grounds, even under an “intermediate” level of scrutiny.

“A public health emergency does not give Governors and other public officials carte blanche to disregard the Constitution for as long as the medical problem persists,” Judge Stickman concluded in his September decision. He took particular note of Pennsylvania’s diversity of communities—and hence of Covid risks—as against the state’s “one-size fits all approach” to stay-at-home orders, which were not in any way tailored to minimize the burden while achieving the government’s legitimate ends.

Judge Stickman concluded that Pennsylvania’s business lockdown requirements failed to meet even the lowest level of constitutional scrutiny—being rationally related to a proper state purpose. He noted that the state had not articulated “a set, objective and measurable definition” of “life-sustaining” businesses, and that its requirements arbitrarily favored large retailers over small ones. Pennsylvania has appealed Judge Stickman’s decision, but it is difficult to see how the state can defend such capricious and comprehensive restrictions. The same goes for other states: Such details as closing health clubs but not beauty salons (New York), or imposing restrictions on the use of sailboats but not motorboats (Michigan), appear driven not by any rational basis but by government officials’ aesthetic and ideological preferences.

No doubt some judges will be inclined to defer to government officials in an emergency. Five Supreme Court justices did so earlier this year when churches in California and Nevada sought to enjoin state orders limiting the number of worshipers at services. In both cases, Chief Justice Roberts voted with the court’s four Democratic appointees to deny immediate relief.

But the other four justices dissented in both cases on the grounds that the orders violate freedom of religion by imposing greater limits on religious activities than comparable secular businesses, including casinos. As Justice Alito quipped during his Federalist Society speech: “Take a quick look at the Constitution. You will see the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which protects religious liberty. You will not find a craps clause.”

This Wednesday the court granted injunctive relief to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and an Orthodox synagogue, which are challenging New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s occupancy limits. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the new 5-4 majority. In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch observed that the state had ignored “long-settled principles” that almost always prohibit government officials “from treating religious exercises worse than comparable secular activities.”

One area in which the states clearly can impose anti-Covid mandates is vaccinations. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), the Supreme court upheld the city of Cambridge’s authority to respond to a smallpox outbreak by mandating vaccines for all inhabitants. The justices affirmed that “the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

Congress may also be able to impose vaccination or testing on employees or others engaged in commerce. But proponents of economic lockdowns overreach when they cite Jacobson in support. The case was modest in scope and dealt with a far surer remedy for a deadlier virus than Covid-19.

Federal and state officials have every right to urge Americans to take precautions against viral spread, though it would help if they consistently followed their own advice. But when the government moves beyond persuasion to coercion, its requirements must meet constitutional muster.

Some of them will, such as well-tailored state-level mask and vaccination mandates. Others probably won’t, including broad curfews, stay-at-home orders, economic lockdown mandates and measures that target protected First Amendment activities. There may be a “judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis,” Justice Gorsuch wrote in the New York case. “But . . . we may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack.”

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-constitution-will-survive-covid-19-11606502792

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

24 February 2019 in the Wall Street Journal

Did law-enforcement officials plot to remove President Trump from office? Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggests they might have. In a recent interview, Mr. McCabe said that in May 2017 Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “raised the issue” of using the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office “and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort.” According to Mr. McCabe, Mr. Rosenstein was “counting votes or possible votes.”

Exactly what happened is unclear. A statement from Mr. Rosenstein’s office called Mr. McCabe’s account “inaccurate and factually incorrect” and asserted: “There is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.” But this is a potentially serious matter, and should be fully investigated.

The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, primarily to provide for the appointment of a new vice president when that office becomes vacant, as it did when Lyndon B. Johnson acceded after John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. It also contains a section creating a process whereby a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” can temporarily cede authority to the vice president, and one through which the vice president and a majority of “principal officers”—cabinet members—can sideline a president who is disabled but won’t acknowledge it.

It is that last provision that supposedly excited Mr. Rosenstein’s interest. Mr. McCabe said the idea came in a discussion of “why the president had insisted on firing the director [Mr. Comey] and whether or not he was thinking about the Russia investigation.” To prevent interference with that probe, Mr. McCabe said, he opened new counterintelligence and criminal investigations of the president in May 2017, both of which were shortly subsumed into the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller, whom Mr. Rosenstein appointed.  Read more »

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley

Feb. 14, 2019, in the Wall Street Journal

As William Barr begins his term as attorney general, House Democrats are aiming a “subpoena cannon” at President Trump, hoping to disable his presidency with investigations and possibly gather evidence to impeach him. Mr. Trump fired back in his State of the Union address: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” To protect the presidency and separation of powers, Mr. Barr should be prepared to seek a stay of all congressional investigations of Mr. Trump’s prepresidential conduct.

The president is not one among many, as are legislators and judges. Crippling his ability to function upsets the constitutional balance of power. For this reason, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has repeatedly concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or prosecuted. The same logic should apply to congressional investigations.

Congress is targeting Mr. Trump’s actions before becoming president because there are well-established constitutional limits, grounded in separation-of-powers doctrine, on its ability to investigate his official conduct. In U.S. v. Nixon (1974), the Supreme Court recognized a constitutionally based, although not unlimited, privilege of confidentiality to ensure “effective discharge of a President’s powers.” In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the justices held that presidents and ex-presidents have absolute immunity against civil liability for official presidential acts.

Executive immunity for prepresidential activity is less clear. In Clinton v. Jones (1997), which arose out of Paula Jones’s accusation that Bill Clinton sexually harassed her while he was governor of Arkansas, the justices reasoned that Ms. Jones’s lawsuit could proceed because the burden on the presidency objectively appeared light. Specifically, because only three sitting presidents had been sued for prepresidential acts, the justices thought it “unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the presidency.” Read more »

By David B. Rivkin and Randall John Meyer

November 23, 2018, in the Wall Street Journal

The Internal Revenue Service infamously targeted dissenters during President Obama’s re-election campaign. Now the IRS is at it again. Earlier this year it issued a rule suppressing huge swaths of First Amendment protected speech. The regulation appears designed to hamper the marijuana industry, which is still illegal under federal law although many states have enacted decriminalization measures. But it goes far beyond that.