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

Oct. 11, 2020, in the Wall Street Journal

The U.S. Supreme Court will decide as early as Monday whether to grant a stay in Pennsylvania Democratic Party v. Boockvar, in which the Keystone State’s supreme court, despite state election law to the contrary, ordered officials to count mail-in ballots received up to three days after Election Day. The justices should do so. This may turn out to be a normal election, in which we know the result by Nov. 4 and the Electoral College meets Dec. 14 to make it official. But a lot could go wrong, and the complex legal issues can be resolved only by the high court. Consider these possible scenarios:

• The counting drags on. If the election is close—and even if it isn’t—the process of tallying the vote could end up making the 2000 election dispute look simple. This year’s election procedures are being revised by courts in multiple states. This raises such questions as whether widespread mail-in voting and “ballot harvesting” are permissible and whether ballots received after Election Day can be counted, along with the overarching question of whether state or federal courts can create new election rules to address the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Bush v. Gore, the justices were forced to act by an impending deadline. Based on a specific constitutional grant of authority, Congress established the date on which the Electoral College must vote—a hard deadline (this year Dec. 14). In addition, Congress created a “safe harbor,” Dec. 8 this year, by which the state’s electoral slate is presumed to be valid. The court in 2000 acted to stop the recounts to meet the latter deadline.

Regardless of the statutory safe harbor, Article II of the Constitution requires each state to appoint electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct” in time for the Electoral College vote. Because this is a specific constitutional duty conferred on state legislatures, they are exercising federal authority. Therefore neither state nor federal courts may rewrite election laws applicable to the selection of presidential electors. Justice Brett Kavanaugh emphasized that point concurring in Andino v. Middleton, an Oct. 5 order in which the justices stayed an injunction by the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would have prevented South Carolina from enforcing its witness requirement for absentee ballots.

The Constitution similarly authorizes Congress to establish a single day—this year Nov. 3—on which presidential electors (and members of Congress) must be chosen. The election must be conducted on that day. This was the Supreme Court’s conclusion in Foster v. Love (1997), which involved congressional elections. The justices ruled that “the combined actions of voters and officials meant to make a final selection of an officeholder” must take place on Election Day, even if some aspects of voting may take place earlier. Thus although ballots can be completed beforehand and returned through the mail, they must be received by Nov. 3.

The justices have discretion over which petitions to hear and when. In cases involving a pending election, they should err on the side of speed and decisiveness. The sooner and more clearly these disputes are adjudicated, the likelier the election will go smoothly—and the less likely the need for an 11th-hour judicial intervention à la Bush v. Gore.

If counting isn’t complete by the time the Electoral College votes on Dec. 14, it’s possible one or more states will fail to appoint electors, violating its constitutional duty and leaving it disfranchised.

In that case, another question may arise: If states are absent from the Electoral College, does a candidate need a majority of the 538 available electoral votes (270) to be elected president or vice president, or is a majority of the votes cast sufficient? The 12th Amendment calls for “a majority of the whole number of electors appointed,” but the Supreme Court has never addressed this issue because it has never arisen. In only three elections—1789, 1864 and 1868—have any states’ electors gone unappointed, and in all three cases the winner had a majority either way.

• State authorities certify competing slates of electors. That’s what happened in the election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. Competing officials claimed their party had won 21 electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, plus a single vote from Oregon—together enough to be decisive. Congress enacted legislation establishing a 15-member bipartisan “electoral commission” to resolve the dispute. The result, just in time for Inauguration Day on March 4, 1877, was a political deal that recognized Hayes as president and ended Reconstruction throughout the South.

The law creating the commission rested on no obvious congressional authority and thus was surely unconstitutional. But in an era when the federal judiciary’s role was far more circumscribed than today, the issue didn’t come before the Supreme Court. That would be different today—and rightly so. A dispute over the certification of electors is a legal question, not a political one. It would have to be resolved in the courts, and, given the stakes, ultimately by the Supreme Court.

• Congress attempts a power grab. In the years after the 1876 dispute, lawmakers enacted statutes to address the presidential election process, including barely intelligible language that purports to establish rules for determining which electoral votes Congress will count and authorizing members to lodge disputes. This too is constitutionally dubious although like the 1876 solution, it has never been litigated.

The 12th Amendment provides that once the electoral votes have been cast, the vice president receives and opens the votes before a joint session of Congress. (Under current statutory law, this takes place Jan. 6, after the new Congress has taken office.) But this is a purely ministerial function. If no candidate has an Electoral College majority, the House and Senate, respectively, choose the president and vice president. That is Congress’s only legitimate role in deciding the election.

This is for good reason. The Framers considered having Congress choose the president but concluded it would give too much power to the legislative branch and violate the separation of powers. Their solution was the Electoral College, an ephemeral body with no institutional interests of its own. Judges don’t decide election outcomes either, but the Supreme Court has recognized since Marbury v. Madison (1803) that it is their duty to “say what the law is.”

However disputed the election results may be, there is no basis for Congress to override the Electoral College or refuse to count the votes. The House recognized this in its 1932 report proposing the 20th Amendment, which noted that it was using “the term ‘President elect’ in its generally accepted sense, as meaning the person who has received the majority of the electoral votes, or the person who has been chosen by the House of Representatives in the event that the election is thrown into the House. It is immaterial whether or not the votes have been counted [in Congress], for the person becomes President elect as soon as the votes are cast.”

Whichever candidates receive the majority of electoral votes on Dec. 14 immediately become president and vice president elect, and they will take office on Jan. 20, 2021—even if it takes a Supreme Court ruling to make it so.

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-supreme-court-and-the-election-returns-11602435660

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

Sept. 26, 2020, in the Wall Street Journal

It speaks volumes that the early opponents of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation have almost nothing to say about the work that has defined her career. Her scholarly and judicial writings place her at the center of the mainstream consensus on the judge’s role as an arbiter, not a lawmaker, who abides by the duty to enforce the law as written.

“A faithful judge resists the temptation to conflate the meaning of the Constitution with the judge’s own political preference,” she wrote in a 2017 article, shortly before she took the bench. That requires “fidelity to the original public meaning, which serves as a constraint upon judicial decisionmaking.” Judging also requires humility, to guard against “the feeling of infallibility” that often tempts judges to stray from the law. After all, “courts are not always heroes and legislatures are not always villains. They are both capable of doing good, and they are both capable of doing harm.” Ultimately, “the measure of a court is its fair-minded application of the rule of law.”

Her opinions for the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals show skilled legal craftsmanship and sensitivity for the people whose rights are at stake. Among her most influential decisions is Doe v. Purdue University(2019), on the rights of college students accused of sexual assault. The case involved a male student who was suspended from school and expelled from ROTC based on his girlfriend’s accusation that he had groped her while she slept. He disputed the charge, but the university refused to disclose the evidence against him, to consider exculpatory evidence, and to interview witnesses—even the accuser, whose account it deemed more “credible” than his. All this was “fundamentally unfair,” Judge Barrett concluded, falling “short of what even a high school must provide to a student facing a days-long suspension.”

The male student alleges that the university “tilted the process against men accused of sexual assault” to comply with since-rescinded U.S. Education Department guidance, and thereby discriminated against him on the basis of sex in violation of Title IX. Judge Barrett’s decision, joined by two other female judges, allows that claim to go foward.

What’s notable about the opinion is Judge Barrett’s skill in working through the complexities of the parties’ arguments—which involved disputes over technical legal matters such as standing and remedies, among many others—without losing sight of the bigger picture. Her decision was not an unalloyed win for the male student, who lost on his claim for money damages. But the persuasive force of its reasoning made it an instant landmark in the wave of litigation sparked by the 2011 Education Department guidance. More than half the courts of appeals and dozens of district-court cases have already cited it.

Judge Barrett brought the same analytical acumen to bear in Kanter v. Barr (2019). Her dissenting opinion is an originalist tour de force on the Second Amendment’s application to “felon dispossession” laws, which restrict gun ownership by convicted criminals. The majority held that the government may categorically strip even nonviolent felons of Second Amendment rights. Judge Barrett took a narrower view based on the amendment’s text and history.

Surveying laws and practice around the time of the amendment’s framing in the late 18th century, she found support only for keeping weapons from those deemed dangerous and likely to misuse them. That category, she concluded, is “simultaneously broader and narrower than ‘felons’—it includes dangerous people who have not been convicted of felonies but not felons lacking indicia of dangerousness”—like the plaintiff, who had been convicted of mail fraud, or hypothetical felons convicted for “selling pigs without a license in Massachusetts” or “redeeming large quantities of out-of-state bottle deposits in Michigan.”

In U.S. v. Watson (2018), a Fourth Amendment case, the court considered whether police had reasonable suspicion to block a parked car based on an anonymous report that “boys” were “playing with guns” nearby. Judge Barrett, writing for a unanimous panel, concluded they didn’t. Because Indiana law permits carrying a firearm in public without a license, that tip didn’t create a reasonable suspicion of a crime, even if it might have been prudent for police to visit the scene and speak with those involved voluntarily. Judge Barrett rejected out of hand the government’s argument that a more forceful response could be justified based on the locale: “People who live in rough neighborhoods may want and, in many situations, may carry guns for protection. They should not be subject to more intrusive police practices than are those from wealthy neighborhoods.”

Judge Barrett has also been sensitive to the needs of law enforcement. In Sanzone v. Gray (2018), she joined two other judges in an unsigned opinion holding that officers were entitled to qualified immunity from money damages when a suspect pointed a gun at officers immediately before he was shot. But she has also denied immunity in a series of cases in which officers allegedly lied or fabricated evidence in warrant affidavits. Her decisions hew close to the facts and the law, neither deferring to law enforcement nor accepting unfounded claims of abuse.

Judge Barrett has been especially attuned to overreaching by administrative agencies. She joined several opinions declining to defer to government agencies’ interpretations of their own regulations—a controversial doctrine known as Auer deference, which four Supreme Court justices said last year they were prepared to overturn.

She has also been aggressive in scrutinizing agencies’ factual determinations, particularly in Social Security cases. If C.S. Lewis was right that “integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching,” then these decisions deserve special appreciation, because they hold the government to its burden when the outcome matters to no one but the litigants.

A final illustration of Judge Barrett’s temperament and discernment can be found in two decisions on immigration law. In Cook County v. Wolf (2020), she dissented from a panel opinion blocking the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, which restricts admission of aliens likely to depend on public benefits. Her dissent was vindicated when the Supreme Court stayed the injunction. In Morales v. Barr (2020), however, she wrote a ruling against an administration policy preventing immigration judges from “administratively closing,” and thereby delaying, deportation cases. While the two opinions differ in their bottom-line results, what they share in common is diligent and faithful statutory analysis following the example of Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom Judge Barrett clerked.

Judge Barrett’s body of work shows her to be independent, discerning, diligent and fair. That’s why her opponents are likely to resort to personal attacks.

Messrs. Rivkin and Grossman practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. Mr. Rivkin served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-kind-of-judge-is-amy-coney-barrett-11601154273

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

30 August 2020 in The Hill

The talking heads and pundits attacking President Trump for giving his Republican National Convention acceptance speech from the White House lawn need to actually read the law. The Hatch Act is a precisely written statute — as is appropriate for a law that limits the indisputable First Amendment rights of federal workers — and it supports the president.

First and foremost, the Hatch Act explicitly exempts the president and vice president from its strictures. It defines “employee,” to which the Hatch Act’s restrictions apply, as someone “other than the President or Vice President.” This is constitutionally required because the president is a co-equal branch of the federal government and Congress can no more limit or restrain his political activities than he could limit theirs.

As a result, President Trump was entirely within his legal rights to give his acceptance speech from the South Lawn of the White House. And any members of the White House staff who may have assisted and supported the president on Thursday night also were in compliance with the Hatch Act.

Although the Hatch Act prohibits a wide swath of federal workers — including many of the individuals who work in the White House — from engaging in political activities while on duty or “in any room or building occupied,” the White House lawn is not such a room or building.  Had Congress intended to extend Hatch Act restrictions to entire government installations or compounds, it could and would have said so.

In addition, there is a further exemption from the relevant Hatch Act restrictions for White House staff members whose work and responsibilities continue beyond normal working hours and while on travel — which includes many if not most of them. These individuals are permitted to engage in political activities while on duty and in a federal room or building, as long as “the costs associated with that political activity are not paid for by money derived from the Treasury of the United States.” The president has stated that the Republican National Committee would be picking up the tab for his White House event (and the fireworks afterwards).

Similarly, the attacks on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for delivering a convention speech from Jerusalem, endorsing President Trump’s reelection, are similarly misplaced based on these same provisions.  In addition to exempting senior White House staff from Hatch Act restrictions on political activities while on duty or in a federal building, Section 7324(b) of the Hatch Act also exempts federal officials who are confirmed by the Senate and who “determine[] policies to be pursued by the United States in relations with foreign powers or in the nationwide administration of Federal laws.” This language includes, at a minimum, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and other members of the president’s cabinet.  

Such officials cannot, of course, use their “official authority or influence” to affect an election’s result, but the State Department has made clear that Secretary Pompeo spoke in his private capacity from Israel, not as secretary. Consequently, his speech was entirely consistent with his legal and ethical responsibilities.

Indeed, to the extent that Secretary Pompeo’s critics claim that he has somehow acted unethically or improperly, even if not illegally, it is significant that Congress itself made clear, in the Hatch Act’s first section, that federal employees — which includes cabinet members — “should be encouraged to exercise fully, freely, and without fear of penalty or reprisal, and to the extent not expressly prohibited by law, their right to participate or to refrain from participating in the political processes of the Nation.” The Hatch Act is a technical law to be applied as far as it goes and no further.

Finally, using the White House as a campaigning site is far from unprecedented. Jimmy Carter is said to have coined the phrase “Rose Garden Campaign,” complaining in 1976 that President Ford was taking advantage of the White House as a backdrop for his campaign. Then, in 1980 — facing economic disaster, the Iran hostage crisis and candidate Ronald Reagan, President Carter fell into the same strategy. Of course, it is only fair to note that the Rose Garden strategy did not turn out well for either sitting president in 1976 or 1980. 

But, there was nothing unlawful or improper about Presidents Ford and Carter using the White House grounds to help their campaigns then, and there is nothing improper about President Trump using it now.  

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. 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://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/514192-there-was-nothing-unlawful-or-improper-about-trumps-acceptance-speech

Podcast of panel discussion hosted by the National Review Institute, August 5th, 2020.

The “Trump Resistance” claims the President is guilty of many crimes, regularly abuses his power, and is a threat to democracy. To bolster their case and support their resistance, the President’s critics have invented a new body of “Trump Law,” rewriting legal norms, standards and definitions across the legal landscape – spanning impeachment, obstruction of justice, “collusion,” executive privilege, management of the executive branch, national injunctions, foreign relations, and more. David Rivkin joins John Yoo, Curt Levey, and Andrew McCarthy to analyze the many areas of law affected by this effort, highlighting the threat it poses to the rule of law and speculating on the long-term impact.

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

6 May 2020 in The Hill

Republican senators, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), are right to oppose legislation that would provide a broad federal bailout of highly indebted states. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York calls this legislative stance “toxic and poison,” but it is constitutionally required.  

As senators, including Florida’s Rick Scott and Texas’s Ted Cruz, made clear in a recent letter to President Trump, no one doubts that the federal government can and should assist states in meeting the coronavirus emergency. Nor can there be any reasonable objection that this aid will benefit certain states — especially New York, which has the majority of coronavirus cases — more than others. There is, however, a profound objection to any plan that would use federal resources to ensure that heavily indebted states need not reassess their policy priorities. These states find themselves in dire fiscal straits primarily because of underfunded pension plans for their public employees. Virtually all of these states are Democrat-run and three of them — Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut — are facing a particularly calamitous fiscal situation.

Politics aside, bailing out unfunded state pension plans with federal dollars would violate the Constitution’s often ignored, but nevertheless binding, “general welfare” clause. Congress does not, in fact, have unfettered power to spend money as it sees fit. The Constitution permits it to tax, and by implication spend, “to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.” (Art. I, § 8, cl. 1) This language was neither puffery nor surplusage, but was added by the Constitution’s Framers for a compelling purpose.

The Framers were determined to vest the federal government with sufficient authority to carry out its national purpose, but also to limit that power. These principles are reflected in numerous constitutional provisions and that document’s overall architecture. Thus, all congressional powers have some limit, some cabining principle. Just as the commerce clause is limited to the regulation of economic activities and does not permit Congress to exercise a general “police power” regulating people simply because they are here, so Congress’s ability to tax and spend is limited by the requirement that this must be for the general welfare.

This requirement stems from the Framers’ concern that large, powerful states would dominate the federal government and would use federal institutions to benefit their own interests, rather than the Union as a whole. Indeed, the question of how to ensure that a cabal of large states would not run roughshod over small states dominated much of the Constitutional Convention. It shaped many key constitutional provisions, including the bicameral federal legislature, with all states having equal representation in the Senate, the apportionment requirement for direct federal taxes, and the language mandating that “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”  

Even such an ardent proponent of a strong federal government as Alexander Hamilton was sufficiently concerned about states acting selfishly that he argued initially for abolishing the states as independent sovereigns altogether because “states will prefer their particular concerns to the general welfare.” Eventually, this concern resulted in the constitutional language that required the federal government to operate for the general welfare of the entire nation. Notably, this language is found both in the Constitution’s preamble and Article I, Section 8, which enumerates Congress’s powers. And, as is made clear in an early draft of the general welfare clause, the Framers understood the phrase to mean that “which may concern the common interests of the Union.”

This understanding of the clause is similarly revealed in a debate that took place in September 1787, near the Convention’s end, after the general welfare language had taken its final form.  This debate concerned whether an additional provision should be included in the Constitution specifically vesting the federal government with the power to build canals, which would benefit some states more than others. Some thought yes; others argued that tasks such as canal-building should be the responsibility of the states that would directly benefit. Regardless of this disagreement, they all appeared to have shared the same view that such authority — which today we would take for granted as being well within Congress’s spending power — was not already present.

As in other areas, after the Constitution’s ratification, the Framers took different views of how far the spending power could go. Hamilton, always the preeminent Federalist, took the position that the power to tax and spend constituted a separate grant of authority to Congress, while James Madison believed it was merely a support for Congress’s otherwise enumerated powers.  Hamilton’s view prevailed and was endorsed by the Supreme Court in the 1936 case of United States v. Butler. The court did not, however, determine the meaning of “general welfare” in Butler, except to note that Hamilton understood it to mean “the purpose must be ‘general, and not local.’”

To be sure, the definition of what types of expenditures advance general welfare has been much debated throughout U.S. history. Prior to the Civil War, a stringent definition prevailed, with Congress vigorously debating expenditures for various types of infrastructure projects and presidents vetoing spending bills that they believed served local needs and did not sufficiently advance general welfare. Post-Civil War, and particularly following the New Deal, a far broader federal spending pattern emerged. This reflected the view that, using federal dollars to pay the costs of natural disasters and similar emergencies, or various infrastructure projects, while benefiting some states more than others at any given point in time, would benefit the nation as a whole in the long run. This practice broadened the understanding of what expenditures served the national interest, but it did not and could not abolish the general welfare requirement altogether.

Thus, however broad Congress’s power to tax and spend may be, this remains the fundamental limitation — expenditures must promote national, rather than local, interests. And it is difficult to imagine a more locally-oriented program than one designed to prop up the fiscal choices of a group of states — to benefit state and municipal government employees by establishing generous, underfunded pension systems — at the expense of other states. Significantly, numerous states repeatedly have rejected similar pension arrangements for themselves, vividly manifesting their view that this was not in their best interests or conducive to general welfare.  Indeed, by subsidizing a particular vision of what constitutes a proper state government, one of the basic justifications for our federalist system — that states can make their own choices as laboratories — would be discarded. True federalism requires that the federal government neither coerces states nor imposes on states’ fiscal burdens that properly belong to individual states that have incurred them.

Senate Republicans have every right, and all senators have an equal obligation, to ensure that any funding legislation meets the general welfare requirement, so that federal dollars cannot be used to pay, either directly or indirectly, for the repair of long-term fiscal liabilities of any recipient state.  

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. 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 and have litigated separation-of-powers cases, representing states in challenges to ObamaCare and the federal Clean Power Plan.

Source: https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/495961-bailing-out-states-violates-the-constitutions-general-welfare-clause

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

15 April 2020 in the Wall Street Journal

President Trump has come under attack this week for saying he has “absolute authority” to reopen the economy. He doesn’t – his authority is limited. But while the president can’t simply order the entire economy to reopen on his signature, neither is the matter entirely up to states and their governors. The two sides of this debate are mostly talking past each other.

The federal government’s powers are limited and enumerated and don’t include a “general police power” to regulate community health and welfare. That authority rests principally with the states and includes the power to impose coercive measures such as mandatory vaccination, as the Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). Nor may the federal government commandeer state personnel and resources to achieve its ends or otherwise coerce the states into a particular course of conduct. There is no dispute about these respective state and federal powers.

In most federal-state disputes, the question is what happens when authorities at both levels exercise their legitimate constitutional powers and cross-purposes. Here, the president has the edge. The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause requires that when the federal government acts within its proper sphere of constitutional authority, state law and state officials must give way to the extent that federal requirements conflict with their own. Federal power encompasses a broad power to regulate the national economy. Thus although the president lacks plenary power to “restart” the economy, he has formidable authority to eliminate restraints states have imposed on certain types of critical commercial activity.

Much of this authority was established by Congress in the Defense Production Act of 1950, which Mr. Trump has invoked on a limited basis to require American manufacturers to make personal protective equipment and ventilators. Most of his current critics lauded these actions and urged him to do more.

The DPA was enacted principally to assures U.S. military preparedness. But it defines “national defense” broadly to include “emergency preparedness” and “critical infrastructure protection and restoration.” The law “provides the President with an array of authorities to shape national defense preparedness programs and to take appropriate steps to maintain and enhance the domestic industrial base.” It authorizes him to prioritize the production of certain products and to “allocate materials, services, and facilities in such a manner, upon such conditions, and to such an extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.”

The DPA isn’t a bank check. The president cannot, for example, impose wage and price controls without additional congressional action, and he is often required to use carrots rather than stisk to achieve the law’s purposes. Nevertheless, because he is acting under an express congressional grant of authority, he is operating, as Justice Robert Jackson explained in his iconic concurring opinion in the “steel seizure” case Youngstown v. Sawyer (1952), at the apex of his legal and constitutional power.

Any state restrictions on commerce or personal behavior would have to yield to the federal imperative. “The states have now power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden, or in any other manner control, the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by congress to carry into execution the powers vested in the general government,”, the Supreme Court explained in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). States, whether acting alone or in coordination, would be barred, for example, from forbidding their residents to return to work in critical industries, or from restraining industrial, agricultural, or transportation facilities in ways that impede the federal mandate.

That said, even the most expansive interpretation of the DPA, and other federal statutes regulating interstate commerce, wouldn’t permit President Trump to reopen all aspects of the American economy on his own authority. The reopening of many local businesses, such as restaurants and nonessential retailers, would be up to the states.

Thus state governors and lawmakers are as vital a part of this effort as the president and Congress. Federal and state officials have to work together, however much they may dislike each other politically or personally to get America back on its feet.

The truly difficult legal issues coming out of the Covid-19 crisis are whether government at all levels has sufficiently protected individual rights. All exercises of federal and state power, emergency or not, are subject to the overriding limitations of the Bill of Rights. The courts have traditionally taken the nature and extent of national emergencies into account in construing and applying these rights, but they cannot be ignored entirely.

So far the American people have largely accepted temporary restrictions on their liberty – especially freedom of assembly and religion – that may not stand up to court challenges. It would serve the president and governors well to make a priority of easing these restrictions and others as soon as possible after the worst of the danger has passed.

Mssrs. 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 and have litigated separation-of-powers cases, representing states in challenges to ObamaCare and the federal Clean Power Plan.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/presidential-power-is-limited-but-vast-11586988414