Pandemic Makes a Hard Left.

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: COVID-19 vaccination

IN DEALING WITH the pandemic, Democrats believe direct executive commands are preferable to allowing individuals to choose what is in their own best interests based on full information. They violate with impunity constitutional strictures that forbid the exercise of raw executive power and that declare law-making the exclusive province of Congress and state legislatures. They also violate the First Amendment protections of the information marketplace, suppressing all dissent from government's demand that everyone be vaccinated.

Pres. Joe Biden and his cohorts expect Americans to give up their freedoms and accept official mandates in servile and robotic obeisance. They urge censorship of all information that deviates or dissents from the official vaccination message. They insist on a one-sizefits-all approach regardless of personal preferences, religious scruples, medical advice to the contrary, or natural immunity.

Their script is classic tyranny, a tyranny our Founding Fathers rejected in favor of individual freedom of choice. It is their gross, condescending paternalism that infuses every COVID-19 policy choice, reflecting an imperious disregard for individual rights to decide what drugs to take to combat disease. That course of action was made glaringly apparent 13 years ago by then-Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who infamously stated: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."

There is, of course, an alternative to state paternalism. It is the intellectual underpinning of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. It starts with the premise that we are a free and sovereign people and that government is our servant, not our master--that rights to life, liberty, and property are from God and are unalienable (not from government and removable by government); that Americans must be free to choose what is in their own best interests, confident in the knowledge that the best test of truth, even scientific truth, is not government sanction but the power of thought to gain acceptance in the idea marketplace where debate is liberally tolerated and protected. Under our Constitution, we have staked our all on these principles--without them we are not a free people.

In the context of commercial speech, the Supreme Court well explained this understanding when rejecting the very rationale now used by Pres. Biden and Democrats nationwide to justify forced vaccination...