The government’s pandemic powers just got extended another 90 days.
The government’s pandemic powers just got extended another 90 days.
B ack in 2020, when almost every head of state in the world was declaring Covid-19 a state of emergency and national executives were obtaining their extraordinary powers, there was an international freak-out about Viktor Orbán, the husky Hungarian prime minister. One writer at the Atlantic said that the prime minister had undoubtedly crossed the line between emergency powers and outright authoritarianism. Another predicted that there would never be elections again in Hungary and that the Hungarian parliament had been dissolved forever. One of my colleagues at AEI said that a full-fledged dictatorship would arise from these emergency powers unless there was vigorous pushback from Brussels and Washington. Human Rights Watch warned that Orbán had seized “unlimited power.”
By July 20 of 2020, Viktor Orbán’s government had returned all his emergency powers back to the Hungarian parliament. His lifelong dictatorship lasted just 82 days.
Yesterday, meanwhile, Joe Biden extended America’s Covid emergency and the extraordinary executive powers that go with it another 90 days. He’s extending it another 90 days even though, several weeks ago, he said in an interview that the pandemic was over, and cited as evidence the scene around him of people attending a motor show. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.”
Currently, Covid cases and deaths are near year-long lows, as are hospital admissions. But the Biden administration wants Congress to approve $22.4 billion in additional pandemic funding. The ongoing emergency allows the Biden administration to keep up with expanded Medicaid benefits and send more money to hospitals and doctors. It funds the purchase of millions of Covid-19 vaccine boosters and the occasional Covid-19 tests that are mailed to U.S. citizens. The ongoing pandemic has also been used recently to justify the transfer of student-loan debt from students to taxpayers, in a brazen election-year giveaway to a needed constituency.
Hungary’s emergency powers weren’t without controversy. Two men had been detained, but not charged, under the confusing decree against spreading misinformation about the government during the pandemic. Some protesters were fined. (Although, unlike in New York City, the people defying public quarantine measures weren’t subjected to vaguely antisemitic heckling by the mayor.) And the Orbán government, in an abusive fashion, authorized the renovation of a public park in Budapest, a move that was meant to endear residents of the liberal city to their conservative leader, and which had been blocked under the normal rules of government by the mayor. Almost two years after surrendering these emergency powers, the Orbán government received them again as the parliament recognized the state of war in neighboring Ukraine as an emergency.
Power does tend toward abuse. In New York, Andrew Cuomo amended hundreds of state laws with his emergency powers, including one that provided a steady stream of revenue to independent local newspapers. If he governed east of the Elbe, this would have been considered an attack on the media. But, near the Hudson, he just received an Emmy for it.
Republicans should be loudly promising to end the state of emergency themselves if elected in November. They should be seeking out Democratic colleagues who want to end the emergency now. Every emergency warps government and erodes our resistance to sweeping powers. In my own lifetime, we were a people that balked at the idea of the feds looking at our library records. Now, we put up with being assigned another person’s student debt and with demands that our employers fire us for our health-care decisions.
It’s time to end this farce.