New Mexico’s governor is just the latest Democrat to wield public-health emergencies as a political instrument. Conservatives are right to be wary.
Among political commentators, a cottage industry has sprung up around the notion that a commitment to paranoia and catastrophism has led the American Right to embrace the evidence-free assertion that the mid-pandemic status quo is making a comeback.
“Republicans are in a tizzy,” read the USA Today headline gracing Rex Huppke’s latest, over the return of “mask mandates that don’t exist.” This piece can coincide and, indeed, avoid any conflict with the Washington Post’s observation that a “few schools” have “mandated masks” because the item’s focus is on the unreasonable, even manic degree to which “conservatives hit back hard” against those mandates. In its report on a New Hampshire–based focus group of Republicans, Semafor observed that some right-leaning voters are inclined to evaluate the return of Covid-related restrictions in conspiratorial terms. Some see it as a plot designed to secure Democratic political objectives via subterfuge — an assertion for which the outlet has little time.
This campaign ran aground on Friday when New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham granted herself the authority to suspend provisions of the United States Constitution under the guise that such extraordinary measures are justified by the existence of a public-health emergency. Pursuant “to the full scope of emergency powers,” read a memo produced by the New Mexico Department of Health, “gun violence and drug use constitute conditions of public health importance” and are, therefore, subject to emergency restrictions and extraordinary interventions from law enforcement.
The governor’s extralegal assumption of powers not delegated to her didn’t happen in a vacuum. Lujan Grisham did not invent the public-health rationale for muscling unconstitutional initiatives into force; she merely applied in practice the logic to which her progressive allies are prone.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration explored the prospects for providing resources to abortion seekers in states with more restrictive abortion regimes by declaring a public-health emergency. Also this year, the Biden White House established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity within the Department of Health and Human Services, a program designed to operationalize the notion that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act authorizes the federal government to treat “environmental justice [as] a public health issue.” Racism isn’t just a “public health crisis” in the estimation of the medical professionals who insisted as much during the long, hot summer of 2020. Its downstream effects measured in “maternal mortality and other health inequities” also constitute “a public health crisis,” according to the administration, Democratic lawmakers, and much of the medical establishment.
It is a source of some reassurance that prominent Democrats like Representative Ted Lieu understood intuitively the undesirable political implications associated with Lujan Grisham’s power grab. “There is no such thing as a state public health emergency exception to the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote without equivocation. But his is, so far, a lonely voice. The American public-health establishment and the Democratic political actors over whom it enjoys outsize influence have earned the mistrust of those on the right, who are justified in their wariness of efforts to wield public-health emergencies as a political instrument.