“Crassly dictatorial”

Nothing in Gov. JB Pritzker’s emergency orders on COVID is more egregiously unjust, tyrannical and arbitrary than his moratorium on residential evictions. Pritzker, in his sole discretion, has effectively forced landlords alone to pay the cost of a free housing program. It’s that simple. His eviction ban prevents even mom and pop landlords from collecting rent they need to pay their mortgages and property taxes, and often to provide income they live on.

The United States Supreme Court last week struck down a federal moratorium on residential evictions. The ruling was based on the absence any authorization for the moratorium by Congress, not on broader constitutional issues like property rights, contract rights or due process. Therefore, as a strict legal matter, the ruling does not apply to Pritzker’s own eviction moratorium. It’s based on Pritzker’s emergency powers, as he sees things.

So Pritzker has been free to extend his emergency order again, as he did last week. And he will probably do so for an indefinite period of time. With COVID breaking through vaccinations at a much faster pace than originally hoped, it’s clear that COVID will be with us indefinitely. That means Pritzker will claim his authoritarian emergency power also extends indefinitely.

But with just a few short questions in his written concurrence with last week’s ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh showed why eviction bans at any level, from any perspective, are so crassly dictatorial and irrational. If the Centers for Disease Control can, through a federal eviction ban, force landlords the pay for free housing, what can’t they do? Here’s how Kavanaugh put it:

Could the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery
to the homes of the sick or vulnerable?
Require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to work
from home?
Order telecommunications companies to provide free high-speed Internet service to facilitate remote work?

Yes, they could – if you accept the absurd thinking behind eviction bans. Pritzker likewise could do the same things at the state level – and dictate countless similar actions – if you accept that thinking behind eviction bans.

The Character of Nations and Failed Leadership

Perhaps not since 1939, when this nation turned away over 900 German Jews seeking refuge from Nazi terror and certain death, has an American president acted as shamelessly as we approach President Biden’s unilateral deadline for evacuating our Afghan allies.

The jewel in the crown of Biden’s career.

Burning question that. To wear or not to wear? Science has the answer. Oh? Yes and no, says this writer in City Journal. Surely, the idea got off to a rocky start:

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.”

Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.”

Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.”

About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding.

Then something (must have) happened. On April 3 of that very same year, the same Jerome Adams said the CDC was changing its guidance . . . the general public should . . . wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.”

A dizzying round, wouldn’t you say? It got dizzier, as we know:

Sen. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance . . . are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status.

The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.

It’s not easy being a CDC.

more coming . . .

In the document, “a shockingly draconian exercise of papal authority, one that strikes at the heart of the spiritual life for millions of Catholics . . . the pope is seeking to exclude from parish churches – and ultimately to eliminate – a liturgical usage that has defined the religious culture of Catholics for centuries, a tradition stretching back in an organic continuum to the earliest days of the Church.”

If Pope Benedict’s own motu proprio Summorum pontificum is to be taken seriously, the legal validity of such a move would seem be inadmissible, and many bishops appear to be dumbfounded by its implications.

What’s more . . .

. . . this strange document, so filled with contradictions and unanswered questions, is no less shocking for its self-defeating nature. It appears to be designed to achieve precisely the opposite of its stated goals, principally the defense of the Second Vatican Council.

It seems that after so many years of suspicion regarding Pope Francis’ ultimate agenda, he has finally shown his hand, and his hand is nothing less than a souped-up version of the “hermeneutic of rupture” that unleashed chaos in the Church during the 1960s and 70s, and has continued to undermine the credibility of Vatican II since the council’s completion in 1965.

In effect, he embraces the post-council revolution.

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger (emeritus Benedict XVI) in 1988 identified this revoltion, citing “a mentality of narrow views that isolate Vatican II,” he told the bishops of Chile. “There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II.”

Indeed, the gauntlet has been thrown.

more more more here. . .

He wants them to change their position about allowing for reasons of conscience in people’s deciding whether to be vaccinated.

Amid disagreement among Catholic leaders over whether there is a moral obligation to receive a coronavirus vaccine, board members at the National Catholic Bioethics Center have told CNA that Blase Cardinal Cupich has urged that the center retract its guidance against mandated immunization.

One board member told CNA that Cardinal Cupich has been “leaning hard” on the bishops and some prominent lay board members, but did not elaborate on specific names.The NCBC board members spoke with CNA on the condition they not be identified by name.
The Archdiocese of Chicago did not respond to CNA’s request for comment.

The board members who spoke with CNA said that they would oppose the change they say the cardinal is seeking.

“I think everyone should be vaccinated,” said one of them, “and Catholics should be the first to give a good example. . . . but the conscience of religious people should be respected.”

Cupich has been applying “tremendous pressure” on the board “to retract its support for conscience or religious exemptions from coronavirus vaccine mandates,” wanting them “to argue in favor of such mandates.”

The NCBC, a bioethics think tank, has as its mission “to provide education, guidance, and resources to the Church and society to uphold the dignity of the human person in health care and biomedical research.” Its board, which includes bishops, a deacon, and lay persons, is chaired by Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans.