April 13, 2020

Trump Is Itching For a Fight With Governors Over Lockdown Orders

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Bloomberg dryly reports on this morning’s presidential tweets:

President Donald Trump declared Monday that he has the power to “open up” states and relax social-distancing practices adopted to combat the coronavirus outbreak, not governors. He didn’t elaborate on how he reached his conclusion….“It is the decision of the president, for many good reasons,” Trump said in a subsequent tweet. He didn’t list any.

Hmmm. Short of martial law, I suppose Trump would have to invoke the commerce clause. Would that work? It might! Shutting down all the nonessential businesses in a state arguably affects interstate commerce, after all. The irony is that liberals like me believe the commerce clause is fairly broad—broad enough, for example, to allow the federal government to mandate that everyone buy health insurance. So I might support Trump’s authority here. Conservatives, by contrast, believe in a narrow reading of the commerce clause—no individual mandate for them! So they would presumably oppose Trump’s power grab.

In any case, Trump has a couple of problems here. First, the states with lockdowns in place would go to court immediately and almost certainly find someone to stay Trump’s order. Then we’d have to wait for the Supreme Court to eventually rule, which would take more than a few months. By then it would be moot.

Second, even if the Supreme Court issued a fast emergency ruling, who’s going to enforce it? What happens if the states ignore Trump? Is he going to send in the National Guard? Something tells me that a city full of guards toting M16s is not going to be open for business no matter what the president says.


UPDATE: A reader points out an obvious flaw in my reasoning (and Trump’s, assuming he has any reasoning to begin with):

Quite so. Martial law it is, then.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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