Pennsylvania can begin national reckoning

In 1789, at the Constitutional Convention, Virginia’s Edmund Randolph warned that the presidency would be a “foetus of monarchy.” Today, something akin to monarchy is enthroned in Pennsylvania. On May 18, however, Pennsylvanians can prune its pretensions by amending their state’s constitution.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, most Americans had a high tolerance for combating the infectious disease with executive fiats curtailing normal freedoms and fundamental rights — to work, travel and associate freely. Inevitably, capriciousness diminished this tolerance, particularly in Pennsylvania. Here “non-life-sustaining businesses” were closed, and myriad other arbitrary distinctions were enforced — or exempted from enforcement through waivers secretively dispensed — by Gov. Tom Wolf, issuing edicts under powers he acquired by declaring a disaster emergency.

The legislature, after unavailing attempts to make Wolf more collaborative (he has vetoed many measures), proposed the constitutional amendments that Pennsylvanians will affirm or reject on May 18. One would prevent the governor from vetoing the legislature’s resolution ending a disaster declaration. The other would stipulate that a governor’s declaration of a disaster emergency shall expire after 21 days unless extended by the legislature.

But choosing the wording of Pennsylvania ballot questions is a prerogative of the governor’s administration — the Department of State. Wolf’s department has produced a meretricious wording. The actual amendment would prevent what is now possible — a governor ruling unilaterally, in perpetuity, under emergency declarations that he can renew indefinitely. But the wording concocted by Wolf’s administration audaciously depicts this as “removing the existing check and balance.” Actually, all it removes is the necessity of submitting the termination of a governor’s emergency powers for approval by … the governor.

(Wolf, who has unilaterally renewed his pandemic emergency four times since March 2020, is also wielding powers under another emergency, concerning opioids, which he declared in his first term and has extended 13 times. Governing unilaterally is more fun than having the check and balance of a legislature.)

Proponents of the amendment include Republican Bryan Cutler, Pennsylvania House speaker, and Martina White, the only Republican representing Philadelphia in the House, and the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s freemarket think tank. Proponents stress that the amendment will not force the reopening of the state’s commercial and social life, but will compel Wolf, and subsequent governors, to govern less regally. Wolf insists that amending the state constitution by popular referendum, as provided for in the state’s constitution, constitutes an attack “on democracy itself.”

In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the pandemic has exacerbated government’s self-aggrandizing reflexes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has swerved into housing policy with a nationwide eviction moratorium, seems to have accommodated public health protocols to teachers unions’ agendas, and last month recommended that children at summer camps wear masks with two or more layers when not swimming.

Anthony Fauci suggests that perhaps masks should rival his ubiquity — that they should be worn in every annual flu season.

The vast latitude granted to vastly expanded government has whetted government’s appetite for more expansion and latitude, facilitated by careless language. “Infrastructure” has become a classification that no longer classifies, denoting everything that polls well (e.g., nutritious school lunches). Instead of treating climate change as a problem — bigger than some that humanity has surmounted, smaller than many others — to be ameliorated by a few broad and efficient measures (e.g., a carbon tax), climate change is presented as an “existential” crisis requiring government to micromanage everything everywhere forever.

Wolf’s tenacious clinging to his “emergency” prerogatives reflects a mentality common in political classes, for whom Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) has become “Impero, ergo sum” (“I boss people around, therefore I am”).

Matt Ridley, writing in the Spectator, recalls how grudging Britain’s postwar socialist government was about ending wartime rationing that was not fully dismantled until 1954. Hence the current U.S. experience with zero-tolerance-of-risk extremism in pursuit of maximum pandemic safety and comprehensive social management by government.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that the states are laboratories of democracy. During the pandemic, many have become laboratories of authoritarianism, the pleasures of which Wolf and some governors seem reluctant to relinquish. Tuesday, Pennsylvanians can begin the process of toppling their governor’s throne.