As coronavirus surges, GOP lawmakers are moving to limit public health powers
Across the country, GOP lawmakers are rallying around the cause of individual freedom to counter community-based disease mitigation methods, moves experts say leave the country ill-equipped to counter the resurgent coronavirus and a future, unknown outbreak.
In some states, anger at perceived overreach by health officials has prompted legislative attempts to limit their authority, including new state laws that prevent the closure of businesses or allow lawmakers to rescind mask mandates. Some state courts have reined in the emergency and regulatory powers governors have wielded against the virus. And in its recent rulings and analysis, the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to limit disease mitigation in the name of religious freedom.
“The legal framework has evolved in ways that will complicate and perhaps undermine efforts to deal with the next public health crisis or even routine health threats,” said Wendy Parmet, director of the Northeastern University Center for Health Policy and Law, who also said she has been a “long critic of emergency laws and their potential for abuse.”
A key issue, Parmet and others say, is that the legislative backlash is based on partisan assumptions about this pandemic, limiting states’ options in the face of a new threat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/gop-legislatures-health-laws/2021/07/25/2455940c-db54-11eb-8fb8-aea56b785b00_story.html
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The legislature is consolidating it's power with things like: allowing themselves, rather than the governor, to call themselves back into session as they see fit; removing the ability of local health districts to flexibly call the shots without state approval; and just this year, severely hobbling the constitutionaly guaranteed citizen initiative process to the point where the requirements will be virtually impossible to meet.
Yay. 
