Quote Quoting Steve418
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From what I have heard, this is a blatant destruction and shredding of the constitution. Yeah, corona is serious. It's a dangerous disease, but it does not warrant suspending our constitutional rights. If that is not what's going on here, then correct me.
Very generally, the Supreme Court has held that none of our Constitutional rights are absolute and that the government may impose reasonable restrictions on those rights so long as they are narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest. Protecting the health and safety of citizens has long been recognized by the courts as a legitimate and compelling government interest. Quarantine laws and the like are nothing new; they've been around in some form for well over a century. What's different today is that we have had the luxury over the last 80+ years of enjoying relative peace and stability in this country. After World War II we have not been seriously threatened with war reaching our shores. We have not seen a serious pandemic disease situation for even longer than that. So most people living today cannot remember a time when the government has had to resort to these kinds of measures to ensure public safety.

But a century ago that would have been more common, at least a local level. Many more diseases existed then that we do not have to suffer today because of the invention of vaccines. Small pox, measles, polio, tuberculosis, etc, have largely vanished in this country. The 1918 flu was the last worldwide pandemic that rivaled the scale of this disease. When such diseases existed you would see quarantine and other controls used to contain the spread. We are indeed fortunate that those sorts of events are so rare in recent decades that few if anyone now remembers them. But throughout the history of humans disease has been a problem we have had to deal with, and it was just a matter of time before another serious one plagued us.

The measures put into place in my state certainly have the backing of existing law. I doubt very much that the Courts are going to say the government's actions were unconstitutional. However, as the laws were not designed expressly for this kind of event, what they can do is limited and the actions are thus a piecemeal approach of cobbling together authority from several different laws to be able to impose the restrictions that are in place. That is not to say that some states or localities might not exceed their authority in their zeal to contain the disease. That can be sorted out in the courts later and will help define how we are able to respond to such events in the future. But I reject the notion that the Constitution has been "shredded". If you look carefully at what most states have done they are relying on laws already in place to carry out their efforts, and that some of what they are doing have been recommendations rather than orders, and of course nothing prevents the government from making recommendations.