(New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham).

You probably know the theme for this morning just from the title. There had been some indications the Central Government was going to take us back to emergency rule for the next iteration of the COVID pandemic.

We got tired of it last time in fairly short order. We naturally complied with the mandates to wear masks and to accept shots of vaccines that now seem to have been approved on a possibly premature basis. In the Big Pink parking lot some of the residents are back to donning masks just to walk alone outdoors to their vehicles. When we lived in Japan that was accepted social behavior. If a citizen preferred to wear a mask, they did so without being characterized as a social alarmist.

That is not the case in the here-and-now. The Governor says it is an emergency, so our basic civil rights apparently can be suspended at her will. The case of the pandemic is a good one to assess our new form of Government rule. COVID was of course a medical emergency. One of us has actually talked to Dr. Fauci about it, back when s/he was still in government service. The message from the Good Doctor was that the special research work would continue and that “We have it covered.”

We assume that was some of the work sponsored in the Wuhan Lab in China or the facilities that stayed open in Ukraine. Dr. Fauci also reminded us of the perils of shutting down parts of the economy in order to support Quarantines even if they might be justified for public health reasons.

Which is how we wind up in the situation we are in now. There has been talk about welcoming the Whirrled Health Organization (WHO, and maybe that was ‘World’) into our national health conversation. The WHO has a lot of sponsors, none of whom are elected, but there are government officials who want to entrust our public health policies to bureaucrats from other places. It is too soon to tell if the mixed results of the last adventure in public medicine will be re-imposed, but there are certainly government people who head organizations who have said they are in favor of it, as are the Chinese who sponsor the WHO’ leadership.

So there is that, and we are a little anxious about it. What came through this morning was the story about the Governor of the State of New Mexico. There is another emergency on the street and it is so enormous that certain Constitutional rights have been abrogated by Gubernatorial Decree.

We could go into this matter in additional detail, since this appears to violate some of the rights assigned to us by the Lord Almighty, not the Governor in Santa Fe. Like everything else these days, we assume this matter will wind up for review before the Supreme Court. The assertion of Emergency Powers by people who do not actually have them is a demonstration of the long and successful Lawfare campaign to undermine legal tradition. We have established a judicial review panel here at Socotra House. That is the one where the Chairman’s legal Department has to review the spritely and entertaining stories we issue each morning.

There is an argument that the product is neither of those things, but we are contractually obligated to treat them as such, or at least attempt to do so. You can imagine how that goes and we were warning with a table showing the rates of poor to excellent legal counsel. We would all be broke before we staggered into judicial review somewhere way south of SCOTUS, and put the whole publishing enterprise at risk.

The issue at hand? Yesterday was a slow news day, the AP was circulating a story about how our states are governed. Our Favorite Congressman had been news the day before. He had risen to serve two terms in the Governor’s office. With Governor Richardson’s recent passing, we were naturally attuned to the news. It is an emergency in progress, and the current Governor of the State of New Mexico became alarmed. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed out some emergency decrees about who can do what the Constitution decrees is a natural right according to what she thinks is appropriate.

Gov. Grisham suspended the right to carry- concealed or open- firearms in public in her state’s largest city. That is Albuquerque and the surrounding county due to a proliferation of drugs and other Emergencies. The Emergency is supposed to continue for at least another 30 days. This is another experiment in usingn the legal system to achieve things that cannot be achieved at the ballot box. Ot empowering local District Attorneys to indict former Presidents in local jurisdictions.

Or people like us. Even a cheap lawyer likely to lose in a court of law would bankrupt us over even a few weeks of trial activity and possibly put us in jail. That is something that we consider an Emergency.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com