Pennsylvania case study; how the IHR voids constitutional and statutory law and underpins public health martial law
This narrative by Balliwick News gives a great summery of what happened legally and extralegally in Pennsylvania during the Covid crisis. From Gov. Wolf’s emergency declaration through the aftermath of the PA Constitutional Amendment restricting a Governor’s emergency powers. The catch is it leaves in place extralegal powers with the Sec. of Health which will be backed by the International Health Regulations (IHR) of the WHO.
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1978 Emergency Management Services (EMS) Code
On March 6, 2020, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf (D) and Secretary of Health Rachel Levine declared a statewide state of emergency under the 1978 Emergency Management Services (EMS) Code, 35 Pa.C.S. §§ 7101 et seq.
The EMS Code was adopted by the General Assembly in 1978 in response to floods and the Three Mile Island nuclear incident.
The EMS Code delegated power from the legislature to the Governor, allowing the Governor to make emergency declarations lasting up to 90 days, renewable by gubernatorial order thereafter.
Governor Wolf renewed his original proclamation for another 90 days on June 3, 2020, and several times thereafter.
1955 Disease Prevention and Control Law
Governor Wolf and Secretary Levine primarily cited the 1978 EMS Code, and secondarily cited the 1955 Disease Prevention and Control Law, 35 P.S.A. Section 521.1 et seq.
By leaning on the 1978 law more than the 1955 law, they sidestepped requirements of the 1955 disease prevention law that limit the government’s power to isolate only individual infected persons or animals, and limit the government’s power to quarantine only “persons or animals who have been exposed to a communicable disease.”
Further, the 1955 law limited the Health Secretary’s power to quarantine people only for “a period of time equal to the longest usual incubation period of the disease.”
By citing the 1978 EMS Code as their primary legal authority, Wolf and Levine managed the disaster not as a human health matter affecting millions of morally-autonomous and individually-subjective humans, but as a geographical contamination matter affecting objectified meat-sacks. And they were able to indefinitely extend the length of time for stay-at-home, school/business/church closures and occupancy limits from 14 days (Covid-19 incubation period as it was understood in the early days of the outbreak).
That’s how they could legally turn “two weeks to flatten the curve” into two years to flatten Pennsylvania’s people, schools, businesses and churches.
Governor Wolf and Secretary Levine basically created a statewide disaster zone that included every individual person’s physical body, every private home and businesses, and every public facility, as if all were objects presumptively under state control and contaminated by a virus, in the same way an area of land or water might be presumptively contaminated by radioactive particles in a nuclear disaster.
Power, checks and balances: executive v. legislative; court-arbitrated; partisan
Under the terms of the 1978 Emergency Management Services Code, the state of emergency could be terminated either by the Governor, or by both houses of the Pennsylvania General Assembly adopting concurrent resolutions.
However, when the Republican-majority General Assembly attempted to modify the terms of Governor Wolf’s orders through concurrent legislation in Spring 2020, and eventually tried to terminate the emergency declaration through a concurrent resolution, Governor Wolf and Secretary Levine simply ignored the legislation and continued enforcing the executive orders.
The conflict made its way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the Wolf v. Scarnati case, 104 MM 2020, which was decided in Wolf’s favor on July 1, 2020.
The partisan Democrat judges ruled that concurrent resolutions (outside of three exceptions interpreted narrowly to exclude terminating emergency declarations) must be presented to the Governor’s for approval or veto. The Governor, of course, would not approve a resolution bringing his extraordinary emergency powers to an end.
This prompted the Republican General Assembly to pass — in two consecutive sessions — resolutions placing a Constitutional amendment on the May 2021 ballot, so that Pennsylvania citizens could amend the state constitution to empower the General Assembly to terminate gubernatorial emergency declarations without presenting the measure to the governor for approval or veto.
Pennsylvania voters approved the constitutional amendment in May 2021 and the Republican General Assembly adopted joint resolutions on June 10, 2021, bringing the Pennsylvania state of emergency to a close.
Sort of.
Despite the legislature stripping Governor Wolf and his administration of the emergency powers they had assumed in March 2020, the Pennsylvania Acting Secretary of Health continued — after June 2021 — to promulgate and enforce unlawful orders including mask mandates, especially targeting schoolchildren attending Pennsylvania public schools.
The Acting Secretary of Health did so under a proposed, novel legal theory that the appointed health secretary’s executive powers may be exercised independent of the Pennsylvania and US Constitutions, the citizens of Pennsylvania, the elected Pennsylvania legislature and the elected Pennsylvania governor.
The Secretary of Health’s claim to unchecked power became the subject of state court cases, including Corman v. Acting Secretary of Pennsylvania Department of Health.
In their Sept. 3, 2021 petition, the Corman case parents argued that the Secretary of Health does not have “statutory or regulatory authority to mandate the wearing of face coverings by teachers, children, students, staff, or visitors working, attending, or visiting a School Entity.”
That legal fight was argued in front of the Commonwealth Court (294 MD 2021, oral arguments Oct. 20, 2021) and the mask mandate was ruled “void from the beginning.” Short summary of Nov. 10 Commonwealth Court ruling by Sullivan-Simon.
Governor Wolf appealed the decision, to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where appeal was denied on Dec. 10, 2021, thus upholding the Commonwealth Court ruling. 83 MAP 2021 case documents.
The court found the Health Secretary’s purported orders void, but only on procedural and regulatory grounds: failure to follow legislatively prescribed public notice procedures.
The Pennsylvania judges did not review, address or remedy the governmental stripping of citizens’ constitutional, civil and human rights by unilateral edict, without evidentiary fact-finding and without due process.
The Pennsylvania Secretary of Education immediately (Dec. 10, 2021) claimed in an email to school districts that the Department of Education and the school boards governing each school district possesses authority — independent of citizens, Constitution, Governor, General Assembly and Secretary of Health — to mandate that schoolchildren wear masks to attend public schools.
School boards and municipalities across Pennsylvania have continued to impose and enforce the mandates, using non-statutory, unconstitutional CDC/HHS guidance as their only remaining rationale.
That issue is now the subject of additional litigation brought Feb. 8, 2022 by parents against the Pennsylvania Secretary of Education and school districts that have retained masking orders (49 MD 2022).
Federal law in Pennsylvania; US District Judge tries to uphold constitutional liberties; Third Circuit evades the issue.
On Feb. 4, 2022, the National File reported that Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor candidate Teddy Daniels plans to arrest government officials who impose mandates, if Daniels is elected.
After reading the National File article, I did some research to update myself about what happened to the federal Butler v. Wolf case (2:20-cv-677), filed by Butler County and several small business plaintiffs on May 7, 2020.
The plaintiffs argued that the business, government, school and church closures and occupancy limits imposed unilaterally by Governor Wolf, among other Covid-19 emergency measures, were unconstitutional government infringements on the rights of the people.
US District Court Judge William Stickman IV agreed, and attempted to overturn Gov. Wolf’s emergency lockdown orders on constitutional and civil liberties grounds, in a well-written opinion and order filed on Sept. 14, 2020.
Judge Stickman’s order was immediately stayed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, following an appeal by Governor Wolf, leaving the lockdown orders in force.
That Third Circuit stay of Stickman’s order overturning Wolf’s orders — and Governor Wolf’s repeated extension of the state of emergency — helped drive the constitutional amendment proposed by the Pennsylvania legislature, which was put on the ballot in May 2021, approved by voters, and cleared the path for the Pennsylvania legislature to end the Covid-19 ‘state of emergency’ in the Commonwealth, which the legislature did in June 2021, as noted in the previous section about Pennsylvania state law conflicts.
In August 2021, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the Butler v. Wolf appeal as moot, taking Wolf at his word that the Secretary of Health would not reimpose draconian mandates, but not ruling that such mandates would be unconstitutional.
PennRecord reported on that August 2021 Third Circuit ruling, quoting Judge Kent Jordan:
“The Governor’s emergency powers have been reduced and the immediate sense of emergency has abated to a large degree, but both in reported public statements and in argument before us, the Wolf administration maintains that dissolving the disaster emergency does not affect a health secretary’s disease-prevention authority to issue mask-wearing and stay-at-home orders or shut down schools and nonessential businesses. Whether that position is legally sound is not before us and I make no comment on it.
The point is that the defendants-appellants in this case – Gov. Wolf and the Commonwealth’s Secretary of Health – have taken that position, so the possibility of future executive orders of the type challenged here is not fanciful. But such orders would have to be just that – in the future – because it is undisputed that the challenged orders have all expired, and a legal remedy aimed at those particular orders is, by definition, impossible.”
The Butler v. Wolf plaintiffs (counties and business owners) then appealed the Third Circuit ruling to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. That was reported Jan. 11, 2022 by Max Mitchell in the Legal Intelligencer, although the story is behind a paywall so I can’t read it in full.
Pennsylvania case study through broader lens
This means that the Pennsylvania Secretary of Health can — as of this moment — reinstate any health-related orders at any time, on any pretext, regardless of the Pennsylvania legislature’s removal of the Governor’s executive power, and without citizen recourse to constitutional liberty protections such as court review.
The Pennsylvania Secretary of Health currently has more power than the citizens of Pennsylvania, the Governor, all of the legislators and all of the judges.
This aligns with what Attorney Todd Callender has been reporting.
So long as a WHO-declared public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) is in effect, nation-states who have signed on to the 2005 International Health Regulations are legally obligated — presumably under penalty of losing access to the privately-owned Bank of International Settlements financial transaction systems — to suspend and violate the God-given constitutional, civil and human rights of their people, void their constitutions and charters, void their statutory protections, and suspend court review of human rights-based claims.
State and county public health authorities, led by the US Secretary of Health and Human Development, currently have complete legal control of the physical bodies of all the human beings within their jurisdictions.
And that federal HHS Secretary delegation of power to state health secretaries and county health departments can and is being backed by county law enforcement personnel.
In other words, we are all already living under executive-imposed public health martial law.
So long as the United States remains a member of the World Health Organization and a signatory to the International Health Regulations, federal, state and county legislatures and courts are powerless to check or remove the public health officials’ power of indefinite, pretextual arrest and detention of any citizen alleged to have asymptomatic colds.