GOP Lawmaker: Idaho Governor’s Designation of Businesses as Non-Essential Is ‘No Different Than Nazi Germany’ – By Matt Naham (Law and Crime) / April 20 2020
A Republican state lawmaker in Idaho who referred to Republican Gov. Brad Little as “Little Hitler” in a recent interview said designations of some businesses as non-essential was “no different than Nazi Germany” putting non-essential workers on a train to concentration camps.
State Rep. Heather Scott had some thoughts on the pandemic and the government response to it. She offered a rambling and non-specific answer when pushing back on the governor’s authority, particularly when it came to designating businesses essential and non-essential.
Scott said such a designation was no different from Nazi Germany putting Jewish people on trains and sending them to concentration camps (listen around the 12-minute mark below).
“Some of the order was actually violating the Constitution. So when, when you—I don’t have the sheet in front of me, I had it up earlier for an interview—but I can go down through the Constitution on all the violations,” Scott said. “You cannot have, um, you can’t have any elected official whether it’s a mayor or a governor interfere with your right to assembly—um, peaceably assembly. You can’t have—it’s illegal, it’s illegal. An elected official does not have the authority to tell you your business is essential or non-essential. I think that’s the one that made me start putting pen to paper.”
Scott said that an elected official designating some businesses essential and others non-essential during a pandemic is “no different than Nazi Germany, where you had government telling people you are an essential worker or a non-essential worker and the non-essential workers got put on a train.”
“I’m not a lawyer,” Scott noted, “but I checked with a constitutional lawyer and absolutely he cannot, he cannot do that … he has no authority—the Constitution does not give him the authority to erase the Constitution. You just can’t do it.”
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