 President Trump called this a war, and it is exactly that. So let's act like it. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer compares today's fight against COVID-19 to the war against Nazi Germany. And she's prepared to use emergency powers in the path to victory. Terony has a new name, and it's called a pandemic. Robert Muiz is a constitutional lawyer with the Conservative American Freedom Law Center, and a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit the center has filed against Governor Whitmer. Quarantine is when you restrict the liberty of people who are sick, and Terony is when you restrict the liberty of people who are healthy. Muiz alleges that Whitmer has violated the First Amendment by banning church services, the Second Amendment by closing gun stores, and the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause by seeming to arbitrarily allow some places to stay open while banning others. One of the clients from Saginaw, Michigan, she could travel from her home in Saginaw to go to Chalavoy and go to a pet store and buy goldfish food. She could go to a convenience store by a Lotto ticket. She could go to a liquor store by liquor. She could purchase marijuana, but if she went to her actual property in Chalavoy County, it was a criminal misdemeanor. She had a restriction where you could be on a lake in a boat without a motor, but you couldn't be in a lake with a boat with a motor. And then she places restriction. You go to Home Depot and you can buy lumber, but you couldn't buy flooring. You couldn't buy flowers and you couldn't buy wallpaper. I represented a landscaper. The landscaping businesses weren't permitted. Landscaping, there's virtually no contact with clients. The landscapers can show up at somebody's property. They can mow their lawn, talk about social distancing. They can exercise it 10-fold, never have any contact with a client. They can send them a bill and so forth. And he was losing thousands and thousands of dollars a day. The American Freedom Law Center has also filed a First Amendment lawsuit against New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has banned protests but permits walking and jogging. This is a total ban on First Amendment activity, which requires the highest level of scrutiny to apply. So I think, you know, if they want to go that drastic route, because they said there's no exceptions, they're going to have a higher burden to demonstrate the justification for those types of restrictions. So to all the people that have disagreed with the actions that I've taken or feel their rights are being infringed, I want to say this. We are taking a limited action for a limited amount of time to save people's lives. People who favor the lockdowns would say, are you really willing to trade more deaths for kind of defending a rather abstract principle or, as they would put it, your particular conception of freedom? These liberties might seem extravagant to some, but they are the fundamental principles that were put in place by our founding fathers. America has become the epicenter of the pandemic. The death toll doubled in just two days and America's top infectious disease specialist is now warning that millions of people face infection. More than half of the American public will get coronavirus and if the data that they model out is accurate, we could lose more than a million Americans to the virus. That's 2.2 million people would have died if we did nothing. We just carried on our life. Constitutional law professor Josh Blackman says that while the emergency orders may have been legal early on, that they can become less constitutional as new information about the threat level and their effectiveness becomes clear. If the elected branch would say there's some crisis that's going on, the courts are hesitant to second guess that. But I think that deference only lasts for so long. A lot of the measures that might have seemed necessary and proper months ago now seem perhaps overkill. Blackman points to a recent Texas Supreme Court opinion finding that as the threat lessens, the continued burdens on constitutional liberties may not survive judicial scrutiny. A federal ruling out of Kentucky struck down that state's non-essential designation of drive-in church services and seriously questioned the constitutionality of government making such designations at all. I don't think the government can decide what is and is not. Essential with any sort of objective measure. Now, for a lot of activities, I think deference is probably the name of the game. But when we get to things like religion, exercise and the right to bear arms, this definition of essential becomes a lot more hard to justify. The desire to take these steps to prevent the transmission of the disease are unprecedented. We even saw a checkpoint. My own home state of Texas put up a checkpoint at the Louisiana border. You know, we have Texas Rangers at the airport giving people forms saying you have to be quarantined and actually house calls to make sure people are staying home. I was just like, I didn't think this was possible. It's just it's stunning how quickly government has interjected itself. Governor Whitmer has analogized the current situation to World War II to justify the lockdown orders. In World War II, there weren't people lining up at the Capitol to protest the fact that they had to drop everything they were doing and build planes or tanks. They rolled up their sleeves and they got to work. We were all in this together. Blackman points out that in this period, the U.S. government did order curfews for Japanese American citizens and eventually sent some into internment camps. Now, we don't talk about those cases because they're considered really bad. But the Supreme Court upheld the curfew. It affects me saying that there's risks of sabotage. There's risk of espionage that maybe these Japanese people are in league with our warring power and that this was an appropriate measure. The court more or less not approved of the detention, but they approved of the curfew measure. Could this potentially set precedents beyond a pandemic type situation? There's an old maxim. I think it's from Cicero. And it's translated as, during the times of war, the laws fall silent. I will amend Cicero's adage during times of epidemic and the laws fall silent. I think the Supreme Court will stay on this as long as possible, but they may have to be called to intervene. What happens if there's an election coming up in November? And there are some corona-related issues, involving mail-in ballots and people waiting online and social distancing at the polling booths. And they will set precedents. And I think they will probably be bad precedents because whenever courts decide cases under crunch time conditions without enough time to consider things, they're ruled to be pretty blousy. So far, governors in Wisconsin and Oregon have had their executive orders nullified by state and county courts, who ruled that they weren't properly reauthorized by the legislature. And Wies's challenge to the Michigan order is pending in federal court, as is his First Amendment challenge to New York's order. Meanwhile, some businesses continue to open despite lockdown orders. Local sheriffs increasingly refuse to enforce closures. DAs refuse to prosecute. And mobility data shows Americans increasingly moving through the world again as they make their own individual risk assessments. You know, civil disobedience has been one way that we've actually made a lot of policy changes in the United States. It's not our burden to prove our freedom, it's their burden to prove that the restriction on our liberty meets the constitutional state.