Chris Powell: In the COVID-19 crisis, both sides threaten liberty; block those raises!

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Fortunately it was just another brief bout of MAGA-lomania the other day when President Trump declared that he would decide when states lift the health and safety restrictions they have imposed because of the virus epidemic. Several governors, including Connecticut's Ned Lamont, quickly protested that the Constitution reserves such power to the states. New York's Andrew Cuomo protested most colorfully, noting that the president is not a king.

But amid the epidemic constitutional rights are under assault by many elected officials throughout the country, Democratic as well as Republican. Several states are imposing or threatening to impose penalties on religious services that exceed recommended attendance levels, in spite of the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of religion and assembly.

Connecticut isn't immune to such assaults. Lamont skirted the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to bear arms by telling gun shops they could remain open only by appointment. State Attorney General William Tong has joined other state attorneys general in a lawsuit to suppress publication of plans for guns that can be made by 3D printers, and this week Tong urged the federal government to criminalize such publication -- that is, to criminalize mere information, as if the First Amendment doesn't also guarantee speech and press rights.

The objection to making guns with 3D printers is that they can be manufactured without legally required serial numbers. But any gun can be, and the designs for many weapons have been published. If mere information can be criminalized in regard to gun designs, it can be criminalized for whatever government doesn't want people to know. Of course there would be no end to that.

Trump can't tell states when to lift their health and safety restrictions. But neither can Tong tell people what they can publish and read, no matter how politically incorrect it may be.

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Yankee Institute investigative journalist Marc Fitch this week reminded Connecticut that as of July 1 state government employees are due to start receiving raises costing at least $353 million a year. Fitch noted that Democratic governors in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia are suspending state employee raises until the immense financial cost of the epidemic can be calculated.

So the Yankee Institute urged Governor Lamont to suspend the raises as well, but it's not clear that he can. For the raises are part of state government's current contract with the state employee union coalition, one of the many lamentable legacies of Connecticut's previous administration, and the federal Constitution forbids states from making any law impairing the obligation of contracts.

It's bad enough that the wages and benefits of state and municipal government employees have been completely protected even as the governor's own orders have thrown tens of thousands of people out of work in the private sector. For state government to pay raises while unemployment explodes in the private sector and state tax collections collapse would be crazy, more proof that nothing matters more to state government than the contentment of its own employees, whose unions long have controlled the majority political party.

But the governor is not helpless here. Using his emergency powers he could suspend collective bargaining for state employees and binding arbitration of their contracts for six months at a time or "modify" those laws to strengthen public administration during the emergency. He should do so, for as the treacle on television says, we're all supposed to be in this together.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.