J.D. Tuccille, Reason.comAcross the country, government officials are tightening and reimposing curfews, stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, and other restrictions as COVID-19 numbers climb. But with public patience over lockdowns wearing thin, many individuals and local authorities openly reject rules that drive people to poverty and despair. County sheriffs in California, New York, North Dakota, Oregon and elsewhere say they'll have nothing to do with enforcement efforts and spar with governors who resent such independence.
It's the rebellious spirit of the earlier sanctuary city and Second Amendment sanctuary movements, amplified by the pressures of the pandemic into an eruption of what some legal scholars call "punitive federalism." Get used to it, because our politically polarized era offers fresh soil for such dictates and defiance.
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"These more recent conflicts represent more than 'uncooperative federalism,'" Richard Schragger of the University of Virginia School of Law wrote earlier this year. "What has emerged instead is something that could be called 'punitive federalism'—a regime in which the periphery disagrees with or attempts to work around the center and the center seeks to punish those who do so, not just rein them in."
But Schragger referred not to battles over pandemic lockdowns, but to conflicts between state governments imposing restrictions on firearms and self-defense rights and localities that refuse to enforce them. He saw the inspiration for such revolts in earlier resistance by sanctuary cities against federal immigration rules.
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"What if polarization is less like a fence getting taller over time and more like an oil spill that spreads from its source to gradually taint more and more previously 'apolitical' attitudes, opinions, and preferences?" wrote Pennsylvania State University's Daniel DellaPosta in a study published in June in American Sociological Review. He points out that even lifestyle choices have taken on political overtones.
https://reason.com/2020/12/11/pande...ffer-glimpses-of-political-conflicts-to-come/