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. . . (S)hutting down gun stores was never necessary to curtail transmission of COVID-19. But . . . reluctance to respect the Second Amendment . . . [does] not bode well for civil liberties at a time when many people seem to think that fighting the pandemic trumps all other concerns.To "save the nation" from COVID-19, Cornell law professor Michael Dorf argued two weeks ago, Congress should suspend the writ of habeas corpus, an ancient common-law right that allows people detained by the government to demand a justification. Yet the Constitution says "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."Although neither of those circumstances applies, Dorf suggested that the spread of the COVID-19 virus from other countries to the United States could be construed as an invasion. While "no one knows" whether the courts would accept that interpretation, since "Congress has only ever suspended habeas in wartime," Dorf said, "there is reason to think that the courts would dismiss a habeas case following nearly any congressional suspension."In a recent survey of 3,000 Americans, the University of Chicago's Adam Chilton and three other law professors found bipartisan agreement that "now is the time to violate the Constitution," as they put it. The survey asked whether the respondents would support various constitutionally dubious policy responses to the epidemic.Sizable majorities of both Democrats and Republicans favored confining people to their homes, detaining sick people in government facilities, banning U.S. citizens from entering the country, government takeovers of businesses, conscription of health care workers, suspension of religious services, and even criminalizing the spread of "misinformation" about the virus. "Even when we explicitly told half of our sample that the policies may violate the Constitution," Chilton et al. report, "the majority supported all eight of them," including the speech restrictions . . .
