In what lately seems like a rare win for local autonomy and constitutional freedom, the Supreme Court struck down Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for large employers late last week.
While I really would love to kick back and celebrate this important victory more thoroughly, I somehow find myself struggling to view it as anything other than an ominous warning about the critical phase our country is entering:
Election Season 2022.
If you’ve been around the block a few times, you know that every time there is an election, writers come out of the woodwork to claim that “this particular election is especially important.” Many reasons are given as to why that is supposedly the case, and while all of those reasons usually carry some level of credibility, it sometimes feels like the emotion behind such arguments serves to cheapen otherwise valid points. So it feels somewhat alarmist and maybe even a little banal to state outright that this particular election is any more important than any other election.
But I’m going to do it anyways:
The 2022 election is the most significant election cycle in recent history, and it’s not close.
Before you write that off as hyperbole, allow me to explain.
I’ve said before on this site that if Covid-19 has done anything, it has shown us that the citizens of America have wildly different views about the direction our country should head. Prior to Covid-19, people knew these disagreements existed, but I don’t think they knew just how wide the gulf between the two parties really was. It has become clear now that we aren’t dealing with some 6 foot ditch that we can just build a little bridge over. We’re dealing with a Grand Canyon sized chasm that not only is too massive to be crossed, but that neither party has any desire to even attempt to cross.
More important than these gargantuan disagreements, however, are the ways in which the responses to them are being weaponized politically. Above all else, Covid-19 has become a means to an end for certain political groups, and if they have their ways, the ramifications of their manipulations will become permanent, one way or the other.
You need look no further than the recent Supreme Court case referenced at the start of this article to see what I mean. I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that if Donald Trump had not won the 2016 Presidential Election, the United States of America would now be in a situation where one person could unilaterally force employees to either surrender their religious and bodily autonomy carte blanche, or face the loss of their livelihood through termination.
It’s a relatively straightforward point to prove. During his tenure in office, Donald Trump nominated and installed three Supreme Court Justices. The vote concerning Biden’s vaccine mandate was 6 to 3, precisely along the party lines of the President who nominated each Justice. If Hillary Clinton had been President, I don’t know what exactly would have happened to those seats, but I know they wouldn’t be filled by those who currently fill them.
And that’s how thin the knife’s edge on which our country is balancing is. One or two random Justices, randomly installed to the Supreme Court based on one random president who won one random election in one random year, just totally dictated the direction our country will take on an issue that directly affects hundreds of millions of American citizens.
That in itself doesn’t really seem right to me, but it’s not the point of this article. The point is that what just happened regarding a single OSHA mandate that reached and was ruled upon by the Supreme Court, is about to happen in regards to a huge number of just as significant, massive policy choices all over the country.
You see, when it comes to where our country is heading, Covid-19 has proven to be a sort of Political Pandora’s Box. Not in the sense that it released evil itself, but in the sense that upon its opening, it fully revealed to politicians on both sides of the aisle that there are realistically only two paths our country can take concerning Covid-19 moving forward, and now these politicians feel they must do whatever is necessary to make sure their path is chosen, or else risk losing everything they've fought for.
And the scariest part…is that they aren’t wrong.
Now that everyone has made up his/her mind as to what Covid-19 is and what should be do about it, and knowing that at this point it is such an issue of pride and confirmation bias that those opinions will never ever change, there is only going to be one agenda on the minds of politicians if they ever again control the sections of the government needed to in order to pass legislation:
Cement the policies they want concerning Covid-19 and do everything possible to ensure they can never be removed.
Think of it this way. In 2018, when you voted, were you thinking about the fact that a Governor might unilaterally lock down businesses and society for months due to a media defined “pandemic?” I doubt it. Did you vote thinking about how one person might shutter schools and require two-year-olds to wear masks in order to attend daycare? Can’t imagine you did.
When Gretchen Whitmer went on her mandate tirade and starting insisting she knew what was best for the citizens of Michigan better than the citizens of Michigan did, a lot of people were justifiably upset. They shouted and screamed how it was unjust, how she didn’t have the right, and how someone had to stop her. Politicians did what they could, but unfortunately, with the checks and balances system being skewed as it is, and with Gretchen Whitmer's total willingness to skirt the system through overt manipulation, there was only so much to do. At the end of the day, the very person implementing unconstitutional mandates had altogether too much power over whether or not she had the right to implement such mandates.
So in general -- and there are always exceptions -- Democrats thought what Governor Whitmer was doing was right, and Republicans thought it was wrong. This disagreement was clear, it was pervasive, and it wasn’t something either side wanted to compromise on. This same disagreement is still glaringly obvious today, so you don’t have to be a genius to figure out what’s going to happen if either party happens to ride a metaphorical “voter wave” to total legislative control of the state:
Republicans will immediately begin passing legislation to make sure the State and Federal overreaches we all came to know and hate during the Covid-19 era are never permissible again under any circumstance.
Democrats will immediately begin passing legislation which protects and extends their ability to extend Federal power and limit personal freedoms for individual citizens under the guise of the “third year of a horrible pandemic.”
This is absolutely what is going to happen, and it’s why the 2022 election is so important for Michigan, and for the rest of the country.
Politicians and the general public didn’t fully grasp how far political overreach could be taken in America during a declared “pandemic” until it played out in front of them over the last two years. Now that they’ve seen it, it’s like they’ve discovered a multitude of brand new decisions that have to be made about how the government should operate in light of these unique, never before seen circumstances. This means hundreds of choices will be made about whether Covid-19 is being handled properly and how it should be handled moving forward. Every one of these decisions will be made immediately, at the exact instant that either party has the branch power to do so, and the new policies implemented will be exhaustive and nearly impossible to revise once codified into law.
All of this is to say one thing: The 2022 election isn’t about Covid-19. It’s about how American citizens believe our government has responded to it so far, and how American citizens believe our government should respond to it moving forward. I can’t overstate how massive the consequences to those two questions will be in determining the overall future of America.
Voters in Michigan and across the country must be so vigilant, so careful, and so concerned about this year’s election season that their dedication to it should almost border on paranoia. We simply cannot afford failure in 2022.
Because by the time we get another chance, it will be too late.
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