April 25, 2022 at 11:33 a.m.
The perils of rogue power
The perils of rogue power
Earlier this month, for instance, the CDC extended the government's mandated wearing of masks on public forms of transportation, despite the pleas of major airlines and many other transit providers to lift the restrictions.
Then, too, in some cities, like New York, politicians ignore science and continue to impose mask requirements on toddlers, to their long-term detriment. The collateral damage of rogue pandemic power will be the historical imprint of this age, and even more so if those who have carried out these senseless assaults on liberty and health are never held accountable.
The airline mask mandate is senseless, to be sure. For one thing, the government should not be telling private carriers how to run their businesses - you know, just like they do when officials call for censorship on Twitter, transforming them all into agents of the state - and adult citizens should have the right to exercise their power of consumer choice if they don't like the decision the company makes.
For another, even if the government was going to mandate mask wearing on airlines, it has never been the CDC's call to enact what is essentially legislation. That's Congress's call - the call of elected officials, not unelected career bureaucrats. The CDC went rogue, to say it another way. Thankfully, last week, a federal judge put an end to it.
It's not always the bureaucrats who run wild. On both the national and local level, it's often elected officials. Gov. Tony Evers tried to become a dictator at the beginning of the pandemic, and local governments have recorded their own ledger of abuse.
Minocqua is no exception. Last year we reported about the case of Amy Davis, who had applied for a county tourist rooming house (TRH) permit. During that process, the Minocqua Plan Commission recommended placing a most unusual and outrageous condition on the permit: Within 60 days, Davis had to provide a letter from the DNR proving a pier in front of her property was compliant with state regulations, or lose her tourist rooming house permit.
There were so many things wrong with that decision that it is hard to know exactly where to begin. For one thing, she was accused of a violation and ordered to prove her innocence, the very opposite of the way our system is supposed to work, where innocence is assumed until proven otherwise.
Second, the plan commission did not seem to understand that it has no power to mandate any condition - that's a county decision - and was making only a recommendation.
That's important not least because the county was letting towns run wild with those recommendations by going along with their every whim, legal or not. That's not on the town alone, but it's indicative of the way county and local governments view their power - virtually anything they want to do is allowable, in their mind.
Just like the CDC thinking it has any sort of power to require mask wearing without any congressional input, government officials think their power is limitless.
Then, too, state law requires that permit conditions be related to the operations of the project for which the permit is being sought, which Davis's pier was not, and, what's more, the town has no jurisdiction over piers anyway.
What these officials don't realize is that the rogue decisions they make have the potential to disrupt and wreak havoc on the real lives of real people. Their quest for power has no compassion.
Take masks for toddlers. When masks fog glasses, the kids have a tough time seeing. Masks have caused severe acne and other dermatological problems. The masks distract children and make learning difficult. They can lead to increased, unhealthy levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, and they have caused children to become so terrified that they are afraid to take their masks off, even in their own homes. Not least they can cause infections if they become moist or are used for too long.
None of this matters to the power-grabbers in charge.
Or, locally, let's see how the pier condition could have impacted Davis. The committee wanted her to submit a letter of compliance within 60 days. But it took the DNR from July 13 to April 6 - a period of 267 days - to find that the pier was compliant.
In other words, not only was the permit condition illegal, it was an impossible condition to meet. Without one shred of actual evidence other than hearsay, without any thought to how reasonable the condition was, or how it might affect Davis financially, the committee just did as it pleased, due process and jurisdiction be damned.
Making matter worse, the commission member making the motion, Mark Pertile, and the member seconding the motion, Phil Albert, were both unelected members of the panel. So unelected "planners" assumed legal authority in areas where they had none and weaponized it.
Not only that, but Davis's equal protection rights were violated by both the town and the county. Like other citizens, Ms. Davis had applied for a permit. Like other citizens, Ms. Davis had not been found in violation - or even accused - of any other zoning violation by any agency of jurisdiction. Yet unlike other citizens, she was required to provide proof of her law-abiding status. That's discrimination because she was not treated the same as other property owners similarly situated and in similar situations.
As we have opined before, one can see how easily this discrimination can be dispensed based on whether the people on the plan commission or working in county offices like you or like what you're doing. If the plan commission and the county had gotten away with this, just about any frivolous accusation could lead to onerous conditions based not on the law and on legal standards, but on the personal preferences of those making the decisions.
In this case, the DNR took more than four times longer than the time the plan commission gave Davis to make a determination about the pier, and, not only that, when the agency did make a determination, the town's fuss - and its vendetta - turned out to be so much hooey because the pier was legal, just as she said it was.
Since this fiasco, the county has stripped the town and the plan commission of its ability to exercise power it does not legally possess.
Let's hope that sticks. In the meantime, everybody going before the plan commission needs to remember the mindsets they will be dealing with. To do so will be to grasp the perils of rogue power, which is alive and well in Minocqua.
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