On Tuesday, April 16, Center for American Liberty Founder and CEO Harmeet Dhillon testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government about violations of Americans’ civil liberties during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Watch her opening statement here:
Here are five highlights from Harmeet Dhillon’s testimony:
“At any given time today, a state or federal government could declare an emergency—or fabricate some other unfounded excuse—and suspend our fundamental rights once again. Most courts will not stop them, as we have unfortunately seen. It is imperative that Congress intervene so history cannot and will not repeat itself.”
“One of the most egregious violations of our First Amendment freedoms was the treatment of religious Americans as second-class citizens, as vectors of disease. From the very beginning of the pandemic, governors across the country discriminately labeled houses of worship, and by extension the First Amendment, as ‘non-essential,’ while at the same time leaving their secular counterparts open for business. In my state, California, marijuana, liquor, and big-box retailers were deemed essential, but God was banned.”
“To me the absurdity that certain people could cross county lines during the pandemic, but our governor forbade the rest of us from crossing county lines unless we had an essential purpose is one of those crazy issues. The fact that you needed a vaccine passport to eat in restaurants well into the pandemic when in fact Governor Newsom with glee ate in the French Laundry restaurant that was cut off from the rest of us. The fact that governor Newsom and other wealthy California elites were able to educate their own children in their backyards in pods and relegate the most vulnerable in our society—inner city children, children for whom English is a second language in Los Angeles County—destroyed careers in education to a lifetime of less learning and less liberty really is an outrage.”
“The fact that judges pointed to Jacobson and said, ‘Ms. Dhillon, we’re not talking about deferential or rational basis scrutiny, no scrutiny is due to the government’s action in shutting us down.’ And so my fear as a civil liberties lawyer is that with the snap of a finger or the stroke of a pen the very same civil liberties catastrophe can happen again unless Congress takes action to right that wrong.”
“No emergency especially one defined by the government should warrant the erosion of our freedoms and the complete disregard for the judicial scrutiny the courts use to preserve them in every other instance.”