By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Friday, October 14, 2022
Back in 2020, when almost every head of state in the
world was declaring Covid-19 a state of emergency and national executives were
obtaining their extraordinary powers, there was an international freak-out
about Viktor Orbán, the husky Hungarian prime minister. One writer at the Atlantic said
that the prime minister had undoubtedly crossed the line between emergency
powers and outright authoritarianism. Another predicted that there would never
be elections again in Hungary and that the Hungarian parliament had been
dissolved forever. One of my colleagues at AEI said that a full-fledged
dictatorship would arise from these emergency powers unless there was vigorous
pushback from Brussels and Washington. Human Rights Watch warned that Orbán had
seized “unlimited power.”
By July 20 of 2020, Viktor Orbán’s government had returned all
his emergency powers back to the Hungarian parliament. His lifelong
dictatorship lasted just 82 days.
Yesterday, meanwhile, Joe Biden extended America’s Covid
emergency and the extraordinary executive powers that go with it another 90
days. He’s extending it another 90 days even though, several weeks ago, he said
in an interview that the pandemic was over, and cited as evidence the scene
around him of people attending a motor show. “If you notice, no one’s wearing
masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s
changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.”
Currently, Covid cases and deaths are near year-long
lows, as are hospital admissions. But the Biden administration wants Congress
to approve $22.4 billion in additional pandemic funding. The ongoing emergency
allows the Biden administration to keep up with expanded Medicaid benefits and
send more money to hospitals and doctors. It funds the purchase of millions of
Covid-19 vaccine boosters and the occasional Covid-19 tests that are mailed to
U.S. citizens. The ongoing pandemic has also been used recently to justify the
transfer of student-loan debt from students to taxpayers, in a brazen
election-year giveaway to a needed constituency.
Hungary’s emergency powers weren’t without controversy.
Two men had been detained, but not charged, under the confusing decree against
spreading misinformation about the government during the pandemic. Some
protesters were fined. (Although, unlike in New York City, the people defying
public quarantine measures weren’t subjected to vaguely antisemitic heckling by
the mayor.) And the Orbán government, in an abusive fashion, authorized the
renovation of a public park in Budapest, a move that was meant to endear
residents of the liberal city to their conservative leader, and which had been
blocked under the normal rules of government by the mayor. Almost two years
after surrendering these emergency powers, the Orbán government received them
again as the parliament recognized the state of war in neighboring Ukraine as
an emergency.
Power does tend toward abuse. In New York, Andrew Cuomo
amended hundreds of state laws with his emergency powers, including one that
provided a steady stream of revenue to independent local newspapers. If he
governed east of the Elbe, this would have been considered an attack on the
media. But, near the Hudson, he just received an Emmy for it.
Republicans should be loudly promising to end the state
of emergency themselves if elected in November. They should be seeking out
Democratic colleagues who want to end the emergency now. Every emergency warps
government and erodes our resistance to sweeping powers. In my own lifetime, we
were a people that balked at the idea of the feds looking at our library
records. Now, we put up with being assigned another person’s student debt and
with demands that our employers fire us for our health-care decisions.
It’s time to end this farce.
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