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Comment by slaymaker1907 | Hacker News Reader

slaymaker1907

In this case I think the ages are a distraction. This is clearly a violation of the constitution even given Covid due to it essentially banning a large section of the population from something as fundamental as visiting friends.

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“Visiting friends” is not protected by the US Constitution.

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

The first amendment guarantees the right to peaceably assemble. Visiting friends is assembly, indeed the ordinance calls it a ban on “gatherings” explicitly.

However as I commented as a sibling comment to yours, SCOTUS precedent would hold that this is almost certainly allowed, despite my utter disgust for these backwards policies.

If you can forcibly sterilize someone, why not prevent them from gathering? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

You've heard of this pandemic thing going on though, right? Perhaps they should have not put an age restriction on.

Credibility goes right out the window when you say "No large gatherings! Unless they're a protest/riot for a cause we support! Or a funeral for a late supreme court justice on our side."

If you want people to follow rules, you have to be consistent in how those rules are applied.

I think it's quite a bit more than a "perhaps". The order is clearly an attempt to target a politically disfavored age bracket; it would never occur to someone without specific animus against CU-Boulder students to write such a narrow rule.

We shouldn’t be trying to prevent cases; a strategy of forcing young people inside, assuming it even worked, would increase mortality by requiring proportionally more at-risk people to get sick to reach herd immunity. But just as far as legal precedent, given this (evil) order is specifically in response to a spike in “cases” (they’re not cases they’re positive tests), it is more than justified under the reasoning used in Jacobson v Massachusetts. Unfortunately.

> We shouldn’t be trying to prevent cases;

Yes, we should.

> increase mortality by requiring proportionally more at-risk people to get sick to reach herd immunity.

This assumes that herd immunity is reached without a vaccine; the whole idea of controlling the spread is to reduce the degree to which herd immunity depends on people getting infected.

I think a textualist and originalist view confirms your belief that it is unconstitutional. But as far as precedent goes, they can definitely get away with it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts (forced vaccination despite history of adverse reaction)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell (forced sterilization)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States (forced detention based off of race)

Not to mention this decision was likely made by the UN-ELECTED Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, Jill Hunsaker Ryan.

I did a quick search of her background and she was almost indicted for falsifying Covid death data to inflate the total number of deaths[1]. Once she was forced to accurately report the numbers, the number of deaths magically dropped significantly. Won't hear about this in the news!

[1] - https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/next/gop-rep-allege...

I also did a quick search. Apparently the CDC required the CDPHE to report the total number of people who died while having COVID-19, which the department did. Then they switched to reporting the number of deaths caused by COVID-19, AND the number of deaths of people who had COVID-19. That caused confusion which led to the threat of criminal charges.

https://koanewsradio.iheart.com/content/2020-05-15-gov-polis...

> Won't hear about this in the news!

Huh? I found lots of news articles about it.

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