Your Governor Can’t Force You To Stay In Your State. Period

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Liberals finally support travel bans. No, not when the president uses his lawful power over foreign affairs and commerce to ban foreign nationals from dangerous countries, such as Iran or China, from immigrating here. Liberal governors are now illegally implementing travel bans on their own citizens from state to state. Welcome to the Articles of Confederation government, unless, of course, you’re a foreign national seeking entry to get on welfare. Then a court will defend your “right” to travel and immigrate to the U.S.

Truth be told, even when states were super-sovereigns, during time of the Articles of Confederation, they did not ban Americans from traveling from state to state, because that was recognized as a fundamental liberty interest that even King George didn’t try to stop. Even as states were free to regulate interstate commerce from 1776 to 1789, Art. IV of the Articles of Confederation unambiguously recognized the right of Americans to travel freely from state to state: “The free inhabitants of each of these states … shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states; and the people of each state shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other state.”

But now, governors like “Lockdown Larry” Hogan of Maryland have illegally barred residents from traveling out of state. You heard that correctly. While these governors and some wayward federal judges opposed a travel ban on foreign nationals from terrorist countries or those who would become a public charge, when there is no right for foreigners to immigrate, they are now implementing a travel ban on their own countrymen.

WBAL TV reports that a spokesman for Governor Hogan said that vacation is not allowed under the governor’s stay-home order, which would bar people from traveling to another state unless they are exempted from the order.

Thus, Hogan has now declared an edict that was never in effect for a single day in the history of the American settlement on this continent, under any governing body. Sadly, and ironically, Maryland was the first state to recognize personal liberty and freedom of movement in an act of the governing body in 1639 – well over 100 years before the Revolution.

The natural right of freedom to travel without restraint that was even enumerated in the Articles of Confederation was codified in Art. IV Sec. 2 of the Constitution, using similar language: The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states. As Clarence Thomas has eloquently written in numerous cases over the years, the 14th Amendment’s Privileges and Immunities Clause granted the federal government authority to enforce this right when states infringe upon it.

Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.

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