COVID Showed State Governors Can Wield Far Too Much Unilateral Power; Pompeo has ‘high confidence’ Wuhan lab is linked to China’s military, and other C-Virus related stories

Associated Press

COVID showed state governors can wield far too much unilateral power:

Pennsylvania legislators last week officially ended the state’s COVID-19 “disaster emergency,” which Gov. Tom Wolf repeatedly extended after declaring it 15 months ago. While the immediate practical effect will be minimal, it’s an important step toward reining in the vast powers Wolf and other governors have exercised during the pandemic.

The Pennsylvania resolution was authorized by a constitutional amendment that voters approved last month, which changed the requirement for terminating a state of emergency from a two-thirds vote to a simple majority. Voters also passed an amendment that reduces the length of future emergency declarations to 21 days, from 90, and requires the legislature’s approval to extend them.

The election results and last week’s resolution amount to a sharp rebuke of the Democratic governor’s pandemic response, which a federal judge described as “shockingly arbitrary” and unconstitutional. The goal of the new limits, according to the state Senate’s GOP leaders, is “re-establishing the balance of power between three equal branches of government as guaranteed by the [state] Constitution.”

Pennsylvania’s governor has very broad powers once he declares a “disaster emergency.” Among other things, he can suspend statutes and regulations, commandeer private property, issue evacuation orders and “control ingress and egress to and from a disaster area, the movement of persons within the area and the occupancy of premises therein.” --->READ MORE HERE

Associated Press

Pompeo has ‘high confidence’ Wuhan lab is linked to China’s military:

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he has “high confidence” in an assessment published by the State Department in January linking the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology to the Chinese military.

Mr. Pompeo, a former CIA director, was among the first government officials to press the case last year that the COVID-19 pandemic could have sprung from an accident or viral escape from the Wuhan laboratory rather than naturally from an animal host.

“I was in a position where we could see the accumulating evidence,” he said in an interview with The Washington Times. “Every piece of evidence that we turned over, every rock that we pulled up suggested that this virology lab had all the hallmarks of a place where this could have leaked.”

Then, U.S. government officials began seeing what Mr. Pompeo called “real tactical clues” that the virus came from a lab leak. The clues included doctors at the institute who reportedly contracted COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019 and secret military work being done inside the laboratory by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). --->READ MORE HERE

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