US Attorney General William Barr yesterday compared lockdown orders to slavery, saying that measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic are one of the biggest violations of civil liberties in US history.
"Putting a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history," Barr said in a Q&A session after delivering a speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Based on that comment, Barr apparently thinks stay-at-home orders designed to reduce the spread of a deadly virus are a greater violation of civil liberties than Jim Crow laws, oppression of Native Americans, and Japanese internment camps run by the US during World War II. Besides that, there was never actually a national lockdown, largely due to the actions of Trump himself. States imposed varying levels of movement restrictions and stay-at-home orders while the Trump administration refused to implement a coherent national strategy and while Trump repeatedly undermined governors by claiming he has "total" authority to override their stay-at-home orders. As Trump downplayed the virus's severity and made calls to "liberate" residents of states with aggressive pandemic responses, Barr threatened to have the US government sue states that don't lift stay-at-home and business-shutdown orders.
Barr continued his attacks on governors at Hillsdale yesterday. "Most of the governors do what bureaucrats always do, which is they... defy common sense," Barr said, according to CNN. "They treat free citizens as babies that can't take responsibility for themselves and others."
Barr also said, "We have to give business people an opportunity, tell them what the rules are, you know, the masks, which rule of masks you had this month... and then let them try to adapt their business to that and you'll have ingenuity and people will at least have the freedom to try to earn a living."
Barr criticizes DOJ prosecutors
Barr's comments at Hillsdale came during a session titled "The Constitution and the Rule of Law," which was part of a Constitution Day celebration. In his prepared remarks (transcript), Barr said elected officials and political appointees like himself must prevent overreach by the DOJ's career staff.
"In recent years, the Justice Department has sometimes acted more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice based on clear and sensible legal rules," Barr said. "In case after case, we have advanced and defended hyper-aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong and we must stop doing it."
Prosecutors must stop "concocting new legal theories to criminalize all manner of questionable conduct," Barr said. "Smart, ambitious lawyers have sought to amass glory by prosecuting prominent public figures since the Roman Republic. It is utterly unsurprising that prosecutors continue to do so today to the extent the Justice Department's leaders will permit it. As long as I am attorney general, we will not."
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