Local Attorney Says Governor Ok to Use Old Law for Mask Mandate
WILLIAMSPORT – A noted attorney in our region says Governor Tom Wolf is in the right while using an old law to enforce the new statewide school mask mandate taking effect Tuesday. Williamsport Attorney Cliff Rieders told WKOK’s On The Mark program, the governor can use the Disease and Prevention Control Law.
“The governor absolutely can force it unless the Supreme Court says otherwise. Right now, the police power of the governor, under the current case law, gives him that right under the statutory scheme we live under,” he said.
Rieders says a case similar to this was decided in Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905 during the small pox outbreak, “Most states and municipalities grant the police power to their officials to prevent harm, to prevent disease, to prevent outbreaks of disease. Prevention of disease and addressing disease is a classic police power. It is the administrative code in 1929…it’s a power given to the Department of Health Secretary to limit diseases.”
But Rieders says arguments for individual rights against government mandates relating to the spread of diseases really haven’t come up until now, “So what’s happening with mask mandate, vaccination mandate, all this kind of stuff…is if you look at the older cases, nobody found the constitution protected people or found any kind of right to resist public health measures. They would’ve laughed at you in 1905…and that would’ve been true up through the modern times.”
You can hear more of Attorney Rieders remarks on this and the Texas abortion law being upheld in the Supreme Court on the WKOK Podcast page.
