Lil ole me has decided to extend martial law

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon said she expects to extend her safer-at-home order beyond April 14 and has urged Gov. Bill Lee to do the same before his order expires next week.

Kincannon said in a Facebook chat Thursday that positive cases continue to rise. Until they start consistently going down, she said, it's best for everyone to continue remaining at home as much as they can.

A few comments:
Safer at home is a euphemism for a martial law order. Kincannon, like many mayors across the country, assumed arbitrary power in the name of the health emergency. But each state has a constitution and in most states, mayors do not have power to declare and maintain martial law. That authority normally resides with the state governor alone, though in the past mayors have on rare occasion usurped that power.

I do not know whether Kincannon acted outside the law when she declared a lockdown in advance of the governor's order. But her plan to continue the lockdown comes with, currently, 28 active Covid cases in Knox County. So numbers in Knox are not rising at all. She is evidently referring to national or regional figures.

That is, there is no health emergency in Knox. Kincannon is acting unilaterally to deprive people of their livelihoods on the basis of what she thinks might happen. I doubt this is her call. The governor is the one who definitely can use emergency power. But, wise leaders realize that maintaining indefinite emergency lockdowns is asking for trouble. Yet all too many public officials do not seem to realize that casualties from lockdowns can be as severe or more severe than casualties from a contagious disease.

I realize that, to many, the first half of the 20th century is history, but no one then thought of shutting down the economy on account of the deadly and recurrent polio pandemic. People realized that it was necessary to cope with it, awful as it was.

Kincannon's approach has a certain maternalistic aura about it. But nanny-state politics do not suit America.