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Lawyer Explains His Federal Lawsuit Against Governor Mills for Her Unconstitutional and Excessive COVID-19 Response in Maine
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal, April 7, 2021
Maine Stands Up (MSU) joined with Ohio-based Make America Free Again (MAFA) and attorney Thomas Renz in filing a federal lawsuit against Governor Mills to challenge Mills’ state of emergency in federal court.
MAFA and MSU believe everyone has a right to protect themselves from COVID or any other disease, but do not believe anyone has the right to force others to take similar measures.
The 79 page lawsuit, filed by Maine attorney Ron Jenkins, outlines how the US CDC changed the death reporting criteria for COVID-19 to artificially inflate the “COVID-19 Death” numbers by arbitrarily labeling any death as a COVID-19 death so long as the deceased had previously tested positive for the virus with a PCR test at some point in the past. It was also shown how Maine uses PCR test kits that were excessively sensitive and produced wildly exaggerated “positive” case numbers throughout the year.
The lawsuit states, “The public has been brainwashed to believe that a 'case' is an infectious person walking among the public, a dangerous 'silent spreader' of a virus. The public is being misled by the fear-inducing, ever-increasing, cumulative case count that is constantly and verbally projected at them, believing that these numbers demonstrate a serious state of emergency. It is no wonder that so many people are living in extreme panic and hysteria over this disease.”
Jenkins was recently interviewed by James Grundvig on America Media Periscope where he discussed the lawsuit in greater detail.
“The defendants have been given a deadline of June to answer,” said Jenkins. “Typically what happens is the defendants are going to attack us now, aggressively, with motions to dismiss, motions for summary judgment. We'll fight those back and we will seek discovery aggressively. Some of our first inquiries we'll make through third party subpoenas to laboratories who are processing the PCR tests here in Maine.”
The lawsuit was brought against defendants, Governor Janet Mills; Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine CDC; Jeanne Lambrow, Maine Health and Human Services Commissioner; Heather Johnson, Commissioner of Maine Department of Economic and Community Development; and up to 20 other “John and Jane Does.”
“I think it's important to understand it's not just the governor's executive orders that are imposing all these mandates. They're coming in different forms. Some of those are in the form of checklists, instructions, orders, guidance, promulgated by people like Heather Johnson that amplify and give teeth to the executive orders. It's important for us to name all the defendants that are relative to the case and ensure that we can seek justice from all of them. So, she's named in the case as well.”
The Plaintiffs so far are: Jere Gray, a private citizen; Valerie Kessler, a business owner; Jennifer Jenkins, a private citizen; Heidi Sampson, State Representative for House District 21 and up to 100 other “John and Jane Does.”
“It's very likely we'll end up amending this complaint. There's a long list of plaintiffs who want to be included in the litigation and as we learn and discover more, of course we have a right to amend it and we likely will.”
In addition to the fraudulent use of PCR tests to gin up fear and panic in society, the federal lawsuit also makes the case that at this point, there is no emergency for the governor to keep renewing her emergency powers to address.
“It's not an approach that we pulled out of our hat. This is based on old Supreme Court precedent. There's a case called Blaisdell that comes from the turn of the century; there's a case called Sinclair that's a companion case. Blaisdell comes from the Great Depression and in that case the Supreme Court reviewed a law that was modifying the foreclosure process based on the idea that the depression was causing an economic emergency at that time. And the Supreme Court stated very clearly that if the conditions which constituted the emergency no longer exist then the law that was drafted and enacted to deal with the emergency can no longer be applied. That obviously has very direct elements for the circumstances which we are in today. The other case, Sinclair is a World War I era case. In that case the Supreme Court took account of the fact that World War I had ended so the rent controls that had been enacted in Washington, D.C. in order to deal with the influx of people coming into D.C. - the staff to meet all the needs during wartime - those rent controls were no longer necessary. The Supreme Court instructed the lower courts to go back and investigate very carefully what were the circumstances that constituted the ongoing emergency. If they couldn't find them, then these that were predicated on there being an emergency could no longer be applied.”
Jenkins says the governor is acting illegally by using emergency powers mandates to bypass the separation of powers doctrine that our state and the U.S. government is built upon.
“Article 3 of the Maine Constitution contains the separation of powers, which mirrors the Federal separation of powers...In most states there is emergency management legislation. We have that legislation here in Maine. There's a count in our complaint that asks the court to declare that Maine's emergency management legislation violates the separation of powers that's required in the constitution because it essentially allows the governor, for an indefinite period of time, to legislate in the absence of a legislature. Here, in Maine, our legislature adjourned days after our governor declared her emergency and didn't come back into session until last week [March 10, 2021] - the day after we filed our lawsuit.”
Jenkins says it was a monumental effort to draft the 79 page complaint because there were so many violations undertaken by governor Mills, the right to freely travel being one of those rights.
“Drafting the complaint was very difficult because under every rock you'll find a new constitutional violation. It's really atrocious. Some of the more important ones in this complaint are the constitutional right to travel. Our federal constitution doesn't explicitly state that we have a right to travel but the Supreme Court has consistently over time found that right and it's not disputable; it's a fundamental right, it's fundamental to what it means to be an American, to live freely in this country and that right has been aggressively protected over time. When your fundamental rights are implicated by law, whether it's a piece of legislation, an executive order issued by a governor, whatever it happens to be, that attracts the highest level of scrutiny from our court system, our federal courts and courts of appeal up to the Supreme Court. That law is then subjected to what we call strict scrutiny and it has to be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest in order to survive the scrutiny. Of course, our position is that our governor's mandates were not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest and they have fundamentally ripped apart our clients' right to travel.
To follow this court case with updates, or find out how to join it, go to www.mainestandsup.org where you will also be able to access a pdf file of the entire 79 page complaint.