I am not a lawyer. None of this is advice, all of this is information and academic speculation. I have cited sources for a few things. Before you take any action on anything written here, please speak with an actual attorney.

So, if there is a legal mandate, and then there is a mechanism by which the ma ndate can be circumvented such as "Children whose parents elect that he or she is not subject to a mandate" then there are now methods within law for circum venting law.

Moreover, Governors asserting authority over localities like this are going to trigger the only Mutually Assured Destructive lawsuit and argume nt that I know of: Municipalities are unconsitutional...

Localities are given authority by their given states, but in the US constitution there is no mechan ism for a locality to actually exist, and court cases that I have been able to find are all very narrowly defined when localities and municipalities involve d and usually reference their overarching state. Now, this isn't new. As far b ack as the late 1970s there have been scholarly articles, legal journal articl es, and warnings from attorneys and legal scholars that the American locality is in danger. In fact, one such article from the Wisconsin Law Review was so f undamentally about this danger that the title is "The Constitutional Vulnerabi lity of American Local Government: The Politics of City Status in American Law ." This article addresses that the concept of the American City isn't grounded in Constitutionality, and suffers a vulnerability there as the title implies. Frug goes further in "The City as a Legal Concept" to show that the actual le gal justifications have been proxies for the political beliefs of various just ices, but that there are no real legal or constitutional proetections for thei r existence or authority. However, a direct constitutional challenge for a sta te to say that a municipality can not have a mandate without the authority of the state would wreak HAVOC on our legal system because of the patchwork natur e of law.

Now: one might ask: but JayCee, can't this be handled by a targeted ruling, a split ruling, a hybrid ruling, or an indirect ruling by the Supreme Court as has happened before? Well, not exactly. In previous times the questio n has always been one of specifics, "Can a city be a monopoly?" Community Comm unications Co. v. City of Boulder (Setting up that Municipalities are governed more similarly to corporations in law than a governmental entity), or "Must a city abide by constitutional requirements?" - Chesapeake & Potomac Tel. Co. v . Morgantown (This also set up that Muncipalities are Corporations with flag a uthority of State government extended either expressly by charter or by State constitution). Those were relatively straightforward to break up; assuming you treat them solely as authority-bearing corporations with only the rights expr essly granted. The risk of the case we're seeing now is such that the legal au thority of the municipality to perform multiple basic governmental functions:

• The authority to pass and maintain local mandates and ordinances. (Also, if yo u were wondering, they're ordinances because municipalities can't actually hav e laws...)
• The authority to enforce local mandates and ordinances.
• The authority to process, manage, maintain, and handle business, operational, and functional policies and procedures.
• Finally, the fundamental authority inherited from Common Law and a generally recognized philosophy of government in Common Law societies that the government must be able to take good faith action to protec t it's citizens.

There is no narrow ruling on any of those points that does no t fundamentally destroy the current state and structure of the United States L egal system. Chaos would ensue while valid legal questions arise such as "Are municipal police departments valid? Do I have to follow any city ordinances? H ow does Zoning work, now? Do I have to pay city taxes?" I know this has been l ong, and I thank you for bearing with me on this, but in their zeal to be flag rantly ignorant pro-COVID politicians are embarking on a journey they have not thought through.

Although, now that I put those two facts in a sentence... it 's not that shocking.