Do governors have the right to decide which activities are essential?

Andrew P. Napolitano   "During the past month, as Americans have been terrified of the coronavirus, another demon has been lurking ready to pounce. It is a demon of our own creation. It is the now amply manifested inability of elected officials to resist the temptation of totalitarianism. And it is slowly bringing about the death of personal liberty in our once free society.
"It is one thing for public officials to use a bully pulpit to educate and even intimidate the populace into a prudent awareness of basic sanitary behaviors — even those which go against our nature — to impede the spread of COVID-19. It is quite another to contend that their suggestions and intimidations and guidelines somehow have the force of the law behind them.
"They don’t.
"The government in America — at both the federal and state levels — is divided into three branches: Legislative, executive and judicial.  his separation of powers was crafted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 after heated debate. The essence of the debate was this: How to establish a government strong enough to protect individual liberty but not so strong as to enable the government to destroy it. James Madison and his colleagues devised the separation of powers to keep power from accumulating in one branch.

"The legislative branch writes the laws, and the executive enforces them, and the judiciary interprets them and articulates what they mean. The president cannot write laws. The courts cannot enforce them. And Congress cannot interpret them. When Congress has gotten lazy or presidents have gotten ambitious and we’ve seen presidential lawmaking, the courts have struck it down. Stated differently, the separation of powers is core to our freedoms and the courts have consistently ruled that core functions assigned by the U.S. Constitution to each branch cannot be ceded away to another branch.

"The same is the case for the states, as each state’s constitution mimics the U.S. Constitution and mandates separation. The separation is not mandated to protect the prerogatives of each branch. It is mandated to protect individual liberty by preventing any branch from accumulating power assigned to the others.

"This has been Madison’s genius. It has become Madison’s sorrow." . . .