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Supreme Court seeks response from Gov. Wolf

AP photo The Supreme Court Building is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington.

It’ll be another month before it is learned whether the U.S. Supreme Court will take the case — brought by, among others, two Warren County businesses who challenged Gov. Tom Wolf’s COVID-19 response business closure order.

The case was set to go to conference — where the justices would determine whether they would grant the writ of certiorari and hear the case – on Thursday.

Back on June 3, Wolf, through the Pa. Attorney General’s office, declined to file a response in the case unless requested by the court.

The nation’s highest court has now made that request.

According to certpool.com, which tracks the status of the cases before the court, a “brief in opposition” has been requested.

The Supreme Court docket for the case indicates that that response is now due by July 22.

Two Warren County businesses are challenging the order — Blueberry Hill Golf Club and Caledonia Land Company in addition to a realtor, political candidate and a laundromat.

The entities argue in the cert petition that the business closure order “exceeded the Governor’s permissible scope of his police powers and thus violated petitioners’ rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”

The filing cites disease data on the flu and noted that “governors have never shut down tens of thousands of businesses throughout their state in response to the flu.”

The argument then shifts to a due process violation under both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

“The Order ousted Petitioners from their place of business and prohibits them from physically operating them,” the cert petition states. “The Petitioners had no expectation that they would be barred from using their physical business operations, which were already in lawful use on their business premises, by an executive order from the Governor.”

Further, they argue the inability to appeal the determination of the waiver process presents another due process challenge.

“The fundamental problem with the Governor’s classification scheme is the two classes — life-sustaining and non-life-sustaining — do not have any commonly understood definition,” they argue, “and do not appear to have existed as industry or business classifications prior to the Governor’s decision to employ them in his Order. In short, no one knows what they mean.”

“This Court,” the cert petition concludes, “should declare the Order violates the rights of Petitioners’ and all businesses and entities on the non-life-sustaining List guaranteed by the U.S. Const. amends. I, V, XIV and should strike it down.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has already denied a petition to stay Wolf’s order.

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