[jandrewrogers]

In the US, the States are explicitly prohibited from closing their borders as a matter of Constitutional law. For different reasons, neither the States nor the Federal government are allowed to prohibit free travel between the States. This has been to the Supreme Court many times, it is mostly settled law at this point.

The right to travel within the US, like free speech, is near absolute. The due process hurdles to temporarily remove that right from an individual are very high; you can't do it with an edict nor de facto travel restrictions by abusing regulatory power (which has also been tested in the US Supreme Court).

Australia has significantly weaker individual freedoms than the US. This is one of those cases where those differences become apparent. Everyone asserting that the US should restrict travel like everyone else is ignoring that it is expressly illegal for the government to mandate such at thing in the US. No one in the US government is interested in dealing with the backlash such an attempt would elicit.

[boatmansloth]

> In the US, the States are explicitly prohibited from closing their borders as a matter of Constitutional law

This appears to be wrong: https://www.justsecurity.org/69770/can-governors-close-their...

[jandrewrogers]

No, that is selective quoting of case law in support of a narrative. There are significant due process hurdles and evidentiary standards of "threat to public safety" in this same case law that are ignored here because they are inconvenient to the argument but nonetheless part of that same judicial precedent.

A thorough reading of that case law makes it plain that the proposals with respect to COVID would never pass judicial muster. In fact, there is considerable case law where attempts at such prohibitions were rejected outright but little curiosity in the above link as to the conditions and circumstances that caused the courts to throw them out.

The government knows that the courts won't allow them to cherrypick and selectively quote case law. It isn't an accident that every State in the US, across the entire political spectrum, came to the same policy conclusion regarding freedom of travel.

[boatmansloth]

I dunno dude, the guy is a law professor. Do you have something more compelling for me to read instead? No insult to you but right now I'm running in to the 'guy on the internet has opinions problem' I hope you'll understand.

This guy from Yale thinks the same as the first one I linked:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-18/in-a-p...

[creato]

Even if we assume you are right, how do you think this would work out in practice? Many police in the US won't even enforce mask mandates, you think they'll enforce travel restrictions on literally thousands of state border crossings? Most of these border crossings barely even have a sign indicating them.