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JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) — A county judge in Missouri ruled that local health restrictions imposed under the guise of halting the spread of COVID-19 in the state are illegal and ought to be lifted.

Green called the measures that had been enacted by health bureaucrats in his state part of an “incredible power to coerce … subjects into submission,” and that as a result of his decision, “schools and places of public assemblies should no longer fear arbitrary closure based on the whims of public health bureaucrats.”

He ruled on November 22 that quarantines, business closures and other such orders violate the Missouri Constitution which contains a clause for the separation of powers regarding the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the state government.

The Missouri Constitution outlines how the different branches of government are required to operate. It reads: “The powers of government shall be divided into three distinct departments — the legislative, executive and judicial — each of which shall be confided to a separate magistracy, and no person, or collection of persons, charged with the exercise of powers properly belonging to one of those departments, shall exercise any power properly belonging to either of the others, except in the instances in this constitution expressly directed or permitted.”

In the opening of the ruling, the judge wrote: “This case is about whether Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services regulations can abolish representative government in the creation of public health laws, and whether it can authorize closure of a school or assembly based on the unfettered opinion of an unelected official. This Court finds it cannot.”

In addition, the judge castigated the delegation of “rulemaking power to an administrative agency.” “This type of double delegation, which results in lawmaking by an administrative entity, is an impermissible combination of legislative and administrative power,” he wrote.

The ruling was in response to a lawsuit that was filed in 2020 called Shannon Robinson et al. v. Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, at the height of the lockdown, when the city and county of St. Louis and other jurisdictions were issuing mandates that have now been deemed illegal and unconstitutional.

Judge Green argued that the lockdown mandates “create a system of statewide health governance that enables unelected officials to become accountable to no one.”

It was his legal opinion that “health agency directors throughout Missouri have used the power granted to them … to exercise unbridled and unfettered personal authority to in effect, legislate.”

He said that local health bureaucrats are “constitutionally prohibited” from issuing the types of mandates that have “been happening across the state for over 18 months.”

Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker tweeted on Wednesday that the decision was “a devastating decision from Missouri declaring all coercive Covid measures to be illegal … Devastating for the bad guys who did all this to us.”