Horowitz: Minnesota AG Keith Ellison threatens black business owner with farm labor for opening restaurant

Joe Biden once said that Republicans want to put black people "back in chains," but it appears that it is the leftist "Branch Covidian" cultists who are actually threatening to place a black single mom business owner back in chains for the "crime" of earning a living.

During the greatest crime wave in a generation, Larvita McFarquhar is the worst type of criminal in the estimation of the socialists. A single mom, rather than going on welfare, McFarquhar opened Havens Garden, in Lynd, Minnesota, a family-oriented restaurant with an attached gymnasium for kids to have a good time. She had the audacity to keep her business opened after the governor unconstitutionally declared property rights dead in the state.

Rather than offering to compensate her for the lost business, on Dec. 18, Ramsey County District Court Judge Sara Grewing found her guilty of civil contempt and fined McFarquhar $250 per day her establishment remains opened.

Evidently, Judge Grewing is a big stickler for the "law" — but only when it comes in the form of arbitrary executive edicts against business owners. Last year, Judge Grewing gave a serial sex predator who raped an unconscious woman just two and a half years in prison. On Aug. 3, she single-handedly nullified state election law by ruling that Minnesota's absentee ballots no longer require the signature of a witness who is a registered voter or a notary public and requiring the board of elections to accept mail-ins that come in after Election Day. And as she threatens business owners with prison time because of COVID, she has also demanded that the Department of Corrections officials show her a plan for protecting prisoners from COVID.

Are you starting to get a sense of which "laws" and which "criminals" she is concerned with?

Well, now that Attorney General Keith Ellison sees Larvita has a spine of steel and is willing to stand for God-given rights, he is upping the ante. Last week, Ellison's office filed a motion for further contempt sanctions with the Second Circuit court to propose jail time for her. Was she burning buildings or lynching motorists like BLM rioters? Nope. Her crime? "Defendant has continued to offer on-premises consumption of food or beverages to the public since receiving the Court's Civil Contempt Order on December 18, 2020."

What is the punishment they are pushing for? Take a look at the motion:

So now, in this country, you are not allowed to earn a living, and your punishment for doing so is slave labor. With China now celebrating the New Year with packed crowds, there is more freedom in China than in Minnesota. We have become a wealthier version of North Korea with a printing press of cash, except that cash just goes to big business or to households that didn't lose a penny from the shutdown. McFarquar didn't receive a penny of compensation.

Ellison's motion also threatens to confiscate the money she raised from her crowdsourcing page to pay for her lawyer's fees. Larvita gave an emotional response on a Facebook live filmed inside her establishment noting that she was "at a loss of words" as to how this can happen in America.

What few people have noticed is that, even if with some convoluted rationale the government had the power to categorically shut down businesses, at worst, it would be covered by the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause, which would mean she is entitled to "just compensation." Instead, in the new America, she has to pay to put herself out of business.

These government workers from the health department are able to earn their paychecks by denying other people their paychecks. We were all supposed to be "in this together," yet so many government workers and white-collar jobs can be done online while brick and mortar businesses get crushed. Again, even if the government was justified, this is exactly what the just compensation requirement expressed in the Fifth Amendment was written to address. As the Supreme Court said in Armstrong v. United States(1960), "The Fifth Amendment's [Takings Clause] . . . was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole."