Robert Alt, president and chief executive officer of The Buckeye Institute, and Buckeye’s client, Eric Flannery, owner of The Big Board, joined Matt Kibbe on the tremendously popular and always edifying Kibbe on Liberty podcast to celebrate the filing of their constitutional challenge against the District of Columbia—Flannery v. D.C. Department of Health.
After Eric announced that his restaurant would not discriminate against the unvaccinated, the city pulled his liquor license and ultimately shut him down completely. Nine months later, after Eric was forced to burn through his life savings, The Big Board is open and the outstanding fines have been dismissed. But Eric and Robert are fighting on in defense of the fundamentally American principles at stake. Their new legal challenge argues that the DC government did not have the authority to issue a string of emergency orders that resulted in The Big Board’s shutdown, and that these actions, by seeking to evade congressional review and judicial scrutiny, violated the U.S. Constitution and the Home Rule Act of 1973.