Governor’s don’t write laws, legislatures write laws. Under what law is this shutdown being enforced?
Yeah. A few points on that, I'll try to go in a logical order.
The legislature has passed laws that give the governor certain powers in an emergency. This makes sense for most emergencies have geographic scope limitations and fairly short time duration. Natural disaster, flood, fire.
None of these laws anticipate an emergency that covers the whole state for months, or some indefinite time. That is part of the problem. Also part of the problem is the governor is the person who makes the declaration.
Under Maine law, once this declaration has been made, the governor gets power to pass regulations relating to the called emergency. The governor has a 30 day window, but under Maine law, these can be renewed one after another without limit. The legislature can, if it wants to (it doesn't) step in and retake the power it has delegated to the governor.
Mills has gone a step further and appointed minion agencies to write the regulations. The doctors are now in charge. The legislature is absent.
Adding insult to injury, if any of the regulations is challenged in court, the court will defer to the emergency. We are now literally under a legal philosophy where if it is not expressly permitted (at the individual level), it is prohibited, under criminal penalty. It is a crime to leave your property unless for a permitted purpose.
I live in Maine. I am an officer in the church, I have a law degree, a few contacts. I'm not afraid to pick up the phone, and I have. The regulations here are a hot mess. The natives are a mixed bag, like here. Some reallydo think the sky is falling. By and large the cops aren't put in the spot of having to enforce anything because the people are by and large falling in line.
If it gets ugly, the state will not get much notice, if any. It'll just happen. There is a HUGE amount of animosity and ill will built up. The government is NOT attending to its people, it is stepping all over them.