Daily Archives: 2 November 2021

Backwards

Posted on by
Reply

Maine is voting today on an amendment to its State Constitution that would declare the right to food to be a fundamental right. The specific phrasing is this:

Constitution, Art. I, §25 is enacted to read:
Section 25.  Right to food.  All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being, as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights, public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.

The problem here, though, is not with the proposed amendment, which may or may not be a good idea. The problem is with the response to the proposal by folks who apparently slept through their grade school American history lessons and their junior high Civics classes. Typical is this response, from Katie Hansberry, Maine State Director of The Humane Society of the United States:

We do not think it is the intent of this proposal to allow food producers and and/or hunters, trappers, and fisherman be exempt from animal welfare and cruelty laws, but as currently written that would likely be the case as the current list of limitations fails to include any reference to such laws.

Constitutions are not subordinate to laws; laws are subordinate to Constitutions. Maine’s laws must fit within Maine’s Constitution, and when its Constitution changes, those laws must be changed accordingly; the laws are not immutable. Nor is there any requirement to enumerate subordinate matters into a governing document.

More than that, it’s foolish to expect the Constitution to be malleable by whatever later lawmakers decide with their new laws.

Still worse, if a Constitution is changeable by any collection of politicians, it will be vulnerable to willy-nilly changes according to the whims of the day, and from that it will soon cease to be a governing document. It will merely be a reflection of what men in government from time to time see as their own benefit, and it will no longer stand as a long-lasting and stable document that represents the will of the citizenry and that restrains those elastic politicians and their inconstant desires.

Reckless—But in Whose Eyes?

Posted on by
Reply

The Tennessee legislature, in a Special Session that lasted into the small hours of last Saturday morning, passed a Wuhan Virus Freedom bill (my term) that achieves a number of things:

The final bill said government entities cannot force private businesses to institute a mask mandate or COVID-19 vaccination mandate, and private businesses cannot take action against an employee for not receiving the vaccine and cannot compel an employee or visitor to show proof of vaccination.

There are a couple of fillips: music venues will be able to require proof of vaccination in lieu of a negative virus test, and K-12 school principals will be able to require masks, but only on a school-by-school basis, and the principal must get the State’s permission, provide the masks, mandate a maximum of 14 days, and act only on a 14-day moving average of 1% cases for the school.

And yet….

Senator Jeff Yarbro (D, Nashville), a member of the conference committee that produced the final bill:

This is a reckless way to legislate[.]

Because individual freedom is reckless to Progressive-Democrats, and voting for individual freedom at 0100, as this bill was due to the long days and late hours of Progressive-Democrat obstruction, is equally reckless.

The bill itself can be read here.

Update: Governor Bill Lee (R) signed the bill 12 Nov 21.