Category Archives: regulation

Backwards

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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?

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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.

Pay No Attention to the Woman Behind the Curtain

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That’s the mantra of Progressive-Democrats, who are enthusiastically supportive of President Joe Biden’s (D) nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova.

Ms Omarova wants to put an “‘end to banking’ as we know it”—again, her words—and transfer private banking functions to the Federal Reserve, where accounts would “fully replace” private bank deposits. The Fed would control “systemically important prices” for fuel, food, raw materials, metals, natural resources, home prices and wages.

And, she says

the Fed should be remade into what she calls “The People’s Ledger.”

And

She calls for “reimagining” the role of central banks “as the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.”

But ignore those calls for Soviet finance controls. She’s the lady the Progressive-Democrats want to inflict on us.

Shut up about that flapping curtain; vote her up.

Biden’s Attack on our Energy Independence

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…continues. President Joe Biden (D), the privileged white male patriarch half of the Biden-Harris administration, said at his Thursday CNN-hosted townhall—and he actually was serious:

I don’t see anything that’s going to significantly reduce gas prices right now. My guess is you’ll start to see gas prices come down as we get by going into the winter, I mean excuse me, into next year in 2022.

Of course he does see what would significantly reduce gas prices—and stop the inflation in the cost of so many other consumer goods that depend on energy production. And no, I don’t mean begging more piteously for OPEC to increase oil production, nor do I mean imploring Russia to increase its oil and gas shipments.

Biden could unlock American oil and gas production, he could freely allow exploration and drilling on Federal lands, he could get out of the way of production from ANWR, just for starters. All of these things Biden knows full well.

Biden could stop his assault on American oil and gas production and let us go back to the energy independence that lowered our costs to historic lows. Biden knows this full well, also.

But he won’t. Instead, he’ll continue to dissemble, like he did at that townhall. It’s about control, not what’s good for our nation.

Out of Touch

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At last Friday’s noon-ish press conference, a reporter (Fox News‘ term) asked President Joe Biden’s (D) Press Secretary Jen Psaki why Biden’s approval ratings were so low. Psaki’s response:

I would just go back to what our view is, is that we’re still going through a hard time in this country. And people are tired of fighting the pandemic, they’re tired of the impact on their lives.
…
And we all thought it would be over at this point in time[.]

No, we’re not tired of fighting the pandemic, or of its impact on our lives. We’re tired of the impact Government is having on our lives with its overreacting to the virus, its interference in our lives, its using this virus situation to increasingly limit our liberties.

We’re tired of the hard time Government is causing under the guise of the virus.

And: the virus situation has long since been over. Peak new Wuhan Virus Delta variant cases was ‘way last August, and peak Delta variant-related deaths was ‘way last September. On top of that, those peaks were a small fraction of the peaks from the original Wuhan Virus new cases and related deaths.

What our view is. This is how out of touch with us average Americans the Biden-Harris administration is.

Or, maybe it’s their fingers in their ears.