What Good Are Constitutional Rights if They Are Violated When Americans Get Sick?

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

One of my Fox colleagues recently sent me an email attachment of a painting of the framers signing the Constitution of the United States. Except in this version, George Washington — who presided at the Constitutional Convention — looks at James Madison — who was the scrivener at the Convention — and says, “None of this counts if people get sick, right?”

In these days of state governors issuing daily decrees purporting to criminalize the exercise of our personal freedoms, the words put into Washington’s mouth are only mildly amusing. Had Washington actually asked such a question, Madison, of all people, would likely have responded: “No. This document protects our natural rights at all times and under all circumstances.”

It is easy, 233 years later, to offer that hypothetical response, particularly since the Supreme Court has done so already when, as readers of this column will recall, Abraham Lincoln suspended the constitutionally guaranteed writ of habeas corpus — the right to be brought before a judge upon arrest — only to be rebuked by the Supreme Court.

"The only thing wrong with this argument is the question of how this would ever happen? Hasn’t yet, why should it ever?"

John, I think you should study some history. Wars have been fought over this, economies have collapsed. It ain't pretty. What happens if you run up debt until you can't pay it?

To get you started, here are a few examples. And few more. There are plenty more if you search.

Finally, here is a more technical paper showing that nations that run their debt up over 90% of the GDP get in real trouble.

Have fun!

“A suggestion - “

A suggestion - read the whole post. He made an uneducated remark off the cuff and called me a moron without provocation. So I educated him and made my point about name calling.

He did not reply so IMO he was only interested in dishing abuse. Or maybe he was properly shamed. Either way suits me.

Notice that even though you chose to insert yourself into this exchange, you didn’t resort to abuse and I didn’t give any back.

“It’s a flu virus. Saying it’s not doesn’t make if so. Ignoring the over 10,000 deaths this year from influenza is moronic.”

It’s not a flu virus. It belongs to the same family as the flu, coronaviruses, as do some of the viruses that cause the common cold.

They are not all the common cold, nor the flu, any more than your housecat is a mountain lion. Saying they are does not make it so.

There have been far more than 10,000 deaths from the flu this year. Over the course of the flu season - 7 months - as many as 60,000 have died (high end CDC estimate). Nobody is ignoring it - you are engaging in arguments that have been made and refuted many times.

CCP-19 has only been killing people in the US for about 1 month. It is now killing about 1,000 per day (and that number is going to go up). We are experiencing the equivalent of 10 or 11 flu seasons simultaneously. So by Monday it will have passed your 10,000 and by the middle of April the flu will be in the rear-view mirror. Unless we do the necessary things to stop it. And if we don’t, our HCS, which is built to handle the flu, will collapse. Then the economy will. Then we’ll be in the same boat as Italy where people are dying at 16x the normal rate. Not all from CCP-19, but from that and the other things that their choked off hospitals can no longer treat them for. Things that often wouldn’t have killed them before this. 16 times the normal rate.

Ignoring 2 months of threads on the topic and jumping in late and uninformed to name call is what’s moronic.

Agreed on the use of models. The ‘crisis is everywhere’ government loves to use models to justify that farce that is climate change, global warming, global cooling.

Having taken a statistic course or two, all of the models...all of them, are flawed. They are inherently guesses. I am curious if anyone on Fauci’s team did an R2 (R-squared) analyses on his 2,000,000 number to see what kind of confidence there was in that number. Of course, you know that was not done. Even if it was, they probably came out with less than a one sigma R2 confidence and that does not bode well for telling the entirely of the US that 2,000,000 ‘might’ die so therefore, you need to stay home and the country needs to be shutdown. At least in Orwell’s 1984, the government drop rocket bombs in the cities and then blamed it on Goldstein to keep the population in check. This virus hysteria is the metaphorical ‘bomb’.

On a side note, I am not disappointed by President Trump in this case. What all of this hysteria is proving is that the “deep state” is so much more than just the civilians in the Federal or state governments. It is the 65+ million people who keep voting for the party of Pelosi and Schumer. He simply can not fight all of that at one time and he has to do ‘tactical retreats’ from time to time.

By the way, I was going to add a couple of Freepers to this reply (Popman; righttackle44) but decided not to. Concerning your note about the citizens not being able to provide adult supervision, it is my opinion that people like ‘Popman’ (based upon his snarky and bitter responses in this thread) and ‘rightackle44’ (with his ad hominem attacks in this thread) that help keep the police state in place so that it may continue to threaten the population with “force” if the people are not sufficiently compliant. If I did add them, I would have expected an angry, bitter, snarky response, an ad hominem attack or a strawman arguments to try to once again convince us how “stupid” we are.

Clausewitz was right with concept of the Trinity and the “violent emotion of the people” being a significant function of why governments do what they do.

In times like this, I think about all those 18 and 19 year olds who stormed Normandy because a government told them too, and died having never had the joy of being a father or to grow old. I find it unfortunate that this “repeating cycle of crisis” (no matter what it is) is the reality of the human existence. Yet here we are, with the government telling us what to do under the threat of imprisonment, or possibly death if we really put up a fight, if we do not comply.

In the end, I will be flying my Gadsden flag from the NRA in front of my house for quite sometime.

Oh and by the way, nice screen name.

JoMa

I have a better way of responding to this event which would not infringe on rights as listed in the US Constitution (specifically the Bill of Rights) but my way will result in other ‘costs’.

However, based upon your snarky way of asking me, I expect you are just lying in wait to respond to my ideas with an ad hominem attack against me which effectively will imply that I am somehow ‘stupid’ or somehow have less intelligence than you do, or somehow I am ‘uncaring’ of my fellow humans.

To that end, I will pass.

And now, I expect that if you respond to this note, you will tell me that I am somehow a weakling or scared or faint of heart since I chose not to provide you my ideas.

JoMa

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