A TVA police officer, Scott E. Stone, gives me this business card after stopping a woman for having a motor vehicle tag that didn’t match her car. (Photo David Tulis)
The TVA traffic enforcement story is raising alarm because it suggests how far down the state has sunk and, with it, its people.
By David Tulis / Noogaradio 1240 AM 92.7 FM
Traffic enforcement is a commercial activity by the state upon the regulated part of the traveling economy. As Tennessee code annotated title 55 makes clear, traffic and transportation are commercial, imposed upon common carriers who make their livings by carrying goods and people for hire in transportation. Transportation is a regulatable. Travel is legally free and exerciseable without incumbrance.
Most Tennesseans, whether they know it or not, are free travelers who do not engage themselves into commerce except by application, and probably mostly as the result of legal error, mistake and ignorance, according to my legal analysis of the driver license application and other statutes.
That the federal government is enforcing traffic laws and citing people to sessions and city court is a surprising devolving of authority and power and its evolving claims by national government.
States departments of U.S.
Just as the federal judiciary seized upon the state prerogative and marriage in a barrage of Obgergefell vs. Hodges, 2015, so here an agency of the federal government whose duty is the generation of electricity and the management of rivers is involving itself in traffic enforcement, in service, as it were, to state commercial government.
Commercial government and transportation enforcement against the right of travel in the name of commerce brings the state millions and millions of dollars every year.
These figures are no doubt in the Tennessee comprehensive annual financial report, or CAFR, published annually, and giving a net worth of big government and accounting for some, if not all, of its financial activities.
TVA officers traffic stops using high-tech surveillance equipment scanning license plate numbers and matching them with cars, is a shocking development for people in the erstwhile “Tennessee Valley,” which is not a real valley at all, but a federal district with a bit of good marketing in the name.
It is perhaps also a ridiculous one. How can officer Scott E. Stone improve the protection of utility infrastructure such as turbines, lakefront property, dams, nuclear blockhouses and the like by stopping a traveler who is going 65 miles an hour over Thrasher Bridge rather than the posted 55 or using surveillance sniffers called LPRs to scan every license plate it sees?
It is as ridiculous as the railroad retirement board having a police force, or the federal education department having a paramilitary organization serving as classroom monitoring adjuncts. TVA’s enforcing of traffic, is no less ridiculous than the social security administration loading up on 174,000 rounds of pistol ammunition, according to a 2013 controversy over government spending, or the FDA’s buying armored vests for raids on Amish milk farmers.
The arming up of federal agencies suggests the spiritual and moral demeanor of the people who run the national government, and their gaining advantage from the homeland security act after 9/11. They are increasingly fearful and want to suppress the people and create an atmosphere of intimidation and fear.
TVA spokesman Scott Fiedler, when first asked about federal authority to run traffic enforcement patrols in Tennessee, was so superior to Tennessee that he didn’t even bother to cite the state statute that, shamefully, allows TVA cops free reign across the landscape. He said, simply, that his is a federal agency, and effectively can do whatever it wants.
State government in Tennessee is as violent against the rights of the people as is the national government, with commercial enforcement of traffic and other laws operating beyond authority as a matter of routine. Still, because the ideal is federalism and confederated government, we are offended at federal extra-territoriality, its disregard of jurisdictional prerogatives and state sovereignty (a term I use advisedly, not theologically, but legally, pursuant to American Jurisprudence 2d, the legal encyclopedia).
There may be state commercial jurisdiction — we know there is, because Tennessee Title 55 authorizes the state to regulate commerce on the highway. That is within the power of the federal authority to regulate Tennessee traffic?
Arguably, there is because the Tennessee transportation statute derives its authority from the federal transportation statute. But to have TVA cops enforce it in disguised or unmarked cars is especially disturbing. The abuse by the state comes now at the hand of its proxy, its master.
Commercial, vehicle ‘crimes’ on Castile’s rap sheet aren’t moral evils at all
‘Fiddle man’ vows appeal after jury rejects constitutional protections
‘Fiddle man’ vows appeal after jury rejects constitutional protections
Police abuse victim sees ‘blue honor’ conspiracy to save lying cop
System won’t let prosecutor obtain justice in school bus killings
/https://tnt23.wpengine.com/2017/07/tva-arrests-family-traffic-stop-agency-claims-total-tn-jurisdiction/
