By executive order the people of Chattanooga and other cities across Tennessee have effectively lost their legal protections under the constitution.
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio 92.7 FM
Executive orders by Gov. Bill Lee declaring a statewide lockdown exceed his grant of authority under emergency powers, it appears, but also contradict clear statutes that grant police powers during a public emergency.
Those laws are the quarantine law, which empowers state action against the recalcitrant and uncooperative sick, and the tuberculosis statute, which outlines legal protocol for the establishing of a person’s illness with that disease. That law is Tenn. Code Ann. 68-1-201, power to quarantine. The TB statute makes clear that coercive power is applied under judicial ruling, based on medical evidence, decided on by a judge in a hearing or trial.
By law, the rights of the people are off limits to the legislature. No right can be overridden by state action, unless that overriding of a right is done with respect to due process.
The rights of the people are off limits to the governor, even under the necessity of a public health emergency.
Built into Tennessee law is respect for the people, and a high regard for their ability to cope with life, even life filled with danger and risk.
With their executive orders, officials act to de-individuate the operation of state power. Rather than particular probable cause being required to allow a confrontation between the police and a citizen, the officer There are no exceptions. “Necessity” is always a claim and practice of men. Rights come from God, and these men do not recognize them.
The citizens are protected by law in their having God-given, constitutionally guaranteed, unalienable and inherent rights that accrue to them as individuals because they are made in God’s image and have duties and obligations to Him in sustenance of their wives, children, families enterprises and properties.
Martial law destroys in every household a property right. That property right is due process. Our property rights are noted in Acts 17:28 that says, “For in him we live, we move, we have our being.” Thomas Jefferson borrowed from this verse to encompass those rights to be protected by American law.
Suppose you demand a jury trial for having violated a “stay at home” decree by your mayor? Who are the people on the jury? They are those who were cowed by the directive of the governor — men and women who live in fear and terror, and cannot be convinced by your defense that you committed no crime and no offense.
If officials throw out the constitution, is there any limit to what they can do? Does not the elimination of the constitution give rise to arbitrary and capricious acts by officers, field commanders, supervisors, deputies,sheriffs and police chiefs. Does not such a circumstance allow for the worst of Jim Crow to continue to operate?
I have established here and at NoogaRadio 92.7 FM that Jim Crow is sanctioned by Mayor Andy Berke, Mayor Jim Coppinger, Sheriff Jim Hammond and police chiefs such as CPD’s David Roddy. It operates via abuse of the state trucking law, and through the rejection and ignoring of Tenn. Code Ann. 40-7-103, grounds for arrest by officer without a warrant.
Ban on religion?
No state official has any authority over the work of the gospel. The church has long enjoyed the status of extra-territoriality — it is effectively an embassy of a foreign king. That king is God, and he does not accept kings, emperors or governors making false claims about its operation nor his full ownership of these properties. Tennessee law in Article 1, the bill of rights, recognizes this claim.
Section 3. That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience; that no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any minister against his consent; that no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience; and that no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship. [Emphasis added]
Ban on free assembly?
The ban on 10 or more people gathering is an arbitrary number, and cannot be understood as legally enforceable. That number is an advised and suggested number — advised by good and honorable medical people. But people who have no legal authority to abrogate any of the rights of the people in Tennessee.
The ban on free assembly thwarts people getting together to overthrow the current medical emergency regime, or for any other lawful and private purpose.
The constitution assumes that when people get together in a group, it is always “for their common good.” They are legally presumed to be acting innocently and harmlessly.
Section 23. That the citizens have a right, in a peaceable manner, to assemble together for their common good, to instruct their representatives, and to apply to those invested with the powers of government for redress of grievances, or other proper purposes, by address or remonstrance. [Emphasis added]
No sheriff, no county commission, no deputy, no chief of police has authority under our law to forbid such gatherings or threaten people who are gathering in groups apart from a state permission.
Militia ‘inconsistent with the principles of free government’
Mayors Andy Berke and Jim Coppinger and Gov. Lee have effectively activated the militia by other means. Not actually the Tennessee defense force (the state’s army) nor the Tennessee national guard.
But it has done so in a way recognized as lawless work-around by the constitutional provision in the bill of rights that restraints the use of military occupation of the state and the people’s cities, towns and properties.
Note the provision that says “martial law *** of military officers, or others” as using this power. This power is “not confided to any department” of the government in the state.
Police departments are, effectively, military organizations, with boots on the ground, deployed daily to harass the people and, occasionally, solve crimes and maintain public order.
Section 25. That no citizen of this state, except such as are employed in the army of the United States, or militia in actual service, shall be subjected to punishment under the martial or military law. That martial law, in the sense of the unrestricted power of military officers, or others, to dispose of the persons, liberties or property of the citizen, is inconsistent with the principles of free government, and is not confided to any department of the government of this state.” [Emphasis added]
Martial law, again, views the people as a mass, a plastic grouping of non-individuated people, none of whom have any particular defensible rights that must be respected. In military occupation, no one can insist on due process rights, and no one can defy an order as unlawful. All orders are presumed lawful and legitimate — barked commands of a cop on a sidewalk, a demand for access to a house without a warrant, a demand for ID though Tennessee is not a “stop and identify” state. All orders are presumptively lawful.
Rights ‘shall never be violated’
But such customs as allowed by Gov. Lee and the general acceptatation of his presumptions by the eager public are DISALLOWED under law.
Article 11, on “miscellaneous provisions” of the law, contains a provision dangerous to any claim of valid authority as exercised under the CV-19 panic.
Section 16. The declaration of rights hereto prefixed is declared to be a part of the Constitution of the state, and shall never be violated on any pretense whatever. And to guard against transgression of the high powers we have delegated, we declare that everything in the bill of rights contained, is excepted out of the general powers of the government, and shall forever remain inviolate. [Emphasis added]
Panic and necessity
Much calming and reasonable reporting has appeared despite efforts by FB, Google, NBC, ABC, CNN and others to control the narrative and promote the sense of panic.
Today a presidential official says that people who die “with COVID-19” are going to be listed as having died from the virus. Many facts don’t bear out the alarm and panic, and don’t support the rationale behind the creation of the police state in Tennessee.
Gripped by fear, the people who comprise the population of Chattanooga and Hamilton County are subject to what St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians calls a “strong delusion.”
This delusion is the greater powerful the less Christian the people show themselves to be. Believing manmade lies about mankind’s condition under a time of disease is easy when people disbelieve the promises of God and those elements in public law that originate in biblical precept.
But, the governor issues edicts upon claims that the constitution vests him with power and authority beyond that of the People that formed the Republic. How is that possible — lawfully?
“To ignore the danger of aggression is simply to invite it … We shall doom our children to a struggle that may take their lives …We know that unless free peoples stand boldly & united against the forces of aggression, they may fall wretchedly, one by one, into the web of oppression.” — General Omar Bradley
Thomas Jefferson insisted that “resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”
Because the Constitution bans martial law, it behooves us to ban those who try to institute it. NOW.