Gov. Bill Lee has authority to build and run concentration camps for sick people under Tennessee law.
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio 92.7 FM
Does that sound scary? More frightening still is this: Gov. Lee is avoiding “use of” the medical concentration camp law and is using one that is vague and offers no limits to what state government can do to save people in Tennessee from the latest flu strain, CV-19.
Gov. Lee is using as his basis of “emergency” the thin body of law that gives him — as he sees it — unlimited power. Under the emergency law, no limit exists to what he might conceive to quell CV-19 transmission and other purported threats affecting public health, welfare and safety.
The concentration camp provision in the tuberculosis statute is as follows:
68-1-202. Quarantine stations.
(a) The commissioner shall select suitable localities for establishing quarantine stations, and may erect necessary temporary buildings for the disinfection of passengers, baggage, cargo and other matter believed to convey the contagious principle of cholera, yellow fever, smallpox and other epidemic diseases, and may enforce the transshipment of passengers as the commissioner may deem necessary.
(b) The commissioner shall assign to the charge of each station a competent physician and necessary assistants, who shall receive such compensation as the commissioner may deem reasonable and just.
In the quarantine statute under tuberculosis, it says this:
68-9-205. Detention facilities.
The department may establish and maintain one (1) or more detention facilities as the commissioner deems appropriate to sufficiently confine all persons who refuse to be examined, treated, isolated or quarantined as provided for by this part.
These facilities are used to those people who refuse to cooperate with health authorities and isolate themselves when contagious. It is a misdemeanor to violate quarantine in 68-2-203.
The statute authorizes the governor and his health commissioner to focus the state’s attention upon the sick.
But in an overthrow of constitutional government in general and this law specifically, the governor has directed police power upon the healthy, generally, by his shutting down of the state economy and his delivery of it into depression.
Using the emergency statute at Tenn. Code Ann. § Title 58, Gov. Lee assumes sweeping power upon 6.8 million people who are not his subjects under any theory of law and whose good health does not put them under any authority in the health code or his health commissioner.
He bases his sweeping use of administrative rule against the constitutional rights of the people on this provision:
Pursuant to the authority vested in the governor under subdivision (a) (1), the governor may issue executive orders, proclamations, and rules and may amend or rescind them. Such executive orders, proclamations, and rules have the force and effect of law. Tenn. Code Ann. § 58-2-107
Notice it doesn’t say he is making law, but that his orders “have the force and effect of law,” and that is understood to say, “his rules have the force of law upon those people subject to his rules. To them, it is as if his temporary edicts were law in the TCA.”
The governor should use existing law to quell and stanch the spread of CB19. If he uses illegal methods, there will be no end of damage he can create in the governor’s legislation. His lawmaking and legislating by EO has damaged the economy in the state of Tennessee probably to the many tens of billions of dollars.
Stores are beginning to mandate that masks must be worn to enter and shop,” says Wartburg mayor Jonathan Dagley. “As Mayor of the City of Wartburg and with the support of the Chief of Police, Teddy Bales, we will not support or enforce any mask mandate within the city limits of Wartburg. This is an infringement upon your rights as citizens of this country and we will not be enforcing any such mandate. If you choose to wear a mask that is your right and your choice to do so, but since the masks mandate isn’t a law then there is no way we can legally support it.”
Due process protections
A person who is sick and unwilling to isolate himself is subject to arrest under a warrant and trial in sessions court. If the state can prove its claim to the person is sick epidemiologically, that person is convicted and bound to be confined in a place of confinement until he is healed or showing to be healed.
Sick people who are confined under due process are subject to staying in the “place of quarantine” until they are proven healthy.
Quarantine power is in state law:
In establishing isolation or quarantine, the commissioner or state, district, municipal or county health officer having jurisdiction shall designate and define the length of time, site and any other conditions required of the person to be isolated or quarantined. Tenn. Code Ann. § 68-9-203 (West)
The person who refuses to self-isolate is targeted by the law. The quarantine statute contains the trial and courtroom protocols for accusing and “convicting” such a person. At the end of these details is language describing such a contumacious person.
If a person, who is admitted either voluntarily or as the result of commitment by the processes authorized in this part, violates quarantine by leaving the place of quarantine designated by a health officer, or becomes unruly, boisterous, offensive or recalcitrant or violates in any manner the reasonable rules and regulations of the institution in which the person is quarantined, then the commissioner or health officer may go before the judge of the court of general sessions to ask the court to commit the person to the detention facility, as provided for in this section. Tenn. Code Ann. § 68-9-206 (West)
A person who is unruly, boisterous, offensive and recalcitrant as an inmate of such “an institution” is also the one who, outside its confines, is subject to police power.
The use of police power against such spreaders of virus is lawful and correct, arising from a God-given power described in Leviticus 13, the leprosy provisions of God’s law.
No mass control of people, but due process
The law requires a conviction because under a constitution, the state has no power over the mass of people as a whole. It has police powers, even during emergency and times of stress, over individuals, one by one, who must be shown to be subject, one by one, in respect of their due process rights, and in deference to the limitations the people place upon the government through the constitution.
Gov. Lee, joined by chief justice Jeff Bivins, has effectively imposed a coup against the people of Tennessee.
These men with their edicts and commandments have swarmed through the people and paralyzed them, closed the courts, shuttered tens of thousands of businesses and ordered people to stay-at-home and to not provide for their families. Their decrees have created such a disaster that hundreds of thousands of people have made themselves dependent on state and federal free money under the government employment programs, and are just about to return to the employment sector in which many business owners are verging on collapse, partly for lack of hired help.
Gov. Lee has acted without restraint against the liberties of the people, and contradicts the entire form and premise of established government in Tennessee. His acts upon the mass — apart from due process — destroy the Christian heritage undergirding the founding of the state by its peoples at convention.
His edicts are not law, but are mere “orders” that most people believe and to which most people, to their own injury, have complied.
The courts should order the governor to abate the nuisance of executive orders and to follow the law as required and use due process against any contumacious person known to be sick. A court may do so, if a proper appeal is filed.
The health law is written with the presupposition that people generally are cooperative, civic-minded, full of amity and goodwill, and will generally cooperate with officials if there is an epidemic.
Use of the emergency statute converts all the people into hostile parties, enemies and rebellious, needing to be subject to coercion and force. This premise is ungodly and thoroughly pagan, and contradicts the Christian ethic. Though Christianity insists all men are fallen sinners in need of Christ and redemption, it does not convert all people into a plastic mass and allow kings and magistrates to dispose of them as if they were under an occupation.
