Mayor Jim Coppinger’s extension of his administrative mask rule upon the people of Hamilton County adds another reason why we should no longer trust “the good people.”
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio 92.7 FM
They have acted with courageous disregard of their oaths of office before God. The sovereign Lord God alone will judge them who deceived the public in invoking his name, seeing that men here on earth are unwilling to hold them to account — and string them up on a steel cable between the courthouse doorjamb and the nearest flagpole.
While our constitutional rights are reflected in their oaths of office to defend us and uphold the law, these rights are for these men and women not in view. As our notables hide their demeanors behind chin diapers, they perform public health theater in a pretended epidemic/pandemic.
On Thursday Mayor Coppinger held a press conference, trotting out local doctors to support him, announcing that he is extending the mask rule to Oct. 8.
We elected our friends, neighbors
When we look at photographs and clips of public officials prior to CV-19, it was difficult to imagine believing them and trusting them and having confidence in their goodwill. The lot of them have been beyond appeal, seemingly beyond remonstrance or pleadings, having ignored widely reported abuses on their watch.
Now, five months into the so-called two-week health emergency, it is even less possible to have confidence in them or their words.
Among those expressing support for the mask rule extension was a small business owner with a Spanish accent and the CEO of the Chattanooga chamber of commerce, Christy Gillenwater, who wholly agrees with the rule, given that 80 percent of her 2,000-plus members are in favor of it.
All agree to continue an oppressive, arbitrary and capricious custom imposed illegally on the healthy en masse, in violation of Tennessee’s health law at Tenn. Code Ann. Title 68.
Refusal to protect, interpose
County attorney Rheuben Taylor, who has a side gig as a gospel minister, also has not taken up the cause of the people. Rather than spend time investigating whether the law has been followed by the health department, and upbraiding its officers to insist that it be followed, he has pursued the policy of Gov. Lee, a Republican, and participated in unconstitutional projects and depredations.
But Mr. Taylor is an attorney. So that might excuse him in ignoring black-letter law and favoring state supremacy as against the people and their supposed rights.
We in Tennessee and in Hamilton County hold God in low esteem. So God will have it that our betters, our benefactors and protectors — our health ensurers — will hold our rights in low esteem.
Rejecting any duty to defend and protect their neighbors in the county were they hold office, these local officials have refused an important duty. That is of intervention and interposition. This concept of self-government and lococentric responsibility has ancient roots. Its biblical origins are recounted in The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate, by Matt Trewhella.
The duty is that a local magistrate will shield and protect those near him in their rights and privileges, that if they are oppressed, he will stand between them and their oppressor.
Mayor Coppinger, joined by Dr. Paul Hendricks and Becky Barnes of the health department, has participated in a global decapitalization, a “great reset” that some are seeing as a medically flavored “green new deal” to suppress populations, industry, commerce and innovation for the pretended goal of “limiting the spread.”
Mayor Coppinger has overseen a deep ruination and suppression of local economy and free markets. It’s under pretext of saving us from the flu, a novel strain that remains unidentified as to its cause and nature, and the transmission agent of which also is unidentified.
The condition has nowhere been certified, nowhere diagnosed. Health officials in Chattanooga have until Monday, Labor Day, to provide evidence of compliance with the law at Title 68. I am expecting that they will provide no evidence. When pressed for such evidence, Gillum Ferguson, spokesman for Gov. Lee, provides no documents, and no answers as to the chief executive’s obedience to black-letter law.
Ignoring due process rights
The government has ignored due process rights that are built into the statute that require certain evidences and proofs in an epidemic. These evidences and proofs have been absent, and apparently not a finger was lifted anywhere to obey the Title 68, the health law, especially chapters 1 and 5 which contain the quarantine power.
The state is using quarantine power without using it properly. State actors are “borrowing” police powers from the law, pretending to ignore the law and due process.
‘Least inconvenience to commerce, travel’
They have betrayed us. They have ruined us. They have a pretense of caring for the public, yet they have violated the essential requirements for care.
Chief among them: The duty, in fighting spread of a disease in Tennessee, to act “with the least inconvenience to commerce and travel.”
The people are right to ascribe their ruin and misery not to CV-19 or Coronavirus. They are right to lay it on the charge of these officials.
We are in a worldwide depression, a global writedown, a great discounting from too much paper money lending, too much insurance and financialization, too much big government. It could be likened to the Rossville Boulevardization of the economy, where discounted, rusty-and-used holes in wall flourish with used junk, car repairs, nail repair and the like.
No one in Hamilton County has consulted the health law. Except me. The law is clear. The governor has violated the law. Jim Coppinger has violated the law. Mayor Andy Berke, in his moment on the stage earlier, violated the law.
They have ignored the built-in protections that should have worked to protect our property, our commerce, our travel, our prosperity. But they failed these protections. They overran them, stampeded over them. They were not loud enough, big enough, barbed enough to stop these muzzled state actors.
These protections were not mean enough, not God-threatening enough to claim these people’s attention.
Degringolade
