Individual rights are to Popular Sovereignty, as State’s rights are to Federalism; integral and unalienable! Our Federal form of government, a dual sovereignty style of governance, balances States’ rights and National authority in an institutional model that reflects the primordial political relationship between the minority (i.e. individual rights) and the majority (i.e. popular sovereignty).
We’d like to thank Tejasinha Sivalingam for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
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When our individual rights are eviscerated by the majority and their government, do we still have popular sovereignty? Even brief remembrance of our bill of rights brings to mind our right to assemble, thereby demonstrating that our rights are so obviously integral to popular sovereignty, that their absence is the absence of popular sovereignty.
When we as the body politic allow a government that federalism does not secure our Rights, we have lapsed from popular sovereignty into ochlocracy or some other form of authoritarianism. The common denominator of all authoritarian regimes is that they do not care for individual rights.
The old litmus test for whether someone supported our rights used to be the Second Amendment, but no longer. It is still important, but we are prepared for the authoritarianism of yesterday, not today. The Fascists care nothing of your firearms, except insofar as they can use the second amendment as a red herring while they take all of your other rights from you, in the name of health and safety.
‘Health and safety’ is the “ring of power”; and inscribed within are the words “Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905).” Our Rights have been stripped by the emergency and executive orders, and those orders may be upheld by the courts.
The new litmus test for liberty is if a person believes individual rights persist in spite of a state of emergency, and it must be applied when evaluating new judicial appointments like Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Judge Barrett firmly relied on Jacobson v. Massachusetts in her ruling in Illinois Republican Party v. Pritzker (2020). To paraphrase the ruling; no, your rights do not persist through a state of emergency.
Judge Barbara Lagoa would have been a much better choice if the President wanted to protect our unalienable rights and by extension our popular sovereignty.
Here are SCOTUS rulings which cite Jacobson v. Massachusetts, and the conclusions they draw based on Jacobson.
- Zucht v. King (1922) affirms compulsory vaccinations.
- Buck v. Bell (1927) affirms forced sterilization and eugenics.
- Prince v. Massachusetts (1944) challenges religious exemptions to vaccinations.
- Finally, Roe v. Wade (1973) conflates the protection of the unborn with limited autonomy over bodily integrity.
‘Health and safety’ is the ring of power; and inscribed within are the words ‘Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905)’, and Judge Barrett has demonstrated that she will use it to undermine our rights in a state of emergency.
“One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them, One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them” (J.R.R Tolkien).