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Posted: 09/18/2021 22:00:05 PM
Modified: 09/18/2021 22:00:05
Washington post Opinion writer Henry Olsen’s recent column, “Biden’s vaccine mandate is unconstitutional” (September 14), makes no reference to supporting authorities. It is because there is none.
Olsen insists that under our federal system, “the US government does not have the power to require an adult American to do anything with their body or to put anything in it.” . Yet the constitutional powers of the President and Congress to protect national security, interstate commerce, and general welfare undoubtedly include the power to require vaccination in order to combat a scourge that has already killed 650,000 Americans and made millions of people sick.
A 1905 Supreme Court case called Jacobson v. Massachusetts has upheld the state’s requirement for mandatory smallpox vaccinations in the midst of an outbreak. Under the Constitution, the court said, reasonable measures to protect the health of the community may require the sacrifice of individual rights. “(I) in any well-ordered society charged with the duty of preserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual to his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subject to such restriction,” to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may require.
Neither the validity nor the wisdom of this decision has ever been seriously questioned. Indeed, it has been reaffirmed by countless lower court decisions over the years.
Jacobson was not applied to a federal vaccination mandate because such a mandate has never been imposed before. But the reasoning of the Supreme Court in that 1905 case would surely be applied in any constitutional challenge to President Joe Biden’s order.
Olsen argues that the president failed to follow proper procedures in invoking his statutory authority under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, which provides for workplace safety rules. It remains to be seen. But that has nothing to do with the constitutionality of the vaccine’s mandate.
Olsen is entitled to his opinion, of course, but not to distort the facts.
STEPHEN DYCUS
Strafford
The writer is professor emeritus at Vermont Law School.
I must respond to James Dwinell’s Forum letter (“Go Where the Votes Are,” September 9), in which he tries to refute Randall Balmer’s argument that Ronald Reagan’s decision to open his presidential campaign 1980 at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., was based on racism (“Race, Reagan, and the Rise of the Religious Right,” September 5), mistakenly suggesting that Reagan only went “where were the votes ”.
Intentional or not, the letter relies on two ancient and dangerous tactics. The first is the “big lie,” attempting to present lies as the truth, while the second is a “bait and the switch” version, masking the real motives with clearly wrong motives. These tactics represent an existential threat to our society and our democracy and must be denounced every time for what they are.
Reagan did not go to Philadelphia, Mississippi, just 16 years after the brutal murders of civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney just to be “where the votes were,” or even, as his campaign claimed. , to reach rural areas. voters. There are dozens of counties in Mississippi with more voters, and hundreds more across the country with more rural voters.
Reagan’s own words that day reveal his true motivation, with his repeated endorsement of “state rights.” These are the very words that apologists for the treacherous Confederation use to hide what the founders of Confederation openly declared to be their true raison d’être: to defend slavery. Segregationists like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond have also relied on claiming state rights to oppose the civil rights movement.
Fourteen years after Brown v. Board of Education spoke out against “separate but (in) equal schools” and years before the desegregation of Mississippi public schools, Richard Nixon deployed his infamous “Southern Strategy” on his return in 1968, s’ opposing the bus to impose school desegregation and, by inference, the Brown decision.
From the civil war in Nixon to Reagan to the false challenges of Donald Trump at the birthplace of President Barack Obama, all the lies and hijackings have always been a call to the lowest instincts of some white voters.
Call it that: racism.
THOMAS OPPEL
Canaan
“We’re trying to help you,” a Republican lawmaker told a crowd of anti-vaccination and anti-mandate protesters at the New Hampshire Statehouse on Monday, as several in the crowd turned their backs on lawmakers and others shouted, ” Do your job!” (“NH crowd taunts lawmakers,” September 15).
The scene reminded me of the Chinese proverb “He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount”, taken up by John F. Kennedy during his presidency: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger found themselves at inside. “
BOB MvsCARHY
Lebanon
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