Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Put It Out of Their Missouri

Missouri, Amendment 4, citizens initiative

Is there no good idea a politician cannot spoil?

Take what’s on next Tuesday’s Missouri ballot. “Amendment 4 was my idea, but I am voting against it,” Ron Calzone wrote on Monday in The Missouri Times.

Mr. Calzone had advanced what is called a Concurrent Majority Ratification process. It was introduced into the legislature by Representative Bill Kidd as HJR 132 in 2022. And then politicians started revising.

Everyone agreed, says Calzone, that Missouri’s constitution “was too easy to amend,” considering “the fact that 50% + 1 of the vote can come from just the urban areas” and thereby inflict upon less-populated rural regions a “Tyranny of the Majority.”

The original notion was “to require a broad consensus before imposing laws on the People.” Before the state constitution could be changed, a majority of voters in a majority of legislative districts would have to concur.

The current Amendment 4, however, though promoted as a solution, really adds three humongous problems:

  1. The amendment applies only to citizen-initiated constitutional revisions — not legislative ones.This is the double standard regarding initiative processes we’ve seen legislatures try over and over again, across the country. Politicians like carving for themselves all sorts of advantages.*
  2. The current measure would require approval of measures in all, not just a majority, of the state’s eight congressional districts. Almost impossible to achieve, it would reinforce a status quo, certainly not rein current powers in.
  3. It shifts the power to alter the constitution from the people to the legislature.

One could write whole histories of how politicians can screw up a good reform. Amendment 4 is now no reform at all.

Doesn’t deserve the name.

Thankfully, Missourians can kill it. On Tuesday.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Legislators complain there have been too many amendments but as Calzone points out: “The fact is, over 80% of the amendments to the Missouri Constitution since 1910 were proposed by the legislature.” 

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Today

DeFoe Pelted

On July 31, 1703, Daniel Defoe — who would later become famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe and other literary works — was placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel. The sedition pertained to a satirical pamphlet he had published, “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church.” The mob pelted him with flowers.

Categories
Thought

Poor Richard

Make yourselves sheep, and the wolves will eat you.

Benjamin Franklin, letter to Thomas Cushing (1773).

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment Fifth Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Fauci Can’t Lie

Anthony Fauci, Congress, Covid, 5th Amendment

Is there any crime for which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, will be prosecuted?

The multi-millionaire former “public servant” received a full and unconditional pardon “FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in . . .” 

Courtesy of Mr. Biden — or his auto-pen.

“Biden backdated the pardon to 2014, a date nearly six years before the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 emerged,” Newsweek reported a year and a half ago.

Why? Come on, man! Because it “shields Fauci from allegations tied to U.S.-funded gain-of-function research in addition to his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, Fauci is immune from prosecution for 

  1. a decade’s worth of skirting U.S. domestic restrictions, to fund gang-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China; 
  2. for each and every lie he told Senator Rand Paul and others in Congress; and 
  3. for any other fraud — such as using his federal employees to solicit more than a million dollars in cash prizes for him personally.

So when Fauci — formerly known as “the Science” — asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times before Congress (NBC says 106), refusing to answer questions about his past role as a government official, it was illegitimate. Because on those matters, he cannot be incriminated.

“No person,” reads the amendment, “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” There can be no criminal case brought for his past lies.

But the problem for Dr. Fauci is that he can be prosecuted for telling those lies again to Congress. Like at yesterday’s hearing. 

Past lies? You’re pardoned, Doc. 

But Fauci cannot repeat his lies. That would be a new crime. 

And since he wants those falsehoods to stand, he will not speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on Common Sense:

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Thought

Tocqueville

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult — to begin a war and to end it.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (1840), Book Three, Chapter XXII.

Categories
Today

Virginia, 1619 & 1676

On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convened for the first time in Jamestown, Virginia.

About a month later, a group of “twenty and odd” captives from what is now Angola landed in Hampton; this is what most Americans, today, refer to as the significant event in American history for the year “1619.”

On the same late day in July, 1676, Nathaniel Bacon issued the “Declaration of the People of Virginia,” beginning Bacon’s Rebellion against the rule of Governor William Berkeley.

Categories
Fourth Amendment rights property rights

Open Fields Closed

IJ, Institute for Justice, privacy, property, Pennsylvania, Court

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled 7-0 to protect the state’s hunting clubs from warrantless searches of their property.

The Institute for Justice observes that the decision protects the right “to be secure on their land” of all Pennsylvanians “and marks a final victory with no further appeal available.”

The decision is a big deal. For decades, courts have accepted the “open fields doctrine” advanced in a 1924 U.S. Supreme Court decision. According to this rule — or rationalization — officials may conduct warrantless searches on any land beyond that which immediately surrounds a home. Even if the open-field land is clearly marked as private property.

This, despite the fact that the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless searches and the issuing of warrants without probable cause.

Other courts have routinely followed the 1924 precedent. The result, says IJ, has been that “about 96% of all private land in the country, and over 90% of all private land in Pennsylvania, was previously exposed to warrantless searches and surveillance.”

The present case arose because officials of the Pennsylvania Game Commission conducted frequent fishing expeditions on the lands of IJ’s clients, the Punxsutawney and Pitch Pine hunting clubs.

Like the Institute, the president of the Punxsutawney Hunting Club, Frank Stockdale, is confident that the ruling “is a victory for all landowners in Pennsylvania.”

This same logic should be pushed throughout the union, curbing government and providing owners the same common-sense protections in every state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Poor Richard

He that hath a trade, hath an estate.

Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack (1772).

Categories
Today

An Anarchist First

King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci on July 29, 1900. After shooting the monarch multiple times, Breschi was wrestled to the ground and almost lynched. Upon his arrest, he said “I did not kill Umberto. I have killed the King. I killed a principle.” This did not prove immediately true, for Umberto’s 31-year-old son, Victor Emmanuel III, succeeded his father to the throne. What Bresci spawned was the terrorist craze of anarchists trying to kill heads of state and captains of industry, itself a kind of self-defeating principle, since the peoples of the world turned decidedly against the anarchists.

Categories
Fourth Amendment rights privacy

Billions Mis-Served

flock camera, surveillance, privacy, police, law enforcement

For decades, cameras have been installed on American roads to snap pics of speeding (or not-speeding) vehicles so that fines can be mailed to the guilty (or innocent) motorists.

These cameras are supposedly about ticketing for speeding. But they have also often been used as a means of revenue extraction.

Now there’s a new angle.

Super-smart, super-dumb artificial intelligence is being merged with street cameras. 

The main company behind them is Flock Safety. Its cameras record license plates and also a vehicle’s make, model, and color, but, says Flock, nothing about individuals. When the AI can relate the plate number to a criminal suspect, law enforcers get a hit when searching for the number.

Then officers act on this information, often without any double-checking, to stop cars and force drivers out of their cars. Sometimes at gunpoint.

Even aside from the issues of privacy invasion raised by the sweeping surveillance, there’s the fact that the automated license plate recognition (ALPR) makes mistakes. Supplemented by officers’ mistakes. Innocent drivers and other occupants may be terrorized, arrested, even jailed before the mistake is realized.

Flock says that its cameras accurately capture 93 percent of license plates. As the Institute for Justice points out, even this “low” error rate means “well over a billion inaccurate readings per month” when Flock is scanning over 20 billion license plates per month.

Many locales that try Flock cameras end up pulling them down. None should ever begin to use them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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