OPINION:
Anthony Fauci, the doctor at the heart of the coronavirus storm — the one whose words of advice and guidance have been taken by politicians as sacrosanct, to be carried into mainstream America as orders — just told BBC Radio 4 that it’s that pesky ol’ 10th Amendment that has proven a real detriment to disease-fighting.
He wants total federal clamp-downs and few-to-zero sovereign state COVID-19 decisions.
Of course, he didn’t explicitly say all this. He gave it the Fauci Treatment — meaning, he said as much using subtle rhetoric that sounded oh-so-soft and compassionate. Logical, even.
“The states,” he said, CNN reported, “are very often given a considerable amount of leeway in doing things the way they want to do it, as opposed to in response to federal mandates which are, relatively, rarely given. … [But the coronavirus] doesn’t know the difference between the border of New York and New Jersey, or Florida and Georgia.”
True.
Viruses don’t stop at borders.
But guess where else viruses don’t stop? At Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests. At the very Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests that Fauci was reluctant to label “super-spreader” events back in July, during a hearing before the House.
“I just want an answer to the question — do the protests increase the spread of the virus?” asked Rep. Jim Jordan, at a July 31 Capitol Hill hearing, The Hill wrote.
“I can tell you that crowds are known, particularly when you don’t have a mask, to increase the acquisition and transmission, no matter what the crowd is,” Fauci said in response.
That was after Jordan asked the same question — and Fauci gave the same duck and dodge.
Or, as The Hill reported it: “Fauci did not address the protests directly, but said more broadly: ’Avoid crowds of any type to matter where you are. … I don’t judge one crowd versus another crowd.’”
Oh contraire.
When asked a month earlier if he would attend a Donald Trump rally, Fauci answered “no” and “of course not.”
When asked in October of his coronavirus-tied opinion of more planned Trump campaign rallies, Fauci said people who attend are “asking for trouble” and that “now is even more so a worse time to do that.”
Let the judging begin. More Fauci Treatment.
Now he wants the feds to take control of coronavirus response, and put a stop to all this silly willy-nilly states’ rights nonsense — yes?
His words: “What we’ve had was a considerable disparity with states doing things differently in a nonconsistent way. There have been a lot of factors that have led to the fact that, unfortunately for us, the United States has been the hardest-hit country in the world, but I believe that disparity among how states do things has been a major weakness in our response.”
Out with the 10th Amendment — the one that says “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
In with the top-down federal bureaucrat boot-stomping clamp-downs.
As if the people aren’t suffering enough from Democrat governors abusing executive powers.
As if the Ninth Amendment — the one that prevents the “enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights” from be used to “deny or disparage others retained by the people” — as if this constitutional provision hadn’t already been thrown out the window. By the coronavirus. By overreaching governors. By health bureaucrats masquerading as duly elected.
By Fauci, and Fauci copycats.
The Constitution still exists, though.
Fauci may fight it — just as others of his collectivist ilk have fought it for years — and just as others of all those bureaucrats’ collectivist ilk will continue to fight it in the years to come.
But in America, the Constitution still exists.
And with it, still stand the 10th Amendment, as well as the Ninth.
It’s up to the people to insist the government comply.
It’s up to the citizens to demand the Faucis of the country stand down and back off and leave alone these core constitutional authorities.
How?
Civil disobedience. Peaceful, protest and civil disobedience. It is, after all, “the right of the people to alter or to abolish” forms of government that become “destructive” of the core American concept — that of individual rights coming from God, not government.
Fauci needs a lesson in founding American ideals. So, too, his followers and believers.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.