PAYING THE PRICE TO ROLL THE DICE

Please do it, or Do It, goddammit! Whichever.

President Biden’s decision yesterday to push for vaccine mandates managed to unleash a flash flood of outrage from the usual suspects: conservative governors and lawmakers, and the collection of clucks one can watch on Faux Snooze every night (all of whom are vaccinated by requirement of Rupert Murdoch).

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (what is it with Republicans that they can only elect good-looking female bimbos as governors - like this one and Palin?) vowed to sue the Biden administration, tweeting: “This is not a power that is delegated to the federal government. My legal team is already working. And we will defend and protect our people from this unlawful mandate!

Unsurprisingly, the disturbing trend of Republicans taking every opportunity to promote potential violence against the government has shown up in their their attacks against the vaccine mandate.

Texas “One-eyed Jack” Representative Dan Crenshaw accused the Biden administration of “trying to start a full on revolt.”

Josh Mandel, the current frontrunner in the GOP’s primary race for Ohio Senate, decided to maintain his 24/7/365 campaign to disprove the ancient anti-Semitic slur that all Jews are geniuses, telling his followers to defy the mandates and reminding them they “know what to do” when “the gestapo show up at your front door.”

Allegedly-intelligent hillbilly-whisperer J.D. Vance, who’s desperate to out-Trump Mandel, declared, “Only mass civil disobedience will save us from Joe Biden’s naked authoritarianism.”

The home office of American Sedition was heard from when South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, who presides over a state that has reached record-breaking levels of COVID-19 - topping the entire country in case rates last week and looking to set a new record this week - tweeted “Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.” (I still claim we should have knocked down every building, chopped down every tree, and salted every field of that home of treason, creating the Great South Carolina Desert, the way Rome destroyed Carthage, as a permanent reminder to traitors of what happens.)

The president was faced with the political fact that this fourth COVID wave has hurt his political standing; leaving him with two choices:

Do nothing, watch the erosion continue, and hope this wave burns itself out. Or do something, try to stop this surge, and hope that success floats his numbers back up.

Doing nothing could allow Democrats to demonize the anti-vaxxers, blame them for every bad outcome stemming from the pandemic, turning them into a proxy for the entire GOP. Such a strategy has the potential to use Anti-vax as effectively as the Republicans used Defund the Police in the last election. Doing this is clear and straightforward and wouldn’t allow much wiggle room for Republicans. They would either be in favor of the vaccine, and thus at odds with their base, or against the vaccine, putting them in opposition to a sizable majority of the voters.

Politics aside, doing this would allow the delta surge to continue and make economic recovery slower, as was seen in the August jobs report.

There is also the fact lots more people would die, following this very Republican kind of a sgtrategy. This won’t happen because there isn’t a Democrat out there as bad as people like Noem, DeSantis or Abbott.

Bear in mind: we are currently doing a 9/11 death toll nationally every 48 hours.

Imposing the mandate means tens of thousands of lives are saved over the next few months, not to mention society and the economy return to normal at a faster rate.

But it also allows Republicans to have their cake and eat it too, claiming: “I’m personally in favor of vaccines. I wish everyone took them. But I’m against the tyranny of mandates.” If more residents of their states die, that’s a small price to pay if you have national aspirations in today’s Republican party, since you can wrap these deaths in the flag of “freedom.”

Some political pundits are worried about this because they note that the geographic distribution of anti-mask/anti-vaxx is so advantageous to Republicans that even having just 40 percent opposed to mandates turns out to be a good position for the party. They also pont to the fact there will be lawsuits and state-level legislation. There is already civil disobedience that is turning to violence and people faking their way around the mandates.

Their worry is that the net result would be to impose all of the political pain of creating mandates, but without getting the benefits of having a significant additional number of people getting vaccinated. Which could lead in 2022 to your average politically0illiterate swing voter saysing, “Those mandates were terrible and they didn’t even work!”

If mandates don’t work because Republicans sabotage them, it will be Biden who pays the price. Not Republicans.

There is, however, something the Republican opposition hasn’t considered, but the President obviously has, as he demonstrated when he brushed off Republican governors’ vows to sue him over his vaccine mandates this morning:“Have at it.”

That’s because Biden knows legal history, something a moron like Kristi Noem doesn’t, when she claims “This is not a power that is delegated to the federal government.”

Here’s the history Biden knows and Noem et al don’t:

In 1902, in the midst of an outbreak of smallpox, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Board of Health declared that all adults who had not been vaccinated since may 1897 must be vaccinated, or re-vaccinated, for smallpox. Pastor Henning Jacobson, who had suffered a bad reaction to a vaccine as an infant in Sweden, struggling for years with an angry rash, decided that since he was now an American citizen, Pastor of the Swedish Lutheran Church in Cambridge, that he had the full protections of the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, he believed that the Constitution’s promise that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law” meant that he did not have to submit to being vaccinated.

Jacobson was fined $5 for failing to get vaccinated and filed suit against the State of Massachusetts. His claim that he had the personal liberty under the U.S. Constitution to decide for himself whether or not to be vaccinated was the same as that being taken for granted by vaccine opponents today:.Pastor Jacobson’s suit was backed by The Anti-Vaccination Society. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, where it was argued on December 6, 1904.

On February 20, 1905, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, with Justice John Marshall Harlan writing the opinion. BrieflyL the decision was that one man’s liberty cannot deprive his neighbors of their own liberty, in the specific case by allowing the spread of disease. Jacobson, they ruled, must abide by the order of the Cambridge board of health or pay the penalty. The good Pastor Jacobson discovered he had not fully understood either the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Should the Six Injustices care to not follow a 116-year old precedent that is the legal basis of public health in this country, they would find themselves grappling with the words of Justice John Marshall Harlan.

Those words make good reading:

“The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States does not import an absolute right in each person to be at all times, and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint, nor is it an element in such liberty that one person, or a minority of persons residing in any community and enjoying the benefits of its local government, should have power to dominate the majority when supported in their action by the authority of the State.

“It is within the police power of a State to enact a compulsory vaccination law, and it is for the legislature, and not for the courts, to determine in the first instance whether vaccination is or is not the best mode for the prevention of smallpox and the protection of the public health.”

"The possession and enjoyment of all rights are subject to such reasonable conditions as may be deemed by the governing authority of the country essential to the safety, health, peace, good order and morals of the community. Even liberty itself, the greatest of all rights, is not unrestricted license to act according to one's own will. It is only freedom from restraint under conditions essential to the equal enjoyment of the same right by others. It is then liberty regulated by law.”

"In the constitution of Massachusetts adopted in 1780, it was laid down as a fundamental principle of the social compact that the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for "the common good," and that government is instituted "for the common good, for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honor or private interests of anyone man, family or class of men.”

The new vaccine mandates are not only good public health. They’re good politics. And they are constitutional. The government does have the power, whatever Kristi the Cowgirl (she first made her name in rodeos) or the rest of the Collection of Clucks say.

We’re constantly told we’re divided as a country, roughly polarized into two equal camps. That’s not true here. Right now, an overwhelming percentage of adults are vaccinated: approximately 65% of Americans over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated and more than 75% have had at least one shot. And the older you are the more likely you are both to be vaccinated and to vote. If you’ve been vaccinated, these requirements and mandates don’t seem burdensome. Regardless of what the idiots say, these mandates have widespread support. The vaccinated, the overwhelming majority of the country, are losing patience with the voluntarily unvaccinated and rightly blame them for keeping us stuck in the pandemic. Biden spoke for a lot of us when he said: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us, so please do the right thing.”

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