Mandates: When Money Comes With $trings Attached
States are supposed to be autonomous and independent from federal government requirements. They must be separate to be able to truly represent the people of the State. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states:
The 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.
But that is not how it works in the real world. States give up autonomy to rule themselves when they accept federal money as “grants” that come with strings attached. A conflict of interest.
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The federal government doles out about $700 million (17%) of its budget to states and cities each year which equates to 25% of state government revenues. In 2017, 65% of federal funds were dedicated to Healthcare.
According to the Tax Policy Center, “today, federal grants for health programs, predominantly Medicaid, represent 65 percent of total federal grant outlays, compared with less than 20 percent in 1980.”
How do federal grants influence state and local behavior? While the accepted narrative is the federal money stimulates state spending, other explanations include an implied understanding between federal appropriators and grant recipients about how recipients will respond to federal money.[i]
Problem Reaction Solution
The federal government turns States into branches of itself by creating a problem for their prescribed reaction and solution. First they choose a spokesperson to announce the problem.
Problem: On February 2019, US Food and Drug Administration’s Commissioner Scott Gottleib said that if states don’t require more schoolchildren to get vaccinated, the federal government might have to step in.
Reaction: The Feds use the media to spread the “rhetoric virus” that creates a reaction of fear that unvaccinated children are a risk to the vaccinated. They blame the unvaccinated for measles outbreaks and blame states that “are engaging in such wide exemptions that they are creating the opportunity for outbreaks on a scale that is going to have national implications.”
If “certain states continue down the path that they’re on, I think they’re going to force the hand of the federal health agencies,” – Scott Gottlieb, FDA Commissioner
Stories in the press admit that case numbers of measles remain low in the U.S. but the disease is growing in areas of high non-vaccination rates. They chastise certain states such as Washington and say they are considering tightening their exemptions even as they “continue to face a more organized anti-vaccination movement.”
Government Solution: On April 23, 2019, Washington state lawmakers voted to remove parents’ ability to claim a personal or philosophical exemption from vaccinating their children for measles, although medical and religious exemptions will remain.
Fascist Politics In Play
If you step back to see the bigger picture. This is all part of a United Nations Agenda to “divide and conquer” through coercion and scare tactics. Eventually, under blanket mandates, people will be made to report on their neighbors who choose not to vaccinate against “a highly contagious disease” even without any reports of injuries from the infection. It is Nazi fascism come home to roost in the Land of the Free.
The narrative becomes freedom is not acceptable under certain circumstances that authorities determine. They claim non-medical exemptions (religious and personal belief exemptions) to vaccine laws have done the opposite of keeping vaccination rates high, associated with decreased vaccination rates and increases in vaccine-preventable diseases.
They convince everyone that exemptions are to blame when exemptions are written into laws, representing the Tenth Amendment that provides the right for States and citizens to maintain autonomy over their own borders; the border of a state and of a body.
In 1905, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Massachusetts law that compelled all individuals to be vaccinated against smallpox. In Zucht v. King, the court in 1922 relied on Jacobson to affirm a Texas law mandating vaccination for schoolchildren. Neither the Jacobson nor Zucht cases dealt with claims of religious liberty, since the court had not yet applied the First Amendment right of free exercise against the states, but in a 1944 case concerning child labor, the court proclaimed that religious freedom “does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease.”
It’s All An Act!
Courts continue to rule that exemptions are not constitutionally required, without understanding that the purpose of the Constitution was to prevent government overreach of personal freedoms and rights.
In a 2012 ruling on the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, the U.S. Supreme Court said that the federal government’s authority over interstate commerce does not permit it to compel individual action. It cannot force anyone to hold health insurance, or eat broccoli, for that matter.
By design, to abolish religious or personal belief exemptions would pave the way for the federal vaccine cradle-to-grave mandate called the Healthy People 2020 Act.
However, denial of exemptions could also cause significant constitutional problems for government. Under the 10th Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine, the federal government cannot force states to pass laws to its pleasing.
What can you do?
We must each hold rogue governments accountable and remind them whom they serve. We must point out blatant conflicts of interest. If governments go beyond their constitutional bounds, the people and the States can remove its powers. The Declaration of Independence reminds us:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
[i] Chernick, Howard A. 1979. “An Economic Model of the Distribution of Project Grants.” In Fiscal Federalism and Grants-in-Aid, edited by Peter M. Mieszkowski and William H. Oakland, 81–103. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.
Rosanne Lindsay is a Naturopathic doctor, writer, Earth keeper, Health Freedom advocate, and author of the books The Nature of Healing, Heal the Body, Heal the Planet and Free Your Voice, Heal Your Thyroid, Reverse Thyroid Disease Naturally. Find her on Facebook at Rosanne Lindsay and at her website at Natureofhealing. Consult with her (Skype or Zoom consults available) at natureofhealing.org. Subscribe to her blog at http://www.natureofhealing.org/blog/, where this article first appeared, and at her podcast Thursdays at 5 pm on Blogtalkradio.
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