Harvard Law prof wants to use coronavirus pandemic to get rid of free speech and property rights
05/06/2020 / By JD Heyes
The Left’s adage of never letting a good crisis go to waste is alive and well, and we’re seeing it play out time and again during the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
For instance, Harvard University Law School Prof. Adrian Vermeule thinks it would be just dandy to use the pandemic as an excuse to reinterpret the meaning of the U.S. Constitution – specifically, to implement policies that destroy the concept of “free speech ideology” and “property rights.”
What’s really ironic is that this guy actually teaches constitutional law at Harvard, so you can get a pretty good idea of what his students think of our founding document: That it’s a malleable piece of scrap paper subject to the whimsical ‘in the moment interpretation by ‘scholars’ and ‘the enlightened.’
Writing in The Atlantic, Vermeule argued that historic interpretations of our founding document have “now outlived its utility,” making it time for the U.S. government to simply assume a much stronger, more centralized role in our lives.
The professor argues that “circumstances have now changed” because of COVID-19 (they haven’t) making it possible to imagine “moral” constitutionalism, which he claims is not “enslaved to the original meaning of the Constitution” – because the rights and restrictions contained in our founding document are impediments to would-be tyrants like Vermeule.
Claiming the pandemic has also “liberated” us from the “relentless expansion of individualistic autonomy” (our personal privacies and liberties), this egghead now believes it’s time for a new interpretation of the Constitution, which he refers to as “common-good constitutionalism.”
The point to make right here is that the rights and protections written into the Constitution by our founders and ratified by the states was for Americans’ “common good.” But we digress.
“Such an approach should be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate,” Vermeule wrote.
Nowhere does it say that health emergencies nullify our individual rights and liberties
And by the way, he never explains just what defines “the common good” – which, in this modern era, is really just academic phraseology for enforced sameness (as in, we are all to behave in a certain, enforced manner – enforced by government, of course).
The law prof then says that “property rights and economic rights will also have to go” because ‘allowing’ individuals to retain them “bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.”
That means he’s advocating for communism and socialism: Government taketh and then giveth to whom it pleases, ‘according to need.’ Or just because.
And remember, this guy teaches ‘constitutional law.’
Vermeule claims that this “global pandemic” makes for the perfect opportunity to implement such strategies that grow government, insisting that “it has become clear that a just governing order must have ample power to cope with large-scale crises of public health and well-being.”
The professor also noted that when he says the government should get involved in “health,” he is referring to that “in many senses, not only literal and physical but also metaphorical and social.”
He goes so far as to acknowledge that “the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself” – a blatant falsehood since the Bill of Rights, specifically, recognizes and protects individual liberties, as do other rights including the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, passed and ratified right after the Civil War.
“Constitutional law will define in broad terms the authority of the state to protect the public’s health and well-being, protecting the weak from pandemics and scourges of many kinds,” he added.
The government’s role in ‘protecting’ us is also defined in, and limited by, the Constitution. Nowhere does it say that health emergencies nullify our individual rights and liberties, though clearly, some federal judges agree with Vermeule.
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Tagged Under: Bill of Rights, constitution, constitutional law, coronavirus, covid-19, excuse, free speech, freedom, Harvard University, individual liberties, insanity, law professor, liberty, Orwellian, pandemic, private property, property rights, tyranny, tyrants, Wuhan coronavirus
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