All through his campaign for the presidency, candidate Joe Biden promised as president that he would use every tool at his disposal to curtail private gun ownership. As recently as April, President Biden told Congress, “I will do everything in my power to protect the American people from this epidemic of gun violence…”
The Missouri General Assembly and Gov. Mike Parson responded in kind by enacting the Second Amendment Preservation Act. Using the constitutionally sound “anti-commandeering doctrine,” SAPA seeks to starve the federal government of the state resources it would need to enforce the president’s plan to take away America’s most popular guns.
Now he is hell-bent on taking away Americans’ right to make personal health care decisions.
On Thursday, while announcing his plan to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine on the unwilling, Biden said, “This is not about freedom or personal choice.”
Back on March 11, he said, “I’m using every power I have as president of the United States to put us on a war footing to get the job done. It sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it: a war footing.”
War on our most fundamental rights.
His plans to force COVID-19 shots on federal employees and contractors, as well as coerce private industries to do the same, would be more at home in the communist country where the COVID-19 virus originated than in the “land of the free and home of the brave.”
The powers Biden seeks to use are not legitimate.
The powers the governor and General Assembly have to resist the president’s abuse of power ARE legitimate and constitutional.
The first and easiest state power to use is the same anti-commandeering doctrine we are using to fight Biden’s gun control plans. Refuse all state participation and cooperation in enforcing Biden’s mandates. Make it against Missouri law to use any state or local resources to help him violate the right of Missourians to decide for themselves whether they want the COVID-19 shot.
Then take it a step further. If Biden insists on punishing Missouri businesses that respect their employees’ right to make personal health care decisions, withhold cooperation with the feds in other areas. For instance, repeal the 1920s era statute that gives the federal government permission to buy Missouri real estate.
There are a lot of smart people among the 197 members of the Missouri House and Senate. Give them a chance, and they will come up with other ways to do what our state constitution says is “the principal office of government” — the protection of individual liberty.
That chance is a special legislative session to run concurrently with the required veto override session coming up just days from now. Gov. Parson has said from the beginning that he is against mandating the COVID-19 shot; this is his chance to do something about it.
Ron Calzone is a businessman and rancher in rural Maries County. For the past two and a half decades he has been an unpaid citizen activist spending a lot of time at the capitol. Ron is also one of the founding directors of Missouri First, a free-market, constitutionally-focused think tank.
