Dissolving State And Individual Sovereignty In Special Session
By Danielle Goodrich [Tri-Cities Area Director of Tennessee Stands] –
What do the COVID crisis/epidemic, the mental health crisis/epidemic and the supposed gun crisis/epidemic have in common?
They resulted in Tennessee special sessions that look to secure federal funding, establish “experts” that have been known to follow the federal narrative, and inadvertently infringe on state and individual sovereignty.
Monday, August 21st will be the start of the First Extraordinary Session of the 113th General Assembly called by Governor Bill Lee bringing the Tennessee legislature back to Nashville in response to the tragic Covenant shooting.
Andy Roth tweeted “Tennessee Gov. @BillLeeTN has called for an Aug. 21 special session. The Uniparty is pitching it as a way to solve the mental health crisis.
Their solution:
1. Expand Medicaid
2. Provide subsidies to Big Hospitals
3. Professing they don’t want red flag laws, but implement them so they can get federal dollars under Biden’s 2022 gun bill (the same bill that bans funds for schools that have archery and hunting programs).”
Three of the Governor’s Priorities read as follows;
1. TennCare Mental Health Coverage Waiver: Directs TennCare to seek a waiver from the federal government to allow federal matching funds for Medicaid to cover services for mental illness and substance use disorders at institutions of mental diseases.
2. Addressing Mental Health Workforce Challenges: Budget initiatives that prioritize opportunities to grow and retain mental health professionals in the state.
3. Reforms for Mental Health: Expands access to mental health treatment by eliminating certain collaborative practice requirements for Advanced Registered Practice Nurses with psychiatric training.
The same Medicare/Medicaid leash was used in the COVID special session.
The OSHA and CMS vaccine mandate rulings should have been the same. The OSHA ruling determined the Federal government didn’t have the delegated authority to issue a mandate on employees because it is not a delegated authority listed in Article 1 Section 8. They pointed to the 9th and 10th, the states and the people as the rightful owners of such decisions.
The CMS mandate should have been exactly the same. But it wasn’t. The Supreme Court instead looked to precedent. The Feds had already been regulating the lives of healthcare workers outside of their delegated authority so the Supreme Court decided to continue to allow it.
Because of this, the state didn’t want to legislate protections for healthcare workers because it would have affected the Federal funding of employers.
Congresswoman Diana Harshbarger spoke at the Summit Leadership Foundation Monday, August 14th. A question was raised about the concerning and uninhibited growth of the Federal government.
Our founding fathers intended the Federal government to be limited in authority so it couldn’t rule as a King. They realized that decentralized decision making was best. Therefore, they left the majority of decisions to the states. That way, if one state went off the rails, like say California, the people still have choices that align with their worldview and beliefs.
Due to the ABC agencies governing outside of their delegated authority, the Federal government has grown to have a lot more influence in the lives of every day citizens than the founding fathers intended. And with it the demand for conformity to a Godless worldview and anti-traditional beliefs.
Diana agreed that the Federal government had grown too large and said that she would like to defund the DOJ and what she believed are the weaponized arms of the government.
But it isn’t just the DOJ or the DOE, it is all of the ABC agencies.
With CMS and OSHA weaponized holding federal funding hostage in exchange for compliance.
Federal funding held hostage from employers to force them to hold employment hostage in exchange for compliance.
The federal government found a way to govern outside of its delegated authority.
And as long as legislators allow funding to influence their decisions in this way, state and individual sovereignty will continue to erode.
A legislator in a meeting last week mentioned “shekels for shackles” acknowledging the bad trade being made. But feeling there was no alternative.
In both special sessions we are being asked to make another bad trade. Liberty for safety. And we know what our founding fathers thought. Those who give up liberty for safety, deserve neither.
Representative Davis has several bills which look to protect doctors providing gender affirming care and abortion from “hate crimes.” There is concern that this will be weaponized against Christians and create another protected class; healthcare providers. But only the ones who conform to the Federal standard.
Lamberth, a supposed Republican, has a bill which could be abused as it expands the need for DNA to be taken from violent offenders to any felony.
A number of the bills deal with mental health and deferring to mental health “experts” to determine a person’s ability to retain their rights.
The concerns of this narrative are extensive.
Dr. Peter Mccullough hosted Dr. Sherri Tenpenny on his podcast on August 18th. Dr. Tenpenny like Tennessee Dr. Denise Sibley and Dr. Peter Mccullough have been wrongly attacked by corrupt state and Internal Medicine Boards for going outside of the official federal health expert narrative surrounding COVID and healthcare.
The free-market was hindered as federal experts like Fauci told people to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears, avoid experiences of their peers although that is how we make other decisions (consumer ratings), ignore word of mouth and results and instead only listen to the one approved government narrative even when the approved profitable narrative turned out to be repeatedly wrong.
COVID showed the dangers of deferring to state experts instead of letting results speak for themselves.
In the interview, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny mentioned that part of the process to regain certifications and licensure is to be examined by a mental health expert.
Doctor’s who were right, examined by mental health experts beholden to those who were wrong.
The system looks to be a system of re-education to an approved state narrative. How Communist.
Currently, mental health is dominated by progressives whose solutions are gender surgeries, puppy play and other dangerous Marxist based ideologies.
“Mental health professionals are overwhelmingly liberal, with ninety Democrats to every ten Republicans in the field, as measured by campaign contribution data.”
And these are the “experts” we want to evaluate Doctors who have proven to be correct? These are the ‘experts” we want to evaluate our young people?
https://www.republicsentinel.com/articles/professional-counselor-summit-features-sessions-on-benefits-of-puppy-play?fbclid=IwAR0pn-Zut1aOXRL7QXLksAMMdA_wDTSLeikw6qPdn34uSsqSxjrUA_eWYE4_aem_th_AdY05zMGuz8okcdgGommBlLJRgok1FkzXe_Q-rhuzydOXP9Rytz3UURXTJEaODvFBWMHear
With liberty-minded parents demanding parental rights speaking at school boards called “domestic terrorists” and Constitutionalists called far right extremists, Constitutional lawyer Jeff Cobble’s warning comes to mind. “Never create a law that in the wrong hands could be used against you.”
Any many of the laws on the table could be abused in the wrong hands.
“Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.”
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/mental_health_round_ups_the_next_phase_of_the_governments_war_on_thought_crimes?fbclid=IwAR2Bo52QytzRTDmPpsp7mgTtnCd6JT2xFbUubLCxkGWFUaqGobmR2Hnz3Ms_aem_AZxixuLMvzYQB1wiChXqbRhgI21RnbieUr6pfNpRBxp61ULaENbbvqeYc5hoSMvBTEs
“Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.”
Aundrea Gomez, Citizens for Renewing America, has warned of this as well, as she posted “The 45 Communist Goals” which include ;”38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat]. 39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.”
“In 1946, President Truman declared a mental health crisis in the United States and the Congress passed the National Mental Health Act, empowering an arm of the administrative state – the National Institutes of Health – with a mission to manage Americans’ psychological state. Hundreds of new psychoanalysts were trained and dispersed to set up “psychological guidance centers” in towns across America. Therapists, counselors, and social workers began to nose their way into every aspect of family, school, and working life….
“As Christopher Lasch noted in his 1991 book on progressivism, The True and Only Heaven, Adorno and his therapeutic legacy thus “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate. This procedure had the effect of making it unnecessary to discuss moral and political questions on their merits.” Only the irrationality of the insane could now possibly explain disagreement with the progressive managerial project. Much as under communism in China and the Soviet Union, dissent became dismissible as deviance.”
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence
There are multiple reasons in recent history and not so long ago history that should caution us to the current narrative and the related legislation.
Speaker Sexton’s HB7035 looks to have the state and our tax payer dollars reimburse mental health experts school debt. Apparently he missed the response by most Republicans when Biden wanted American tax dollars to be used to reimburse college education. A person who opted to go to trade school needing to pay for someone who went to a left-leaning indoctrination center to learn how to undermine American values.
Concerning the funding to Big Hospitals Roth mentioned, Ballad Health is one of the largest healthcare monopolies in the country and it is based out of Northeast Tennessee. A 24-page report recently came out stating “without the COVID relief funds rescue, Ballad would have generated a loss of more than $40.2 million.
https://johnsoncitytnfreedom.com/local-issues
WJHL just ran the following story Ballad operating loss $40 million for fiscal year ’23, confirming what the report had projected.
But not to worry, with the special session coming on Monday and it projected to provide subsidies to Big Hospitals, relief is coming to the state created monopoly just in time as the COVID funds depleted. Another case of the citizens being expected to keep afloat private corporations with their tax dollars.
In all of these scenarios, our tax money is being used to fund our demise.
It is being used to fund the enemy of American values.
It is being used to walk in 3/8 steps to Communism. Take control of healthcare control the people, take control of education and take guns.
The reason for this special session was to determine how to deal with the Covenant shooting.
What was the cause of the Covenant shooter? What created this radical young person? What possessed them to shoot up a Christian school?
If you want to stop radical young people from shooting up schools you must stop what is radicalizing them in the first place.
If government schools stopped teaching young people Maoist/Marxist principles, we would stop having Maoist/Marxist results.
When you have children being taught to hate themselves, that they were born in the wrong body, to hate their country, that their country is racist despite being one of the first to do away with slavery, to hate the traditional, to hate those who uphold the values that our country was built, to hate God and therefore God-given rights, you end up with children who are similar to Mao’s Red Guard. Children who will shoot people who represent the values they have been taught to hate.
But the special session isn’t looking to get to the root of the moral rot. The special session seems to be looking to further erode state and individual sovereignty by accepting more federal dollars with federal goals attached. Another crisis being used to further erode freedoms. Another crisis where we are being asked to trade our liberty for safety.
And because of this we shouldn’t entertain this special session which doesn’t seem to be fitting to the constitutional requirements for an extraordinary session anyways.
We can move to adjourn. We can motion to recess. We can motion to move. We can gavel out. We can say No to every piece of legislation that comes up. Even good legislation. So that it can be dealt with in regular session.
And by that time, maybe our legislators will have fully mulled over what the true goal of the related legislation should be, and how best to accomplish it.
Why is Bill Lee going from a ‘regular’ guy from good ol’ Fernvale to an elite ruling class member, who’d sell out his constituency, relegating it to more federal bureaucracy and regulation…is it the money or is it that he is a bit naive. I’ve thought the later since he began his campaign. But, is he so naive that he’d tell the truth on the campaign trail, that “most politicians figure out a way to pass the buck, and new laws after such tragedies, rather than dealing with the real issues”. Bill is on record for saying as much, but apparently he is naive enough to believe we have forgotten that. We are not! I’m hopeful that some of our real constitutionalism minded representatives and senators like Gino Bulso and Jack Johnson have a plan to end this session with no expansion of federal government regulations and nix Bill Lee’s naivate!
This OpED certainly makes the case for: Tennessee CITIZENS for State Sovereignty.
Look us over at; TNCSS.weebly.com
CRIMINAL!!