Volume 80, no. 8 August 2024
The word “sovereign” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, but the U.S. was clearly founded to be independent and self-governing. Jeremy Rabkin writes: “‘Would we be far wrong,’ President Lincoln asked in a special message to Congress in 1861, ‘if we defined [sovereignty] as a political community without a political superior?’” (https://tinyurl.com/5enkpu3x).
The principle of state sovereignty was established in the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War. Each nation was to be equal to the others, and none could interfere in the internal affairs of others. These concepts were reaffirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when Napoleon I was defeated.
On the eve of WWI, Czar Nicholas II convened two International Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907) in The Hague to “seek the most effective means of assuring all peoples the benefits of a real and lasting peace.” The Conference agreed that, during armed conflict, populations and belligerents must remain under the protection of the principles resulting from “the usages established between civilized nations, the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience” (i.e. morality). This system failed in 1914 because states had lost their sovereignty by entering into defense treaties that required them to go to war automatically in certain circumstances (https://tinyurl.com/jtjnsr3f)—the “entangling alliances” against which George Washington warned us.
WWI destroyed the stable order in Europe and set the stage for WWII. Afterward, Roosevelt and Churchill dreamed of establishing a one-world government, controlled by “Anglo-Saxons” (ibid.). Today, conflict rages between nationalists and globalists. The Ukraine proxy war, writes Glenn Diesen, is “a predictable consequence of an unsustainable world order” and the battleground where the future new world order is being decided; it is “either global hegemony or Westphalian multipolarity” (https://tinyurl.com/4weu43v9) (see p2).
Treaties
The Constitution, unlike a treaty, is irrevocable, Rabkin writes. It describes itself unambiguously as “the supreme Law of the Land”—even adding, “any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
The Constitution provides for treaties, and even specifies that treaties will be “the supreme Law of the Land.” But from 1787 on, it has been recognized that to be valid, a treaty must be consistent with the Constitution. As Alexander Hamilton explained, “A treaty cannot change the frame of the government.” Since it is the Constitution that authorizes us to make treaties, a treaty that violates the Constitution would be like an agent betraying his principal or authority. Thomas Jefferson was clear on this point: If the treaty power is unlimited, then we don’t have a Constitution. As the late Dr. Curtis Caine wrote: “Surely the President and the Senate cannot do by treaty what the whole government is interdicted from doing in any way” (aapsonline.org/treaties). Few ever questioned this consensus in the past.
In 1919, the U.S. participated in a conference to establish the International Labour Organization (ILO), which planned to vote on labor standards that member nations would automatically adopt. The American delegation refused because it would be surrendering its sovereignty to an international body. Instead, the Americans insisted they would decide upon these standards unilaterally. The U.S. has adopted only three of them in 90 years.
Today, this principle of non-delegation of power to an international entity has become a contentious issue. In 2006, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), claiming that it should update its standards for methyl bromide, a chemical thought to be depleting the ozone layer. NRDC stated that Congress had instructed the EPA to conform to the Montreal Protocol (see p2) and updates. In dicta, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals suggested that holding the decisions to be “‘law’ would raise serious constitutional questions in light of the nondelegation doctrine, numerous constitutional procedural requirements for making law, and the separation of powers (https://tinyurl.com/mt342vm2). The Court’s finding of nonjusticiability was felt by environmentalists to be the best decision achievable, to eliminate any temptation of a future court to find the Protocol unconstitutional (tinyurl.com/yc83ncr8).
The Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Climate Accord similarly delegate enormous authority to globalists. Most recently there is the concern about the World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic agreement (https://tinyurl.com/mvj9j9hy), which is to be considered again in May 2025, overriding our sovereignty. The current draft, however, states that the agreement “should not be interpreted” as providing WHO with any authority over domestic laws or policy. There is no mechanism for punishing member states (tinyurl.com/2bseurjv), but U.S. authorities might use the agreement as cover for their own aims.
Sovereignty Yielded to ‘Protected Class’
Rather than a U.S. Empire, we have a “Money Powers” empire, writes Fadi Lama (tinyurl.com/mtccebx5). Western nations lost their sovereignty simultaneously with the establishment of privately owned central banks (see p2). The “sovereigntist states” are now led by Russia, Iran, and China. We must recover our civilizations and sovereignty, or our future will be “a boot stamping on a human face…forever” (https://tinyurl.com/3fjdvu4u).
The ‘Money Powers’ Empire
The origins of the situation in which “you will own nothing” (unless you are a member of the tiny “Protected Class”) date back many centuries, but the technical requirements enabling a global transfer of wealth were put in place in 1973 with the establishment of the Depository Trust Company (DTC), where all securities are digital and are pooled. In 1994, the U.S. Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) was modified in all 50 states. Ownership of securities has been replaced with a new legal concept of a “security entitlement,” a very weak contractual claim. All securities are held in un-segregated pooled form. These assets are collateral for the interests of the “Protected Class” (the largest hedge funds: Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street and T. Rowe Price), which will vacuum them up if the fragile “everything bubble” collapses.
Since 1998, jurisdictional sovereignty has also been eliminated in Europe. “There are now no property rights to securities held in book-entry form in any jurisdiction globally” (Lama, op. cit.).
A financial crisis could lead to global war. However, the current period differs from that of WWI and WWII. Then, the allies dominated economically and consequently militarily. Currently, the Sovereigntist states dominate both economically and militarily, in Lama’s view. Will the Protected Class opt for the “Samson Option”? Or will it split the world into the Western realm, which they still control—which will experience the Great Equalization and the Great Reset—and a Sovereign realm dominated by Russia, Iran, and China? (https://tinyurl.com/z343vx9m)? Or will people in the Western Realm revolt against this miniscule parasitic financial “elite” and restore America?
The Montreal Protocol Model
Created in 1987, the Montreal Protocol has been signed by nearly 200 countries, and some 100 chemicals have been phased out or down. It has been hailed as a model for environmental treaties. Elements for success include partnerships between governments, industry, NGOs, and academia; the “start and strengthen” approach (at first only three halons and five chlorofluorocarbons [CFCs] were involved); financial incentives; and a global threat. If the proposed Kigali Amendment is implemented, which requires replacing the HCFCs and the equipment which uses them, which replaced CFCs, “experts” claim that up to 0.4 °C. warming can be prevented by the year 2100 (https://tinyurl.com/yeyubc78). A home air-conditioning system is already up to ten times more expensive.
India felt that its sovereignty was threatened and feared becoming dependent on chemicals it could not produce, but it eventually signed under threat of trade sanctions (https://tinyurl.com/5b7ae4jn).
The alarming threat purportedly posed by refrigerators and asthma inhalers is based on computer models (tinyurl.com/yve9ftku) and incompetent “science” (tinyurl.com/2jwpxf4w). Sadly, the Senate ratified Kigali: huge cost for zero health benefit (tinyurl.com/ykx5bsnk). Post-Chevron, it may be possible to reassert American sovereignty through the courts.
“It is our true policy to steer clear of any permanent alliance with any part of the foreign world.”
George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
Nominating Committee Slate
The Nominating Committee presents the following slate of officers for election at the 81st annual meeting:
President-elect: George Smith, M.D., Covington, GA
Secretary: Lawrence Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Eden, NY
Treasurer: Tamzin Rosenwasser, M.D., Venice, FL
Directors: Chandrasekhar Doniparthi, M.D., Yuma, AZ; Martin Dubravec, M.D., Cadillac, MI; Kristin Held, M.D., San Antonio, TX; Thomas Kendall, M.D., Greenville, SC.
Global Public-Private Partnerships
The UN’s core belief is that the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-state primacy is obsolete, and will be replaced in the New World Order by the global public-private partnership(G3P). Leaders of major transnational corporations acquire the equivalent of the divine right of kings. They will exercise centralized control of the entire planet—all its resources and everyone who lives on it (https://tinyurl.com/bdz2su27).
We already see demonstrably false and counterproductive narratives being globally promoted and rapidly transformed into globally accepted public policies without significant debate or scrutiny. Repeated global harmonization of bad policy decisions not only implies but requires centralization and massive data collection (https://tinyurl.com/ysszpjhw).
The Trojan horse for the corporatist coup was public health. A document written by the Department of Homeland Security in 2007 amounts to a full-blown corporatist imposition on the U.S., abolishing anything remotely resembling the Bill of Rights and Constitutional law. A 2005 draft was a scheme for combating bird flu. These plans were never legislated, debated, or publicly discussed. They were simply posted as the result of various consultations with experts, who worked out their totalitarian fantasies as if scripting a Hollywood film. Committee members represented big everything: food, energy, retail, computers, water.
Uprooting the problem requires decisive steps, writes Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute. The indemnification of pharma from liability for harm needs to be repealed. The court precedent for forced shots in Jacobson needs to be overthrown. But even more fundamentally, the quarantine power itself has to go, and that means the full repeal of the Public Health Services Act of 1944 (https://tinyurl.com/4wk4b3bv).
The pharmaceutical industry is facing a patents cliff. From now until 2030, $180 billion in sales will be at risk. It is shifting its emphasis to biotech, which is significantly more risky—but WHO and G3Ps are pursuing an unprecedented legal process to cement loopholes that could solve these significant market challenges. It needs a permanent pandemic marketplace (tinyurl.com/jrvvx26k).
AAPS Calendar
Sep 18-21. 81st Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX.
Chevron Overturned
The 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the underpinning of 70 Supreme Court decisions and roughly 17,000 in the lower courts, instructed the courts to give deference to agencies’ interpretation of any law deemed to be ambiguous.
Loper Bright v. Raimondo challenged a rule requiring fishing companies to pay for the cost of federal monitors that may be assigned to their boats. The Court held that the rule violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the separation of powers.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion is clear in its holding: “Chevron is overruled.” The conclusion is primarily grounded in the view that the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act does not permit courts to defer to agencies’ interpretations of statutes, even if ambiguous (NEJM 7/17/24).
Overruling Chevron provides a first step in restoring constitutional administration, writes John O. McGinnis. He points out that “just because the agency claims that its interpretation of technical words flows from its expertise, does not mean that it actually does.” Post-Chevron, Congress will be less able to blame bad effects of its laws on agencies’ “misinterpretations” (https://tinyurl.com/2vvfdhma).
The decision has already been cited by U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola in Mississippi to stop nationwide implementation of Biden’s interpretation of Title IX rules that interpret “sex” in anti-discrimination rules to mean “gender” and require provision of hormone therapy and mutilating surgery (https://tinyurl.com/3wdnvdc9). Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, who is part of the lawsuit, said, “The administration has over and over again issued regulations that mangle the law to advance an ideological agenda” (https://tinyurl.com/bdf4vu3j).
In MedPage Today, Elizabeth Cerceo, M.D., laments that “health and environmentalists’ hands are tied.” “Democracy” now depends on the legislature, not the administrative state, to protect “those of us who like to breathe air, drink water, and not overheat.” Chevron deference, she writes, has also protected programs like Medicare and Medicaid, with expert federal agencies like CMS being charged with interpreting and implementing the regulations (https://tinyurl.com/ywhpknvh).
In JAMA (5/7/24), Daniel Aaron, M.D., J.D., and Avery Emery, B.S., call Chevron the “bedrock principle” for agency power “from health care to climate change.” Justice Kavanaugh’s statement that the historic role of the judiciary has been “to police the line between the legislature and the executive to make sure that the executive is not operating as a king,” they state, seemingly implies that “Chevron places agencies in the position of royalty.”
They state that the Supreme Court has been replacing deference with antideference and has instituted the modern major questions doctrine (MDQ), used to strike down EPA’s Clean Air Rule in West Virginia v. EPA (2022). The Supreme Court had previously relied on the MQD, although without yet formally naming it, to strike down the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA’s) SARS-CoV-2 vaccine mandate for large employers and the CDC’s eviction moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic. With Chevron, the FDA won every single case; when courts found the statute clear and granted no deference, they sided with FDA less than half the time.
“The attack on Chevron is part of a wider trend of skepticism toward administrative agencies” (https://tinyurl.com/38x3c3nk).
Supreme Court Rulings on Treaties
· Reid v. Covert (1956): “There is nothing in [Article VI, the Supremacy Clause], which intimates that treaties and laws enacted pursuant to them do not have to comply with the provisions of the Constitution…. [S]uch construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V. The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined” (https://tinyurl.com/4pnbezhy). The Court held that treaties authorizing military commission trials of American citizens abroad on military bases could not displace Fifth and Sixth Amendment criminal procedure rights (tinyurl.com/jpfwchfz).
· Boos v. Berry (1985): The Court held that a treaty-based obligation to protect foreign embassies did not authorize Congress to enact legislation that infringed on individuals’ First Amendment right to freedom of speech (https://tinyurl.com/yb652xmm).
· Bond v. U.S. (2014): The Court held that “federal law typically does not intrude on the ability of states to regulate local matters, and the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act is not an exception to that general rule. While Congress has the authority to create legislation to enforce treaties, it must do so while respecting the traditional division of sovereign responsibility between the federal government and the states” (https://tinyurl.com/32yuae5s). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) opined: “As the Framers wisely understood when they ratified the Tenth Amendment, the division of power between the States and the federal government is essential to the preservation of liberty” (https://tinyurl.com/ye29mbrm).
Executive Authority to Enter Agreements
It seems clear from the composition of the U.S. Senate that a pandemic treaty currently has no chance of achieving two-thirds concurrence. However, only 6% of the 15,000 international agreements entered since WWII have gone through the constitutionally prescribed Senate ratification process. Instead, the President has used his Article II authority. The U.S. joined the International Health Regulations (IHR) in 2005, which largely committed the U.S. to information sharing, long a proper source for sole executive action. The President is authorized under the current governing statute to issue broad waivers of intellectual property protections for vaccine technologies. Constitutional constraints will guide U.S. participation in a pandemic agreement (https://tinyurl.com/5v6rt2ka).
Tip of the Month: “Look before you leap,” the 2,600-year-old adage from Aesop’s Fables, is essential whenever signing an employment contract. Increasingly, hospitals and medical practices are owned by private equity firms or conglomerates that are aggressive in the fine print of contracts for physicians. Often these contracts are provided in an electronic system such that it can be difficult to open all of the attachments or make your own modifications. Do not be rushed or herded into signing these agreements. When you ask to see the fine print you might be told that you’re the only one who has asked. Remember, whatever a physician signs can and will be used against him in a court of law.
Correspondence
Which First, Vaccine or Pandemic? Just in case there’s a bird flu epidemic in people, the U.S. government is paying Moderna $176 million to accelerate development of a pandemic bird influenza vaccine, as concern grows about cases in dairy cows. It will use the same mRNA technology that allowed rapid development of the COVID vaccine. It can be re-directed in case another type of influenza emerges (https://tinyurl.com/2cnjpfff).
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
From Republic to Hegemon. George Washington understood the principles of Westphalia. But after WWII, his simple, mature wisdom was jettisoned for imperial dreams. Between 1947 and 1989, more than 70 foreign regime-change operations were authorized and managed by the deep state. The U.S. has scrapped morality for the siren song of utilitarianism: The ends justify the means. Realpolitik. And increasingly, socialism and cultural Marxism. Once morality is compromised, further compromises become inevitable. The U.S. must return to a commitment to its founding principles, to the rule of law, and to a firm, unwavering commitment to the core principles of Judeo-Christian morality.
Robert Malone, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/ycxn77mz
Lawfare Precedent. In 1959, Alabama indicted Martin Luther King, Jr., for felony perjury. Like Alvin Bragg in New York, the Alabama prosecutor ratcheted up a misdemeanor charge of underpayment of state income taxes into a felony charge in an indictment that, like the Trump case, “was the first time in the state’s history that a defendant was so charged in such a case.” As in the Trump case, the objective of the Democrats was to sideline Martin Luther King through lawfare. Had he not been acquitted by the jury, King might have been imprisoned for up to 10 years (https://tinyurl.com/278z967k).
Willie Soon, Ph.D., Salem, MA
Experts’ Tears Flow. The best part of the Chevron decision so far is the reaction of experts. Laurence Tribe said: “The ones I feel sorry for are my administrative law colleagues who built their courses and careers around the intricacies of Chevron deference.” A short summary: If Congress made de jure law over some area, everybody had to follow that law; if there was no explicit law, government Experts got to decide de facto law on the fly. Experts can no longer get away with that so easily, because now they can be overruled by courts. Oh, sad, sad, sad for Experts. They now have to worry about being right!
William Briggs, Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/ybeu3wad
Shared Space. Law is not merely downstream from morality; they compete for the same space. If you have too much law, you shrink the moral sphere. In contemporary America, where everything is a crime, it’s hardly surprising that the moral space is so put upon. America is down to the remnants of its “moral space.” This is not only the fault of the left in delegitimizing any institution that obstructs its ambitions, but also that of the right, which being entirely absent from all other societal levers (from Hollywood to the schools) has bet the republic on having five out of nine judges adjudicate every aspect of life.
Mark Steyn, https://tinyurl.com/bd7ca6jc
Trial by Jury. In SEC v. Jarkesy, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Securities and Exchange Commission could no longer impose fines for securities fraud in administrative proceedings without a jury and a neutral adjudicator (https://tinyurl.com/3a8f53sm). The Court held that this was the equivalent of a “suit at common law,” to which the 7th Amendment applies. Dissenting Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson called the decision “a devastating blow to the manner in which our government functions.” Some two dozen agencies may be affected—some depend on revenues from penalties to support their budget (tinyurl.com/5n6hwydk).
I had assumed the opinion would rest on the 6th amendment—when the government comes after you for a regulatory violation it is the equivalent of a criminal prosecution and never should have been considered a suit at common law. The SEC case involved a claim of fraud. The administrative code of regulations is a quasi-criminal code. Administrative law judges (ALJs) can’t send people to prison, but they have the power to destroy industries. Given the cozy relationship ALJs have with the agencies, there is no unbiased tribunal. If an agency is about to destroy you, you are in the same position as a criminal defendant, and you need a jury and a properly adversarial system before an Article 3 judge, not an Article 1 ALJ.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
Truths on COVID Emerging. Speaking in an interview with Chris Cuomo two weeks ago, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield accepted some of the self-evident realities we’ve all endured: e.g., the CDC stopped tracking “vaccinated” people who became infected because they didn’t want it to sound as if the shots were ineffective. Had Dr. Redfield said these things a year ago, his license would have been threatened in some states.
Stewart Tankersly, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/yvcy2t27
