RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/john_murawski/

The national racial reckoning over reparations and critical race theory is taking over the world of medicine and health care. Prestigious medical journals, top medical schools and elite medical centers are adopting the language of social justice activism and vowing to confront “systemic racism,” dismantle “structural violence” and disrupt “white supremacy” in their institutional cultures.

Is U.S. health care against her? Lately medical journals,  drawing on critical race theory, implicate the profession in untold numbers of black and brown deaths.

Klaus Nielsen

Some activist physicians describe the present-day health care system with such ominous terms as a “medical caste system” or “medical apartheid,” the latter locution taken from the title of a 2007 book about America’s history of medical experimentation on enslaved blacks and freedmen.

“Modern American medicine has historical roots in scientific racism and eugenics movements,” according to a February article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities.” “Black communities became medical training grounds and a source of profit, reinforcing the American medical caste system that we have today.”

Rare is the doctor who is willing to publicly question claims of white privilege and implicit bias in the healthcare system, and already several doctors who have publicly pushed back have been demoted and have filed legal actions alleging retaliation. This year the medical profession received an unequivocal message when two editors of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association resigned under pressure over a podcast that aired opinions expressing skepticism that the United States is plagued by systemic racism.

While racialized politics has infused every corner of American life, the moral stakes in the health care arena go far beyond, say, the perceived slights called microaggressions. The medical literature, lately drawing on critical race theory, depicts the health care industry itself as a historical source of illness in — and even killing of — black and brown bodies. That would make medicine analogous to policing and criminal justice, the other social institutions directly blamed for maiming and murdering black people.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/10/ny-lt-governor-kathy-hochul-to-replace-cuomo-after-he-resigns-in-disgrace/

New York’s lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, is set to replace disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo after he steps down over multiple sexual harassment allegations.

Hochul is considered to be a “moderate” Democrat, and will be the first female governor of New York.

Cuomo announced his resignation one week after New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced in a 168-page report that “the governor engaged in conduct constituting sexual harassment under federal and New York State law.”

The governor said on Tuesday that his resignation will be effective in 14 days.

The AG’s report came after a five month investigation into sexual harassment allegations from eleven women, including former staffers and one current staffer.

“I take full responsibility for my actions. I have been too familiar with people. My sense of humor can be insensitive and off-putting. I do hug and kiss people casually — women and men. I have done it all my life,” Cuomo said.

“In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone. But I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” he added. “And I should have. No excuses.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/10/how-states-could-constitutionally-assume-abandoned-responsibilities-of-the-national-government/

The COVID pandemic has witnessed the exercise of state “police powers” on a scale and scope unprecedented in America’s peacetime history. Out of fear of contagion, massive amounts of private property in the form of shops, restaurants, bars, and other businesses were peremptorily seized and shuttered. The rights of landlords to collect rents and evict tenants were suspended. The ability of people to cross from one state to another was hobbled by regulations, quarantines, and delays. And most of this was accomplished by governors and mayors acting by decree, with only the most tenuous of statutory authorizations. 

Initially implemented for what was to have been a brief period of medical unreadiness, the restrictions and impositions were extended month after month in the name of protecting Americans from a threat the specific magnitude of which was never clearly defined. Although some raised concerns about the legality of and need for these coercions, most Americans obediently submitted to them.

The purpose here is not to justify the particulars of what seems to us to have been a huge and clumsy overreach. It is instead to point out what such robust assertions of police powers could achieve, constitutionally and politically, if put to different and more legitimate ends—protecting Americans’ health and safety against what predictably ensues when the federal government abandons one of its primary charges. It is a road which, if taken, could not only repair the harms of gross federal nonfeasance but usefully up the ante in the struggle to thwart the Left’s accelerating efforts to unmake America. In other words, a course of action that could materially improve public health, safety, and welfare while also firing a powerful salvo across revolution’s bow. 

We propose calling this the doctrine of “protective resumption” whereby, finding that the national government through negligence, inability, or malice had ceased to meaningly perform one or more of its core functions—thus endangering the health, safety, and welfare of a state’s citizens—the states either severally or acting in concert among themselves, could resume their core police power functions without being preempted by federal law. The states, it should be stressed, would not thereby be taking over national government functions, they would only be shielding, via recognized police powers, their citizens from the effects of these functions’ abandonment. This distinction is important since it would place limits both on what the states could do and how long they could do it. Moreover, it would not allow them to exercise any powers specifically denied the states by the U.S. Constitution. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/legally-flawed-eviction-moratorium-richard-l-cravatts/

When queried last week about the CDC’s controversial eviction ban, President Biden seemed intransigent concerning ending the moratorium protecting the nation’s renters. Even though, as he admitted, “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” the administration was going to leave the onerous regulations in place, since, as the President put it, “by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”

At issue is a moratorium on evictions put into place in 2020 by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, with the intention of limiting the spread of COVID-19 by helping renters stay in their homes. Although the CDC’s order contended that “The ability of these settings to adhere to best practices, such as social distancing and other infection control measures, decreases as populations increase,” critics of the order—including the Supreme Court—have contended that the CDC lacked the authority to impose regulations affecting intra-state relationships between landlords and tenants—commerce overseen by states, not the federal government, and that the order was not only an overreach by the CDC but was unconstitutional as well by violating Fifth Amendment protections. By compelling owners of private property to forgo the collection of rents and lawful evictions, the CDC, as an agent of the government, was implementing what is deemed to be an unlawful “taking.”

The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment specifically states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation,” and while takings are generally of the type when the government takes physical possession of the property (for instance, through eminent domain for a public works project), unconstitutional takings also apply to regulatory takings, as well. In these cases, even though the government does not take physical possession of a private property, the property owner is denied his legal rights of ownership, even if the taking is temporary—as in the case of the eviction moratorium here.

Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh seems to have acknowledged that the moratorium should not, and will not, prevail after legal challenges when he wrote in his decision that, while the moratorium could be extended long enough for all stakeholders to get their affairs in order prior to its expiration, any further regulation had to come from Congress and from individuals states, not from a federal agency like the CDC without authority for such broad national policies affecting landlords and renters nationwide.  “In my view,” Kavanaugh wrote in June, “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31.”