Relatively recently, Alan Dershowitz, an American criminal and constitutional lawyer, has claimed that government has a right to forcibly vaccinate individuals in order to protect the health of the public in general. I do not believe that his claim is tenable, and while elucidating what I consider to be the errors in his way of thinking will take a bit of time to delineate, nonetheless, I believe the exercise will be worth the time and effort that are required to concentrate and reflect on the ideas that follow.
Let’s begin with a counterclaim to Mr. Dershowitz assertions concerning forcible, mandated inoculations, and let’s use this as a starting point through which to explore a variety of issues from the perspective which is inherent in such a counterclaim. More specifically, consider the following thesis: The unspecified, retained rights of the Ninth Amendment and the unspecified, reserved powers of the Tenth Amendment are independent of the jurisdiction of both the federal government as well as the state governments. Therefore, the executive, legislative, and/or the judicial branches of federal and state governments do not have any constitutional standing or authority with respect to identifying, designating, defining, or making rulings concerning the conceptual structure and/or content that might be entailed by either the retained rights or reserved powers of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments respectively.
Another way of stating the foregoing thesis is the following. Anyone (whether government official, lawyer, judge, media personality, senator, representative, corporate official, or academic) who tries to claim that the Constitution recognizes only the rights, powers, and sovereignty of federal or state authorities, and, thereby, allegedly establishes that individuals do not have retained rights and reserved powers under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments that give expression to a separate, independent venue of rights, powers and sovereignty which is not subject to the authority of either the federal or state governments is engaging, knowingly or unknowingly, in a process of seeking to gaslight whomever they are addressing.
Now, let’s take a look at a Constitutional provision that complements what already has been said. More specifically, the provisions of Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution:
“… guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government”
… that is, a form of governance is being guaranteed which must abide by the principles of republicanism (a moral philosophy that came to prominence during the Enlightenment and influenced the formation of the Constitution) that require government officials to be individuals who are: Impartial, disinterested in personal gain, unbiased, selfless, objective, fair, honorable, given to reason, compassionate, inclined toward self-sacrifice, committed to the idea of liberty, as well as require individuals in government to act with integrity, independence, egalitarianism, and who are opposed to the idea of serving as judges in their own causes.
