Rob Natelson on Politics of Healthcare, How U.S. Budget Exploded

Former UM Law Professor, Constitutional Fellow at the Independence Institute and weekly contributor to the Epoch Times online news site, Rob Natelson made his monthly appearance on Talk Back on Monday.

Natelson slammed the blatant politicization of the COVID 19 pandemic by the Biden Administration, the CDC and the WHO.

“The decision of the CDC to, ‘investigate gun violence’, which they did during the Clinton administration in order to serve the Clinton administration's political agenda, has now become how the COVID 19 pandemic will serve the Biden administration's political agenda,” said Natelson. “Politicization of healthcare is a very, very dangerous thing because it can cost lives and it can cause misery for many people.”

When asked about how Dr. Peter Marghella, noted public health specialist described controlling the narrative about the pandemic, calling it ‘managing the message, Natelson said it smacked of Soviet Russia.

“You know, it sounds like Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany,” he said. “That's exactly what that is. And that, unfortunately, is the mindset of some people involved in public health today. You've got to prevent that in a democratic republic. You've got to balance all these issues, and you can't allow public health authorities or anybody else to have absolute say over all the levers of power, because if you do, then you wind up with something like Soviet Russia.”

Natelson then answered a listener’s question about how the U.S. government began its policy of deficit spending.

“It was based upon those Supreme Court decisions that were issued during in panic circumstances, during the Great Depression,” he said. “The government fundamentally changed from a government that in peacetime generally balanced its budget, into a government that almost never balances its budget, and it is wrong with this enormous debt. It shows how a constitutional change, in this case because of two Supreme Court decisions, can basically change the entire dynamic with the federal government.”

One of the favorite topics for Natelson is helping to organize a Convention of States to amend the U.S. Constitution, specifically to mandate a balanced budget amendment. He acknowledged the fact that the current government would fight such a movement tooth and nail.

“It was one of the points that Mark Meckler, the president of the Convention of States movement has made is that they figure that once you get close to a convention, we will get slammed with all the power that the establishment can bring against us,” he said. “And we're going to have to win that campaign, and that's going to require a lot of money, it's probably going to require about $400 million. That's a rough estimate at this point. That money we believe will be available. But the point is that nobody claimed this is going to be easy, but then, nobody ever claimed saving the country was going to be easy.”

Natelson’s scholarly writings have been referenced several times in recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions.