Rob Natelson on the January 6th Washington Riot ‘ Get Over It’
On Monday's KGVO Talk Back show, former UM law professor and Constitutional Fellow at the Independence Institute Rob Natelson had some advice for those on the left consumed with the January 6th Washington, D.C. riot; ‘get over it’.
“Let me just suggest something to my friends on the left regarding January 6, it was a riot,” began Natelson. “It was serious, but get over it, okay? It was not anywhere near as serious as the riots that that went on all through the summer of 2020, that killed about two dozen people and that resulted in billions upon billions of dollars of property damage and that also destroyed inner cities across the country. They were far more serious.”
Natelson also addressed the three major vaccine mandates put forth by the Biden administration attempting to weaponize the issue.
“The health care worker order says the federal government isn’t going to give any money to any health care provider that doesn't have its entire staff vaccinated,” he said. “With that, they're stretching a congressional statute for the payment of this money and, and the policing of the quality of the health care services into a vaccination mandate.”
Natelson said the federal courts have not looked favorably so far on the Biden mandates.
“The fate of these three mandates in the federal courts has not been really good,” he said. “The administration hasn't lost them all, but it's lost most of them and has lost most of them on the grounds that the statutes that they're using to justify these mandates were never intended to be stretched into general public health statutes, and that if Congress had intended them to be general, public health statutes, Congress would have said so,” he said. “But several other courts have also expressed Constitutional concerns that this is really not something that affect public health matters, like vaccination issues, is really not something that's entrusted to the federal government.”
Finally, on the issue of the recent oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court that potentially could undo Roe v Wade, in which UM law professor Anthony Johnstone told KGVO that the Montana Constitution would still allow a woman’s right to an abortion, Natelson vehemently disagreed.
“I strongly disagree with that,” HE SAID. “I very strongly disagree with that. Now, there's no saying what the Montana Supreme Court is going do. I mean, it's a very unpredictable court. But if you go back to the legislative history of Montana, in the right privacy, there is zero evidence that it had anything to do with abortion. First off, it was adopted a year before Roe vs. Wade invented the right to abortion in the federal right to privacy. Secondly, at the time the Montana right to privacy was adopted, Montana had probably one of the strongest pro life laws in the country. It was no suggestion that the right to privacy would change. I've been all over the ratification record and people are free to look at a database that I collected for that purpose. There is nothing indicating that the Montana right to privacy was presented to the people in any way that would compromise what was at the time, Montana's strong pro life standard. So the evidence to me is compelling that the Montana right to privacy in fact does not include does not include any purported right to abortion.”
Read Natelson’s articles from the Independence Institute here. His weekly articles in the Epoch Times can be found here.
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