Month: November 2023

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin saturday, NOVEMBER 21, 2023 by devadmin

The Governor’s emergency powers are wreaking havoc across our state. The COVID emergency is statistically over and has been over for months. The real Public Health danger in Oregon is not coming from SARS-CoV-2, it is coming from government’s overreach.

The headaches, nausea, and cold-sweats which the public is suffering from comes from fear. The Fear of Big Brother, or Karen’s, or neighborhood snitches or do-gooders who are trying to do right, but never-the-less create a very real and palpitating tension and uneasiness.

People find themselves constantly worried, not about infecting anyone, they know they do not suffer from COVID-19. They know they have immunity, natural or otherwise. Yet, they are always wondering who might demand what? Can I be normal in this store? Where’s my mask? Will I have to show my paperwork? Is a mask required for my grand-daughter? Does my teen need a vaccine card? Will I be banned from participation here, or there?These questions of self-assessment and personal review are untoward and degrading, and are frankly, unconstitutional.

Last week, on the Senate Floor, I made a motion to bring Senate Joint Resolution 23 to the floor for a vote. My motion was necessary because SJR 23 found itself aground on the sands of political despotism fortified by Oregon’s committee-centric majority party process. Yet, ensuring the protected constitutional rights and representation for the public is the legislature’s most basic responsibility. Governor Kate Brown, has engineered executive overreach and become a super-legislator who has chosen to neglect her responsibilities as outlined in the US and Oregon Constitutions.

Oregonians should have a say in how they are governed, period.

SJR 23 would have put the question to Oregon voters as to how they would like their elected representatives in the legislature to constrain or check the Governor’s power via unelected bureaucrats. SJR 23 went down to defeat with every Republican voting YES and every Democrat voting NO. Oregonians have been denied their rights to constitutional governance, once again, by the Democrat super-majority.

As background, Oregon has detailed legal procedures for addressing communicable diseases and for testing, treating, quarantining, or isolating individuals believed to pose a threat to public health.

Oregon’s existing statutes, akin to those upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), express a fundamental legislative determination that the appropriate response to serious communicable diseases was to delegate to the State Public Health Director or others the power to petition a court for an order to isolate or quarantine a person or group of persons as necessary (ORS 433.123) or use emergency administrative orders as needed (ORS 433.121).

No absurd, inconsistent, or arbitrary rule-making was ever needed. No lockdowns were necessary. No mandates for healthy people would be required; these measures have never been tried in all of human history. Lastly, no violations of the separation of powers and other provisions of the Oregon Constitutional is required to implement such safety procedures to protect the public welfare in cases of epidemics. The public’s protections have been codified in our state’s own Constitution.

Specifically, Article IV, § 1 of the Oregon Constitution provides:

• “The legislative power of the state, except for the initiative and referendum powers reserved to the people, is vested in a Legislative Assembly, consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives.”  No legislative powers are vested in the Governor.

Article I, § 21 of the Oregon Constitution provides:

• “. . . nor shall any law be passed, the taking effect of which shall be made to depend upon any authority, except as provided in this Constitution”.

Article I, § 22 provides:

• “The operation of the laws shall never be suspended, except by the Authority of the Legislative Assembly.”

Article III, § 1 of the Oregon Constitution provides:

• “The powers of the Government shall be divided into three separate (sic) departments,  the Legislative, the Executive, including the administrative, and the Judicial; and no person charged with official duties under one of these departments, shall exercise any of the functions of another, except as in this Constitution expressly provided.”

Now is the time for the legislature, citizens in Oregon, and citizens across these fifty United States, to focus on educating ourselves and the next generation to understand and appreciate our founding documents. Our history, traditions and constitutional form of governance gives great weight and unprecedented value to the people in order to check the power of the powerful.

As Thomas Jefferson warned,

“Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power…

“In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

– Thomas Jefferson, Draft Kentucky Resolutions [1798]

If we don’t stand for rural Oregon Values and common-sense… No one will!

Regards,

Dennis Linthicum
Oregon State Senate – District 28

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin Wednesday, NOVEMBER 21, 2023, by devadmin

In the movie, Collateral Damage, Arnold Schwarzenegger saves the day at the last minute. Aside from the bad guys, explosions, and the lustre of an action movie, there is another lesson – Don’t be fooled by kind words and false pretenses. In Oregon, businesses are being forced to submit to a miasma of safety measures for “their own good.” The result is untold collateral damage caused by grasping hands of overreach, manipulation and coercion.

The Governor’s office finds itself battering against a historical bulwark of common-sense, sound business policies, and prudent governance. Policy inconsistencies have spawned interventions which are becoming more nakedly absurd and less scientific as time progresses while reasonableness and balance have been cast-aside.

As noted in my Press Release [below], there is a perverse logic in the latest lockdown actions. For instance, last week restaurants could turn-on their state owned and licensed lottery machines, but they could not serve food.

What local Mom & Pop restaurant can afford to open their doors, keep the lights and heaters on to sell a handful of lottery tickets without welcoming diners who stop in for a meal? What statistical evidence do we have to warrant these new rules?

Ultimately, this is simply a slap in the face of the hard-working, independent entrepreneurs who have barely survived the past eleven-months’ worth of shutdowns. The New York Times has even reported hat Oregon has some of the most restrictive lockdown rules and is only one of the two states in the US where businesses are “Mostly Closed”.

Remember, Oregon has the 4^th lowest death count for states within the US. Oregon’s ratio for total death count (2,031) to active case count (147,932) is 0.0137. This ratio is not significantly different from seasonal flu statistics over the past decade. Certainly, elderly patients with co-morbidities require greater protection, but it seems Oregon is more intent on managing everyone’s life not just the various sub-populations which warrant greater attention.

Should customers of a local bar be forced out onto the street at 10:00pm because of COVID regulations? Is there any science that justifies this outlandish requirement? How can 12 customers be welcome, safe, warm, and merry inside at 9:59pm then be thrown out into the cold, dark night under a blanket-edict that mandates this will be safer for the community. How are the state’s actions justified by the data? Besides, do we have any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 knows how to tell time?

A study published last November, with nearly 10 million enrolled participants from Wuhan, substantiated that asymptomatic carriers are unable to produce replication-competent virus or infect susceptible hosts. Is this study unknown in Oregon?

The study, published in Nature, confirms that if asymptomatic carriers do exist, they make up an insignificant percentage of any population (0.00029%). Given these results, one should ask why are businesses across Oregon still facing draconian fines, threats, and shutdowns for trying to keep their businesses afloat?

From my perspective, these centrally planned policy mandates are being ramped up and are not diminishing, but they are not working either. We can see this by trying to assess and quantify collateral damage which is well-hidden beneath the rhetoric of “saving lives.”

If the Governor started a campaign to “End all Traffic Fatalities”, would there be brute force mandates, county risk assessments and new flashing highway lights? Would Amazon delivery trucks be essential but not food delivery or school buses? Would Multnomah County be stuck at a speed limit of 15MPH because there are more traffic accidents in that county than elsewhere, like Sherman County?

This leads me to my final questions regarding the cultural, societal, and economic destruction that is sweeping through our counties. First, how many businesses can actually survive and thrive in this turmoil? Second, how many people, families and individuals will continue to put up with the overt regimentation and intrusions into their private, constitutionally protected concerns?

Lastly, we are endlessly told that diversity is the answer. If we truly believe this, then it is surely time we let our diverse communities, churches, schools, families, individuals, and their private enterprises have the freedom to take the precautions they feel are most appropriate and necessary, given their situation and circumstances.

As author Jeffrey Tucker explains, we can do better:

“We do not need to destroy society, lock people in their homes, tear down businesses, close schools, traumatize kids, drive people to alcoholism and drug abuse, divide society between the clean ruling class and the dirty working class, ban travel, close churches, abolish choirs, close the arts, and whip up the population into a frenzied psychological meltdown in order to deal with a new strain of a respiratory virus.”

If we don’t stand for rural Oregon Values and common-sense… No one will!

Regards,

Dennis Linthicum
Oregon State Senate – District 28

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin friday, November 21, 2023, by devadmin

I will not be in attendance for today’s Senate Floor Session.

Why not?

Because the power-hungry Senate Democrats are planning another heist of our lawful right to self-protection. Therefore, I will not participate by lending to the chamber’s member count for attaining quorum. If eleven Senators would stay off the floor and deny quorum, then our Oregon constitution would forbid the majority party from continuing down their partisan warpath.

At issue is a gun-control, lockup, and persecute bill known as, SB 554-Engrossed B version.

With careful reading, SB 554 exposes the heart of the hard-Left. The bill starts with a series of “Whereas” clauses that imply, in the broadest terms available, that tragic criminal events and horrendous accidents are caused by the presence of guns not people. By sweeping several anecdotal accusations and real stories into broad generalizations, the language of the bill herds everyday citizens into circumstances that will make owning a firearm in Oregon very difficult and financially burdensome.

Only the naive will think this a good thing.

Statistics inform our intellectual and cognitive faculties that good people are saved by firearms daily. After all, those seeking to rob, rape or steal from unarmed victims will never leave their weapons behind.

Interestingly, the first “Whereas” clause, refers to a sad and serious shooting that occurred at the Clackamas Town Center, in 2012. That was a long time ago and the Democrat supermajority didn’t finally stumble upon the solution. No, rather they are giddy with power and will destroy as many of our long-held constitutionally protected traditions and values as possible.

There is nothing in this bill that will stop a criminal from executing malevolent desires, whether in 2012 or 2021. A person with criminal intent can never serve as a proxy for how any other person might behave. There is no causal, or meaningful correlation that can offer predictive insight into the probabilities for a single criminal event.

Criminal activity cannot be tied to the availability of common-place tools. Kitchen knives are available everywhere. They are rarely, if ever, locked up and they are the weapon of choice for assaulting far more people in the US, than handguns. The rioters, antifa looters and “mostly peaceful” arsonists prefer more common melee weapons, like baseball bats, iron pipes, umbrellas, frozen water bottles, hand-held lasers, hairspray and Zippo-lighters. But the professional Left find these weapons non-threatening.

The focus with SB 554, is not just about guns, it is also about people, law-abiding people, people who live in rural areas and use their weapons regularly. That guns are useful tools, when used safely, matters not.

Concealed Handgun Licensed (CHL) holders have under-gone training and testing; their personal information and background check results are on file; their fingerprint records are also at the County Sheriff’s office; and these are the people the Democrats see as threats to the community?

There is an obvious agenda. The Democrats are not interested in stopping the purposeful billion-dollar destruction in downtown Portland due to lawlessness, arson and violence. Neither are they concerned about the destructive Covid lockdowns and the hundreds of million-dollar losses in our local municipalities, counties, and communities. As SB 554 illustrates, they have different goals in mind.

What is the goal?

Statism is the modern Utopian agenda. Both parties can fall prey to this Utopian ideal, because it is attractive. It relies on experts, not peons, and concentrates control, authority, and power into the hands of the powerful. For the Democrat super-majority, the real goal is not gun-control but control, absolute control. SB 554 is just another step up the ladder.

Democrats in both chambers have been watching Gov. Brown with a keen eye to see how dictatorial power is effectively used. They’ve learned their lessons well.

The first step is to keep the citizens at bay; don’t let them participate; don’t let them speak, keep them locked down. Then, step up the rhetorical war and feed a distorted picture of what is right, good and true. After a time, reach for the top of the ladder; reach for total power and total domination. Like we see with Gov. Brown’s weekly COVID fearmongering, when backed by fallacious authority, such as, Oregon Health Authority (OHA) and Oregon OSHA, the domination strategy is total. Author Leonard Peikoff, refers to this as a movement toward the, “almost metaphysical.”

Peikoff was analyzing the application of unlimited unreason imposed on prisoners during World War II and he notes that while prison camps were expected to wreck prisoners, that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to make omnipotent rulers.

Peikoff outlines these details in his book Ominous Parallels. He notes, metaphysical power is the inner-soul of statism which requires a god-like allegiance. Absolute obedience is needed to satisfy the wider demands of statism. No entity, or law, or constitutional protection, or church, or business, or school of any kind can be allowed to stand in the way of any of the ruler’s whims. For the state, even the most contradictory, benign, or casual dictates must be followed to the letter.

This can be seen in Oregon’s COVID-19 protocol, a trademark example of modern tyranny.

It all started easy enough. Just a small demand for some fawning compliance with some ridiculous mandates, which happen to defy every conceivable fact of nature, virology and epidemiology. After all, never in history have healthy populations been quarantined. Even the phrase, “lockdown”, comes from the prison industrial complex where prisoners are “locked down” until prison population compliance is achieved. But remember, the goal is not the publicly proclaimed goal – health, it is the more insidious goal – metaphysical control.

The statist seeks to quell independence and foster dependence. This is accomplished through education, media campaigns, billboards, and news sources, while censoring any opposing voices. There is no reason to question the absurdities of changing rules like, No-Mask, Must-Mask, Double-Mask, and No-Mask if vaccinated. There is no consistency because confusion offers control to the powerful.

Peikoff explains, once the state can coerce submission to utter senselessness, they have defeated sense. When they can require obeisance to absurdity, they have successfully refuted logic. As they garner acceptance for their lies, they successfully overthrow truth. And finally, when the people surrender their values, the state gets to either smash all value or inculcate an entirely new set of values.

Now, if you happen to think that I have driven myself off a metaphysical cliff, let’s look back at a key sentence in SB 554. It asserts that a, “violation constitutes per se negligence, and the presumption of negligence may not be over-come by a showing that the owner or possessor acted reasonably.” This phraseology in not just an obscure reference but occurs in four separate sections of this bill. In other words, this bill, by law, would turn reasonableness into negligence and destroy reason.

In closing, we must continue to fight against the current gross and overbearing regulatory mandates flowing from the legislative body and the Governor’s office. We must stand against the absurdities that are demanded daily. We must stand for the self-evident truth that we witness, the common-sense we utilize, and our own just pursuits and economic enterprises regardless of the crushing weight of the statist bureaucrats. To pursue justice without regard for the individual is statism and statism requires, “a certain kind of universe: a universe of non-fact, non-thing, non-identity,” which is a self-annihilating lust for power known as, Utopianism.