Does The Rule of Law Exist? Part 2
IN part 1 of this essay, I came to the conclusion that the rule of law does not exist when everyone is under the thumb of arbitrary rule as seen with emergency laws, conscription, slavery, prohibitions, and even gun rights. For instance, the right to bear arms could be seen as a constitutional right that is interpreted as only being active in a period of just war. When the constitution is suspended in a state of emergency, as seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina where residents were forced to surrender their guns based on the fallacious assumption that physical carnage brings about lawlessness, then all “guaranteed” rights are void even though the judgement of the governor does not correspond to the fact pattern on the ground.
Emergency laws violate the rule of the law in that due process (or the judicial process one is due as a citizen) is always violated when it is thought that the best way to govern an emergency is to impose rules of safety-oriented conduct. The rule of law does exist in a pre-constitutional sense, but it does not ultimately exist in that the highest mode of law can not be made active by some oversight committee or, in other words, a government beyond government. For instance, all of Canada saw the mythical nature of social contract theory when we watched the pendulum of constitutional integrity swing from capricious to sound when the Senate voted on whether or not to invoke the Emergencies Act to end the freedom/truckers convoy. Even though the constitutional experts in the Senate are supposed to be constitutionalists first and conservative or liberal mouthpieces second, the viewers booed whenever the political tribalists of the Senate showed support for the Emergencies Act and then cheered whenever the more neutral Senators used strictly constitutional reasoning in support of the freedom protestors. I should also add that members of the Ottawa police force (or farce) insisted that the convoy was an “insurrection” without any material evidence and thus violated the rule of law in speech because the facts on the ground did not correspond to the insurrectionist charge.
The Ottawa police, and all the other police forces (which included some mercenary police from the US) where in breach of the three main principles that AV Dicey formulated as it relates to the rule of law:
Absence of arbitrary power: The politically entrenched Ottawa police with their blatantly defamatory comments about the alleged criminality of the freedom convoy acted as henchman for the Federal government. The henchman-like tactics consisted of confiscations of life-sustaining resources such a containers for fuel and firewood. The use of militarized police and snipers was a needless addition but a necessary addition if the police were following the insurrectionist narrative. There were also 40-50 people arrested on mass but were not charged with any crime and were simply driven out of the municipal jurisdiction and dropped off at a desolate towing lot. These arrests were what I call “photo op'“ arrests in that they police-henchmen were desperate to vilify benign protestors who were lawfully assembled. Granted, the protestors may have broke many parking by-laws due to the sheer volume of attendees, but if the government wants to break our constitutional rights, then we have a right to break the municipalities by-laws because the creation of a mass spectacle to force change was the only outlet that was left. The Ottawa police called us insurrectionists, but I call them mutilators because arbitrary rule is unprincipled law, and the result of unprincipled law is the mutilation of natural justice. Moreover, every single police force at all levels of government acted as henchman for the politicians who were following Dr. Fauci’s “made up” Coronavirus rules that he has now admitted were made up. The freedom convoy was a response to two years of mandate non-sense that had escalated to vaccine passport rules which violated everyone’s freedom of mobility and association. The various governmental gangs enjoyed taste testing the different flavors of arbitrary power until the mildly coercive freedom convoy protestors, those who arrived in large trucks to apparently “occupy” Ottawa for 6 plus weeks (a small price to pay for two years of unilateral occupation through mandates) embarrassed both the Ottawa and the Federal government by creating a scene of confrontation that symbolized a power imbalance between those who justly assert their constitutional rights and those who were unjustly withholding such rights through brute force. A.V. Dicey stipulates that laws should be rooted in moral principles and that an overly detailed law loses its moral foundation because it causes people to break that law due to a series of understandable mistakes of fact. To make assault, theft, indecent exposure, vandalism, common nuisance behavior, and harassment crimes is to create a criminal code that is rooted in moral principles, but to make a law that coerces people into mandatory quarantine without any diagnostic evidence is a function of politics and not law because law deals with what is whereas politics deals with what ought-to-be.
Equality before the law: Willful inaccuracy is akin to defamation in that when once accused a person or group of insurrection, one is essential saying that every participant is a thug who has as low a moral character as an actual insurrectionist. Interestingly, an insurrection takes place whenever the police gang trample the constitutional rights of the public and then (as I observed in Ottawa) literally trample the protestors with horses, club people for standing in the supposedly incorrect spot, and pepper spray people for being “too close'“ to the police line. From what I saw on the ground in Ottawa, the riot police continued to advance into the crowd in hope of provoking a reaction that would ignite a brawl and consequently vilify the convoy once and for all. Fortunately, the good dissenters of Canada, many of which were apolitical people from all walks of life who never felt the need to dissent until now, did not fall for this tactic. Then again, where is the the equality before the law? We know the riot police were sent to fulfil an ulterior motive, but the function of riot police is to defend the parliament building from those who would want to raid in it. In other words, riot police represent self-defense in team formation. If the cowardly Prime Minister wants to defend himself when near a crowd of protestors who may throw projectiles his way, then it is better to defend oneself with riot police as opposed to dressing up in cumbersome riot gear he is not trained to use. The thing is, what about our right to self-defense? Why can’t we use our own security forces to boot out the police-henchmen who want to raid and shutdown businesses who refuse to comply with inane public health mandates? Where is the equality before the law? The politicians believe in the non-aggression principle when it suits them when they condemn others for aggressing against them without just cause, but when the shoe is on the other foot, they will break the non-aggression principle more times than a dog will break a bone fresh off a carcass.
Individual liberties: All the virtue signaling politicians will tell you to not travel due to the Coronavirus, but they have no problem invoking their freedom of mobility to mobilize out of Canada for their holidays-holidays they have acquired through theft. Individual liberty for me but not thee! They invoke their right to freedom of expression when they, like Trudeau, defame protestors by calling them Nazi sympathizer or a “small fringe minority” or “insurrectionists”, but when we invoke our freedom of expression we are slammed with online censorship bills and then proposals to increase that censorship power. I recall trying to share are article from a mainstream news outlet (CTV) and being censored by Facebook even though the article as apolitical and came from a “acceptable” outlet. The Ottawa elites are also free to invoke their freedom of association by sending weapons to Ukraine to support the NATO proxy war, but we can not invoke our freedom of association by choosing which guns we carry as gun ownership is not seen as a natural right but a heavily regulated privilege.
I will leave it here for now, but tell me the rule of law is fiction without telling me it is a fiction! A.V. Dicey has formulated sound theoretical principles, but as it relates to the status quo, these principles are purely theoretical as we are in an anarcho-tyrannical relationship with our government. In other words, the government in of itself is in a state of anarchy because it does not abide by its own rules and takes liberties with immunity, while we are meant to follow the tyrannical rules that break our constitutional rights with unquestioning obedience. How absurd!
End.