Zealots abuse science and law

It is the convergence of junk science and public policy gone horribly awry. A Washington, D.C., man with coronary disease wants a federal judge to impose a smoking ban in Virginia so he may patronize restaurants there without having to inhale secondhand smoke. He claims his condition limits what the Americans With Disabilities Act defines as "major life activities," so restaurants that let people smoke discriminate against his "disability." Some observations:

It is an annual tradition for the Virginia legislature, respectful of individual rights, to reject smoking bans for bars, restaurants and bowling alleys. And until Virginians change their minds, the courts should butt out. This goes double when a lawsuit is brought by an out-of-stater who has the option of dining at hundreds of restaurants in his district and suburban Maryland, all of which are smoke-free by law.

The surgeon general unilaterally declared the secondhand-smoke debate over in 2006, but only so he and other anti-tobacco types could advance their agenda without sustainable evidence, silence scientific debate and quash contrary research, such as: the 2002 British Medical Journal report that found that 41 of 48 studies on secondhand smoke showed no link to lung cancer; the 39-year analysis by two American scientists, reported in the BMJ in 2003, that found no "causal relationship between exposure to (passive smoke) and tobacco-related mortality"; the New England Journal of Medicine's findings that passive smoking in restaurants amounts to 0.004 cigarettes per hour. The debate was cut off, too, so the zealots won't have to defend their claim that secondhand smoke kills up to 69,000 statistical Americans a year, but has yet to produce a single corpse with a name.

Enacted to remove employment barriers to the legitimately disabled, the ADA has been perverted through predatory litigation to broaden the definition of disabled. Congress may expand the definition further to include depression, diabetes, cancer and other conditions that reasonable people would never consider disabilities. Now the federal lawsuit, relying on deceptive science, seeks to add heart disease through judicial fiat while ignoring, as the defendants have pointed out, that smoke in restaurants doesn't discriminate against the abled or disabled.

It has been said the goal of anti-tobacco zealots never has been about protecting non-smokers, but getting smokers to quit. Can't this be done without abusing science and the Constitution?

There is one possible solution in the creation of a “college of scientists”, for particular sciences, whose sole purpose is to adjudicate efforts to legislate, based on scientific opinion.

But as has been nobly demonstrated in the last few years, scientists are terribly vulnerable to political and economic manipulation, and relatively speaking, there are so many scientists today with low standards and even lower ethics, that the imperative to corrupt such an organization would be easy to do.

So the other alternative, and a far more sensible one, is to make legislation far more difficult to pass. This was one of the major goals of the US constitution itself, to *prevent* new laws from being passed. To make the process inherently hard.

Legislators are fearful of this, because it makes their jobs far harder, but that is the intent of the idea. A legislator of any kind should be able to number the laws he promulgated on the fingers of both his hands, after a long and distinguished career.

Each year, besides maintaining the laws and systems of our nation, the US congress feels obligated to pass innumerable new laws. Often these are to the detriment of the people, and are half done as experiment, and the other half as largesse. In truth, the vast majority of these we could do without, as a nation, as a people, and as individual citizens.

During the Reagan years, the novel idea of “sunset laws” gave the congress pause to reexamine their legislation after a few years, to see if it had failed, and could thus be allowed to die, or if it should be extended. And while a good idea, it still meant several years of bad laws.

Now, the federal government has tremendous inertia, but such an idea as making State laws harder to pass would be both more practical, and far easier to bring about. Ideas could include:

1) Requiring public commentary on prospective new laws, after publishing projected costs and benefits.
2) Creation of a legislative committee to review scientific objections to prospective new laws.
3) Mandating that new laws indicate the itemized percentage of the public directly affected by the new law. (It is often far less than 1%.)
4) Identifying all lobbyists and their clients, who have expressed interest in the prospective law.
5) Strengthen the right to table a prospective law in committee.
6) Prohibit the use of the voice vote.

It’s bad enough when legislatures pass nanny laws but the guy in the article wants a federal judge to do what the Virginia legislature has so far refused to do.

Just wait. The liberals continue to attack the checks and balances inherent in our system of government so that their "majority" numbers (artificially inflated by dead people, cats and dogs, and the occasional illegal) can force itself on the rest of us.

And, you know the usual: it's "for the children."

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