Posted on 11/19/2013 1:19:52 PM PST by Kaslin
Berkeley, Calif., City Councilman Jesse Arreguin has recommended that the city ban smoking in single-family homes. Councilwoman Susan Wengraf, who supports an ordinance to ban smoking in multiunit dwellings, is appalled.
"The whole point is to protect people who live in multiunit buildings from secondhand smoke," Wengraf said. Locals have told her they find the notion of a ban in single-family homes scary. "I hope he wakes up and pulls it," she said.
Actually, I think Wengraf should want Arreguin's recommendation to stick around. After all, his proposal makes the multiunit ordinance seem reasonable.
Arreguin aide Anthony Sanchez tells me that the recommendation is really just a "footnote," "a non-actionable topic of future consideration."
Or call it the next logical step. Berkeley already has banned smoking outdoors -- in commercial districts, in parks and at bus stops, where nonsmokers are free to walk away from smokers or ask them to move. With that ordinance on top of California laws banning smoking in the workplace, at restaurants and in bars, have advocates of nonsmokers' rights determined that their work is done? Never!
The job is never done in the nanny state. Hence the Berkeley proposal, hardly the first in the Bay Area, to ban smoking in multiunit dwellings. Wengraf tells me that smoke can get into ventilation systems and spread through a building.
But what if it doesn't? What if you live in a building where secondhand smoke doesn't leach? There is no burden of proof that your smoke bothers others. If you smoke in an apartment, you're guilty.
Enter Arreguin, who fears that the multiunit ordinance would fall "disproportionately and unfairly on the backs of tenants." It's not fair. So if the city is going to tell renters what they can do in their own lodgings, he writes, it should pass a ban "in any dwelling (including single-family dwellings)." In deference to the secondhand smoke rationale, Arreguin suggests that the ban apply if a minor lives in the home, "a non-smoking elder (62 or older) is present" or any other "non-smoking lodger is present."
Walter Olson of the libertarian Cato Institute compares the Berkeley nanny ordinance to secondhand smoke itself: "They are seeping under our doors now to get into places where they're not wanted."
He faults "ever more ambitious smoking bans" that rework the definition of private space. "Now they're really just saying it doesn't matter if you have the consent of everyone in the room." Olson savored Arreguin's suggestion that 62-year-olds cannot consent to being near a smoker.
When I asked Cynthia Hallett of the Berkeley-based Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights whether she supports the Arreguin recommendation, she answered, "Right now, the policy trend is really for multiunit housing."
The left always likes to say that the government shouldn't tell people what they can and cannot do in their own bedrooms. Yet here is progressive Berkeley about to pass a law that tells people they cannot smoke in their own bedrooms.
Of course, there is an exemption for medical marijuana. City Hall wouldn't dare to tell pot smokers not to exhale. After all, they have rights.
Well, that’s odd about coffee, because I was just reading where at least fours cups a day are quite beneficial. And ... I haven’t seen Amy movements to ban coffee. Are you planning to start one?
When I personally run into a Marxist, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Welcome to the real world of living among human beings.
“If you don’t like our Constitutional Republic, you can always go somewhere else and set up your own government.”
We haven’t been living in a constitutional republic for 100 years. Keep fooling yourself and empowering the marxists that have destroyed it.
There are no trains to get them on; they are killing themselves.
It only seems that way to you, because you’re the one who is spinning.
I wouldn’t take that path, but then I appreciate individual liberty and practice the art of responsibility. You on the ohter hand are a dangerous enemy of both.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, you’re on the wrong site.
Well ... That’s really odd, because I see Freepers on this forum who correct others all the time — saying that we are not a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic. I happen to agree with them. It seems that you don’t.
If you want to write to her, you’re gonna have to find her Freeper-handle.
Okay, so you won’t be working on banning those. You’re in my camp - then - on those items, because neither would I.
The entire political spectrum has been shifting leftward for over a century. The National Review of the 1950s and 1960s would be considered paleoconservative in our day; the current publication would have been viewed as at best centrist, like Scoop Jackson. We might consider Scalia and Thomas to be conservatives, but they would be regarded as flaming liberals in FDR's time. The more leftist justices would never have received an appointment to the Supreme Court but would have been at best professors at someplace like the New School for Social Research.
The amendment process is extremely difficult, and has been successfully accomplished only 17 times since the passage of the Bill of Rights.
In spite of the good intentions of the Framers, the Constitution has become a "living document", i.e., it means whatever the Supreme Court and lower courts think it means. It is extremely difficult to amend, even when a proposal has widespread support, such as returning abortion rules to the states. On the matter of smoking, we now see municipalities, in the most liberal areas of the country, infringing on personal behavior even in one's own home. BTW, these are the same people who have eliminated restrictions on homosexual sex, a behavior far more risky than smoking.
In modern day America, the phrase, the rule of law, is empty rhetoric.
It’s always been said that whenever someone invokes the Nazis and their actions in connection with a discussion - that the conversation is basically over at that point.
I can see what they mean.
It’s called Godwin’s Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law
Thanks for ending the discussion. It was getting long-winded anyway.
You have to come to one of several conclusions on this - then.
One is that the founding fathers created a flawed government and a flawed document — and we have what we have today because of their failures in forming the right government.
Or, it could be that they did a good job of it and that there is nothing wrong with what they made and what we have today is the out-working of what they made.
Or perhaps one could say that while the founding fathers may have created something different back then - that “in the meantime” the various peoples and generations of the USA over this period of time has made it to be what it is today, by their choice and that ‘this’ is what we operate under now - because of all those prior people and generations.
I don’t know which one you want to take for an explanation (or even something else) — but the fact remains that we are where we are at - and then the question is - “What are you going to do about it?”
The Framers of the Constitution were sincere, unlike the authors of the Soviet Constitution, which guaranteed on paper freedoms of speech and religion when in fact neither existed and dissent, even if minor or expressed privately, resulted in death, torture, or imprisonment. Their goal was to provide for an effective federal government with independent funding sources, create a common economic market among the states, and provide effective means of dealing with foreign nations, while maintaining state sovereignty over internal matters not covered by the enumerated powers.
The Constitution had flaws having nothing to do with original intent. The Framers failed to address the slavery issue or the right, or lack thereof, of a state to secede. These flaws led to the failed secession of the South and a horrible war. Stronger language should have been included to protect property rights and freedom of association and to leave internal improvements like roads, parks, harbors, etc., to the states. Citizenship and naturalization rules should have been established more clearly. Whether a state could or could not nullify Federal legislation within its boundaries should have been addressed.
The human factor is the ultimate issue, however. Within a decade of the ratification of the Constitution, the Sedition Act was passed, even though it clearly violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. Andrew Jackson ignored a Supreme Court decision to prevent the forcible migration of Indians from Georgia to Oklahoma. These actions did not even have the excuse of wartime powers Lincoln used to suppress the Copperhead press and imprison pro-Southern politicians and newspapermen in the Northern states. All these events occurred decades prior to the moral rot that started setting in, mainly among the Yankee elite, in the late 1800s and metastasized in the post-World War II era.
Until American culture is reformed and restored to its condition in the Founders' era, there will be no return to a really small Federal government and a restoration of property rights and freedom of association.
Not numbered for me, I smoke were I want because I live in a free state, where bans are either defeated or ignored.
Except when true. Your language mimics theirs, it is almost exact.
“Well ... That’s really odd, because I see Freepers on this forum who correct others all the time — saying that we are not a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic. I happen to agree with them. It seems that you don’t.”
At this point I can only conclude that you are being purposefully obtuse. I find it impossible that a FReeper could be so ignorant to make this statement.
Lets review, you claim to think that we still live in a constitutional republic, yet favored democracy (tyranny of the majority) up thread. However, you can’t recognize the introduction of progressivism ushered in by Wodrow Wilson and that has been advancing for the past 100 years.
When one has no true convictions, then it is easy for one to get twisted in so many directions.
Sorry to disappoint you, but it certainly is a Constitutional Republic by definition of what those words mean. It’s a Republic by definition and “Constitutional” by way of our US Constitution.
Here’s someone else’s comments on it ...
Michael Farris: The answer is that it is complicated. The Founding Fathers used the term “democracy” in two ways—one general, one specific. Sometimes they would use the term “democracy” to describe all forms of self-government. In that sense, the United States is a democracy.
But, in the more specific sense, democracy means when the people directly make the law. The federal government is not a democracy in that sense. However, the term “representative democracy” is actually a synonym for a republic. This means that the legislators elected by the people make the law. A constitutional republic is where the legislators elected by the people make laws but only as authorized by the Constitution.
So the most accurate description of the federal government as designed by the Constitution is a constitutional republic.
http://www.brr-va.com/america-a-constitutional-republic-or-representative-democracy/
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