Democrats keep public out of “open” meeting to make State House VAX only

By Rubashov

In the coming battles between authoritarianism and democracy, what the State Capitol Joint Management Commission pulled yesterday will be pointed to again and again – used as a cudgel to demonstrate the hypocrisy, lust for unchecked power, lack of rational balance, use of fear, and general bad faith that define the authoritarians. The culprits here are partisan authoritarian bureaucrats – paid by the taxpayer, with benefits superior to those of average taxpayers, and pensions that working people can only dream of.

On a 5 (D) to 2 (R) party-line vote, the Commission voted to block any citizen from entering the public legislative areas of the capital complex if they cannot show proof of vaccination or the negative results of a COVID test from the preceding 72 hours. This includes the public areas of the legislative chambers and the committee hearing rooms, where members of the public once had the right to testify for or against legislation under consideration. All citizens will be required to wear a mask inside the building.

New Jersey now has a vaccine-or-test mandate for entry into public political and policy forums. Citizens not in compliance will be blocked and confronted by men with guns. Any citizen wishing to speak his or her mind to power, whether individually or assembling as a group, to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, is no longer free to do so. Their papers must first be in order. Journalists will likewise be unable to provide the scrutiny that the powerful require.

When it comes to exercising the freedoms contained within the Bill of Rights, five members of a Commission have unilaterally decided that a proof of vaccination card is now more important than a passport. Indeed, the primacy of the proof of vaccination card rises as the need for a passport is diminished.

If this was really about public health, the Murphy administration would not welcome, support, and promote undocumented immigrants residing in the United States in violation of federal law. Especially as so few come from nations that have had the opportunity to offer their people vaccination against COVID-19.

In this segment, anti-authoritarian Democrat Krystal Ball examines the collusion between the Biden administration and the pharmaceutical industry to keep most of the nations of the world unvaccinated and vulnerable – while pursuing a policy of open borders. If this was about public health, the members of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission would be demanding that the national borders be as tight as are the borders they police – the doors of the state capitol building.

Of course, they will not make such a demand because they are aiding and abetting an act of hypocrisy. Now watch this video and listen to a fellow Democrat, a woman of the Left, and a believer in democracy (true to her party’s name):

“The consequences for our own population – of this greed, cowardice, and corruption – will be deadly. We can get every last solitary soul in our own country vaccinated and it is not going to matter much in the end if new variants are constantly emerging from an unvaccinated global south. The pandemic will never end so long as billions of people remain vulnerable as a laboratory for COVID to mutate and jump the vaccines that we’ve already created.”

“Stop worrying about the anti-mask Karens and start worrying about the real COVID criminals, the CEOs and the politicians who would let millions die to protect their profits.”

If Black Lives Mattered as much to the five Democrats on the State Capitol Joint Management Commission as their political bosses say they do, they would issue a statement demanding that American pharmaceutical firms drop their patent protections and allow nations in Africa to produce the vaccine. This would save a lot more lives than any Assembly resolution or protest-turned-riot-turned-looting-turned-arson ever has.

The five Democrats on the State Capitol Joint Management Commission really don’t believe in mass vaccination. This is about power, about crushing the Bill of Rights and bringing a formerly democratic people to heel. They ignore the billions of unvaccinated waiting to come to the United States illegally but demand full compliance from every citizen who wishes to exercise the Bill of Rights.

But the actions of the Democrats who run the State Capitol Joint Management Commission were actually much worse than that described so far. Apparently, someone with the keys to the State Legislature’s website was concerned enough to block access to the Commission’s virtual/remote meeting yesterday morning. We heard from numerous people who looked for the usual link on the Legislature's website to sign-up and provide public input and it wasn’t there. It had been removed.

This went against both the policy of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission and the Open Public Meetings Act. In an October 22nd memorandum to Commission members that was not publicly posted on the Legislature’s website, the Commission Chairman wrote:

Due to the current public health emergency, the State Capitol Joint Management Commission meeting will be conducted remotely. The next meeting of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission will be held on Tuesday, October 26th at 10:00 a.m. in Committee Room 4. All Commissioners will receive instructions for remote access. For anyone who wishes to submit comments on any agenda item, or to participate in the meeting, please have them contact Roger Lai at rlai@njleg.org. For anyone who would like to view the proceedings, they will be live streamed at https://www.njleg.state.nj.us. Enclosed is an agenda and briefing material for this meeting.

In other words, an average citizen, wishing to comment or provide perspective, would need to be invited by one of the Commissioners to do so, as this notice was not made public on the Legislature’s website where members of the public generally go if they wish to testify or comment. The October 26th meeting of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission was posted on the legislative calendar in the usual place on the Legislative website, but all links to testify were removed and the Commission Chairman’s October 26th memo was not publicly posted there.

In effect, public comment was suppressed by the Commission’s actions and indeed, no member of the public was heard from despite dozens going to the legislative website to sign-up to be heard from. Remembering those large numbers of citizens who showed up to the State Capitol to protest attempts to do away with religious exemptions to vaccination, perhaps this is the purpose of the new rule and not “public health” after all?

“The people in charge are intent on replacing our free democratic system with an authoritarian system, where they don’t convince you of anything, they simply make you do things. And they benefit from that.”

Tucker Carlson