“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” This fiscal committee item has precipitated an incredible amount of public sentiment in opposition. It may well be a defining vote for those in elected office and is deserving of our most careful scrutiny.
The department is doing what it believes it must do. Its mission is “To join communities and families in providing opportunities for citizens to achieve health and independence.” Its intentions are understandable. But we are not the department. We are the elected representatives of a people that entrust to us their freedom, the freedom of their children, and the freedom of future generations of our people. As with all of us, my mission is “to faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all duties incumbent on me as a State Senator, according to the best of my abilities, agreeably to the rules and regulations of this constitution and laws of the state of New Hampshire. So help me God. To us falls the obligation of holding government accountable, of protecting and defending first and foremost the freedom of our citizens against the inevitable erosion that government is capable of producing, no matter the beneficence of its intent. Our founding president, George Washington, has been credited by some with stating that “Government is like fire – a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” Implicit in this statement is something we as legislators are not always diligent in considering: whether a program infringes on the natural and constitutional rights of our citizens.
But we as the elected guardians of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness bear the grave responsibility not only to look at the efficacy of programs presented for consideration but their actual and potential impact on the freedom of this and future generations. Before us today is an item in which the contract under consideration clearly articulates that the federal government can, at an indeterminate time in the future, impose limitations and conditions on the government and the people of New Hampshire. With all due respect to the opinion of Attorney General Formella that the terms in the contract under consideration are not enforceable, and aware of the legal impotence of the nonbinding resolution adopted by the Executive Council, it falls to this committee to weigh the potential benefit of increased government efficiency in managing the details of an Executive Order that shreds our natural and constitutional rights against the threat that Order, and this program, represent to freedom. I have served my country as an officer of United States Marines and as a sworn Special Agent of the FBI.
I have traveled the world as a military officer and the captain of incredible engines of commerce, and I’ve seen firsthand the consequences of tyranny. I’ve been to China and Venezuela and Pakistan and Kashmir and Hong Kong. In China, the government monitors and assesses the worthiness of citizens to partake of the benefits it doles out. It decides whether individual citizens are deserving of employment. It decides how many children a family may bring into the world. It controls every aspect of the lives of the people over which it rules. We’d like to believe that our federal government would never do such things. Our federal government would never weaponize the IRS to audit those who differ in their political views. But it did. Our federal government would never order a sniper to murder Vicki Weaver, an unarmed woman with a child in her arms, based on warrants replete with misinformation. But it did. Our federal government would never ambush and kill a non-violent man driving to meet a sheriff in the Malheur National Forest. But it did. Our federal government would never threaten to weaponize the FBI against parents who want their children educated and not indoctrinated.
But it did. Our federal government would never force a person to take an experimental injection against their will as a condition of employment or continued service to our nation. But it did. The contract before us states that the data collected by the state is deidentified and aggregated before being sent to the federal government. We must ask ourselves in the first instance why the state government is collecting this individualized identifiable data to begin with, and why the private entities injecting our citizens automatically send the identifiable data to the federal government. Under the terms of the grant under consideration, the department states that data is de-identified and aggregated. But under the terms of that same grant, this protection remains only until the CDC requires the disclosure of that identifiable data at some point in the future, and for some purpose unknown to us and utterly beyond our control. The action we take today will be historic. It will be historic because we reject the notion of subservience to government coercion, or it will be historic because we accede to that notion and violate the most fundamental premises of freedom upon which our state and nation were founded, and which are imperiled as never before in our nation’s history.
Sen. Bob Giuda
