James Madison Knew the Antidote for Fauci’s COVID Tyranny
Former COVID-19 official Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times before Congress despite having received a presidential pardon, prompting calls for a contempt vote.
Anthony Fauci, the bureaucrat who became synonymous with America’s disastrous COVID-19 response, appeared before Congress last week and delivered a staggering display of contempt for the American people by invoking the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.
The extraordinary refusal to testify comes despite Fauci having already received a sweeping presidential pardon, according to Josh Hammer writing in New York Post. The columnist argues that Congress should vote to hold Fauci in contempt for this unprecedented defiance of congressional authority.
Wednesday’s heated Senate confrontation followed Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s earlier release of excerpts from Fauci’s personal diary, which revealed a bureaucrat consumed by his own growing public profile and harboring serious private reservations about key COVID-era controversies—including the virus’s origins—even as he publicly projected unwavering certainty to an anxious nation.
The week’s revelations painted what Hammer describes as a James Bond villain-like portrait of the power-obsessed official who came to embody the COVID nightmare for countless Americans.
The Fallacy of Scientism
By demanding Americans simply “trust the science,” Fauci committed what the New York Post analysis identifies as the fallacy of scientism: conflating science itself with the public good that elected statesmen are constitutionally tasked with securing.
Fauci’s one-man biomedical reign of terror represented the culmination of a century-long administrative state project designed to elevate unelected Washington elites above the judgment of the American people.
Yet not all Americans were equally subjected to Fauci’s overreaching, politically expedient and constantly shifting mandates. The Founders’ vision of federalism allowed many Americans living in states with leadership willing to resist COVID-era biomedical despotism to escape the worst of what Hammer terms “Faucism.”
Florida’s Defiance and Vindication
Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-led legislature acted heroically during the pandemic, the columnist writes. At a time when white-coat tyranny dominated national discourse, DeSantis studied the evidence himself and concluded that dissenting voices—including Great Barrington Declaration authors Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff—were correct: COVID-19 did not justify the draconian measures demanded by the biomedical establishment.
Florida fully reopened restaurants, bars and beaches in 2020, well ahead of federal guidance. The state mandated in-person schooling for fall 2020 and blocked local governments, schools and private businesses from imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates in fall 2021. More than any other state, Florida remained free and open.
For this, Fauci called DeSantis a “complete disgrace” in his now-public diary.
But the data proved Fauci wrong. During the core pandemic years of 2020 through 2022, Florida’s age-adjusted COVID mortality rate significantly outperformed the national average. Many blue states that imposed harsh lockdowns and school closures, including New York and New Jersey, fared considerably worse.
Americans voted with their feet: Florida recorded the largest annual net in-migration between July 2020 and July 2021, according to US Census Bureau data. The once-iconic swing state that decided the 2000 presidential election by just 537 votes now boasts a Republican governor who won reelection by 19.4 percent and Republican supermajorities in both legislative chambers.
Vindicating the Founders’ Vision
Florida’s approach didn’t merely vindicate itself scientifically and politically—it vindicated the Founders’ constitutional vision of federalism, Hammer contends. One-size-fits-all bureaucratic governance from Washington is fundamentally incompatible with American constitutionalism and the American way of life.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45, the powers remaining with state governments are “numerous and indefinite.” Justice Louis D. Brandeis memorably observed in a 1932 Supreme Court dissent that the federal system allows a single courageous state to serve as a laboratory for novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
That is precisely what Florida under DeSantis accomplished.
Meanwhile, Fauci has been reduced to ham-fisted legal stunts and pathetic temper tantrums. The columnist expresses hope that those tantrums will soon be taking place behind bars.
With information from New York Post
