Transportation administrative notice is coming up on its 1st year as a newfangled reform doctrine and public document, hanging over the heads of Chattanooga-area city governments and the state’s executive branch.
Those who know the most about it are readers of this website and listeners of my weekday show at 1 p.m. at 92.7 NoogaRadio.
By David Tulis / 92.7 NoogaRadio
Those who know the least about it are those subject to it, namely city council people, county commissioners, and also members of the bar in Hamilton County.
Attorneys universally tow the state’s line on Tenn. Code Ann. § Title 55, agreeing that its scope is 100 percent of users of the road. In fact, the statute makes liable for performance people involved in transportation, the for-profit use of the road by operators and drivers of vehicles for hire, those carrying goods and people from Point A to Point B.
Enough of conventional thinking
Attorney thinking is entirely conventional. Not a single one I’ve questioned knows about the travel-transportation distinction or anything about the right to travel nor has the slightest inkling that Title 55 is an instrument of state-based extortion and human trafficking. Sadly, this journalist seems to know more about the law than they.
They are not trained to understand the Constitution, but train only in court opinion. Court opinion in Tennessee denies a fundamental human right that began with Adam in Genesis 1. At the beginning, God ordered mankind to be fruitful and to multiply and to “fill the earth and subdue it,” having dominion over “every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). This order requires free, extensive movement of people, and controlling of animals, that also move whimsically and at liberty. In Gen. 3, men refused to scatter across the earth and built a great centralized city, Babel; but God confused their tongues and ordained them to scatter across the plant (Gen. 11:9)
Lawyers ignore this fundamental right. The law considers private travel a matter of pleasure, private pursuit or to serve the exercise of the free people and their rights, using their public property — the roads, highways, boulevards, freeways and lanes stewarded by state and local governments.
One effort I will make this year will be to find a cooperating attorney who can sue cities and counties on behalf of individuals and people groups oppressed by state-based human trafficking via Title 55.
The attorney’s prospective client very likely would be from those oppressed classes, namely African-American, Hispanic immigrant, economically poor, orphans and widows. To prevent this prospect class of people from getting too large I save to the end mention of the remainder of the American adult traveling population, including people like you, the everyday American Joe, a Caucasian male or female.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 55 is used as an engine of oppression against all these distinct categories, but also against everybody else. Because the Christian teaching in Southeast Tennessee is so poor and so weak, even faithful Christians don’t see the tyranny of the Double Nickel as it operates against the most vulnerable poor and alien, nor against themselves.
Role of cooperating attorney
A cooperating attorney would help file cases against city of Chattanooga, Hamilton County, City of East Ridge, City of Red Bank and City of Dayton Tenn. These jurisdiction have received the notice and are liable for obedience to Title 55 or face accusations of oppression, harassment, police abuse and bad faith dealings. State attorney general Neal Pinkston is also under notice, and is required by his professional ethics rules to obey all laws and to not abuse any law.
The State of Tennessee is also liable to obey Title 55, as I have given notice to Gov. Bill Haslam and his commissioner of safety, David Perkey.
It is perhaps unrealistic to think that there will be an attorney to cooperate in this effort. The Tennessee bar has built into the statute emoluments, inurements and special privileges for its members, and are unwilling any longer to defend the rights of the people.
It is perhaps unreasonable, even childish, to expect a member of the local bar to enthusiastically participate in the rolling back of Title 55.
Title 55 is the status quo and in it lawyers find their livings. Not just lawyers, but jail personnel, court personnel, probation profiteers and many others who are part of the judicial-industrial complex and Hamilton County.
I realize that the reform may take hold first at the street level, and not be brought about by decrees from people in high places. I believe that is possible that judges, city mayors, county mayors and governors will ignore the people’s rights and continue to abuse them as the half for decades.
Individuals are key
And so, the fight for liberty is in the end an individual matter. The system will continue to roll along as it always has, assuming every user of the road, every person cited, every arrest, is a commercial operator. And it won’t make the slightest effort to prove the commercial nature of that person’s activity prior to his being stopped and arrested or cited. The system has converted a right into a privilege and it has done so outside the scope of the statute as written and rejecting of our liberties
It is up to individuals to find freedom and live as a free people.
It is up to individuals to assert their rights and live as free men. This thought is a solace to me as I work into the second year of this project that went public in Chattanooga on Feb. 20 and in Hamilton County on March 1. I know that even if nothing can be accomplished outwardly, an individual who understands the issues since as I have presented in here, can use my work to his own personal advantage.
