Thomas Linzey, chief legal counsel for the CELDF (Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund) once quipped during a class on democracy that the American revolutionaries didn’t first petition the British government to ask if it was legal to revolt. The Declaration of Independence explains that we are endowed with certain “unalienable rights” and “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…” Linzey was explaining that regulatory agencies are not in the business of denying permits to polluting industries, no matter how much their existence infringes upon the life, liberty or happiness of the people around them. Rather they exist solely to regulate the terms under which a company can pollute your water, air and food supply.
When you think about it, for those who have had their health ruined by industrial pollution or lost a child to toxic sludge it is a little like regulating murder. You may assail your victim if you do not exceed x parts per million. In short the system is stacked against you because it is property based and not rights based as in individuals have an unalienable right not to have their bodies trespassed upon by toxic chemicals.
One of the systems used by CELDF is to focus upon every community’s right to self-governance and develop rights based home rule charters and ordinances.
With Home Rule, municipalities take themselves out from under Dillon’s Rule – the prevailing legal doctrine which states that municipalities only have the powers given to them explicitly by the state – and instead allows them to create a form and structure of governance of their choosing, so long as they do not conflict with state or federal law…
Adopting a rights-based home rule charter is an obvious step toward community assertion of the inalienable right to local self-government, and a fulfillment of the long-postponed ideals of the American Revolution.
An example of a rights based home rule charter can be found here and includes such things as the rights of nature, the right to a healthy environment, the right to due process and habeas corpus, the right to safe workplaces, etc…
Locally, we might include the right to fair and equitable taxation to the list of rights and by so doing challenge the funding constraints placed upon our county by Salem. Many things that might have come out of the SDAT discussions, had we ever held them, might be included in a rights based home rule charter. We don’t have to take up arms to start a revolution.
Instead of working within the confines of bad laws and policy, it is time to assert our fundamental right to self-governance.
