States Rights

The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right.

Are you concerned about the erosion of states' rights today? Let's see how the hotbed issue of states rights and the 10th Amendment is going today in the ever-more-centralized United States. Let's see if the following sounds familiar to you.

There's this one group of Americans that is very largely made up of small business owners, craftsmen, small farmers, and entrepreneurs. They are predominantly family-oriented.The leaders of these people believe that they deserve a say in how they are governed. They believe that the Constitution of the United States calls for a small-sized federal government with restricted enumerated powers, and they are sick and tired of bureaucrat powers expanding. They would defend to the death their rights to freedom of speech and of what they can write for the public to read. These people believe that the great majority of governing and legislative power is, by the words of the Constitution, vested in the states, not the feds; so they are adamant defenders of states rights, believing that important decisions about government should be made locally whenever possible.

There is another group of Americans who oppose this first group. They are mostly people involved in the financial industry, members of corporations including giant farms who lobby the federal government all the time, and high-paid professionals like university professors or Hollywood actors. They believe that there is a de facto aristocracy in America and it's defined by "intellectuals" (whom the first group would call educated idiots) and wealthy people who are involved in politics, such as billionaire George Soros. This aristocracy, like the government itself, is the embodiment of a higher moral authority and should tell everyone else how to run every aspect of their lives through immense rules and regulations, as well as heavy taxation. The Constitution, according to them, is written in general language so that it can be applied very broadly, meaning that the federal government should be expanded all the time as is necessary. States' rights are to always buckle under to the power of the federal government whenever Washington passes legislation saying so.

It seems like that second group is definitely winning these days. How far the mighty have fallen! How did we let it get to this?

Well, you might be surprised to learn that the sharp dichotomy described above is nothing new. It's not a symptom of modern times. That first group of people would be called Jeffersonians. That second group of people would be called Hamiltonians, after Alexander Hamilton, who wanted the U.S. to have a powerful central bank and who admired, and wanted the U.S. to emulate, the British aristocracy and government. This fight has been going on since only a few years after our Constitution was ratified.

Notice that Thomas Jefferson favored states' rights. As a matter of fact, he once wrote, "[the most important fortification of individual liberty in the republic is] the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies."

Let's fast-forward to a modern day issue of states' rights and see how it's playing out.

House Bill 246, sponsored by Republican Rep. Joel Boniek of Livingston, Montana, sought to exempt guns made and remaining in the state of Montana from federal background checks as well as dealership licensing. In other words, it says that a state doesn't have to adhere to the Commerce Clause if that state's legislature decides that doing so violates that state's Constitutional rights.

The measure passed the Legislature easily, and state Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer signed it. "I didn’t go to the Legislature to be a rubber stamp for more regulation. I went there to protect people’s freedom, and [House Bill 246] is a great vehicle to do that."

House Bill 246 signed into law on April 15th, 2009. Now, several other states are proposing to write similar laws. Indeed, On April 14th, 2009, Texas Governor Rick Perry issued a statement in which he said, “I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state. I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our union.”

Needless to say, Democrats hate all of this. “It’s a loopy plan and we look like complete idiots doing it. You’re not going to just opt out of the U.S. Constitution. If you can opt out of the commerce clause, the same logic would say Massachusetts, a very anti-gun state, can opt out of the Second Amendment,” says Senator Larry Jent (D-Bozeman, Montana), who voted against the bill this session.

Jent insists that this bill only became law because of the inclusion of the "gun ownership issue" and when it comes to enforcing it, it will be struck down by the Supreme Court. But the law's supporters insist that the bill was never about gun ownership, but about revisiting the Constitutional limits on federal control over the states.

What Democrats like Jent (and Republicans who think like Lincoln) don't want to understand is that the Second Amendment was a federal law from the start and states agreed to it (didn't Democrats try to say that this was just authorization for states to maintain a standing militia, anyway?). The Commerce Clause, on the other hand, was only intended to facilitate interstate trade; not defend individual rights to own guns, which was made a federal law from the start in order to fend off federal and state government tyranny. And what do federal background checks on in-state purchases of in-state-manufactured guns have to do with facilitating interstate commerce? Nothing!

Back in 1798 and 1799 Jefferson and Madison got the Kentucky Resolutions (as well as the Virginia Resolutions) passed into law. Drafted in secret by that pair in the Autumn of 1798, they were written up to counter the threats of the Alien and Sedition Acts, newly minted federal laws which would have crushed First Amendment rights by declaring that public criticism of government officials was seditious libel, which could be punished with fines and even imprisonment. Jefferson's drafted resolutions said that the states had the right to nullify federal laws and acts if they went against the Constitution. Indeed, these resolutions stated that “the powers of the federal government [are derived] from the compact, to which the states are parties...in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.” The Kentucky Resolutions set a powerful and liberating precedent that has held right up to today, in spite of endless Liberal attempts to obliterate our First Amendment rights.

Yet, the federal government has never ceased from tirelessly trying to find ways to violate States' Rights and the 10th Amendment, which protects states' rights--including the right of any state to secede from the United States if they have the votes in the legislature.

In the late 1850s and the 1860s, came Abraham Lincoln--the nation's first RINO. But, wasn't Lincoln the great Emancipator, the white man who could not tolerate black slavery and sentenced hundreds of thousands of white boys to die to free those slaves and give black Americans the right to vote? Well, Lincoln might have legitimately had better opinions of blacks toward the end of the Civil War...but before the War and during its early years, Lincoln was an obvious racist who merely used the issue of slavery to worm his way into the hearts of the fledgling anti-slavery Republican party and secure financial aid from European nations who had recently outlawed slavery. One Senator Douglas said that Lincoln's hidden agenda was to "impose on the nation a uniformity of local laws and institutions and a moral homogeneity dictated by the central government [placing] at defiance the intentions of the republic’s founders."

The Civil War was not about freeing slaves. It was a war over whether or not the states had the right to secede, which Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers clearly said they did. Lincoln succeeded in outlawing secession. Since then, those of his ilk have been aided and abetted by a liberal Supreme Court, and the protections of state sovereignty embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have essentially been annihilated.

Fast-forward again. In 1996, the Clinton Administration passed the so-called Victims' Rights Amendment, which essentially stated that under federal law just about everyone who had ever been hurt by somebody else could claim victim status and demand remunerations in a court of law (this could very well include, say, the little sister of a man who was a violently abusive husband for years who finally got what was coming to him when his abused wife pulled out her handgun and blew him away during one of his attacks against her one day). Former assistant attorney general of Colorado Dave Kopel and Elisabeth Semel, a criminal defense attorney in San Diego and the legislative co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, wrote in an article for the Cato Institute published on September 20th, 1996, "It is ironic that a Congress which professes to be committed to states' rights and the Tenth Amendment is ready to foist such an immense unfunded mandate onto the states. The same members of Congress who complain about federal judges telling the states how to run their courts now propose an immense shift of power from the states to the federal courts which will be responsible for enforcing the Amendment."

States rights have been viciously attacked by our federal government for about 150 years now, and ideologically they have been attacked since the inception of our nation. The terrible tendencies of government that the Founding Fathers were concerned about since the beginning have been played out in the very way that they foresaw and which they tried to mitigate against with our Constitution have been playing out the entire time. The only thing we can do is join the Second Revolution today!

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