Something's Brewing

States Rebellion Pending
By Walter E. Williams

Our Colonial ancestors petitioned and pleaded with King George III to get his boot off their necks. He ignored their pleas, and in 1776, they rightfully declared unilateral independence and went to war. Today it's the same story except Congress is the one usurping the rights of the people and the states, making King George's actions look mild in comparison. Our constitutional ignorance -- perhaps contempt, coupled with the fact that we've become a nation of wimps, sissies and supplicants -- has made us easy prey for Washington's tyrannical forces. But that might be changing a bit. There are rumblings of a long overdue re-emergence of Americans' characteristic spirit of rebellion.

Eight state legislatures have introduced resolutions declaring state sovereignty under the Ninth and 10th amendments to the U.S. Constitution; they include Arizona, Hawaii, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington. There's speculation that they will be joined by Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nevada, Maine and Pennsylvania.

You might ask, "Isn't the 10th Amendment that no-good states' rights amendment that Dixie governors, such as George Wallace and Orval Faubus, used to thwart school desegregation and black civil rights?" That's the kind of constitutional disrespect and ignorance that big-government proponents, whether they're liberals or conservatives, want you to have. The reason is that they want Washington to have total control over our lives. The Founders tried to limit that power with the 10th Amendment, which reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

New Hampshire's 10th Amendment resolution typifies others and, in part, reads: "That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General (federal) Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." Put simply, these 10th Amendment resolutions insist that the states and their people are the masters and that Congress and the White House are the servants. Put yet another way, Washington is a creature of the states, not the other way around.

Congress and the White House will laugh off these state resolutions. State legislatures must take measures that put some teeth into their 10th Amendment resolutions. Congress will simply threaten a state, for example, with a cutoff of highway construction funds if it doesn't obey a congressional mandate, such as those that require seat belt laws or that lower the legal blood-alcohol level to .08 for drivers. States might take a lead explored by Colorado.

In 1994, the Colorado Legislature passed a 10th Amendment resolution and later introduced a bill titled "State Sovereignty Act." Had the State Sovereignty Act passed both houses of the legislature, it would have required all people liable for any federal tax that's a component of the highway users fund, such as a gasoline tax, to remit those taxes directly to the Colorado Department of Revenue. The money would have been deposited in an escrow account called the "Federal Tax Fund" and remitted monthly to the IRS, along with a list of payees and respective amounts paid. If Congress imposed sanctions on Colorado for failure to obey an unconstitutional mandate and penalized the state by withholding funds due, say $5 million for highway construction, the State Sovereignty Act would have prohibited the state treasurer from remitting any funds in the escrow account to the IRS. Instead, Colorado would have imposed a $5 million surcharge on the Federal Tax Fund account to continue the highway construction.

The eight state legislatures that have enacted 10th Amendment resolutions deserve our praise, but their next step is to give them teeth.

Another Sign of Something Stirring

See:

President of Texas ? ? ? ?

Governed by Faithless Liars

All but a handful of the fewer than 2,000 individuals -- a president, senators, congressmen, appellate court judges, and a few high level bureaucrats -- who run our government are liars from the get go.

Every one of these poohbahs takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution yet almost none of them ever intends to do so. Very few of them have any understanding of that document. Fewer appreciate and value it. And one has to wonder how many of them ever even have read it.

One of our local congressional representative even has had the gall to proclaim that the Constitution is out of date, no longer relevant, and passe, likening it to a blue dress that she had when she was a little girl but that she now has outgrown.

A nation governed by such faithless clods, charlatans, and scoundrels has no moorings. It is adrift and subject to the whims of the moment and the mob. It cannot prosper or endure.

The above is from mudgeonsmusgings

Well Worth a Second Effort

Prior to the War Between the States, people said:

"The United States are . . . ."

Since then it has been:

"The United States is . . . ."

The difference reflects the centralization of power in the national government . . . and its ever increasing insistence that we all march in step. That step is almost always determined by the chic enclaves in which dynastic ruling elites establish political and cultural boundaries that suit them and impose those boundaries on everyone in the entire country.

That is not what our nation's founders had in mind when they broke away from British rule and thereafter wrote a Constitution that ordinary citizens could and did understand, celebrate, and protect. The size, scope, cost, and authority of the federal government took several big jumps -- with corresponding diminutions of the autonomy of the states and individual liberties -- under Lincoln's administration and the War Between the States. The process accelerated under Theodore Roosevelt's "progressive" leadership and then again with World War I under Woodrow Wilson. With only a brief and very limited respite during the Reagan years, the trend has been accelerating ever since F.D.R.'s inauguration and the enactment of his "New Deal."

The upshot of all this is that we today have a virtually unlimited federal government that has become corrupted by its insatiable quest for ever more power. Our "leaders" occasionally pay lip service to, but in reality completely ignore the Constitution. Consequently, there currently are no limits on the constantly expanding role of the central authority at the expense of individual autonomy and freedom. This trend now has such a head of steam that it probably has become inexorable and unstoppable. It will not end until the rotting structure that such corruption produces falls of its own weight.

As indicated above, the political and cultural mindset behind what is transpiring is set in -- and spreading from -- the nation's major metropolitan areas. Most of what the leaders in the chic urban enclaves refer to as "flyover country" -- the "red states" and the people who live there -- have not yet been infected by the received wisdom of the elitists who look down on them.

The basic difference between the two areas is that the urban centers are dominated by people who manipulate and work with concepts, ideas, and theories. In the uncontaminated areas, the dominant mindset is that of people who manipulate real things, tangibles, people who deal with reality and do most of the nation's truly productive work -- things like growing its food, extracting and processing its minerals, and harvesting its timber, to mention just a few examples. The latter group adheres to the same traditional values and remains committed to the concepts of individual freedoms for which the nation's founders fought and sought to enshrine in the Constitution.

In the long run, however, the trend toward urbanization of the nation's is unlikely to end and, as Thomas Jefferson noted:

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe."

In fact today's "progressives" openly express their desire to have the U.S. become more like Europe.

If freedom is to be preserved anywhere -- and it exists in only a very few (and diminishing number of) places in the world today -- it is going to have to be preserved in rural and small town America . . . in the less densely populated "red counties" and "red states." For it to be preserved there, the people in those venues will have to resist succumbing to what is transpiring at the national level and, instead, act decisively to preserve their culture and liberties by separating from the central power and going their separate way.

This blog is dedicated to exploring this proposition.

Two additional points require mention.

1. In contrast to the first attempt at secession from the U.S., which was intertwined with preserving slavery, the effort this time will be to escape from slavery and to preserve and enhance freedom.

2. We have a ready made Constitution -- the one that the U.S. has abandoned. It requires only minor changes to (a) close the loopholes through which judges, the legal profession, and members of a decadent intelligentsia have managed to seize control of, and twist and corrupt it, (b) add a provision proclaiming that "this time we really mean it,"and (c) establish legal processes whereby individual citizens and private entities could challenge and prevent or reverse governmental expenditures and actions not authorized by the Constitution.