states rights

Unknown but Important: How the States Created the US Constitution

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What You Don’t Know About Political Parties In The United StatesPaul Rosenberg – I’ll be brief, but there’s a crucial fact that Americans have seldom grasped. It’s not really secret, but it’s almost unknown. And it’s very important.

Notwithstanding its rhetorical “We the people” opening line, it was the states that created the US constitution. It was their representatives that produced it and it was they who ratified it. This was clearly understood at the time and long afterward. I could throw a number of quotes at you to support this, but I’ll give you just one, from James Madison, the primary author of the constitution, in the Federalist Papers (#39, to be specific). This is Madison explaining the power of the states over the senate in the new arrangements: Continue reading →

Five Shots of Optimism for Freedom-Lovers

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federal governmentJ. B. Shurk – Allow me to state three personal beliefs:

  1. I see no truth in the political left’s insistence that history marches inexorably toward some Marxist utopia.  Those who most often resort to ludicrous claims that their opponents are “on the wrong side of history” usually have little to no understanding of anything that has taken place before their adolescence.

I do believe there is an uncanny repetition throughout human history in which many of the same ideas and conflicts emerge, burn brightly, and rudely disappear until they are made new again.  The fight for human freedom is a fundamental part of this cycle, and the political left continues to be on the wrong side of liberty. Continue reading →

States Go Full Throttle To Limit Feds

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Hundreds Of Bills Looming In Legislatures On Common Core, NSA, Marijuana

Less than one month into the 2015 state legislative season and the Tenth Amendment Center counts more than 200 bills seeking to block or limit federal power.

Sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, these bills range from narrowly focused legislation that would allow terminally-ill people access to experimental drugs and medical treatments despite FDA regulations, to bills that would deny resources and assistance from states to the NSA. Other legislation addresses the Second Amendment, the federal prohibition of hemp and marijuana, common core, the use of drones for surveillance, the Affordable Care Act, and even federal grant programs that arm local police with battlefield-ready military equipment.

Tenth Amendment Center founder and executive director Michael Boldin said the sheer number of bills indicates just how mainstream state action to block federal power has become.

“This is unprecedented,” he said. From mass spying, to gun control, property rights, militarized police, the drug war and everything in between, we’ve never seen so much activity to push back on a state level.”

Some say all of this state action merely represents a right-wing movement and backlash against President Obama. Boldin bristles at this notion. Continue reading →

Joe Wolverton, II, J.D. ~ Rasmussen Poll Reports Majority of U.S. Support Nullification

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The New American May 8 2013

NULLIFICATION

In what must be bad news to Attorney General Eric Holder (and his boss in the Oval Office), results of a new Rasmussen poll indicate that 49 percent of respondents believe that the regulation of gun ownership is a state or local issue.

On May 3-4, 2013, Rasmussen Reports polled the opinions of 1,000 likely voters. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points.

What is even less favorable to the administration’s program to exalt the federal government above the states is the poll’s finding that 44 percent of those who participated in the survey believe states retain the right to nullify any act of the federal government they deem constitutionally invalid.

Simply stated, nullification is the exercise by a state or states of the right to hold as null, void, and of no legal effect any act of the federal government that exceeds the boundaries of the powers given to it by the states in the Constitution.

The issue, while not new, has regained prominence recently as the federal government has enacted ObamaCare and various gun control restrictions. Opponents of these efforts point to the fact that the authority to do neither of these things is granted to the federal government in the Constitution. Therefore, states are flexing their sovereign muscles, nullifying these and other attempts by the federal government to constrict the scope of liberty.

Of more particular interest to those in the liberty movement (especially elected officials looking to communicate with likely supporters) is the Rasmussen report that of “mainstream voters” who participated in the survey, 52 percent say that state governments have the right to refuse to enforce any federal act with which they disagree “on legal grounds.”

Read that again: A majority of Americans who vote believe that the federal government does not have the exclusive or the ultimate right to impose its rule on states that regard its acts as unconstitutional or illegal.

And it must be pointed out that nullification is not the right of states to nullify any federal act. Rather, it is the right of states to choose to not enforce any federal act that fails to conform to the constitutionally established limits on the authority of the federal government.

Continue reading →