Solution: Nullification

There are a number of excellent posts to highlight today. Mark Lewis, at Townhall.com has a piece entitled Hey, Al, That's Exactly What They Did in which he points out that Al Sharpton is a boob who doesn't know history. Madison and Jefferson in fact did revolt against their existing government under the theory of natural rights granted by our Creator. Then there is The Curious Effect of Insular Liberalism, by Jim Gammon at the American Thinker in which he answers David Brooks at the New York Times question of "are we the bad guys" with a resounding "Yes! You are the bad guys, and you ought to cut it out." Finally, Kurt Schlichter has a piece analyzing what might happen if the Biden administration refused to leave office if a Republican won the election. Can't happen, you say? Read it and think about the possibilities. We should be prepared.

But today I want to concentrate on J.B. Shurk, at the American Thinker whose piece entitled Throw All The Bums Out offers a historic solution to our current woes. Shurk recounts, for those just joining us, that the Constitution of the United States established a limited government while the individual states maintained full sovereignty, and independence over the everything except the matters delegated to the Federal Government. Shurk takes us briefly through the formation of our exceptional union, the purpose of which is to protect, not trample our individual rights:

I don't think the federal government will exist in its current form much longer. The reason is simple: if Marxist globalists get their way, then sovereign U.S. powers will continue to be unlawfully delegated to the U.N., the WHO, and other international monstrosities until some Obama-type tyrant is ruling over us all from Turtle Bay or a stately castle outside Brussels. If freedom-minded people succeed in reining in the federal government and reimposing the Constitution's limited delegation of powers, then the monstrosity that is already with us will radically diminish or disappear. Either the current beast lording it over us will transform into something even more menacing, or it will be sapped of its blood-thirst for unconstitutional overreach and brought to heel. For what it's worth, my vote is for the Price Is Right option: the whole D.C. menagerie should just be spayed or neutered.

As we stand right now, the federal government functions as an extra-constitutional and largely illegitimate system that usurps the individual states' respective sovereignties, infringes the American people's personal rights, and betrays the spirit of our country's foundations in liberty.

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Quite the contrary, the individual states maintain a political stature on par with foreign nations such as France and Spain; it is only in the specifically enumerated powers delegated to the federal government that federal authority supersedes the states' own. That word "delegated" is important. The federal government's power does not spring from thin air, but rather is derived from specifically listed authorities delegated to it from the states and the people. The American people and the individual states are the origin of all legitimate power, and the federal government exists only so long as the people and the states continue to lend their own innate powers to breathe life into an otherwise powerless system. Before the Civil War, the idea that an American was a citizen of the United States would have been as absurd as an American today being a citizen of the United Nations. Americans are citizens of their respective states, and the states belong to the Union.

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In other words, the individual states and the American people delegated a small number of powers (there are only eighteen enumerated legislative powers in Art. I, Sec. 8) to a jointly directed government that would provide for the states' common defenses, represent the states in negotiations with other nations, and regulate foreign commerce among the states. That's it. All other powers, as the Ninth and Tenth Amendments make clear, remain with the individual states and the people.

The plain meaning of the U.S. Constitution and the Founding Fathers' copious essays and personal correspondence all attest to their intention to keep the federal government small, limited in authority, and deferential to the states. Instead, we have today the largest, most expensive, most powerful central government that has ever existed on Planet Earth. No detail of an American's life is too small for the federal government not to regulate; no nuclear confrontation is too risky or military alliance too great for D.C.'s permanent "ruling class" not to unilaterally undertake. The federal government insists on controlling the rain puddles(*) on our land, the political speech that we may voice, the health care we may receive, the appliances in our homes, and the fruits of our labor. The Constitution vests none of these powers in the federal government; they represent illegitimate power-grabs, yet the government has legalized its illegitimacy anyway.

* The statement that the federal government "insists on controlling the rain puddles on our land" is not an exaggeration. The Army Corp of Engineers and the EPA have interpreted the Clean Water Act such that any water that potentially ends up running off and could find its way into the navigable waters of the United States is a navigable water. Well, that's pretty much any water anywhere that falls in the United States. A man-made ditch becomes navigable waters by this standard. And the courts give deference to this ridiculous interpretation through a ruling called Chevron Deference. You don't want to get crosswise with the Corp. They will ruin you.

Shurk then points to a historical solution. That solution is nullification. Several states have nullified parts of the laws that they feel are unconstitutional, particularly on Second Amendment issues. But they need to be more jealous and vigilant about nullifying laws that step on their sovereign toes.  They need to do it so often, and so forcefully, that the fed finally gets the message:

The remedy to all this nonsense has always been straightforward: nullification. In the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions arguing against the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison insisted that the states have a duty to reject acts of Congress not authorized by the Constitution's enumerated powers. "[W]here powers are assumed which have not been delegated," Jefferson wrote, "nullification ... is the rightful remedy." Alexander Hamilton — a staunch supporter of centralized government — agreed and warned that should Congress exert authority beyond its "constitutional powers," its actions are "merely acts of usurpation and will deserve to be treated as such."

The other thing that Shurk notes, and it is not entirely untrue, is that we currently have two private corporations which pretend to be political parties, and we need to throw those bums out too.