In the early days of the republic the president was a much less consequential position than it is today because all of the decisions that affected the day to day lives of Americans were made much closer to home at the state and local level. National politics was not local. It used to be far more important who was elected to the state legislatures and the governorships.

Rather than battling for the presidency as if our very lives depended on it we need to focus our efforts on securing conservative majorities at the state and local level and electing people to these offices who are dedicated to federalism. Returning to federalism will reduce the power of the federal government and minimize the impact the election of one person has on the nature of our republic. It will also reduce the wild swings in national policy as the Congress switches from party to party and they are derived of their usurped power to pass unconstitutional legislation. There has been a lot of hand wringing and gnashing of teeth about the future of our country should Obama get reelected.

I have to ask, why do we have to allow this one man and his party’s limited time in office fundamentally transform our nation? We don’t have to if we change our strategy and work hard to restore federalism.

This is a large and diverse country. I live in Arkansas and it is definitely not California. Nor is it Michigan or Massachusetts. It’s Arkansas, and the citizens of Arkansas have different wants, needs, and desires for their state than do the citizens of the rest of the country. One size government does not fit all, yet the attempt by the Left to impose their agenda on everyone is the root cause of so much division in the nation.

Take Obamacare for example; if the Left want to impose statist solutions on their citizens at the state level, I say let them. However, why should they be allowed to impose it on everyone else? One reason they want to I suspect, is that they know their ideas always fail and that allowing them to be enacted at the state level rather than the national level will provide an escape route for the industrious and leave behind the dependent classes. Centralization prevents escape. One of the great unwritten freedoms we have in this country is the freedom of movement; it is the key to competitive state government. If productive citizens are free to move to another state, states are restrained from abusing or overburdening their citizens lest all the productive citizens depart for more friendly and welcoming states. We see this in action today as people abandon California and Texas booms.

Rather than live in fear of electing Democrats and reelecting Obama, work to reestablish federalism and make them near irrelevant. Imagine how powerless we can make the Democrats and their interest groups if power were returned to the states. No Democrat special interest group can afford to fight fifty state level battles for their pet projects. They would have to abandon the fight in strong red states.

I think many on the Left hate the ongoing battles as much as we do and many would be willing to join with us in restoring federalism if it assured them that they wouldn’t have to worry about a GOP Congress crippling unions, outlawing abortion, undercutting welfare, et al. because the power to do so was stripped from Congress and returned to the fifty states.

Unfortunately, politicians in DC won’t give up their power voluntarily; it must be seized from them by the states acting together. Rather than suing the federal government over Obamacare for example, the states that are suing should simply refuse to implement it. This strategy can be expanded to other areas outside the enumerated powers such as education, energy, infrastructure et al.

In summary, the tools to reduce the power of the central government exist if only we would use them and we have nothing to lose and much to gain.

The Repeal Amendment has significant support but like most amendments has little chance of passing due to the high hurdles for passage of Amendments.

New York Times Article.

Forbes article by Randy Barnett who teaches constitutional law at the Georgetown Law Center and is author of Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton 2005).

WSJ article by professor Barnett.

The second step is for states to pass legislation, the Constitutional Review Act, which explicitly expresses their right to declare acts of the federal government unconstitutional and of no force within their borders.

From the very beginning of our history states have maintained that they have the right to disregard legislation that they deemed to be unconstitutional, the first instance being the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in 1798. The Resolutions, which were in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, were written respectively by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the author of the US Constitution.

The Resolutions were very controversial at the time and threatened to tear our new nation apart. Ten other states declared their opposition to the Resolutions and stated their belief that states did not in fact have the right to nullify federal legislation and that the right to do so was the exclusive domain of the courts.

New Hampshire’s resolution for example stated: 

That the state legislatures are not the proper tribunals to determine the constitutionality of the laws of the general government; that the duty of such decision is properly and exclusively confided to the judicial department.

The idea that it was the sole province of the courts to determine the constitutionality of federal legislation evolved into the doctrine or judicial review and was particularly influenced and institutionalized after Marbury vs. Madison.

Although today we take judicial review as established and indisputable, it is not a power explicitly delegated to the judicial branch by the Constitution and it is from this silence on the part of the Constitution that is the basis for the Constitutional Review Act.

My task here is not to cover the full history of the Acts, Resolutions, and talks of secession and war they engendered but rather to provide some background information for my recommendation of nullification.

Although Jefferson and Madison later distanced themselves from their respective Resolutions and stated that the states in fact did not have the right to nullify federal legislation, we cannot fully know why they did so. Perhaps they feared tearing apart the new nation or exposing it to danger from abroad through its disunity. Perhaps they feared more civil strife and bloodshed with the Revolution still fresh in the minds of many. Perhaps they feared how history would remember them if blood was spilled because of their efforts.

Whatever their reasons, I believe they were correct when they asserted that the states did in fact have the right to nullify federal legislation because as was stated in the Kentucky Resolution:

That the several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by 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; that to this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party; that this government, created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

In summary, the federal government was a creation of the states, the states created a government of limited authority, and the states retained all authority unto themselves not specifically given to the new federal government therefore the states retained the right to decide issues of constitutionality.

There are those who would argue that the courts are indeed the proper place to resolve issues of constitutionality and I largely agree, however, as Newt Gingrich and many others have pointed out, we can no longer trust the courts. The Left has worked for decades to install Leftists to the federal court who don’t interpret the Constitution, rather, they legislate from the bench and cite “penumbras and emanations” as their basis for the discovery of new rights.

The Left has been very successful in seeding the courts with their fellow travelers and we are all familiar with their strategy of trying to win in the courts what they cannot win in the legislature, Proposition 8 in CA, the various illegal immigration bills, et al.

A specific example is Roe v. Wade. Regardless of your position on abortion the Constitution does not grant the right to abortion or the right to privacy from which the right to an abortion was derived. Roe is perhaps the most famous case of judicial activism and one that continues to divide us to this day.

So, what are we to do? Do we submit to an increasingly activist court regardless of the plain and obvious examples of unconstitutional rulings? Or do we pursue another path?

I believe the path is via the Constitutional Review Act and the seizing of power back from the federal government.

Using, again, the example of Obamacare consider two outcomes in which Obamacare is upheld:

1. The legislation is upheld in the Supreme Court and the states accede to federal power. In the event the GOP fails to rid us of this unconstitutional abomination we are now more subjects than citizens and are forever more to be dependent on the federal government for our health. The federal government is now free to mandate our behavior because the precedent has been established that they have that right via the Commerce Clause. Where does it end? Are we still a free people?
2.  The legislation is upheld but the twenty-six states that have gone to the Supreme Court to fight it do not accede to federal supremacy and instead reject Obamacare and do not allow its implementation within their borders. What then can the federal government do to compel compliance? Nothing. Can the legislation survive without half of the states participating and funding it? What would be the reaction of the other twenty-four states? What would be the reaction of the citizens and businesses of those states? Would they join their fellow “26ers” in their newly asserted freedom?

I believe that we are well past the times when such an approach would have led to bloodshed and secession, as Jefferson and Madison no doubt feared, and believe that such a reassertion of state power would lead to the reestablishment of a truly constitutionally limited government as the Founders intended. I believe that if the states were to stand up and simply say “no more” that the federal government would have little recourse to make states submit. In a nation such as ours, governmental power is dependent upon the willing submission to it by the people. Without cooperative submission that power evaporates.

Unlike the federal government, the state governments have to take care not to oppress their citizens; otherwise people can exercise one of their basic freedoms, the freedom of movement, and simply leave for another state.

Liberalism cannot survive the decentralization of power and we cannot survive additional centralization. Who will win this battle for freedom?

For decades the federal government has used the carrot and stick of federal funding to force states to bend to its will. The federal government now collects and then redistributes money to states for infrastructure, education, health care, and countless pet projects in the form of earmarks. These federal funds often come with strings attached and states with limited ability to raise their own tax rates more often than not meekly comply. The states have thus allowed themselves to become subservient to the federal government through their dependency on federal funding.

The sad irony is that much of the revenue the federal government doles out to the states is collected from the state’s residents to start with so the entire exercise is a money recycling scheme with DC skimming off the top for administrative costs and redistribution to other states.

So how to strike the first blow for independence? The Federal Funds Act.

From the 10th Amendment Center:

Already introduced in Georgia (HB877), Oklahoma (HB2810), and Washington (HB2712), such laws would require that all federal taxes come first to the states Department of Revenue. A panel of legislators would assay the Constitutional appropriateness of the Federal Budget, and then forward to the federal government a percentage of the federal tax dollars that are delineated as legal and constitutionally justified. The remainder of those dollars would be assigned to budgetary items that are currently funded through federal allocations and grants or returned to the people.

Once states are able to keep the tax dollars that otherwise would have been returned to them after a trip through the bureaucracy they will have much greater freedom to defy the diktats of the federal government and restore the liberties of their citizens.

In the article Congressman Bishop mentions an issue, among a host of others, that I myself have considered at length to be the biggest obstacle to restoring federalism; the intoxication of power. Even conservatives who claim fealty to the Constitution and a desire to downsize government want to cling to their power rather than actually return much of it to the states.

He says:

“Our battle cry will be the commitment to ‘lose power’. We will return home for re-election proud to have made a step in re-establishing the Constitutional “vertical” separation of powers concept. We will return proud of voluntarily relinquishing federal control. We will return proudly having lost power in Congress. We will also have struck a blow in defense of individual liberty.”

Much to my chagrin, this battle cry did not rouse the troops. republicans in Washington, so long out of power, were not in the mood to lose the power that had so recently gained.

Congressman Bishop “gets it”.

Rarely is there an article or diary that challenges this premise, when in these increasingly lawless and extra-constitutional times a challenge is desperately needed. Not only from us here at RS but from our state and federal representatives as well. I hope I can start a trend or at least start a conversation.

It is my opinion that if we are to have any real chance of reducing the size, scope, and reach of the federal government we must start at the state level by electing constitutional conservatives to our state legislatures and governorships. We must elect people who acknowledge, understand, and will fight to seize back from the federal government the states’ rightful, constitutional powers that have been steadily usurped since the end of the Civil War.

Even the most conservative and successful conservative governors have failed to adequately challenge the supremacy of the federal government and instead accept the conventional view that the federal government is the ultimate authority.

For example, twenty-six states have sued to stop Obamacare. The fact that they are suing the federal government rather than just ignoring what is a clear violation of the Constitution, specifically the plain text of the 10^th Amendment, is evidence of the institutionalization of the premise.

What would the federal government do, what could they do, if all twenty-six states submitted the PPACA to their respective legislatures for them to vote on the legislation’s constitutionality and if found unconstitutional, simply refused to implement it or allow its implementation? The federal government is not the ultimate arbiter of what is and is not constitutional.

What would the federal government do, what could they do, if energy producing states simply ignored the diktats of the EPA?

We all know our history and we know that the federal government is a creation of the states and that many, if not most, of the states would not have ratified the Constitution if they knew that their states would one day become subservient to the diktats and whims of the central government. The purpose of the federal government was as a means for the states to speak with one voice when dealing with the rest of the world. Internal affairs were to be the province of the states.

There are clear historical reasons that the Founders specifically enumerated the powers of the federal government and explicitly stated our inviolable rights in the Bill of Rights; they feared, rightly, an all powerful federal government. Recent polls show that the public is more fearful of a powerful central government than they are of any other large institutions. The public would support states reasserting their authority.

Just this morning I finished reading an article  about the EPA’s vision for its future as an organization dedicated to sustainability. Sustainability is one of those words that will mean whatever the EPA says that it means and it represents an enormous power grab by an unelected and dangerously unaccountable bureaucracy. An EPA whose mandate is sustainability would have the authority to dictate where you could build your house, how you should build your house, what appliances can be installed in your house, design your city’s sewage system, and countless other details clearly outside their jurisdiction.

From where does the EPA derive this authority? When will states stop allowing the EPA and other bureaucracies dictate to them how they will manage their natural resources, provide for their poor, build their roads, care for their seniors, educate their students, etc?

It’s obvious that the federal bureaucracy has been captured by the Left and that they are using the bureaucracy to implement all of their socialist policies to the detriment of our liberty and our economy. Only be seizing back their rightful power can the states neuter the federal government and end the spreading tyranny.

The Left needs centralization to succeed. They can’t control us if power is dispersed among the fifty (seven) states and we can’t escape their tyranny if power is centralized.

Imagine the environmentalists having to fight battles in all fifty states rather than a single battle in Washington? Imagine an Alaska in charge of its own natural resources without the meddling interference of San Francisco Liberals who’ve never seen Alaska except on the Natural Geographic channel.

Imagine a Texas that didn’t have to worry about a lizard shutting down oil drilling in all of west Texas.

Although it is important to continue to fight to elect conservatives to federal office, it is more important, in my opinion, to elect hungry, 10^th Amendment conservatives to state offices. So, when you start evaluating candidates for state office for 2012 ask them where they stand on the 10^th Amendment and dive into their responses. Don’t allow them to espouse platitudes, look for a history of supporting federalism in their record, hold them accountable, and ask them what specific actions they will take to restore power to your state.

This must be a multi-pronged fight if we are to win and drive Liberalism into the same ash heap of history as Soviet Communism.

We had a bunch of Wall St. analysts in town for one of our annual updates and the UFCW got wind of the news so decided to show up.

They bussed in two bus loads of people from out of town. There were two charter buses parked across the street from the HO and it looked like there may have been about 100 union folks there for the cameras. I could tell they were from out of town not only because of the charter buses but also because there were more black Americans in the crowd than there are in the entire town. The largest minority groups here are Hispanics and Indian IT people.

It was quite a pitiful, short-lived, for the cameras only affair. I saw them on my way to the gym and they were gone when I came back.

I have a picture of the protesters but don’t know how to embed it.

Let’s see how many we can come up with:

1. When Rick Perry goes horseback riding his staff gives advance notice to the USGS to avoid causing a panic.
2. When Rick Perry goes jogging, foxes are listed as an endangered species.
3. When Rick Perry speaks everybody listens…or else!

But what is never discussed is the true cost of the tax code and the billions of dollars wasted complying with it.

According to the BLS there were ~69,000 people employed as “tax examiners and collectors, and revenue agents” with an average salary of $54,830 or $3,783,270,000 per year. These job titles indicate that these are government employees and not private sector employees.

~57,000 people are employed as “tax preparers” at an average annual salary of $37,060 or $2,112,420,000 per year.

There were 1,072,490 people employed as Accountants and Auditors at an average salary of $68,960. Now, not all of these people are engaged in tax work so let’s conservatively assume that 15% are engaged in tax activities full time, so that’s another $11,093,836,560 per year.

H&R Block employs 107,200 people according to hoovers.com with total annual revenues of $3,778,300,000. Let’s assume that with a flat tax that their revenues would approach zero. What else would they have to do?

Jackson Hewitt employees 6,005 people and earned $248,000,000 in 2009. Again, with a flat tax, assume zero.

According to Intuit Corp they sold 10,970,000 units (CDs and online) of their popular tax preparation software, TurboTax. I paid $35 dollars to file federal and state with TurboTax so Intuit’s revenues from TurboTax were approximately $383,950,000.

I work for a Fortune 5 company and our US tax department alone is over 200 people. That’s 200 people employed as overhead to comply with the federal tax code at a cost of $30,000,000. Multiply this across hundreds of thousands of businesses large and small and you will exceed the totals of the above figures of $21,181,776,560 and 400,000 people. Money and time that could be better spent on actual productive activities.

My numbers aren’t complete and I can only guess as to the undercount in both dollars and employees that are tied up in complying with our tax code and I can’t even begin to estimate the opportunity cost of tax code compliance. But I think you get the picture as to just how much our government costs us each year. The tax code is a federal jobs program in itself.

In the midst of the current debt limit debate the Democrats are once again screeching about how the GOP wants to throw grandma off a cliff, force seniors to eat dog food, and end all life on the planet in spite of the fact that no GOP proposal would affect any retirees or near retirees. As we know, Democrats are impervious to facts and truth.

The Democrats also repeatedly claim that Social Security is a popular program and the deluge of calls to Congress when Social Security legislation is discussed would seem to support their claim. They’re wrong though.

My father, who is 70 and receives Social Security, hates the system. He hated being forced to “contribute” to it his entire working life but when I raise the idea of him declining to take the money he goes ballistic stating basically, “I was forced to contribute to the system and I’m going to get my money back!” Hard to argue with that.

Using this slim anecdotal evidence I believe this attitude is widespread and SSI is in fact not popular, rather, seniors merely want to get back money that was confiscated from them over the course of decades.

We’ve all seen polls that state younger generations don’t expect to receive SSI benefits and would opt out of the system if given the opportunity.

So, I think the GOP ought to challenge the Democrats premise of SSIs’ popularity by submitting a bill titled “The Freedom of Choice in Retirement Act”, using the Left’s “freedom of choice” language against them.

The terms of the act that I propose are harsh but will expose the Democrats’ true purpose for protecting the system as it exists, to keep voters dependent on government.

I only have two terms. In exchange for being granted the ability to opt out, all those that opt out will have to forfeit all previous contributions and the ‘opters’ employer contribution must be maintained.

I would only present the forfeiture in the first version of the bill and the employer contribution maintenance in a second version to up the stakes.

What’s not there for a Liberal to love except the loss of captive voter and that voter’s taxes? But I believe presenting it as a “freedom of choice” issue with two very punitive opt out provisions would make it difficult for Democrats to oppose without exposing their socialist inclinations.

I’m 45 and I personally would forfeit all my “contributions” if going forward I could add that money to my 401k instead. Younger people have even less of a stake in the current system and I believe would opt out in droves. And I guarantee that the Democrats know this and they fear it.

The GOP can employ the Left’s strategy of “incrementalism” in following years to eliminate the employer contribution.

I’ve contacted my GOP freshman rep, Steve Womack (AR-R), contact yours.

The real damage to the unions are:

1. The end of mandatory union membership to work for state or local WI government. How many people will opt out of the union, keeping their money for themselves and thus depriving union coffers of money for Democrats?

2. The end of the government collecting union dues on behalf of the unions. Just as Democrats need employers to deduct our taxes they also need employers to deduct union dues so that members pay scant attention to the transaction. If members have to actually sit down and write checks to the union and see how that impacts their personal finances then refer to 1 above.

3. Requiring that union representation be voted upon by secret ballot yearly. This measure is the anti-card check. Just as the Left is moving one way, Governor Walker is aggressively moving the other way. Without mandatory union membership and no army of thugs to stand over their shoulders, yet, while voting for union representation many members are likely to vote against union representation.

The locals may not realize that these and not their collective bargaining “rights” are their real death knell but Obama and the national union establishment sure do. That’s why they’re getting involved in this situation. The three reasons cited above have the potential to decimate union membership and thus union contributions to the Democrat party and the union bosses and the Democrat party know it and are fighting for their long term survival.

Rep. Cantor started the YouCut website to solicit input from We the People on ways to cut the federal budget. The problem, however, is that it’s difficult to know what to suggest except in the broadest sense because We the People don’t know on what our government spends our money. I guarantee you that if the entire budget, excepting anything that impacts national security, were put online with the budgets of every agency and department listed down to paperclips and sticky notes we’d find plenty to cut. We just need the ability to look. I recommend each budget line have three options for us to choose, No Change, Cut Back, and Eliminate (or something similar) we could vote democratically for items to cut. Let’s get RedState to champion this idea. What say you?

The past tense of ‘lead’, as in ‘to lead a group’  is not ‘lead’ it is ‘led’ as in “Caesar led his legions across the Rubicon.

Lead, pronounced as ‘led’, is only correct when referring to the metal Lead , symbol Pb from the Latin for Plumbum.

‘Loose’ means “not tight” it does not mean the opposite of ‘win’, that would be the word ‘lose’.

You’re is a contraction of ‘you are’ and does not mean the same as ‘your’ as in ‘it is your mistake to use your to mean you’re’.

And a favorite of Ed Morrisey on HotAir is to write ‘amuck’ when he clearly means ‘amok’ as in ‘to run amok’.

If you want to be take seriously then please demonstrate that you in fact did graduate high school having passed basic English.

And as an aside I only just learned the origin of the word ‘nitpick’ when my 5-yr old daughter picked up lice from her school. In ridding her hair and our home of them I learned that larval lice are called ‘nits’ and thus nitpicking is the act of removing lice larvae from hair.

Since the health care debate got really heated I’ve been making regular comments regarding federalism and how a return to federalism is a critical guarantor of our liberties. One of my last posts resulted in a suggestion that I create a diary about federalism and make my case for why I believe it may be our last best chance to preserve our freedoms. Let’s hope I can make this coherent.

Much has been said and continues to be said about how the Founders in their infinite wisdom gave us a federal government with three separate but coequal branches that would each act as a check on the other to make sure no single branch of government could run roughshod over the rights of American people. This is such a well established and recognized fact that it is grade school knowledge. In the modern era the true genius of our Founders with respect to the government they set up is often not fully understood or appreciated because the system in place today has so radically changed from what was established. The Founders and citizens of the founding era were fearful of big government and when they convened to establish a government for the new United States they sought to create one that limited the power of the central government and preserved the bulk of powers to the states and the people. Their first attempt, the Articles of Confederation, succeeded too well in creating a weak central government that soon the Articles were ratified talk began of creating a new agreement among the many states. That new agreement was of course our Constitution. Although many agreed upon the need for a stronger federal government the many states were still very wary of an overly strong central government and determined to maintain strong state governments with full autonomy in respect to their internal affairs. To guarantee the rights of the states the Founders granted the right to appoint federal Senators to the states themselves. Senators were to represent the interests of the states, not the people. The 17^th Amendment which was to make senators directly elected by the people was born in an era of William Jennings Bryant driven populism and progressivism.

The 17^th Amendment wasn’t the first blow to federalism although it was a significant one. The first blow was the Civil War, or as we like to say down here in the South, the War of Northern Aggression. The defeat of the South in the Civil War established the supremacy of the federal government and changed the direction of our nation. We all know the history so in the interest of brevity I will leave the history lesson behind.

We’re not likely to repeal the 17^th Amendment since Senators aren’t going to commit to sacrificing their own careers but we should seek to communicate the detrimental effects it has had on our republic.

The third blow to federalism, one not fully recognized, was the federal income tax. How has the federal income tax harmed federalism? Consider the effect on the credit markets when the federal government borrows money? Money borrowed by the federal government crowds out private borrowers driving up interest rates and limiting the availability of funds for others. The effect of federal taxation is similar. When the federal government taxes heavily they crowd out the ability of states to raise taxes without creating a tax revolt as taxpayers won’t tolerate much more taxation. This has created a situation in which all states are dependent on the federal government to one degree or another for funding critical infrastructure projects, schools, health initiatives, etc. The federal government doesn’t provide these funds without condition thus bribing or blackmailing the states to implement federal policies that might otherwise be rejected by the states and their citizens. The prime example of federal blackmail is the 55 MPH speed limit. States that didn’t lower their speed limits to 55 MPH were threatened with the cutoff of federal highway funds, money that could have been collected by the states themselves had they the political freedom to raise their tax rates. This tidbit of information was lost on Senator Patrick Leahy who just last month said the federal government set the speed limits in defense of the federal mandate to buy health insurance.

Now let me return to the theme of this diary, Federalism is Freedom, and the genius of the Founders. The Founders, as stated above, sought to create a system of checks and balances to prevent the government from running roughshod over our rights. But this system of checks and balances extended beyond the federal government because the states were also supposed to be a check on federal power via the Senate. And what was the check on the power of the states themselves? The freedom of movement. Unlike federal legislation which cannot be escaped, citizens are free to leave their state of residence at any time if they find their state hostile to their lives or businesses. One need only look to California to see people acting on this freedom. This freedom of movement serves to keep state governments in check under threat of losing taxpaying citizens should the governments create a hostile environment.

The Democrat Party has been trying to undermine federalism, either purposely or quite accidentally, for generations and they have largely succeeded. But what havoc has it wrought? We are a nation divided and our most bitter disagreements, largely social in nature, are fought in Washington DC in Congress and the Courts. The divisions between the Right and the Left are growing deeper and bitterer.

Given the opposition to the Left’s social agenda by residents of Red states one would be led to believe that the Democrats would be enthusiastic supporters of a return to federalism. One would be wrong because the Left’s lust for power over all of us exceeds their desire for individual liberty. It would never be enough for California to allow gay marriage if Arkansas didn’t also allow it. It would be intolerable to them if abortion were legal in Massachusetts but illegal in Tennessee. It would be unacceptable to them if Washington established an expensive public option for health care funded by Washington taxpayers only to see productive citizens leave Washington in search of lower taxes and increased personal liberties. No, the statist cannot allow escape from the state. If you’re familiar with the EU you will recognize that the EU is trying to harmonize laws across the EU so that no country will have an advantage over another in terms of personal and economic liberties. They too want no escape.

So what is the solution? I believe that we must continue to work hard to elect conservatives to the Congress. Conservatives who are supportive of a federalist vision of government and not themselves lusting after power. But we must also turn our energy and attention to our states and begin to elect conservatives to state legislatures and governorships who are eager to reclaim the states’ Constitutional roles and powers. Several states are already, as Mark Levin would say, “on the move” and although largely symbolic have passed resolutions reaffirming their 10^th Amendment sovereignty.

See here for more on nullification: http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/the-10th-amendment-movement/

See here for Walter William’s on the 10^th Amendment: http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2008/07/16/oklahoma_rebellion

However, other states, most notably Arizona, have taken it a step further and are considering constitutional Amendments to nullify what they believe to be unconstitutional federal legislation. Arizona for example has a ballot initiative to nullify whatever nationalized health care plan put forth by the Democrats. This will certainly set up a Constitutional challenge, one I expect the federal government to lose. If even half a dozen states follow suit then I believe the entire nationalized health care plan will collapse. We have been encouraged to activism and what better outlet than trying to get an effort similar to Arizona’s before the voters?

See here for the Arizona initiative: http://www.azhealthcarefreedom.com/

See here for George Will’s opinion regarding the AZ effort: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2008/10/27/20081027WP-editazprop1027.html

See here for other states with initiatives in progress: http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/nullification/health-care/

Success in defeating the socialists at the state level will further embolden states to nullify other federal legislation they’ve long suffered under. It would become a mechanism that feeds itself and frees us from the federal leviathan.

Federalism is freedom!

When I have addressed federalism in prior posts I’ve been asked to comment on federal taxation because although nullification would prevent participation in national health care it couldn’t prevent federal taxation. Enter the federal escrow account. I’m certainly no expert on this topic but proposed legislation would establish an account and set the states up as tax collectors for the federal government. The states would collect all federal taxes from their citizens, deduct any monies they would expect to be returned as bribes and blackmail and submit any balance to the federal government. Any taxes collected to pay for a nullified health care plan could be returned to the taxpayers. As with the 17th Amendment it’s highly unlikely we’ll aver repeal or limit the federal income tax but the states can act to free themselves from federal bondage by preventing the federal government from taking from the states citizens more than is required to conduct Constitutionally authorized federal functions.

See here for escrow account draft legislation: http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/wp-content/uploads/legislation/Tax-Escrow-Account.pdf

We find ourselves at a crossroads. One path returns us to freedom. The other takes us down the road to socialism and ultimately despotism. I hold many people including myself responsible for where we are today because we as Conservatives have not been vigilant in guarding our liberties. It is the nature of the Conservative to mind his own business, to work, to live, to take care of one’s family and to expect those elected to represent us to look out for our best interests. While we have been busy with our own lives we have left the field of battle to our enemies and they have rooted themselves deeply in our public institutions, our schools, the bureaucracy, the non-profits, the culture and all outlets of information.We now have to commit to acting against our nature, engage the enemy, and stay engaged. We can never again leave the field of battle.