Throw All the Bums Out By J.B. Shurk
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.
Our Union came into existence only because the former colonies were assured that they would maintain their freedom and independence. Had the Articles of Confederation or their successor, the U.S. Constitution, sought to extinguish the individual states’ inherent sovereignties by replacing their discrete political powers with those of a single new nation, then no agreement to form a Union would have ever been reached. The colonies did not fight a war for their independence from an empire only to squander their victory and become part of another empire.
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.
Because history and civics are no longer taught in school, the federal government has worked a self-serving linguistic voodoo that has allowed it to pretend that the birth of the United States was the birth of a brand new nation. In actuality, we are a federation of independent states that magically became a single nation before inexplicably becoming a borderless empire.
If we were still abiding by the Constitution, then 99% of today’s federal government would be chucked to the bottom of the Potomac. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers (No. 45):
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
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 idea was simple: divide the federal government into three branches that would compete against one another, let the state legislatures control the U.S. Senate, and let the people choose their representation for the House. Instead, the branches conspired with one another to become bigger and more powerful, the Seventeenth Amendment turned the Senate into a ruling aristocracy, and the imposition of political parties gave private corporations control over who would pretend to represent the people. In order to sidestep the Constitution’s limitations completely, the federal government invented a fourth branch — the administrative State — that acts with the combined powers of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches while operating beyond the reach of the people. In order to preserve these illegitimate powers, the federal government then invented an unaccountable Intelligence Community that spies on and bullies ordinary Americans.
Within the Constitution’s “checks and balances,” the people have three principal powers to use against the federal government: their vote, their free speech, and their Second Amendment right to defend themselves against tyranny. Today, elections are not trusted, the federal government censors political speech and dissent, and there is an ongoing effort to deprive Americans of their firearms. The federal government has stolen the people’s power.
The individual state governments, bought off or intimidated into submission long ago, have largely remained quiet. It is as if someone told the states to play dead, and they complied.
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.”
What we need is a movement of people who recognize that nullification is not only possible, but necessary. The problem is that Americans have been forced to choose between two private corporations posing as political parties that do not embrace a duty to protect Americans’ freedom and liberty. That is perhaps the most telling symptom of our current problems. A Union that was formed to protect the people’s inalienable rights and liberties has no political party addressing those foundational concerns on the national stage.
Perhaps it is time to throw all the bums out, so that we may begin representing ourselves.
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