From
Tenth Amendment Center
...from
Tenth Amendment Center
From the beginning of our history, there have been many people such as Nathaniel Bacon, Tomas Jefferson, James Madison, President John Tyler, John Calhoun, John Taylor of Caroline and the Richmond junto who have championed the idea of nullification. Today, we look back through time and wonder how we can follow in the footsteps of those people even with this monstrous national government that’s grown exponentially since constitutional debates of 1787.
Hamilton was one of the first to spread an infectious disease called misconstruction. During speeches made in 1787, he argued for an elected king, and lifetime senators, thinking it would prevent usurpation of power. But a national government and a federal Republic can’t exist on the same foundation. The latter consists of the states and their constituents as a check and balance, and the former consisting of the people of the whole along submitted to pure majority rule and public opinion. Madison even said “a federal Govt. derived its appointments not immediately from the people, but from the States which they respectively composed,” meaning the states are in fact the only part of the compact needed to prevent the usurpations of power.
And who makes up the states?
We do!
The role of the states in the constitutional system was debated during the Philadelphia Convention. In fact, the delegates discussed whether the states should serve as a check and balance on the general government. Mr. Dickenson, of Delaware, illustrated the issue using the example of the sun and planets, basically saying you can’t take the states out of the picture otherwise the sun will cease to exist.
Within a few years after the ratification of the Constitution, the usurpation of powers had already started to take place. Jefferson and Madison went to work trying and stop these unconstitutional power grabs. Even though Madison was a nationalist during the drafting of the Constitution, he believed strongly that the delegated powers of the Constitution as ratified created a limited general government. In 1798, Jefferson and Madison wrote “The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of,” laying out the principles of nullification as a refusal to cooperate with the unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts.
The Alien Acts were an unconstitutional power grab going strictly against Article 1 Section9 Clause 1 stating “The Migration or Importation of such Person as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.” Effectively they were saying, “No!” to the general government through means of nullification/refusal, because it was unconstitutional for the general government to come in and snatch people out of the state if the people of the state allowed them to be there.
Jefferson started off the Kentucky Resolutions with Resolved 1, stating “They constituted a general government certain definite powers, reserving, each state to itself, the residual mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes in delegates power, its acts are unauthorized, void, and of no force…” Asserting that if the general government was going to try and usurp powers, it’s up to the people of the states to stop them.
In the Virginia Resolutions, Madison wrote that a state was “duty bound” to “to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil” when the general government overstepped its bounds
You might ask yourself currently how you can be like Jefferson and Madison in this crucial time of extreme usurpation of powers.
There are four steps you can take.
The first step is reading and understanding the Constitution. Knowing the enumerated powers in Article 1 section 8 is a great start. Ask yourself: just what powers did the states delegate to the general government? Then look at Article 1 section 10 to understand the negatives on the states. What can the states do? What can’t they do? Then repeat the 10th amendment many times. “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.”
This serves as the foundation for where to start in this modern era, if we bring back this idea of nullification and restore power back to the states we can slowly crush this giant we are up against.
The second step is getting rid of the notion of party politics or majority rules. The parties have worked long and hard to deceive and divide us. If we fall in line with corruption, we only vote to despise each other and make it known that we voted in favor of our interest or the party interest. John C Calhoun said when addressing the second commission of the Bank of United States that “I am a partisan of no class, nor, let me add to either political party. I am neither of the opposition nor administration. …..” Calhoun was a strict constructionist, voting only for the Constitution. We, as constituents of the state, should vote only in favor of the Constitution and only by the Constitution. Let us fill in this hole that’s been dug.
The third step is to get very active at the local level. Know what’s going on in your own state. Brion McClanahan coined the phrase “Think Locally, Act Locally,” which is the strongest card we have today. We don’t need to worry about what’s going on in any state other than our own. You don’t need to worry about Washington D.C. Control your state and push legislation to nullify unconstitutional federal acts.
The fourth and final method is to defund the Treasury and nullify the Federal Reserve. Hamilton’s bank set things in motion. President Lincoln put a nail In the coffin with the “Legal Tender Act of 1863” and “The Legal Tender Act of 1864,” giving the government the ability to print money and control currency by levying a 10 percent tax on state bank notes. It was unconstitutional to create national paper money and incorporate a national bank in the first place. It also gave the federal government the ability to bring about inflation, debt, bankruptcy, loans, and economic instability. There are four strategies states can take to nullify the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money. By encouraging the use of gold and silver, we can undermine Federal Reserve notes and ultimately nullify the Fed.
The general government has grown into a behemoth that even Hamilton could have never dreamed of. It inserts itself into every nook and cranny of our lives. It even dictates how much water we can have in our toilets.
Utilizing these four steps, we can reclaim the spirit of Madison and Jefferson, and put the federal government back into the limited box it was intended to operate in.
JP
February 25, 2018 at 01:20PM
