Nullification and the Tenth Amendment

Contrairimairi of Chicago sent me a link to Michael Boldin's excellent blog on the Tenth Amendment Center site. Boldin's blog is evidence why no media source or national politician ought to be trusted. Questions like nullification and secession are off limits on the Republicrat media, but they ought to be issues that Americans are considering now.

According to Boldin:

"Nullification begins with a decision made in your state legislature to resist a federal law deemed to be unconstitutional. It usually involves a bill, which is passed by both houses and is signed by your governor. In some cases, it might be approved by the voters of your state directly, in a referendum. It may change your state’s statutory law or it might even amend your state constitution. It is a refusal on the part of your state government to cooperate with, or enforce any federal law it deems to be unconstitutional.

"At its very core, nullification is mass civil-disobedience to the federal government with the support of the state apparatus. It’s about 'We the People' exercising our rights whether the politicians or judges in Washington D.C want to give us “permission” to exercise those rights or not."

Boldin goes on to discuss the history of Roscoe Filburn, a farmer who resisted the Roosevelt administration's fascistic agricultural regulations that limited food production at a time when the country was going hungry, during the Great Depression. Boldin points out that once the federal government gets a power it never gives it up. Socialists claim that collectivization is naturally altruistic, but history has concluded that collectivism involves transfers of wealth to the socialists themselves, to Wall Street and ultimately involves starvation and mass murder.

Boldin is spot on. His argument is for a literal interpretation of the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which reads:

"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."

If you accept that we are a nation of laws and that the Constitution governs those laws, then much if not most of the federal legislation of the past 100 years has been unconstitutional. As Boldin points out, "conservatives" have been as complicit as "liberals". In fact, both names are inaccurate; better names would be Taftian Progressives and Rooseveltian Progressives. William Howard Taft was the first twentieth century conservative and was also the second Progressive President. When he favored judicial rather than regulatory enforcement of anti-trust law, his sponsor, Theodore Roosevelt, broke with him and ran as a third party candidate, effectively backing Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Legislation such as Wilson's Federal Reserve Act and establishment of price fixing during World War I have led to the modern day super-state. Ongoing subsidies to many industries, including agriculture, which most national Republicans favor, violate the right to property as does "social welfare" motivated legislation. Both seriously damage social welfare, whether in the name of economic trickle down effects or of debilitating welfare payments to multi-generational poor. No greater harm has been done to the poor than by the Democrats and "social liberals" in the tradition of John Dewey.

I can certainly agree with Boldin when he concludes:

"...we can see that the Tenth Amendment is not about political parties. It’s not about political ideologies. It’s not even about political candidates. It’s about liberty. It was designed to promote your liberty by strictly limiting the powers of the federal government."

The problem facing Boldin and anyone else who cares about freedom is that there is no national voice for freedom.