UT Governor to Veto States Rights Legislation
Note from Marc Pelise:
I spoke with the Governor’s office today and he is reviewing SB11 Utah Firearms Freedom Act right now and will make a decision as early as tomorrow or early next week as to whether or not he will sign or Veto the bill. This bill has HUGE implications for the State sovereignty. The message in blue is the action item, my commentary and summary of the issue for those who care to read it are after that.
We are in trouble. The Utah House of Representatives passed SB11 the Utah Firearms Freedom Act. It passed the House of Representatives overwhelmingly. It also passed the Senate with no Democrats and two Republicans, John Valentine and Lyle Hillyard, voting against it. I will post their email’s below. There is now a real movement to have Governor Gary Herbert veto the bill. The long and short of it is, that we MUST FLOOD the Governor’s office with email’s asking him to support the bill and to sign it immediately! He needs to received HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of email’s telling him that you support this bill as a state sovereignty bill! We also need to flood the switch board at his office. We need to assure him that the people support him on this issue and ask him to stand tall for our state sovereignty.
We need everyone to contact Governor Gary Herbert. We need to thank him for his principled stance on supporting state sovereignty, and encourage him to stand tall, and sign this bill into law.
Here is the contact info for both the Governor and his chief of staff.
John Valentin jvalentine@utahsenate.org
Lyle Hillyard lhillyard@utahsenate.org
Governor Herbert gherbert@utah.gov or jperry@utah.gov
Call Governor Herbert: 801-538-1000
Please, if you haven’t done so already, contact Governor Herbert’s office and express your support specifically for SB11, which is the Utah Firearms Freedom Act.
It also wouldn’t hurt to mention that you are also in support of Utah’s right to opt out of Federally mandated healthcare and other State’s rights issues.
I know many of you don’t follow politics as closely as I do, but this is a REALLY BIG DEAL and there is a lot of out of State money and opposition trying to thwart this effort by our legislature to assert the 10th amendment, which is our Constitutional right and what this legislation is really about. Our Governor needs to hear from us to know that we stand behind him on this issue.
Those in opposition to this bill say that we would be inviting a law suit on the supreme court level with a bill like this because the Federal government doesn’t like to be put in its place and we shouldn’t be spending money on legal fees in an economy like the one we are in now and therefore, not worth the fight. My question to those with this mindset, is the Constitution worth so little to you that after the Billions of Dollars spent on everything under the sun by our current government, that the cost of a single, or even multiple, lawsuit/s to defend the 2nd and 10th amendments is not worth it because of the state of our economy?
How many programs could we cut or put on hold while we fight this most important fight? This is where I think of the 4 million dollar project that was spent on a climate controlled building for smokers at the Health department of all places, so that they didn’t have to stand in the heat or cold, when out smoking a cigarette. I am not even going to begin to go into how much we are spending in this State on illegal aliens. My point is that there is plenty of money in this already heavily bloated, even though balanced, budget, that if we truly cherished the Constitution, sovereignty and the rule of law, we would find room in the budget to defend ourselves. Which they have already done by the way, and allocated funds in this years budget, just in case the BATFE decide to challenge this.
Utah is not alone in this. It is Montana that initiated similar legislation back in May 2009 that perked up ears from States like Texas, Vermont, Oklahoma, and a whole host of others. It is Montana we are all rallying behind as States so that they don’t have to go it alone. They figured out that the best way to fight the tyrannical actions of an out of control federal government is to assert the 10th amendment on ALL in state issues starting with the hot button 2nd amendment.
The Montana bill basically says that if guns are made in Montana and sold in the residents of the State of Montana, the commerce clause does not apply. The difference between our bill and Montana’s is that ours was written with the specific intent of going to the supreme court to defend it so it has a lot more teeth to it than just a Constitutional declaration. That makes us all the less likely to be the target of a suit by the feds, but at the end of the day, this is about sticking together as States against a bully of a national government who has been left unchecked to rule the playground for far too long.
As a reminder, the 10th amendment reads as follow, “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 was the final amendment in the Bill of rights and for good reason. They wanted to keep power FROM a centralized government and so they gave very few powers to that government which are call enumerated powers. Everything else, as clearly stated in the 10th amendment, was reserved to the States and the People of those States.
In the late 1800′s, Congress, in it’s craftiness and looking for an excuse to give itself more power, started using the commerce clause as a “catch all” for everything under the sun. The commerce clause is one of the enumerated powers given the Federal government which was originally designed to “regulate” trade between us and other Nations, the States severally and the American Indian Nations.
It is important to note that, “words have meaning”, and according to the Oxford Dictionary which gives historical context to the words used in different Era’s, the word, “regulate” meant, “to make regular”. The intent by our founders, it seems, was to make sure that there was free flow of commerce between the States, as pertaining to such, so that Pennsylvania, for example, couldn’t just decide that because they had a grudge against the south that they could blockade their cotton from coming north, or that States couldn’t be singled out by other States and economically isolated from free trade with or through the other States. If this were not their intent, why then did it take 100 years and an act of congress for this definition to change?
Since the the definition of commerce has been so loosely applied, it has become a problem in that they now use the commerce clause as part their legislation even when there is nothing trade related just so that the supreme court can’t challenge the authority. The result is that we have law upon law compounding upon each other that are un-Constitutional and to date we have over 6 million laws on the books that fall under this category. Just because you put an un-Cosntitutional law on top of a Constitutional one, it does not make the one on top Constitutional.
Just because a friend of mine made this point I feel it worth mentioning before concluding. Some are concerned that the idea of guns made in Utah might not stay in Utah and cross the border into other states. This idea that we should not move forward on this because another sovereign State might find that a gun made in Utah crossed the border into their state is like saying that Canadians should not be able to manufacture and sell pharmaceuticals because they might end up in the United States. There are exponentially more people who die from pharmaceutical drugs than who die from gun related incidents in this country so I think the scenario is appropriate. Just in case we missed the point about “regulating trade” means to “make regular” and not to micromanage and control, this point is still irrelevant when one considers the fact that the 2nd Amendment precedes the 10th and what part of “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” are we missing here anyway?
Freedom is NOT free! We need to prepare ourselves for the showdowns to come if we want to keep what we have left of our unalienable rights and hopefully we can restore the Republic that once was. Inaction because we are afraid of provocation for whatever reason, financial or otherwise, should speak volumes about how far we have strayed from the form of government given us by our founders. Personally, I am grateful for the legislators who are willing to stand up lead the charge and want to show them my support in any way I can.
Please get involved, talk to your neighbors, contact your legislators, read the Constitution, read the founding documents, read the 5000 Year Leap and a whole host of other great books, so that you can understand the gravity of the situation we are in, and then be a part of the solution to fix what is broken.
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