Recently, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle’s Outdoors Editor Shauna Stephenson published an article about recent changes to energy rules and regulations from the nation’s Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and how they would affect both Wyoming’s energy producers and the conservation groups that fight them. (Yes, we need energy, but not at any cost) Stephenson failed to ask the one fundamental question that should be driving this debate and instead focused on the partisan issue at hand.
The driving question should be: why is it Washington’s decision what Wyoming does with our energy?
Being something of a tree hugger, I understand the issue of sustainability and conservation, but I am practical enough to understand that the forces at work here are not what they pretend to be. A generally free market, Constitutional understanding of the issue immediately tells me that government, especially centralized control in Washington, will do little to “conserve” anything and a lot to bring new hazards to our great state’s future.
Wyoming is the nations number one net producer of surplus energy and is responsible for about 34% of the nation’s total clean coal supply. We are also one of the greatest producers of natural gas and have some of the highest potential for renewable wind energy production. No wonder the feds in Washington want to control our energy sources. Even Texas, often seen as the nation’s oil capital, doesn’t produce a surplus like we do and remote Alaska is unable to export well enough to beat our ability either.
In this regard, Wyoming is at a real negotiation advantage. All we have to do is realize one thing: the District of Columbia doesn’t control us, the People of Wyoming control us and our energy.
Earlier this week, I listened in on Senator Barrasso’s telephone town hall meeting where as much was said by one caller, who questioned why Washington was so interested in telling the People of Wyoming what to do. That was in regards to health care, but it applies here as well.
Of course, environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy and other big-money psuedo-environmental groups hope to gain more control over policies affecting Wyoming’s energy. None of those groups are based in Wyoming and I’d be willing to bet that few even include citizens of this state. I don’t belong to any of them. Do you?
The citizens and their elected officials here in Wyoming need to begin weighing everything Washington does to control our everyday lives and our economic future and begin to consider the idea that maybe Washington is more trouble than it’s worth. As an independent State in the Union, Wyoming has the Constitutional authority to tell Washington to shove off.
Perhaps it’s time to do so. Other states, such as our friends up north in Montana, have already done so on other issues – they decided gun control from the BATFE in Washington was not for them. Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and others have all proposed 10th Amendment legislation to assert their rights as independent States.
I think it’s high time Wyoming did the same.
The people who live here and enjoy our beautiful state’s natural wildness, great resources, rural living, and unobtrusive politics are the ones who should decide what is done with resources that surround us.
After all, it’s our mountains, our prairie, our oil, our gas, our water, and our wildlife that are at stake here. Not America’s, but Wyoming’s. Yours and mine. Washington is 1,400 miles away. What can they possibly know about Wyoming?
Let me set down a couple of fervent beliefs that animate everything I do and everything I say.
I believe that God created heaven and earth and every single individual on the planet.
I believe that the God who gave us life gave us liberty and that freedom is our birthright.
I believe that the States created the federal government and not the other way around. And that the power that the States gave to the Federal Government – they can take back.
When we were colonists, and the King and the Parliament needed money from us, and they always seemed to need money, they devised ingenious ways to tax us. One of them was called the Stamp Act. The Parliament decreed that every piece of paper that the Colonists had in their homes; every book, every document, every deed, every lease, every pamphlet, every poster to be nailed to a tree had to have the King’s stamp on it. You think going to a Post Office is bad? You had to go to a British Government office and buy a stamp with the King’s picture.
Question. How did the King know that his picture was on every piece of paper in your house? The Parliament enacted a hateful piece of legislation called the Writs of Assistance Act which let the king’s soldiers write their own search warrants, and bang down any door they chose to look for the stamps or anything else that they were looking for.
It was the last straw.
We fought a revolution. We won the revolution. We wrote the Constitution. The constitution doesn’t grant power, it keeps the government off our backs.
When they were debating the Constitution in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, there were two great arguments – one by the Jefferson and Madison crowd and one by the Adams and Hamilton crowd. Jefferson argued, though he wasn’t physically there in Philly, as he did in the Declaration of Independence that our rights are ours by virtue of our humanity. That as God is perfectly free, and we are created in his image and likeness, we too are perfectly free. The big government crowd – yes they had them even in those days – argued that you can’t have freedom without government, and that government gives us our rights, and therefore, that government can take them away. This is not an academic argument. Jefferson and the natural law argument prevailed because the Constitution was written to keep the government from interfering with our natural rights.
And so, your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to publish what you say, to travel where you want, to worship as you see fit, to keep and bear arms to defend yourself against a tyranny. And, after the right to life, the greatest and most uniquely American of rights – and I say this in front of the seat of the government – is the right to be left alone.
We wrote a Constitution to ensure that the government would never interfere with these rights. Think about it – if rights come from the government, then the government, by ordinary legislation, or presidential decree can take them away. But if the rights come from our humanity, then unless we violate someone else’s natural rights, the government cannot take our rights away.
This is not just a democrat, upper case D, or a republican, upper case R, problem. It’s a problem with government today. There’s a republican version of big government just as assaultive to our liberties as the democrat version of big government.
We fought a revolution because British soldiers could knock on our doors and demand that we house them, and demand that we turn over property to them because they could write their own search warrants. In the Patriot Act, the most hateful piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts, a republican congress and a republican president authorized federal agents to do the unthinkable – to write their own search warrants. And the republican administration didn’t even let members of the House of Representatives read the Patriot Act before they voted on it.
Why should the government be able to spy on us? We should be able to spy on them!
When some judge is rationalizing away our liberty, or some congressman is plotting to take away your freedom or your tax dollars, we should know what they do every minute that they do it.
I was speaking to a group of congressman from a neighboring state – I won’t tell you which state it was, but they don’t play football there – and they came up to me and said “this is the first time we have heard that the Patriot Act allows federal agents to write their own search warrants.” Remember, in the Constitution, we put in the 4th Amendment, the right to be left alone, to make sure that if the government had a target, no matter how guilty the target, no matter how widespread is the belief in the guilt of the target, no matter how dangerous is the target, the government has to go through a neutral judge with a search warrant before it can get to that target. These members of Congress said, “we didn’t know that the Patriot Act allowed the government to bypass the courts and write any search warrant they wanted.” Then I asked them a question I knew the answer to already – did you read the Patriot Act before you voted on it? The answer – no. What were you voting on? A summary we received. Let me guess who wrote the summary – some lawyers in the justice department, right? Of course.
Would you hire anybody to run your business that committed you to a violation of the very reason you’re in business if they didn’t even read the document by which they were making that commitment? Of course not.
The camera is the new gun. There’s nothing that government dislikes more than the light of day, and cameras recording what the government is doing, whether it’s on a street corner, or in there, or in Washington D.C., we have the right to know everything that they do and why they do it, and when they do it, and how they are taking our freedoms.
I have another one of my basic core beliefs. The individual has an immortal soul. Every individual is greater than any government.
Your government is based on fear and force. You don’t have to take my word on it. The 2nd president on the United States, John Adams, said “Of course the government is based on fear.” And the first president, George Washington, said “Government is not reason, it is force.” I think they knew what they were talking about.
Now fast-forward to modern times. Whenever the government wants something, it scares us. During the civil war, Lincoln tried civilians in this state where no battles occurred, by military tribunal. After he died the Supreme Court invalidated everything the military tribunals did. During the first world war, the Wilson administration locked up 2000 people called anarchists – same thing as enemy combatants. No trial, no charge, just jail for the duration of the war. In World War II, FDR locked up 150,000 Japanese Americans, people born in the United States, who got no trial and had no charges, and when the war was over were given $25 and told to go home.
Today we have federal agents. You know I get in arguments with my friends at Fox News, and one of them, I don’t have to tell you who it is, but is truly the most irascible person there. And he said to me, you know you have a problem with Guantanamo Bay, and you have a problem with the Patriot Act, what will you do if I get sent to Guantanamo Bay, will you visit me? And I say, Bill – no, because they’ll probably keep me there as well.
Government likes to say that it’s taking an oath to uphold the Constitution. In the years that I was on the bench, it seemed that every time government lawyers were in my courtroom, if the government was prosecuting someone who was legitimately guilty or whether it was a mistake, or whether somebody was suing the government because government contractors or government doctors, or government workers made a mistake – the government doesn’t come in to the courtroom to enforce the constitution, it comes into the courtroom to evade and avoid it. That, ladies and gentlemen, must be stopped.
This is a great moment in our history. A crowd of this magnitude on a beautiful day, in the boiling sun, in the most middle-American of great middle-American states…comes together not because the president is a democrat, not because his predecessor was a republican, not because a war is just or unjust, not because the Fed is stealing or printing – you’re here because you believe in human freedom.
It is the essence of our existence that we should be free. But remember this: the government hates freedom. It is an obstacle to every one of their designs. Whenever they write laws, whenever they take your tax dollars, whenever they regulate your private behavior, whenever they tell you how to spend your money, whenever they tell you what medicines to take, whenever they tell you what food to eat, whenever they tell you with whom you may or must associate, they are taking away your freedom and they love to get away with it. And they cannot get away with it any longer.
In the long history of the world, very few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its maximum hour of danger. This is that moment and you are that generation! Now is the time to defend our freedoms.
Jefferson was no saint but he was the greatest of our American presidents. He believed that the individual was greater than the state. He believed that the states were greater than the federal government. And when he wrote that our rights come from our creator, and that our rights are inalienable, he forever wed the notion of natural rights to the American experience and the American experiment. We must be vigilant about every right that the government wants to take away from us.
You’ve heard the president say, present president and his predecessor, “my first job is to keep you safe.” He’s wrong! His first job is to keep us free. It is his only job to keep us free.
Shortly before he died, Jefferson lamented, that in his view of the world it was the natural order of things for government to grow and freedom to be diminished; how ardently he wish that that wouldn’t happen. And in order to prevent it from happening he had a very simple remedy, “When the people fear the government, that is tyranny. When the government fears the people, that is liberty!”
Montana state Rep. Joel Boniek, shown with his mule Jesse, introduced a bill seeking to
exempt from federal regulation any firearm made and used within the state borders.
An expanded federal role prompts declarations of state sovereignty. Montana goes further with a gun bill defying U.S. firearm restrictions. The goal: Keep Washington on its side of the fence.
Reporting from Bozeman, Mont. — Frustrated by the expanded power of Washington, a growing number of state lawmakers are defying the federal government and passing legislation aimed at rolling back the reach of Congress and President Obama.
While many measures are symbolic ones declaring the sovereignty of states, some Westerners are taking more dramatic steps. One Utah lawmaker wants to limit federal law enforcement in his state. In Montana, legislators enacted a bill that flagrantly ignores federal firearm restrictions, hoping to force a constitutional showdown.
FOR THE RECORD:
Western politics: An article in Tuesday’s Section A about the state sovereignty movement referred to legislation being considered for introduction next year in Montana that would make the sheriff the top law enforcement official in each county. The state Legislature does not meet again until 2011. —
Supporters of the bill want the Supreme Court to eliminate gun controls and, eventually, curtail Washington’s ability to set policy on a wide range of issues, including education, civil rights, law enforcement and land use.
“It’s about states’ rights,” said state Rep. Joel Boniek, an independent-turned-Republican from nearby Livingston, who introduced the bill. “Guns are just the vehicle.”
The Montana Firearms Freedom Act seeks to exempt from federal regulation any firearm, gun component or ammunition made and kept within the state’s borders. The legislation, signed by Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, becomes law Oct. 1, though federal officials will likely act quickly to keep the measure from taking effect.
Legal experts are skeptical Montana will prevail in court, and even some proponents express their doubts. But supporters say the fight is a necessary step to change Washington’s attitude. Similar bills have been introduced in nearly a half dozen states, and lawmakers in about a dozen more have expressed interest.
“We need 15, 25, 30 states to pass these types of legislation, so that we send a clear message to the country and to the national government,” said Utah Rep. Carl Wimmer, a Republican from suburban Salt Lake City.
In addition to supporting a version of Montana’s gun law, Wimmer is drafting legislation that would forbid local authorities to help enforce federal statutes inside Utah — another bill that, if passed, would surely trigger a court fight.
“The national government has gained more and more power . . . to a point where we’re simply subjects of the ruling masters in Washington, D.C.,” said Wimmer, who has established an organization, the Patrick Henry Caucus, to rally like-minded lawmakers from other states. “That is not the way this country and this government were set up.”
It is no accident the greatest defiance has surfaced in the West, a region with a history of antipathy toward outsiders and, especially, Washington.
“You’re going to get more of it as people look at the growth of the federal government and the big bailout of financial interests,” said Eric Herzik, a University of Nevada political scientist and expert on the Sagebrush Rebellion, the populist movement that swept the West a generation ago and helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
The sacred text for Wimmer, Boniek and their allies is the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which limits the powers of Washington. Although the language is straightforward — all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved for the states — the meaning has been debated (and elastically interpreted) throughout history.
Conservatives and libertarians have long cited the 10th Amendment to press their case against the expansion of federal power, usually to little avail. Their latest effort is the state sovereignty movement. (Some also refer to the “states’ rights” movement, though for many those words evoke the segregated South and efforts to fight racial equality.)
In just the last few months, legislatures in five states — Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma and South Dakota — have passed resolutions asserting their sovereignty and asking the federal government to “cease and desist” from meddling in their business. Similar measures are pending in about two dozen other states, including seven out West.
“There’s a lot of people in the federal government saying: ‘Do this. You must do that. We’re the boss,’ ” said Republican state Rep. Brad Klippert, co-sponsor of sovereignty legislation pending in Olympia, Wash. “That’s not true.”
Several Republican governors, including Sarah Palin in Alaska, Mark Sanford in South Carolina and Rick Perry in Texas, have gone beyond symbolism, turning down a portion of federal stimulus funds — and rejecting the strings attached — as a way of expressing their independence from Washington. That has sometimes meant going to court and fighting fellow lawmakers eager to accept the money.
Recently, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle’s Outdoors Editor Shauna Stephenson published an article about recent changes to energy rules and regulations from the nation’s Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and how they would affect both Wyoming’s energy producers and the conservation groups that fight them. (Yes, we need energy, but not at any cost) Stephenson failed to ask the one fundamental question that should be driving this debate and instead focused on the partisan issue at hand.
Montana state Rep. Joel Boniek, shown with his mule Jesse, introduced a bill seeking to
exempt from federal regulation any firearm made and used within the state borders.
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