by Michael Boldin, LR

The following is based on a speech at the first annual Tenth Amendment Summit in Atlanta, GA on February 26, 2010.

How can a “crazy” Californian and a “conservative” Georgian be friends? It’s simple – through the principles of ’98. In 1798, the John Adams administration signed into law that Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government or its officials. In practice, it was used to quell the freedom of speech in dissent against the sitting administration.

In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Thomas Jefferson responded:

“the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government”

But wait – that’s not all. He went on to say that all undelegated powers exercised by the federal government are “unathoritative, void and of no force.” And, that a “nullification of the act is the rightful remedy.”

NULLIFICATION?

There’s been plenty of people talking about nullification lately, but many people don’t know what it really means. I can think of no better way to define it than how my friend Derek Sheriff from the Arizona Tenth Amendment Center has done:

Nullification is not secession or insurrection, but neither is it unconditional or unlimited submission. Nullification is not something that requires any decision, statement or action from any branch of the federal government. Nullification is not the result of obtaining a favorable court ruling. Nullification is not the petitioning of the federal government to start doing or to stop doing anything. Nullification doesn’t depend on any federal law being repealed. Nullification does not require permission from any person or institution outside of one’s own state.

Nullification is something that’s already happening around the country – and Derek explains the process:

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.

ROSCOE FILBURN

During the Great Depression, while millions of people were out of work or starving, the FDR administration required American farmers to restrict production of wheat in order to raise prices.

As a farmer, Roscoe Filburn was told he could plant a little over 10 acres of wheat, which he did grow and sell on the market. He also decided that it was in his best interest – possibly because he had less revenue due to the production limitations – to plant another 10 or so acres. But, the “excess” wheat grown was used at home to feed his livestock, among other things. He never sold it, so he saw this as being outside the scope of Congressional power to regulate “interstate commerce.”

What did the federal government do? The expected – they ordered Roscoe to destroy his crops and pay a fine. Think about that for a moment and you’ll really understand the evil of having too much power in too few hands. At a time when large numbers of people were starving, these thugs in government forced people to reduce production for the sake of raising prices. From this, it seems clear to me that corporate bailouts have been going on a long, long time in America.

Roscoe sued, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In Wickard v Filburn, the Court ruled against him and the result was that the Federal Government assumed a power that was new in the history of this country. It now had the power to control the growing and consuming of something that never left one’s back yard.

LOST LIBERTY

John Adams, who as we can see from his signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts, was no saint, did give us a great warning on the growth of government power. In 1775 he wrote, “liberty once lost, is lost forever.” He went on to explain that when the People allow government to gain power and restrict liberty, it will never voluntarily give that power back. Liberty given up to government power will never be returned to the people without a long and difficult struggle.

If we fast-forward to present times, we can see this principle at work.

ANGEL RAICH

In the 1990s, the People of California voted to legalize consumption of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Angel Raich, who has a huge cancerous tumor in her brain was told by her doctor and California law that using marijuana to relieve some of the pain associated with her cancer was acceptable.

The Feds don’t take too kindly to states passing laws in direct contravention to theirs. Marijuana, for example, is illegal on a federal level in all circumstances, and federal agencies have consistently said they don’t recognize state laws. You can probably guess what happened, right?

Federal agents destroyed Angel’s homegrown marijuana plants without much resistance. Like Roscoe before her, Angel sued, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2005, the Supreme Court once again ruled that growing and consuming a plant in one’s own back yard qualified as “interstate commerce.” And, because of that, the federal government was then authorized to control, regulate, or outright ban such activities under the threat of fine or prison.

Clarence Thomas, in his famous dissent, got it right when he wrote, “If the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States. This makes a mockery of Madison’s assurance to the people of New York that the “powers delegated” to the Federal Government are “few and defined,” while those of the States are “numerous and indefinite.”

PARTISAN CONSTITUTIONALISTS?

The main problem we face is that much of the support for the 10th Amendment is little more than partisanship. For many years, conservatives have rightly railed against policies such as the ones that FDR used against Roscoe Filburn. But, at the same time, they’ve turned a blind eye to those same policies when used against Angel Raich and her use of marijuana. And on the other hand, liberals have done just the opposite.

The bottom line, though, is this. When you allow politicians to bend the rules of the Constitution – even for things you may support – over a long period of time, sooner or later you’re going to end up with politicians who feel that the rules don’t apply at all. And, if we’re not there right now, we’re pretty darn close.

EVERY ISSUE, EVERY TIME

That’s why we at the Tenth Amendment Center demand adherence to the Constitution – Every Issue. Every time. No exceptions. No excuses. That means that much of what the federal government does is unconstitutional, including:

The Department of Education, The Patriot Act, Federal Gun Laws and Regulations, National Health Care Mandates, and something that’s been going on since 1941, wars without a Congressional declaration of war from Congress.

LIBERTY

From this 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.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been interviewed by mainstream media sources literally dozens of times. And whether it’s Fox News, or CNN, or the New York Times, the reporters invariably ask the same question, “What political party do you support?” Each time, I give them the same answer, “The Tenth Amendment Center is a non-partisan think tank that supports the principles of strictly limited constitutional government.”

They always have virtually the same follow up question too – “what about you? As the founder of the Center, what’s your political background, what political party do you support?”

“None,” I tell them. I don’t know if they believe me, but it’s true.

I’m no conservative, and I’m no liberal. I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. And I’m not a green or a libertarian, or a socialist or an anarchist. I’m not even an independent.

All I am is me, and all I want is to live free.

Thank you….

This is reprinted from the Tenth Amendment Center.

by Steve Watson

Billed as an alternative grassroots movement to the Tea Party, which has been for the most part absorbed by mainline Republicans and Neoconservatives, the “Coffee Party” promised to wake up politically minded Americans and offered a different avenue for the freedom movement.

However, the so called founder of the Coffee Party has been quickly exposed as an Obama campaign operative, whose caffeine concept was purely designed to undermine and co-opt the Tea Party ideology.

Described as “a documentary filmmaker who lives outside Washington”, Annabel Park has amassed some 40,000 members via a Facebook page.

“We’re not the opposite of the Tea Party,” Ms. Park, 41, told the New York Times. “We’re a different model of civic participation, but in the end we may want some of the same things.”

“We need to roll up our sleeves, put our heads together and work it out,” she said. “That’s, to me, an American way of doing this.”

The slogan is “Wake Up and Stand Up.” The mission statement declares that the federal government is “not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges we face as Americans.”

At first glance this sounds like attractive stuff to concerned Americans who are sick and tired of big government ruling over their lives. However, a quick background search on Miss Park reveals her real intentions.

Park campaigned for Obama in 2008 and was one of the organizers and operators of the influential United for Obama video channel at YouTube.

“I found that people have little understanding of the change that Senator Barack Obama is advocating. I thought from my experience in using videos for civil movements that videos would be the best way to promote the need for change and for Obama. That’s why I decided to work for the Obama campaign,” Annabel Park said.

She made over twenty promotional videos for the Obama campaign that drew tens of thousands of views.

William A. Jacobson of Le-gal In-sur-rec-tion has the full story.

The revelation, along with the discovery that Park is a former Strategy Analyst at the NY Times, [Park's Linked In page has been taken down, here is a cached link] explains why she has received a great deal of mainstream media coverage recently.

The Times and the Washington Post both ran glowing articles on Park in the last week, a factor that immediately raised suspicion over her grassroots credentials.

Clearly, either the newspapers were incapable of googling her name or taking five minutes to look into her activities, or they were fully aware of Park’s intentions and background and chose not to include it in their pieces.

In addition, Park’s various tweets reveal that, far from being open to working with Tea Party activists, Park appears to have a vitriolic hatred of them:

“The Coffee Party simply is part of the perpetual Obama campaign, a means by which to subvert the real grassroots Tea Party movement by co-opting part of the message, but in a way which supports keeping Obama in power.” Jacobson writes.

“Much like a parasite which feeds off of and ultimately takes over the host.”

The author of the New York Times piece has since declined a request by Jacobson to update her article on Park with this information.

Unfortunately, the Coffee Party is simply another example of the entrenched political establishment piggy backing on the unstoppable grassroots liberty movement in an attempt to manipulate and control it.

from The Nashville Post

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stakeright through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speechdesigned to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

This new tea party bears no resemblance to the one that began a year ago as a reaction to the collapse of our financial system and the subsequent bailout. That movement of ragtag and unorganized libertarians, independents and conservatives was something new and unique. An authentic protest movement angered not just by the new President, Barack Obama, who had presided over the bailouts but the president who started the ball rolling and whose incompetence had led to the crisis in the first place, George W. Bush.

The people we saw on the steps of Legislative Plaza and county courthouses across the state last year weren’t “movement conservatives.” Certainly the movement conservatives were there at those protests but the tea parties were much bigger in size, scope and concept than just traditional modern conservatism reheated. Last night, the professional conservatives fixed that for good.

For over a year the media has struggled to try and define just what exactly the movement was. Now they have a definition.

Sarah Palin.

Palin, while explicitly saying the movement had no leader, implicitly offered herself up as one. After this speech, which was widely covered on the internet and carried on television, the tea party movement and Sarah Palin will be inextricably intertwined.

So with the spotlight on her and the attention of the curious media surrounding her what did she present as a tea party agenda? What did she discuss?

Ronald Reagan, national defense and superficial deficiencies of the current democratic occupant of the White House. Wow.

Read the rest at this link.

by Kurt Nimmo

The Tea Party movement is now almost completely unrecognizable from what it was a few short years ago. It came to prominence in 2008 when the Libertarian Party of Illinois planned to hold an April 15, 2009 anti-tax “Boston Tea Party” in Chicago. In February 2009, the idea grew after CNBC personality Rick Santelli, speaking from the floor of the Chicago stock exchange, criticized the Obama administration’s tax and economic policies and urged Americans become Tea Party activists.

In fact, the idea began as the Boston Tea Party in 2006. It was founded by a group of former Libertarian Party members who criticized the party for its “abdication of political responsibilities,” declaring that “Americans deserve and desperately need a pro-freedom party that forcefully advocates libertarian solutions to the issues of today.” The Boston Tea Party opposed statism at all levels. “The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose.”

How things have changed.

It didn’t take long for establishment Republicans to steal the idea and claim it as their own. A few weeks after Rick Santelli made his comments, Ron Paul’s media coordinator Steve Gordonwent on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show and complained about what he characterized as an attempt by Republicans to hijack the idea. Gordon specifically blamed former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

It didn’t take long for Republicans to embrace the idea. RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, and Rep. Michele Bachmann from Minnesota have suggested the Tea Party should be rolled into the Republican Borg hive.

Now there will be a national Tea Party convention in Nashville. It will be a parade of Republican statists with former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin leading the charge. “I look forward to meeting many Americans who share a commitment to limited government, common sense and personal responsibility. This movement is truly a grassroots, organic effort. It’s not a top-down organization,” Palin wrote for USA Today, “it’s a ground-up call to action that already has both political parties rethinking the way they do business.”

Ground-up? Tea Party candidates for the 2010 mid-term elections “will be expected to support the Republican National Committee platform,” according to Fox News. “If a particular candidate meets the proposed Tea Party criteria he or she would be eligible for fundraising and grassroots Tea Party support.”

“Once elected to office, members would be required to join a Congressional Tea Party Caucus, attend regular meetings and be held accountable for the votes they cast. Those who stray from the Tea Party path would risk losing it’s support and a likely re-election challenge.”

In other words, business as usual. Under the rule of George W. Bush and the Republicans, “inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent, according to the libertarian Cato Institute. Eight years of a Republican president, six with a Republican-controlled Congress, resulted in bigger government, the biggest expansion of entitlements in 40 years and a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street that continues to grow,” writes Donny Ferguson of the Libertarian National Committee.

Bush and the Republicans also invaded two sovereign nations and killed more than a million Iraqis. Democrats by and large supported these war crimes. They also overwhelmingly supported the Republicans when they attacked the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the so-called Patriot Act being only the most egregious example).

If the co-opted Tea Party embraces the Republican National Committee platform, it will finalize its mutation from a grassroots libertarian organization into an establishment statist tool pushing a national debt for the banksters, bloated government, taxation, perpetual war, and continued attacks on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It should be obvious by now that the Republicans plan to run Sarah Palin against Obama in 2012. This will be a disaster for the Republicans because many Americans are not fooled by her sudden Tea Party plumage. Republicans are desperate to regain control of the White House and Congress and give us four or eight more years of Bush and his warmongering statist neocons. It is a shabby and absurdly transparent gimmick.

Real Tea Party activists and supporters need to reject Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, and the Republicans out of hand. They should be vocal about their rejection. Otherwise we will end up with another ideologue and teleprompter reading cigar store Indian for the ruling elite.

by Michael Boldin

“The several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government.”
–Thomas Jefferson

For the past few days, I’ve received loads of emails urging me to get active regarding the healthcare vote – most of which had a subject line similar to: “Last Chance to Stop National Healthcare!”

Well, if you believe the only way to protect your rights is by begging federal politicians to do what you want, then these emails are certainly right. The vote went as expected, and so will the next.

So if you think marching on D.C. or calling your Representatives, or threating to “throw the bums out” in 2010 or 2012 or 20-whatever, is going to further the cause of the Constitution and your liberty – you might as well get your shackles on now. Your last chance has come and gone.

But, those of you who visit this site regularly already know that the Senate’s health care vote is far from the end of things – and you also know that even when it goes into effect (which I assume some version will), it’s still not the end of the road for your freedom.

The real way to resist DC is not by begging politicians and judges in Washington to allow us to exercise our rights…it’s to exercise our rights whether they want to give us “permission” to or not.

Nullification – state-level resistance to unconstitutional federal laws – is the way forward.

When a state ‘nullifies’ a federal law, it is proclaiming that the law in question is void and inoperative, or ‘non-effective,’ within the boundaries of that state; or, in other words, not a law as far as that state is concerned.

It’s peaceful, effective, and has a long history in the American tradition. It’s been invoked in support of free speech, in opposition to war and fugitive slave laws, and more. Read more on this history here.

Regarding nullification and health care, there’s already a growing movement right now. Led by Arizona, voters in a number of states may get a chance to approve State Constitutional Amendments in 2010 that would effectively ban national health care in their states. Our sources here at the Tenth Amendment Center indicate to us that we should expect to see 20-25 states consider such legislation in 2010.

20 States resisting DC can do what calling, marching, yelling, faxing, and emailing has almost never done. Stop the feds dead in their tracks.

For example, 13 states are already defying federal marijuana prohibition, and the federal government is having such a hard time dealing with it that the Obama administration recently announced that they would no longer prioritize enforcement in states that have medical marijuana laws.

Better yet, in the last 2+ years more than 20 states have been able to effectively prevent the Real ID Act of 2005 from being implemented. How did they do that? They passed laws and resolutions refusing to comply with it. And today, it’s effectively null and void without ever being repealed by Congress or challenged in court.

While the Obama administration would like to revive it under a different name, the reality is still there – with massive state-level resistance, the federal government can be pushed back inside its constitutional box. Issue by issue, law by law, the best way to change the federal government is by resisting it on a state level.

That’s nullification at work.

Over the years, wise men and women warned us that the Constitution would never enforce itself. The time is long overdue for people to start recognizing this fact, and bring that enforcement closer to home.

The bottom line? If you want to make real change; if you want to really do something for liberty and for the Constitution…focus on local activism and your state governments.

Thomas Jefferson would be proud!

Michael Boldin is the founder of the Tenth Amendment Center

Copyright © 2009 by TenthAmendmentCenter.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.