Ability of the States to Resist Federal Threats to Liberty

I have been asked about “nullification” and whether the
various bills pending in our General Assembly right now, two of them from
Spartanburg representatives attempting to nullify the Patient Affordable
Care Act,” are Constitutional.

There are two questions here: 1) Is there a Constitutional problem with
these bills; and 2) If not, will such efforts be effective, even if they are
passed by the General Assembly? The second question is a political
question and the answer to a political question is always, “Do you have
the numbers?” Or as our own local Constitutional Law Professor,
Dr. Robert Jeffrey, put it in in a response to a
reporter from the Spartanburg Herald Journal, the use of nullification
requires an “army.” And while that army does not have to be a military
army, it must be at the least, be a large army of people.

Article Six of the Constitution says: “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and
all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the
several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.”

Thus, if a state official believes a law has been passed in violation of the
Constitution, at whatever level, he or she is bound by oath to defend the
Constitution, but not instructed as to how to go about this. However, very
early in our history, when the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition
Acts, the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures responded with resolutions
condemning these Acts as Unconstitutional. Virginia’s resolution was written
by James Madison, the Father of the Constitution; Kentucky’s was secretly
penned by the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, then Vice-President of the United States. Together they were called Nullification resolutions.

There are other examples of the use of nullification in our nation’s history,
such as the refusal of anti-slavery officials in Wisconsin to follow the 1860
Fugitive Slave Act.

If we consult The Federalist Papers, as the Supreme Court has done hundreds of times in its efforts to determine the Constitutionality of state
and federal laws as well as the executive actions of federal and state
officials, we find support for state resistance to federal encroachment

Excerpt from Madison’s Federalist Paper 51
In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself (Retrieved March 8, 2013, from http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm).

Excerpts from Hamilton’s Federalist Paper 28
The obstacles to usurpation and the facilities of resistance increase with the increased extent of the state, provided the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them. The natural strength of the people in a large community, in proportion to the artificial strength of the government, is greater than in a small, and of course more competent to a struggle with the attempts of the government to establish a tyranny. But in a confederacy the people, without exaggeration, may be said to be entirely the masters of their own fate. Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress. How wise will it be in them by cherishing the union to preserve to themselves an advantage which can never be too highly prized!
It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority. Projects of usurpation cannot be masked under pretenses so likely to escape the penetration of select bodies of men, as of the people at large. The legislatures will have better means of information. They can discover the danger at a distance; and possessing all the organs of civil power, and the confidence of the people, they can at once adopt a regular plan of opposition, in which they can combine all the resources of the community. They can readily communicate with each other in the different States, and unite their common forces for the protection of their common liberty.
The great extent of the country is a further security. We have already experienced its utility against the attacks of a foreign power. And it would have precisely the same effect against the enterprises of ambitious rulers in the national councils. If the federal army should be able to quell the resistance of one State, the distant States would have it in their power to make head with fresh forces. The advantages obtained in one place must be abandoned to subdue the opposition in others; and the moment the part which had been reduced to submission was left to itself, its efforts would be renewed, and its resistance revive (Retrieved March 8, 2013, from http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa28.htm).

Finally, in more recent times, there have been efforts to nullify Federal laws which did not resort to the use of the words “nullify” or “nullification,” but neither a rose nor a thorn are changed by their names and whatever the state resistance to federal laws might be called, eventually one side or the other wins –
depending on which side has the most political support.

I often wonder why we continue to conduct this charade every four years.

The Framers did not even hold a prayer before their daily Sessions and when such a motion was made on June 28th, 1787 it did not pass. The minutes of the Covention do not show debate referencing the Holy Bible. The Federalists argued that a Bill of Rights was not needed throughout the Ratification Conventions.

When Patrick Henry leading the anti-Federalists began getting traction to call a “second” convention, the federalist changed direction and introduced what beame the Bill of Rights.

Until the ratification of the Constitution of 1787 ours was a conventantal nation. One of the reasons that the Constitution has failed or is failing (depending on a person’s point of view) is because it initiated the turning away from God and instilled upon our land a “national” form of government as the Virgina Plan described.

In early 1983, I wrote Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia
to ask about the redeemability of Federal Reserve
Notes. His reply arrived on March 11 and read (in
part) as posted below.

It would APPEAR that either:
1. Sam Nunn ACTUALLY gets it about what happens when man
(or certain men) play God with “money;”
2. Nunn DOESN’T get it — and some staffer sent this out
without actually READING it or running it by the boss (in
which case said staffer now works for the DC Sanitation
Department.
3. None of the above. Because nearly every American is an
economic illiterate, what possible harm could it do to send it?
In which case, you economic illiterates who read this will mutter
“So what?” and flip back to MTV.

In any event, for the edification of you non-economic illiterates
out there, here it is.

“Dear Richard:

Thank you for your letter requesting information on
redeemability of Federal Reserve Notes for lawful
money. I have enclosed information from the
Congressional Research Service that I hope will be of
assistance.”

The enclosure was 4 pages from something called
“The Gold Standard: Its history and record against
inflation. A Study prepared for the use of the
Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy of the Joint
Economic Committee, Congress of The United States.” It
was printed September 18, 1981. I was sent only the
England and U.S. portions of the study. What they
revealed was most interesting. From the England study:
(Emphasis added)

“England has had 350 years of experience with
various forms of the gold standard. She first went on
the gold coin standard, de facto, in 1717. This was
done by Sir Isaac Newton, then Master of the Mint (and we all know what a dumb ass HE was). It
was done by pricing gold at the mint more favorably,
relative to silver, than in the marketplace. An Act of
Parliament in 1816 gave formal recognition to this
‘new’ monetary standard that had been operational for a
century in promoting England to a world power.

“Between 1797 and 1821, England temporarily
suspended the gold standard because of the economic
disruptions of the Napoleonic Wars. With no gold
backing to the currency, the supply of money had no
discipline except that imposed by the Board of
Governors of the Bank of England (analogous to our Fed
of today).

The result was that wholesale commodity prices shot up
nearly 50% in 4 years-a momentous inflation.

The ‘Bullion Committee’ was formed by parliament
to investigate. Their findings read in part as follows:

‘The suspension of cash payments has had the
effect of committing into the hands of the Directors of
the Bank of England, to be exercised by their sole
discretion the immediate charge of supplying the
country with that quantity of circulating medium which
exactly proportioned to the wants and occasions of
the Public. In the judgment of the Committee, that is
a trust which it is unreasonable to expect that the
Directors of the Bank of England should ever be able to
discharge. The most detailed knowledge of the actual
trade of the Country, combined with the profound
Science in all principles of Money and circulation,
would not allow any man or set of men to adjust, and
keep always adjusted, the right proportion of
circulating medium in a country to the wants of trade.’

“Gold convertibility of the currency was resumed
in 1821. It is a matter of record that wholesale
prices came back down immediately to the level
preceding the hiatus in the gold standard.

“England was again off the gold standard between
1919 and 1925. When she resumed gold convertibility it
was on a gold bullion standard where she remained until
1931, when she went off the gold standard altogether in
the midst of the Great Depression.”

Under the United States, we find the following:

“The long period of the gold standard in the
United States was not an economic nirvana. The most
severe inflationary period reaching completion under
the gold standard was from 1897 to 1920. But from
trough to peak, the average annual compound rate
was 5.4%–mild by present experience. And most of this
occurred from 1914 to 1920 when the European war and
its aftermath bore so heavily on the domestic economy.
If we look at the period between 1897 and 1914, the
average annual rate of inflation was 2.6% — enviable
from the perspective of today.”

Many of us are fed up with the GOP national “leadership”. They are either unwilling or incapable of challenging an administration trampling on the Constitution and making a mockery of the rule of law.
Boehner’s recent move to halt Issa’s probe of “Fast and Furious” is just the tip of the iceberg.

The anger and dissention during the Georgia Convention was simply an expression that, to the extent you Georgia officials support an uncaring and/or ineffective GOP national “leadership”, you are their accomplices in Obama’s ongoing destruction of this nation. Some of us are actually beginning to wonder if the passivity of the national GOP is because Holder, ala J. Edgar Hoover, has “files” on these guys.

Then again, it is more than possible that these GOP Beltway guys do nothing for fear they will lose the fradulent votes of the millions of illegals and “walking dead” voters the Dems have used — and will use — to steal the 2012 election. If they believe sitting down and remaining silent while Obama et al turn us into a socialist dictatorship will garner them those votes, they’re too stupid to be in “leadership” positions. Standing on PRINCIPLE is often a costly endeavor.

An even worse nightmare scenario is that the GOP national people AGREE WITH WHAT OBAMA and his minions are doing and look forward to being the princes in the new regime. The old joke that the GOP is simply Democrat Lite will have achieved a new level.

Referencing Washington during a recent FNN show, Steve Hayes used a phrase that has crept into my speech when he called the place “…a cesspool.”

Statesmen cannot survive in a cesspool. That almost certainly explains why there are but a handful left up there.

I leave you with the words of our first President:
“The common and continual mischief of the spirit of Party is
sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to
discourage and restrain it.” George Washington