You can't afford to not read this. If your state is one of those guilty of not
getting their absentee ballots out to our troops in the battlefield, despite
their pathetic excuses, call your state congressmen, governor and federal
Representatives and Senators and demand that this issue be resolved once and for
all.
The most pathetic excuse I've heard was that mailing the ballots would not
guarantee the receipt of the ballotted votes in time, much less the security of
the ballots. For God's sake, we have the most secure, timely method of getting
these ballots to our troops and back to their state's Election Commission
offices on time. It's called the United States Air Force. I guarantee that
these particular absentee ballots would go "full circle" faster than any other
absentee ballots mailed out by any state.
This Patriot is a good friend of mine and the most honorable American that I've
ever known. So what you will be reading is coming from his heart, is
straightforward, and he is earnestly looking for fellow Patriots to help take
care of the rights of our men and women in the armed services.
Thanks for your help,
William (Wild Bill) Conant
My name is George "Nutzy" _ _ _ _ _. I served my Country with Honor and
> distinction for over 31 years. I have done thing and been places that many
> wouldn't brag about.I lost 3 of my best friends I ever had in my entire life
> in combat. I have myself been shot, stabbed, blown up and left on the side of the
> road for dead. So now you are wondering why I am writing this: because the
> worst thing you can think of is happening to "OUR" Troops. States are making
> a concerted effort to stop military personal in their states (Illinois,
> New York and Calf so far) from being able to vote. This is the worst thing
> that can happen to them. You are basically telling them they can't vote but
> go die for mine. No one, not even the President, should get to vote before
> these national treasures we hold near and dear to our hearts. Those state
> representatives should be removed from office and his pay docked until the
> military men and woman vote. Just in NY alone it has come to over 330 thousand
> votes that could change every election in NY. But not even punishment for
> anyone whose job it was to get these ballots out. This sucks and I think
> everyone needs to start calling in on this one; and people wonder why I left
> the service with a very bad taste in my mouth. Will the Democrats stop at
> nothing to secure they're seat,,,,,Well maybe we need to start doing
> something to put them out of it; Permanently.
>
> Please Call everyone in your state and ask them if they ever served and why
> they are treating our soldiers and sailors like cannon falter. This is
> sickening!!!!
Showing posts with label citizens' rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label citizens' rights. Show all posts
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, August 9, 2010
THE FRAGILITY OF OUR NATURAL UNALIENABLE RIGHTS
The following is a quote from almost 45 years ago. If the citizens of the USA are not truly dedicated to the philosophy behind this quote, then the Republic is on perilous waters: “Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment... You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children, this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. “ – Ronald Reagan
This country survived the devastating economic times of the Socialistic policies of President Carter by implementing the conservative measures of the Reagan years. This prophetic statement has risen again because We, the People remained apathetic towards governmental affairs within our states and our federal government for the following decades. Now, the citizens of the USA are waking up and becoming more involved in our governments’ business (from local up to federal) in an effort to ensure that we are truly being represented by our elected officials.
Yet, we still find ourselves in this same prophetic situation as described by President Reagan. We, the People still have a lot of hard work to perform and it will go far beyond the remaining primaries and general election of this year. It is up to the citizens of our Republic to remain vigilant towards our governments’ affairs. Otherwise, the reality that was spoken of some 45 years ago will become a prophetic reality for our Republic and for our future generations.
This country survived the devastating economic times of the Socialistic policies of President Carter by implementing the conservative measures of the Reagan years. This prophetic statement has risen again because We, the People remained apathetic towards governmental affairs within our states and our federal government for the following decades. Now, the citizens of the USA are waking up and becoming more involved in our governments’ business (from local up to federal) in an effort to ensure that we are truly being represented by our elected officials.
Yet, we still find ourselves in this same prophetic situation as described by President Reagan. We, the People still have a lot of hard work to perform and it will go far beyond the remaining primaries and general election of this year. It is up to the citizens of our Republic to remain vigilant towards our governments’ affairs. Otherwise, the reality that was spoken of some 45 years ago will become a prophetic reality for our Republic and for our future generations.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
THE STATE SOVEREIGNTY MOVEMENT
The following was excerpted from the Georgia First.org website and reflects Ray McBerry's movement for state sovereignty rights for the citizens of Georgia (Ray is the candidate for Governor of Georgia). This article was written by Dr. Donald W. Livingston, Professor at Emory University:
The State Sovereignty Movement by Dr. Donald W. Livingston
For the first time in 144 years State interposition (Madison) and State nullification and secession (Jefferson) have entered public discourse as remedies to usurpations by the central government of rights reserved to the people of the sovereign States by the Constitution. Since Americans are not in the habit of exercising these policy options, it is worthwhile to ask just what State legislators and governors can do to protect their citizens from usurpations by the central government. First, they can begin by passing resolutions (as a number have done), declaring in no uncertain terms that all powers not delegated to the central government nor prohibited to the States by the Constitution are reserved by them; and that the States themselves have the authority to judge what is reserved and what is delegated--Supreme Court case law notwithstanding. To deny this is to say that the central government can define the limits of its own power which flatly contradicts the Constitution’s language of State delegated and reserved powers.
Second, the States can insist that an office be set up in Congress to receive and respond to these resolutions. Resolutions are words. They cost little to produce, but words have power. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume observed, political authority is based primarily on opinion not force. It is not merely iron bars that confine you to prison, it is also the guard’s opinion not to let you out. If you could change his mind, the bars could not restrain you. A continuous flood of resolutions from the States about the constitutionality of this or that issue (and widely publicized), would serve to educate the public (and their rulers) about constitutional limits and alter the mind-set of politics in a decentralist direction. Further, State legislators and governors should revive, where appropriate, the Jeffersonian discourse of State interposition, nullification, and secession as policy options. To deny this is to say that an American State is not a genuine political society at all, but a mere aggregate of individuals under control of a central government that alone can define the limits of its powers. To hear such discourse in public speech can strengthen civic virtue and revive the long slumbering disposition of self-government that has been suppressed by a century of runaway centralization. Lincoln understood the power of words, and advanced the cause of centralization by refusing to describe the States as sovereign political societies. He described them as mere counties authorized by central authority. He asked incredulously: “What is this particular sacredness of a State? If a State, in one instance, and a county in another should be equal in extent of territory, and equal in number of people, wherein is that State any better than a county?” Lincoln was not describing the federative America that Jefferson and Madison founded, but an imagined and wished for centralized, unitary American state. It is time that the Lincolnian inversion of political discourse be inverted.
Third, In addition to changing the terms of discourse, State legislators and governors should engage in 10th amendment acts of recovering usurped authority. The least controversial of these acts would be simply to not accept federal money for projects that are judged unconstitutional, such as federal involvement in education. Refuse the money, and begin restoring state and local control over education or whatever the issue might be.
Fourth, in order to restore usurped constitutional authority, a State must be prepared, at some point, to resist federal intrusion. There is a long history of States doing just that. Georgia nullified the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chisholm vs. Georgia (1793); New England States nullified fugitive slave laws; and earlier New England townships nullified Jefferson’s embargo and the war of 1812 declared under Madison’s administration. Jefferson said “he felt the foundations of the government shaken under my feet by the New England townships.” Wisconsin was nullifying what it declared to be usurpations by the Supreme Court into the 1850s. There was a time when the States kept the central government under control.
Can this be done today? Before it is attempted a clarification is necessary. We must understand that any such constitutional challenge is a political one based on the States’ sovereign authority and not a matter justiciable by the courts. Genuine federalism in America can be recovered only by political action in the name of the State’s own authority and not by Supreme Court legalism. Indeed, legalism only affirms that the Court has the final say over what powers the States have. When States interposed to block the Supreme Court’s orders to desegregate public schools in the South on the ground that such orders were unconstitutional, the move failed but only because racial segregation was not a popular issue. Many scholars then and now thought that Brown v. Board of Education was bad constitutional law, i.e., that the court had abandoned its proper role of policing the Constitution in favor of social engineering. Most, however, approved of the engineering, and paid little regard to the constitutional cost.
But the process can be reversed. States can recover usurped authority by carefully choosing the right issue, at the right time, in the right circumstances, and for the right reasons. Such an act, of course, would require considerable political prudence and skill, and should not be attempted without a reasonable chance of support from public opinion. In such an act of lawful and constitutional resistance, the State would be answerable only to her other sister states. The action might spark a constitutional amendment as happened when Georgia nullified the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) that an individual could sue a state in federal court without the State’s permission. The States agreed with Georgia’s nullification and promptly passed the 11th amendment that prohibited such suits. That is how American federalism was supposed to work. The three branches of the central government would check each other, but it would be up to the sovereign States to keep the central government itself in check. The Constitution was to be enforced through political action of the States not by the legalism of nine unelected Supreme Court justices.
Another outcome might be a political settlement that would allow a State, or a number of States, to opt out of a class of federal acts judged to be unconstitutional or fundamentally repugnant. Other federal systems allow this possibility. For instance, the Canadian Constitution has institutionalized federal nullification. Any Province can nullify acts of the central government in the area of civil rights within its own borders, even though other Provinces may enforce the act in theirs.
The States can also try to restrict unconstitutional acts of the central government through amending the Constitution, but that is virtually impossible. Two thirds of both Houses of Congress are required to pass an amendment which must then be ratified by three quarters of the States. Since 1790, over 10,000 amendments have been proposed to Congress. Only 30 have passed the Congressional gate-keepers, and 27 have been ratified. The other path is that two thirds of the States can compel Congress to call a constitutional convention–a very high bar to meet. It is, therefore, virtually impossible to limit the central government’s power by constitutional amendment. It is worth noting that the framers of the Confederate Constitution sought to overcome this barrier to self-government in Article 1, Section 1 which enacted that if only three States concurred on a constitutional amendment, Congress would have to call a constitutional convention. And only two thirds of the States would be needed to ratify the amendment.
To all of this it is often said that State interposition, nullification, and secession were eliminated as policy options by the Civil War. Brute force, however, cannot settle moral and constitutional questions. Lincoln’s claim that the Union is older than the States; that it created the States; that a State is merely an administrative unit (like a county in a unitary state), are historical and moral claims that must stand on their own. They cannot be settled by superior firepower but only by reasons that persuade. The problems of limiting central power in a federal system of State delegated and reserved powers, which brought forth the doctrines of State interposition, nullification, and secession as remedies, are as topical today as they were when first broached in the 1790s.
Or it will be said that, even so, too much water has gone over the dam. Institutions of the central government are so entrenched, so entangled with powerful interests, and this system has gone on for so long that people have lost any sense of civic virtue on the State and local level. It is certainly true that the central government has intruded into nearly every aspect of life, and disentanglement will not occur overnight. But centralization in America is not as intense and debilitating as it was in the former Soviet Union, from which, nevertheless, 15 States recovered civic virtue and seceded. Moreover, the current State sovereignty movement suggests that State and local civic virtue are not dead in America. But as mentioned above, a shift in the decentralist direction will require a long course of political re-education. And the sort of education required is not academic but practical–one exemplified in the conduct and civic virtue of State legislators and governors who take to heart Madison’s admonition in the Virginia Resolutions (1798) that State governments not only have the constitutional right of “interposition” to protect their citizens against usurpations by the central government but the “duty” to do so.
Finally, there is the objection that the primacy of State political action over Supreme Court legalism could work when there were fewer States, but now that there are 50 States interposition and nullification have become impractical. But If true that means the Union has simply grown too large for the purposes of self-government; in which case the obvious response is that it should be divided through secession into smaller political units that make self-government viable. Consider how dull our notion of self-government has become. Congress has capped the number of representatives in the House at 435, a majority of which is only 218 representatives. A majority in the Senate is 51. A majority of both Houses is a mere 269 people. This small number, with concurrence of the President, rules over 300 million people. But worse. Congress has long ago alienated much of its legislative responsibility to the Executive and Judicial branch. Its main interest is in distributing its vast revenue (which now is nearly 3 trillion dollars) to its clients. The President and the Supreme Court are the dominant rulers. The Executive office makes war, and its bureaucracy makes laws. The Supreme Court, with only 9 unelected judges, has become the most important social policy making body in the Union, and makes claim to be the final authority on interpreting the Constitution. Never in history have so many been ruled by so few.
As the American empire grows in population and as the ratchet of centralization tightens with each turn, talk of self-government becomes increasingly meaningless. The ratio of representatives to population in the House of Representatives today is one representative for every 690,000 people–a vacuous ratio for representation. When the population reaches 435 million, there will be one “representative” for every million persons. What to do? Expand the size of the House? No; it is about the right size for a legislative body. The only remedy is territorial division of the Union through secession into a number of different and independent political units. Such a division can spring only from political action by the States, each acting in its sovereign capacity. And what form the new order might take (whether a number of federal unions, a number of independent states, whether these will be large or small states like Singapore, etc.) can only be determined by political action of the States themselves.
The central government of the United States (that is, 9 unelected judges, a congressional majority of only 269, and 1 CEO) cannot manage the bloated and unwieldy empire that a century of ritualistic centralization has produced; nor will it ever relinquish power. George Kennan thought that a discourse on how to divide the Union was bound to develop out of pressure generated by the sheer oversized character of the regime. It is too early to say that the current State sovereignty movement is the beginning of that discourse, but it might well be the beginning of the beginning.
________________
Dr. Donald Livingston, professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has been called the preeminent political philosopher of our day in Georgia.
The State Sovereignty Movement by Dr. Donald W. Livingston
For the first time in 144 years State interposition (Madison) and State nullification and secession (Jefferson) have entered public discourse as remedies to usurpations by the central government of rights reserved to the people of the sovereign States by the Constitution. Since Americans are not in the habit of exercising these policy options, it is worthwhile to ask just what State legislators and governors can do to protect their citizens from usurpations by the central government. First, they can begin by passing resolutions (as a number have done), declaring in no uncertain terms that all powers not delegated to the central government nor prohibited to the States by the Constitution are reserved by them; and that the States themselves have the authority to judge what is reserved and what is delegated--Supreme Court case law notwithstanding. To deny this is to say that the central government can define the limits of its own power which flatly contradicts the Constitution’s language of State delegated and reserved powers.
Second, the States can insist that an office be set up in Congress to receive and respond to these resolutions. Resolutions are words. They cost little to produce, but words have power. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume observed, political authority is based primarily on opinion not force. It is not merely iron bars that confine you to prison, it is also the guard’s opinion not to let you out. If you could change his mind, the bars could not restrain you. A continuous flood of resolutions from the States about the constitutionality of this or that issue (and widely publicized), would serve to educate the public (and their rulers) about constitutional limits and alter the mind-set of politics in a decentralist direction. Further, State legislators and governors should revive, where appropriate, the Jeffersonian discourse of State interposition, nullification, and secession as policy options. To deny this is to say that an American State is not a genuine political society at all, but a mere aggregate of individuals under control of a central government that alone can define the limits of its powers. To hear such discourse in public speech can strengthen civic virtue and revive the long slumbering disposition of self-government that has been suppressed by a century of runaway centralization. Lincoln understood the power of words, and advanced the cause of centralization by refusing to describe the States as sovereign political societies. He described them as mere counties authorized by central authority. He asked incredulously: “What is this particular sacredness of a State? If a State, in one instance, and a county in another should be equal in extent of territory, and equal in number of people, wherein is that State any better than a county?” Lincoln was not describing the federative America that Jefferson and Madison founded, but an imagined and wished for centralized, unitary American state. It is time that the Lincolnian inversion of political discourse be inverted.
Third, In addition to changing the terms of discourse, State legislators and governors should engage in 10th amendment acts of recovering usurped authority. The least controversial of these acts would be simply to not accept federal money for projects that are judged unconstitutional, such as federal involvement in education. Refuse the money, and begin restoring state and local control over education or whatever the issue might be.
Fourth, in order to restore usurped constitutional authority, a State must be prepared, at some point, to resist federal intrusion. There is a long history of States doing just that. Georgia nullified the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chisholm vs. Georgia (1793); New England States nullified fugitive slave laws; and earlier New England townships nullified Jefferson’s embargo and the war of 1812 declared under Madison’s administration. Jefferson said “he felt the foundations of the government shaken under my feet by the New England townships.” Wisconsin was nullifying what it declared to be usurpations by the Supreme Court into the 1850s. There was a time when the States kept the central government under control.
Can this be done today? Before it is attempted a clarification is necessary. We must understand that any such constitutional challenge is a political one based on the States’ sovereign authority and not a matter justiciable by the courts. Genuine federalism in America can be recovered only by political action in the name of the State’s own authority and not by Supreme Court legalism. Indeed, legalism only affirms that the Court has the final say over what powers the States have. When States interposed to block the Supreme Court’s orders to desegregate public schools in the South on the ground that such orders were unconstitutional, the move failed but only because racial segregation was not a popular issue. Many scholars then and now thought that Brown v. Board of Education was bad constitutional law, i.e., that the court had abandoned its proper role of policing the Constitution in favor of social engineering. Most, however, approved of the engineering, and paid little regard to the constitutional cost.
But the process can be reversed. States can recover usurped authority by carefully choosing the right issue, at the right time, in the right circumstances, and for the right reasons. Such an act, of course, would require considerable political prudence and skill, and should not be attempted without a reasonable chance of support from public opinion. In such an act of lawful and constitutional resistance, the State would be answerable only to her other sister states. The action might spark a constitutional amendment as happened when Georgia nullified the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) that an individual could sue a state in federal court without the State’s permission. The States agreed with Georgia’s nullification and promptly passed the 11th amendment that prohibited such suits. That is how American federalism was supposed to work. The three branches of the central government would check each other, but it would be up to the sovereign States to keep the central government itself in check. The Constitution was to be enforced through political action of the States not by the legalism of nine unelected Supreme Court justices.
Another outcome might be a political settlement that would allow a State, or a number of States, to opt out of a class of federal acts judged to be unconstitutional or fundamentally repugnant. Other federal systems allow this possibility. For instance, the Canadian Constitution has institutionalized federal nullification. Any Province can nullify acts of the central government in the area of civil rights within its own borders, even though other Provinces may enforce the act in theirs.
The States can also try to restrict unconstitutional acts of the central government through amending the Constitution, but that is virtually impossible. Two thirds of both Houses of Congress are required to pass an amendment which must then be ratified by three quarters of the States. Since 1790, over 10,000 amendments have been proposed to Congress. Only 30 have passed the Congressional gate-keepers, and 27 have been ratified. The other path is that two thirds of the States can compel Congress to call a constitutional convention–a very high bar to meet. It is, therefore, virtually impossible to limit the central government’s power by constitutional amendment. It is worth noting that the framers of the Confederate Constitution sought to overcome this barrier to self-government in Article 1, Section 1 which enacted that if only three States concurred on a constitutional amendment, Congress would have to call a constitutional convention. And only two thirds of the States would be needed to ratify the amendment.
To all of this it is often said that State interposition, nullification, and secession were eliminated as policy options by the Civil War. Brute force, however, cannot settle moral and constitutional questions. Lincoln’s claim that the Union is older than the States; that it created the States; that a State is merely an administrative unit (like a county in a unitary state), are historical and moral claims that must stand on their own. They cannot be settled by superior firepower but only by reasons that persuade. The problems of limiting central power in a federal system of State delegated and reserved powers, which brought forth the doctrines of State interposition, nullification, and secession as remedies, are as topical today as they were when first broached in the 1790s.
Or it will be said that, even so, too much water has gone over the dam. Institutions of the central government are so entrenched, so entangled with powerful interests, and this system has gone on for so long that people have lost any sense of civic virtue on the State and local level. It is certainly true that the central government has intruded into nearly every aspect of life, and disentanglement will not occur overnight. But centralization in America is not as intense and debilitating as it was in the former Soviet Union, from which, nevertheless, 15 States recovered civic virtue and seceded. Moreover, the current State sovereignty movement suggests that State and local civic virtue are not dead in America. But as mentioned above, a shift in the decentralist direction will require a long course of political re-education. And the sort of education required is not academic but practical–one exemplified in the conduct and civic virtue of State legislators and governors who take to heart Madison’s admonition in the Virginia Resolutions (1798) that State governments not only have the constitutional right of “interposition” to protect their citizens against usurpations by the central government but the “duty” to do so.
Finally, there is the objection that the primacy of State political action over Supreme Court legalism could work when there were fewer States, but now that there are 50 States interposition and nullification have become impractical. But If true that means the Union has simply grown too large for the purposes of self-government; in which case the obvious response is that it should be divided through secession into smaller political units that make self-government viable. Consider how dull our notion of self-government has become. Congress has capped the number of representatives in the House at 435, a majority of which is only 218 representatives. A majority in the Senate is 51. A majority of both Houses is a mere 269 people. This small number, with concurrence of the President, rules over 300 million people. But worse. Congress has long ago alienated much of its legislative responsibility to the Executive and Judicial branch. Its main interest is in distributing its vast revenue (which now is nearly 3 trillion dollars) to its clients. The President and the Supreme Court are the dominant rulers. The Executive office makes war, and its bureaucracy makes laws. The Supreme Court, with only 9 unelected judges, has become the most important social policy making body in the Union, and makes claim to be the final authority on interpreting the Constitution. Never in history have so many been ruled by so few.
As the American empire grows in population and as the ratchet of centralization tightens with each turn, talk of self-government becomes increasingly meaningless. The ratio of representatives to population in the House of Representatives today is one representative for every 690,000 people–a vacuous ratio for representation. When the population reaches 435 million, there will be one “representative” for every million persons. What to do? Expand the size of the House? No; it is about the right size for a legislative body. The only remedy is territorial division of the Union through secession into a number of different and independent political units. Such a division can spring only from political action by the States, each acting in its sovereign capacity. And what form the new order might take (whether a number of federal unions, a number of independent states, whether these will be large or small states like Singapore, etc.) can only be determined by political action of the States themselves.
The central government of the United States (that is, 9 unelected judges, a congressional majority of only 269, and 1 CEO) cannot manage the bloated and unwieldy empire that a century of ritualistic centralization has produced; nor will it ever relinquish power. George Kennan thought that a discourse on how to divide the Union was bound to develop out of pressure generated by the sheer oversized character of the regime. It is too early to say that the current State sovereignty movement is the beginning of that discourse, but it might well be the beginning of the beginning.
________________
Dr. Donald Livingston, professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has been called the preeminent political philosopher of our day in Georgia.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
