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Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. is terrified. He is terrified that the
American public has started to believe that they are the masters rather than the
servants of their own government. He is terrified that they may have started
to think that the old Jeffersonian dictum that governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed is not such a bad idea. Most of all,
he is terrified that the public will act on these beliefs, organize
themselves into political communities at the state level, and oppose
socialized healthcare, endless "stimulus" spending by the federal
government, and the never-ending expansion of the welfare state.
"I have introduced an Economic Bill of Rights!", he whined,
while bemoaning citizen opposition to this hoary socialistic scheme. Thats
why he is doing what all Democrats seem to do these days insinuating that
anyone who holds such beliefs is either a racist, as he did in a recent
speech, or a member of a "hate group" (or both).
There are a lot of black people on welfare, you see, so that in the mind
of Jesse Jackson, Jr., (and his friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
and other Democratic Party appendages), the only conceivable reason why
anyone would ever criticize the welfare state is racial hatred. The Obama
regime promised a "post-racial America" while working diligently
with all of its supporters to create a hyper-racial America instead.
In his recent bloviation Congressman Jackson bemoaned the fact that
politicians like Governor Rick Perry of Texas have been talking a lot lately
about states rights and the Tenth Amendment as tools with which ordinary
Americans can oppose the corrupt, imperious regime in Washington, D.C. This
of course is the very reason why Thomas Jefferson believed that the Tenth
Amendment ("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") was the cornerstone of the U.S.
Constitution and the key to creating what he called "an empire of
liberty." The clearest example of this Jeffersonian states rights
tradition is the first section of Jeffersons famous Kentucky Resolution
of 1798 (written by Jefferson at the request of his friend, Senator John
Breckenridge of Kentucky) which announced that the citizens of Kentucky would
not abide by the unconstitutional Sedition Act that was being enforced by the
Adams administration. The Sedition Act essentially outlawed free political
speech in America by making it a crime punishable by prison for criticizing
the Adams administration. Section 1 of the "Kentucky Resolve" reads
as follows:
Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America,
are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General
Government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution
for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General
Government for special purposes, delegated to that Government certain
definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right
to their own self Government; and that whensoever the General
Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void,
and of no force . . . . the Government created by this compact was
not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated
to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the
Constitution, the measure of its powers . . . (emphasis added).
This, along with the Tenth Amendment, is the essence of the Jeffersonian
states rights philosophy. During Jeffersons term as president the New
England states used the language of the Kentucky Resolve to nullify the trade
embargo that Jefferson attempted to enforce after the British confiscated
American ships and conscripted American sailors. (He believed that a trade
embargo, as damaging as it was, was a better alternative than another war
with Great Britain). All of New England, plus Delaware, nullified the embargo
as an unconstitutional usurpation of federal power, and used Jeffersons own
language to justify their actions.
New Englanders also refused to participate in the War of 1812 by refusing
to send militia troops by citing once again Jeffersons Kentucky Resolve.
Many states assisted President Andrew Jackson in is political battle with the
Bank of the United States (which he eventually de-funded) by trying to tax
branches of the BUS out of existence. Ohio took the lead, with its
legislature announcing that "the States have an equal right to interpret
the Constitution for themselves" and that Ohio would withdraw "the
protection and aid of the laws of the State" from the BUS (see James J.
Kilpatrick, The
Sovereign States, p. 152). And of course South Carolina famously
invoked the Jeffersonian states rights tradition to nullify the hated 1828
"Tariff of Abominations."
Congressman Jackson sees it all very differently. He views states rights
not through the eyes of a student of American history who is familiar with
such facts. Instead, he views states rights from the viewpoint of what he
is, namely, a Chicago political hack who never hesitates to use the
"race card" to try to get his way in politics. Like father, like
son. Accordingly, he recently proclaimed that Governor Perry – or anyone else
who invokes the Tenth Amendment as a political strategy – must be inflicted
by the basest of motives. "It was the Tenth Amendment and States Rights
that protected the institution of slavery," he shouted. In fact, the
exact opposite is true.
Slavery existed in all states when the federal Constitution
was ratified in 1789 and was protected by it until the states ratified
the Thirteenth Amendment in 1866. Thats seventy-seven years of slavery
protection by the federal government. In addition, the federal
Fugitive Slave Act (which was very strongly supported by Abraham Lincoln)
socialized the cost of enforcing the slave system by forcing the citizens of
states were slavery no longer existed to capture runaway slaves and return
them to their owners. Congressman Jackson is apparently unaware that this was
a federal government program.
More importantly, it was the
Jeffersonian states rights tradition that was invoked to oppose the
Fugitive Slave Act in the form of various "personal liberty laws"
at the state level. In response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan,
Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania all passed state laws that
prohibited the use of the states jails for detaining fugitive slaves. They
also provided legal counsel for persons accused of being fugitive slaves;
gave fugitive slaves the right of Habeas Corpus and trial by jury;
required the identity of the alleged fugitive to be documented by two
witnesses; prohibited the states from offering any assistants to the
claimants; and imposed heavy fines for attempting to claim that a free black
person was in fact a slave.
Another false claim that Congressman Jackson made in his recent anti-Tenth
Amendment outburst was that when the Southern states seceded they committed
"an act of treason." Once again, he gets it exactly backwards. The
U.S. Constitution has a very clear definition of treason in Article 3,
Section 3: "Treason against the United States shall consist only in
levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them aid
and comfort." As in all the founding documents, the words "United
States" are always in the plural, signifying that the document is
referring to what the Declaration of Independence called "the free and
independent states." "Levying war against them" means levying
war against the free and independent states, or giving aid and comfort to
"their" enemies.
Abraham Lincoln never conceded that secession was legal. He therefore
committed treason by levying war upon the Southern states, which never
legally left the union as far as he was concerned. It was the Lincoln regimes
invasion of the Southern states that was the very definition of treason under
the U.S. Constitution. Congressman Jackson follows a long line of conniving
statists, beginning with Daniel Webster himself, who have chosen to ignore
the actual constitutional definition of treason while redefining the term to
mean the opposite opposition to the unconstitutional usurpations of the
federal government.
Government will never be limited unless the citizens take matters into
their own hands by resurrecting the states rights mechanisms of
nullification, interposition, and secession.
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