-By Warner Todd Huston
One of the main forces behind the Tea Party movement and the disgust that many Americans have with the federal government is its supreme arrogance and its constant unwanted and unwarranted power grabs. This is one of the things that the American people really need to put their attention toward reversing.
Perhaps it is just beginning?
Alaska, for instance, has just thrown its weight behind the opposition to the federal government’s obscene persecution of an Alaskan citizen who was arrested for violating rules that the federal government has imposed on those Alaskan waterways flowing through national parks.
The state is claiming that regardless of what the man did on the waterways, the federal government has no authority to arrest and prosecute the man because the waterways are in Alaska’s purview and the feds are over stepping.
Another recent example is in the millions of dollars that the federal government is forcing local city and state governments to spend on new street signs. The feds have changed its regulations on the typography on street signs and is requiring all street signs in the country to conform to the new regulations. From whence does this arrogance come? Well if states get federal highway money the feds feel they have the right to demand that the states spend that money the way the feds say they must spend it. If that means wasting millions on new street signs then that’s just what they will expect to be done.
Then there’s the multiple states joining the lawsuit over Obamacare. At least 20 states attorney generals have joined together to fight off President Obama’s attempt to take over the country’s healthcare system.
The federal government’s grasping for unconstitutional power is everywhere these days from the EPA, to the president, to Congress making rules without really bothering to justify them under our governing document.
All might not be lost, though. There is a growing movement among the various states to begin to reapply their 10th Amendment rights.
The 10th Amendment states: “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.” States are beginning to find a renewed interest in this clause.
Certainly it should come as no surprise that this is occurring when one reviews the many, many ways that the powergrabbers in Washington have exceeded their authority and encroached on the sovereignty of the states.
Another effort is the “Repeal Amendment” effort as seen at www.repealamendment.org. The site tells us of its goal…
Our Founding Fathers gave enumerated powers to the Federal Government and reserved most of the power for the States. Today, the federal government has usurped the power that the Founders originally intended for the States.
The Repeal Amendment is dedicated to restoring our nations economic liberty by advocating for an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that restores the balance of power between the States and Federal Government.
The Amendment these folks would like to see passed is this:
Any provision of law or regulation of the United States may be repealed by the several states, and such repeal shall be effective when the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states approve resolutions for this purpose that particularly describe the same provision or provisions of law or regulation to be repealed.”
“This doesn’t undo some of those bad Supreme Court cases and doesn’t resolve some of the problems of the Seventeenth Amendment, but it does restore some of the balance of power that was originally intended — and the mechanism by which we can control some of the out of control spending and get our debt under control,” said Marianne Moran, executive director of RepealAmendment.org.
It is hoped that this renewed interest in state’s rights will lead to knocking down the federal government’s power a few pegs and eliminating some of the undue and illicit power that the federal government has stolen from us.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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