Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The Sovereign States Of America



If the citizens believe that the Constitution actually means something, and that those who ratified the Constitution and its amendments had the authority to do so, then they understood the meaningful terms precisely as used and applied in their time, and if they knew what they were doing, then the import of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments come into focus.

By de Andréa

In the American system of federalism, with the exception of the limited constitutional powers it has already been granted by the states, the power is derived from the people to the individual States and subsequently from the States to the Federal Government.

As time has passed that ‘Chain of Command’ has been perversely ignored and subsequently lost. The body of the Congress and the Presidential Administration now truly believe that the States and the citizens are, without limits subject to the power of the ‘Central Federal Government’. This long abused position of the federal government may be about to “CHANGE”

The two most overlooked and ignored laws in America are by far the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Federal Constitution. For at least the past one hundred years the U.S. Congress has tried to pretend that these two laws do not exist. These are the laws that guarantee “State Sovereignty” as well as the sovereignty of the people.

The Sovereign State of Arizona has recently asserted that ‘it has sovereignty’ under 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”, as well as the people's unremunerated rights under the Ninth Amendment . I also want to emphasize that as an example the fact that when Arizona entered the union in 1912, its individual people did so as part of a contract between the state and the people of Arizona, and subsequently the United States Federal Government.

The surging movement that now exists across the United States is a challenge to the federal government's grotesquely expansive abuse of its power in general and the specific abuse of the interstate commerce power to regulate – well … everything, whether it has anything to do with interstate commerce or not. The now “Infamous Health Care Plan” for example was passed under the shroud of interstate commerce.

The Ninth and the Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are the most ignored Amendments in the Bill of rights, partly because they refer to no specific rights. But therein lays the purpose of the last two bills of our rights. They cover every other right of a free people.

Liberty doesn't just happen – it needs to be worked for. Getting that work done can make the difference between having to work for liberty, and having to literally fight for it.

While the Federal Constitution's interstate Commerce Clause can be viewed as specifically regulating interstate commerce, it also can also be viewed as having been modified for example by the later Second Amendment assuring citizens of the right to own weapons, especially within the borders of their own state.

No less significant, is the Ninth Amendment, which states, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

In the Western world, individuals voluntarily surrender some portion of their political power to the community of their state in order to empower the state to do some selected things for them in common that they cannot do well or effectively as individuals. The political state of individuals, in turn, surrenders a specific portion of its collected political power to the United States under our federated system, and for the same reasons.

It is however, vital to note two important points. First, this grant of power from sovereign individuals to the state, and secondarily from the state to the federal is a limited transfer of power. Under this system, people do not for example; give themselves into slavery to the power of an unlimited government, nor do they fail to delineate limits to this grant of political power to the governments. Secondly, this grant of power from individuals to government is for a very specific purpose.

The Declaration of Independence states, "Governments are instituted among men"… "to secure" the rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Throughout the founding of America, individuals always have granted "carefully specified powers" to a central government, this is not however an authoritarian right to control everything.

Specific rights were retained in the Bill of Rights, which was never intended to be an exhaustive list, hence, the Ninth Amendment.

Some of those most interested in instituting a. federal government 'to secure these rights' understood that it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive catalog of rights inherent in a people as a part of their humanity, 'natural God given rights' or 'liberty rights.’ There are powers and rights that cannot be particularly enumerated, and if a list of rights is specific, it could be interpreted that no other rights exist.

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments [reserving other rights to the people and the states] were added to protect all rights not listed in the first eight amendments.

Examples are the right to privacy, the right to self-defense, the right of freedom of conscience, and the right to choose in one's own affairs, all considered to be important individual rights but none mentioned under the list of protected rights in the Bill of Rights.

For example the right to self-defense strongly implies the right to keep and bear arms.
Of what value are any or all of the other protected rights if a person may not defend the person from threat to life or limb? How could a newspaperman exercise his freedom of the press if he could be killed with impunity? How could any person effectively exercise his freedom of speech if he could be summarily killed because he exercised that freedom?

The rights of states have been aggressively and carelessly trampled on by the federal government for decades. The issue is not only about guns but about states' rights and the constant overreaching by federal agencies and Washington to impose their requirements on sovereign in-state activities.

When Wyoming for example joined the other five states with self-declared exemptions from federal gun regulation, officials there took the unusual step of actually including penalties for any Federal agent who "enforces or attempts to enforce" federal gun rules on a personal firearm. The penalties could be up to two years in prison and $2,000 in fines for an offender. The other five states are Arizona, Utah, Montana, South Dakota, and Tennessee. There are 27 other states in the process of standing up to the dictates of the Federal Government regarding the massive attack on the citizens and states rights to keep and bear arms.

The federal government was created by the states to serve the states and the people, and it is time for the states to begin drawing boundaries for the federal government and its agencies.


The Federal government has even claimed the authority to regulate "intrastate" commerce if it so chooses, (which is commerce within the states), a blatant violation of its constitutional authority.

In an analysis by the Tenth Amendment Center, the state gun laws were described as a nullification of Federal Law. Laws of the federal government are to be supreme in all matters pursuant to the delegated powers of U.S. Constitution. When D.C. enacts laws outside those powers, state laws trump those laws. As Thomas Jefferson said, “when the federal government assumes powers not delegated to it, those acts are 'unauthoritative, void, and of no force' from the outset.”

In Conclusion
When a state 'nullifies' an unconstitutional and therefore illegal federal law, it is proclaiming that the law in question is void and inoperative, or 'noneffective,' within the boundaries of that state; or, in other words, is not a law as far as the state is concerned. Implied in such legislation is that the state apparatus will enforce the act against all violations – in order to protect the liberty of the state's citizens.

THE BOTTOM LINE: This ignorance of the “Federal Constitution” by the many citizens of these United States of America, is what has surreptitiously and incrementally led the boiling of the frog. American citizens are now paying dearly for a hundred years of complacency. This attitude of personal ‘amour proper’ among Americans is what has set the stage for the oppressive edicts now generated by Washington and this Social Communist regime. .

The Supreme Court has become ineffective in its charge of protecting the citizens from the enormous power of the Federal Government. It now takes an average of 3 ½ years and 2 ¼ million dollars to bring a case to the Supreme Court. In the mean time, Congress continues to write and pass unconstitutional and oppressive laws designed to destroy the individual rights of its constituents.

The legislative body of the U.S. Congress has perversely written laws that stealthily and incrementally destroy the freedom and rights of American citizens.

Fredrick Bastiat wrote in his “Classic Blueprint For A Just Society”, titled “The Law” that the sole purpose of law in a free and just society cannot be for any other purpose but to uphold and protect the rights and freedoms of a liberated people. There can be no other purpose for law… But sadly in the last one hundred years or so, the purpose of most Federal laws and many state laws as well have been only for the purpose of destroying these individual rights of the citizens and empowering and ever expanding and oppressive government.

Unless the people of several States began to stand up and take their rightful place in the God given sovereignty of this great and prosperous country. America will cease to be a great nation; moreover it will cease to be the most blessed nation on this earth.

"Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power.... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1799

"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."
General Douglas MacArthur

de Andréa

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