Ross: Isn’t It Time?

Federal Observer – by Neal Ross

I know I sometimes come across spreading doom and gloom; all pessimistic and cynical, but that is just how I feel based upon how I see things. Sometimes, in outbursts of anger or frustration I lash out at people for continuing to believe in the system as it exists today; thinking that by playing within the existing framework they can somehow effect change in this country. If you’ll allow me, I’ll attempt to explain why I believe this to be futile; and I promise to try and keep it civil.  

To begin with I would like to take a few moments to address those who keep reminding me of the Samuel Adams quote where Adams states, “It does not take a majority to prevail…but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

I consider myself relatively new to the patriot movement, having only been at this for around 15 years. I know many who have been at it much longer than I and many of them have expressed the same sentiments as I; that no matter how hard we try we just can’t get people to see the truth. While it may be true that the patriot movement grew in numbers, especially in the early stages of the Tea Party movement, I have yet to see any serious change in things in America; it seems to me that it has pretty much been business as usual.

I have also been told not to focus too much attention to the general mass of the people as they are irrelevant when it comes to effecting change. How can that be; that the masses are irrelevant? If we plan on working within the system then the masses certainly do play a major role in determining who will sit in the seats of power as it is their votes that put them there. While it may be true that it would take a much smaller percentage to achieve victory should a revolution take place, and that is questionable after the loss of the Second American Revolution (The Civil War), what happens after victory is achieved?

You see, should a revolution take place, and should those in power be thrown out of office, imprisoned, and replaced by good virtuous men and women who will support the Constitution, how long do you think it would be before the people began replacing them with candidates who promised to reinstate all the benefits they had lost when government was returned to its Constitutional limits?

Our Founders fought a war, and with a little help from the French, they achieved independence for America. At that point in time we were 13 independent colonies, or States if you will, and were recognized as such by the King of England. When the Treaty of Paris was formalized and agreed to, Article 1 of the treaty declares, “His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States.”

In his pamphlet Common Sense Thomas Paine declared them to be “…free and independent States of America…” They were united in a common cause to obtain their independence from Great Britain, but aside from that each state was independent and free.

As government is a creature created by man, then true original power resides with the people, as upheld by a 1794 Supreme Court ruling, “The sovereignty of a state does not reside in the persons who fill the different departments of its government, but in the People, from whom government emanated; and they may change it at their discretion. Sovereignty, then in this country, abides with the constituency, and not with the agent; and this remark is true, both in reference to the federal and state government.”

Therefore if the people are the creators of government, they only surrender the power and authority provided for in the document which establishes said government; i.e. the various constitutions. When our federal government was yet unborn then all power resided either with the State governments, or with the people who created them.

One of the biggest arguments which took place during the ratification process for our Constitution was the fear that the federal government it created would absorb all power held by the States and pose a serious threat to State sovereignty. At the time the Constitution was being argued in the State assemblies, one of the most outspoken against it, and might I add, ridiculed for his paranoia, was Patrick Henry.

In a speech delivered on June 5, 1788 Henry declared, “The fate of this question and of America may depend on this: Have they said, we, the States? Have they made a proposal of a compact between states? If they had, this would be a confederation: It is otherwise most clearly a consolidated government. The question turns, Sir, on that poor little thing-the expression, We, the people, instead of the States, of America.”

The question Henry asked lies in the difference between a federal government and a national government, on which derives its power from the people, or from the States. Today those two words, federal and national are interchangeable when used to describe our system of government, but in 1787 they were entirely different concepts.

A federal government was a government formed by a compact between political units, such as the free and independent States. A national government, on the other hand, absorbed the powers of the independent units and became sovereign over them. In a national government the States would lose their sovereignty to the government created by the Constitution. So Mr. Henry’s question was a serious concern and his fears have proven valid over the course of time.

Mr. Henry went on to say, “Here is a revolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain. It is radical in this transition; our rights and privileges are endangered, and the sovereignty of the states will be relinquished: And cannot we plainly see that this is actually the case?” Apparently not enough people shared Mr. Henry’s concerns as the Constitution, by way of a bit of fraud and manipulation of the press, was agreed to by the requisite number of states and became the Supreme Law of the Land.

Yet just a decade after it went into effect Mr. Henry’s fears were realized when the government created by this Constitution attempted to interfere in the internal affairs of the States with the Alien and Sedition Laws. These laws were so reprehensible to those who wished to see the Constitution strictly adhered to that Adams own Vice-President, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Kentucky Resolution in opposition to them. In his resolution Jefferson declared, “The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but by a 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 [and] delegated to that government certain definite powers and whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”

What this means is that the States had the right to nullify laws passed by the federal government which exceeded the specific powers granted the general government by the Constitution. They could simply tell the government that these laws had no effect in their State.

In 1839 the Supreme Court once again ruled on the subject of the powers granted the federal government and those reserved to the States, this time in the case of Bank of Augusta vs. Earle. In the ruling the Court declared, “The States between each other are sovereign and independent. They are distinct and separate sovereignties except so far as they have parted with some of the attributes of sovereignty by the Constitution. THEY CONTINUE TO BE NATIONS, with all their rights, and under all their national obligations and with all the rights of nations in particular except in the surrender by each to the common purposes and objects of the Union under the Constitution. The rights of each state, when no so yielded up remain absolute.”

Jefferson was the author of our Declaration of Independence and a supporter of the Constitution. Yet even Jefferson felt that should the government created by the Constitution become too threatening to the sovereignty of the States that the States should exercise the same right contained within the Declaration of Independence and dissolve the bond which held them to the Union. In a letter to James Madison, written on August 23, 1799 Jefferson stated,“[We should be] determined…to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government…in which we see liberty, safety and happiness.”

Three quarters of a century after the Constitution went into affect 11 States sought to sever the ties which bound them to the Union. The president at the time was Abraham Lincoln. It matters not whether you think the South seceded from the Union due to disagreements over slavery, unfair tariffs, or a combination of both; the fact was it was their legal right to do so and the president held no authority to demand that they remain in the Union. The right of secession was commonly accepted by those both in the North and the South.

Prior to the War of 1812 a group in Massachusetts, nicknamed the Essex Junto, had advocated for secession from the Union. Led by Timothy Pickering, who had served as Secretary of State under president Washington, was a driving force behind this movement which, had it succeeded, would have included New England, New York, New Jersey, and parts of Canada. Although they never went through with their plan, it shows that secession was not just a concept the South pulled out of thin air before the Civil War; it was a widely accepted belief that the States held the right to dissolve the compact which bound them to the Union.

No matter what his reasons were for doing so, Lincoln believed it was within his power to use force to keep the South within the Union, and therefore subservient to the power of the general government. The resulting war cost well over half a million lives and forever shattered the belief that the States could withdraw from the Union at will. This was a war for independence, and this time those seeking independence from an oppressive government lost.

You have to realize that whether the government was created by an act of the people; making it a national government as Patrick Henry feared, or a federal government; created by a compact between the States, the government had no say in whether or not a portion of the country could or could not dissolve the ties which bound them to the Union. In using force to demand adherence to the Union Abraham Lincoln placed the government above both the States, and the people who sought only to exercise the right contained in the Declaration of Independence,“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under asbolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Lincoln not only exercised unconstitutional power in forcing the South into adherence to the Union, he trashed the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and in so doing declared the federal government to be above the will of the States and the people.

Then Fifty years after the end of the Civil War the three things happened almost simultaneously which forever enslaved us to the government. In 1913 the 16th and 17th Amendments were ratified along with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act.

The Sixteenth Amendment changed how and from where Congress could collect taxes, making personal income taxable for the first time. The Seventeenth Amendment took the power of choosing the members of Senate away from the States and gave it to the people; who are more fickle and subject to rash and emotional choices, therefore more easily controlled by propaganda and rhetoric. Thirdly with the creation of the Federal Reserve the government was given a blank check on its spending ability; money the government could use for everything from internal improvements to wars abroad, all borrowed with the debt being placed squarely upon the shoulders of each and every citizen paying taxes.

Today our debt stands at over $18 trillion, that’s 18 with twelve zeroes after it. Each and every citizen is liable for $58,000 of that debt. But the interesting point is that that number includes every man, woman and child in America. If you parcel that down just to those who pay income taxes the number climbs to $157,000 per person. Yep, that’s how much you are on the hook for. I don’t know about you, but that’s roughly six years worth of my annual salary that I’m responsible for paying for things that I never asked my government to do in the first place.

The balance of power, which was so meticulously crafted by our Constitution has been altered; the States no longer are co-equal partners and have a voice in how the government operates by their choice in the selection of Senators. Now they are as much beholden to federal funds for things within their own borders as the people are to the subsidies which they depend upon for their own survival. If a State chooses to disregard, or refuse to enforce a federal mandate within its borders all Uncle Sam has to do is cut the money off to that State and they eventually will cow tow to whatever the federal government demands of them.

The federal government has long ago ceased being a servant of the people and of the States and has assumed to role of master over all. It micromanages almost every aspect of our lives with rules and regulations which de Tocqueville declared, “Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

At the same time our most sacred rights have all but been stripped away by both federal and State laws. Our right to keep and bear arms is constantly under attack, as is our right to speak freely. Our right to privacy within our homes is under attack, as revealed by Edward Snowden yet we called him the traitor, the enemy, for exposing the truth of our government’s actions to us.

We are no longer free people, at least not in the sense that our Founders understood freedom. We can choose to eat steak or chicken, but how many rules and regulations control everything from the raising of the meat we eat all the way to the time we pick it off the shelf at the grocery store?

If we choose to exercise our right as Jefferson once believed, to simply disobey an unconstitutional law then there are a myriad of federal agencies the government can bring to bear upon us to either force us into obedience or haul us off to jail; the ATF, the DEA, the FBI, and the EPA just to name a few.

Face it folks, the government owns you and your lives; as well of those lives yet unborn. And you believe that by making a choice at the election booth that makes you any freer? You are all inmates in a huge prison and all you are doing is voting to see who will be the warden and the guards of your prison.

If it weren’t so sad, and so frightening, I would have to laugh at how easily the people have been subdued and placed into servitude. My God people, you have brains…use them. Read the Declaration of Independence and see the charges leveled by the Colonists against the King which left them no choice but to free themselves of his tyrannical reign. Then read Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution and see what are the specific powers for which our government was created and tell me it has not become far more oppressive and controlling than the one our Founders fought a war to free themselves from.

Freedom is not just a word to be tossed about carelessly; it is a gift which each and every one of us is responsible for maintaining. There is more to being free than simply going to the polls every couple of years and choosing who will be your slave masters. And like I said in my last article; freedom isn’t free, sometimes you have to fight for it.

I hope I have explained why I am so pessimistic and cynical. It is not that I have lost my love of the principles I hold dear; I have lost faith in the people who inhabit this country to exhibit the character and courage it takes to stand up against this tyranny that has been spreading over the land since the end of the Civil War. As the Supreme Court said, the people are the rightful masters of government; isn’t it time we started acting that way and prove that we are, indeed, freemen?

January 12, 2016

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