States rights is not just another theory…

Spread the love

My friends when men would rail and deprive oth­ers of free­dom they are not good peo­ple it is not the hope and it is not the kind of change that peo­ple were told they could expect, it is because of this that we must vote those out of office that will not lis­ten or do the will of the peo­ple.

Restor­ing the 10th Amend­ment
By Dustin Stock­ton

“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.”

Pow­er­ful, sim­ple words. The Tenth Amend­ment was designed to be a catchall, ensur­ing that as our great nation devel­oped, the choic­es of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment would remain sec­ondary to the rights of the states. Yet fed­er­al politi­cians have found ways to cir­cum­vent their lim­it­ed pow­er. The result has been a dis­as­trous erod­ing of per­son­al lib­er­ty and gov­ern­ment effi­cien­cy.

They’ve bas­tardized the intent of the inter­state com­merce clause. On Oba­macare, Obama’s lawyers argue that the com­merce clause gives them author­i­ty to reg­u­late every­thing that has to do or not to do with the mod­ern def­i­n­i­tion of com­merce. Their argu­ment goes like this. If peo­ple don’t pur­chase health insur­ance it impacts inter­state com­merce; there­fore, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty to man­date that every per­son pur­chase health insur­ance.

Imag­ine the impli­ca­tions if that argu­ment is suc­cess­ful. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment would grant itself uni­lat­er­al author­i­ty to dic­tate every pur­chase your fam­i­ly choos­es or doesn’t choose to make. Don’t want to buy a new car in Neva­da? That would impact the car indus­try in Michi­gan there­fore grant­i­ng author­i­ty for the gov­ern­ment to demand that you buy a new car. Even worse, every deci­sion has an impact on health. If giv­en the pow­er to reg­u­late health­care then the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment could reg­u­late every deci­sion from what kind of tooth­paste you use to what kind of food you eat. All these reg­u­la­tions would be con­trolled by a hand­ful of politi­cians in Wash­ing­ton DC.

I sup­port States’ rights because an ordi­nary cit­i­zen has almost no con­trol over Wash­ing­ton. Each of us is rep­re­sent­ed by just one Con­gress­man and two Sen­a­tors. That means our indi­vid­ual vote only has an impact on 3/535 or about ½ of 1%. Amer­i­ca is great­est when deci­sions are weight­ed as close to each indi­vid­ual as pos­si­ble, because the small­er the gov­ern­ment the more agile and reac­tive it can be to its unique com­mu­ni­ty. Every indi­vid­ual school board should have broad­er con­trol over its district’s edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy than the State and espe­cial­ly the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, because you can have an impact on your local school board that you can’t have with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.

The 10th amend­ment applies both ways.

I don’t care if the peo­ple of Ver­mont use their edu­ca­tion sys­tem to fem­i­nize their boys and sex­u­al­ize their girls. I don’t care if they want to raise their effec­tive tax rate to 90%. I could care less if they want to teach their chil­dren that avoid­ing pain is more impor­tant than per­se­ver­ance and hard work. Their com­mu­ni­ties should be free to cre­ate a nar­cis­sis­tic lib­er­al utopia and then suf­fer the con­se­quences when it inevitably fails. On the same account, if I choose to live in a com­mu­ni­ty where schools seg­re­gate based on abil­i­ty, allow prayer, and teach­es moral­i­ty, the lib­er­als in Ver­mont and the politi­cians in Wash­ing­ton should mind their own d–n busi­ness.

This is a big coun­try. Com­mu­ni­ties in rur­al Alaba­ma face far dif­fer­ent chal­lenges than com­mu­ni­ties in urban New York. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment will nev­er have the abil­i­ty to reg­u­late each of those dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties equal­ly and there­fore should stay out of the busi­ness of reg­u­lat­ing them at all. If it takes a Con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment to restrict the com­merce clause in order to restore the Tenth Amend­ment that will be the cost of pre­serv­ing lib­er­ty.

Dustin Stock­ton
Media/Events Direc­tor TheTeaParty.net
Chief Strate­gist West­ern Rep­re­sen­ta­tion PAC