State Sovereignty

State sovereignty may be the only way that we can stop this runaway federal government. The statists that are in Washington are only going to keep buying votes and grabbing all the power they can. However, if enough States stand up and say NO maybe we can turn the tide.


Nebraska legislators seek to assert state sovereignty
By Martha Stoddard
WORLD-HERALD BUREAU
« Metro/Region
(2)

LINCOLN — At least three Nebraska lawmakers want to send a message to the federal government:
Butt out of state business.
Next year they will see if a majority of their colleagues agrees.
The senators are working on resolutions asserting Nebraska's sovereignty under the 10th Amendment of the Constitution.
Congressional powers
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.

Among the powers given to Congress by the U.S. Constitution:

>>To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

>>To borrow money on the credit of the United States.

>>To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.

>>To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States.

>>To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.

>>To establish Post Offices and Post Roads.

>>To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court.

>>To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.

>>To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.

>>To provide and maintain a Navy.

>>To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
Nebraska wouldn't try to secede from the union under their proposals but would go on record objecting to federal laws that they say go beyond constitutional authority.
“My goal here is to shine light on the fact that the federal government is overstepping its bounds,” said State Sen. Tony Fulton of Lincoln. “We would be making a statement on behalf of Nebraska.”
The tension between states' rights and federal authority has been a repeated theme in U.S. history, starting with arguments among the founding fathers.
The struggle turned bloody when Southern states seceded, citing states' rights on the question of slavery, and the Civil War ensued.
Critics say the current measures amount to little more than political posturing — passing resolutions doesn't mean that states refuse to comply with federal law or send back federal funds that come with mandates.
State Sen. Bill Avery of Lincoln said the proposals sound disturbingly similar to the states' rights arguments made in defense of racial segregation and laws blocking blacks from voting.
“The history of this movement is rife with racism in the name of states' rights,” he said. “I'm not saying that the people making the case now are racist, but I don't think Nebraska needs to be getting in bed with these kinds of resolutions.”
Colleagues denied links to that history. Fulton, an Asian-American, said he has no intention of promoting racism or segregation.
Interest in states' rights is spreading as the federal government has taken over businesses, mandated driver's license security measures and proposed a public health care program.
Seven states passed resolutions this year affirming their sovereignty, and resolutions were introduced in 30 others. Some states have filed lawsuits or taken legislative action to challenge federal laws.
In Iowa, State Senate Republican leader Paul McKinley of Chariton offered a resolution this year calling on the federal government to “cease and desist” in issuing mandates that go beyond what the 10th Amendment allows. The body's Democratic majority has kept the resolution alive but bottled up in committee.
The movement's rise followed the election of President Barack Obama. Most of its supporters, though not all, can be found in conservative camps, such as libertarian talk-show host Glenn Beck and his conservative Web site. The states passing resolutions all voted Republican in the 2008 presidential election.
Online petitions urge Nebraska's state lawmakers to act.
“Either states can use the Constitution to maintain the power they have always had, or they can give it up,” said Gregory Boyle of Omaha, who started one online petition this spring.
A constitutional scholar questions the effectiveness of legislative resolutions and legal challenges.
“This is an outlet for those who are worried that the federal government will take over everything,” said Mark Kende, director of the Drake University Constitutional Law Center in Des Moines.
Richard Duncan, a constitutional law professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law, said legislative resolutions send valuable political messages even with no legal weight.
“It's kind of a nice warning that people are growing tired of the size of the federal government,” he said.
Under the 10th Amendment, states and citizens retain all powers not specifically given to the federal government.
Sovereignty supporters argue that the federal government has overstepped those bounds on matters such as endangered species protection and seat belt laws. Others say the Constitution, as interpreted by courts from the 1800s on, gives the federal government broad authority.
Fulton and Sens. Mark Christensen of Imperial and Ken Schilz of Ogallala are researching possible resolutions.
“I absolutely don't like where our government is going right now,” Christensen said.
Among his complaints are the mandates attached to federal stimulus funds and the new national health care proposals.
Fulton listed federal control of General Motors and mandates imposed on schools under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law.
“I'm not saying that every interaction with the federal government is bad,” he said. “I'm saying that some are over the line.”
Schilz's concerns include a proposal to extend the Clean Water Act to all bodies of water.
None of the three Nebraska lawmakers is ready to advocate giving up most federal funds to avoid the accompanying mandates, although Christensen supported the governor's decision to reject some unemployment stimulus money because of the strings attached.
Speaker of the Nebraska Legislature Mike Flood of Norfolk said he wasn't sure whether he would back a resolution, though he supports states' rights.
“Every day in the Legislature,” Flood said, “it seems we deal with issues where the federal government has its tentacles, either on the policy or the money or both.”
South Dakota's GOP whip, State Rep. Manny Steele, introduced his state's successful resolution. Steele said change will occur if enough states follow sovereignty measures with legal challenges to federal authority.
Some challenges have already popped up, on both conservative and liberal issues.
Montana, for example, passed a law this year asserting that guns made, sold and used in the state are exempt from federal laws and taxes. The law's chief backers said they hoped it would trigger a court battle.
Arizona lawmakers put a measure on the 2010 ballot that would exempt residents from a federal health care plan.
On the liberal front, Massachusetts cited the 10th Amendment in filing suit against a federal law barring recognition of same-sex marriages.
And six states sided with a California woman who argued to the U.S. Supreme Court that states had the power to legalize medical marijuana. The court ruled for the federal government in the 2005 case.
Kende questioned the states' chances of prevailing, saying the federal government won all cases from 1937 to 1995, although its record has been mixed since.
Courts already have upheld the practice of attaching strings to federal funds, Duncan said.
No matter the result of the court cases, states can make a difference through political pressure, said Michael Boldin, founder of the Tenth Amendment Center in Los Angeles. The howls that greeted a George W. Bush-era law increasing driver's license requirements, for example, forced the federal government to rethink that law.
“With each state,” Steele said, “we gain power.”
Contact the writer:
402-473-9583, martha.stoddard@owh.com

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Healthcare

I faxed the letter below to Congressman Travis Childers hoping to stop the government takeover of healthcare. If you are in his district, please pressure him to stop this mess. If you are in another district, please contact your representative and work to stop this before it is too late!

To: Congressman Childers

Please put the brakes on the administration’s ramming of healthcare reform through congress. There are many options that can be looked at, but government takeover and control is not the answer. And we definitely do not have to do it in the next 20 minutes!

The only reason your leadership wants to push this through so fast is to keep the American people from finding out the truth about this travesty and rising up to stop it. It is ludicrous to keep bringing 1,000 plus page bills before congress and expecting a vote within hours allowing no time to review the bill. Please ask the President about his transparency promise to post bills on the Internet and allow 5 days for public review.

Also, we cannot afford it. Our country is bankrupt by any definition. Someone somehow has got to put fiscal responsibility back to the forefront. This is a problem that both parties have had a big hand in creating. However, the party is over and the clean up is not going to be pretty, but it must be done.

I encourage you to stand against your party leadership and do what is right for the United States and Mississippi. I know it will be a hard row to hoe, but someone has got step up and work to get this country back on track.

Back

I have not posted anything in quit a while. However, as our country is fast falling into the abyss I will be posting some items that will hopefully help wake people up!

Libertarians gaining ground?

Our freedoms in this country are under assault. More and more of our citizens had rather give up their freedom and let government decide what is best for them. If we do not put the brakes on, we are going to wake up one day and realize it is too late.

Some people see the problems that we face and realize that they are not going to be solved by democrats and republicans. As more people understand the slippery slope that we are on, the libertarian ideals make more sense to them. The following article by Brian Doherty gives some insight to the libertarian movement.


Libertarians' silver lining
The third party may not have much electoral success, but its free-market ideals are becoming popular.
By Brian Doherty, BRIAN DOHERTY is a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of "Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement."
March 25, 2007


LIBERTARIANISM may seem hopelessly marginalized in American politics. The national record of the Libertarian Party since 1972 — the first year it fielded candidates — isn't too bright. Ed Clark, the party's presidential candidate in 1980, received 921,000 votes, the highest ever, but Michael Badnarik, the 2004 nominee, garnered merely 397,000.

Americans continue to be suspicious of radical third-party alternatives — if they are lucky enough to be aware of them — thanks largely to media that foster a feedback loop of "they can't win, so why cover them?" However, including about 600 candidates on every level — local, state and federal — the Libertarian Party attracted more than 13 million votes in 2006.

But counting votes for third parties isn't the best way to judge the growth and prospects of libertarianism in the United States. Libertarian ideas should never be counted out in this country because they are at the heart of its founding.

The central insight of libertarianism is in the Declaration of Independence. We have the right to life, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness (though no guarantee of achieving it). Government's only purpose is to help protect those rights — and if it fails, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

But from the declaration on, in some libertarians' telling, it has been downhill for liberty in this country. Certainly libertarian sensibilities were offended by the expansion of government's ability to tax, manage and regulate the economy and our private lives in the 20th century, and by the projection of U.S. military might overseas for reasons other than direct defense of the American people.

In the immediate aftermath of the New Deal, the modern American libertarian movement first began to coalesce in the works of such feisty American female novelists and philosophers as Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, and in the insights of Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek.

But the libertarian movement began as a reaction to how alien the ideas of unbridled individual and market liberty had become. When former Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce chief Leonard Read launched the first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education, in 1946, his ideas about limited government and free markets were so marginal in the United States as to seem almost seditious.

Lane was investigated by the FBI in the early postwar years for daring to write on a postcard that Social Security was the sort of socialistic government management of people's lives we fought wars against. True Social Security, she insisted, was canned vegetables and slaughtered pigs in your cellar. She and Paterson refused to accept anything from the Social Security system.

In 1950, the Buchanan Committee, a House panel investigating lobbying efforts, found Read and his foundation positively un-American because they opposed price controls, public housing, the draft and loyalty oaths. The committee subpoenaed records, called Read to testify and ordered some of his supporters to report on which organizations they backed. One foundation funder, Southern California Edison Vice President William Mullendore, denied Congress' right to make such a "harassing and burdensome inquiry" into his attempts to influence his government. Mullendore got away with his defiance — but today's campaign finance laws allow such governmental intrusion.

When, in 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater used libertarian ideas to decry the excessive growth of government, he was defeated by what was at the time the largest margin of votes in U.S. history. He also was condemned as "psychologically unfit" by more than 1,000 psychiatrists (who never met him) for his belief that the managerial-welfare state in the United States had strayed too far from the country's roots.

Libertarian ideas had a tumultuous period of expansion in the years after Goldwater. Rand became a campus favorite, selling novels of uncompromising libertarianism to tens of millions. A Harvard philosophy professor, Robert Nozick, won a National Book Award for his 1974 book, "Anarchy, State and Utopia," which rigorously maintained that if we have rights, then most of the functions of the modern state, including redistributing wealth and outlawing certain drugs, are philosophically illegitimate.

Also in 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize for economics. Hayek is best known for his 1944 book, "The Road to Serfdom," which demonstrated to those who believed in a benign socialism that government economic control tends inexorably toward political tyranny. Two years later, Milton Friedman, a man as well known for his libertarian polemics as for his economic contributions, also won the Nobel Prize for economics. Libertarian ideas were moving toward the mainstream.

And then Ronald Reagan, who declared that "the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism," won the presidency. Libertarians never believed that Reagan fully lived up to his small-government promise. But his libertarian ideas were a key part of the GOP's electoral appeal.

Over the decades, both major parties have successfully run on libertarian fumes: see Reagan's talk of tax cutting and entitlement reform; control over inflation since the 1980s, largely thanks to Friedman's monetarist ideas (Friedman also persuaded President Nixon to end the draft in 1973), and President Clinton's overhaul of the federal welfare system, which echoed the beliefs and data in libertarian Charles Murray's 1984 book, "Losing Ground." One of the biggest policy debates of the Bush presidency has been about privatizing Social Security, an idea in the works at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, since the 1980s. Introducing market incentives and competition into government services — ideas that originated at the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles — are increasingly popular with local and state governments looking to cut costs and improve services.

A full libertarian victory is certainly unlikely, as a cursory survey of the leading presidential candidates going into 2008 shows. But libertarians can take heart in Americans' growing dissatisfaction with military intervention overseas, with the prospect of an entitlement state in which recipients far outnumber taxpayers and with government manipulations and intrusions in education, immigration, abortion and stem cell research. In such a political context, libertarian wisdom about keeping government out of our lives as much as possible looks more and more promising.

FairTax Act of 2007 H.R. 25

Please get behind your congressman and encourage them to become a co-sponsor of H.R. 25. The more co-sponsors that can be brought on board will help make the FairTax a reality.

Please see the press release below and use it to encourage others.


REPRESENTATIVE LINDER INTRODUCES H.R. 25, THE “FAIRTAX ACT OF 2007”

Washington, D.C. - Today, Representative John Linder (R-GA) introduced H.R. 25, the “The FairTax Act of 2007.” This bill was first introduced by Congressman Linder in 1998, and has become increasingly popular since that time. At the close of the 109th Congress the FairTax Act was the most popular tax reform bill in Congress with 59 supporters in the House, which far exceeded any other piece of tax reform legislation.

“The progress we have made since first introducing the FairTax is simply amazing. The grassroots growth has been phenomenal and it is evident that Americans get it. They are way ahead of the politicians on this one. In the 109th Congress, we had 59 supporters on the bill, and we did not solicit a single one. They came to my office because their constituents demanded it. That is happening all over the country.”

This bi-partisan legislation, with Congressman Dan Boren (D-OK) as an original co-sponsor, will repeal all corporate and individual income taxes, payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes and gift taxes and replace them with a revenue-neutral personal consumption tax. The revenue neutral number advocated in the bill is 23%, which is very near to the average 22% embedded cost of the current system in every good purchased today. This embedded cost will be driven out of the price of goods because the FairTax will also eliminate all business to business taxes.

“Americans realize that we can achieve a voluntary tax system by allowing everyone to pay taxes when they choose and how much they choose by how they choose to spend. We are giving Americans an option of paying 23 cents of every dollar they spend with the freedom of anonymity, or paying 33 cents of every dollar they earn and the fear that the IRS will come knocking because of some unintentional mistake. They get it, and they are coming in droves to support change.”

The FairTax achieves voluntary taxation by providing a prebate to all Americans that offsets the tax consequences of spending up to the poverty level. This aspect of the bill makes it the most progressive tax proposal today. In essence, if a family of four does not exceed the poverty level spending which is established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, then, with the prebate, they will pay no federal taxes for that year.

“Big ideas take a long time to achieve in Washington D.C., and I am excited with the progress we have made in such a short period of time. There are certain economic forces that are pushing us toward the FairTax. If we are going to continue to compete in a global economy, then we will have to move towards a system that removes the foot of the IRS from the throat of our economy.”

Congressman Linder added that he has a new grassroots oriented website, http://linderfairtax.house.gov/, that contains answers to any FairTax related questions.

Unbelievable

The following information published by the CAGW is truly unbelievable. How the rest of the Senate could let this go through is outrageous. Based on the information presented, D,M&E does not even have enough gross revenue to make the note payment.

It does not take a financial genius to realize that this is simply theft of the American taxpayer. We are the ones that will be paying this off. Below is what the CAGW published about this atrocity:

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has named Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) Porker of the Month for helping to secure a record $2.3 billion loan from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for the Dakota, Minnesota, and Eastern Railroad (DM&E). DM&E paid Thune $220,000 in 2003 and 2004 to lobby for the loan before his election to the Senate, where in apparent anticipation of the loan in 2005, Sen. Thune was instrumental in increasing the FRA’s loan guarantee authority a whopping 10-fold, from $3.5 billion to $35 billion. The loan would require an annual payment of $246 million, more than DM&E’s current annual revenue of $200 million -- making it a poor credit risk to taxpayers, who will be forced to foot the bill if the company defaults. What’s more, two other railroads already serve the coal fields of Wyoming, where DM&;E plans to use the loan to expand and improve a rail line for transporting coal to Minnesota. For championing a loan guarantee that puts taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars, circumvents public debate, skews market incentives, and rewards his former employer, CAGW names Sen. John Thune its' Porker of the Month for November 2006.

Wilemon Wonders Why We Can't Talk

The following article, written by Thomas Sowell, once again really says it all. We can no longer question or criticize someone without being labled a racist.

Did you hear about the young lady in Great Britain who requested to be moved from a study group where only one of the others spoke english? The teacher declared her racist, filed charges and she was eventually picked up by the police and spent a short time in jail.

Here in the USA, we are quickly moving in this direction. When we reach the point that we cannot even talk about problems, we might as well turn out the lights.


Can We Talk? By Thomas Sowell

There are very few saints among people of any race, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation. None should be above criticism.

Increasingly, however, there are tighter and tighter restrictions on what you can say about more and more groups. San Francisco radio talk show host Pete Wilson discovered this recently when he criticized a city Supervisor and his female friend -- but not lover -- who had a baby together.

The man is gay and the woman is a lesbian, so they are not lovers in a committed relationship.
Raising a child is no piece of cake, even when the parents are married and committed to staying together.

Raising a child where there is no stable, committed relationship may be cutting edge stuff but Pete Wilson's point was that a child is not an experiment.

The same could be said of heterosexuals like the woman who recently had a baby in her sixties. That's great for making a splash in the media but what is going to happen when the baby becomes a teenager and the mother's energy level has declined with age, if she is still around at all?

The real issue, however, is neither heterosexual or homosexual, and it extends even beyond the important question of the best interests of the child.

The larger question for American society is, as Joan Rivers has often said: "Can we talk?"
Political bigwigs in San Francisco say "No." They are demanding that Pete Wilson resign. In San Francisco, no one is supposed to criticize anything done by homosexuals.

Moreover, this attitude is not confined to San Francisco or to gays. On the other side of the country, Columbia University students stormed the stage when one of the Minuteman critics of our lax immigration laws was trying to speak.

At many other colleges and universities, he would not even have been allowed on campus in the first place. Many campuses have speech codes where it is called creating a "hostile environment" if you say things that make various racial, sexual, or other protected groups unhappy.

Young people educated at our most prestigious colleges and universities are learning the lesson that storm trooper tactics can silence those who are not in vogue on campus, and honest expressions of opinion about issues involving anything from affirmative action to women in the military can get you suspended if you refuse the humiliation and hypocrisy of being "re-educated."

Meanwhile, liberals in Congress have long been advocating a return to the so-called "fairness" doctrine requiring "balance" in broadcasting. Talk radio is overwhelmingly conservative simply because liberal talk radio has failed repeatedly to attract comparable-sized audiences.
The listeners have spoken but the politicians want to overrule them. Some call it "hush Rush" legislation.

"Fairness" here, as in so many other contexts, means nothing more and nothing less than the exercise of arbitrary power by third parties, since everyone has a different definition of what "fairness" means.

Free speech is not a luxury but a necessity if we are to hear the various sides of issues before we decide what to do.

It is not a question of Pete Wilson's rights or even of the rights of all the people who speak or write on public issues. Such people are not even ten percent of the population and probably not even one percent.

Their individual rights matter. But among the pressing problems of our time, their interests alone rank far down the list.

Free speech rights exist for the whole society, not for writers and speakers. When you say that we can hear only what a growing number of censors want us to hear, you are condemning us to grope in the dark when making all sorts of decisions -- about ourselves, our families and the future of our society.

Whether Pete Wilson's opinion was right or wrong is a very small issue compared to blinding us all for the sake of political correctness. Can we talk? Apparently, for some people, the answer is "No."

Copyright 2006 Creators SyndicatePage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/can_we_talk.html at October 17, 2006 - 07:52:44 AM CDT

Roger Wicker among Porker of the Month Honorees

Our own Congressman Roger Wicker has been named to the CAGW's Porker of the Month. I know that he wants to "bring the money home" to our district, but so does every other congressman on the hill. Many of these projects that your tax dollars fund throughout the country are an absolute waste of money.

The more light that we can shed on this spending will help insure that your tax dollars are spent as they should be. Please read the release below that was put out by the CAGW:

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) this month named all 171 members of Congress who voted against the disclosure of earmarks Porkers of the Month. On September 14, the House of Representatives voted 245-171 for an internal rule change (H.Res. 1000) that requires all earmarks and their sponsors to be identified in spending, tax, and authorization bills. “This is a serious step toward opening up the earmarking process,” CAGW President Tom Schatz said. Partisan politics and self-interest clearly influenced what was an easy vote for transparency and accountability. Of the 171 votes against the resolution, 147 were from Democrats. Twenty-two of the 24 Republican nay votes came from members of the Appropriations Committee, where most earmarks are anonymously slipped into spending bills by individual appropriators without debate. For ignoring taxpayers’ outrage over the waste and corruption of pork-barrel spending, CAGW names the 171 nay voters on H.Res. 1000 Porkers of the Month for September 2006. Read more about the Porker of the Month.