Secession, Civil Disobedience or Nullification
By Paul R.
Hollrah
DrRichSwier.com
On October 30, 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama
stood on a platform in Carnahan Quadrangle at the
University of Missouri. Speaking to a crowd of
several thousand starry-eyed students and Democrat
Party faithful, Obama said, “After decades of broken
politics in Washington, and eight years of failed
policies from George W. Bush, and 21 months of a
campaign that’s taken us from the rocky coast of
Maine to the sunshine of California (presumably, all
57 states), we are five days away from fundamentally
transforming the United States of America.”
Then, with a straight face, he segued to a list
of Republican talking points. He said, “In
five days, you can put an end to the politics that
would divide a nation just to win an election, that
tries to pit region against region and city against
town, and Republican against Democrat, that asks us
to fear at a time when we need to hope… So, as
president, I’m going to go through the federal
budget line by line, ending programs we don’t need,
making the ones we do need work better and cost
less. We’ve got to make sure that we are not
charging a credit card to the next generation,
borrowing from China just to pay off our dependence
on foreign oil.”
Now, after just over seven years of Obama’s
leadership, we find a nation that is more divided
along racial, religious, and economic lines than
ever before; a nation in which elections are
decided, not by what is best for the nation as a
whole, but by votes purchased with money borrowed
from China. When Obama took office on January
20, 2009, the national debt stood at $10.6 trillion.
In just seven years in office, Obama has used the
national credit card to increase the debt by an
additional $8.2 trillion, to $18.8 trillion..
Clearly, the federal government caters to the
demands of the cities, where Democrats rule, at the
expense of our rural areas, which are predominately
Republican. In spite of the fact that the 2012
electoral map of the United States appeared to be
almost totally red, with an occasional splotch of
blue indicating the major urban areas, Barack Obama
was able to win reelection by an electoral vote of
365-173. In that election, of the 3,100
counties in the United States, Obama won a majority
of the popular vote in only 653 counties (21.06%),
while Mitt Romney won the popular vote in 2,447
counties (78.94%).
Some 239 years ago, another
man, Thomas Jefferson, also promoted a historic
transformation of government. He wrote,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness – that to secure these rights, governments
are instituted among men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed, that whenever any
form of government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
abolish it, and to institute new government…”
Jefferson understood the necessity of creating a
government “of the people, by the people, and for
the people.” Yet, experience tells us that
what Jefferson had in mind was the exact polar
opposite of what Obama had in mind when he promised
to “fundamentally transform” our nation. After
nearly seven years of oppressive rule by the Obama
regime, a lawless regime for which constitutional
principles and the rule of law are seen as mere
annoyances, it’s time we considered whether or not
our republic can ever be restored to its former
greatness.
There is evidence that liberals and Democrats are
using the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 as a means
of importing a ruling majority of the poor and
uneducated from the Third World, whose allegiances
are easily purchased by a corrupt and lawless
political party with access to the public treasury.
As Democratic strategist Patrick Reddy is quoted as
saying, “The 1965 Immigration Reform Act promoted by
President Kennedy, drafted by Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, and pushed through the Senate by Ted
Kennedy, has resulted in a wave of immigration from
the Third World that should shift the nation in a
more liberal direction within a decade. It
will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift
to the Democratic Party.”
In other words, what Democrats have done,
methodically, over the past 50 years is to import
sufficient votes to offset those they are unable to
attract among white professionals and blue-collar
European-Americans. It causes one to wonder
how many years we have left as the freest, most
prosperous nation on Earth.
A retired United Airlines pilot compared what the
passengers on Germanwings Flight 9525 must have felt
to what it feels like living through the Obama era
in American politics. He said, “It is hard to
imagine the growing feelings of fear and
helplessness (they) felt as the unforgiving
landscape rushed up to meet them… We feel the
descent in the pits of our stomachs. We don’t
know where we’re going anymore, but we do know it
isn’t good. And above all, we feel helpless because
a man very few Americans had heard of ten years ago
(Barack Obama) has locked us out (of the cockpit).”
So, if our constitutional republic has been
savaged to the point where it is beyond repair, what
are our alternatives? In a previous column I
have suggest three alternatives with the order of
preference being: a) massive civil disobedience, b)
widespread 10th Amendment nullification
by states and local communities, and finally, c)
dissolution of the Union, otherwise known as
secession… the most draconian of the three
alternatives. However, upon further reflection
I have concluded that our first reaction to the
heavy-handedness of the Obama regime should not be
civil disobedience. We have always been a
nation of laws, and to suggest that we should resort
to unlawful tactics such as street protests,
marches, riots, and sit-ins is to suggest that we
should become a nation of law breakers.
It is not the sort of undisciplined behavior that
we should be teaching our children. Nor should
we be agitating for dissolution of the union,
although a new nation comprising the 26 most heavily
Republican states of the Old South, the Far West,
the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the Midwest
would make a very fine country… the greatest nation
on Earth.
In a December 6, 2015 column, titled, “Secession
or War – America’s West Against the East,” the
President of the National Association of Rural
Landowners, Ron Ewart, described the problems
created by federal government ownership of land in
the western states. According to Ewart, of the
2.27 billion acres of landmass in the U.S., the
federal government owns 28%, or
635.6 million acres. Of that 635.6 million
acres, 572 million acres are in the 18 western
states.
Ewart suggests that the 18 western states form an
alliance, warning the federal government that “they
are on thin ground,” and that the only solution to
the unwarranted and unconstitutional federal power
grab is capitulation by the federal government…
including the release of all federal lands (other
than national parks and national forests) to private
ownership. He warns that, if the federal
government fails to agree, the result might be an
effort toward secession.
However, our first
alternative should be the widespread use of
nullification by states and local governments, as
envisioned by the 10th Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution. 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.”
Liberals and Democrats
might argue that the 180 American cities who have
declared themselves to be “sanctuary” cities are
examples of nullification. But nullification
is not about systematic disobedience to federal law
that is, constitutionally, the province of the
federal government. Nullification represents a
decision by state and local governments to refuse to
yield to federal laws that are, under the 10th
Amendment, solely the province of state and local
governments.
In a December 16, 2015 report by the Tenth
Amendment Center, we are told of a bill prefiled in
the Missouri legislature, HB1791, which would
require the Missouri General Assembly to “adopt and
enact any and all measures as may be necessary to
prevent the enforcement of regulations, rules, and
memorandums issued by a presidential executive
order.”
The bill describes executive orders not justified
by federal law, or the limited constitutional
authority of the president of the United States, as
“repugnant to the Constitution of the United States
and the Constitution of Missouri.” Language in the
bill declares such executive orders to be “null,
void, and of no effect” in Missouri.
The Tenth Amendment Center
notes that “HB1791 rests on a well-established legal
principle known as the anti-commandeering doctrine.
The cornerstone of that doctrine is found in the
U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Printz v. United
States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997). In that
decision the court ruled, “We held in New York
(v. United States) that Congress cannot
compel the States to enact or enforce a federal
regulatory program.
Today we hold that Congress cannot circumvent
that prohibition by conscripting the States’
officers directly. The Federal Government may
neither issue directives requiring the States to
address particular problems, nor command the States’
officers, or those of their political subdivisions,
to administer or enforce a federal regulatory
program. It matters not whether policy making is
involved, and no case by case weighing of the
burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are
fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional
system of dual sovereignty.”
Republicans now control 32
governorships and both legislative bodies in 30
states. Armed with the words of the 10th
Amendment and the anti-commandeering doctrine, those
governors and those legislators are capable of
reasserting their state sovereignty by engaging in
massive acts of nullification.
Since we cannot rely on Republican majorities in
Congress to reverse the trend toward federal
supremacy, the states represent our only hope for
restoring our constitutional republic as the
Founders conceived it. Nullification is the
answer, secession is an alternative.