Constitutional "Legitimate remedy" by federal tyranny

I simply do not believe that the Constitution of the United States was written to be read and interpreted by anyone other than the average citizen of the 13 Confederate States of America. Mind you, in the 18th century that meant white male homeowners, but those were the times, and the fact is that literacy estimates at the time of our war for independence ranged up to 95% of the population. By Thomas Paine Common senseFor example, it sold over 100,000 copies in the first two months of its printing, a staggering number that must have delighted and overwhelmed its publisher.

So when I read in the Constitution, Amendment X: “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,” I can understand. It says that if the Constitution does not explicitly authorize the federal government (“the United States”) to do something, nor does it explicitly prohibit individual states (“the States”) from doing something, then those powers to do things belong to the states and, by extension, its constituents (“the people”). If it is not specifically given to the feds, or specifically denied to the states, in writing in the Constitution, then automatically and until the Constitution is amended, power belongs to the states and their people. The states have a lot of power; the federal government has much less power; and the powers belonging to the federals are detailed in black and white. Is that so difficult?

Fast forward a couple of centuries and here we are. The federal government has grown to gigantic proportions and has become involved in every corner of our lives. Surprisingly, this very development was anticipated by the architects of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights was added to explain in unambiguous language what was commonly understood to be true, and was added to ensure ratification of the Constitution by several states, chief among them Virginia, which would not otherwise vote for it.

So now we have a federal government that does pretty much everything it wants to do: all three branches. The question is: What can we do about it? Where can we go if, when and because the government violates the Constitution? This is where Thomas E. Woods, Jr. comes in.

In Annulment, Woods has written a manual on “Resisting Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.” That is also quite clear.

It turns out that the framers of the Constitution not only anticipated that the federal government would gradually usurp the rights of the states and their peoples, but they also created ways to combat that usurpation. There is secession, of course, which, despite the Civil War, has never been proven to be illegal. There is the path of constitutional amendment, which is highly desirable and logistically arduous. And then there is the nullification, which means that if a state finds that an action of the federal government is a violation of the Constitution, then it has the right and the duty to declare that act or law null and void within its borders, reject to enforce it, and prohibit federal government agents from enforcing it, to the best of their ability to do so.

Annulment has a long and honorable history dating back to the early days of the Republic, and Woods covers that story thoroughly. Northern states even used the override to refuse to enforce runaway slave laws. Currently, nullification is practiced in at least 14 states, which have declared the medical use of marijuana legal and acceptable within their borders, in defiance of federal laws. There is also a growing movement to amend the Constitution to reaffirm that it protects only the rights of living human beings, something the Founders deemed too obvious to justify mentioning it, and the repeal could prove fruitful here as well. The current Supreme Court has dramatically extended First Amendment rights to soulless corporations, in a way that all four dissenting justices found “wrong,” “dangerous,” “reckless,” almost certainly unconstitutional. Yes, the Supreme Court, one more branch of the federal government, must answer to the states and the people, the ultimate judges of constitutionality.

Woods maintains that annulment is, and since the time of Jefferson and Madison has been regarded as the “legitimate remedy” for unconstitutional acts by the federal government, and that the states that preceded and ratified the Constitution are and should be the vehicle for the application of that resource. The federal government, of which the Supreme Court is a part, cannot be the final judge of the legality and constitutionality of its own acts. That is the best example of the fox that guards the henhouse. The states, individually if necessary, have the right to judge the constitutionality of federal acts and the duty to act on that sentence. The annulment repairs constitutional grievances without a state leaving the Union (secession) and without modifying the Constitution, which due to its understandable difficulty is easily blocked by other states whose interests may benefit the unconstitutional act.

This is a powerful thing. And it comes at the right time. The people are not powerless in the face of an unaccountable and maddened government. They are the states in which power resides. It says it in plain language, in the Constitution, and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., has done us a great service by pointing it out.

Please read this book and make its arguments your own. Purchase an additional copy for your local library. And above all, read, discuss and defend the Constitution of the United States.