"Let them use ours.  We're not using it."

A few years ago comedian Jay Leno, in discussing America's efforts to create a constitution for Iraq, said, "Let them use ours.  We're not using it."  As is so often the case in Leno's political jokes, the punch line was based on a sad truth in this country, so while we laughed we also nodded in agreement with the statement he was making.

I just returned from a War Between the States living history and reenactment event in Lewisburg, WV.  This event is somewhat unique in that it annually stresses scholarly study of the conflict and its causes and effects, along with the camps, uniforms, battles, and leaders.  I was privileged to participate this year as part of a presentation we call "Commonwealth of Virginia, et al. v. The United States", a what-if scenario that poses the question of what would have happened had the middle-tier states of Virginia,  North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, after the secession of the seven deep-south cotton states, brought an original proceeding before the United States Supreme Court seeking a declaration of laws of whether secession was, indeed, a legal right reserved to the States under the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution.

The next day a group of us, including many of my colleagues in the Lee's Lieutenants group (http://www.leeslieutenants.com/), were sitting in camp, and discussing the modern states' rights movement that has in recent months taken on such a head of steam.  Many state legislatures have either passed, considered, or are considering, resolutions in various forms requesting/demanding that the Congress and the Federal government comply with the Tenth Amendment.   http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2009/02/23/state-sovereignty-resolutions/ . 

It struck us as ironic that we, sitting there is our gray wool under a canvas tent fly, were discussing very much the same issues that our counterparts were debating 150 years ago - states' rights vs. an oppressive Federal government.  Our forebears were upset over high federal tariffs and other acts of economic oppression being perpetrated by a northern-controlled Congress over the rest of the country.  They were tired of seeing hard-earned southern dollars being taken by Federal taxes to fund a bail-out of highly-indebted northern industries and public works projects.  Anything sounding familiar here?

I suspect much of the problem the present-day Tenth Amendment resolutions may be facing is fear of somehow losing Federal funding - many state governments would be financially sunk without Federal highway, education, and healthcare dollars.  Yet it is in many ways this very addiction to the Federal trough that has resulted in the virtual destruction of the Tenth Amendment, for the Federal government is institutionally very gifted at attaching strings to this money that last far longer than the money itself, or its benefits.  This is the very reason several governors have contemplated refusing Federal bailout money, and the fiscal shackles that accompany it.

The Tenth Amendment, of course, 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.  The Constitution, Article I, Section 8, assigns 18 specific powers to the Federal government.  Article I, Section 10, prohibits seven powers to the States.  Simple reference to these lists of specifically-enumerated powers will establish, without question, that the Federal government has long since trampled on the Tenth Amendment and left it in the dust.

The original concept of American government was that the states were sovereign entities from which all governmental power emanated.  Contrary to a question I was asked this weekend, which is still stunning in its misconception of American government, the "United States" did NOT pre-date the states themselves.  The original 13 states were, of course, English colonies prior to declaring their independence in 1776.  The Treaty of Paris, wherein the King of England acceded to our freedom, was made with the 13 sovereign and independent states.  And it is clear not only from the Constitution, but from every legal scholar and Supreme Court decision of the antebellum period, that it was understood that any right which might exist in a sovereign state that was not specifically and explicitly assigned to the Federal government was reserved to the states.  The Supreme Court said several times that the powers of the Federal government were specific and defined, and the powers of the states were indefinite and need not be listed or defined to exist. 

After Mr. Lincoln submitted this issue not to a Court of Law but to the Gods of War, the entire Federal-Constitutional model has progressively been turned on its head.  John Randolph Tucker, first Dean of the Washington & Lee College of Law, once compared sovereignty of the states to the light of the sun, and the powers of the Federal government to the reflected light of the moon.  Now, we are faced with a Federal government that sees itself as a Divinity that commands total obedience, as if it were the source of all governmental power.  This is precisely upside down from any historic concept of a Constitutional republic form of government, which is, in reality, what we are supposed to be.

To paraphrase one of the great lines from the movie "The Patriot", there is little difference in the tyrannical English King of 1776, 3000 miles away, than the tyranny of an omnipresent Federal government that consists of a few hundred tyrants within our own midst.  Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence proposed that humans have the right, indeed the duty, to throw off oppressive forms of government and replace them with government that more suits the needs of the people.

I do not propose open revolution or the overthrow of our government.  What I do propose is that we, the people, demand that our government play within the rules set for it over 200 years ago.  Those rules still do apply, and today make as much, if not more sense than they did to the Founders.  Americans were not intended to be oppressed by a tyrannical Federal government.  The Federal government has a specific list of powers it is to use for the common good of the entire republic of sovereign states - not to abuse and pound the several states into so much dust under the heavy thumb of Federal taxes and regulation.

This movement must arise from the grass roots, from the people.  We must demand that our legislators pass strong Tenth Amendment resolutions.  We must support state government officials who refuse to knuckle under to the Federal government.  We must elect officials who have not only read the Constitution (any bets on how many have even read it?), but who not only "get it" and comprehend what the American form of government was meant to be, and have the moral courage to slowly but surely return this country to a form of government that is truly "of the people, by the people, and for the people". 

Unless we find a way to return to our origins of government, the current problems will only get worse.  We will continue to see a Federal government that interferes with literally every facet of our lives.  We are told what to eat, who will run our companies, how to spend our money (what little is left after taxes), what kind of car we can drive, and so on.  Try to think of one thing in your daily life that is not regulated by the Federal government in one form or another - it is virtually impossible.