Great Idea
Saturday 14 May 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized
It’s clear to most people beyond central authority boot lickers that the amount of power and influence DC exudes over the lives of people has gone far beyond what is called for in the Constitution. Obamacare might be a good example, as are some of the latest federal iniitives of blocking state mandated medical marijuana laws which allow their citizens to use marijuana with a doctor’s recommendation. Unfortunately, states and their populations have long been led to believe that state nullification is a racist practice because some instances of state nullification and ultimately the cessession of the confederate states was couched in the language of states rights.1. Some prognosticators of central authority have even tried to reinterpret uses of states rights rhetoric in past so they they can re-frame the argument in purely racist terms for their own political advantage. After all, the “smartest people in the room” can’t tell everyone else how to live if the people of individual states can simply give them the finger and move on with their lives. States rights is anathema to a top-down approach to governance, and has no place in their “we know better than everybody else how heterogeneous localities ought to deal with the issues they face” approach.
The “Repeal Amendment”, introduced on May 12, is designed to give states a tool to assert the powers given to them by the 10th amendment, rather than mere language that can (and has been) ignored. What makes this initiative different from most is that this is not a partisan issue. States of both Republican and Democat flavors have an overriding interest in fighting against centralized authority in order to protect their citizens from an over-reaching federal government.
There are limitations to the repeal amendment of course, namely in that it requires 2/3 of the states to vote to repeal a federal law in order for the amendment to work. It seems to me that it shouldn’t require 32 other states in order for California to tell the federal government that, when it comes to medical marijuana legislation they’ll do as the voters of their state will see fit, or that if only 30 states decide on repealing a law, as opposed to the required 33, that states should somehow be compelled to act against the interest of their citizens. A single state actively nullifying a law should be satisfactory, and according to the constitution it is. Not only does the repeal amendment allow, but it encourages tyranny of the majority because how nullification after a repeal amendment ratification will be understood will be that in order to ignore federal mandate, 33 states must comply. It turns centralized authority in to an entity no better: consensus authority.
That’s unacceptable.
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1. of course there are dozens of other examples of states exercising their constitutional authority of nullification such as when many free states refused to act on the Slave Fugitive Law, yet the intellectually dishonest simply ignore that the concept of nullification has nothing to do with racism and slavery, but with states exercising the power given to them via the 10th Amendment.
2011-05-14 » madlibertarianguy