Record Set Straight on Nullifiation

http://www.trevorloudon.com/2013/01/nullification-deniers-this-is-what-james-madison-really-said/

http://newjerseypatriotblog.newjerseypatriot.us/?p=2310

Hat tip to New Jersey Patriot.

I know that preface my remarks with bits of my life story entirely too often, but there is a purpose for doing so. For many years, indeed decades, I resisted admitting to myself what was happening to our nation. I refused to accept that our nation was headed in a dangerous direction.

An old (And still) adamant Union and Lincoln man, I naively applied my reasoning for condemning the acts of the Confederacy to our current situation. I failed to understand that, although the South did commit a grievous wrong by  seceding from the US government, this did not mean that later there could not arise conditions that could put us in a situation in which nullification or secession  was necessary.

Here we are.
Firstly, our Federal government was not truly federal in nature. Our government is actually a national one that has aspects that are federal, such as sovereign states that have real political power. Those who supported adopting the Constitution took the initiative by taking the name of Federalist, which forced their opponents to, by default, be referred to as Anti-Federalists.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, made the point  in the early 19th century that our federal government was clearly a national one.

The national government has assumed much stronger national powers than that which was provided for in the Constitution. A Civil War, along with slavery and suppression of rights of freedmen were the primary reasons for this. The rise of the Progressives, who gained the reigns of power by WWI, was the spark which accelerated the move towards a purely national government. FDR only completed the process.

With the schools creating more socialist-minded and anti-Western culture statists which each graduating class, generations of people made dependent by being placed on welfare, and the mass importation of people who come from countries that have no history of republican-type governments, the Left now has the political pull to empower the national government like never before.

We face a political situation that would be utterly unrecognizable to any of the framers. Our national government now exercises powers completely foreign to anything within the wildest imaginations of our founders or even Lincoln. While our founders fought for their rights over some taxes, restrictions on expansion to western lands and markets for our exports, we stand idly by while being hit again and again with one new oppressive law or regulation after another. Those who made a stand for their rights as Englishmen in the late 18th century did so for far less reasons than we have for doing so today.

Oh, to be able go back to the freedoms we had during the worst days of King George III and Parliament! We never had it so good.

Trevor Loudon is a New Zealander. He is a strong supporter of the US and its Constitution. As a citizen of a British Commonwealth nation, he has seen firsthand how quickly a people can be reduced to political impotence and how a free nation can, in the blink of an eye, be mired in stagnant socialism and full governmental control. Like a specter from A Christmas Carol, he works to warn us to stand up for our rights before it is too late.

Please read the article from his blog which is linked at top. It puts to rest many of the claims by the media and the elitists of Academia that we have no option other than to accept what is being rammed down our throats.

Regarding the portion of the article on the Supreme Court and the determination of the Constitutionality of laws, I want to add that, by providing the following three examples, we can know that we no longer have a court that will function as a bulwark for, and last defense of, our freedoms.

The first was Wikard v. Fillburn, in which the Court upheld a draconian FDR-era law that resulted in a man being fined for growing more than the allowed amount of grain on his own farm. Threatened with Justice-packing by the Mussolini and Stalin-admiring FDR (The President threatened to change the number from nine Justices and add more who would follow his lead), the Court ruled that, because the farmer may be able to grow enough grain to enable him to feed his own livestock without buying grain, the farmer's actions could be regulated under the Commerce Clause.

The next nail in the coffin was Kelo V. New London. Here the concept of eminent domain morphed from the state forcing the sale of private property in order to serve a public need (Roads, Schools, etc.) to a governing body being able to condemn a person's home in order to sell it to a private developer. There would not even be a need to prove that the municipality was in dire need of funds - all it had to say was that it could make more money from selling the property and maybe receive more tax revenue from the newly-developed seized properties.

The most recent and egregious case was on Obamacare. Here the Federal government could not only compel a person to purchase something (Insurance is merely the foot in the door for far more), the Court is now effectively able to assign new meanings to the law.The compulsion to purchase can, with no legislation or tax code to cite, be considered to be a tax.

I find no reason to believe that things will improve in time to arrest the collapse of what is left of our freedoms. The Court will see at least one more (Possibly three) new appointments in Obama's second term.