by Bryce Shonka

The pen that the President used has already been tucked away for it’s ‘historic value’. The bill has been printed with congressional approval and now that Barack Obama’s signature appears on it we have officially entered an age of unprecedented Federal control over the most tangible aspect of our human experience- our bodies.

It is also likely that printing presses are already churning out a form that you will someday find in your mailbox, the papers requiring you to sign away your medical authority to bureaucrats who make their assessments from the other side of the continent.

What is your emotional reaction to this new era? Trepidation? Despair? Grief over the loss of our constitutional republic? What will we do? What will you do?

Some will celebrate what they see as the passage of a ‘change’ bill, granting at long last access to health care so badly needed. Others like myself, are seeing an alarming parallel between the health care talking points released today and the lofty promises made at the beginning of the Iraq War. The track record of Federal power increases tell us that mandates like the one signed into law today are seldom a net gain for those outside of the political class.

Just as the Bush administration promised that the Iraq invasion would “pay for itself” through oil revenue, DC’s current crop of spinners claim that this unprecedented new health care bureaucracy will actually diminish the national deficit, though the actual amount we will pay in taxes won’t be known until Barack has exited the Oval Office. In 2003 ‘spreading democracy to the Middle East’ was similarly sold to the American people, with end results that look much different from that glorious initial pitch.

What we do now should not be centered around the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Reacting with national solutions to Federal actions is simply playing their game. Have no doubt, someone with a Federal pay stub is ready and waiting with a plan to counter reactions, such as the Attorney’s General from a host of states who sued the Federal government 7 minutes after the bill was signed. It may even be the same brain trust that effectively parried those opposing health care reform at the grassroots level before the bill became law.

To repel the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, there is one solution that not only denies this new Federal mandate, but also future ones as well. Banding together in our respective sovereign states (yes, even California) and pushing back against those who are prepared to limit our choice of medical treatment is the starting point for resistance to a whole host of Federal mandates, on everything from light bulbs to what is in our children’s textbooks. We must assert our sovereignty as described in the 10th amendment.

State sovereignty is suddenly on the lips of many across the republic who recognize that the only way to stop the out-of-control Federal beast is to head it off at the pass- a.k.a. our state border. This the strategy of the state sovereignty movement- to respond using the tools so thoughtfully provided by the architects of our constitutional republic. Chief amongst those tools is the concept of nullification- not waiting for a US Supreme court decision for approval, but rather asserting that unconstitutional Federal mandates are null, void and of no force.

reclaiming-american-revolutionYou, myself and everyone we know form the top of the food chain in the American system of government. It is up to We the People as sovereigns- not the Federal legislative branch- to honor out the intentions of our nation’s founders and see to it that the Federal beast remains within its strict limits. This will never be achieved by asking the beast, for once escaped from its confinement it will only seek to increase its current power.

We must cast a net over this rampaging Federal government from each of our 50 states and with the resolute solidarity of We the People, the animal we created will be returned to its cage.

Bryce Shonka [send him email] is media and grassroots director for the Tenth Amendment Center and state chapter coordinator for the California Tenth Amendment Center.

Copyright © 2010 by TenthAmendmentCenter.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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