Much like last year’s health insurance bill, the recently passed Food Safety and Modernization Act (or “Food Patriot Act”), is unconstitutional for one simple reason: the federal government lacks the authority to regulate economic activities that do not cross state lines. 

But try explaining that to the Food and Drug Administration, which, in concert with the Department of Homeland Security, will now have greatly expanded power to smother small farmers and local food producers in bureaucracy and red tape. 

Not to mention the ability to enforce disturbingly authoritarian doctrines on the American people such as:

“There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food.”

“There is no ‘deeply rooted’ historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds.”

“Plaintiffs’ assertion of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.”

“There is no fundamental right to freedom of contract.”

Every single one of the above arguments (made by the FDA in response to a recent lawsuit) is diametrically opposed to the ideas of individual liberty on which America was founded, and is clearly contradicted by the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states:

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Yet, perhaps the FDA is not solely to blame for the logical disconnect between a federal agency’s legal argumentation and the foundation of federal law.

After all, the Supreme Court itself has opined on numerous occasions that there are no constitutional limits on federal power to regulate every aspect of American life under the guise of regulating commerce, state lines and sovereignty notwithstanding. And they’re the ones who interpret what the Constitution means, right?

Ironically, the very premise that the highest court in the land should have such a unilateral final say in questions of constitutionality is based on bad precedent. Chief Justice John Marshall simply fabricated the interpretive authority of “judicial review” in 1803, and flawed logic and legislation, invariably tending toward absolutism, has been heaped atop ever since.

But misreading the Constitution, or perverting it for political gain, does not change the legal force of the original document. To paraphrase Austrian economist Peter Schiff, the Constitution doesn’t need to be interpreted; it’s not written in Chinese. It just needs to be followed.

If federal lawmakers and their alphabet agencies refuse to obey the very document on which their political authority and legitimacy is based, then it is up to state and local governments to pass and enforce laws like the Intrastate Commerce Act (ICA), which explicitly remind the feds where their authority ends.

So far in 2011, legislation has been introduced in Arizona (SB1178), New Hampshire (HB324) and Virginia (HB1438) that defines intrastate commerce as anything produced, mined or grown and used within a given state’s boundaries. Such economic transactions are, by definition, not subject to federal regulation of interstate commerce.

New Hampshire’s proposed law would even go so far as to make it a felony for any agent of the federal government to attempt to enforce unconstitutional regulations in the state.

Thanks to the tireless work of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty, a version of the ICA has passed the state’s House of Delegates by a wide margin two years in a row. But that’s not nearly good enough. Success in the Virginia Senate will require a groundswell of public outrage similar to that which helped get the Health Care Freedom Act passed last year in seven states.

Absent passage of the ICA or similar legislation, there will be nothing to stop the FDA from using the Food Patriot Act to drive family farms across the country out of business; killing jobs in the growing industry of local organic food production, without improving safety at all.

Even if activists do succeed in properly defining interstate commerce, the federal government already operates with such blatant disregard for its own laws that it’s clear the question of state vs. federal power will ultimately have to be decided in the only court that matters anyway: public opinion.

As the people of the Middle East are reminding America, when the governed actively withdraw their consent, even the most repressive dictators are rendered powerless.

The days of relying on the wisdom of black-robed deities in Washington, D.C. are long past. Those gods have failed us. We the People, through our state and local governments, are all that stands now between a power-mad federal tyranny and the future of liberty in our constitutional republic. And time is running out.

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The roadmap of nullification doesn’t require the establishment, and that’s the beauty of it…

Unless you’re a federal bureaucrat, we’re on the same team.

“All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”, Lord Acton

We can rephrase Acton’s observation and apply it to today’s world by saying that the more power we grant to our elected officials, the more corrupt they will be.

In 1994, the republican candidates for the House of Representatives used their “Contract With America” as a campaign tool.  In this “contract”, along with other things, prospective representatives promised to implement these reforms on their first day in office.

• FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
• SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
• THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
• FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs;
• FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
• SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public;
• SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
• EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.

Do any of those promises even begin to resemble today’s reality?  In a 2000 issue of Forbes Magazine, Edward H. Crane, President of The Cato Institute declared that the Contract with America had failed.  Saying,

Consider: Over the past three years the Republican-controlled Congress has approved discretionary spending that exceeded Bill Clinton’s requests by more than $30 billion.  The party that in 1994 would abolish the Department of Education now brags in response to Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union Address that it is outspending the White House when it comes to education. (emphasis added)

The republicans who ran on a limited government platform became the new generation of spenders and central planners.  In both 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush campaign featured promises to reform Social Security by allowing citizens to own their own retirement savings. Saying things like,

We want to allow younger workers to take some of their own money & put it in safe investments so that $1 trillion grows to $3 trillion. The money stays within the system.

and,

If we don’t trust younger workers to manage some of their own money, it’s going to be impossible to bridge the gap without causing huge payroll taxes or major benefit reductions.

So how is your privatized retirement savings account performing?  Instead of privatizing social security, President Bush and the republican congress gave us medicare expansion, the Patriot Act, TARP and a GM bailout (among other things).

From 2006 through 2008, Barack H. Obama provided limited government rhetoric of a different sort.  He promised to close the detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year and to be out of Iraq in 16 months.  Then Senator Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid also railed against the Patriot Act, saying,

Senator Obama, 2007:

“This is legislation that puts our own Justice Department above the law.  When National Security Letters are issued, they allow federal agents to conduct any search on any American, no matter how extensive or wide-ranging, without ever going before a judge to prove that the search is necessary.”

Representative Pelosi, 2005:

“This is a massive invasion of the privacy of the American people, not just some idle threat.  The Washington Post reported last month that the FBI hands out more than 30,000 national security letters per year, a reported hundred-fold increase over historic norms.  How did this happen?”

Senator Reid, 2005:

“Now, what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas, but not in this instance.  It’s in some federal data bank. That’s what the Patriot Act is doing to the American people. And we have to make sure that big brother doesn’t take over this country.”

Now, 18 months after the people of this country have entrusted these officials to act upon those words, there is still no visible horizon in Iraq; we’re still holding detainees in Guantanamo Bay; and the democrat house, senate and president not only didn’t repeal the Patriot Act, but they renewed it!  Beyond the Patriot Act, the executive branch of government has also claimed the authority to assassinate American Citizens with no involvement from the legislative or judicial branches.  Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence, testified that,

“We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community, if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Where, oh where have our passionate defenders of civil rights gone?

In his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Thomas Jefferson wrote,

“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.

Have we seen “a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers”?  I know my answer.

What has gone wrong?  In Federalist 51, James Madison wrote,

But the great security against a gradual concentration of those several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional and personal motives to resist the encroachments of the others.  The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of the attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.  The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.  But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?  If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.  A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions… (emphasis added)

We have written about incentives here.  Unfortunately, today the incentives are wrong.  The Seventeenth Amendment has misaligned the interests of our Senators and our state legislators have forgotten their role as one of Madison’s “auxiliary precautions”.  A century of consolidation later, our government has become so powerful that it corrupts nearly everyone who arrives there.  Further, we the people have forgotten our own role as the primary control on government.

As the e-mails, blog posts and articles counting down the days to the November elections appear, 100 days, 99 days, 98 days, …., it is important to be consider that November is not the solution to our problems.  Remember Lord Acton,

“All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The solution to our problem is not to find the right people and send them to Washington.  By all means, vote the bums out, but if that is the end of it, the new crop of bums (from both parties) will forget their limited government rhetoric just as surely as their predecessors did.  We have a continued role to play as an informed and active citizenry.   We must remind our state officials of their duty to protect the Tenth Amendment.  We must remain informed about our local, state and national governance, acting when necessary to protect the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.  We should focus, especially, on our state and local representatives, since decentralization of power serves their interests and ambitions.

Here in Pennsylvania, we should be encouraging our elected officials to support the following legislation, regardless of who wins in November,

• Tenth Amendment Sovereignty Resolution, declaring sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment and demanding that the federal government cease & decist from Unconstitutional actions;
• Nullify the Federal Health Care Takeover (such as the Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act, Health Care Freedom Amendment or the Federal Health Care Nullification Act.);
• Firearms Freedom Act, exempting firearms built, sold and used exclusively within the state from federal regulation;
• Real ID NonCompliance, stating that Pennsylvania will not participate in the invasive federal RealID legislation.

If we are going to set Pennsylvania free, November is the beginning, not the end.

Steve Palmer is the State Chapter Coordinator for the Pennsylvania Tenth Amendment Center.

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

On a recent road trip, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with a great and wise friend of mine. While reminiscing the years from his past, he told me the story of a great speaker, writer, and philosopher who spoke at Wheaton College in nineteen sixty-eight. He laid out the setting of the speech, the speaker’s demeanor, and the effectual, authoritative words that were spoken. Something specific that the speaker said awed him and the crowd – something that has lasted a lifetime and left a long lasting impression on his life. He quoted these words to me as something the speaker repeated over and over while ending his speech:

“Do not stop, keep going. Do not stop, keep going.” – Francis Schaeffer – Founder of L’Abri Switzerland

The quote itself implies an admirable and noble quality that is relevant to all of us – perseverance. In fact, it is of essence and a necessity when striving for what we struggle for: state sovereignty, nullification efforts, and God given rights. Yet, unfortunately to our great misfortune, perseverance diminishes over time – seemingly for all of us. It is a quality that frequently dries up in our lives. We cannot seem to hold it in our hands as if it blows away with the wind – it is there one moment and gone the next.

We are inspired when we hear the news of success and hope briefly grazes over us, our spirit’s are lifted and like a medicine it cures the disease. We hear or read something profound and it sends chills down our spines and we can taste the inspiration and our sense to persevere is renewed. And yet again, for most of us it is short lived and it subtly but surely wanes over time. Therefore, we often lose confidence in ourselves and in our struggle. And ultimately we wonder: Is this pain, this struggle, and this fight worth our trial and should we persevere through it?

To answer the above question, let it be known there is no quick fix for this problem and our American idea of instant gratification will not bend itself to success as what lies ahead of us is a long hard path or possibly better stated, “the road less traveled.” However, while viewing it from the illuminating light of liberty, it is without question worth the patience, pain, and struggle. Why? In the words of Charlton Heston, “Because it matters.”

We often hear or speak of the patriot Samuel Adams and one of his most famous quotes.

“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.” – Samuel Adams

In my opinion, it is one of the most insightful and beautiful quotes in American history. However, it implies something greater than what we most often conceive. The ideas of prevailing, an irate minority, and setting brush fires in people’s minds all sound wondrous to us; yet, my fear is that “tireless” does not. And today we struggle for something that unyieldingly requires a “tireless” mind and a constant restoration of perseverance. We struggle for something real, something innate to ever person by their God given right – liberty, which is not easily acquired nor is it something that should be apathetically disregarded. I emphasize this point with the following quote:

“Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” – John Adams

If thought about considerably, our founder’s foresight and prudence shows us the magnitude and scope of our concern. I personally have hope that it is not “lost forever,” as I do not think this was Adam’s intention in writing. It was a forewarning, which will unquestionably take time to reacquire – perhaps years or even decades. As Michael Boldin stated, “There is no silver bullet.”

So, do not be deceived into thinking that those in the position of federal power will desist and wither away silently. This futile thinking will lead to dismay, loss of hope, and ultimately apathy. It will take a consistent group of like minded people in support of the original intent of the constitution and an unwavering opposition to unconstitutional mandates and laws. It will be a continual process, one that most likely will never end.

To regain what has been lost, one must dedicate themselves throughout their lives to the cause of liberty, true patriotism, constitutional knowledge, education, and American foundational history. Indeed, this must also be shared and taught to our fellow citizens, children, and grandchildren lest we tread down the same blemished path forever.

And to quote Boldin again, “We the people are sovereign. We just need to start acting like it.” However, underneath this statement lies all that has been stated in this article – “acting like it” requires long term challenges which in turn requires long term firm resolve, which can most accurately be described fundamentally as perseverance.

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To that end, the question remains: Will the brush fires set in people’s minds be greater for liberty or will they be outweighed by those predisposed to tyranny? And to the greatest extent, only prevailing with perseverance will decide the outcome. Therefore, I urge you to run your race well.

“Do not stop, keep going. Do not stop, keep going.” – Francis Schaeffer

Shane Musgrove [send him email] is a freelance writer living in Vail and Denver, Colorado.

Everything has been turned upside down in the past 12 months- Dems and Reps have swapped dugouts along with the establishment media, from overlord to underdog and vice versa.

So much is different that it can be tough for a champion of state sovereignty to know what steps to take, so I have assembled a list as we at Tenth Amendment Center see it.

READ tenthamendmentcenter.com

We provide the best examples we can find of past, present and future thought on the balance of state and Federal power. The best first step for all who want to counter the tactics of misinformation is right on our website. Read up on past articles and jump in with your own personal view on the battle. The more educated our ranks, the better our chances of winning this fight.

CONTACT lawmakers in your state

The Tenth Amendment Center’s 10-4 Pledge is a great way for patriots to weed out those lawmakers who talk a good talk but won’t really take a stand for liberty. By presenting the 10-4 Pledge to your state legislature the cream will rise to the top and leaders worth rallying around will stand up and become visible to all.

DRAFT sovereignty legislation

Many groups around the United States have already begun to craft sovereignty legislation for their state. With the help of our scholars and legal experts, Tenth Amendment Center has a new offering, with example resolutions that serve as an excellent starting point for your state’s sovereignty resolution.

CAMPAIGN to introduce sovereignty bills

As 10-4 Pledges emerge in your state, the entry point for sovereignty legislation is clear and available. 10-4 lawmakers are champions who have already chosen the side of liberty and can be considered the entry point to get your sovereignty resolutions introduced in your state house.

Once 50 states have said NO and chosen to resist DC, we will be close to the goal of liberty in our lifetime.

Now is the time to take action!

On August 1st at the Statehouse in Columbus, The Ohio Liberty Council will send a powerful message of group unity. For the first time, a multitude of groups like the Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus Tea Party groups, The Ohio Freedom Alliance, Ohio Free State, Buckeye Firearms Association, Cincinnati and Central Ohio 9-12 groups, Americans for Prosperity and many others will come together to make a powerful statement that we are united in the strong defense of liberty.

This event of unity and coordination is the first of its kind and an idea we hope catches on across the country. We will join forces and submit a unified declaration of grievances and principles supported by all participating groups. We will come together on August 1st specifically to support the Tenth Amendment and the State Sovereignty Resolutions currently working their way through the General Assembly in Ohio.