The Star Circled Banner
June 2010
COMMANDER'S COMMENTS - James Staton, Cmdr, Camp 2089
Fellow Compatriots,
Over the past few months our Camp
has been in the process of reevaluating some of our policies and procedures and
during this, sometimes trying, time I have asked my self the question, “Why do I
do this?”. Then the thought entered my mind, if
we ask ourselves this question, then there are sure to be times when
others will ask us the same thing. How will we answer? Why do we give of our
time, talents, and abilities to this organization? What motivates us to become
so involved in an organization that is, sadly, so unknown to the general public?
For me, it is the result of a deep seated love for the South and Her
people. Not a mere interest in history, but an interest in a true account of
history as it applies to our South. I belong to the SCV for the simple purpose
of preserving and honoring the memory and the sacrifices of so many brave men(
and women). Men willing to leave there homes and firesides and fight to secure
the right to live their lives as Southerners! So I have learned a lesson over
these past few weeks and months, my friends we should always be ready to answer
the question, Why do I/You, do this?……..What will your answer be?…….Just food
for thought.
I Remain, Your Humble Servant,
James A. Staton
We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth
worship Thee, the Father everlasting.
To Thee all angels cry aloud; the heavens and all the powers therein. To Thee
cherubim and seraphim continually do cry;
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabbaoth; heaven and earth are full of the majesty
of Thy glory. The glorious company of the Apostles praise Thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise Thee. The noble army of Martyrs
praise Thee.
The holy church throughout all the world doth acknowledge Thee; The Father of an
infinite Majesty; Thine adorable, true and only Son; also, the Holy Ghost, the
Comforter.
Thou art the King of glory, O Christ. Thou art the everlasting Son of the
Father. When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man,Thou didst humble Thyself to
be born of a virgin. When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, Thou didst
open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God,in the glory of the Father. We believe
that Thou shalt come to be our Judge.
We therefore pray Thee to help Thy servants, whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy
precious blood. Make them to be numbered with thy saints, in glory everlasting.
O Lord, save thy people, and bless Thine heritage. Govern them, and lift them up
forever. Day by day we magnify Thee; and we worship Thy Name ever, world without
end. Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin. O Lord, have mercy upon
us, have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let Thy mercy be upon us, as our trust is in Thee. O Lord, in Thee have
I trusted; let me never be confounded.
Taken from the "Confederate Soldier's Pocket Manual of Devotions" compiled by
Charles Todd Quintard, Chaplain 1st Tennessee Regiment, CSA
Let us all glorify Almighty God and bring Christ into the camp.
God Bless you all, Chaplain William McKiven
Quote of the Month
"I can only say that while I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the States and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be agressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it." Robert E Lee to Lord Acton.
States’ Rights
Nullification makes a comeback—and not just on the Right.
Jeff Taylor
John C. Calhoun is back with a vengeance, warming the hearts of Old South
romantics while chilling the blood of modern liberals. He conjures up images
both appealing and appalling: old-fashioned patriotism, partisan demagoguery,
genuine fears, love of liberty. The modern Tea Party movement owes much of its
inspiration to the Ron Paul campaign, the only national effort in recent years
to mention the Tenth Amendment. Yet inevitably talk of nullification evokes
memories of Calhoun and the Lost Cause—even though the roots of the idea run
much deeper.
The re-emergence of nullification—the repudiation or ignoring of a federal law
by a state government—poses an interesting challenge to the power of the federal
government and its monopoly on constitutional interpretation.
In recent decades, the first organized attempt came from the Left and
libertarian Right’s advocacy of medical marijuana. The movement achieved success
in California in 1996 with passage of Proposition 215—a direct affront to
federal anti-drug laws—and has since spread to 13 other states. But in 2005, the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gonzales v. Raich that the Constitution’s commerce
clause gives the federal government the right to criminalize marijuana. This
trumping of states’ rights was supported by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John
Ashcroft, and Alberto Gonzales as plaintiffs, and was advanced by Justice
Antonin Scalia. In addition to being joined by three of the court’s Republican
justices, Scalia allied with two liberals in declaring that Angel Raich, a woman
with a brain tumor, substantially affected interstate commerce when she grew a
plant in her backyard and used it to alleviate her own suffering.
To his credit, Clarence Thomas dissented, writing, “If the majority is to be
taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes
drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 states. This makes a mockery of
Madison’s assurance to the people of New York that the ‘powers delegated’ to the
Federal Government are ‘few and defined,’ while those of the States are
‘numerous and indefinite.’” He was referencing Federalist 45. Thomas further
invoked the principle of original intent by noting, “In the early days of the
Republic, it would have been unthinkable that Congress could prohibit the local
cultivation, possession, and consumption of marijuana.”
Chief Justice William Rehnquist also dissented. Similarly, the attorneys general
of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana filed an amicus curiae brief supporting
the defendant on states’ rights grounds. The Deep South is not a hotbed of NORML
members, but it does have a longstanding suspicion of federal usurpation of
state prerogatives.
Although the Controlled Substances Act was deemed superior to the Tenth
Amendment, the Obama administration has backed away from strict enforcement in
clear cases of medical use in legalized states. De facto nullification has won a
partial victory. But it is likely that the Justice Department’s stance has more
to do with politics than principle. Barack Obama is a former professor of
constitutional law, but he is not known as a friend of states’ rights.
Nullification has been gaining popularity in states North, South, and West. One
week before Obama assumed office, Joel Boniek introduced the Montana Firearms
Freedom Act into the state legislature. The freshman Republican legislator
previously affiliated with the Constitution Party was a veteran of Paul’s 2008
campaign. His legislation challenged ATF authority, declaring federal firearms
laws within the state to be null and void on the basis of the Second, Ninth, and
Tenth Amendments. It was written and advanced by two other Paul admirers between
2004 and 2007, while Bush was president, but was twice defeated by the state
senate. It eventually passed both houses and was signed into law by Gov. Brian
Schweitzer, a Democrat. Firearms Freedom Acts have since been adopted by
Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, South Dakota, and Idaho, and are under
consideration in 20 other states.
Another recent nullification effort concerns the Real ID Act of 2005, which sets
national standards for state driver’s licenses. According to the law, Americans
without federally sanctioned licenses would be denied access to commercial
airlines and federal buildings. The regulations were to take effect in 2008, but
resistance forced the deadline back—first to 2010 and then to 2011. Half of the
states have approved resolutions or laws refusing to follow the federal
requirements.
As with firearms law, opposition to Real ID is a bipartisan effort. Following
the lead of their more consistent brethren in the Constitution and Libertarian
Parties, Republicans have been most vocal in objecting, but many Democrats have
come aboard. In 2007, a de facto nullification resolution in Maine was approved
by the state house 137-4 and by the state senate 34-0. The Utah legislature and
Missouri senate also unanimously refused to co-operate with Real ID.
Governor Schweitzer, a strong opponent of Real ID, is former chairman of the
Democratic Governors Association. Calling the law a “harebrained scheme” when
interviewed by NPR in 2008, he ended with this verbal blast: “There’s nothing in
the Constitution that tells Homeland Security that they’re supposed to do this
or they must do this. … This is another bluff by some bureaucrats in Washington,
D.C., and thank God, we live a long ways from Washington, D.C.” Former Gov. Tim
Kaine, who signed Virginia’s anti-Real ID bill into law last year, is today the
chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Now the recently enacted healthcare reform stands to become the subject of
nullification efforts. There could be “mass noncompliance with the law without
any consequences,” say Lisa Lambert and Karen Pierog of Reuters news service.
Immediately after President Obama signed the legislation, 13 state attorneys
general filed a lawsuit to block implementation on constitutional grounds. Five
more have since joined in. (A collective suit represents Florida and 17 other
states. Virginia has staked out a separate legal challenge.)
Unlike the medicinal marijuana, firearms freedom, and anti-Real ID endeavors,
the anti-healthcare reform effort is lopsidedly partisan. Opposition is almost
entirely Republican, which may explain why Fox News is promoting this cause
while remaining silent on the others. Another difference is that resistance to
Obamacare is being carried out through lawsuits in federal courts by a handful
of top state-level politicians, rather than by declarations and defiance by the
people and their legislators en masse.
Examples of direct nullification attempts are still rare. One is the recently
adopted Virginia Health Care Freedom Act, which prevents the federal government
from requiring mandatory insurance coverage. In 2009, a state sovereignty
resolution overwhelmingly passed both chambers of the Tennessee legislature.
Although relatively toothless, it did mark the first time a state sovereignty
resolution had been signed by a governor. Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota,
Idaho, and Oklahoma have passed similar resolutions.
The author of the Tennessee resolution, state Rep. Susan Lynn, had healthcare
reform in mind when she announced last December that she would introduce
stronger legislation to declare null and void any federal law deemed
unconstitutional by the state. Prospects of passage are not good—it’s one thing
to pass a symbolic resolution, quite another to claim the power of
nullification. Glen Casada, a leading conservative Republican in the state
house, told a reporter, “Susan’s a sharp girl, but I don’t know. I didn’t
realize states had that right to nullify specific laws passed by the federal
government.”
Ignorance of nullification is not confined to the political class. With their
focus on hot-button issues of immediate concern, few modern reformers are even
aware of the historical context. But nullification has roots in an honorable
tradition and a powerful legacy of curbing centralized power.
In 1798, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were secretly written and
advanced by Vice President Thomas Jefferson and his ally in the House of
Representatives, James Madison, to encourage resistance to the Alien and
Sedition Acts. Jefferson and Madison grounded their resolutions in the compact
theory, which sees the Constitution as an agreement between the states. In the
Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson asserted that state governments have a right to
interpret the Constitution, arguing, “[T]he government created by this compact
was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated
to itself.”
His original draft included an explicit mention of nullification: “Where powers
are assumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the
rightful remedy.” The final version, enacted by the legislature, did not contain
the word “nullification,” but ended with the same thought, calling on other
states to join Kentucky in “declaring these acts void and of no force.”
The Virginia Resolution, written by Madison, was guided through the legislature
by John Taylor of Caroline. When powers not granted by the compact between the
states are dangerously exercised by the federal government, Madison argued,
states “have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the
progress of the evil.” Always more conservative than Jefferson, Madison had the
language declaring the Alien and Sedition Acts “void, and of no force or effect”
removed from the final version approved by the legislature—but declaring the
federal laws to be “unconstitutional” clearly implied nullification.
While the New England states rejected nullification in 1799, viewing it as a
harbinger of insurrection and civil war, this bastion of Federalists changed its
tune when President Jefferson pursued policies not to its liking eight years
later. The state governments of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island
threatened to ignore the Embargo Act of 1807 because of its perceived
unconstitutionality.
The War of 1812 was also unpopular in New England, and states officially
resisted federal authority to mobilize their militias and enforce a new embargo
act. The assembly of Connecticut urged noncompliance as “a FREE SOVEREIGN and
INDEPENDENT state.” In 1814, the General Court of Massachusetts invoked “the
sovereignty reserved to the states,” opining, “Whenever the national compact is
violated, and the citizens of this State are oppressed by cruel and unauthorized
laws, this Legislature is bound to interpose its power, and wrest from the
oppressor its victim.”
Toward the end of the war, radical “blue light” Federalists were calling for
secession from the Union. Gov. Caleb Strong of Massachusetts began secret
negotiations with the British government to effect a peace treaty with the
state. Delegates from five New England states met for the Hartford Convention,
which in addition to proposing constitutional amendments declared that the
region had a duty to resist unconstitutional violations of state sovereignty.
Federalist opposition to political centralization during the War of 1812 was not
completely opportunistic. The Constitution was a dramatic strengthening of the
central government compared to the Articles of Confederation, but it still
promised a federal system—not a unitary or consolidated one. The Supremacy
Clause of the Constitution refers to the founding document and to federal laws
and treaties as “the supreme Law of the Land.” Yet the Tenth Amendment provides
that 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 federal balance between the Supremacy Clause and the Tenth Amendment was
maintained as long as each level of government stuck to its constitutional areas
of concern. But that equilibrium has shifted as federal power has intruded into
areas reserved to the states. Beginning with the Marshall court in the early
19th century, with its invention of the non-constitutional power of judicial
review and its creative use of constitutional loopholes, the judiciary
facilitated this imbalance. By the early 1820s, it was clear that states’ rights
were being largely ignored by all three branches of the federal government.
Unlike Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun was not a democrat, egalitarian, or
libertarian. Jefferson was motivated by concern for civil liberties and popular
control of government. The South Carolinian Calhoun was primarily interested in
protecting slave-based plantation society. In some ways reprising the role of
Jefferson with the Kentucky Resolution, Calhoun secretly advocated nullification
30 years later. When the Tariff of Abominations was enacted by Congress in 1828,
it became the highest tariff in U.S. history. Outrage swept the South, and
Calhoun published an anonymous booklet, South Carolina Exposition and Protest,
that touted nullification.
Incoming President Andrew Jackson was a Jeffersonian who supported states’
rights, but he also supported the Union and did not see the high tariff as a
violation of the Constitution. The conflict between President Jackson and Vice
President Calhoun would continue for four years. In 1832, South Carolina adopted
the Ordinance of Nullification against a new tariff. In reaction, Congress
authorized the president to use force to ensure federal law was executed in the
states. South Carolina then nullified the Force Bill, but a lower, compromise
tariff passed the same day. This allowed the state to rescind its nullification,
thus averting an armed crisis.
More representative of the Jeffersonian tradition was use of nullification by
the abolitionist movement. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required the return of
escaped slaves, even when they were caught in free states. The law sparked
anti-slavery defiance of the federal government and its pro-slavery policies.
Four years after passage, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the fugitive law
unconstitutional. In 1859, the Wisconsin legislature quoted from Jefferson’s
Kentucky Resolution in its proclamation condemning the “Bloodhound Law.”
Massachusetts also embraced nullification, making it illegal for state officials
to enforce the fugitive law. Other northern states joined in enacting personal
liberty laws that prevented federal officials from using local jails and
hindered enforcement in other ways. The Underground Railroad itself was a
large-scale example of civil disobedience against the federal government, a type
of “personal nullification.”
Unfortunately, mid-20th-century examples of nullification tended to center
around the sectional and racial politics associated with Calhoun, not the
freedom and equality causes of Jefferson and the abolitionists. Nullification
resolutions were adopted by Virginia and Florida in the 1950s after the Supreme
Court outlawed segregation in the public schools. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed
to the subject in his famous speech of 1963: “I have a dream that one day, down
in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping
with the words of interposition and nullification ... little black boys and
black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as
sisters and brothers.” By their loud but opportunistic use of states’ rights as
a tool to advance their economic and racial interests, generations of
slaveowners and segregationists tainted the concept in the public mind.
But now nullification is back—under a much broader banner. Bestselling author
Thomas Woods’s latest book, Nullification, will be released by Regnery this
summer and promises to bring Jefferson’s ideas to a wide modern audience. A
recent Rasmussen survey revealed that 59 percent of likely voters say that
states should have the right to opt out of federal programs. Only 25 percent
disagreed.
Predictably, when the masses begin to raise noisy objection to the status quo,
the power structure reacts. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s nullification
article in The New Republic is accompanied by a picture of Calhoun, who makes a
more convenient bogeyman than Jefferson, still a favorite of liberals. Wilentz
writes, “The idea was broached most vociferously in defense of the slave South
by John C. Calhoun in the 1820s and ’30s, extended by the Confederate
secessionists in the 1850s and ’60s, then forcefully reclaimed by militant
segregationists in the 1950s and ’60s.” Nothing about tariffs or abolitionists
defending runaway slaves. Nary a trace of marijuana or chemotherapy. The media
demands a soundbite, and respectable liberals provide one: nullification is all
about race hatred.
In the current political climate, the distinct message and heritage of
nullification has been overshadowed by radicals drunk on tea. But to be
effective in changing the role of government in our lives, it’s not enough to
fear Barack Hussein Obama and call Democrats ugly names. If Tea Partiers and
state sovereigntists are informed and honest, they will recognize that there is
no substantive difference between Romneycare and Obamacare, between Republican
posers and Democratic phonies. It’s a bipartisan racket of federal overreach,
deficit spending, ungodly values, and imperial arrogance. Obama is not going to
confiscate our guns because he has other concerns: he has to keep his Wall
Street patrons happy. They don’t care if you own a semiautomatic or a water
pistol, as long as the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department continue to cater
to their every desire. Same with the military contractors vis-à-vis the Pentagon
and State Department.
I live in the Heart of Dixie—Calhoun County, Alabama—and I can attest that bread
and circuses have taken their toll on even the most patriotic and traditional
among us. There is more enthusiasm for Nick Saban than Tom Jefferson. More folks
are watching ’Bama than reading the Bill of Rights. More are trying to protect
electronic bingo than freedom of speech.
We the People are angry at Washington, but we don’t understand how the system
works and are too easily fooled by self-serving politicians and media
puppeteers. They keep us ignorant while they tell us how to feel. Perhaps the
first step is to turn off the television. Read. Look beyond rhetoric. Follow the
money. Organize locally. Talk to your neighbors—even those with whom you
disagree. We might find some common ground and useful ideas that will bring not
just heat but light.
__________________________________________
Jeff Taylor teaches political science at Jacksonville State University. He is
the author of Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey,
and the Jeffersonian Legacy.
REMEMBER: GRAVE MEMORIAL CEREMONY AT RICEVILLE ON MONDAY MAY 31st
Mash our link to 43d Tenn Descendants for full particulars, directions to cemetary, etc. We hope to see you there! The public is cordially invited. Come honour our veterans with us!