On the Eve of the Most Important Election of Our Lifetime - Let's Hope We Get it Right | Eastern North Carolina Now

    In that speech he talked about the futility of petitioning a government that has no intention of respecting the rights of the people or giving up its power over them. The colonies tried reasoning with King George for 10 years. Patrick Henry said: "We have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming. We have complained, we have protested, we have petitioned; we have pleaded; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and we have implored the British ministry to step in on our behalf to arrest the tyrannical hands of the King and Parliament."

    I summon the words of Patrick Henry not to urge dissent but rather to remind us of what the American Revolution was all about. It was about liberty. I also hope his stirring words will help get us off the couch and active once again in our government and to engage us in solutions. The bottom line is that we have to scale back the size and scope of government.

    It's no longer a topic for discussion. It's a moral imperative. If we want to preserve liberty for our children and grandchildren, then we have to scale back government. We can't trust government to take the initiative to divest its expanded powers or to restore the proper constitutional balance of power - which is defined in the 9th and 10th Amendments. Throughout the years, on every occasion, the three branches of the federal government have sought to enlarge its powers, not constrain or restrain them. Thomas Jefferson knew this would happen. Within the first years of our new republic, as government was already re-interpreting the Constitution, he asked: "What can we do when the government - all three branches - refuses to be bound by the limits of the Constitution? He told us there are 3 options: Judicial review (that is, take our chances with the federal courts), secession, or nullification. The courts, he reasoned, could not be trusted. In 1820, after witnessing how the Supreme Court was working with great speed to re-interpret the Constitution, he wrote: "To consider the Judges of the Superior Court as the ultimate arbiters of constitutional questions would be a dangerous doctrine which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. They have with others, the same passion for party, for power, and for the privileges of their corps - and their power is the most dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the Elective control. The Constitution has elected no single tribunal. I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves." And the following year later, he wrote: "The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary: an irresponsible body, working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed; because, when all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."

    Jefferson said that secession, while always a viable option, must be viewed as the most extreme measure and avoided at all costs. But Nullification, he articulated, is the rightful remedy. It is the remedy grounded firmly in our federal system and legally available by the nature of the compact that brought the states into agreement regarding their common agent - the federal government. It puts the power in the hands of the parties that had the power to begin with - the states and the People.

    People like to dismiss and discredit Nullification by labeling it a racist doctrine. They claim that because the racist Southern Democrats tried to use it in their states to resist the de-segregation mandate imposed by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, it is somehow unconstitutional and not a legitimate doctrine. Yet these same critics would be happy to accept a decision by the US Supreme Court - a branch of the federal government - that held that negroes are "beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and are so far inferior that they have no rights which the white man is bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery." [Dred Scott decision, 1857]. Either you accept the right of a state to challenge any act of the federal government that exceeds constitutional bounds (which the southern states did with the Brown decision, as unfortunate as that challenge was), or you resign yourself to the fact that the government is always right, always has the final say, always has the power to define its own limits of power, and always trumps the parties that in fact created it. Only one position protects liberty.

    The responsibility falls upon citizens like us to educate ourselves on Nullification and vet candidates in our state legislature and on the local level who embrace this Jeffersonian remedy.

    Probably the most important of our founding principles is this: Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. We have a bottom-up system, where power derives from the Individual. Not a top-down scheme. The Constitution is our document to limit government and NOT the government's document to try to regulate us. As Patrick Henry wrote: "The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests." Government serves the interests of the people. The people are not supposed to serve the interests of government.

    Again, the Constitution was written for those who have the most to lose and therefore would have the greatest incentive to be vigilant and educated - We the People. And so we must be its faithful guardians. "For those to whom much is given, much is required." We can't allow the government to redefine it or abuse it to the point where we the people are left without the means of defending our God-given rights.

    We have survived for two and a quarter centuries. But our republic is in dangerous peril. We are confronted with a fierce urgency and an ideological conundrum. We stand between the forces that wish to 'transform' America and the forces that wish to 'restore' her. We all know that transformation implies a contempt or dissatisfaction, whereas restoration implies honor and respect.

    The big question, of course, is this: If we do nothing, what will become of our Inalienable Rights? Government has already strayed away from its intended purpose. All levels of government have abused their powers. The federal government is no longer constrained by the document that alone gives it permission and limits on what it can legally do -- that is our Constitution. It no longer protects our Life, Liberty, and Property. It actively looks for ways to regulate each of our most precious human rights. It attacks our Life with the Obamacare. It attacks our Liberty with the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, the TSA at our airports, and with the Supreme Court's healthcare decision (since according to Justice John Roberts, the government not only has the power to tax Americans when they engage in certain activities, but they can also tax them when they refuse to engage in conduct that the government wants them to engage in; ie, it has the power to use taxation to coerce people into doing something that the government wants them to do). And it attacks our Property with the federal income tax system and Agenda 21. The government's evil, liberty-killing scheme is funded by the power of plunder that was granted it under the 16th Amendment. The government plunders our very natural human resources -- our Property.... the fruit and improvements of our property, the products of our labor, and the creations of our mind. Individuals have become pawns of a government that seeks primarily to advance its own agenda rather than serve their individual liberty interests. And right now, the government is using the economy to control us and advance its socialist/utilitarian agenda.
A government that can create economic stress is in a good position to constrain our liberties. A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom.

    Last year Glen Beck wrote this: "The riddle today is the same one faced by our Founding Fathers when they began their experiment. Societies need government. Governments elevate men into power, and men who seek power are prone to corruption. It spreads like a disease. And sooner or later the end result is always a slide into tyranny. That's the way it's always been. And so this government of the United States, so brilliantly and deliberately structured by our Founders, was designed to keep that weakness of human nature in check. But it required the people to participate daily, to be vigilant. And we have not. It demanded that we behave as though government is our servant, but we have not. So while we slept, the servant has become our master."

    It looks as though the focus of government has shifted on its end and we have bared raised an eyebrow. The "injuries and abuses" that the colonies would not tolerate from King George are being repeated by our own government but no one has even taken notice or even cares. Maybe liberty can't survive. Maybe it is inherently destructive of its own ends. Maybe complacency is a fatal flaw in human beings. People who suckle at the government teat are not exactly the guardians of liberty that our Founders had in mind.

   I want to end with this bit of history: In his opening speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788, Patrick Henry warned: "A wrong step now will plunge us into misery and our republic will be lost." He pleaded: "Liberty is the greatest of all earthly blessings. Give us that precious jewel and you may take everything else. There was a time when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty and which, I believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American." He went on to urge his fellow delegates to regard the Constitution with suspicion and caution. He feared it might lead to too much government power, at the expense of the States, thereby negating the reason for the American Revolution.

    Let those words remain with us: "A wrong step now will plunge us into misery and our republic will be lost. Liberty is the greatest of all earthly blessings."

   Please vote intelligently and responsibility on November 6th.