How The West And The Constitution Were Lost, And Why You Should Care – Part I

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “That’s how this whole land grab thing evolved.  In the first instance it was: Well, we know we don’t have the power.  Back in the 1870s, members of Congress were saying: We don’t have the power to make national parks.  We can’t do it.  It’s not enumerated.  So they went: Well, we can make national monuments, can’t we?  Yeah, let’s start with monuments.  So they made a few monuments. ‘First they came for the monuments and I said nothing…’ “ Check out today’s Clip of The Day for my take on this…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  That’s how this whole land grab thing evolved.  In the first instance it was: Well, we know we don’t have the power.  Back in the 1870s, members of Congress were saying: We don’t have the power to make national parks.  We can’t do it.  It’s not enumerated.  So they went: Well, we can make national monuments, can’t we?  Yeah, let’s start with monuments.  So they made a few monuments.  Then the monuments, [mocking] “Well, the land around the monuments, we gotta keep people off that.”  Okay, how you gonna do that?  Well, we’ll pass an act.  After some of these acts were passed, the Supreme Court was asked — the federal government was sued by some of the landowners saying: You can’t do this.  This is my land.  You can’t just come in here and declare this a national monument, then a national park and take it away from me.  In the first couple of cases, the Supreme Court made the proper decisions and said: You’re right, they can’t.  Ultimately, folks, as you know, designing men don’t ever give up.  It’s always the conservationist or the conservative that’s on the losing end of these things.

Now, does that mean that a state, if it wanted to, that they couldn’t exercise the power and create a state park?  No.  This is the problem here.  A state obviously reserved that power.  They reserved it so that they, for the benefit of their citizens, and for the benefit of their landowners, private and otherwise, could use it.  So this is another perversion of the Tenth Amendment.

So they kept attempting to do it, and by the time the 1930s roll around, this is basically what we see today.  It has remained as an implied power ever since.  The implied power is that if some of you bird-watching, cactus-hugging lunatics out there, if you see a piece of property and you think it’s pretty and you’d like to take Ansel Adams-style photographs on it, all you’ve got to do is convince a member of Congress that it ought to be a national park.  He then convinces Obama or Bush or Clinton or whoever is the president at the time that it ought to be.  As I said, they write an executive order, sign it, and bammo.  Some of you maybe think I’m making this up.  I’m not making it up.  That’s what’s shocking about this.

This Post is Part I of II and is Continued in How the West Was Lost Part II

So what does this have to do with the situation going on out there in Nevada?  Well, I’ll tell you what it has to do with it.  Something else that you will discover in researching this is that there should be no debate over why, for example, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was entered into.  It was entered into to keep the property from the Mexicans.  Okay, why would you want to do that?  You would want to do that so that your citizens, Americans, can go out and settle that territory.  Okay, why would you want to do that?  Well, because it’s very likely that they’ll be friendly and hospitable to you.  They may get together, form communities, then say: Hey, why don’t we form a state?  Yeah, let’s ask Congress.  Sure you can do that.  Write a constitution.  Okay, sure.  Would you like admission into the union?  Sure.  Apply for it.  Great, wonderful.  Bammo, you’ve got western states.

So the plan worked like a charm.  We know the plan worked, ladies and gentlemen, because we can see the borders of the states.  We know that the plan was executed.  This is the bitch of the whole thing.  The way it was supposed to work, it actually did work, but something strange happened on the road to perdition.  Greed, corporatism, and all the other things that go along with it took over.  And instead of dispensing with the lands, which was obviously the stated purpose or the stated goal, the national legislature decided that it was in their and their buddies’ best interest to keep it and that’s what they did.

If you really want to dig into this, there really is no power for Congress to hold land long-term.  If you really want to get into the spirit of why there’s a clause to acquire territory, it’s not to hold it long-term.  It can either be for defense purposes, which you would say: Okay, we’re not going to let the eastern border or western border be occupied by X (name your country here.)  Okay, that’s a genuine use, I think, of the territory power.  Is it a genuine use of the territory power to acquire a swath of land so you can put a park ranger station on it and a bunch of nature Nazis can go out and photograph rare birds or snakes or coyotes or whatever the hell it is they’re looking for?  No.  No one would be so bold to proclaim that either when the Constitution was in effect.  They didn’t do it.  They said the exact opposite.

I think I’m going to be embroiled in this for quite some time because there are significant abuses of power here.  In browsing around on this, what you find is that the same things that we all go through and we all bemoan over the overreach of the federal government into the affairs of the states, totally trashing and ignoring the Tenth Amendment, that is really what is at play here.  If a power was not granted — let’s just go over this real quick.  The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, if a power is not granted then it’s reserved, end of story.  We don’t have to discuss this anymore.  There is no power to create national parks, no power to create national monuments.  There’s no power to confer a silly Freedom Medal award, nothing.  It doesn’t exist.  That’s why Congressman Paul kept voting against the purchase of the gold medals to give to the Congressional Freedom Medal because he said: We don’t have any power to confer medals on people unless they got them in war.  So there’s no enumerated power being exercised here.

This Post is Part I of II and is Continued in How the West Was Lost Part II

Now, does that mean that a state, if it wanted to, that they couldn’t exercise the power and create a state park?  No.  This is the problem here.  A state obviously reserved that power.  They reserved it so that they, for the benefit of their citizens, and for the benefit of their landowners, private and otherwise, could use it.  So this is another perversion of the Tenth Amendment.  What’s happening in Nevada, the land grabs, the keeping and squatting on of the land by the federales is an abuse and flies in the face of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.  What does the Tenth Amendment say?  If you’re a new listener, you should have this one committed to memory.  It’s pretty easy.  “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.”  If you don’t get that, then here’s the Ninth Amendment, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  In other words, in case we forgot any and didn’t put them in the Bill of Rights, if they’re not prohibited to us in the body of the Constitution, then we reserve all of them, and anything you can make up between now and then, or between now and Roe v. Wade.  We reserve all of those rights.

There was a book that was written in 2000 called How the West Was Lost.  A gentleman who goes by the name William C. Hayward wrote the book.  In researching this subject yesterday, as I work tirelessly for you, thanklessly for you people, I kept stumbling upon or finding people referring to How the West Was Lost.  Finally I decided: You know, Mike, maybe you ought to go check this How the West Was Lost book out.  I mosied on over, found a digital copy that had some previews in it, and it didn’t take long, browsing through the book, to find what I was looking for.  The book is loaded with it.  As a matter of fact, the description of the book, I’m going to put this in the Amazon library at MikeChurch.com and in the regular library that we have where I list books we have referenced here on the show.  How the West Was Lost is described at Amazon.com:

[reading]

“…the most complete book on how the Federal Government took over and held the land in the western states.” — Bert “Nevada” Smith, Nevada rancher and owner for over 53 years

“This book tells the story of how the Federal Government has taken authority and control away from our separate states.” — Clifford P. Hansen, Former Governor of Wyoming and former U.S. Senator

“This book will be a valuable addition to anyone’s library, particularly those who are interested in constitutional history.” — Larry O. Putt, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at Faulkner University…

This Post is Part I of II and is Continued in How the West Was Lost Part II

[end reading]

End Mike Church Show Transcript