Mark Kreslins Updates Us On Oklahomas Nullification Of Obamacare

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Let’s go to the Dude Maker Hotline.  Let me get an update on what it is that’s going on in the great State of Oklahoma.  My friend Mark Kreslins is on the line.  Mark, you actually are a newcomer to Oklahoma, yet in the first year, you rabble-rouser, you’ve already got people to draw sides and a line in the sand over Obamacare.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Let’s go to the Dude Maker Hotline.  Let me get an update on what it is that’s going on in the great State of Oklahoma.  My friend Mark Kreslins is on the line.  Mark, you actually are a newcomer to Oklahoma, yet in the first year, you rabble-rouser, you’ve already got people to draw sides and a line in the sand over Obamacare.  Congratulations.

Mark Kreslins:  Well, it’s really not just me.  How are you doing, my friend?  It’s good to hear your voice.

Mike:  Well, thank you.

Kreslins:  It’s a very joint effort.  There’s been a lot of ground laid down here prior to my arrival here.  What I was able to do, because of some wonderful folks up in the northern part of Oklahoma, stand up an organization that was able to get on the air and in the media and sort of force this issue of nullification to a head.  It wasn’t just me.  We’ve got a great board of advisors of political leaders that have big names here in the state.  I don’t want to take any credit for myself.  It’s very much a joint effort with folks down here.  That said, there is a lot going on down here in Oklahoma.  We’ve been really pushing a number of pieces of nullification legislation through our legislature.  However, as red as we are as a state, we’ve run into some roadblocks, surprise, surprise.  We have one piece of legislation out, Bill 1021, that made its way through the House side of the legislature by a vote of 72 to 20.  There are 101 representatives here.  It was an overwhelming vote in advancing the nullification of Obamacare here in the State of Oklahoma.

We’ve run right into a roadblock in the Senate.  A particular senator named Clark Jolley, who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, has decided singlehandedly not to hear the House-passed bill in his committee.  A constituent in particular wrote to him and asked him for a detailed explanation of why he would not call up the bill.  What we got has launched a new effort by a bunch of political leaders in the state to deal with this issue of nullification once and for all in the State of Oklahoma.  By way of saying we want to deal with it once and for all, a number of political leaders, both elected officials and political leaders on the grassroots level, are going to call for a debate down here in Oklahoma between people like Tom Woods and Marshall DeRosa, Kent Masterson Brown perhaps.  The sources the chairman cited in defense of his position not to advance nullification, such as David Barton, Matthew Spalding at The Heritage Foundation, some folks over at National Review.  I think we’ve got to have this debate.  I know you appreciate this.  This is always headed to this point.  It’s always headed to a point where we need the academics to make their historical case.  I think we know, from knowing Tom Woods and others and our own individual studies, that there is a clear case for nullification of the state of unconstitutional legislation that passes out of Washington, DC.

Mike:  The reason I asked Mark on is because Mark forwarded me a copy of this letter that Senator Jolley wrote to this constituent.  Besides the condescension and arrogance of it, I’m reading this going: My God, this guy couldn’t be more misinformed if he woke up in the morning and said, “I desire to be misinformed.”  This is just pure kindergarten-level ahistorical slop.  I’m reading this.  The letter is public.  He writes:

[reading]

Dear Karen,

Thanks for the email and the opportunity to explain why I didn’t hear the bill to nullify Obamacare.  As you may know, I’ve been an ardent opponent of the President’s initiative and was one of the authors of the constitutional amendment in Oklahoma to fight the individual mandate.  However, nullification is simply a fantasy that is the most dangerous type — one semi based in reality.  It gives false hope to those that oppose ObamaCare that we can somehow veto the actions of the federal government because we find them unconstitutional.  This is pure legal fiction that has been trounced by everyone [Mike: He’s sounding like Obama. Obama always said: Everybody agrees with me.] from George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson (who is wrongly invoked as supporting the idea) and Daniel Webster and many of our founders.

[end reading]

Mike:  Daniel Webster was not a founder.  Why does Webster get thrown in there?  Because Webster, at the urging of President Andrew Jackson, goes into the floor of the Senate to oppose John C. Calhoun’s nullification act, but in doing so — I know this because I have a book coming out with Brion McClanahan in about two weeks.   It is a reprint of Albert Taylor Bledsoe’s “Was Davis A Traitor?”  If you read the Webster debate, what Webster was claiming was the Constitution wasn’t a compact; it was an edict and everybody agreed to it.  One American people ratified one American Constitution, end of story.  Of course, that is not the way it happened.  To invoke Webster is ridiculous in any of this.  To say that Jefferson, this is the shocking part, is wrongly invoked as supporting the idea, not only did he support it, he created it.  It was his idea.

Where does this guy get his history?  I’m reading the list of sources.  David Barton of WallBuilders, The Heritage Foundation’s Matthew Spalding, National Review, and some guy who writes at The Cato Institute.  As you mentioned, Woods has volunteered for the debate.  Gutzman has volunteered for the debate.  McClanahan and DeRosa have volunteered for the debate.  I have volunteered, although I’ll leave it to the academic heavyweights to go up there.  There’s something else that’s going on in Oklahoma that’s worthy of note.  You have a constitutional amendment to protect your citizens from the disastrous side effects of the Affordable Care Act, don’t you?

Kreslins:  That’s correct.  It was passed back in 2010 by a vote of 65-35.  There were 638,530 Oklahomans that went to the polls on November 2, 2010 and pressed the lever to stop the implementation of the individual mandate in the State of Oklahoma.  As far as I know, all of our elected members in our legislature raised their right hand, put their left hand on the Bible, and swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution of Oklahoma.  Article II, Section 37 of the Oklahoma Constitution stipulates that no one in the state should be compelled by law to participate in any healthcare plan.  We’re calling upon our Senate to fulfill their oath and bring this bill to the Senate floor for debate.  The people of Oklahoma deserve to hear where their senators stand on this particular piece of legislation.

What’s particularly troubling, Mike, is that Oklahoma, as you know, is the reddest state in the union.  There was not one single county in the State of Oklahoma that voted for Obama in the last election cycle.  A good friend of mine, Pastor Paul Blaire goes with me often up to the legislature to talk to these members.  He says, “Just how conservative are we when we can’t even get a bill through to stop Washington, DC from exercising an unconstitutional law upon the State of Oklahoma?”  That’s the key part of this.  So often we frame this debate as federal law trumps state law.  That’s just baloney.

At the end of the day, what was the purpose of the Constitution?  It was to form a government, a general government, a federal government, and then tell it what it can and cannot do.  There are a few mentions of the states, Article I, Section 10, of course.  Then we see in Article III as well there’s mention of the states.  The purpose of the Constitution was to form a government and then restrain it, as Jefferson says, “by chains.”  It’s those guys that are breaking the law, not us.  We’re actually trying to defend the Constitution by nullifying unconstitutional acts.  I think this is where we get all backwards when we talk about these ideas of constitutional rights.  We don’t have constitutional rights; we have God-given rights.  The Constitution was formed to protect those rights, not add to them.  It’s not redistribute from one to another.  We find the argument wrong sometimes.  I think that, Mike, puts us on their battlefield.

Mike:  Sure.

Kreslins:  Then we get into negotiating what our rights really are.  Our rights are clear and the role of the federal government is crystal clear in Article I, Section for the Congress especially.  I think we’ve got to get back to the point where state legislators see it as their duty to protect their citizens from an out-of-control national government, and that is where we are.  That’s what we’re calling on our Senate to do here with House Bill 1021, to immediately call it up on the floor and debate it.  638,530  people deserve to hear where the Senate stands on this.

Mike:  630,000-some deserve to hear it.  I concur with all of that. Of course, that’s Constitution as compact theory.  Like I told you on the phone on Friday, Mark — Mark Kreslins is my guest on the phone from Oklahoma.  Like I told you on the phone on Friday, either you have compact theory and you believe in it and you agree to be bound by it and live by it or don’t.  It’s kind of like being half pregnant.  Either it is a compact or it isn’t.  If it’s not a compact, then the road to perdition has already been laid and we know what the end result is going to be, heaven help all of us.  If it is a compact, then the world is at our feet and all we have to do is convince enough of our citizens to exercise the political will to right many of the wrongs, the political wrongs anyways.  This certainly is one of them.  Isn’t it fascinating that March 23, 2010 was the day the Affordable Care Act passed the House.  It was March 23, 1775 that Patrick Henry spoke in St. John’s Church.  Do you think there’s divine intervention there?

Kreslins:  Amen, brother.

Mike:  There were some master plans to call forth Patrick Henrys across the amber waves of fuel and stand up as he did “against this tyranny” and to oppose it with manly fortitude.  Certainly in Oklahoma you’re doing that.  We’ve done similar things in Louisiana, but we have gotten not nearly as far as you guys have.  We’ll be keeping an eye on this.  I will be looking very much forward to any debate that might happen between Clark Jolley and Tom Woods.  I would pay to see that.

Kreslins:  We had brought Professor Woods into the Senate just a couple days before the hearing that was supposed to be held on this bill to try to persuade the Senate to reconsider their position and take the historically-accurate position of the state nullifying this unconstitutional act.  Again, we can’t drive that point home enough.  What Congress did was just unconstitutional.  To your point, Mike, if the compact theory is not the proper rendering of history when it comes to the formation of our union, then let’s just wipe out all the state governments, all the state constitutions, and let’s just admit what we are, just one big blob of 310 million people in the aggregate all ruled from Washington, DC.  Let’s end the farce and just accept what we really are, which are serfs to a new king.  He just happens to be represented by 535 of them in Washington, DC.  I just want to close with that.  Mike, if people want to connect with us who are in Oklahoma, they can go to OklahomaLiberty.com or go on Facebook and you can connect with us.

Mike:  All right, brother, keep up the fight.

End Mike Church Show Transcript