Compacts Aren’t Just For Purses: The Constitution As A Compact Pt I

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – This particular individual [Mark Levin] is making the claim about James Madison.  He has his army of acolytes out there making the claim [mocking] “What the Tenth Amendment Center, and what Mike Church and Kevin Gutzman and Tom Woods and the rest of these rabblerousing, ill-informed losers is trying to do is undo our union.  They want secession.  They don’t want nullification.  They don’t want Article V.”  Well, that’s just not true.  We want all of the above, whatever it takes to get the job done.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  . . . in defense of my friends at the Tenth Amendment Center, who have been accused and slandered because they’ve dared to vary or dared to veer from the 3×5 index card, as Tom Woods calls it, of approved opinion and thought.  [mocking] “You’re not supposed to be talking about this nullification stuff.  You can’t upend our glorious federal union.  One state cannot stand against all the other states.”  What if it’s more than one state?  Last time I checked, there were 26 states, either by resolution or by actual act of the state or by ballot initiative voted to undo the damage of the Affordable Care Act.  Twenty-six, that’s a majority the way I count.  What are people to do?  What is left to combat the Affordable Care Act other than the action of the people and the action of the people in the sovereign states?  What’s left?  This is the last rampart.

Click for audio from this segment from the Mike Church Show on SiriusXM Patriot, ch 125

You could have an Article V Amendment Convention.  To my knowledge, the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid has not been proposed by any Article Fiver that I’m aware of.  We all want to have these counsels of revision where the states can say: You guys just passed this act and we don’t like it.  We’ve got a majority to overrule you, so we’re just going to go ahead and veto that and there’s nothing you can do about it.  These acts have already been passed.  They’re not coming to us.  They already have been sent to us.  Now they’re raining tyranny on our heads.  Not only are they raining tyranny, they are threatening your life.  They are threatening people’s liberty.  They are threatening people’s economic and financial liberty.

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Again, what is left?  Nullification and interposition.  This requires statesmen that have brass you-know-whats.  It’s going to require governors that have similar aspirations or hardware, if you will.  It is going to require legislatures to tell their state’s judiciaries to say: Look, if you get a case and it has something to do with this Affordable Care Act, you are under order of this legislature that you are not to hear the case and you are not to turn over any evidence.  Nullification is the last defense here against the Affordable Care Act.  Congress is not going to repeal this.  The U.S. Senate is not going to repeal this, and even if they did, Obama would veto it.  There’s no guarantee the next president is going to be any more amenable to it.  As a matter of fact, I would hazard a guess to say, once the teat-sucklers get ahold of this thing, the rest of us are going to be left holding the bag, and they’re going to find themselves in an even more unenviable position.

This particular individual is making the claim about James Madison.  He has his army of acolytes out there making the claim [mocking] “What the Tenth Amendment Center, and what Mike Church and Kevin Gutzman and Tom Woods and the rest of these rabblerousing, ill-informed losers is trying to do is undo our union.  They want secession.  They don’t want nullification.  They don’t want Article V.”  Well, that’s just not true.  We want all of the above, whatever it takes to get the job done.  The implication is that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson never intended for nullification to be used in the manner in which we say it should be used; and furthermore, that the Constitution, because it’s a compact between states means it can’t be used that way.  Folks, if you woke up in the morning and you tried to be wrong about this, that’s what you would say.  If you endeavored to get the wrong answer so you could fail the class, that’s the answer and that’s the opinion you would feel.

How do I know this?  And what is the correct opinion?  If we view the Constitution as a compact between states, and it is, and it always has been, and we should want to view it that way, we are equal parties to it.  The general government is not the big kahuna who gets to decide, as I framed it in my essay, there is not a papa bear that’s the federal government and a bunch of little baby bears which is the states, and it is not the papa bear that gets to write all the rules.  The papa bear only gets to write the rules it has the enumerated and granted power to write the rules for.  The baby bears are equal.  They’re not baby bears at all.  They’re uncle bears.  They’re on the same level as the papa bear.  This is where the whole endeavor has gone off the track here, ladies and gentlemen.

The state legislatures and the states themselves — what makes up a state, class?  We went over this the other day.  A state is made up of citizens.  The people are sovereign not the state legislature.  The legislature is just the arm that doe the bidding of the sovereign people.  This is another one of these historical facts that has been erased from teaching.  It has been erased and eradicated from the public consciousness.  This is a very powerful thing.  If I were a tyrant, I’d want to erase it, too.  I wouldn’t want anyone to know you have an equal amount of power that I have.  I would want to be the big bully, 800-pound elephant in the room saying: No, no, no, you guys can have your little constitution and your love for it and the founders, that’s fine and dandy, but please, you don’t have any power.  You can only do what we tell you to do.  Does that sound like a deal?

Just think of it like this, even before I get into the fact-finding mission here.  Does that sound like something that a member of the generation that declared independence from the empire of Great Britain would sign their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to, that they would create an entity that was central, almighty, all-knowing, all-seeing and got to determine the extent of its own powers at the expense of the several states that had just been freed from the exact same tyranny?  Are you kidding me?

Practically speaking, as a common-sensical matter it doesn’t even make sense and doesn’t compute.  The historical record reflects and will show unequivocally that those men did not grant that power to that central entity and did not surrender their individuality, nor did they surrender this thing called sovereignty.  The idea that that monstrosity, that that ten-mile square that sits on the banks of the Potomac River, that that thing is sovereign is at fault here.  It’s not sovereign, it can’t be.  It is nothing more than an agent.  It is a political entity.  It cannot be sovereign.  It must not be sovereign.

Here’s what’s sovereign: you driving around in your car.  You’re sovereign.  You in North Carolina driving around in your cars, commiserating and gathering together as people of North Carolina, you are a sovereign people.  You hire and you trade some of your sovereignty to this thing called the North Carolina Legislature.  They divide some of the power between the governor, the judicial, and the legislative branch.  But it’s your power; it’s not theirs.  You have the power.  It’s your power.  You let them administer some of it for your benefit.  That’s how this system is supposed to function.  Under any other explanation, it ceases to become a compact, we cease to be sovereign, and then we are nothing more than subjects of a central authority.  We are not residents or citizens of our states.  We do not own our own labor.  We don’t own our own intellectual property.  They own all of it.  It’s theirs.

We have the sovereignty question in reverse.  They don’t let us keep our intellectual property.  They don’t let us keep some of our money.  They don’t let us drive on the roads.  They don’t let us talk to our neighbors.  They don’t let us print our opinions in newspapers and online.  They don’t let us hold meetings.  They don’t let us do anything.  We let them.  This is almost like we’re waking up, or sometimes I feel like we have awakened in Oz.  All that is required to get back to Kansas is to believe and understand what our true power is, click our heels together three times, and bam, we’re back in Kansas.

The people that are saying these things and the people that are promoting these things cannot have it both ways.  Either the Constitution is a compact, which that particular radio host says it is, and if it is, then the power in a compact is divided among parties — to my knowledge, and as a statement of the historical record, there was never a transfer of the sovereignty of the people to that entity.  If we did transfer it, I would like to see that legislative act.  There would have to be more than one.  There would have to be 50.  You’re not going to find it in the historical record.

Let me let Albert Taylor Bledsoe explain this a bit to you, about the Constitution as a compact. See the rest of this discussion in: Compacts Aren’t Just For Purses: The Constitution As A Compact Pt II