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Type: Hardcover
Item#: C7611
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The Federal Government has far exceeded its Constitutional authority -- but the States have a way to fight back, if they dare. . .
Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
When a reporter asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to
explain where in the Constitution she found the authority
to nationalize the health insurance industry, she laughed
and replied, "Are you serious? Are you serious?" So what if
the Constitution says nothing about granting the federal
government the power to force Americans to buy approved
health insurance packages? As Virginia's Democratic Senator
Mark Warner explained, "There is no place in the
Constitution that talks about you ought to have the right
to get a telephone, but we have made those choices as a
country over the years."
(continued from above)
That's the kind of high-level analysis that prevails
in Washington in the Age of Obama: Everyone takes the
elephantine growth and continued expansion of the Federal
Government for granted -- and no one seems to care about
exceeding constitutional bounds. But in Nullification: How
to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, Thomas E.
Woods, Jr. maps the road back to constitutional sanity, and
to a federal government that operates within the bounds
marked out for it by the Founding Fathers. The bestselling
author of
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American
History, Woods explains that Thomas Jefferson and other
Founding Fathers had a remedy for unconstitutional federal
overreaching: individual states could simply nullify
federal laws they found unjust. Moreover, he argues, today
there is no viable alternative to nullification, which is
itself entirely constitutional and explicitly defended by
several of the Founders. "It is not difficult," says Woods,
"to find support in history for the general principle that
an unconstitutional law is void" -- and he invokes Alexander
Hamilton, James Madison and others to prove this.
A recipe for anarchy or disunion? Hardly. Woods traces
the historical use of nullification in the early days of
the American Republic, and provides sound, common-sense
answers to objections to those who claim that such an idea
is unconstitutional, or a relic of history, or practically
unworkable for whatever reason. "There has been no more
destructive force in the history of the world," says Woods,
"than the modern state. There is nothing sinister about
thinking in different ways. To the contrary, it is probably
the most intellectually and politically liberating thing we
can do." In Nullification, he strikes a forceful blow for
that liberation.
The path to federal tyranny,
and the way back to sound government:
- How, with nullification, "stimulus spending," Obamacare,
and other unconstitutional expansions of federal power
can be repealed
- The Declaration of Independence: how it makes clear what
the thirteen colonies thought of themselves -- as free and
independent states with just as much sovereignty as Spain
and Italy and other states enjoyed
- How the United States, once a federative polity, has
become just another modern unitary state like France or
Germany -- and we have been taught to celebrate this
betrayal of our Founding Fathers, cheering what we ought
to have mourned
- How more and more Americans concerned about ongoing and
apparently unstoppable government growth are beginning to
wonder if some other strategy should be pursued, since
the exclusively electoral one has been such a failure
- Why it is unlikely that any government, constitutional or
otherwise, can remain limited over time -- and how the
Founding Fathers labored to ensure that the federal
government would not exceed its legitimate powers
- How Thomas Jefferson refused to accept the idea that the
federal government would resolve disagreements between
itself and the states -- and argued that under that
arrangement, the states would inexorably be eclipsed by
the federal government
- Why the various states, not the people, are the
fundamental building blocks of the United States -- and
why the common understanding of the Constitution's phrase
"We, the people" is wrong
- How it was impossible for Thomas Jefferson to believe
that the states would have agreed to a system that
assured their unjust subordination
- How some federal activities have begun to alarm even
those who have historically cheered government growth as
a progressive force -- yet nothing has been able to stop
it
- Nullification: how it is common in current discussions of
the issue to hear critics say the Civil War "settled" the
issue -- but it didn't
- How even Ronald Reagan, for all his charisma and
rhetorical prowess, was able only to slow the growth of
certain categories of federal spending
- The Founding Fathers: their deliberate stance against the
centralizing trends that were already at work in the
eighteenth century and which would explode in the
nineteenth and twentieth
- Why the Supreme Court is entirely unsuited to judge a
dispute between the states and the federal government
- The three constitutional clauses that have most
frequently been exploited on behalf of expansions of
federal government power -- and how they are properly
understood
- How activities of the federal government that we have
been taught to consider perfectly unobjectionable were,
to James Madison, clear and obvious violations of the
Constitution that derived from a dishonest reading of the
general welfare clause
- Plus: Eleven essential and little-known documents from
the early days of the United States, making the case for
nullification
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