There is a new movement developing to promote a constitutional amendment to take away the power of the federal government, and allow states to refuse to obey federal laws and statutes! This is secession all over again, just as we come close to the 150th anniversary of the secession of the Southern states between December 1860 and April 1861! 🙁
Tea Party activists and other conservative interests want to negate the effects of the Civil War, which ended for all time the concept that states rights could be utilized to defy federal law and the Constitution!
Basically, what these radical extremists want to do is revive the Articles of Confederation, which denied the national government any real authority, and totally failed between 1781-1789! The American people were in the “critical period” during this decade, with states going their own way and no federal authority to enforce the concept of one nation indivisible! The Founding Fathers saw the necessity of a stronger national government when they gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1787, and drew up the Constitution we live under now for 221 years!
These Tea Party activists fail to understand our history, and the essential nature of having a central government which keeps order and promotes freedom and liberty!
The history of the states is that many have failed to promote equality and freedom, so all this does is try to revive the past, when the mass of common citizens were denied just treatment under the law!
Do we really want to go back to the era of the Articles of Confederation; or the times of the Southern Confederacy; or the Gilded Age, when big corporations ran rampant over the rights of their workers, and immigrants and women and children were exploited for the benefit of unbridled capitalism? 🙁
Do we want the rights of minority groups and women taken away by state governments that historically have not given any concern to basic human rights?
Is this not a power play by conservative interests to bring back the 19th century, the “good old days” of slavery, segregation, labor exploitation, mistreatment of women and children, and widespread nativism against immigrants? 🙁
Has not the American dream been advanced by the federal government, the Supreme Court, and Presidents of both parties who saw the NATIONAL interest, not petty, sectional and regional interests, as essential for the common good?
The fortunate thing about this mad rush to destroy everything that has been good about our national experience is that it requires a constitutional amendment–two thirds vote of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, and three fourths (38) of the states with majority vote in both houses of the state legislature!
This is a tall order, and thank goodness, the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, made sure that outrageous ideas such as this loony amendment would not see the light of day, beyond the suggestion itself!
The American people need to make clear in their votes this November that the Tea Party activists are repudiated as a anti democratic movement that would take away progress, human freedom, equality, and basic fairness!
The American dream was not meant to be in the form that these disgraceful extremists wish to take it! 🙁