Texas lawmaker Dan Flynn has introduced legislation that would invalidate within the sovereign borders of his state every act of the federal government that exceeds its constitutionally derived authority.
State Representative Dan Flynn's bill — House Bill 98 — denies to the federal government "the power to take any legislative, executive, or judicial action that violates the constitution, specifically including those actions that unconstitutionally undermine, diminish, or disregard the balance of powers between the states and the federal government established by the constitution."
Flynn goes on to cite chapter and verse of the Constitution and the principles of federalism in defense of his position that the state of Texas retains the power to refuse to carry out federal mandates that are not specifically authorized in the Constitution's enumeration of federal powers.
Nothing more needs to be said. Flynn's bill, officially titled the Texas Balance of Powers Act, is a full-throated defiance of federal tyranny and attempts to subjugate the states into nothing more that administrative sub-units of the plutocracy on the Potomac.
Representative Flynn seems to appreciate the fact that states are not left defenseless in the battle to fight the cancer of consolidation. There is a remedy — a "rightful remedy" — that can immediately retrench the federal government's constant overreaching. This antidote can stop the poison of all unconstitutional federal acts and executive orders at the state borders and prevent them from working on the people.
The states created the federal government and reserve the right to resist the exercise by Congress of any powers not specifically granted to it by the states in the Constitution.
There are those commentators, however, who insist that the Civil War settled the question of sovereignty and supremacy once and for all. They are wrong.
The Civil War made one thing clear: The federal government believes (and the Confederacy was forced to concede) that might makes right. The Union army defeated the army of the Confederacy, therefore, so the thinking goes, secession is no longer a constitutional remedy available to states. Might makes right.
Only it doesn't.
Think of it this way. Assume my neighbor and I disagree over the exact location of the boundary line between our properties. One day, while I'm out building a shed that my neighbor believes encroaches on his property, we start arguing, and the argument escalates to a full-fledged fist fight and I knock out my neighbor. Does that mean that the location of our mutual property line has been settled? Does the pummeling of my neighbor make my opinion of the location of that line the legal boundary?
Of course not.
Might, it seems, does not make right, neither in boundary disputes regarding land nor in similar conflicts over state sovereignty.
Nullification, as defined by Jefferson and Madison, and understood so well by Representative Flynn, is the most powerful weapon against the federal assault on state sovereignty and individual liberty. By applying the principles repeated in HB 98, states can simultaneously rebuild the walls of sovereignty once protected by the Constitution, in particular the Tenth Amendment, and drive the forces of federal consolidation back inside the constitutional cage meant to restrain them.
Connect With Us