States' Rights

   Since the Civil War the Federal Government has never stopped trying to gain more power over the states. But if you you use the expression “states’ rights”, you dump yourself into a huge vat filled with intellectual black tar, the same hot and boiling verbal tar that is spread justly over people who support or refuse to condemn the klu-klux-klan. But what if states do in fact have rights and what if the exercise of states’ rights is now the only real means left for Americans to govern themselves democratically? Governor Romney denounced Donald Trump recently as a fraud and it is implicit in his criticism of the naive voters who support Trump that if they believe they have some sort of democratic control of the Washington government they are wrong. The President, the Congress and the Supreme Court have great power and men with power in Washington fight to use it to their advantage. The Congressmen and Senators we send into the fight from our states battle as best they can but they lack the power to turn the tide of the battle to the advantage of the citizens back home in their state. The Federal Government is fully committed to using its power militarily and economically worldwide. The Supreme Court in Citizen’s United has judged that unlimited money can be spent on politicians to gain economic and political power in Washington. Our government in Washington is the center of a worldwide complex of international and interstate governmental and economic activities that is now such an essential component of all organized life on our planet at all levels that without it a calamity would fall on us all worldwide that would make the decline and fall of the Roman Empire seem trivial. The Federal Government is a world banker with mountains of monies, billions and billions, stuffing its pockets and sent quickly flying from its munificent hands to whoever has the right stuff to come to Washington from anywhere in the world and grab some of it. We don’t have, we who send most of the money to Washington, “states’ rights”? Since most of us have no money to buy influence in Washington, we must count politically for nothing? We Americans are totally loyal to a government in Washington that is not fully sovereign and not located in any state and yet we in our states don’t have rights that count politically? We have to start counting. We have to understand that it is not so bad that we can not govern in Washington as long as with some help from it we can at least govern democratically our states.

Daniel McNeill