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With the federal government not only failing to do its job but being complicit in the war on national sovereignty, why then should we suffer the internal tyranny it is imposing upon us? At this point, isn’t the federal government all pain and no gain?
Our founders never envisioned the federal government would have so many policing entities with the technology, resources, and manpower it has today. Because the police power was left to the states, Madison actually feared the states would be the more likely culprit in usurpations than the federal government, which is why he originally wanted to give Congress veto power over state legislatures. Now, we not only have the DHS, FBI, ATF, and DEA, which are larger than the standing army the founders envisioned, but even the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Labor, and Department of Education have tactical response teams.
According to a 2015 CRS report, out of the (only) 13 agencies that responded to their questionnaire, there were a total of 271 federal tactical teams across the different offices and departments. There are now 200,000 federal employees (outside the Department of Defense) with firearms along with their badges, larger than the size of the U.S. Marines.
Almost none of it is used upon enemies of the country and to protect our liberties. It is all used to monitor, record, surveil, and now apprehend political dissidents. Thus, if we have given up our freedom to such a behemoth, what have we gotten in return?
At its core, the most important job of the federal government is to protect us against external enemies. That begins at our border. There have now been a total of 4.9 million known border incursions since Biden took office, nearly the population of Ireland. These comprise roughly 3.9 million apprehensions and close to a million gotaways (which is probably lowballing it). Our government has not only abrogated its most important responsibility to the states – protecting against invasion – but it has been complicit in the smuggling and criminal conspiracy that has brought over sex trafficking, drugs, and dangerous criminals.
Our founders didn’t fear this degree of federal government not only because it was not supposed to have all these federal police agencies, statutes, and executive authority over every aspect of our lives (including breathing without masks!), but because it was supposed to be busy working on external affairs. In one of the most important descriptions of the federalist arrangement, Madison laid out the design in Federalist #45 as follows:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
The operations of the Federal Government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State Governments, in times of peace and security. As the former periods will probably bear a small proportion to the latter, the State Governments will here enjoy another advantage over the Federal Government.
So why did he not fear federal tyranny so long as his design was followed?
The more adequate indeed the federal powers may be rendered to the national defence, the less frequent will be those scenes of danger which might favour their ascendency over the governments of the particular States.
Well, given that we now have record numbers of DHS and DOJ law enforcement agents with zero regard for protecting our national border, they have all the resources imaginable to focus on you and me.
Perhaps we need the federal government for the military, you might say. Really? A woke and broke military that only exists for critical race theory, transgenderism, and nation-building for every other border but our own? Again, once a federal force is no longer used for its proper purpose, it can only serve as a menace to our liberties in the long run.
So now that we have uniform weights, measures, and currency, why exactly do we need a federal government to abrogate its core defense responsibilities just to prevent the states from securing the border? All other activities were supposed to be done by the states. Founder Tench Coxe, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress, listed in a 1788 essay the following as off-limits to the federal government:
They cannot interfere with the opening of rivers and canals; the making or regulation of roads, except post roads; building bridges; erecting ferries; establishment of state seminaries of learning; libraries; literary, religious, trading or manufacturing societies; erecting or regulating the police of cities, towns or boroughs; creating new state offices; building light houses, public wharves, county gaols, markets, or other public buildings; making sale of state lands, and other state property; receiving or appropriating the incomes of state buildings and property; executing the state laws; altering the criminal law; nor can they do any other matter or thing appertaining to the internal affairs of any state, whether legislative, executive or judicial, civil or ecclesiastical.
Rather than just railing against the FBI and making this all about Trump, conservatives must compel a broader discussion in red-state legislatures and among the governors about how we return to this original design. They need to cut off the spigot of federal funding for all of the aforementioned functions, along with its accompanying officious litany of regulations, and with it, the police power to capriciously enforce nebulous (or even phantom) laws against political opponents.
Contrary to Mike Pence’s sentiments, dismantling these agencies is not akin to abolishing the police. Our founders envisioned state and local police and a national military – not dozens of national police forces larger than a military. Police power is the bluntest instrument of government, and it needs the scrutiny of local politics inherent in elections for sheriff, mayor, and county legislative and executive positions. When Madison warned during the Constitutional Convention, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” he certainly never envisioned this degree of an executive branch with this number of paramilitary organizations.
The purpose of forming a federal union was to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” for things that states were inherently incapable of doing. Yet what we have today is a government that engages in the antithesis of justice by fanning and fomenting true violence and framing its opponents, gutting our military, empowering the cartels to control our border, and creating monopolies for transhumanist World Economic Forum types at the expense of the general welfare and liberties of the people.
Rather than protecting the ideals spelled out in the preamble of the Constitution, the federal government abrogates every one of them and prevents others from upholding them. Nowhere is this more evident than at the border. If you simply abolished the federal government, then the states could have a fighting chance to secure the border. Yet now, Fox’s Bill Melugin is reporting that while the Texas Guardsmen close the gates to illegal aliens, Border Patrol comes and opens them!
Which leads us back to the original question: At this juncture in time, if our desideratum as a civilization is justice, tranquility, the common defense, general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty, why even have a federal government? I can sure think of a lot of revolting activities of the federal government we can live without. Now, can you think of one we must live with?
Reporting from The Blaze.
