The Unorganized

American Militia

King George didn’t listen to us either!

By Charles Pitts

The presidential oath of office contains a pledge to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States, and by implication the liberties of the American people that the document is intended to preserve. In light of this, can you name which of the delegated powers in the U.S. Constitution allow the president to invade his own country, mass murder 300,000 of his own American citizens, and bomb, burn and plunder their cities? Can you explain how such acts would be consistent with protecting the constitutional liberties of those unfortunate citizens? If you think you can, then congratulations, you are a Lincoln sycophant just like President Barack Hussein Obama. If not, do not despair. You are in decent company, including the five living past presidents as of 1861, namely, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. Lincoln’s predecessor, President James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, stated the truth when he said the following:

Has the Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw . . . from the Confederacy [of states]? If answered in the affirmative, it must be on the principle that the power has been conferred upon Congress to declare and to make war against a State. After much serious reflection, I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the federal government (Senate Journal, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, 4 December 1860, 15–16).

Unlike Lincoln, James Buchanan was a constitutionalist. Buchanan understood, as did nearly everyone prior to Lincoln, that the states did not give up any of their sovereignty when they ratified the Constitution; they merely delegated several distinct powers to the central government that was designed to act for their mutual benefit.

Buchanan’s position on secession is described in some detail by John Avery Emison in his new book, Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes to America. It’s high time that Americans grow up, says Emison, and confront the reality of their own history, as opposed to the childish fairy tales concocted by the court historians of the Church of Lincoln.

As for the other living presidents mentioned above, the New Yorker Millard Fillmore, a former Whig, opposed the war for its duration and never joined the new Republican Party after the Whig Party imploded, as did most Northern Whigs. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was a fierce critic of the war and especially of Lincoln’s Stalinist, police-state tactics in suppressing political opposition in the North. New Yorker Martin Van Buren died in 1862 but opposed the war, and John Tyler of Virginia, who also died in 1862, actually served in the Confederate Congress.

These men were all patriotic Americans who understood that waging war against the citizens of any state was an act of treason. They understood this because, unlike Lincoln, they had read, understood, and believed in the Constitution. As Emison points out, Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines treason as follows: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort” (emphasis added). As with all the founding documents, “United States” is in the plural, signifying that the free and independent states are united for some specific purpose, in this case in delegating certain powers to the central government, mostly for foreign policy reasons. Treason meant waging war against the citizens of the states, not the government in Washington, D.C. Lincoln’s war was nothing if it was not a war prosecuted by the Republican Party against the Southern states. It was therefore the very definition of treason under the U.S. Constitution.

The Lincoln Cult sometimes claims that the so-called “insurrection clause” of the Constitution (Article 4, Section 4) gives the government the ability to wage war on its own citizens, but this is a gross misreading of the document. Article 4 states: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.”

Lincoln violated the first part of Article 4 by imprisoning members of the Maryland legislature in 1861 and by occupying various southern states, ruling over them with military dictatorships during the war. The war was not a domestic insurrection within the Southern states. But even if one assumes that it was, as Lincoln falsely did, it is important that the second part of Article 4 denotes that the central government cannot interfere in an insurrection within any state unless first invited to do so by the legislature or governor of that state. The governors of the Southern states never invited Lincoln to invade them, bomb their cities, and murder their citizens by the thousands. But then again, Lincoln believed that he was more important than the Constitution.

In his chapter entitled “Secession, the Constitution, and the Law,” Emison devastatingly critiques Lincoln Cultist James McPherson’s one-sentence quip in his (McPherson’s) book, Battle Cry of Freedom, that the states that entered the union after the original thirteen were creatures of the central government and therefore were not sovereign over it and had no right to secede. This quip has been endlessly repeated by Lincoln cultists in their defense of Lincoln’s war despite the fact that it is historically and constitutionally baseless. It is baseless because of what the Supreme Court has called the “Equal Footing Doctrine.” When Tennessee became the third new state in 1796, for example, it was admitted “on an equal footing with the original states in all respects whatsoever,” phraseology that has been used ever since, Emison reminds us. This means that, just as the original thirteen states were sovereign over the central government, so are all the others. All states are equal under the Constitution.

This fact motivates Emison to ask the obvious question: “If all the states are equal, do any states or combination of states have the legal or moral authority to destroy another state and replace its lawfully elected government with one imposed by military occupation? If so, which states have such authority? How did they get it? Lincoln’s answer to these questions was, essentially, “the side with the most bayonets makes the rules.”

In his chapter entitled “War Crimes” Emison details just how Lincoln “proved” his new theories about the absolute and omnipotent powers of the federal government to be “correct.” He explains how the Lincoln regime reignited the horrors of total war in the world, including the waging of total war on one’s own citizens. Among the language used to describe the waging of total war on Southern civilians is “rampage,” “theft and indiscriminate destruction of property,” “rob, tyrannize, threaten,” “numerous reports of rape,” and “woe betide the region’s unprotected black women, against whom acts of the most beastly an infamous character” were perpetrated by Union Army soldiers.

Much of this barbarism was the work of the “heroic” General Sherman. Emison scoured numerous biographies of Sherman and found him to be described in the following ways by those who knew him best: “A near emotional cripple”; a dangerous man”; “traumatized, marginalized, and self-loathing”; “a caged lion . . . angry”; suffering from “delusional misjudgment”; “suicidal impulses”; “confessed to his wife a death-wish for himself . . .”; “a man of primal rage.”

“Sherman’s gone in the head, he’s luny [sic],” said Assistant Secretary of War Thomas Scott, as quoted by Emison. “It would be dangerous to give [Sherman] command,” said General Henry Halleck. Of course, Lincoln not only gave Sherman command, but made him one of the top commanders, and the Republican Party turned him into a national icon after the war. (Sherman spent the next 25 years after the war orchestrating the campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians.)

Emison documents with Sherman’s own words how the man seemed to hate just about everyone especially blacks, Mexicans, Jews, and Indians. He was not an enlightened egalitarian devoted to black equality, as the buffoonish Lincoln cultist Victor Davis Hanson has contended. This mentally-deranged maniac “justified” his mass killing of civilians by inventing the “doctrine of military necessity,” which essentially said that anything goes in war, even the murder of innocent women and children. Sherman’s armies would later perfect this barbaric ideology during the Indian Wars, as Emison recounts.

When backed into a corner the Lincoln Cult usually resorts to the preposterous claim that everything the Lincoln regime did (or did not do, such as peacefully ending slavery, as the rest of the world did in the 19th century) was justified because Northerners were enlightened about race and Southerners were not. Evil Southerners had to be civilized, the story goes, even if that meant killing them by the hundreds of thousands. But as Emison writes, “The idea that . . . white Northerners . . . fought the Civil War to end slavery, or were on the right side of the racial justice issue, is preposterous.” It is “nothing short of gullible self-deception, bordering on simple-mindedness.”

Your author is not as generous as Emison in this regard. James McPherson, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and other Lincoln cultists are not simple minded. They know what they are doing, and they know that it pays very well careerwise and moneywise to be a court historian.

In another attempt to allow Americans to wean themselves from childish self-deceptions about their own history, Emison devotes a chapter to race in American history. He discusses how slavery existed for hundreds of years in the North, especially in New York, Boston, and Newport, Rhode Island, the hubs of the transatlantic slave trade. The transatlantic slave trade “was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure” for generations. The slave trade was also “one of the cornerstones of New York’s commercial prosperity in the eighteenth century.”

Emison documents the truth behind Tocqueville’s statement in Democracy in America that “the problem of race” was even worse in the North than it was in the South in the early nineteenth century. He presents a table of seventy-six Northern Jim Crow Laws that were enacted beginning with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New York in 1868. Jim Crow laws were a Northern invention. In the decade preceding the War to Prevent Southern Independence alone, California, Utah Territory, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas Territory, Nebraska Territory, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Oregon disenfranchised all free blacks.

In 1839 Ohio’s legislature passed “a resolution that Negroes have no right to petition the legislature for any purpose whatever.” Massachusetts banned interracial marriage in 1836, after Rhode Island did so in 1822; during the same year (1836), state legislator Abraham Lincoln voted for an Illinois resolution that “the elective franchise should be kept pure from contamination by the admission of colored votes”; In 1833 Connecticut criminalized “the establishment of any school for persons of the African race”; Ohio, Indiana and Illinois required “good behavior bonds” from free blacks; many Northern states enacted “Negro Exclusion Laws”; the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that blacks were not citizens twenty years before the famous Dred Scott decision; and Illinois amended its Constitution in 1862 to add a Negro exclusion provision.

One very interesting aspect of Lincoln Über Alles is Emison’s discussion of the preponderance of “German Forty-Eighters” in the Lincoln administration and at the upper levels of his army. These men were German immigrants who participated in an 1848 European political revolt that advocated highly centralized government, despised state’s rights, and believed that citizens needed to subordinate their personal interests to the state. “Many Forty-Eighters were Marxists; some considered themselves communists. One of the Forty-Eighters was Marx’s own brother-in-law . . . the Forty-Eighters saw themselves as international agents of change.”

One of the more prominent German immigrants in the Lincoln administration was Francis Lieber, who Lincoln employed to write the military code for the U.S. Army, which was known as the “Lieber Code.” Another was General Franz Sigel, and officer in the Prussian army who fled Europe and became a Union army general who gained notoriety for his defeat in the Battle of New Market at the hands of VMI cadets. Sigel apparently believed he would teach the sons of Virginia, including a descendant of Thomas Jefferson’s who was killed in the battle, what it meant to be an American. Emison describes numerous other German “revolutionaries” who were given important commands in Lincoln’s army.

A great many German immigrants settled in the Midwest and were instrumental in Lincoln’s nomination and election. Abe recognized this, and purchased several German-language newspapers in order to bolster his German immigrant support. Emison makes a very persuasive case that it was German immigrants who “put him over the top” in six key states (Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin) in the 1860 election. This perhaps explains why so many prominent Germans, some of whom barely spoke English, were commissioned as colonels, majors, or generals in Lincoln’s army.

Emison views Lincoln’s relevance to modern America very differently than Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer, authors of Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever. Cuomo and Holzer celebrate the fact that Lincoln has long been the image/poster boy of America. In a textbook example of the kind of childish simplemindedness that Emison refers to, Holzer has even said that “everything good” in all of American history since 1865 is due to Abraham Lincoln.

Our Conclusion

America is haunted by Lincoln’s blood lust for a coercive, dominant, unitary, unaccountable, debt-laden central government whose principle function is the plunder of society and the redistribution of wealth to the politically privileged elite like Barack Obama and their collection of political sycophants [like Obama cultists] who help keep them in power. In this regard, the two major parties have become the party of Lincoln, each a metastatic twin of the other. Abraham Lincoln opened the door to the Leviathan central state that mandates, manipulates, and regulates virtually every aspect of life in America and seeks unilateral hegemony around the globe, and President Barack Hussein Obama has become its patron saint. If you want to live under a government defined by militarism, mercantilism, dictator worship, and imperialism, then continue following the political son of "Father Abraham", Barack Obama, as he continues to invoke his "martyred Christ" as rhetorical cover for an agenda that sounds remarkably identical to early twentieth-century European fascism. Americans once fought a war against such an ideology, if you can recall.

A Silver Bullet From the States Kills Mandatory Obamacare

At least 36 state legislatures are considering legislation that would allow citizens to opt out of a key component of President Obama's health-care "reform" – an "individual mandate" requiring that all Americans have health insurance.

Both the House and Senate health-care bills require Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. The House bill establishes a fine based on percentage of a person's income, while the Senate version creates a penalty as a flat fee or percentage of income, whichever is higher. Those refusing to get insurance could be found guilty of a misdemeanor crime, punishable by another fine or even jail time.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, formal resolutions or bills have been filed in opposition to the individual mandate in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Lawmakers suggest approval of the legislation may spark a legal battle over states' rights versus the federal government's reach of power. The Boston Globe reported the measures could set the stage for "one of the greatest tests of federal power over the states since the civil rights era." "The administration is trying to shift from a government by social compact, agreement between elected officials and citizens, to a government where the leaders tell the subjects what to do," Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall, chief sponsor of the measure in his state, told the Globe. "That is not what the American Revolution was about."

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has sparked nationwide interest with its model "Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act: How Your State Can Block Single-Payer and Protect Patients' Rights." ALEC warns that forcing patients to enroll in one-size-fits-all plans would cause massive increases in spending and force policymakers to ration care as a cost-containment measure.

Minnesota State Rep. Tom Emmer told the New York Times in September 2009 that lawmakers in his state have proposed a state constitutional amendment to protect citizens from government interference in their private health decisions. "All I'm trying to do is protect the individual's right to make health-care decisions," Emmer said. "I just don't want the government getting between my decisions with my doctors." He said an amendment wouldn't prohibit anyone from participating in a federal health program. It would simply prevent them from being forced to enroll. "[T]ell me where in the U.S. Constitution it says the federal government has the right to provide health care," Emmer said. "This is the essence of the debate."

During the Democratic presidential primary, Obama took a jab at Hillary Clinton over the individual mandate. "The main difference between my plan and Sen. Clinton's plan," he said, "is that she'd require the government to force you to buy health insurance and she said she'd 'go after' your wages if you don't."

According to the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, the federal government has never mandated that Americans purchase any good or service. In 1994, the CBO studied the individual mandate in Clinton's universal health-care plan and found that it was an unprecedented requirement. "A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action," the CBO report stated. "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government."

Opponents say the individual mandate is unconstitutional because the Constitution doesn't grant the federal government power to fine citizens for refusing to purchase goods and services. Ken Klukowski, senior legal analyst with the American Civil Rights Union, explained in a Politico commentary why there is no constitutional basis for the individual mandate. "People who decline coverage are not receiving federal money, so that mandate can't fall under the spending part of the Tax and Spending Clause," he wrote.

Article I of the Constitution authorizes excise and capitation taxes, and the 16th Amendment created the income tax. However, Klukowski contends that government health insurance cannot be considered an excise, capitation or income tax. "It can't be an excise tax because that's a surcharge on a purchase, and here people are not buying anything," he explained. "It can't be a capitation (or 'direct') tax because that is a tax on every person in a state and must be equal for every person in the state; this would be a levy that some people would pay and others would not. And it can't be an income tax because that must be based on personal income, not purchase decisions."

He added, "All that's left is the Commerce Clause. And the people who declined to purchase government-mandated insurance would not be engaging in commercial activity, so there's no interstate commerce. That, in fact, is the government's problem with them: Those people refuse to take the money or play the game."

Likewise, the Congressional Research Service recently reported that determining whether an individual mandate is constitutional under the Commerce Clause "is perhaps the most challenging question posed by such a proposal, as it is a novel issue whether Congress may use this clause to require an individual to purchase a good or service."

Klukowski wrote that if Obama wants a plan that forces Americans to purchase insurance, he will need to "persuade the nation to adopt a constitutional amendment creating a right to health care." He added, "You might have better odds of getting struck by lightning."

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and outspoken critic of the individual mandate, told CNS News that if Congress can force Americans to buy health care, or mandate the purchase of anything, "we've lost our freedoms, and that means the federal government can do anything it wants to do to us."

States Declare Sovereignty

by  A.W.R. Hawkins

State governors – looking down the gun barrel of long-term spending forced on them by the Obama “stimulus” plan – are saying they will refuse to take the money. This is a Constitutional confrontation between the federal government and the states unlike any in our time.

In the first five weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has acted so rashly that at least 11 states have decided that his brand of “hope” equates to an intolerable expansion of the federal government’s authority over the states. These states – "Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, [Minnesota]...Georgia," South Carolina, and Texas -- "have all introduced bills and resolutions" reminding Obama that the 10th Amendment protects the rights of the states, which are the rights of the people, by limting the power of the federal government. These resolutions call on Obama to “cease and desist” from his reckless government expansion and also indicate that federal laws and regulations implemented in violation of the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states.

When the Constitution was being ratified during the 1780s, the 10th Amendment was understood to be the linchpin that held the entire Bill of Rights together. The amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The use of the 10th Amendment in conjunction with nullification garnered much attention in 1828, when the federal government passed a tariff that southerners believed affected them disproportionately. When the 1828 tariff was complemented by another in 1832, Vice President John C. Calhoun resigned the Vice Presidency to lead his home state of South Carolina in pursuit of an “ordinance of nullification,” which was no less a declaration of the sovereignty of each individual state within the union than the declarations now being made.

Calhoun was simply exercising what he recognized to be his state’s right to defend liberty within its borders by rejecting the dictates of an overbearing central government. While his efforts culminated in a tense affair referred to as the “nullification crisis,” which witnessed everything from threats of a federal invasion of South Carolina to an ongoing and near union-rending debate over national power vs. state’s rights, they also succeeded in turning back the tariffs that had been passed in spite of the Constitutional limits on federal power.

This time around, in 2009, appeals to the 10th Amendment are not based on tariffs but on unfettered government expansion in Obama’s “stimulus bill,” federal mandates on abortion that violate state laws, and infringements on the 1st and 2nd Amendments, among other things.

For example, Family Security Matters reports that Missouri’s “House Concurrent Resolution 0004 (2009) reasserts its sovereignty based on Barack Obama’s stated intention to sign into law a federal ‘Freedom of Choice Act’, [because] the federal Freedom of Choice Act would nullify any federal or state law ‘enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of [its] enactment’ and would effectively prevent the State of Missouri from enacting similar protective measures in the future.”

The resolution in Montana grew out of concerns over coming attacks on the 2nd Amendment, thus its preface describes it as, “An Act Exempting From Federal Regulation Under The Commerce Clause Of The Constitution Of The United States A Firearm, A Firearm Accessory, Or Ammunition Manufactured And Retained In Montana.”

New Hampshire’s resolution actually references certain federal actions that would be nullified within that state were they pushed by Obama’s administration, according to americandaily.com. Among these are “Any act regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press, [and any] further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms including prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition.

Regardless of the specific reason behind each of the resolutions in the 11 states, all of them direct the federal government to “cease and desist” in its reckless violation of state’s rights. In this way, South Carolina’s resolution is typical of the others issued to date:

“The General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, by this resolution, claims for the State of South Carolina sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the United States Constitution…

Be it…resolved that this resolution serves as notice and demand to the federal government, as South Carolina's agent, to cease and desist immediately all mandates…beyond the scope of the federal government's constitutionally delegated powers.”

What these state assemblies and congresses have hit upon here is key to our entire conservative interpretation of the Constitution, for these states understand that the Constitution limits the federal government, not the people. Or to put it another way, it guarantees the freedom of the people by limiting the government.

Every conservative should relish the call for the federal government to “cease and desist all mandates that are beyond the scope of [its] constitutionally delegated powers.” In this way, we honor the Constitution that enumerates a number of our liberties yet also guarantees us other liberties that are neither enumerated nor denied in the document.

Liberals don’t respect the Constitution, and liberals in Congress don’t hesitate to propose legislation that would clearly violate it. The current push to give Washington, D.C. a voting representative in the House of Representatives is a good example; even liberal Prof. Jonathan Turley told a Congressional hearing that this bill is patently unconstitutional. But they press on with it.

Our Constitutional system of checks and balances is always thought of as enabling two of the three branches of the federal government to keep the third within its constitutional bounds. But there is a fourth check, the states, which also have a Constitutional function. It is to them this burden now falls. The states can choose between allowing the federal government to impose untenable conditions on them if they accept the stimulus money, or to reject it.

These eleven states have the right to reject the stimulus plan. And they must.

There is no other option. For this federal expansion will not stop unless we stand in its way with courage in our hearts and the Constitution in our hands.

Obama's Bill of Rights

What is the "Second Bill of Rights?"; The idea, that seems to be forming as part of the Barack Obama Agenda of redistributing wealth, was first articulated by none other than President Franklin Roosevelt during his 1944 State of the Union Address.

"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

"The right of every family to a decent home;

"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

"The right to a good education."

The revival of the concept of a "Second Bill of Rights" puts a new face on Barack Obama's seven-year-old musings about the Constitution.