Doctrines of Nullification and Interposition Are Not Outdated

by Michael Anthony Peroutka

The next statement may strike you as unusual, and perhaps you may not want to take my word for it; so, please check it out for yourself:

The Federal government in Washington, DC has no authority to feed, clothe, or shelter anyone.

Yes . . . That is what I said. There is no legal authority for the Congress or the President or the Courts to provide welfare to anyone.

Now, I know that there is something called the “General Welfare Clause” but, as written by our founders, this only meant that the powers and authorities that were delegated to the central (Federal) government could only be used for general purposes and not for the specific welfare of any specific people or groups of people.

Another way to say this is that the “General Welfare Clause” is a clause of limitation on the powers that are delegated to the federal government in Article One, Section Eight—not a clause of expansion, granting unlimited power to Congress to enact anything they determined to be generally desirable. As James Madison explained in Federalist Paper No. 41, if the General Welfare Clause granted plenary power, there would be no purpose for the limited delegations of power.

Understanding this truth allows us to see that fully 90 percent and more of the programs and actions in Washington are unconstitutional—that is to say, illegal—that is to say, criminal.

This is why many Americans are beginning to remember and recover the ideas of nullification and interposition, which our founders and our grandparents knew were the people’s and the States’ proper legal defense against lawless, tyrannical central government.

It’s also why the right of Secession—originally threatened by the Northern State of Massachusetts, in the year 1803 in protest of the Louisiana Purchase—is being discussed again in the North, and the South, and the East, and the West.