Dr. Dan Eichenbaum, congressional candidate in North Carolina’s 11th District speaking at the 1st Annual 10th Amendment Summit held in Atlanta, GA on Feb 25 & 26 2010.
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The Tenth Amendment Summit Recap
Atlanta, Georgia (TAC) March 1, 2010
For two days last week, candidates for both state and federal offices in the 2010 elections gathered together to discuss strategies for upholding a strict interpretation of the 10th Amendment, which 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 candidates presented their views and ideas to a capacity crowd last Friday.
In a joint statement read to the crowd, the nearly two-dozen candidate participants pledged to “limit and restrain all federal government exercise of power that exceeds in any way the plain language of those few powers listed in the Constitution and to nullify all others that exceed such limit.”
Speakers such as Ray McBerry, Gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, and Roy Moore, Gubernatorial candidate in Alabama and former Supreme Court Justice for that state, slammed what they called federal overreach on traditional conservative issues such as gun rights, health care, and education.
But conservative issues were far from the only viewpoint that the so-called “Tenther” candidates championed. Adam Kokesh, an Iraq War Veteran and Congressional candidate in New Mexico’s 3rd District, proudly proclaimed, “During my deployment I realized that the greatest enemies of the Constitution to which I swore an oath to support and defend are not to be found in the sands of some far off land, but rather, right here at home!”
Michael Boldin, founder of the Tenth Amendment Center, also railed on U.S. foreign and domestic policy. He received standing ovations when listing what he considered to be ongoing violations of the constitution by the federal government, including the Department of Education, the Patriot Act, undeclared wars since 1941, federal gun regulations, and proposed national health care mandates.
Many of the participants expressed their gratitude for the Summit. Lex Green, candidate for Governor of Illinois, explained the results of the event, saying, “I went to the Tenth Amendment Summit with confidence in the power of state sovereignty, but looking for direction. I came away knowing that those powers that are reserved to the states and to the people provide the best way to protect our freedoms, and to help guide the nation back to prosperity.”
The Tenth Amendment Summit, sponsored by Georgia Gubernatorial Candidate Ray McBerry, and Los Angeles-based think tank the Tenth Amendment Center, was a two-day event on Thursday and Friday, February 25-26 at the Atlanta Airport Hilton. Thursday was a closed-door strategy session for candidates and organizers only. The all-day public event on Friday was attended by over 300, according to organizers.
Resolution of the First Annual Tenth Amendment Summit
The Upcoming Tenth Amendment Summit
For the first time in perhaps generations, the people of the states are demonstrating their disgust with the actions, policies, principles, and philosophies of the federal government. People who have attempted to change Washington, D.C., by playing by “their rules” have reached an end to that game of charades. To many, it has become all too clear that controlling the federal government through the three branches of the federal government alone is insufficient.
In Federalist Paper 48, James Madison warned:
Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power?… The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands. (Emphasis added.)
What is a sufficient guard? The Founding Fathers actually incorporated myriad guards into the new federal system of government: They not only crafted a system of checks and balances among the three branches of the federal government — equipping each branch with means to check encroachments by another branch — they also perserved states rights, opting for a “compound republic” as opposed to a “single repubic” as Madison explained in Federalist Paper 51:
In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.
Many Americans who want to return the federal government to its constitutional moors are redisovering the truth that the states are not provinces or political subdivisions of the federal government but are themselves republics and possess sovereignty as acknowledged and confirmed by the Tenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution: “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.” Put simply, the states can reassert their sovereignty to rein in a runaway federal government!
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