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The 10th Amendment

 

Some of the folks who support Romney, and Romney himself, they say that the healthcare mandate in Massachusetts is Constitutional, and they use the 10th Amendment as support.

It reads:

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.
To suggest, as some do, that it is then Constitutional for states to have near dictatorial rights to pass any damn thing they want, as long as the majority want it, is a ridiculous abuse of the amendment.

The 10th Amendment was not written to give states a license to trample our rights and freedoms. It was written to protect the states from an overreaching federal government.

It's important to understand a bedrock principle of our founding: the individual is granted inalienable rights by the Creator, not by man, not by the government. Those rights cannot be taken away by man or by the government. This renders the individual, here on Earth anyway, sovereign. No one is a subject of the government here in the United States. We are a free people.

The Constitution sought to establish the minimum framework necessary for free people to maintain a society. For that reason, the power of the federal government was limited. Madison wasn't real excited about the 10th Amendment, but he gave in to those who demanded it. As a draft of it was passed around through the room, someone wrote in ", or to the people." It served as a healthy reminder that the state was not to become sovereign over the individual. The state, like the federal government, was also to establish a minimum framework to maintain society, while respecting the primary principle of our country: that men are, by nature, free and have rights that cannot be removed from them.

Nobody ever cites that last part of the amendment when they defend Romneycare.

A Reuters poll from March of last year showed that MassCare had an 84% approval rating in Massachusetts. You know what that means? It means that 16% of the people don't approve of it. The way it works: everyone is required to have health insurance - the mandate - and for the very poor, the amount owed can be as low as a few dollars per month.

Let me make this point: the government of Massachusetts decided that private citizens are forced to purchase specific goods and services from a private enterprise. That is unlike having to get a driver's license (government), schools (government), property taxes (government), or speeding limits (government). All of that is addressed by my relationship with the government. But you can't make me buy milk. What if I don't want milk?

If I don't want to have car insurance because it's too expensive, I can walk, ride a bike, or use public transportation. But in mandating the purchase of health insurance, I am robbed of my freedom to choose what I purchase, and thus, gone is my individual sovereignty.

Some read the 10th Amendment as allowing the states to be almost dictatorial in controlling their respective citizens.

That's a horrible reading of the amendment and it forgets the overarching intent of the Constitution.

The truth of the Constitution is that it did not allow the federal government to step in and prevent the states from being almost dictatorial in controlling their respective citizens. The 10th Amendment is a limitation on the federal government, as are the other nine amendments. It is not a license granted to the states to do as they please. Only citizens have a license to do as they please, not the states.

The 10th Amendment doesn't mean that states have authority over us, especially when we are in the minority, nor should we allow them to take it just by legislating it into being. Ours was intended to be a free country, despite state bureaucratic mischief. We either fight for it, or we don't, but I have no clue why conservatives who support Romney would cede one bit of their god-given freedom to the state or any government. What the hell??

Remember: the 10th Amendment is not license. It simply limits the federal government from interfering in matters outside federal jurisdiction, but Constitutionally, I am still sovereign over any government because my freedoms are granted to me by my Creator, and no body of man can remove them from me.

When a state mandate removes individual freedom from us, there's nothing Constitutional about it, and any day that I allow myself to surrender to tyranny of the majority within a state is the day that give up my individual sovereignty.

Today, the popularity of Romneycare is plummeting:

A recent poll from Suffolk University and WHDH-TV reports that 49 percent of respondents do not believe RomneyCare has helped, while only 38 percent believe that it is working.
I won't get into why that's happened, only to say that at the end of the day, everyone wants the freedom to choose the direction of their own lives. Anything less than that is un-Constitutional.

 


by Brett Rogers, 2/9/2012 7:21:44 AM
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