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After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
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Nice word: Nullification. Constitutionally speaking, “nullification” has been around in the USA for more than 230 years. Take a look at Jefferson’s and Madison’s “Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions” (1798).
“The resolutions argued that the states had the right and the duty to declare unconstitutional those acts of Congress that the Constitution did not authorize. In doing so, they argued for states’ rights and strict construction of the Constitution.”
The idea was that any state legislature could declare any law passed by the US Congress that said state considered unconstitutional as “absolutely null and utterly void.” Thus that state would be under no legal or moral obligation to enforce such a law.
Nullification has been for some years slowly creeping into the mindset of Americans, especially where firearms and taxation and energy and abortion are concerned. If some state—Nebraska for example—considered any ban on oil drilling to be unconstitutional then that state could drill to its heart’s content. The same with firearms. If some 3 letter agency issues some diktat restricting in whatever fashion the 2nd Amendment, then any state could tell that agency to go have sex with itself.
Imagine the possibilities! Each state would be free to enforce whatever law it considered constitutional, and to nullify any law it considered unconstitutional. The states would then revert to what they were supposed to be from the formation of our Republic: “laboratories of democracy”. The 9th and 10th Amendments would actually mean something.
The word for this is Liberty. And one outcome of each state claiming the power of nullification would be the complete impotence of the Supreme Court—John Marshall be damned. Which he already is.
In my opinion the feds main buttress blocking nullification by states is money. 36% of Oklahoma’s state funds is federal revenue, Alaska, it’s 50%, for the great majority of states it’s at least a third of their revenue according to Pew Trusts. You children better not get too uppity or else we, the feds, will stop giving a fraction of the money we took away from your citizens back to you!
I’ve often heard state legislators say, “We can’t do that, the feds will withhold…!”
Pretty big stick the feds have to make states toe the latest line.
Perhaps, but states got along just fine before FDR, LBJ and Nixon without oceans of federal monies. America had excellent schools, no income tax and we won all our wars. We were free then.
Any national cataclysm—civil war being only one possibility, losing a world war would be another—would end the federal blackjack over the states. The federal government would not then have the power to threaten anybody. Most of state and federal spending is at any rate an absolute waste. It would hardly be noticed except by our parasites, who would over time simply disappear.
Once you become noticed, or once “they” arrive at your door, you’ve lost the present battle.
I live in a rather well defensible place, and the whole county is majority good guys. Very. well. armed. good guys. The Hole In The Wall Gang, so top speak.
My state is hard to imagine as a Nullify State – rather, it is hard left on the other side of the mountains from me. But, the idea of re-locating to a Nullify State is odious – I’m well established and well entrenched here.
Besides, much of the conflict we now face is an information conflict. It could go kinetic in a minute, but there is an enormous amount of friction that keeps the feds in their own lanes for now.