The Nature of the Constitution
Topic: State of Jefferson
In understanding the nature of our constitution we can better understand not only the tactics that we should employ and the incremental goals we should strive toward but also the tactics which those who oppose us may employ to hinder our efforts. Even though it is statehood we seek and not necessarily our own nation, we must realize that the States will not easily relinquish their hold on Jefferson, nor will the Federal government be in favor of our statehood, unless when all else fails and the will of the people is not obeyed, we are prepared to secede completely. This assumes, of course, that the will of the people of Jefferson is overwhelmingly on our side. If it is not we must rightly fail.

If it is, however, we need to understand the vehicle we must use in order to gain our objective. That vehicle is the Constitution of the United States. The first and most important question one must ask when thinking about the nature of the constitution is: What purpose does our constitution serve?

The simple answer is that our constitution is a contract. More specifically it is an employment contract. The founding fathers and the people they represented employed a government to serve the people. To do so they essentially drafted an employment agreement "the constitution" which contained a job description describing the responsibilities (powers) of the employee (government). The key here is to recognize that the power here rests with "the employer," the people. We The People created the government to serve us and we gave the government certain responsibilities as defined in our contract, The Constitution.

Our employee has an appalling record of continuous violations of our contract. Where in the Constitution is the government given the power to own vast tracts of land and administer the same? What article of the Constitution authorized the government to create Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, The Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the EPA, the FDA, the Department of Health and Human Services, HUD, the Department of Labor, NASA, the Department of Transportation and on and on and on.

How can the government get away with this? Wasn't the Separation of Powers supposed to prevent such things from happening? The three branches of power in the federal government are still parts of the same government. The "scratch-my-back-and-I?ll-scratch-yours" mentality of two party politics in Washington has eroded the effectiveness of the separation of powers to the point where the branches are more interested in maintaining the status quo than upholding the constitution. All one has to do is read the Constitution and compare it with the decisions handed down from the Supreme Court since the days of Lincoln and judge for oneself.

So what happens when an employee breaks their contract? You fire him. This is essentially the argument in favor of Secession: That the government is in power at the pleasure of the people. That it governs with the consent of the governed, and that when the government oversteps the boundaries which the people have placed on it, they have the right to abolish the current form of government and "institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." (DoI)

The argument against Secession is that we don't have the right to do it, or that the civil war determined that secession is not an option. Some even argue that as long as people are given the right to vote in a democratic process, there can be no argument for secession--an argument that generally stems from a fear that a wave of secession would fracture the country into small fiefdoms. This, of course, is ridiculous. Secession, historically speaking, is always a last resort and any legitimate secession movement arises out of an overwhelming rejection of the ruling political body by a majority of citizens in the seceding territory. Thus any argument against the "legality" of secession is contrary to Natural Human Rights, specifically the right to liberty visa vies self government. Our own nation was founded by seceding from Britain. Yet does anyone argue that that makes our nation illegitimate?

In our own Civil War for example, the North had no right to prevent the South from Seceding--a fact that most people of the day took for granted. If not for Lincoln's single minded conquest of the newly born Confederacy there might have been two Americas in our time. In that aspect Lincoln's Union was very much like King George's Britain, trying to maintain control over the rebellious colonies. In the post war era revisionists subsequently made the war about slavery, obscuring the fact that the debate over slavery was only a symptom of the real cause the war, which was the increasing usurpation of State's Rights by the Federal Government.

The Civil war proved one thing very clearly: The Federal Government is willing to use all means to preserve its territorial integrity, and subsequently, its power over the people. The Civil War transformed us from a Republic of and by the people to a Nation over and above the people. What this means for citizens of Jefferson is this: Just because we play by the constitution doesn't mean that the Fed will.

Never-the-less it is important as we proceed in the effort to establish a new state that we understand the unchanging nature of our constitution as it was set down by the men who forged this country. Once we come to that understanding we will have the rhetorical ammunition that will win our cause.