The growing grass roots resistance against the Federal government covers a wide range of topics including gun control, Obama Care, Common Core, warrantless spying on citizens, and other topics important to the American people. The resistance ranges from individual citizens to state legislatures and really raises a basic question: what happens to the country if Washington issues a decree or law and the rest of the country simply ignores it or aggressively resists it? Will the center hold?
The latest resistance efforts start below and will likely go on for a few days after:
1) In the recent elections, the state of Arizona and its voters took a giant step towards formally reasserting the rights of the state and its citizens. Arizona voters approved Proposition 122, an amendment to the state constitution that enshrines nullification, or anti-commandeering. Specifically, the amendment permits the state to “exercise its sovereign authority to restrict the actions of its personnel and the use of its financial resources to purposes that are consistent with the Constitution.”
In other words, Arizona citizens can now more easily tell the Federal government to pound sand when the state and its citizens in Arizona feel the Federal government is overstepping its Constitutional limits. It will allow Arizonans to refuse to enforce Federal laws by allowing voters to hold and vote on referendums on such issues as withholding state resources from enforcing Obamacare, Federal impingement on American’s Second Amendment rights, NSA spying programs, and other measures, according to the Tenth Amendment Center.
While Arizona citizens could have held such referendums at any time in the past, adding this new language to the state’s constitution means that such referendums will now be statutory, rather than constitutional, making it easier and far less expensive to get on the ballot for the people to decide.
Apparently there is legal precedent for this type of action. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld previous efforts by states to refuse to implement federal programs. These efforts include: Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), New York v. US (1992), Printz v. US (1997) and National Federation of Businesses v. Sebelius (2012).
Thus, it appears that the Arizona not only is a slap against Washington’s infringement on state rights and citizens’ personal freedoms but it also has a strong legal underpinning. Which again raises the central question we have been asking: what happens when Washington tells the state government and state citizens in Arizona to implement a Federal program and Arizona says, “thanks but no thanks?”
2) Yesterday, we discussed the bravery and initiative of a Wisconsin high school senior that was battling against the idiocy of the latest Washington school lunch guidelines. But it seems that not only are kids resisting Michelle Obama’s food dictates, but teachers across the country are also getting in on the food rebellion.
According to an article written by Kyle Olson for the Education Action Group that appeared on November 7, 2014, many teachers aren’t happy with how the new Federal school snack rules, e.g. banning birthday cakes in classrooms, have impacted their classrooms. They are so unhappy that “Nearly every teacher” at Tyler’s Bonner Elementary School are turning their noses up at the new rules, according to TV station KLTV: “Ridiculous,” Debbie Oliver, a 5th grade teacher, says. “To me, it might be saying, let’s not have any kind of fun in school anymore. It would be one thing if teachers were constantly bombarding the kids with treats and candy and cokes and stuff like that, but that’s not realistic. That’s not even happening.”
While the Washington nutrition rules are supposedly to curb childhood obesity, the teachers think they’re missing their mark.
“A lot of us are obese. That’s true,” teacher Camille Moore said. “But I don’t think we’re getting obese in the classroom.”
Meanwhile, the lunch rules aren’t going over much better in Michigan’s Pinckney school district, which has seen a dramatic drop in school lunch purchases as a result of the nutrition guidelines: “It’s frustrating because we want to serve these kids, but there are less students in the lunch line,” Linda Moskalik, the district’s assistant superintendent of finances and operations.
As with other school districts around the country, because of the new rules, kids in Pinckney are going hungry rather than eat the new food, a very bad unintended consequence of the Michelle Obama push. Before the “healthy” rules were implemented, food sales at Pinckney schools during the 2011-2012 school year were roughly $400,443.
The next school year, the district’s lunch sales dropped to $377,200, or 5.8%. During the 2013-2014 school year, they dropped an another 4%. In order to get the Federal government financial support, schools are required to give students the prescribed servings of fruits and vegetables.
But what is the reality of the new lunch guidelines? Not good: “As soon as they leave the lunch line, they will throw the food right in the garbage, which is a waste of food,” according to a teacher quoted in the article.
“I have a particular thing with frozen foods, and I kind of feel like some of the lunch foods taste like they’re frozen,” Lewis Tate, an eighth-grader at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Buford Middle School, tells Charlottesville Tomorrow. “One of the reasons I pack my lunch so often is because if I don’t know where my food came from I don’t like eating it.”
“Most of the food is just defrosted,” adds Maggie Vidal, a sophomore at Western Albemarle High School.
What good is having a so-called healthy lunch menu if kids do not eat it, especially if the food is unappetizing, recently defrosted, and insufficient for kids to learn and be active with? Unintended consequences of another bad Federal program.
No sane person could deny that we have an obesity problem in this country. But you do not solve this problem by denying a birthday cake in the classroom every once in a awhile, serving recently defrosted tasteless food in school cafeterias, or penalizing schools financially. You launch a nationwide, long term public health strategy and program to educate and change underlying behaviors, starting in the home, not in the school cafeteria line.
3) Common Core is getting rebutted across the country, with the state of Maine being the latest to join the surge of taking back control of heir kids’ education.
Maine Governor Paul LePage recently stated he was convinced that his state needed to get out from under Common Core and find another education solution for Maine’s kids. The impetus for his decision and awakening occurred after he observed that Massachusetts fell from being first in the country for education to seventh place after adopting Common Core standards.
LePage recent told WABI in Maine: “First of all, there is always a better way. And I no longer support Common Core, and I say that because we have been in Common Core for several years here in Maine. But after seeing what has happened to Massachusetts—they were the number one education system in America prior to adopting Common Core. That tells me that we need to take a hard look, maybe it would be better going back to what they had before.”
If that is not a slap across the face of the Federal government. After all of the effort, all of the expense, and all of the promotion, this governor has reached the conclusion that doing nothing is better than enacting Common Core principles. Another failed Federal government program that the rest of America is starting to reject.
4) Resistance to the Federal government takes many forms but probably not many are as forceful as the recent line in the sand that newly elected Texas governor Greg Abbott drew. In a recent television interview, Abbott said Texas will sue the Obama administration if the President tries to overstep the bounds of his executive power and interfere in immigration and naturalization issues and existing immigration laws: “If the president crosses the line he’s going to see an overwhelming rejection of what he’s trying to do, so he better not overstep. If he does, for one of course we’ll be involved with another lawsuit against him but [for] another you can expect quite a strong pushback [from the people].”
It does not look like Washington will get much help from the state of Texas if it decides to ignore existing immigration laws and may well find itself in front of a judge as Texas dares the Feds to disobey standing laws.
I can think of no time in our past where states were willing to pass amendments to the state constitution to inhibit Federal government overreach or sue Federal government for disobeying its own laws or tell Washington bureaucrats that we will ignore your nutrition and education guidelines and do what is best for our kids. Never before have I observed Americans actively taking back their liberties and freedoms that the Federal government has eroded over time.
At what point to Federal actions and initiatives become mere suggestions to the rest of the country? And at that time, when we ignore what is usually expensive and ineffective Federal laws and acts, does the center hold? More rebellions against the center tomorrow.
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Please visit the following sites for freedom:
Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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