Posted by Mike Maharrey

Like most guys, I started to gain weight in my 30s. In fact, I got pretty big.

My solution?

Complain about it.

I can remember sitting on the coach bemoaning my increasing girth. Oh sure, every once in a while I would get really disgusted with myself and run a few days in a row, or create some kind of workout regimen. I generally followed up the exercise session with a donut, or maybe a sausage and egg biscuit from McDonald’s, and then more complaining. It never lasted very long either – those bursts of workout mania. After a week or two, my disgust would revert back to apathy and I returned to the couch – with more complaining

And of course, I got bigger.

It wasn’t until I got really serious and made a true commitment to change my lifestyle that I lost any weight. Open heart surgery for a genetic defect jumpstarted my lifestyle change. A week on a cardiac wing will do that to you. I realized I didn’t want the future so many of my fellow patients in the hospital were living. Watching men and women in their 50s struggling just to walk across a room jolted me out of my stupor. I suddenly discovered enthusiasm for getting in shape and maintaining a healthier diet.

But make no mistake, it took a lot of work, self-sacrifice and determination. No more donuts, at least not on a regular basis. No more trips to Mickey D’s.  Hard work in the gym and at the track. Every day.

British historian Arnold J. Toynbee said, “Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.”

It took enthusiasm to rouse me from my complacency and motivate me to start taking care of myself. After recovering from my surgery, the ideal of healthy living took my imagination by storm. I developed a plan – diet and exercise. Then I went to work. Sure enough, the weight eventually came off.

Most American’s approach politics in much the same way I approached weight loss in my early 30s – sit on the couch and complain. Every once in a while, they may get up and fire off a letter to a senator, or throw a sign up in the yard supporting a presidential candidate. But after that little burst of energy, back to the couch for the latest episode of American Idol, or the next big basketball game.

And the government gets bigger.

Most American’s recognize Washington D.C. as a problem. Recent polling indicates a majority of Americans view an ever more powerful federal government as a threat. But Washington D.C. will never change itself. That’s a little like expecting a baby to hop up and change its own diaper. Every parent knows that infant will wallow in her own filth until the end of time until somebody comes along and changes that soiled diaper.

It’s time for the American people to change some diapers. But that will never happen while you sit on the couch watching TV. The federal government won’t change just because you write a letter to your congressman one day when you feel particularly irked. D.C. won’t shrink just because you vote one bum out, making way for a new bum.

The states hold the key to reigning in an overreaching federal government. James Madison said states “have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.”

But state representatives won’t do squat until we the people insist. We can argue for principles like nullification until we turn blue in the face, but our states won’t act without prompting. Citizens have the opportunity to exercise much more influence over state legislators and executives than they do over federal officials hundreds of miles away in D.C. We live in our state officials’ neighborhoods, our kids go to the same schools as their kids and we shop in the same stores.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to get to work.

The greatest danger to our liberty doesn’t reside in the White House, nor does it roam the corridors of on Capitol Hill office buildings.

Apathy stands the greatest threat to our liberty.

We’ve got the ideal – the Tenth Amendment. We’ve got the intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice – nullification. But we need help.

Become a member and support the TAC!

We need people to step up and support the work of the Tenth Amendment Center financially. We can’t educate and lobby without funds. We can’t maintain a website and put on events without a reliable flow of cash. And while we’re on the subject, I am extremely limited in what I can do for TAC because I work a full-time job. Even so, our organization has managed to create a high level of visibility on the national stage. We’ve had information from our press releases find its way into major newspapers and radio and TV broadcasts. I had the opportunity last year to speak before a joint congressional committee. Imagine what we could do if I could dedicate my full attention to TAC? It staggers my imagination sometimes.

But even more than that, we need workers. We need volunteers to go out and get involved in their states, lobbying their representatives, pushing legislation, campaigning for candidates who will uphold the principles of the Constitution and stand up to federal overreach. We need volunteers to attend meetings and educate people on the Constitution. We need workers to organize groups, write letters to the editor, blog, make videos and track legislation.

We need people to do work.

Will you consider volunteering? Washington D.C. will not fix itself. And you can’t rely on politicians. It’s up to you!

Just click this link to get started.

“The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.” -Samuel Adams

Michael Maharrey [send him email] is the Communications Director for the Tenth Amendment Center. He proudly resides in the original home of the Principles of ’98 – Kentucky. See his blog archive here and his article archive here. He also maintains the blog, Tenther Gleanings.

I tremble with fear every time a serious constitutional question is put to the “Supreme Court”.

Obvious to all but the willfully ignorant or ideologically blind, over the years SCOTUS has evolved into an essentially unbridled power unto itself. Guided by the principle of “judicial supremacy” vs “constitutional supremacy”, and tainted by politics, ideology and a sinister proclivity for social engineering, it has morphed into an unelected, unaccountable, black-robed judicial “Oligarchy of Nine”, America’s Privy Council, whose constitutional moorings have long ago been abandoned.

I can still recall the devastating words of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in the 30′s when he dropped all pretense of judicial faithfulness to the Constitution by haughtily proclaiming that “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.” Whoa, baby! Just let those insidious words sink in for a moment. Rather imperious, wouldn’t you say? Just who made these mere mortals Gods? Most certainly NOT the founders and most certainly NOT We the People. But thanks to an overreaching Marbury v Madison (1803) ruling which vested exclusive authority in the Supreme Court for divining what is and what is not constitutional, the judicial tyranny has continued unabated ever since.

Clearly, we are seriously in need of a constitutional amendment to reign in our runaway courts, most particularly the Supreme Court. No less than Thomas Jefferson warned us against the encroaching, indeed despotic, power of the Supreme Court. Tragically, his warnings have been ignored, and we are now paying the awful price for having failed to properly and effectively challenge the sacrosanctness of Marbury v Madison and the boundless “Supreme Court,” it–and our own neglect–has imposed on the Republic.

That said, if SCOTUS “rules” in favor of “Obamacare’s” individual mandate, should We the People yet again obediently and robotically yield because the Oligarchy of Nine ruled that we must? NOT ON YOUR LIFE–NOR MINE!!!!

Per the 9th and 10th Amendments, We the People and our immediate fiduciary agents, the States, must be fully prepared to summarily nullify such a ruling. And that remedial action should only be the first step in a determined grassroots effort to reign in the runaway courts and the mortal jurists who populate them. Our founders and our progeny would expect nothing less of us.

As originally intended, We the People, the final arbiters, the “highest tribunal”, are duty-bound to assert our constitutional authority when the “supreme court”–or any branch of the federal government–oversteps its original constitutional authority, failing which we deserve the cesspool of statism and tyranny which will surely ensue.

On the grounds that Justice Thomas’s wife is involved with the Tea Party movement, Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker recently demanded that Justice Thomas recuse himself from sitting on a  case challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare’s “individual mandate”, the lynchpin of the health care leviathan.

True to hypocritical liberal form, Toobin studiously neglected any mention of Justice Elena Kagan’s conflict of interest occasioned by her having worked on the issue in the Justice Department before her appointment as Associate Justice.  Another case of selective lib indignity.

The liberal strategy is embarrassingly obvious: eliminate conservative judicial threats to their activist agenda before the case is reviewed.

For me, such deceitful attempts to manipulate the court underscores a much greater concern–a more fundamental concern–that being the menacing power and corruption of the Supreme Court itself..

For years, SCOTUS has substituted “constitutional supremacy” with “judicial supremacy”, surely a recipe for constitutional disaster. To better illustrate this dangerous transformation, during the Roosevelt years Chief Justice Hughes arrogantly asserted  that “We are under a Constittution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.” Wow! But at least he was honest about the his own and the court’s authoritarian predilection.

These nine unelected, unaccountable, life-long tenured, black-robed oligarchs, more often than not driven by their political dispositions than by their faithfulness to the Constitution itself, have exercised far too much influence over our Republic’s direction. Relying on politically driven and often arbitrary rulings, the dissembling of the Constitution over the years has been unrelenting and inexorable. By the court’s failure to faithfully abide by its sworn oath to uphold the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land, they have all but wrecked the constitutional framework so carefully crafted by our founders.

Owing to this unrestrained erosion of our constitutional foundations by the Supreme Court itself, I no longer respect what this gaggle of mortal “super legislators” deign to be constitutional or unconstitutional.

In short, SCOTUS has become an unbridled and overzealous power unto itself–NOT what the founders intended at all. And if SCOTUS again blows it by imperiously granting its blessings to the “individual mandate”, then it is encumbent upon the States and “we the people” to assert our 10th Amendment right and duty to nullify or otherwise ignore the ruling. For as Alexander Hamilton explained, just as an unconstitutional act of the legislative body is null and void, it should be clear that an unconstitutional edict by the Supreme Court is equally invalid. .

We must remember that the founders intended that “we the people”–not SCOTUS or any of the other branches of government–are THE final arbiters of what is and what is not constitutional. But, if we continue to routinely yield to judicial, executive and legislative overreach, we have only ourselves to blame for the calamity which will surely follow.

A final note: just as the founders intended, Justice Thomas has proven to be a faithful defender of the original meaning and intent of the Constitution. For this reason, he has my unwavering support and respect.

Rule of Thumb: whenever a liberal “living constitutionalist” attacks a judge, in this case Justice Thomas, you can be sure that the victim of that attack is a person patriotic Americans  should enthusiastically rally around.

No nation is immutable; historically, nations evolve and devolve. And there’s no historical precedent which would uphold the assertion that America will be an exception to this rule.

And though our Founders had hoped their carefully crafted Constitution which created a confederated republic would remain intact in perpetuity, none deluded themselves into believing that, for better or for worse, the inherent depravity and fallibility of man wouldn’t inevitably, and likely irretrievably, alter both the nature and structure of American society and government. Thus, from a historical perspective, the reconstruction of our society and its model of governance is likely inescapable. (more…)