The County Sheriff Speaks

Your sheriff is the most powerful law enforcement officer in your county. One of America’s most prominent former sheriffs is former Graham County sheriff Richard Mack. In The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope, sheriff Mack wrote the following: “Our American republic has been replaced by a corrupt system of political correctness. The founders of America warned us repeatedly, in their writing and their intent, to avoid gun control, a police state, entangling foreign alliances, a grandiose and omnipotent central government, enslaving taxation, and paper money not backed by gold and silver. A limited central government was the goal.”

Sheriff Mack also writes that you will never find any references made by the founders to their hopes of making America the next great democracy. There had already been numerous failed democracies throughout history (such as Rome and Greece), and the founders had no intention of risking their lives just to start another one here. They were all about a new experiment—an experiment of a unique form of government based on the idea that all men were created equal and would therefore be left to govern themselves. The people would retain an inviolable sovereignty and power over the government, which exists to serve them, not vice versa.

In United States history, the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions were political statements in favor of states’ rights, written secretly by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the third and fourth presidents of the Union. They were indeed passed by the two states in opposition to the federal Alien Act and Sedition Acts. The resolutions attacked the Sedition Acts, which extended the powers of the federal government. The resolutions declared that the Constitution was a compact, an agreement among the states. They claimed the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically designated to it, and that should the federal government assume such powers, its acts under them would be void. Thus it was the right of the states to determine the constitutionality of such laws passed by Congress.

Here in 2010, America faces a crisis of vast federal government overreach, running far beyond the scope of our most important founders, Jefferson and Madison. The neocon-influenced Bush administration was a model of overreach. And the Obama-fronted Radical Progressive Movement (RPM) has now proven to be the inciter of a massive states’ rights movement that has come to be known as the TEA party movement. The TEA party movement is not about Republicans, and certainly not about Democrats. It is clear that just as the Bush administration was hijacked by the Wolfowitz-influenced big-government, nation-building concept of government, the Obama administration is largely Marxist in orientation, finding its footing in the likes of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, Cass R. Sunstein’s The Second Bill of Rights, Robert Creamer’s Stand Up Straight, and Marx and Engels’s famous The Communist Manifesto. If my inclusion of The Communist Manifesto seems a little harsh to you, perhaps you have not taken a look at the manifesto’s 10 guiding principles of revolution. If you remember your history, you of course remember that Karl Marx was principally about centralizing all instruments of production in the hands of the state.

Sheriff Mack writes that James Madison said, “We can safely rely on the disposition of the state legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.” Today Arizona is taking just such a stand against Obama overreach. And all Jeffersonian government supporters are in lockstep with Arizona. The Kentucky and Virginia resolutions act as a beacon ahead for all believers in a constitutional republican form of government. “Don’t Tread on Me” yellow flags featuring a blue rattlesnake will be an increasingly common sight as America moves forward to the critical fall elections that will replace politicians friendly to Obamacare, cap and trade, and Wall Street bailouts with Kentucky and Virginia resolution conservatives.