Today I am announcing the formation of The Liberty & Freedom Initiative. The purpose of the initiative is to promote the sort of Federal Republic form of government intended by Founders Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Nathaniel Macon and John Taylor of Caroline. The Initiative’s research findings will appear here at my Insight and Incite site. Leading off the new initiative will be some unpleasantness on the father of big government and judicial activism Chief Justice John Marshall. The Founders were against entanglements in foreign wars and meant to stay clear of foreign alliances. The Founders promoted neutrality. The Founders would not have had any part of the Vietnam, Korean, Iraq, Afghan or Libyan military engagements. All have been clearly unconstitutional.
Here is how Thomas Jefferson saw our Federal Republic. As the author of the “Kentucky Resolves,” Jefferson promoted states’ rights, pure and simple. Jefferson wrote, “Whenever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void and of no force.” For Mr. Jefferson, it was the states that held the ultimate sovereign power. It was not the president, not Congress, and most directly not the Supreme Court. The Founders never intended the states to be subservient to a central government. Perhaps the best way to frame the issue is to say that the Founders believed in united states, not the United States. The Founders did not believe in a standing army and believed that foreign alliances worked against the liberty of America’s citizens.
Today, due in large measure to constitutional overreach by an activist judicial system, we have moved far away from the ideals of the Founders. In 2012 there will be an opportunity to return the country to the true form of Federal Republic intended by the Founders.
