Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center.
He's got a piece today on LewRockwell.com called Null, Void, of No Effect.
I kind of like the sound of that.
How's it going?
Doing well here, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
You're very welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
So, let's see here.
Something about Thomas Jefferson right at the beginning.
What's that about?
Yeah, T.J. was a pretty cool guy in my viewpoint, you know, Declaration of Independence and all.
But, you know, a lot of people don't realize he had this other declaration, at least that's how I view it.
In 1798, he wrote this Kentucky Resolution in response to the Alien and Sedition Act.
I mean, without getting into all the boring details, but basically what he wanted to tell us was some advice on how to answer the essential question of all time.
When you have a government and it violates the rules given to it, what do you do about it?
Well, Jefferson said straight up, a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy.
Now, he didn't say a nullification of the act is, you know, kind of a good idea.
You know, maybe vote some bums out or sue the people in federal court or all those other things and try nullification later.
He said it is the rightful remedy every time government assumes power is not delegated to it.
And that means stand up, reject, resist, and say no to every action that Washington, D.C. does that they're not supposed to be doing.
Well, so you must be a cynical George Bush-loving right-winger who's just mad that John McCain lost the election.
And now all of a sudden you're principled and for the Constitution and anti-government.
But really all you want is the Republicans to have total power again.
We know you.
Radical panthers, they call us.
You know, we obviously hate America.
Didn't they use that kind of terminology when Bush was around?
If you oppose the endless foreign wars or the Patriot Act or the Real Idea Act or the Military Commissions Act, you obviously were with the terrorists.
Now they just changed the word from terrorist to racist.
So if you want to decentralize power and keep the most difficult and divisive issues close to home, you just do it because you hate Barack Obama personally.
I dislike them all.
Right.
You know, I'm sorry to throw that straw man at you, but it seems like, you know, these kind of vagaries and impressions are what rules the debate most of the time.
But in fact, no, the real answer is that you're consistently anti-state, and you never were for any of those things in the Bush era, and you never were a cheerleader for them.
Absolutely.
And every time I talk to some of the mainstream media, whether it's, you know, someone from Fox News or CNN or the New York Times, all across the political spectrum, they always, you know, they always ask, OK, Michael, so what political party are you for?
And I tell them none.
But I don't think they believe me.
It really is true.
I'm not on the left or the right or anywhere in between.
All I want is to live free.
Well, and we can already see that the – I mean, it happens every two or four years or whatever, eight years sometimes.
But we have these elections where everything's supposed to change.
We can already see, just like Obama didn't change anything, the Republicans coming into Congress aren't changing anything.
Interview after interview after interview, these guys get on TV and say, oh, yeah, well, you know, we're going to raise the debt ceiling, but only if we can get the Democrats to promise that we're going to have some cuts someday.
And they're actually really pushing that.
There's your big change.
That was the one big issue that the Republicans took the House based on, and here they're going to just give away the whole story every time.
They always have.
I think it's almost laughable.
For maybe a century or even longer, every time a federal government does something wrong, you know, we the people, you know, we march on D.C. and ask federal politicians to limit their own power, or we vote bums out in the hope that new bums will come in and say, oh, I don't want all this power you've handed me, or we go to federal courts and ask federal judges to limit federal power.
And I think the concept of going to the federal government to limit the power of the federal government is idiotic.
All right.
Well, now, first thing is first, we've got to change the minds of the American people so that they ain't such status anymore and believe that not only they, but maybe their neighbors ought to enjoy some freedom, too.
That would be a good step.
But you've got some concrete things going on here.
If we do agree that, forget about it, the federal government and the two political parties on the national level are just a complete waste of time, as you just said.
The best you're going to do is be able to beg a federal judge to find in your favor.
We just talked with the lady from the Center of Constitutional Rights about how a judge refused to say that Obama doesn't have the power to order an American citizen killed because he said that's a political question, not one for his federal court.
And we just covered this one moment ago before the break.
So, OK, now everyone agrees with you on that.
What do we do?
What is all this nullification and interposition and all this you're pushing?
I'll answer it in one word.
Marijuana.
And people always laugh at me when I say that, but I think it's true.
Here we've got a situation.
You live here in California now, too.
But, you know, back in the mid-'90s, California passed a state law that said, you know, we're going to allow people to use weed for certain limited purposes.
And the federal government said, uh-uh, no matter what you do, marijuana is illegal.
It goes all the way to the Supreme Court.
In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that all state marijuana laws are illegal.
At the time that that ruling came down from Washington, D.C., there were 10 states that had medical marijuana laws.
How many have been repealed since then?
Zero.
And another five, most recently, what some people would call very red state Arizona, has also passed a medical marijuana law for the state.
The blueprint, in my view, is that when enough people just stop complying with Washington, D.C., and then on top of it, enough states pass laws to reject unconstitutional acts from Washington, D.C., there's not much that D.C. can do about it.
They'll make some noise and bang some heads here and there.
But the bottom line is if you really want to expand freedom, or if you just want to expand any personal political goal, you're best off working in a state or a local level.
You're never going to get anything done in Washington.
Well, you know, I never really tried this or anything, but at least it seems conceivable to me that a regular citizen could go to the state capitol, maybe organize not even too many people to go and say, we're mad as hell about this, that, or the other thing.
But going to D.C., I mean, forget about it.
Unless you are a lobbyist or you have the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to buy an effective lobbyist up there and give him enough capital to bribe all the congressmen with for you, then forget about it.
You're not even going to try.
Well, even if you could influence what happens in Washington, D.C., I think that kind of avoids the essential question.
When they don't do what we want to do, what's supposed to be the result?
I mean, should we continue to go to Washington?
Should we continue to rely on elections and nine unelected, unaccountable, politically connected lawyers in black dresses in Washington to fix the problems created by Washington?
So even if all of a sudden we had a few more million dollars of printed Fed notes in our hands and we could influence a senator or something for a couple of weeks, it doesn't fix the problem for the long term.
We need to have a sea change in how society deals with problems, and we need to keep it far more local.
You know, I was eating a bowl of granola this morning, and I look at the box, and I'm like, oh, this is awesome.
It's hemp granola.
Here it is.
We're in economic trouble all around the country, all around the world, for that matter.
Farmers are having a horrible time.
We've got this nice product with the good health benefits, hemp.
It's not like an addictive substance like marijuana, even.
I mean, we could talk about that separately.
And they make it illegal.
China is the greatest exporter of hemp in the world.
The U.S. is the greatest importer.
We wonder why we have problems.
Just something as simple as that, we can look and say, Washington, D.C., is causing this problem.
They're never going to solve it.
Well, now, that's the thing, too, though, man, is you've got such ideological divides and problems in this country.
I read a piece at Salon.com this morning about former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson giving a speech.
And at the end, apparently it was to the right-wing Tea Party types.
And at the end, someone asked him about pot, and he said, absolutely, we've got to legalize it.
And the whole crowd booed him.
And he said, no, look, you've got to understand the costs of locking these people up and the enforcement and all of our liberties.
And they just booed him damn near off the stage.
And these are the guys with the tri-corner hats on pretending they're all of a sudden concerned about individual rights.
Sure, sure.
And I speak at events with Gary.
In fact, Gary and I are speaking at an event in Phoenix next week.
And oftentimes they're the Tea Party groups, and they're a lot of the right-wingers.
I think Gary has the right idea.
I do believe he's not communicating the message to the right very well.
I spoke at the Gun Rights Policy Conference, the 10th or whatever, 20th annual, whatever it was, just this last fall.
I mean, this is no left-wing crowd, no anti-drug war crowd.
I spent the entire time talking about marijuana and how this is the example.
And if you put it in terms of let's just decentralize, they get it.
We don't want top-down solutions.
And I think that's what Gary was communicating there.
Well, and that ought to be something that liberals and conservatives can agree on or whatever people call themselves, depending, of course, on who's in power at the time and who's identifying with who.
But we'll get to more of that when we get back with Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center after this anti-war radio.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show, anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center.
That's tenthamendmentcenter.com if you want to learn more about that.
And so you talked about the different states legalizing medical pot.
But why don't you give me some more examples of, you know, it's easy to talk about, you know, the Kentucky Resolution of 1798 and all this, but that's just a curiosity.
Bring this to our current day, and you know me, my focus is on imperialism.
And so I'd like to see if maybe you've already seen states angry and doing something about the overuse and abuse of their guard units being nationalized and sent to fight in occupied countries overseas.
Sure, sure.
I mean, if you want to set it up and let me tee off, that's fantastic, Scott.
I mean, there's a lot going on.
I think the marijuana issue is the best example because we're actually seeing states, not just from the left or from the right, but across the political spectrum, standing up and saying no to Washington, D.C., saying no to laws in Congress and saying no to the Supreme Court.
It kind of lets us know how things play out when people actually resist Washington.
We've also seen something similar happen with the REAL ID Act, the national ID card that the Bush administration slammed down our throats.
Twenty-five states have resisted it, and a number of states are looking to apply these principles on gun laws and health care and constitutional tender and the like.
Now, the guard troops, this is a major, major issue.
I know you've interviewed Ben Manski of Bring the Guard Home previously, and the concept pretty much originates with these guys and some people up in the northeast in New Hampshire to say that the Constitution only authorizes the guard to be used in specific situations.
You can read it, Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 and 16, if anyone wants to look up what those are.
But one of those specific situations is not being overseas, occupying other countries.
Period.
So the idea under the tensor ideology is that if we believe in following the Constitution every issue, every time, no exceptions, no excuses, then it's the state's duty to pass a law or to do something to say that we're not going to allow our state's National Guard troops to be sent overseas.
A few years ago, when Bush was in office, we saw a few states considering these bills, most prominently in Wisconsin.
There was Assembly Bill 203, and Cindy Sheehan was pushing it up in Oregon, I believe.
But since then, it's kind of fallen by the wayside.
I don't know why we've reached out to so many organizations on the left to say, come on, let's work together on this.
And we don't seem to get a lot of people biting.
I think maybe they're afraid to oppose bad foreign policy because of the peace president in there.
I don't know.
I did get some rumblings that actually a Republican House member in Maine will be introducing our version of this type of legislation pretty soon.
So maybe there's one state that's going to say, no, we're not going to allow our Guard troops to continue to be used and abused in this way.
And maybe that will make a dent in some way in what goes on in Washington, D.C.
Well, and now on I mean, that to me is you talk about medical pot and especially bring the guard home movements like that.
These ought to, you know, be especially appealing to people on the left.
You know, maybe whatever the national government decides isn't the best thing.
Maybe it would be better to have more decentralization and decision making at lower levels.
And why should all 50 states be the same and have the same policy on every single thing?
Maybe in some places, 90 percent of people, 95, don't want pot to be legal.
You know, I still think that's violating pot smokers rights if they get their way.
But still, I mean, that's the way if that's the way it's going to be in Mississippi or something fine.
But why shouldn't the rest of the states be able to decide?
And why shouldn't the states be able to decide whether people's sons are going to have to submit to federal power and go fight in a war?
Again, people have a much better chance of influencing their state government than their national government.
They ought to be able to hire their state government to protect them from their national government if it comes down to it.
Like, for example, the Texas Rangers should have thrown the ATF and the FBI out or off of that property outside Waco back in 1993 and said, we'll handle this.
You guys have already blown it.
Get out.
Right, right.
I mean, you know, I mean, if we're realistic, and I think people on the left and the right are not realistic.
They think that somehow that all they have to do is use the force of Washington, D.C., and everyone's going to come to their ideological viewpoint in time.
The reality is, is we've got a huge range of political, religious, economic viewpoints in the United States of America.
And, you know, if you have a one-size-fits-all solution, you're going to end up with how Tom Woods describes it, what we have today.
You know, this low-grade civil war of one side versus the other every four years trying to control the entire enchilada.
Well, the only way that all these different viewpoints can live together in this huge land mass in peace is to allow people to have their own way in their own area and kind of test it out and see what works and what doesn't for various people.
And I guess if something becomes so oppressive, I mean, California's probably the most oppressive state in the country, and you and I live here.
So, I mean, we still have free choice to try to go somewhere else that might be, like, 10 percent better, but, you know, at least it leads it to the individual choice at that point.
Right.
Well, and that's what they always say, too, right?
It's like, well, you don't have to live here.
You can always move.
But, geez, what if we don't want to leave the U.S.A., but we do want to leave this state or the other one?
Sure.
Well, it's a lot harder to move to another country.
The reality is this is supposedly some kind of a country here that we have, so we should be able to, you know, make choices about how we're going to live.
You know, it's funny when you say, why don't you just leave?
We used to hear, and the Tenth Amendment Center was founded back in mid-2006, and when we were opposing a lot of the Bush policies, we'd hear a lot of people from the right send an email or call or whatever and say, why don't you just move to Cuba, you commie?
Because we didn't want the Patriot Act or something.
And now we get it from the other side.
You know, you oppose a national health care plan or you oppose the drones in Pakistan, and it's like, oh, you must be racist.
So, you know, I think the real problem is that so many people are just partisan hacks.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, and, you know, I don't know.
I do like, though, well, all of these things, because I'm a libertarian, so I'm against everything that the government's doing.
So whatever the right is against, whatever the left is against, I agree with them on that.
And so, you know, come on, we can find some common ground.
We'll have some states, enough states, make it a crime for the new health care law to be enforced in their state.
We'll have some others defy the national government on the drug laws and on the troops and maybe on whether our tax money can be used to bail out banks or whatever.
And let's have some of these fights.
Seems like it could be a lot of fun, you know?
Yeah, I'd rather have those fights in my neighborhood rather than in Washington, because, you know, it's like, who in South Carolina really wants California's policies?
And maybe there's a few, and vice versa.
The reality, like I was saying before, is we have so many viewpoints, and they are – we're hugely diverse in this country.
And the only way to achieve a uniform situation is through force, and force is a failure.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
It accomplishes some things for some people.
Well, yeah, you've got a valid point there.
It's especially convenient when you're the – you know, running the national government especially, you finance all the universities, so all the intellectuals are beholden to the state, which, you know, maybe that's just because the market really wouldn't provide for that many intellectuals to sit around reading and talking for a living.
But, you know, it's funny how official thought is also pro-state.
As someone in the chat room was remarking earlier, any of us could be said to have what the psychologists are now calling oppositional defiant disorder.
Nice.
Which is a nice way of explaining why you don't agree with Leviathan.
I'm happy with that.
You're crazy.
Like, we're really moving into Soviet times here.
Yeah, it's pretty sick.
I mean, but the reality is if people don't start, you know, just doing something differently than people in this country and probably most of the world have been doing for eons, you know, I mean, we know what path things are going on.
They're just getting worse and worse and worse, and it doesn't matter what political parties in power or what individual occupies the White House.
Government power always grows.
Foreign policy keeps getting worse.
Domestic policy keeps getting worse.
The economy keeps getting smashed, and it's not going to change.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so give me some hope now.
Tell me a little bit more about some of these issues.
What kind of successes have you all had on gun laws?
Well, you know, there's been eight states that have passed a Firearms Freedom Act, and that is a bill that says that if a gun is made in your state and it's sold in your state and it's kept in your state, then it's not under the purview of federal laws or regulations, including registration, under their excuse, the so-called Interstate Commerce Clause.
Well, the problem is is the people who have been pushing these primarily are just looking for a federal court fight.
And, you know, any society that leaves the fate of its liberty in the hands of nine unelected individuals on a court is in a lot of trouble.
But it's at least getting the issue out there that, you know what, we don't have to necessarily go to Washington.
People aren't necessarily paying attention to the court part of it.
They're recognizing that maybe they can activate their state to resist Washington, D.C., and expand freedom like the people have done for marijuana.
Right.
All right, cool.
Well, I think it's another great place where liberals and conservatives as well as libertarians can agree, and that is at least let's just decentralize.
It doesn't mean everybody's got to agree on what should be done about every issue, just where it should be decided.
It makes a lot of sense to me, and I really appreciate your work along these lines.
Michael Bolden, Tenth Amendment Center, thanks.
Thanks, Scott.
