06/18/09 – Michael Boldin – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our first guest on the show today is Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
Scott, it's an honor to be here.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
So, for those who don't have the Bill of Rights memorized, which one's the Tenth?
The Tenth is the one that says that the federal government is restricted to only certain powers.
It can't just do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.
And those powers not given to the federal government are left either to the state government or to the people themselves.
And if you were to really follow the Constitution and those listed powers in the Constitution, the federal government wouldn't be doing much.
Uh-huh.
So, you know, did you see that article in the Wall Street Journal about, hey, maybe it's time the United States broke up like the Soviet Union?
I did.
I just actually read it this morning.
Well, you know, I was thinking when I was reading that, and I'm all for that.
But I was thinking if we just went by the Constitution, we'd be 90% of the way to private property anarchy, really.
No doubt about it.
From where we are now.
Well, Lysander Spooner made a really good point back in the 1800s sometime, and this is a great individualist.
And he said, you know, whether the Constitution authorized what we have today or it was powerless to prevent it, either way it's unfit to exist.
Well, I think that's correct if you're relying on a piece of paper to enforce itself.
But we have to recognize that if we, the people, don't educate ourselves on the proper role of government, and we, the people, don't actually do something about it, then we're always going to be in a situation of almost complete tyranny.
Well, you know, this is one of the things that got me interested in politics when I was a kid.
I guess ninth grade, they went to war in Iraq, but they didn't have to declare war.
And I remember thinking, well, what do you mean that they passed a law decades ago that said that we're part of the UN now, and that means that a UN resolution is good enough?
I mean, doesn't the Constitution, I mean, if it's the law, then it's the law.
And if you don't like it, there has a, you know, you're supposed to amend it.
I mean, you know, I think back, I wasn't taught this kind of stuff by hardcore libertarians as a kid or anything.
This is just my basic understanding of the Constitution, is it says what it says, and it is the law.
And if you don't like it, you get, what, two-thirds of the Congress, each house of Congress, and three-fourths of the states to agree to change it.
That's all.
Absolutely.
And what you're referring to is the War Powers Act that they passed in the 70s, which said, well, hey, you know, if you decide you want to go to war, you don't really, you know, the president can co-do this.
But just report back to us a little bit later and let us know what's going on, where the Constitution is completely different.
It says that the Congress has the power to declare war.
So the representatives, or the so-called representatives of the people are the ones that are going to determine whether or not the nation is going to go to war.
And the president only gets involved once the people, through their representatives, have decided it's okay.
And the founders really made a big deal out of it, because the founding generation lived under this unlimited government of King George, where the government could do whatever it wanted, could go to war whenever it wanted, could choose how it was going to be fought, however he wanted.
And they wanted to restrict that power and separate it between the people and the executive.
So at the Tenth Amendment Center, your official position is then that the Tenth Amendment forbids these kinds of wars.
Oh, no doubt about it.
And in fact, if we actually were following the Constitution, most of what has actually caused the wars, the imperial foreign policy, military all over the world, just crazy stuff that the founders would be just revolting against.
None of this stuff would even happen.
And we probably wouldn't even have to worry so much about national defense, because we wouldn't be meddling in the affairs of so many other countries.
James Madison really had a great statement on this, and I think it really kind of represents my position on the Tenth Amendment so well.
And I can only paraphrase it, but what he said was, war is the disease that affects everything else in society.
It's the parent of armies and debts and taxes, and these are the known instruments for bringing the many under the oppression of the few.
And no nation could ever preserve liberty in a state of perpetual war.
That was pretty close.
He was right.
That was a really good paraphrase.
Well, I think I probably read it a couple of dozen times.
I think the only part you missed was about the handing out of emoluments and favors by the executive, which means the military-industrial complex, the firms that get the contracts to do the government's business.
Right.
Well, I mean, if you really look at it, and I've brought that quote up to a number of people, and they'll say, well, these are different times now.
And my argument is, you're right, and that's all the more reason that we need to limit government and restrict its power to engage in war and imperial foreign policy, because what it does has greater damage in a short amount of time.
So we need to slow it down at every turn possible.
That's funny.
You know, back when I was a minarchist, I used to argue that the Constitution was a reactionary right-wing coup d'etat, created a giant government.
Hell, they put General Washington in charge of the thing, and there's been a war ever since.
But, you know, the government it describes is about right for our times.
If it was brand new, eh, you know, I could see a government being as big as what the creators of the Constitution envisioned, or maybe less Hamilton.
Well, I mean, if we actually followed the Constitution, I would prefer, actually, no federal government at all, because it hasn't done anything for me.
It takes money from me at the point of a gun.
It forces me to pay for murdering people all over the world, and it's been doing it my entire life.
So I would prefer not at all.
But you know what?
People all through the mainstream, they seem to think that the Constitution is what we should follow.
So we've got it here as a tool to be able to explain how things are supposed to be.
That's why I feel if presented in a proper way, it can be very powerful.
Well, you know, here's the thing, though.
You might remember from during the Ron Paul campaign, George Will's first statement on it, and I think later he kind of tried to walk this back a little bit.
His first opinion that he put out, and of course, George Will is the bow tie wearing definition of mainstream conservatism there from ABC News and Newsweek.
And he said, listen, Ron Paul represents the doctrine of enumerated powers.
And I'm sorry, but the consensus in America has been for more than 150 years, probably the entire history of the country, since Hamilton defeated Jefferson over the first Central Banking Act and the first Washington administration, that rather than the idea, as you seem to be putting forward here in 2009, that whatever the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow it forbids, that that's not the case, that instead, whatever the Constitution does not forbid, it allows.
So, OK, you have your Bill of Rights and your explicit restrictions against ex post facto laws and bills of attainder and that kind of thing.
But other than that, Congress is Congress and it's Congress's job to run the world.
It's the president's job to run the economy, to do all the things that by democratic process the American people have ceded to their power.
And that's exactly how it works today.
And you know how that's worked out?
We've got endless war.
We've got imperial foreign policy.
We've got bailouts where they take your money and give it to their corporate buddies.
They restrict your gun rights, your property rights, habeas corpus.
They torture.
They create free speech zones.
They've got this war on drugs where they arrest hundreds of thousands of people every year for the harmless activity of owning a plant.
And on top of it all, these same people, these crooks, these criminals, these thugs, these warmongers, these same people have the power to destroy the entire earth with the push of a button.
If that's not unlimited power to fear, I don't know what is.
So screw that consensus.
It's time to go back to before Washington and, you know, put his cabinet together and have them get to work is what you're saying.
That's really my goal is to basically put out this principle that whether, I mean, some people say, well, the Constitution is an old document.
But you know what?
There's a lot of old laws that are good, like laws against murder, laws against rape.
These have been around for centuries and centuries.
It's the beginning of time.
It's natural law.
So just because something is old doesn't mean it's bad.
So my goal is to present this old-fashioned principle that government should not be unlimited in its power.
Governments need to be strictly limited.
And the Constitution provides the groundwork.
Well, let's talk a little bit more about the structure of the war powers in the Constitution.
The President in Article II is described as he shall be the commander-in-chief when called into the actual service of the United States, which it doesn't say by the Congress, but that certainly seems to be the implication, if I can start implying things, in the Constitution.
Well, there are implied powers.
And you made a note just a minute or so ago about what Congress can do.
And a lot of people say that there are no implied powers, and that's actually close, but it's not correct.
The Constitution authorized to the federal government about 30 things in the Constitution, most of which are in Article I, Section 8.
And the last clause of Article I, Section 8 says that they can also do whatever is necessary and proper to carrying out the previous 17 and the other powers throughout the Constitution.
So there are implied powers.
But if we talk about war and peace and declaring war versus waging war, there is a total consensus in the historical record that's very easy to look up from virtually every founder, including even the centralizer Hamilton, who said that they were breaking up the powers between declaring war and waging war because they didn't want to have another King George.
So that one is pretty simple because that's what the people approved at the time.
Well, and of course, one of the major arguments by the anti-federalists who opposed the Constitution, who were actually, they were the pro-federalists, and it was the people who called themselves the federalists were the centralizers.
But anyway, corruptional language leading people off the path from the very beginning there.
But that was one of their big arguments was, hey, we don't want a standing army.
And this thing gives the power to this government to keep an army forever, basically.
And the idea of having a standing army was, well, I think Jefferson said, banks are the only thing more dangerous.
Right.
And they all warned against this kind of power.
The unfortunate thing is that all these principles that you and I are talking about here, they're completely ignored.
And that's just what we're trying to educate people about.
And that's what we see.
You know, you had a great interview with Ben Mansky just recently from Bring Home the Guard, right?
Yeah.
And he's really on to this same type of idea where, look, we've been banging our heads on the federal government for how long?
Trying to get them to do things.
Trying to get them to stop killing people around the world.
Trying to get them to stop torturing.
And what happened?
The anti-war president is now escalating war in Afghanistan.
He's not ending war in Iraq.
And troops are still going to be stationed all over the place.
So that type of activism really is just a complete failure.
So bringing it closer to home, which is what the founders really wanted for this country.
Bringing it closer to home and doing things like putting in bills or laws in your own state that are just going to refuse to participate.
Don't send the guard overseas.
Bring them back.
This is probably a much more effective thing.
And it has an actual tradition in American history, too.
Well, you know, one of the things that's just the most unfortunate is that really going back to the very beginning, the people who were for the most liberal program in the old sense of the word.
Who wanted, you know, the Jeffersonians.
The people who wanted, you know, who were against subsidies for people who were already rich.
And they were against central banking.
And they were against this permanent standing army and all that.
They were the libertarians compared to the federalists who were more like our modern day republicans.
However, they were the slave owners.
And they seceded from the union, at least in part, to protect their right to be slave owners.
And then you had 100 years after that, at least, of the worst oppression of blacks in the south that the federal government then used force to solve.
And the bigots used the banner of states' rights and the enumerated powers doctrine of the U.S. Constitution to defend their bigotry to the end.
And so now, anybody who's not, you know, by definition the most politically correct progressive, who somehow raises, you know, these kinds of topics about federalism and reserved states' powers and all these kinds of things, is somehow tinged with all this legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
You know, that's what the governor said when he was blocking the doorway to the school.
It was none of the federal government's business.
Well, and that's really part of the sad part of it all.
You know, the founders of this country, they were far from perfect.
And oftentimes they were totally inconsistent and completely unjust, especially with things like slavery.
I mean, it's absolutely disgusting.
But the basic principle behind what they put together, which is government should be limited, not unlimited, that's totally found.
And I can't imagine anybody wanting someone to have unlimited power.
Let's put it this way.
I guess we could play a little game with it.
Let's say, Scott Horton, you are an all-powerful god for the day.
And you pick out ten people and say to them, for the rest of your lives, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want, and no matter what, you'll continue to exist.
I mean, I believe in the goodness of human nature at its core.
But with such powerful temptations, we would end up with some really nasty stuff.
So the principle behind limiting government is the same thing.
If we allow government to do whatever we want, whatever it wants, then we're going to end up with tyranny, war, empire, and violations of liberty at every turn.
Well, and you know, it's interesting, too, when we look at the various secession movements around the country and that kind of thing, it's not just limited to, you know, the South will rise again, boy, type sentiment.
I mean, you have the Vermont secessionist movement.
They're very progressive, too.
Yeah, I mean, it is a very kind of green, you know, old hippie sort of movement, it seems like.
I've been talking to a lot of people, actually, surprisingly enough, in the mainstream media about these Tenth Amendment resolutions that have been introduced in 36 states around the country and have passed in a number of them, a small handful.
And they always ask me, you know, what's this whole right-wing thing all about?
And my position is really far different.
The idea of actually taking activism on a state or a local level isn't really exclusive to the right.
And in fact, in practice, we can actually see how the left has been far more effective.
Here in California, as you know now, you know, this is the medical marijuana state.
That is not a traditional right-wing thing at all.
And this is, you know, this in practice is how the Tenth Amendment is supposed to work.
You know, this is not something that's authorized to the federal government or the Constitution, so the state makes the determination or the people themselves.
So whether it's medical marijuana in California or gay marriage in Maine or gun rights in Montana, all these people from all across the spectrum, whether they agree with each other on a specific issue, can support each other on the base principle that the most important issues should be handled close to home.
Well, it seems like, who knows, maybe a lot of this has been killed by the election of Barack Obama, but it seems like a lot of liberals were starting to see the wisdom of federalism in practice, not just the medical marijuana issue, but other issues, especially concerning, you know, Ashcroft and Gonzales' Justice Department and their bogus terrorism prosecutions and the rest of it.
I think the idea that people in the blue states, you know, might think that they could probably trust their local attorney generals and prosecutors' power over their lives rather than U.S. attorneys and federal prosecutors, at least during Republican times, is pretty hard to ignore that, you know?
But, I don't know, I guess we'll see.
I don't trust the attorney general here in California either.
But you know what?
If they get crazy and they start restricting everyone's rights and it's not the same policy around the country, you can at least get away from it.
Think of it this way.
Let's say Stalin only ruled over Moscow, and Mao was limited to Beijing, and George Bush, let's give him Texas, and Obama only has...
Give George Bush Connecticut.
Okay, let's give him Connecticut, and we'll give Obama Illinois.
But if that was the way things were, the size and scope and geographic area of their power is extremely limited, the world would be a different place today.
And that's really the goal, is to limit the power of these people, because as the Lord acted, quote, you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
As long as they have power and they can draw an entire massive nation and all its wealth to do their evil deeds, they're going to do it.
I always think of this whenever they talk about spreading freedom to the Middle East and to whoever, and these poor people live under a dictatorship, and so we ought to guarantee to them a Republican form of government.
It seems like the media pundits, they don't know the Constitution at all.
So when they talk that way, they don't realize they're actually paraphrasing a power that is specifically granted to the national government in the Constitution, which is that they have the power to prevent any of the states from abandoning legislative, judicial, three branches and separated powers and little-r Republican form of government.
And if they did understand that that power is in the Constitution in reference to the states, then that might lay a little bit more bare in front of their eyes, that that power is limited to these shores.
Our national government has not granted the authority in the Constitution to guarantee American loyal or whatever, you know, capital R Republican form of government to other countries around the world.
That's just here.
And the sad part of it all, even if they were given that power, they're not good at anything that they do.
I mean, Harry Brown used to say it great.
He said, you know, government's only good at one thing.
They break your leg and then they come in and they give you a solution.
Oh, now we're going to fix it.
So we're the good guys.
Give us your money.
And that's really what we see.
I mean, you talk about, you know, keeping the peace or dealing with foreign policy.
Well, I always use the drug war as a great example and crime.
If you look at Washington, D.C. itself, here's the federal area.
I can't even consider letting these people deal with crime here in California or the drug war here in California unless they could clean up that small, tiny area in Washington, D.C.
They're a complete failure at what they do.
So to trust them with anything is almost absurd in my mind, especially things like health care.
Here we've got a bunch of warmongers that have been running around the world.
How many people has American foreign policy killed in the last few decades?
Millions.
Why would I want to trust these killers with the life and death decisions of my 90-year-old grandmother?
I can't even imagine that.
I think there's a cognitive dissonance in this country where people are not recognizing the crimes of their own government, and it's really just sad, maybe disgusting.
Yeah, well, and it's funny because they even all hate politicians mostly.
I guess they'll pick one or another as a hero every once in a while, but for the most part they hate politicians, yet they still want everything for free.
And, you know, here's the thing, too.
When it comes to the decisions about your grandmother, I mean, is it hard to conclude?
I mean, it's so obvious.
It's already been reported this happening all over the place as it is and all over the world, too, where the bureaucrats decide why would we put all these resources into keeping this 90-year-old lady alive for one more year when we could put those same resources into helping this 24-year-old or whatever, and they go ahead and let the old person die because that's the way government makes these decisions.
That's what they do.
They ration out their services.
So rather than your grandma saying, well, actually I got some money left over from grandpa and I want to live as long as I can and it's up to me, now it's up to them and she ain't going to live as long.
I mean, and it ain't hard to figure that out.
Come on, man.
It's not, and it's even worse than that.
It's not that they're taking the money and giving it to some 24-year-old.
They're actually taking the money and killing some 24-year-old and their grandmother overseas, and that is even worse.
Taking money from one person and letting them die or whatever, taking money from one person and giving it to another person is theft on its face.
But letting someone die to save another person or letting someone die to kill another person, I can't think of what is more morally depraved than such activity.
All right.
Well, you brought up these resolutions that have been brought up.
In how many states did you say the Tenth Amendment resolutions?
Thirty-six.
Thirty-six states, and they've been passed by how many?
Six so far.
Six so far.
Both houses.
All right.
Now, how serious are these things?
Because if my understanding of these resolutions is these states are saying, hey, federal government, Tenth Amendment, do what it says and leave us alone and whatever like that, and yet we all know that since at least the Civil War, if not since the 30s, the states are basically big counties and they are at this point subsidiaries of the federal government.
All the money comes from the people, goes to D.C., and then D.C. rations it out, highway money and whatever other subsidies.
And as we all know, most people in most congressional districts in this country consider their congressman's job to bring home federal money to their district so that somehow they can hope that out of this zero-sum game, they're going to end up making more than they, you know, stealing more from other districts than they get taxed.
And that's the whole name of the game now.
So, I mean, are we really seeing a strong enough movement here that we could have states say, no, we refuse like Louisiana did with the highway funds for so many years over the drinking age and seat belt laws and stuff.
But, I mean, can we see states really refusing federal money across the board and trying to reassert, you know, any level of sovereignty?
Well, I sure hope so.
And I've talked with probably a large majority of the legislators around the country that are involved in these issues.
And while some of them are clearly involved in just some political posturing, oh, now there's a Democrat in office, let me stand up and say something.
Yeah, exactly.
There are many out there that actually believe that they need to start refusing funds.
One guy is Paul Opsomer up in Michigan.
In fact, he's working on a bill that basically they want to refuse.
You talk about the highway funds.
He's calling for just completely getting rid of the highway trust.
And there are some people out there just like you and I who have regular jobs that do normal stuff and they happen to be legislators or part-time guys in local government, and they're sick of this.
So will something really happen?
I don't know.
I know there's a lot of grassroots support.
There's a lot of people, just everyday people that are sick and tired of an unconstitutional government.
So they're pounding on their state reps.
I mean, state reps are getting so many phone calls and e-mails about this stuff that they almost cannot ignore it.
So that's what it's really going to take.
I don't think there's anything easy that's coming up.
But it's not just these Tenth Amendment resolutions where all these states are considering whether or not to tell the federal government, look, if it's not authorized in the Constitution, stop it.
There's also individual bills that are coming up, whether it's medical marijuana bills coming all over the country or gun laws that, like in Montana and Tennessee, there's these Firearms Freedoms Acts that tell the federal government, look, you can't regulate guns that are made in our state and aren't leaving our state under the Commerce Clause, so you've got to keep out.
And then you've got Ben Manski's Bring Home the Guard, and here's state-level laws talking about calling back the guard for more.
So whether it's left, right, or center, you see people calling on their state governments not just to say no but to completely resist actions of the federal government on many levels.
Well, and it seems like, I don't know, I've always sort of believed it ought to be the case, at least, that if your argument, which is a very libertarian argument, is also Thomas Jefferson, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, red, white, and blue argument, then hell, you ought to be able to win, because first of all, you're right, and second of all, you're basically just asking that we follow our own creed.
You're not proposing some kind of drastic change that we live like people in the old world somehow or whatever.
This is pure Americanism you're preaching here, it sounds like.
It really is.
It's good, exciting stuff that normal people get really into.
And like I said, I've been doing a number of interviews, and I recently was down at the Fox News studio here in West L.A., and they were asking me, I think they were expecting a lot of right-wing talk.
What's this Tenth Amendment thing coming up?
What are all these resolutions?
And I'm talking to them about, well, you know, the foes of the Constitution are many.
They're all for creating free speech zone.
They like torture.
They like wars that the president can choose.
And of course they didn't air it, because that's not the type of thing that the mainstream media likes to talk about.
So will this message actually get out there in the broad mainstream?
Ron Paul does a pretty good job, as much as he can.
Peter Schiff does a good job, as much as he can.
And then, of course, online places like Lou Rockwell and Mises and things like that.
But is it accepted by the broad media?
Probably not.
Well, they're starting to understand more and more.
I mean, it ain't that difficult.
Yeah, it's really pretty simple stuff.
Federal government, you can do these things, and when you start doing things that are outside your scope of power, you really get out of control and we end up with tyranny.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing, too.
And this is what Ron Paul often talks about.
In fact, I saw on C-SPAN where he was talking to some kids at a high school.
And he was saying, the Constitution ain't perfect.
You know, I'm not in love with the thing.
I'm just saying it's the law.
And if you want to change it, you've got to change it.
But the principle that the law is the law here, and that's where we start from, is all important.
Because once we abandon that, you see what happens.
It's not just that, oh, well, you know, we didn't amend the Constitution so that we can all have, I don't know, Medicaid, which everybody thinks is wonderful and we ought to have more of or whatever.
But it also is the abandonment of the principle of law altogether so that we end up with a torture regime, with aggressive war, with, you know, cops, local police driving around in Pentagon equipment that was given to them.
We've changed our entire society by abandoning the process of following the law.
If you really want Medicaid, amend the Constitution to allow Medicaid or whatever it is.
I know that's a state program.
You know what I mean.
Well, what you're talking about is right, Bill.
Back when they put in the alcohol prohibition, they had to amend the Constitution.
Now they just prohibit whatever they want, whether it's marijuana or now some people are talking about tobacco, you know, just totally prohibited.
But there's another thing to point out.
I'm not like one of these guys that's like a law and order right-wing Republican like that sheriff, what's his name, Arpaio in Arizona, where everybody just follows the law because it is the law.
Because there's a lot of laws that are unjust.
And I think on a popular level, whether for the people, it's important that they resist peacefully, nonviolently, laws that are unjust and evil.
But government, when you allow it to bend the rules, ostensibly even for good reasons, for a long period of time, eventually you'll have a government that feels that the laws, the rules don't apply at all.
And if we're not there already, I think we're pretty darn close.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the real point too, right?
As it is now, the law applies to us like crazy, but it doesn't apply to them.
That's what it means to abandon the rule of law.
It doesn't mean we're all free.
It means they're free to do whatever they want with us.
And that's the point of unlimited government.
When government can do what it wants and we simply have to obey or else, we've got a lot of problems.
All right, everybody.
That's Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center.
That's tenthamendmentscenter.com.
Spell out Tenth there.
It's not the number.
Or does it forward if you put in Tenth?
No, it doesn't.
You need to take care of that.
I know.
Tenthamendmentscenter.com.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Take care.