In the shadow of the abyss that has presently opened before us, there are premonitions of death, a cold wind that carries the stench of putrefaction into the nostrils of fearful Americans; it is a distant whisper that all is lost.  Is this the death knell of the Great Republic?  Is this the end of the Last Best Hope?

There is much talk now, on the political right and among leaders, and commentators who should know better—talk of Nullification—of attorneys general ignoring the law, as did the South during the Civil Rights Movement, as did the Confederacy in 1861.

No thought of Nullification may properly reside in a patriotic American.  Nullification is lawlessness because Ordered Liberty is anchored in our commitment to the Rule of Law.  The idea of refusing to obey the laws is contrary to the character of a Conservative.  Any talk of actions outside the mechanisms of the Constitution and the Laws of the United States—carries with it the same stench of putrifaction that is wafting from the diseased halls of our corrupt Congress. 

Any such talk of Nullification or Insurrection or Secession is a betrayal of the Rule of the Law.  Such actions would make us no better than Leftists who are the enemies of lawful government.  One form of lawlessness cannot displace, cancel or redeem another form of lawlessness.  The path to saving our country from the insidious grip of socialist contempt for law is obedience to the law; it is to pledge ourselves obedient servants of a Constitutional Republic.

So what am I advocating?

I am advocating Voting. Petitioning.  Arguing.  Marching.  I am advocating that we, unlike the lawless men and women of this Congress, that we stand four-square on the unshakable conviction that Barack Obama like Jefferson Davis, that Nancy Pelosi like Justice Roger Taney, that Harry Reid like Alexander Stephens, speak as perverters of the laws, and that they, therefore, are doomed to the ash heap of history in the long moral struggle to secure liberty under the protection of written Constitutional law accessible to all literate Americans.

I am advocating electing representatives dedicated to interpreting the Constitution according to the clear meaning of words.

I am advocating the lawful and systematic dismantling of the calculus of illegal and immoral laws that threaten to reduce a nation of free men into a nation of dependent and servile Dred Scotts.

I am advocating that Republicans, just as they did after the usurpation of law by the Taney Court, not ignore the laws, but scrupulously obey the laws as they are currently interpreted, but to change the laws as they are understood, by challenging, overturning and reasserting the limits of government through proper legal channels. 

I am advocating a Political and Cultural Reformation that will not yield to this grotesque and cynical re-writing of the Constitution by scofflaws and dissimulators.  The Dred Scott Decision was not overturned by Nullification.  The usurpation of the Constitution was not ended by the Civil War, rather title to the Constitution was returned to its rightful sovereign, The People, and cured by Reconstruction in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. 

That is what I am advocating. 

I am saying be wary.  Do not imagine that two wrongs make a right. We need to shape by a clear vision of purpose and legal action, those 38 states whose attorneys general are flirting with Nullification and direct them to set into motion the process of amending the Constitution such that the General Welfare Clause shall not be construed so sweepingly that it becomes the exception that consumes the rule that limits the enumerated powers of government.  This crisis cannot be improved or edified by 10th Amendment arguments or assertions of State's Rights; it is rather an Article I Section 8 controversy—an issue flowing from the limited powers enumerated to Congress by the Constitution.  It is Not an issue of powers reserved to the states. 

We need the Republican Party or Tea Party or an alliance of both to become an unstoppable reforming opposition to the designs of these neo-national socialists that have precipitated a constitutional crisis, if not a coup.  We need to dedicate ourselves to first containing and eventually overthrowing this modern Slavocracy just as we did 150 years ago—legally, through the mechanisms of the law-not by Nullification.  We can do it, just as we did in that great crisis long ago, by transforming out national government from one controlled by the lawlessness of the Democratic Party, to one controlled by those who respect the rule of law under the clear limiting authority of a Constitution that has meaning.  

Most of us in America are Conservatives—notwithstanding all the assertion by the Left to the contrary.  We are Conservative because we believe in WE THE PEOPLE, in the CONSTITUTION and the RULE OF LAW.  We are Conservatives because we deplore lawlessness, and antinomianism.  We are Conservatives because we are not like them.  We do not think that our wills may properly trample the mind of the law or the restraints of the instruments of liberty.  We must change the law-- and we change the laws by taking the government back by election and placing these abuses of power in the tethers of legal constraint, by constitutional mechanisms of legislation and the amendment process. 

I advocate that we pledge allegiance to “One Nation, under God, INDIVISIBLE, with LIBERTY and JUSTICE for all.” 

Nullification abandons part of the WHOLE people to the servitude of sectional socialism. It wrongly imagines that we have no duty to the WHOLE. This is OUR country.  All of it.  And I'll be damned before I skulk away under the fig leaf of Nullification--as if it offered redemption from the grasping hand of tyranny.  Abrogation does no such thing.  We, by our proxies long ago, pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to a Union under law.  I am a Republican.  I am not a Confederate, a nihilist, an anarchist or a coward.  I will march on Washington before I allow a Slavocracy to pervert our Constitution--but first, FIRST we have recourse in the LAW.  We have remedies in the political process.  This is a contest between the champions of the Rule of Law against the Principalities and Powers of Lawlessness.  It is not a war of lawlessness against lawlessness.  As Lincoln said, "Let us have faith that Right make Might-- and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

The present contest is not about health care, it is not about the rules of Congress or anything so pedestrian as a balanced budget or a national debt; is about the CONSTITUTION and whether the title of that instrument of liberty is held by the Courts and Congress or by We the People.  This is a nation, of, for and by the people.  This is not the first time that powerful men and women have conspired to defeat the laws and ignored by lies and subterfuge the clear meaning of words in the legal instruments of our Republic.  Every generation must secure liberty anew and if we are true to our heritage, if we love liberty and maintain against all lawless instincts a profound respect for the supremacy of law, America can and shall have a New Birth of Freedom.  The winds that sweep from Washington will cease to carry the diseased stench of lawlessness, but rather carry forth again, the sweet sounds of liberty—a liberty consecrated and maintained under the security and protection of a Constitution whose meaning is anchored in a common understanding of words as they are written, and honored by reverent respect affirmed by the mutual assent of We the People.