Prattville Dragoons SCV Camp 1524 Commander's Column for July 2022 - State's Rights Affirmed

 Jefferson Davis said, “It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are Sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again, when a better comprehension of the theory of our Government, and the inalienable rights of the people of the States, will prevent anyone from denying that each State is a Sovereign, and thus may reclaim the grants which it has made to any agent whomsoever.”  The recent US Supreme Court rulings seem to have refocused and reasserted this originalist Constitutional doctrine of states’ rights.  The court’s overturning Roe v. Wade and sending the regulation of the appalling practice of abortion back to the states’ governments was the biggest news of the recently completed US Supreme Court session.  But another huge decision issued was that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could not enforce federal carbon reduction dictates and that again, it was the states which should decide the regulations of such.  “The Supreme Court ruling in the Environmental Protection Agency case on Thursday was a significant victory for libertarian-minded conservatives who have been working for decades to curtail or dismantle modern-style government regulation of the economy.  Known as the administrative state, this system consists of a series of specialized agencies Congress has set up in the executive branch to regulate the economy across a broad range of issues, like keeping the air and water pure and ensuring that food, drugs, vehicles and consumer products are safe.” (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/30/us/supreme-court-epa)   The nanny state which governs and regulates thru “agencies Congress established (as) part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program during the Great Depression.”  This ruling has great implications for curbing massive federal overreach initiatives like the progressives’ Green New Deal.  The US Department of Education should certainly be on the chopping block as well which has only served to remove God from classroom by outlawing prayers in schools and even at extracurricular functions and has served the government as an indoctrination tool as forewarned by Gen Patrick Cleburne who said, “(The War) is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.  Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy, that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; learn from Northern school books THEIR version of the war and taught to regard our gallant dead as traitors and our maimed veterans as fit subjects of derision."  And today it means that public schools are empowered to teach only an amoral atheistic curriculum which has resulted in generations accepting of socialistic equity theories, racist revisionist history like Project 1619, and anti-family anti-Biblical and scientifically unsupportable LGBQT and non-binary sexual perversions. 

These recent US Supreme Court rulings reinforce precedent from other cases and more importantly reassert the Constitution’s 10^th Amendment which says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  In a 1992 ruling, then Justice Sandra Day O’Connor ruled a federal law “would ‘commandeer’ state governments into the service of federal regulatory purposes and would for this reason be inconsistent with the Constitution’s division of authority between federal and state governments.”  Current Justice Alito wrote in a 2018 opinion, “The anti-commandeering doctrine may sound arcane, but it is simply the expression of a fundamental structural decision incorporated into the Constitution, i.e., the decision to withhold from Congress the power to issue orders directly to the States.  Conspicuously absent from the list of powers given to Congress is the power to issue direct orders to the governments of the States. The anti-commandeering doctrine simply represents the recognition of this limit on congressional authority.”  (https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-the-supreme-court-reinforces-the-10th-amendment)  These Supreme Court rulings while perceived as a conservative judicial overstep are sound in precedent and reflect the founders’ and originalist intent to preserve the power of government at the state and local levels. These are the core ideals for which our ancestors fought for Southern Independence.   As Jefferson Davis said in reflecting over the “Lost Cause”, “The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.”