Because of this inability to use critical thought to differentiate between those who legitimately hold power, and those who merely occupy positions of influence, such as a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck or a Dick Cheney or a Sarah Palin; many people are under the misapprehension that people like Limbaugh, Beck, Cheney, and Palin have far more legitimate power than any single elected Representative, Senator, or even the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele. Because of this, while they lack both the authority and responsibility of any office or position of public trust; Limbaugh and the rest of these right wing demagogues have a greater say in the policies of the Republican Party, and influence far larger numbers of Republicans, than any elected official or functionary.
What is wrong with this, you might ask? It is quite simple: it is morally wrong for anyone to have so much power if they lack the concomitant authority and responsibility that must go with any form of legitimate power. This usurpation of power by Limbaugh, Beck, Cheney, and Palin, and the rest of the cadre of right wing demagogues' is amply demonstrated by their completely self-serving use of the Tea Party movement. Finally, these right wing demagogues' complete unwillingness to speak out against the excesses of the more violently radical members of the Tea Party who, in word and deed, threaten public officials, prove their irresponsibility beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Because of these demagogues' failure to act in a responsible manner to control the Tea Party's excesses, whatever power they might believe they hold is illegitimate, because--in my opinion--you simply cannot have the authority to legitimately use power unless you do so responsibly.
How do we bring this madness under some degree of control, before it boils over into wide spread violence, or even civil war?
First, we must make everyone understand that our Union, under the Constitution, and the bonds that join the states together, cannot be undone by a single state, or even a group of states. It would (I believe) require the states to call a Constitutional Convention, with the express intention of dissolving the Union, the passage of a declaration of dissolution of the Union by the Convention, and then that declaration of dissolution would have to be approved by three-fourths of the state legislatures before it would take effect. No single state, or group of states, can secede from the Union by its own volition. That matter was settled in the period 1861-1865, and it required the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans to settle that point.
The only people who are keeping the question of a broad interpretation of "state's rights" alive today, are the wannabe oligarchs of the modern neo-Confederacy, no matter the state in which they reside. This group of proto-fascist idiots seems not to have learned in school that Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in 1865, not vice versa. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history, attempting to maintain the peculiar institution of slavery--under the guise of "states rights"--in an industrial world. These neo-Confederates ignore the reality of history, because it clashes with their sense of the world as they believe it should be, not as it is.
That reality quite simply is this: that in a general sense the whole concept of states rights under the Tenth Amendment was superseded when the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution was adopted in 1868, enshrining the results of the Civil War in the Constitution. Only in those specific cases where Congress or the Supreme Court has clearly stated otherwise, do the States retain any rights.
On the other hand, individual American citizens (in theory) gained additional rights under the self-same Fourteenth Amendment, when the Bill of Rights was at long last--de jure--applied to the States. It would be almost a century before it was applied de facto.
As I have written elsewhere, President Andrew Jackson wrote of the limitations of state's rights nearly three decades before the Civil War. In 1833, when South Carolina passed its Ordinance of Nullification over new tariffs; President Jackson wrote, "The Constitution of the United States, then, forms a government; not a league; and whether it be formed by compact between the states or in any other manner, its character is the same. It is a government in which all of the people are represented, which operates directly on the people individually, not upon the states; they retained all the power they did not grant. But each state, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute, jointly with the other states, a single nation, cannot, from that period, possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league but destroys the unity of a nation; and any injury to that unity is not only a breach which would result from the contravention of a compact but it is an offense against the whole Union." (See my article, "Teacher's Pet," September 10, 2009, OpEdNews.com, for more on President Jackson and the Ordinance of Nullification.)
President Jackson's reasoning is why I believe that a Constitutional Convention--specifically convened to dissolve the Union, followed by the consent of three-fourths of the state legislatures--is the only means by which the bonds of the States to each other and the Federal Government might be sundered.
As both Sara Robinson in her April 5th article "None Dare Call It Sedition," (http://www.ourfuture.org/trackback/45451), and Meg White in her April 8th article on Buzzflash.com "Confederate Resurgence Shows That, in America, History is (Re)Written by the Losers," the seditious drivel arising from the Right Wing secessionists has been growing ever since Barack Obama became President. And now you have an ever growing group of state governors who are skirting the edge of violating their oaths under Article VI of the Constitution.
I know that I am on the correct side of this argument, by the simple fact that Pat Buchanan is on the other side. In the extremely right wing magazine, Human Events, Mr. Buchanan goes out of his way to give an extremely slanted view of history, and what is happening today.
Mr. Buchanan correctly states that Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had not yet seceded when Lincoln took office. What he neglects to mention is that all four of those states either had state-wide conventions of secession or their state legislatures meeting to decide on secession, when the attack on Fort Sumter occurred.
Mr. Buchanan is also correct; those four states did secede when President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. What he neglects to mention is that that three of those states (Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee) had substantial regions that clung to the Union cause. One of those regions became the state of West Virginia. Another (Tennessee) had a Senator, Andrew Johnson, who adhered to the Union cause until the very end.
Mr. Buchanan mentions Major General William Tecumseh Sherman as the "great terrorist" of the war; ignoring Confederate Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest, and John Hunt Morgan. General Forrest was exceptionally brutal, killing more than one hundred Union soldiers--most of them African-Americans--at Fort Pillow after they had surrendered. I have never heard of General Sherman being accused of murdering helpless prisoners.
I am beginning to think that President Jackson was wrong: he should not have written a letter; he should have ordered out the United States Army, nationalized the militias of the several states, headed south, and extirpated the rebellion root and branch in its cradle, South Carolina, beginning with his former Vice President, John C. Calhoun, in 1833.
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