The Deep Roots of the Teaparty member

A good friend asked me about Sarah Palin and although this article does not talk about her, I believe Pat sums up the feeling that many Americans have when it comes to the government. Sarah, at this point in time, is the one person who is expressing what most Americans are thinking. You may not like HER, and maybe she will not be the candidate that pulls most Americans together, but it is her MESSAGE that resonates strongly with many of us diseffected Americans.


THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - February 16, 2010

Secession in the Air
by Pat Buchanan

No, it is not 1860 again.

But with all the talk of the 10th Amendment, nullification
and interposition, states rights and secession -- following
Gov. Rick Perry's misstatement that Texas, on entering the
Union in 1845, reserved in its constitution a right to
secede -- one might think so.

Chalk up another one for those Tea Party activists who
exploded in cheers when Sister Sarah brought up the dread
word in endorsing Rick Perry in the primary.

Looking back in American history, however, these ideas,
these sentiments, decried as insane inside the Beltway,
were once as American as "The Midnight Ride of Paul
Revere."

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good
thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms
in the physical," wrote Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
from Paris in January 1787, about Revolutionary War Capt.
Daniel Shay's anti-tax rebellion in Massachusetts.


In the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, both of these
founding fathers sanctioned the idea that states could
interpose their own sovereignty and nullify acts of
Congress. Both were enraged by the Alien and Sedition
Acts of John Adams and the Federalists, written into law
to combat sedition during the undeclared naval war with
France.

On taking office, President Jefferson declared the acts
unconstitutional, refused to prosecute those charged and
freed the imprisoned writers.

In 1814, Timothy Pickering, another veteran of the
revolution and secretary of state to both George Washington
and Adams, was a force behind the Hartford Convention,
which argued for New England's secession and reuniting with
Great Britain. Massachusetts opposed Madison's War of 1812
that had caused the British blockade that destroyed their
trade and prosperity.

The war's end and Jackson's victory at New Orleans,
however, aborted the Hartford movement and finished
off the Federalists forever.

In 1832, it was Vice President John Calhoun who inspired
South Carolina to vote to nullify the Tariff of Abomination
that was killing the cotton-exporting South and enriching
Northern manufacturers. To the chagrin of Madison, Calhoun
invoked his and Jefferson's Virginia and Kentucky
resolutions in defense of Carolinian defiance.


In 1845, it was Massachusetts again. Ex-President John
Quincy Adams declared that admission of Texas to the Union
as a slave state might constitute grounds for secession
and civil war.

With Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 and Republicans,
the Northern party, assuming power, South Carolina,
Georgia and the Gulf states seceded.

But not until after Fort Sumter, when Lincoln called for
volunteers to march south and crush the rebellion, did
Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas secede,
rather than remain passive or participate in a war on
their kinfolk.

Unlike the issues of yesteryear that tore the Union
asunder, Tea Party issues are not sectional but national.
Yet, they are rooted in a similar set of beliefs -- that
the federal government no longer serves their interests,
but the interests of economic and political forces that
sustain the party in power.

In 1860, the South saw power passing indefinitely to a new
regime, a Republican Party that represented high-tariff
industrialists and New England radicals and abolitionists
who despised the agrarian South and celebrated the raid on
Harper's Ferry by the terrorist John Brown, who had sought
to incite a slave uprising, such as had occurred in Santo
Domingo.

What called the Tea Party into existence?


Some are angry over unchecked immigration and the failure
to control our borders and send the illegals back. Some
are angry over the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some are
angry over winless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some
are angry over ethnic preferences they see as favoring
minorities over them.

What they agree upon, however, is that they have been
treading water for a decade, working harder and harder
with little or no improvement in their family standard
of living. They see the government as taking more of
their income in taxes, seeking more control over their
institutions, creating entitlements for others not them,
plunging the nation into unpayable debt, and inviting
inflation or a default that can wipe out what they have
saved.

And there is nothing they can do about it, for they are
politically powerless. By their gatherings, numbers,
mockery of elites and militancy, however, they get a
sense of the power that they do not have.

Their repeated reappearance on the national stage, in new
incarnations, should be a fire bell in the night to the
establishment of both parties. For it testifies to their
belief and that of millions more that the state they
detest is at war with the country they love.

The secession taking place in America is a secession of the
heart -- of people who have come to believe the government
is them, and not us.

Obama's problem, like the Bushes' in 1992 and 2008, is that
one thing these folks are really good at is throwing people
out of power.

END OF Conservative Review

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