Although last year’s midterm elections dealt Democrats a devastating blow at the federal level, what has liberals reeling now are the ramifications of power Republicans accumulated on the state level as well. Just consider their reaction to the union-adjusting policies of the newly elected governors in Ohio and Wisconsin (John Kasich and Scott Walker), and it’s evident that the outcome of November 2010 continues to be more than many Democrats can handle.

Yet the key battleground for a clash between the political status quo, which is always good for Democrats, and an active conservatism, which is always good for liberty, looks like it may take place hundreds of miles away from either Kasich or Walker, in a state that still symbolizes the strength and courage of the Wild West: namely, Montana.

Yes, it’s there that the battleaxe of Tea Party conservatism is crashing down with a boom on liberalism, progressivism, and every other “ism” that threatens to the limit the intrinsic (and inalienable) rights of the citizens in that state.

The Associated Press (AP) recently bemoaned the fact that Republicans emerged from the November 2010 elections with a  “supermajority in the Montana House.”  Which means they now control both chambers in that state. This also means that words like “nullification,” phrases like “states’ rights,” and theories like Thomas Jefferson’s description of the union of states as a “compact” are not only spoken in the legislative halls, they are shouted from the rooftops. (Jefferson’s view on the nature of the union, best set forth in his “Kentucky Resolutions,” is that states do not look to the federal government for the cause of their existence rather the federal government exists because the states chose to delegate certain powers to it.)

In Montana, they are trying to right the ship by restoring a constitutional balance of powers that constrains the federal government’s habit of infringing on the rights of the people.

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In the words of our President: “Let me be clear,” Missouri’s Prop C represents a victory for individual freedom, not “states’ rights.”

I am not sure why I have to keep repeating this, but there is NO SUCH THING AS STATES’ RIGHTS!  And people that use that term, or the term “nullification,” do not help our cause.

States have powers, and while those powers diminish in the face of the progressive-statist attack upon our Constitution, powers run contrary to individual rights.  So let me break it down:

1) Prop C places a duty on the state of Missouri to defend its citizens from the IRS enforced individual mandate.

2) Prop C denies the federal government state resources to enforce the individual mandate.

Anyone with an ounce of constitutional knowledge knows that neither of those aspects of Prop C conflict directly with the Supremacy Clause. (more…)