Constitution-Enforcement Laws

The Constitution requires state-government people to protect residents from national-government people’s tyranny. It’s high time that state-government people step up.

Total USA national, state, and local government spending consumes 38% of GDP. Regulations consume another 7% of GDP.

The USA national debt exceeds 123% of GDP. Total USA national-government promises exceed 753% of GDP.

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. The faster, the better.

Limiting Themselves

The current congressmen and president should enact a limited overall appropriation—a continuing resolution consisting of just a single total amount—to cover up to the start of the next congress.

As vice president and therefore president of his upcoming senates, J.D. Vance’s oath will make it his power and duty to interpret the filibuster cloture rule as unconstitutional and to enforce simple-majority voting. The incoming congressmen and president should pass a new limited overall appropriation consisting of just a single total amount that’s declining, to cover the first calendar year.

As president, Donald Trump’s oath will make it his power and duty to close every department, agency, chartered organization, subdivision, and scope area that he independently interprets is unconstitutional.

State and local officials should provide their jurisdictions with a republican form of government—the only indisputable example of which is the national government under the Constitution. These officials, under their oaths to support the Constitution, likewise have in their own jurisdictions the power and duty to enforce simple-majority voting, pass limited overall appropriations consisting of just a single total amount that’s declining, and close every unconstitutional operation.

Human nature and all experience have shown, though, that enough of these people won’t limit themselves fully. This is incentivized by quid pro quo arrangements by politicians to help each other to our stuff, arrangements sanitized by pretending they demonstrate admirable party loyalty.

Limiting Others

Fortunately, it’s central to the Constitution’s design to instead depend on people to limit others. Such a use of constitutional power has lately been called constitutional hardball.

To the founding generation, though—to people who declared independence and fought a war to protect our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and secure property—such a civil rather than military use of constitutional power would have clearly been constitutional softball.

Constitutional softball is of first importance. As I point out in The Constitution Needs a Good Party, from 1774 to 1860 the fraction of total personal income in all thirteen colonies or states that was earned in the slavery-is-legal region declined from a controlling 57% to a superminority-weak 31%. The Fifth Amendment’s rule that protects all persons’ liberty (the so-called the Due Process Clause) should have been civilly enforced by the small-government Democrats, as constitutional softball.

Instead, secession was not responded to by simply letting slavery ebb away across an unenforceable porous border and otherwise die off from abhorrence and wastefulness. Instead, the big-government Republicans escalated to industrial-scale Civil War, as unrelenting hardball.

From there, government people kept ratcheting up USA governments in scale and tyranny.

To shut down the national-government people’s tyranny, we need enough state-government people to step up to protect their state residents.

Escrow of national-government taxes by state governments has been introduced in bills as a way to protect state residents from having massive taxes taken and used for unconstitutional current spending, including spending on servicing unconstitutional national debt.

State gold depositories, which will offer modern digital savings and checking accounts that are fully backed not by paper dollars but instead by gold, are being developed in Texas, Tennessee, Idaho, Florida, and Kentucky. These and other states continue to clear the way to bypassing the inflationary Fed.

These are good developments, but they are limited and slow. We need stronger protections, and now.

Fortunately, stronger help is emerging. Freedom caucuses, for instance, are developing alternative norms of behavior. The politicians in freedom caucuses limit themselves and, crucially, also collaborate to limit others.

And appropriately, local, county, and state law-enforcement officers already outnumber national law-enforcement officers 5.3 to 1:

(Sources: 2018 state and local census, 2020 federal census)

Such powers must get used to secure our unalienable rights.

Constitution-Enforcement Laws

Through their oaths to support the Constitution, the state-government people have the power and the duty to protect state residents from national-government tyranny.

State legislators and governors need to protect state residents comprehensively, by enacting state statutes that define necessary, fundamental rules and sanctions:

• The rules need to flow directly from the Constitution’s fundamental structure, and be actionable. Each national-government statute must pass the following six pass/fail tests: (1) No misleading parts. (2) Only uses powers enumerated for the national government. (3) No delegation of legislative power. (4) No grabs of executive power. (5) No grabs of judicial power. (6) Not noncritical, complex, or long, and not helping make the total corpus of law incomprehensibly complex or long.For the very-few statutes that will pass the first five tests, the sixth test will be surprisingly easy to apply acceptably well. Even though some people’s interpretations of exactly what content is noncritical or incomprehensible will likely differ somewhat, especially at first.

  For any statute that fails any one of these tests, the statute and any resulting rules of any kind (regulations, guidance, etc.) are plainly unconstitutional and must not be forced on any state residents.

• The sanctions associated with these rules need to counter violations with overwhelmingly-powerful penalties. State executives need to enforce these state statutes on all violators.Like with every law, legislators are vested only with the power to pass rules and sanctions; executives are vested with all power to develop processes and execute the law.

  State executives will be fully accountable for: • interpreting which national-government statutes are and aren’t constitutional, • calculating what fraction of national-government spending is constitutional, • collecting only this constitutional fraction of state residents’ national-government taxes and paying it to the national government, and • prosecuting and punishing any national-government people or cronies who violate these state statutes that enforce the Constitution.

Congressmen and presidents in turn need to limit the state-government people constitutionally:

• They need to require by law, and need to enforce, that each state, county, city, and community must have a constitution that’s indisputably of republican form, modeled exactly on the Constitution.
• In each jurisdiction constitution, powers must be specifically enumerated and must be limited to an extent that clearly shall not unduly deprive persons of life, liberty, or property.

Politics attracts government people who have been loath to confront their colleagues across the aisle.

Politicians have been more willing to confront their colleagues in other jurisdictions. Activists can greatly help make this happen, and should.

Politicians most of all fear being directly confronted by the people.