Five great Kid Rock lines

5. “I’m the illest fool – Cooler than the water in a swimmin’ pool”
4. “Trash me in the news, give me wack reviews but you’ll never find another who can fill my shoes”
3. “They say that every man bleeds just like me”
2. “God is great indeed — if you believe, in the everlife”
1. “You know its time to rock when Old Glory drops”

Sovereign Defense of Faith and Freedom (Part II)

Albert Gallatin characterized the American Revolution as ‘a monument’ to the right of resisting unconstitutional laws. Indeed, before Americans became American, they were loyal British subjects—loyal that is, until king and Parliament subverted the venerated British constitution and with it, their sacred rights as freeborn Englishmen. Now sovereignty is the supreme power of governance, and the British also believed that sovereignty resided with Parliament, binding subjects everywhere to any law that Parliament passed. The Colonists, on the other hand, believed sovereignty for all “internal” matters—particularly the power to tax, resided in each colonial legislature. This “Whig” view of the constitution, rights and sovereignty continued in the American Republic, though in slightly altered context. American Independence from Great Britain left them 13 sovereign States, which fairly quickly formed a loose confederation under the Articles of Confederation to resist British subjugation. After the War for Independence, these States sought a stronger, more effectual union together. The Constitution was the sole source of jurisdiction for the national government under this circumstance. States preceded the national government, in other words. The ratification of the Constitution by the people of the several states at respective, special constitutional conventions brought about the national government according to its terms.
The terms, however, were not unlimited. Powers not expressly delegated to the national government were retained by the states. During the years of the early Republic, it was not uncommon to hear of “internal” matters vis-à-vis the federal government. In a letter to James Monroe in 1797, Thomas Jefferson observed that “it is of immense consequence that the States retain complete authority as possible over their own citizens,” rather than bowing to “foreign jurisdiction”—meaning the national jurisdiction of the federal government! One year later, both he and James Madison were moved by the political overreach and centralization of power under High Federalists in office, to write resolutions for the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures. The Resolves, as they were called, formed the basis for State resistance to unconstitutional acts, specifically to the Alien and Sedition Acts. They helped shape political opinion, which led to the peaceful ‘Revolution of 1800’ bringing Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party to power. While the Alien and Sedition Acts simply expired, the Resolves bolstered for a time, the limitations clearly intended and placed on the federal government by the Bill of Rights. That is to say, the basis of rationale in the Resolves, as well as the implicit threat of state action against overreach, helped contain the federal government to its role and function under the Constitution.
The Framers had after all, created a system in which the people of the several States delegated specific powers and were left with two governmental sovereigns: the National and the State governments. Both levels of government were sovereign in their respective orbits; hence “federalism” was thought to be an ingenious device that precluded a tyranny or despotism from emerging out of any branch of the national government. Madison explained in the Virginia ratifying convention, that the “powers of the federal government are enumerated; it can only operate in certain cases; it has legislative powers on defined and limited objects, beyond which it cannot extend its jurisdiction.” The Bill of Rights furthermore, which includes the Tenth Amendment [“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”], was passed in 1791 to codify Madison’s stated interpretation, as well as to cement the support of former Anti-Federalists, who felt the Constitution needed this explicit guarantee of rights which the national government was then bound in writing to respect. For Jefferson, the Tenth Amendment became “the foundation of the Constitution.” The States retained legislative sovereignty over most objects of lawmaking except for foreign policy and trade. Further, as Jefferson reasoned, the same States retained a right to judge constitutionality and measures of redress for themselves. Otherwise, the national government would be left the final and exclusive judge of its own, delegated powers! Even now, it seems absurd that it should be. For as John Taylor wrote in his Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, “a jurisdiction limited by its own will, is an unlimited jurisdiction.” If the federal government has, in history since that time, assumed an unlimited jurisdiction, then it must be said that it is not the handiwork of the Founders. Neither is it the Original Intent of the Constitution and certainly not Jefferson’s, or Madison’s intent that the States should let it rest.
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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary. Article loosely based on William J. Watkins, Jr., Reclaiming the American Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), chapters 2-4. Email: wes@wesriddle.com.

Tuesday fun: Five injustices you bravely suffer

5. Watching 10 minutes of television commercials for Coke before a movie in the theater.
4. Texas heat
3. Arriving for a photo shoot and realizing your camera batteries are dead
2. No one laughed at your “We Grow Them Bigger in Delaware” t-shirt
1. The “other” paper got credit for an interview you had a month earlier.

What are your top 5?

A Pox on Stem Cell Research

In vetoing legislation that would have supported medical research using embryonic stem cells, President Bush described his decision as moral rather than scientific, an act of conscience opposed to the taking of the “innocent human life” represented by embryonic stem cells. The potential of using these cells to develop life-saving medical cures, Mr. Bush said, was a temptation to be resisted.
The president’s veto appears to create an intractable problem for stem cell researchers and their advocates. How is the research to advance from hopeful to helpful when national policy inhibits the work from being done? Discouraged proponents have suggested that the president’s decision, which was applauded by conservative religious groups, has the potential to keep American science locked in the past.
The past, however, seems to encourage a more optimistic outlook. Medical progress has stirred religious and moral objections throughout history — objections that were overcome as the benefits of medical advances became overwhelmingly obvious. In the 11th century, European church leaders warned monks that treating illness with medicine showed such a lack of faith in God that it violated holy orders. When 19th-century doctors began using chloroform to alleviate the pain of childbirth, the Scottish Calvinist church declared it a “Satanic invention” intended to frustrate the Lord’s design.
An illuminating case study is the late 18th-century controversy over inoculation against smallpox. Condemned by clerics as both immoral and blasphemous, smallpox inoculation offers some surprising parallels to our current impasse over research using embryonic stem cells.
The word “smallpox” once implied all the horror of a murderous infection against which people had little remedy. A 19th-century historian called it “the most terrible of all the ministers of death.”
Smallpox’s legacy of misery obsessed the English doctor Edward Jenner. Born in 1749, Jenner spent years hunting for ways to conquer, or at least prevent, the dread disease. He gathered anecdotal evidence from patients and strangers, including milkmaids, who appeared protected from smallpox by their exposure to a related, but milder, infection called cowpox. He also studied the folk medicine practice of inoculation, in which pus from smallpox pustule was rubbed into an opening scratched in the skin of an uninfected person.
Other doctors were also exploring the idea of inoculation, but Jenner went further, conducting experiments in the mid-1790’s. He designed a procedure using fluid from cowpox lesions to inoculate against smallpox. His approach was untested, but Jenner believed it offered the potential to become “essentially beneficial to mankind.”
The religious authorities of Jenner’s day viewed smallpox inoculation as an affront to God and man. A widely published British sermon was titled “The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation.” American clergy warned that inoculation usurped God’s power to decide the beginning and end of life. Only hypocrites would undergo the procedure and still pray to God, one theologian declared.
Jenner responded with a risky demonstration of his idea. In 1796, the doctor persuaded his own servant to allow the man’s 8-year-old son to be inoculated with cowpox material; two months later, Jenner exposed the child to smallpox.
The experiment was a success. Moreover, the child remained immune to smallpox even after the doctor exposed him to it a second time. The doctor himself, however, was reviled. Clerics denounced him as a tool of the devil. Newspapers ridiculed him as “a presumptuous man” overselling his results; one cartoonist portrayed him as a country bumpkin surrounded by patients sprouting cow parts.
Even some of his medical colleagues questioned whether he might have gone too far. In retrospect, one can easily imagine Jenner’s brilliant idea sinking under the combined weight of moral antipathy and scientific disdain.
Instead, the doctor persevered and triumphed. Not by hyping the potential of his ideas, as some stem cell supporters occasionally have done, but by doggedly gathering more evidence based on more inoculations. Fueled by his success, the practice spread, and smallpox rates plummeted. In time, the life-saving merits of inoculation eventually overwhelmed all doubt; the evidence, Jenner wrote, became “too manifest to admit of controversy.”
I hope we’re headed in a similarly pragmatic direction with regard to stem cell research. We still have not ventured much beyond the promising preliminaries; there is no multitude of saved lives to serve as a moral counterweight to the use of embryos, even unwanted ones.
For now, the breakthroughs may well occur in another country. To the dismay of the Vatican, the European Union recently agreed to expand investment in embryonic stem cell research. But in time, the promise of treatments made possible through embryonic stem cell research may prove impossible to resist in the United States, as well.
The fact is that stem cells — especially the amazingly versatile cells evident in early human development — have the potential to hold off our own ministers of death. And history suggests that’s a proposition too powerful to remain shackled by the moral strictures of the moment.
Deborah Blum is the author of the forthcoming “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death.”
From August 1 issue of the New York Times.