Nullification
Who understands the weightier matters?
Can you free a nation of people one case at a time?
If the people forgive one another and come together to seek the kingdom of God by attending to the weightier matters.
In early America and England the people decided "fact and law" with power to veto the legislators and the Judges through acquittal by way of Jury nullification.
Nullification
The Doctrine of Nullification from the State's point of view has been held that states have the right to declare null and void any federal law that the State deem unconstitutional. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions declared in 1799 that nullification was to be the rightful remedy used by the states for all unauthorized acts done under the pretext of the Constitution.[1]
That was possible when those "States remained “as foreign to each other as Mexico is to Canada"[2] even after the ratification of the Constitution and the citizens of those state were still Not a party to that constitution. The States were truly independent in 1799 but by 1899 that was no longer true and by 1999 it could not have gotten farther from the truth.
While the process of the modern assent into bondage can be debated the out come is self evident. Today the federal government has an increased interest in its citizens whose labor, property and children have all become surety for its debt like in the days of the bondage of Egypt.
Because a citizen in the United States is no longer the same as the natural citizens in states that had once been Republics. Neither the State governments have the capacity to assert such rights as the Doctrine of Nullification nor can citizens of the U.S. as residents in those States practically defend their right through Jury Nullification either. That right was once a key element of liberty in America and freedom from unwarranted usurpation from either State or Federal governments.
The United States government and those to whom they are indebted have now a prior right to protect their interests. The citizens have become a surety for debt among other compromised positions that have come about over many generations of degeneration, by avarice and sloth, and a myriad of benefits by way of a mire of moral compromises.
For true nullification there must be a real call for a large social group of people who are bound by virtuous "social bonds" alone. Decades of "Legal charity" has bankrupted the character of society required for a free society. The people must breath life into the care for one another by attending to what Christ called the "weightier matters".
Things forgotten
Americans have forgotten the art of liberty but there is a way back that is found by creating the social bonds that have connected all free societies throughout the history of mankind and had once made America great.
- “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”[3]
In every turn of the writings of Alexis, he saw “Individual charity is a powerful agency that must not be despised,” and that “Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class."[4] -Alexis De Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism
"good should be done without the hope of reward, as it is done by the Deity himself."-Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America p 147
"American moralists do not claim that one must sacrifice oneself for one's fellows because it is a fine thing to do but they are bold enough to say that such sacrifices are as necessary to the man who makes them as to those gaining from them. . .They do not, therefore, deny that every man can pursue his own self-interest but they turn themselves inside out to prove that it is in each man's interest to be virtuous" (Tocqueville 1840, 610).
"Enlightened self-love continually leads them to help one another and inclines them to devote freely a part of their time and wealthy to the welfare of the state" (Tocqueville 1840, 611).
"I have seen Americans making great and sincere sacrifices for the key common good and a hundred times I have noticed that, when needs be, they almost always gave each other faithful support" (Tocqueville 1840, 594-595).
“It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults." ― Alexis de Tocqueville
"When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness." Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis, like many others in history, understood more than most that "The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens." That would mean private religion which was a form of private welfare does far more to secure liberty than the legal charity of public religion.
"Americans group together to hold fêtes, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, distribute books, dispatch missionaries to the antipodes. They establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method. Finally, if they wish to highlight a truth or develop an opinion by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association." Alexis de Tocqueville 1840, Democracy in America 596.
The Contrast
- "There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license."
Zero Point
- "When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
- "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
- "For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.” — Cicero (106-43 BC)
The night was provided by those who thought themselves righteous and born again but still loved the darkness.
Edwin Emil Witte [5] focused on social insurance issues for the people who already were forgetting the nature of Pure Religion.
"Social insurance is a form of social welfare that provides insurance against economic risks either through public or private means.
The contributions, which may be be considered a form of insurance premiums does create a common fund out of which the individuals may then be paid benefits in the future.
That common fund is not different than the One purse referenced in Proverbs. While, in Alexis de Tocqueville's America and in the Early Church such Social protection was provided by fervent charity of the people the same Social protection, as "defined by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development is concerned with preventing, managing, and overcoming situations that adversely affect people's well-being."
This Social protection through policies and programs designed to reduce poverty and vulnerability by the use of men who exercised authority was done through the Imperial Cult of Rome and its Temples and by Herod and the Pharisees but such systems not only make the word of God to none effect but they usher in the rule of despots and tyrants.
The Gospel of the kingdom requires men to repent and seek The Way of righteousness and a rejection of the reward of unrighteousness.
Footnotes
- ↑ Nullification, in United States constitutional history, is a legal theory that a state has the right to nullify, or invalidate, any federal laws which that state has deemed unconstitutional with respect to the United States Constitution. The theory of nullification has never been legally upheld by federal courts.
- ↑ Clark's Summary of American Law, Constitutional Law.
- ↑ This was attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville in the book The Kingdom of God and the American Dream by Sherwood Eddy which was published in 1941 and again on November 3, 1952 in a final campaign address in Boston by Dwight D. Eisenhower. It similarly was quoted in A Third Treasury of the Familiar by Ralph L. Woods, published in 1970. Presidents Reagan and Clinton and many others have quoted the line not just because they thought Alexis wrote it but because they believed it was true. Others traveling through America in 1834 did write an almost identical quote at the same time as Tocqueville was touring America, “America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud.” "A Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches: By the Deputation from the Congregation Union of England and Wales (Vol. II). by Andrew Reed and James Matheson, Harper & Brothers, 1835.
- ↑ Ezekiel 16:49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy." This is what socialism does and only pure Religion holds the solution.
- ↑ Born January 4, 1887 – Died May 20, 1960, was an economist who worked for U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is sometimes called "the father of Social Security".