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OLYMPIA — The time has come for people who believe in states’ rights to move from protest to political action, a Spokane Valley legislator told a crowd on the steps of the Capitol Building this afternoon.
Rep. Matt Shea, a first-term Republican, told a crowd estimated between 200 and 300 they need to rein in the federal government that’s becoming too powerful and too intrusive.
“We will not suffer government any more telling us how to live our daily lives…buy our health insurance…buy our energy,” Shea said.
He and other House Republicans have introduced a series of bills they say will allow Washington to reassert rights it has under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which essentially reserves to the states anything not mentioned in the Constitution.
Among his bills are proposals to nullify any national health care plan in Washington state, nullify any cap and trade system set up on energy, keep the federal government from regulating any firearm manufactured in the state and require federal agents to check with a sheriff before conducting an investigation in a Washington county.
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While he called the bills a way to reclaim state sovereignty, prospects of their passage are not good at this point because Republicans are in significant minorities in both houses. Rep. Joel Kretz, R-Wauconda, a co-sponsor of many of the bills, said they represent issues important to many of the constituents in his rural northeastern Washington district, but may not get committee hearings, let alone floor votes, this year.
“Sometimes it takes three or four years” for issues to pass the Legislalture, Kretz said.
The rally, officially called the Sovereignty Winterfest, included elements of the Tea Party, the 9/12 Project and the Campaign for Liberty, and attracted two busloads of participants came from Spokane. If the different groups can work together, it could be “a little ripple on the surface that becomes a tsunami,” said George McGrath, a Spokane resident who attended.
They gathered outside the Capitol in intermittent rain, carrying placards with messages like “Defend the Constitution” and “Bill of Rights for All Americans Only”. Mike Fagan, a Spokane activist who ran unsuccessfullly for City Council last year, served as master of ceremonies. The portable toilets, he said had been renamed for the event in honor of Washington’s two U.S. senators and governor.
Members of the group waved yellow flags with a coiled rattlesnake and “Don’t Tread on Me” message. Tom Newcomer of Skagit County unfurled a Confederate battle flag, which he said was a symbol of the fight for states’ rights, not slavery.
“It’s just a battle flag, not a flag flying over a country,” said Newcomer, a former high school English teacher who now works as a security guard. He came to the rally, he added, “to let the people in office know what we think of them.”
Jim Camden is a veteran political reporter for The Spokesman-Review.
Jonathan Brunt covers Spokane City Hall for The Spokesman-Review.
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Citizen on January 14 at 5:46 p.m.
That guy is an embarrassment to Eastern Washington. Does he even have a basic understanding of the Constitution? How in the world did he ever get elected?
Liberty_Bell on January 16 at 6:14 a.m.
And that Slavery Question, when States Right’s were taken away with the 14th Amendment?
To John Holmes Monticello, April 22, 1820
I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a State. This certainly is the exclusive right of every State, which nothing in the constitution has taken from them and given to the General Government. Could Congress, for example, say, that the non-freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other State?
I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.
To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect. THOMAS JEFFERSON
Liberty_Bell on January 16 at 6:23 a.m.
And the real battle flag with a snake? “Join or Die” from Ben Franklin?
“a high school english teacher?
The cartoon has been reprinted and redrawn widely throughout American history. Variants of the cartoon have different texts, e.g. “Unite or Dead”, and differently labeled segments, depending on the political bodies being appealed to. During the American Revolutionary War, the image became a potent symbol of Colonial unity and resistance to what was seen as British oppression. It returned to service, suitably redrawn, for both sides of the American Civil War.