On Monday, The Conservative Review posted an article about some recent decisions by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding North Carolina. It seems that the wishes of the voters and the legislature have taken a back seat to the wishes of the Court.
The article reports:
As we’ve noted in a series of articles, the unelected federal courts have destroyed North Carolina’s right to self-determination. They have mandated transgenderism, blocked every voter integrity law, required very specific times and amounts of early voting, criminalized voluntary public prayer, and erased every single districting map — from federal and state districts to even county school board maps in middle of an election season and after candidates already spent enormous sums campaigning. Again, this was all done by federal, not state courts. They are rendering elections moot and are now ensuring that conservatives can never win elections by ruling Democrat racial gerrymander advantages into law and into the Constitution.
Now, the Fourth Circuit has unilaterally hired a liberal proctor to oversee and supervise the state legislature in the new redistricting it previously mandated.
It is not the duty of the Court to legislate–they are not elected officials and do not have that power.
The article continues:
It is first important to recognize that North Carolina received pre-clearance from Obama’s Justice Department, and the maps were upheld twice in state court. That should have ended the matter. Federal courts should have absolutely no jurisdiction over state legislative maps. Yet the federal courts nullified 28 legislative districts and remanded back to the three-judge panel, which includes two Obama-appointed judges.
The North Carolina legislature went back and drew a new, clean map that is better than anything Democrats put out when they had control for 100 years. That should have ended the matter. Yet the Obama judges, who have been accorded God-like power over subject matter the Constitution did not entrust to them, want to make sure the maps maximize the Democrat Party advantage. They gave standing to another lawsuit challenging three Senate and nine House districts. Last Thursday, in a written order, Judge Catherine Eagles wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel that she feels the new map doesn’t redress the “constitutional” violation and is “otherwise legally unacceptable” — in other words, it doesn’t contain enough Democrat advantages. So, in the ultimate act of legislating from the bench, the judge said that due to “the technical nature of determining an appropriate remedy” and “exceptional circumstances,” the court is appointing a “special master” to oversee the maps.
Thus, an unelected federal court with no constitutional jurisdiction over maps cleared by the DOJ and state courts is now requiring that de facto veto power over the new maps be given to an unelected “expert.” While this is not the first time officious federal courts have created a “special master,” the circumstances are particularly indefensible, given that the state has done everything properly until now.
This is not acceptable. The solution is nullification.
The Tenth Amendment Center explains the concept of nullification:
Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions claim that the U. S. Constitution was a compact among the several states-whereby the states delegated certain limited powers to the U.S. government; any undelegated power exercised by the U. S. government is thus void.
Furthermore, the general government is not the final and authoritative judge of its own powers, since that would make the government’s discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of those powers-but rather the parties to the contract, the states, have each an equal right to judge for themselves whether the Constitution has been violated as well as “the mode and measure of redress”-since there is no common judge of such matters among them.
Thus, every state can of its own authority nullify within its territory “all assumptions of power by others”-i.e., all perceived violations of the Constitution by the federal government.
The Kentucky Resolution uses the Tenth Amendment to justify a strict construction of the general government’s powers; any powers not expressly delegated to the U. S. government remain the province of the states or the people, and any exercise of those powers by the general government is void and can be struck down by the states on that basis.
Furthermore, Jefferson warns against construing the “necessary and proper” clause so broadly as to justify the assumption of undelegated powers by the general government; the intent of the clause was to only enable the execution of limited powers, not to indefinitely extend the general government’s scope. Otherwise, this part of the Constitution would be used “to destroy the whole residue of that instrument.”
We have wandered far afield from the republic our Founding Fathers envisioned. It is time to change direction and get back to where we belong. Nullification is one weapon in our arsenal that will allow us to do that.
