Restoring the 10th Amendment
by Marshall Sage
“Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.” Tom Remington of Black Bear Blog has written an excellent four-part history of wolves in post-modern Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia [here, here, here, here]. We only have to look north to our neighbors in Canada and Alaska to see what wolves are capable of when not controlled.
We are witnessing and living with out of control wolf populations now in Idaho and western Montana. To be fair to the wolves, they are just doing what they were created to do. We must focus our ire on their advocates who got the federal government to “re-introduce the Canadian Grey Wolf into our states protected them under the ESA”.
Until we realize that the wolf is only a tool used by the environmental extremists to attack capitalism, property rights, individual rights, and the cultures of big game hunting and ranching, we are fighting a loosing battle. We must realize that our real adversaries are the environmental extremists who are pursuing an anti-capitalist/socialist/Marxist agenda.
Environmental extremism got its first taste of power with the successful DDT hoax which led to the formation of the EPA and the ESA. Since then they have used the spotted owl to destroy the US forest products industry, the bull trout to limit access into the back country (travel on logging trails creates siltation which endangers bull trout), Sage Grouse to stop oil/gas exploration and production, and wolves to eliminate elk and deer for hunting and force ranchers into economic hardships from livestock losses. If you think hard enough you will think of other examples where the environmental extremists have used plants and animals with the protections of the EPA or ESA to limit or stop economic activity or limit people’s access or freedoms.
To break the environmental extremists monopoly on power under the EPA and the ESA, we must develop and implement a strategy that takes away their advantage of centralized political power and money. We can do this by restoring the 10th Amendment to it’s original intent. If the environmental extremists had to get their agenda approved by each state legislature, they would be hard pressed to prevail in more than 10 states.
What can we do? Get active and pressure your elected state representatives to pass legislation putting the federal government on notice that only regulations and federal laws in compliance with the 10th Amendment will be honored or enforced. The sovereignty of the states to manage their wildlife and natural resources will not be compromised by the federal government. Encourage a states convention on the 10th Amendment to create a coalition of states demanding their rights under the 10th Amendment.
Make support for the 10th Amendment a litmus test for political support of all state representatives. It took years of incrementalism for the federal government to take away much of our state’s sovereignty and we won’t overcome that with out a long, hard fight. If we get started now, we might be able to make the 10th Amendment a national issue in the 2010-2016 elections. Most states will use common sense if they are responsible for EPA and ESA actions in their states, because the elected and appointed officials will be accountable to the voters of the state. As it stands now, we are subject to the ideology and political views of a few who control the EPA and USFWS.
“United we stand but divided we fall.”
