State asserts its sovereignty

Inter Lake editorial

Is Montana the political equivalent of a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. government? Or is it a sovereign state that has the power to govern itself and to reject the oversight of Congress and the president when appropriate within the framework of the U.S. Constitution?

Those questions are about to be settled, thanks to one and possibly two bills to emerge from the current legislative session in Helena.

These so-called 'sovereignty bills' are part of a nationwide movement that has seen states chafe against the ever-increasing presence of the federal government in the day-to-day lives of the people. Montana first bucked against the federal yoke last year when Gov. Brian Schweitzer declared that the state would never comply with a Homeland Security mandate creating what amounted to a national ID card.

Now, the governor has signed a bill sent to him by the Legislature that asserts the right of Montana to regulate its own industries as well as to protect the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

On the surface, House Bill 246 declared the right of Montana to exempt guns and gun parts from federal regulation under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution of the United States if they were manufactured in Montana and never left here. But in essence, if the new law is upheld in court, it will greatly lessen the power of the federal government to invoke the Commerce Clause as a general authority to regulate commerce of all kinds.

This bill and a related measure, House Resolution 3, are based on the Ninth and 10th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantee to the states and their people all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution. In recent years, these amendments have been largely ignored, but as the federal government grows more and more powerful, it would be unwise to continue to do so.

The Founding Fathers included the cautionary language of the Ninth and 10th amendments specifically to protect against a juggernaut government that claimed for itself excessive power. The colonies had already survived their war with a tyrannical crown; they did not want to risk their own federal government growing into a danger to the sovereign rights of the states, so they included these safeguards.

Gov. Schweitzer and the Legislature are to be commended for sticking their necks out in defense of principle. It is easy to label opponents of the federal government as malcontents and rabble-rousers, but let us remember those were the same names applied to the lovers of liberty who founded this nation. Another name for them is patriots.