Tuesday, July 27, 2021

The Great Reagan properly understood "Jeffersonian Republicanism" --how the State & National governments were properly supposed to be balanced under the Constitution of 1787! His amazing executive order 12612 returned us to how it was intended to be to ensure safety & liberty! (Unfortunately Clinton later rescinded it...)


The goal: 
Preserving Liberty & Safety for all Americans. Guaranteeing the responsible use of freedom under the rule of law without depriving anyone else of their freedom.

Defining the rule of law:
Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12612 --on Federalism (not to be confused with Hamilton's "Federalist Party" which usurped the name but did not believe in actual "Federalism.") 

Retaining what was accepted as the 1787 Constitutional Convention's final design (the fundamental law the State Ratifying Conventions thought they were setting in stone when they voluntarily agreed to accept the Constitution of 1787) --a decentralized societal organization best kept intact by a Jeffersonian/Madisonian "strict construction" of that Constitution.

October 26, 1987

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, and in order to restore the division of governmental responsibilities between the national government and the States that was intended by the Framers of the Constitution and to ensure that the principles of federalism established by the Framers guide the Executive departments and agencies in the formulation and implementation of policies, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Definitions. For purposes of this Order:

(a) "Policies that have federalism implications'' refers to regulations, legislative comments or proposed legislation, and other policy statements or actions that have substantial direct effects on the States, on the relationship between the national government and the States, or on the distribution of power and responsibilities among the various levels of government.

(b) "State'' or "States'' refer to the States of the United States of America, individually or collectively, and, where relevant, to State governments, including units of local government and other political subdivisions established by the States.

Sec. 2. Fundamental Federalism Principles. In formulating and implementing policies that have federalism implications, Executive departments and agencies shall be guided by the following fundamental federalism principles:

(a) Federalism is rooted in the knowledge that our political liberties are best assured by limiting the size and scope of the national government.

(b) The people of the States created the national government when they delegated to it those enumerated governmental powers relating to matters beyond the competence of the individual States. All other sovereign powers, save those expressly prohibited the States by the Constitution, are reserved to the States or to the people.

(c) The constitutional relationship among sovereign governments, State and national, is formalized in and protected by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.

(d) The people of the States are free, subject only to restrictions in the Constitution itself or in constitutionally authorized Acts of Congress, to define the moral, political, and legal character of their lives.

(e) In most areas of governmental concern, the States uniquely possess the constitutional authority, the resources, and the competence to discern the sentiments of the people and to govern accordingly. In Thomas Jefferson's words, the States are "the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies."

(f) The nature of our constitutional system encourages a healthy diversity in the public policies adopted by the people of the several States according to their own conditions, needs, and desires. In the search for enlightened public policy, individual States and communities are free to experiment with a variety of approaches to public issues.

(g) Acts of the national government -- whether legislative, executive, or judicial in nature -- that exceed the enumerated powers of that government under the Constitution violate the principle of federalism established by the Framers.

(h) Policies of the national government should recognize the responsibility of -- and should encourage opportunities for -- individuals, families, neighborhoods, local governments, and private associations to achieve their personal, social, and economic objectives through cooperative effort.

(i) In the absence of clear constitutional or statutory authority, the presumption of sovereignty should rest with the individual States. Uncertainties regarding the legitimate authority of the national government should be resolved against regulation at the national level.

Sec. 3. Federalism Policymaking Criteria. In addition to the fundamental federalism principles set forth in section 2, Executive departments and agencies shall adhere, to the extent permitted by law, to the following criteria when formulating and implementing policies that have federalism implications:

(a) There should be strict adherence to constitutional principles. Executive departments and agencies should closely examine the constitutional and statutory authority supporting any Federal action that would limit the policymaking discretion of the States, and should carefully assess the necessity for such action. To the extent practicable, the States should be consulted before any such action is implemented. Executive Order No. 12372 (``Intergovernmental Review of Federal Programs'') remains in effect for the programs and activities to which it is applicable.

(b) Federal action limiting the policymaking discretion of the States should be taken only where constitutional authority for the action is clear and certain and the national activity is necessitated by the presence of a problem of national scope. For the purposes of this Order:

(1) It is important to recognize the distinction between problems of national scope (which may justify Federal action) and problems that are merely common to the States (which will not justify Federal action because individual States, acting individually or together, can effectively deal with them).

(2) Constitutional authority for Federal action is clear and certain only when authority for the action may be found in a specific provision of the Constitution, there is no provision in the Constitution prohibiting Federal action, and the action does not encroach upon authority reserved to the States.

(c) With respect to national policies administered by the States, the national government should grant the States the maximum administrative discretion possible. Intrusive, Federal oversight of State administration is neither necessary nor desirable.

(d) When undertaking to formulate and implement policies that have federalism implications, Executive departments and agencies shall:

(1) Encourage States to develop their own policies to achieve program objectives and to work with appropriate officials in other States.

(2) Refrain, to the maximum extent possible, from establishing uniform, national standards for programs and, when possible, defer to the States to establish standards.

(3) When national standards are required, consult with appropriate officials and organizations representing the States in developing those standards

Sec. 4. Special Requirements for Preemption. (a) To the extent permitted by law, Executive departments and agencies shall construe, in regulations and otherwise, a Federal statute to preempt State law only when the statute contains an express preemption provision or there is some other firm and palpable evidence compelling the conclusion that the Congress intended preemption of State law, or when the exercise of State authority directly conflicts with the exercise of Federal authority under the Federal statute.

(b) Where a Federal statute does not preempt State law (as addressed in subsection (a) of this section), Executive departments and agencies shall construe any authorization in the statute for the issuance of regulations as authorizing preemption of State law by rule-making only when the statute expressly authorizes issuance of preemptive regulations or there is some other firm and palpable evidence compelling the conclusion that the Congress intended to delegate to the department or agency the authority to issue regulations preempting State law

(c) Any regulatory preemption of State law shall be restricted to the minimum level necessary to achieve the objectives of the statute pursuant to which the regulations are promulgated.

(d) As soon as an Executive department or agency foresees the possibility of a conflict between State law and Federally protected interests within its area of regulatory responsibility, the department or agency shall consult, to the extent practicable, with appropriate officials and organizations representing the States in an effort to avoid such a conflict.

(e) When an Executive department or agency proposes to act through adjudication or rule-making to preempt State law, the department or agency shall provide all affected States notice and an opportunity for appropriate participation in the proceedings.

Sec. 5. Special Requirements for Legislative Proposals. Executive departments and agencies shall not submit to the Congress legislation that would:

(a) Directly regulate the States in ways that would interfere with functions essential to the States' separate and independent existence or operate to directly displace the States' freedom to structure integral operations in areas of traditional governmental functions;

(b) Attach to Federal grants conditions that are not directly related to the purpose of the grant; or

(c) Preempt State law, unless preemption is consistent with the fundamental federalism principles set forth in section 2, and unless a clearly legitimate national purpose, consistent with the federalism policymaking criteria set forth in section 3, cannot otherwise be met.

Sec. 6. Agency Implementation. (a) The head of each Executive department and agency shall designate an official to be responsible for ensuring the implementation of this Order.

(b) In addition to whatever other actions the designated official may take to ensure implementation of this Order, the designated official shall determine which proposed policies have sufficient federalism implications to warrant the preparation of a Federalism Assessment. With respect to each such policy for which an affirmative determination is made, a Federalism Assessment, as described in subsection (c) of this section, shall be prepared. The department or agency head shall consider any such Assessment in all decisions involved in promulgating and implementing the policy

(c) Each Federalism Assessment shall accompany any submission concerning the policy that is made to the Office of Management and Budget pursuant to Executive Order No. 12291 or OMB Circular No. A - 19, and shall:

(1) Contain the designated official's certification that the policy has been assessed in light of the principles, criteria, and requirements stated in sections 2 through 5 of this Order;

(2) Identify any provision or element of the policy that is inconsistent with the principles, criteria, and requirements stated in sections 2 through 5 of this Order;

(3) Identify the extent to which the policy imposes additional costs or burdens on the States, including the likely source of funding for the States and the ability of the States to fulfill the purposes of the policy; and

(4) Identify the extent to which the policy would affect the States' ability to discharge traditional State governmental functions, or other aspects of State sovereignty.

Sec. 7. Government-wide Federalism Coordination and Review. (a) In implementing Executive Order Nos. 12291 and 12498 and OMB Circular No. A - 19, the Office of Management and Budget, to the extent permitted by law and consistent with the provisions of those authorities, shall take action to ensure that the policies of the Executive departments and agencies are consistent with the principles, criteria, and requirements stated in sections 2 through 5 of this Order.

(b) In submissions to the Office of Management and Budget pursuant to Executive Order No. 12291 and OMB Circular No. A - 19, Executive departments and agencies shall identify proposed regulatory and statutory provisions that have significant federalism implications and shall address any substantial federalism concerns. Where the departments or agencies deem it appropriate, substantial federalism concerns should also be addressed in notices of proposed rule-making and messages transmitting legislative proposals to the Congress.

Sec. 8. Judicial Review. This Order is intended only to improve the internal management of the Executive branch, and is not intended to create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law by a party against the United States, its agencies, its officers, or any person.

Ronald Reagan

The White House,

October 26, 1987.

[Filed with the Office of the Federal Register, 4:33 p.m., October 28, 1987]

Spot on Piers... Don't let the Neo-Bolsheviks Silence You!

Yet Another Racial Justice Warrior...

Monday, July 26, 2021

Any Bolshevik's Dream Come True...

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

'Death Solves All Problems,' He Said

    

'Death Solves All Problems,' He Said  By Richard Pipes  

Nov. 10, 1991  

(STALIN Breaker of Nations. By Robert Conquest. Illustrated. 346 pp. New York: Viking.)  

This biography is about a mean-spirited little man with "cockroach whiskers" (the phrase is the poet Osip Mandelstam's) whose ambitions far outran his capacity: to realize them, he used the machinery of total power set in place by Lenin and Trotsky to destroy all who stood in his way. They numbered in the tens of millions. No man ever possessed such power over so many human beings; no one ever inflicted such havoc on his own country. The magnitude of the devastation stands in stark contrast to the intellectual and moral nonentity who was responsible for it.  

Robert Conquest is the author of more than a dozen pioneering studies on subjects that most of the Sovietological profession has studiously avoided: the man-made famine of 1932-33, the exile of Soviet nations, the Great Terror of the 1930's. His books, recently translated into Russian, have found an attentive audience in the Soviet Union. The latest, "Stalin: Breaker of Nations," is a precis of his life's work. Intended for the general reader, it provides a superb portrait of the man who terrorized his country for 30 years and inflicted the cold war on the rest of the world. It is the third major study of the tyrant to appear in a year (the other two are by Robert Tucker and Dmitri Volkogonov, a Soviet general turned historian). Briskly written, authoritative yet not pedantic, filled with interesting incidents and anecdotes, "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" makes for fascinating reading.  

Mr. Conquest focuses on the man, concentrating on the political machinations by means of which Stalin first acquired total power and then used it physically to liquidate anyone who actually or even potentially threatened it. Murder was his way of resolving difficulties: "Death solves all problems," he is quoted as saying, "no man, no problem." This principle he applied to individuals as well as to whole categories or "classes." In his last years, the passion for killing became entirely irrational, a way of exorcising spirits that haunted his paranoid psyche.  

The author's stress on biography and politics (the historical background has merely been sketched) is likely to displease that part of the Sovietological establishment that views politics as a byproduct of economic and social processes, and historical figures as instruments of those processes. But in the case of Communist Russia, the evidence indeed points to the primacy of politics. There is nothing to indicate that Lenin and Stalin reacted either to the exigencies of the economy or the pressures of the population, but a great deal to show that their supreme consideration at all times was maintaining and expanding their personal power.  

The relatively weakest part of Mr. Conquest's book is that dealing with Stalin's ascent to power. As in Mr. Conquest's chef-d'oeuvre , "The Great Terror," the reader gets hardly any inkling that nearly every one of Stalin's political practices had been conceived and tested by Lenin. The invasive presence of the secret police; concentration camps; show trials; summary executions; collectivization and the war on the kulaks as well as the other familiar features of Stalinism save one -- the killing of fellow Communists -- were introduced by the regime's founding father. The 1932-33 Ukrainian man-made famine, for example, singled out by Mr. Conquest for savage condemnation, had its forerunner in the famine of 1921, which claimed almost as many victims and had been in large measure precipitated by Lenin's inane policies of food requisitioning.  

Apparently influenced by Trotsky's writings, Mr. Conquest minimizes Stalin's personal closeness to Lenin. But it is worth recalling that on the eve of Lenin's death, Stalin was the only person to sit on all three of the directing organs of the party's Central Committee: the Politburo, the Orgburo and the Secretariat. In 1921-22 he was Lenin's principal deputy and heir apparent. His political base was the party bureaucracy, which he staffed with personnel who satisfied Lenin's criteria of orthodoxy but in fact were selected on the basis of personal loyalty to him. That Lenin should have chosen such a man to enforce party purity tells a great deal about his limitations as a statesman.  

Mr. Conquest is without peer in the knowledge of Soviet history of the 1930's. He has supreme command of the sources, including those currently being released from Soviet archives. The byzantine intrigues by means of which Stalin, having transformed the country into his private domain, subjected the Soviet Union to experiments that were as cruel as they were senseless are told succinctly, with reference to reminiscences of contemporaries and a wealth of engrossing detail. He depicts with cold detachment foreign dupes like George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Lion Feuchtwanger, who out of self-deception or self-interest portrayed Stalin as a humane and popular leader, finding all manner of excuses for his barbarities. The gullibility of foreign apologists knew no bounds. When Stalin passed a law making children as young as 12 liable to the death penalty for "economic crimes" like stealing food, the French Communist newspaper justified the measure on the ground that under Communism children matured so rapidly that by the age of 12 they were fully responsible citizens.  

As this biography makes clear, Stalin owed his political successes to an uncanny ability to conceal his murderous instincts behind a mask of moderation and bonhomie. He learned early to pose as a pragmatic man of the middle, steadier and more dependable than his rivals. He also possessed throughout his life a remarkable ability to charm: even experienced foreign statesmen, well aware of his record, fell under his spell. Mr. Conquest admits to being puzzled by this paradox. At one point he comes close to suggesting that Stalin may have "possessed the gift of instilling hypnotic blindness by some psychological method as yet uninvestigated." Astonishingly, Stalin succeeded in deceiving even his mentor, Lenin, who became aware of his true nature only at the very end of his life, when it was too late to bring him down; and then, the worst quality that he saw in Stalin was rudeness. Even Andrei Sakharov admitted to being taken in. He recalled that on the day of Stalin's funeral he was "under the influence of a great man's death . . . thinking of his humanity." Such, he noted in retrospect, "shows the hypnotic power of mass ideology."  

The legacy of Leninism-Stalinism will take a long time to overcome. It consists not in the destruction of the country's economy alone -- the ruin of agriculture, which once had fed its people and produced sufficient surplus to permit sizable exports, and the creation at great cost of an anachronistic industry centered on the production of weapons. It also lies, first and foremost, in the spiritual realm. Seven decades of Communism have obliterated among the peoples living under it the qualities necessary for citizenship, including respect for law and mutual trust. To survive under its regime, one had to mind one's own business; any interest in public affairs was judged under Stalin as prima facie evidence of subversive intent and under his successors as a symptom of insanity. Little wonder that the effort to eliminate altogether private concerns had the opposite effect, causing self-interest to obliterate all traces of public spirit. The successor states of the defunct Soviet Union have the unenviable task of rebuilding what had been destroyed in the vain attempt to remake man and (in Trotsky's words) "overturn the world."

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

The Senile Nasty Ole Bastard on the Move...

The Proof Keeps Flowing In...

Sunday, July 11, 2021

Dr. Mark Andrew Holowchak Interview!
Part 2: Defining "Jeffersonian Republicanism" (7/9/21)



We would like to welcome back to the program, Jeffersonian Hero, Dr. Mark Andrew Holowchak—philosopher & historian... 

Dr. Holowchak continues to face Leftist censorship from the mainstream as he dares to apply reason and objective thinking to the historiography of Thomas Jefferson! 
 
As listeners know, we had the preeminent Jeffersonian scholar of our time, Dr. Mark Andrew Holowchak, on two weeks ago to talk about his book, Did Thomas Jefferson Really Father Sally Hemings’ Black Children (Edwin Mellen Press, 2021) and the necromancy of the "Left-wing" Thomas Jefferson Foundation for what he claims is promulgation of a myth

The feedback for part 1 was tremendous as he destroyed the "Neo-Bolshevik" Sally Hemings cult...

Today he’ll talk about his upcoming companion book, Thomas Jefferson, Politically Corrected: My Travails as a Jeffersonian Scholar in Today’s Culture of Cancellation (Edwin Mellen Press, 2021). He briefly tells us his story of being cancelled by the Leftists revisionists in and around Monticello. He then segues his travails into a critical discussion of the indispensability of open, critical discussion for a thriving democracy. 

The issue: What can we learn from the great Jefferson (Founder of the Republican party) to salvage our Republic? or will those of us who champion the ideals of "Jeffersonian Republicanism"—free speech, critical discussion, free enterprise, robust individualism, & localized democracy—be cancelled by the "Neo-Bolshevik" Mobocracy? 

This is an amazing 2-hour discussion YOU SIMPLY WILL NOT HEAR ANYWHERE ELSE! 

The problems we face today as a Republic are clearly defined and what can be done to preserve Freedom & Liberty for future generations is explored in depth!
 

Recent works include:
 

Coming soon:

-Thomas Jefferson, Politically Corrected: My Travails as a Jeffersonian Scholar in the Culture of Cancellation

Other projects: 

Jefferson and the Fine Arts, A Prolegomena to Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson in Paris
 
Get in touch with Dr. Holowchak at mholowchak@hotmail.com if you are interested in bringing him for a lecture to your institution or business.