July 7, 2013
How to Repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments
By Theodore Koehl

Americans may be able to regain control over their federal government by moving their respective individual state legislatures to invalidate the 16th and 17th Amendments to the United States Constitution. Essentially, this is a vote to reverse ratification of an Amendment without a Constitutional Convention.

Repeal of the 16th Amendment starves the federal beast by depriving it of its consumption of money from the states and the taxpayers through income taxes. States could exercise better control over how or even if their money is spent.

Repeal of the 17th Amendment makes United States senators directly appointed by the state legislatures, as they were at our nation's founding, and representative of the will of each state and its citizens. This action would check the federal government's proclivity to pass laws binding the states to unfunded mandates. It would increase the sovereignty of the several states and restore true federalism back into our system of government.

The states can do this by individual vote; this way, a Constitutional Convention and the subsequent dangers presents to liberty can be avoided. Three-fourths of the state legislatures would have to vote to repeal each or any Amendment. Once each state votes to invalidate an Amendment, the vote is sent to the Archivist of the National Archives. The result would be a return to the Constitution as it existed before the now repealed Amendments were included.

The United States of America was founded as a representative republic, where several sovereign states voluntarily joined under a common federal sovereign to better guarantee the unalienable rights of "We the People." This federal government was to be strictly limited to the enumerated powers given to it under the Constitution of the United States by the sovereignty of the several states and the people, who themselves are sovereign individuals.

The federal government is supposed to be strictly limited in power to only those things authorized in the Constitution. The several states were to always enjoy plenary power -- that is, power over everything not specifically given over to the federal government. Any powers not delegated to the several states were to be with the people as individuals.

Today, the federal government has been allowed to grow in size and scope of authority where it now imposes its will in every way over our individual daily lives. It has usurped the plenary powers of the several states. Every issue making news today seems to have a federal solution proposed or enacted instead of allowing the states, which are closer to the people within them, to address those issues.

The root of the current problem is that the federal government bends and contorts and stretches the plain meaning of the U.S. Constitution. It is allowed to do this, in part, by its taxing authority. The federal government taxes almost everything, taking the wealth of each state and of every individual for its own use.

The federal government redistributes this wealth as it sees fit to enact controls over the several states and the people through various administrative agencies, policies, and programs. The purported original need for an administrative agency, policy, or program is rarely, if ever, met.

In fact, the original need becomes modified with other causes and objectives requiring these agencies to grow; new policies and programs must be promulgated to better meet real or imagined demands.

Thus, the system is self-perpetuating. Without proper checks by the Congress, the administrative state becomes all-encompassing, oppressive, and in some respects, tyrannical.

Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/h...l#ixzz2YQ7kPMW7

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