Moving Toward Lawlessness

Michael Bradley’s reports on the recent lawlessness of Attorney General Eric Holder ought to be noted. Holder is continuing to trample on the rights of each state to define marriage according to the will its residents. Bradley wrote:

Federal district judge Robert J. Shelby in Utah invalidated the will of Utah’s citizens by declaring the conjugal view of marriage to be unconstitutional. Then, the Attorney General of the United States declared that the Department of Justice will not, in fact, respect the Supreme Court’s stay on Shelby’s ruling, a stay command that simply declares Shelby’s ruling to be void of authority for the present.

This is a trampling of state’s rights and should not be tolerated in a country in which the rule of law should reign, not the whims of the court.

After spending a weekend colloquium in Seattle discussing the issues which commence when states are in disagreement with the federal government, I can’t help but quote Calhoun:

Should the General Government and a State come into conflict, we have a higher remedy: the power [the States] which called the General Government into existence, which gave it all of its authority, may be invoked…The State, acting in its sovereign capacity…may compel the Government to submit a question touching its infraction, to the parties who created it; to avoid the supposed dangers of which, it is proposed to resort to the novel, the hazardous, and, fatal project of giving to the General Government the sole and final right of interpreting the Constitution–thereby annihilating the authority which imposed it and from which the Government itself derives its existence.”