10th Amendment Issue: Texas Sends Rangers To Border Because Federal Government Failed To Address Problems

Count on this happening more and more often in the coming months and years. As the Federal Government over-reaches its powers in some areas (i.e. health care, financial institutions, auto industry, etc.) and fails in its responsibilities in other areas (i.e. border control, anti-terrorism policies, etc.) the several states will begin invoking the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Constitution of the United States and begin taking action of their own.

This story, from MSNBC of all places, is one example of it:

Special teams of Texas Rangers will be deployed to the Texas-Mexico border to deal with increasing violence because the federal government has failed to address growing problems there, Gov. Rick Perry said Thursday. "It is an expansive effort with the Rangers playing a more high-profile role than they've ever played before," Perry said of the Department of Public Safety's elite investigative unit. The forces, dubbed "Ranger recon" teams, are the latest effort "to fill the gap that's been left by the federal government's ongoing failure to adequately secure our international border with Mexico," he said.

This action brings with it several implications, not the least of which is that if Washington D.C. does anything to try and stop the State of Texas from continuing this action, it will highlight the fact that Federal Government did fail in one of its greatest responsibilities and ignoring it will produce the same exact result.

More:

"They'll be deployed to high-traffic, high-crime areas along the border," he said. "They'll give us boots on the ground, put people in these hot spots no matter what or where they may exist." Perry said the effort also would focus on remote areas where farmers and ranchers have complained of being overrun by smugglers and gangs from Mexico in numbers that also overwhelm local law enforcement and border patrol officers. "Washington is shortchanging them, not giving them the support they need," Perry said. "As a result, we're having to dedicate our resources to deal with the challenges we have along the Texas-Mexico border and ensuing issues that porous border has created all across state of Texas."

If the Obama administration wishes to bring any type of legal action against the State of Texas for this, I say bring it on. We need debates like this to help educate the American people as to exactly what kind of person Obama really is.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Texas Governor Sends Rangers To Mexico Border
Associated Press via MSNBC
September 11, 2009

Democrats Delay Bill Release To Conceal Hidden Agenda, Uploaded It In Non-Searchable Format

Whatever happened to the promise of making bills public for at least 48 hours before a vote so that the bill can be reviewed before debate begins? Apparently, the Dems had no intention of keeping that promise. Nor did they want the public to be able to do key-word searches on the porkulus/spendulus package going before a vote today.

From Connie Hair at Human Events:

Democratic staffers released the final version of the stimulus bill at about 11 p.m. last night after delaying the release for hours to put it into a format which people cannot “search” on their home computers. Instead of publishing the bill as a regular internet document -- which people can search by “key words” and otherwise, the Dems took hours to convert the final bill from the regular searchable format into “pdf” files, which can be read but not searched. Three of the four .pdf files had no text embedded, just images of the text, which did not permit text searches of the bill. That move to conceal the bill’s provisions had not been remedied this morning at the time of publication of this article.

Why did the Democrats go to such lengths to conceal what is in this bill? Why are they making it so difficult for people to research and study its contents? It is almost like a little child trying to hide a piece of food that he/she doesn't want to eat while not knowing that Mom and Dad are watching them search for a hiding place.

There is alot the Dems want to hide. The aforementioned Health Care provisions that allow the Federal government to step in and reverse your doctor's decisions are among them. But, there are some more sinister ones that may even be unconstitutional:

We found one provision that may be a good example of why the Democrats are desperate to stop any exposure of what is in this bill. Like this gem: SEC. 1607. (a) CERTIFICATION BY GOVERNOR -- Not later than 45 days after the date of enactment of this Act, for funds provided to any State or agency thereof, the Governor of the State shall certify that: 1) the State request and use funds provided by this Act , and; 2) funds be used to create jobs and promote economic growth. (b) ACCEPTANCE BY STATE LEGISLATURE -- If funds provided to any State in any division of this Act are not accepted for use by the Governor, then acceptance by the State legislature, by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be sufficient to provide funding to such State. This provision -- apparently aimed at conservative governors such as South Carolina’s Mark Sanford who does not want the federal money -- would overturn state laws and constitutions, intervening directly in the state’s government to give the legislature the power to overturn a government’s decision. This provision probably violates the U.S. Constitution, a matter which will be of no concern to Congressional Democrats.

That's right. The Constitution of the United States guarantees each state a "Republican form of government" and the 10th Amendment relegates all powers not enumerated in that document to the several states.

Pretty easy to see why the Dems are trying to slip this one past us hoping that we wouldn't notice.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Democrats Delay Bill Release To Conceal Details
Connie Hair
Human Event Online
February 13, 2009