This is a very useful article published November 29, 2009, by Tenth Amendment Center: www.tenthamendmentcenter.com.

by State Rep. Matthew Shea (WA-4th)

This summer, legislators from several states met to discuss the steps needed to restore our Constitutional Republic. The federal government has ignored the many state sovereignty resolutions from 2009 notifying it to cease and desist its current and continued overreach. The group decided it was time to actively counter the tyranny emanating from Washington D.C.

From those discussions it became clear three things needed to happen.

A.State Legislatures need to pass 10 key pieces of legislation “with teeth” to put the federal government back in its place.
B.The people must pass the legislation through the Initiative process if any piece of the legislative agenda fails.
C.County Sheriffs must reaffirm and uphold their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
With the advent of the Tea Party Movement, many people have been asking how exactly we can make the above reality. What follows is Part I of the outline of that plan regarding state legislation, the action steps any concerned citizen can take to see this legislation to fruition, and the brief history and justifications behind each.

Step 1: Reclaim State Sovereignty through Key Nullification Legislation

Our Constitutional Republic is founded on a system of checks and balances known as the “separation of powers.” Rarely, however, are the states considered part of this essential principle.

Enter the “doctrine of nullification.”

Nullification is based on the simple principle that the federal government cannot be the final arbiter of the extent and boundaries of its own power. This includes all branches of the federal government. In the law this is known as a “conflict of interest.”

Additionally, since the states created the federal government the federal government was an agent of the states; not the other way around. Thus, Thomas Jefferson believed that, by extension, the states had a natural right to nullify (render as of no effect) any laws they believed were unconstitutional.

In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 he wrote,

“co-States, recurring to their natural right…will concur in declaring these acts void, and of no force, and will each take measures of its own for providing that neither these acts, nor any others of the General Government not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shalt be exercised within their respective territories.”1

Alexander Hamilton echoed this sentiment in Federalist #85 “We may safely rely on the disposition of the state legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.” 2

It is clear then that State Legislatures can stop the unconstitutional overreach of the Obama administration through nullification. Here is a list of proposed nullification legislation to introduce in all 50 States.

A.Nullification of Socialized Health Care [current efforts] [example legislation]
B.Nullification of National Cap and Trade [example legislation]
C.Federal Enumerated Powers Requirement (Blanket Nullification) [details]
D.Establishment of a Federal Tax Escrow Account [example legislation]
If imposed, socialized health care and cap and trade will crush our economy. These programs are both unconstitutional, creating government powers beyond those enumerated by the Constitution. If those programs are nullified, it will give the individual states a fighting chance to detach from a federal budget in freefall and save the economies of the individual states.

Next, blanket nullification.

The Federal Government, particularly the House of Representatives, needs to abide by its own rules. In particular, House Rule XIII 3(d) specifically states that:

“Each report of a committee on a public bill or public joint resolution shall contain the following: (1) A statement citing the specific powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact the law proposed by the bill or resolution.” 3

Needless to say, this rule is generally ignored. The idea behind blanket nullification is that if the Congress does not specify the enumerated power it is using according to its own rules, or the power specified is not one of the enumerated powers granted to Congress in the United States Constitution, then the “law” is automatically null and void.

Lastly, the federal government cannot survive without money. I know that seems obvious but many states are missing the opportunity to use money as an incentive for the federal government to return to its proper role. Most visibly, states help collect the federal portion of the gasoline tax. That money should be put into an escrow account at the state level and held there. The Escrow Account legislation includes a provision that all consumer, excise, and income taxes payable to the federal government would go through this account first. This would do two things. First, it would give states the ability to collect interest on that money to help offset revenue shortfalls. Second, it would allow states to hold that money as long as needed as an incentive for the federal government to return within the enumerated boundaries of its power.

Step 2:   Erect an impenetrable wall around the County Sheriff and the 2nd Amendment.

As recently stated in the famous Heller opinion by the United States Supreme Court, the right to bear arms “is an individual right protecting against both public and private violence” and “when the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized they are better able to resist tyranny.” 4

Thus, it is clear that the 2nd Amendment not only protects the right to self-defense but that right extends to defending oneself against tyranny. As with any historical attempt to establish a dictatorship weapons must be seized or severely regulated. 5

Here is a list of legislation to prevent this from happening, some of which has already been introduced in states around the country:

◦Sheriff First [model legislation]
◦Extension of the Castle Doctrine (right to protection) [sample legislation]
◦Prohibition of Gun and Ammunition Tracking [see above]
◦Firearms Freedom Act [current efforts] [model legislation]
The county Sheriff is the senior law enforcement officer both in terms of rank and legal authority in a county. This comes from a tradition of over 1000 years of Anglo-Saxon common law. Anglo-Saxon communities were typically organized into “shires” consisting of approximately 1000 people. 6

The chief law enforcement officer of the shire was the “reeve” or “reef.” Hence, the modern combination of the two words, as we know them today, “shire reef” or “Sheriff.” 7

Consequently, the Sheriff’s pre-eminent legal authority is well established. This was confirmed in Printz v. United States. 7    Justice Scalia quotes James Madison who wrote in Federalist 39:

“In the latter, the local or municipal authorities form distinct and independent portions of the supremacy, no more subject, within their respective spheres, to the general authority, than the general authority is subject to them, within its own sphere.”9

Sheriff 1st legislation would formally declare that all federal agents and officers must give notice of, and seek permission before, any arrest, search, or seizure occurs. Thus, federal agents and officers seeking to enforce unconstitutional laws must go through the county Sheriff first.

Extending the castle doctrine to one’s person would go a long way toward eliminating the arbitrary “no carry” areas. Like Virginia Tech, it is these areas where guns for self-defense are most needed.

Many gun and ammunition tracking schemes have been, and are still being, attempted. The intended purpose of “reducing gun related” crime is never realized. Instead, law-abiding citizens are punished with regulatory burdens and fees. Quite simply we need transparency in government not in the people.

Montana started the firearms freedom act to rein in the federal government’s use of the Commerce Clause to regulate everything within the stream of commerce. The original intent of the Commerce Clause was to regulate commerce between states not within states as Professor Rob Natelson points out in his 2007 Montana Law Review article.10

The Montana FFA simply returns to that original understanding regarding firearms made, sold, and kept within a state’s borders.

This list is by no means exhaustive. However, it does contain some immediate steps that can be taken toward freedom and restoring our God honoring Constitutional Republic. Hitler’s laws of January 30 and February 14, 1934, should serve as a stark reminder of what happens when state sovereignty is abolished.

In the coming few weeks I will publish the next part of the plan.

Matthew Shea [send him email] is a State Representative in Washington’s 4th District. He’s the author of HJM4009 for State Sovereignty.  Visit his website.

Copyright © 2009 by TenthAmendmentCenter.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

NOTES:

•1. Kentucky Resolution of 1798, Thomas Jefferson, Adopted by Kentucky Legislature on November 10, 1798.
•2. Federalist No. 85, Publius (Alexander Hamilton), August 13 and 16, 1788.
•3. Rules of the House XIII 3(d), “Content of Reports,” Page 623, 110th Congress.
•4. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. ___ (Actual Pages 11, 13) (2008)
•5. Id at (Actual Page 11).
•6. http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/history/ancient/1859-teutoburg-forest-the-battle-that-saved-the-west
•7. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=sheriff&searchmode=none
•8. Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997)
•9. Federalist No. 39, Publius (James Madison), January 16, 1788
•10. Tempering the Commerce Power, 68 Mont. L. Rev. 95 (2007).

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Martha Coakley’s Convictions
The role played by the U.S. Senate candidate in a notorious sex case raises questions about her judgment.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving
American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District
Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to
assure that the Amiraults’ name would be known around the globe.
The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of
hardship. Violet had reared her son Gerald and daughter Cheryl with help from welfare, and then set out to
educate herself. The result was the triumph of her life—the Fells Acres school—whose every detail Violet
scrutinized relentlessly. Not for nothing was the pre-school deemed by far the best in the area, with a long waiting
list for admission.
All of it would end in 1984, with accusations of sexual assault and an ever-growing list of parents signing their
children on to the case. Newspaper and television reports blared a sensational story about a female school
principal, in her 60s, who had daily terrorized and sexually assaulted the pupils in her care, using sharp objects as
her weapon. So too had Violet’s daughter Cheryl, a 28-year old teacher at the school.
But from the beginning, prosecutors cast Gerald as chief predator—his gender qualifying him, in their view, as the
best choice for the role. It was that role, the man in the family, that would determine his sentence, his treatment,
and, to the end, his prosecution-inspired image as a pervert too dangerous to go free.
The accusations against the Amiraults might well rank as the most astounding ever to be credited in an American
courtroom, but for the fact that roughly the same charges were brought by eager prosecutors chasing a similar
headline—making cases all across the country in the 1980s. Those which the Amiraults’ prosecutors brought had
nevertheless, unforgettable features: so much testimony, so madly preposterous, and so solemnly put forth by the
state. The testimony had been extracted from children, cajoled and led by tireless interrogators.
Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then
had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was
doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which
had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright
afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with “a magic wand.” She
would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl had cut the leg off a squirrel.
Other than such testimony, the prosecutors had no shred of physical or other proof that could remotely pass as
evidence of abuse. But they did have the power of their challenge to jurors: Convict the Amiraults to make sure
the battle against child abuse went forward. Convict, so as not to reject the children who had bravely come
forward with charges.
Dorothy Rabinowitz: Martha Coakley’s Convictions – WSJ.com Page 1 of 3
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003341640657862.html 1/15/2010
Gerald was sent to prison for 30 to 40 years, his mother and sister sentenced to eight to 20 years. The prosecutors
celebrated what they called, at the time “a model, multidisciplinary prosecution.” Gerald’s wife, Patricia, and their
three children—the family unfailingly devoted to him—went on with their lives. They spoke to him nightly and
cherished such hope as they could find, that he would be restored to them.
Hope arrived in 1995, when Judge Robert Barton ordered a new trial for the women. Violet, now 72, and Cheryl
had been imprisoned eight years. This toughest of judges, appalled as he came to know the facts of the case,
ordered the women released at once. Judge Barton—known as Black Bart for the long sentences he gave
criminals—did not thereafter trouble to conceal his contempt for the prosecutors. They would, he warned, do all
in their power to hold on to Gerald, a prediction to prove altogether accurate.
No less outraged, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein presided over a widely publicized hearings into the case
resulting in findings that all the children’s testimony was tainted. He said that “Every trick in the book had been
used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted.” The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly—which had
never in its 27 year history taken an editorial position on a case—published a scathing one directed at the
prosecutors “who seemed unwilling to admit they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that had
never occurred.”
It was clear, when Martha Coakley took over as the new Middlesex County district attorney in 1999, that public
opinion was running sharply against the prosecutors in the case. Violet Amirault was now gone. Ill and penniless
after her release, she had been hounded to the end by prosecutors who succeeded in getting the Supreme Judicial
Court to void the women’s reversals of conviction. She lay waiting all the last days of her life, suitcase packed, for
the expected court order to send her back to prison. Violet would die of cancer before any order came in
September 1997.
That left Cheryl alone, facing rearrest. In the face of the increasing furor surrounding the case, Ms. Coakley
agreed to revise and revoke her sentence to time served—but certain things had to be clear, she told the press.
Cheryl’s case, and that of Gerald, she explained, had nothing to do with one another—a startling proposition given
the horrific abuse charges, identical in nature, of which all three of the Amiraults had been convicted.
No matter: When women were involved in such cases, the district attorney explained, it was usually because of
the presence of “a primary male offender.” According to Ms. Coakley’s scenario, it was Gerald who had dragged
his mother and sister along. Every statement she made now about Gerald reflected the same view, and the
determination that he never go free. No one better exemplified the mindset and will of the prosecutors who
originally had brought this case.
Before agreeing to revise Cheryl’s sentence to time served, Ms. Coakley asked the Amiraults’ attorney, James
Sultan, to pledge—in exchange—that he would stop representing Gerald and undertake no further legal action on
his behalf. She had evidently concluded that with Sultan gone—Sultan, whose mastery of the case was complete—
any further effort by Gerald to win freedom would be doomed. Mr. Sultan, of course, refused.
In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor’s Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald’s
sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with
one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of
the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the “extraordinary if not bizarre
allegations” on which they had been convicted.
Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board’s findings. District Attorney Coakley
was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to
meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board’s ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the
press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures
they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.
On Feb. 20, 2002, six months after the Board of Pardons issued its findings, the governor denied Gerald’s
commutation.
Dorothy Rabinowitz: Martha Coakley’s Convictions – WSJ.com Page 2 of 3
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003341640657862.html 1/15/2010
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Gerald Amirault spent nearly two years more in prison before being granted parole in 2004. He would be
released, with conditions not quite approximating that of a free man. He was declared a level three sex offender—
among the consequences of his refusal, like that of his mother and sister, to “take responsibility” by confessing his
crimes. He is required to wear, at all times, an electronic tracking device; to report, in a notebook, each time he
leaves the house and returns; to obey a curfew confining him to his home between 11:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. He may
not travel at all through certain areas (presumably those where his alleged victims live). He can, under these
circumstances, find no regular employment.
The Amirault family is nonetheless grateful that they are together again.
Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought
the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her
view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told
reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was “formidable” and that she was entirely
convinced “those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants.”
What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general
of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults
to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated
squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is
little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley’s concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—
her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.
If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha
Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.
Ms. Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s editorial board, is the author of “No Crueler Tyrannies:
Accusations, False Witness And Other Terrors Our Times” (Free Press, 2003).
Dorothy Rabinowitz: Martha Coakley’s Convictions – WSJ.com Page 3 of 3
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003341640657862.html 1/15/2010

Adam Kinzinger Wins!!!

A letter from Eric Odom

Fellow Patriots,

Illinois held the nation’s first primary election today, and one of our endorsed candidates, Adam Kinzinger for Congress, dominated his race for the nod in the 11th Congressional District.

According to the AP, there were a total of 50,443 votes cast in the district. Of those votes cast, Adam Kinzinger walked away with a whopping 32,121.

This gave Adam Kinzinger 64% of the vote in the primary, with the second place coming in with just 10%.

Yesterday, we ran a full page ad in The Herald News support Kinzinger’s candidacy for the 11th District. We also cut an audio ad that we’ll soon begin running throughout the district.

You can listen to the audio ad here.

This is a huge victory for our movement. But today was just a battle, and liberal incumbent Rep. Debbie Halvorson is going to put up a very, very tough general challenge for us.

We’re going to be putting together phone banks, GOTV campaigns, TV ads, radio ads and direct mail over the coming months. And we need your help to do it.

Please consider a contribution to help us work to defeat Debbie Halvorson and replace her with Adam Kinzinger.

Unified, we can move mountains. This is the first campaign that we’ve had direct involvement in, but it certainly won’t be the last. Keep an eye out for upcoming endorsements.

And thank for all that you’ve done so far!

For Liberty,
-Eric Odom