A word of caution about Utah Rep. Ken Ivory. Instead of enforcing the Constitution, he wants to open it up for revision by initiating the first national constitutional convention since 1787. However, the Constitution doesn’t need to be changed; office-holders who violate or fail to enforce the Constitution need to be changed. Enforcing the Constitution includes using nullification and interposition, but Ivory has helped thwart Utah’s efforts to do just that. The good news is that his HJR 14 “Convention of the States” con-con application recently failed in Utah!
You may be aware of Ivory’s American Lands Council (ALC) which has constitutional problems of its own.
U.S. Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 17: The Congress shall have power … to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings.
How do National Forests, Monuments, Parks, Wilderness Areas, etc. fit into that enumerated power? They don’t; they’re unconstitutional. The federal government should absolutely relinquish lands that it unconstitutionally controls and should stop trying to acquire new lands. The unconditional surrender by the federal government of land in the states should have been done a long time ago.
Big government cheerleaders will have a fit no matter how you approach this, just like they do about any attempt to limit government. So as usual, conservatives anticipate the negative reaction and offer to compromise in their opening gambit. But nobody has a right to compromise our Constitution! However, Ivory’s ALC says the Federal Government should keep all the National Parks and National Wilderness Areas, even though they have no constitutional authority to do so. Ivory wants his state of Utah to unconditionally surrender to the federal government millions of acres of the best land containing vast resources such as coal fields.
And here’s another ALC compromise that, to me, is insane: They want all lands that have already been gobbled up by government to be retained by government. One of the ALC-inspired bills in MT (SB 215) would prohibit any future sales of lands that are transferred from federal to state control. What would this look like in the western states? It would make state governments landlords of 30-90% of the land in their states! That would require awful BIG state government. Here’s their claim:
Here are my questions:
- The only solution big enough? For what? Growing state government? Seriously. Look at the red on the map in the western states. Why should state governments own all that land? Eastern states’ governments don’t own 30-90% of the land in their states. That’s ridiculous but that’s what Ivory’s ALC wants.
- And why do they want to prohibit the re-privatization of lands that have already been unconstitutionally acquired by the federal government by way of the green movement for Agenda 21 and the Wildlands Project?
- And why do they want the federal government to keep unconstitutionally designated wilderness areas and parks?
Which brings us back to: Why does he want to change the Constitution instead of enforcing it? The inconsistency makes you wonder what else is going on here.
The problem with many “conservatives” is that they’re not constitutionalists. Instead of focusing on the proven solution of the Constitution, “un-constitutionalists” try and reinvent the wheel with innumerable alternative gimmicks. But we’re a Republic. The Constitution is the law of the land. We don’t need their gimmicks and I don’t appreciate them always leading conservatives astray. When we hit critical mass with enough Americans focused on enforcing the Constitution, we win! Socialism is stopped.
Our Constitution enabled a greater amount of freedom and prosperity for a greater number of people than any system ever devised by man!
Lovers of the Constitution working to take lands away from the federal government would do well to chart a constitutional course and beware of advice coming from un-constitutionalists who “love the Constitution” so much they want to compromise it rather than obey it.
