Considering the current situation at the American border, it is important to remind every state in our country that they have the sovereign constitutional authority to reject, both formally and informally, any action of the federal government that exceeds its constitutional authority. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants the federal government specific, enumerated powers. Any power not specifically granted to the federal government is reserved to the states, and to the people, under the 10^th Amendment.

As James Madison, the father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist 45, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite…the powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”

In Federalist 39, Madison further establishes that “…the jurisdiction of the national government extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several states, a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.”

Any suggestion that states do not have the constitutional authority to reject Biden’s lawless effort to facilitate a mass invasion of our country is analytically incompetent and morally preposterous nonsense. To the contrary, Biden’s actions are “merely acts of usurpation and will deserve to be treated as such” by both the states, and the people. (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 33).

Our Founders fought a bloody revolution to escape the “absolute despotism” to which they had been reduced under the British government, a system that Thomas Paine said had “laid the world in blood and ashes.” They knew only too well the dangers of an unrestrained or incompetent federal government, and their singular focus was to create a republic that zealously safeguards state sovereignty and individual freedom by vesting only limited, specific grants of authority to the federal government.

The notion that the individual states are constitutionally impotent to act independently in this critical situation to defend our country against lawless, unchecked immigration would have been a shock to the men who gave us the greatest, freest nation in the history of the world. And every state in the union must know they have not only the right, but the obligation, to assist in this critical effort to fully and finally secure the American border. We are a country of immigrants. We are also a country of laws- laws that our federal government is systematically refusing to enforce.

It is our hope that every American state will act decisively, cooperatively, and courageously in this crisis. The future of our country as a free and prosperous republic depends upon it.

J. Christopher Alexander
Louisiana Citizen Advocacy Group
www.lacag.org