Did the Government Break Its Own Rules? What Can We Do When The Government Violates Its Contract?

In every contract, both parties agree to the performance of certain duties, the violation of which can nullify the contract. The Constitution is just such a contract, and the federal government has violated the provisions that govern its action. What now?

This is an excerpt from Ben McClintock’s keynote presentation at the 2025 Constitution Party convention, entitled “Make America STATES Again!” Watch the whole presentation here: https://treeoflibertysociety.com/articles/what-does-article-5-really-mean-for-us

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TRANSCRIPT

Generated using A.I.; please forgive any mistakes.

So you have two options, right? We have one option is to cancel the contract as it's been violated, or you enforce it, because the contract has been violated. And what needs to be understood is that it was not us that violated the contract. It was the general government that violated the contract by forcing a violation of it. So what can a state do now that it's been supposedly passed? Do we just have to capitulate and go along with it, right? No, you don't have to just go along with it. That's what the founding father said with the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions and other examples of nullification.

You just say no, we're not gonna go along with it. It's a violation of the contract, and so it's null and void, and we're just not gonna do it. But there are other, an option that you don't have to leave the union, that you can actually start to enforce the Constitution. And that is another option that can be done. We'll get into that. So what a state can do, you have James Madison in Federalist 46. What he said, right, this is an argument you had. Patrick Henry, who is also what was considered an anti-Federalist, saying we were giving too much power to the general government.

And you had James Madison, the Federalist Papers, defending the Constitution, saying no, we would have to be insane. He says, what degree of madness would we have to have come to, to allow the general government to be so powerful that it takes away the state's rights? And so he says, so in Federalist 46, he goes through and he lists the things that can be done for an individual state to withstand the unconstitutional actions of the federal government. He says that the means of opposition to the federal government, going beyond its bounds, are powerful and at hand.

So he's like, it shouldn't be a difficult thing. These tools that we have, they are powerful tools, and they're right next to us. We can grab them anytime we want to. He says, to the disquietude of the people, their repugnance, and perhaps refusal to cooperate with the officers of the union, the frowns of the magistracy of the state, the embarrassment created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose in any state difficulties not to be despised.

A correspondence would be opened. Plans of resistance would be concerted. In the contest with Great Britain, one part of the empire was employed against the other. The more numerous part invaded the rights of the less numerous part. So he's going back to the war for independence that we just went through, and saying we had a much bigger organization coming against us. And then he's saying now that no, we have a much bigger thing. He says, what would be the contest in the case we are supposing? Who would be the parties?

A few representatives of the people would be opposed to the people themselves. So he's saying it would be the exact opposite. So it would be much easier because we'd have more people opposing a smaller group of people. And so it would be much easier for us to oppose the government if they went beyond its bounds in the Constitution in this scenario. So I wanna break this down also into more modern tongues. We can, disquietude is not really a word that's used very often today, at least in the circles I run around with. Or repugnance, I think that the meaning of that has changed a little bit as well.

So I wanna just talk about those meanings and that will help us to understand what it is our duty is, or what are the things that we can do when the government goes beyond its contract. So talking about disquietude, I'm sorry. With this, just kind of breaking down what it is that James Madison said in Federalist 46, he says, the disquietude of the people, the people's repugnance, and the refusal to cooperate with the officers of the union. So these are the tools that we have at hand to be able to resist when the contract is being violated. So now we look at the definitions of these words, disquietude.

We go to the dictionary of the time, Samuel Johnson's dictionary. That was what the founding fathers would have used. And it says that it's uneasiness, anxiety, disturbance, wanton tranquility. So essentially no peace until the tyrants retreat. So that's what we're supposed to do, according to James Madison, is that we are to have no peace. We are to be full of disturbances and wanton tranquility until they back off. So that's what disquietude means, that we are to be constantly going after them. Somebody talks about one topic, and we just bring it right back. We say, no, we're talking about the violation of the contract.

And then something else comes up again. We're like, no, we're talking about the violation of the contract. How about repugnance? Today, the word means, in most people's minds, at least in my mind, it's ugly, it's gross, right? But that's not what he meant there in the context of '46. In Federalist '46, disquietude means something completely different. But I am getting ahead of myself again. And I'm going to get some more background on how the founding fathers were full of disquietude, how they were full of disturbances leading up to the war for independence.

We have a 10-year period, 1766 to 1776. There were more than 70 recorded incidents of tarring and feathering by colonists against government officials. Just right there. Today, can you imagine the way that our population is today? If a single politician was tarred and feathered by the populace, what would the response be? The founding fathers were of a different breed than we are today. They'd 70 in 10 years. In Berkshire, colonists forced justices of the court from their seats, shut up the courthouse, and forced the justices from the city.

So they just ran everybody out of town that was going to be enforcing the tyrannical acts of the crown. Another thing that they did, they said outside of Boston, colonists went to the home of another judge and fired shots into his house, forcing him out of the city. So again, you can just imagine what that would be like today because of the way that our culture is, that this would be seen as unacceptable. But the founding fathers said, no, this is how we behave to be able to get government back under control. This is something that most people in America believe that they support the founding fathers.

They love what the colonists did to be able to gather independence. But when we say, let's be like them, they're like, wait, hold on a second. That's a little extreme to be like the founding fathers as much as we like to respect them. But this is what they said was the solution to an out of control government. Again, in 1774, the attorney general's house had windows broken and other damage, forcing him to flee the city to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lieutenant governor had his house ransacked by colonists and was forced to resign and flee to Boston for safety.

5000 colonists went to Worcester and compelled the judges, the sheriff and other judicial officials to promise not to hold courts enforcing the acts of Parliament. So again, they were full of disquietude. They did not allow the government to enforce its tyrannical edicts. They said, no, we're not going to do it. And if you're going to be a part of that, we're going to drive you out of town. So we you know, it's our godly duty to be full of disquietude. The scriptures talk about that in Proverbs. We're to open my mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.

Open my mouth, judge righteously and plead the cause of the poor and needy. And then in the Doctrine and Covenants, section one, 23, the Lord says also it is an imperative duty that we owe to all the rising generation and all the pure in heart that we should waste and wear out our lives and bring into light all the hidden things of darkness where and we know them. So we're told to be full of disquietude. We're supposed to waste and wear out our lives in exposing what's going on. Lord says that we're we're wearing out our life. Like when we wear out something, it's something that is used up because it's not hidden away, something that is regularly used.

And so we are told to be full of disquietude, to expose the evil that is going on and so that good may prevail. So go to repugnance. What we think today and what it was back then, repugnance was just disobedient. Wasn't something that was stinky or ugly. If you were repugnant, it meant that you were going to resist what was going on. You just don't do it. And that's what the founding fathers said in the Kentucky resolutions and in the Virginia resolutions and other examples of when the federal government violated the contract, they said, we're not going to do it.

We're not going to obey. And that's our job to preserve the union, preserve the contract was to not obey anything that was outside of the contract. So we're supposed to be disquiet, full of disquietude and repugnance. And so we do that through passing out literature or having cottage meetings in our home where people present something. We pass out books to help people understand what's going on. We go to a meeting and we public meeting of a public official and we get in their face and we say, you're violating the contract. You're breaking the law.

You need to be called out on it specifically. Also, getting together with those that we know and just meeting with them one on one and sharing with them the facts of liberty, of what God has asked us to do and what is being violated in those things. And so that we can bring more people to an understanding of their duty to be full of disquietude and repugnance. So an example that he said, he says, we need to refuse to cooperate with the officers. Here's some examples of officers, right? We have IRS agents.

You have OSHA agents. You have ATF agents and even local police would be considered the officers of the government because, hey, of course, they are enforcing the tyranny and they are funded by the federal government. And so they are considered officers of the federal government that you would not cooperate with when they are sent to enforce these illegal edicts that violate the contract. So I want to be more general, right? Just like when we say that we shouldn't buy it, we shouldn't obey things that violate the contract doesn't mean we can just go down I-15 and do a bunch of donuts.

We don't just break the law just because the government said you should do it. Right. There's wisdom and things that you do. And so we don't just because of a government agents agent wants to ask for your help in finding out what's going on with something. Then we have to say, OK, is it reasonable? Right. If somebody has actually murdered someone, then we should help catch the murder because murder is wrong. But we see these agencies, they are illegal. They shouldn't exist in the first place. And so we don't cooperate with an agent of an agency that is illegal in the first place.

But let's give some specific examples of what I mean of not cooperating, refusing to cooperating with the officers we have here. I don't know if you guys remember. This was back in 2003. Here in Utah, you had a 12 year old that was diagnosed with cancer and his parents didn't want to give him chemotherapy treatment. But that's illegal in the state of Utah. You are compelled to treat your minor with what the state says you must treat them with for that disease. And they didn't want to do that.

And so they fled the state. They left the to go to Idaho so that they could get the treatment that they wanted for their child instead of the one that the state wanted. So if somebody came to me, I knew this family and they wanted my help in finding them. I absolutely would refuse to cooperate with that officer. Sometimes you see these amber alerts that come on your phone and we'll see them pop up where that's somebody where it's a just a specific example just happened last year where a mother and a daughter, which the grandma and then the daughter were got in a fight.

The daughter left with her baby and the mom was scared. And so I called the police and the police issued an amber alert threatening to take away the child and put the mom in jail simply because of an argument. Well, most of these cases that we see of these amber alerts are simply the government attempting to kidnap somebody's child. And so that's an example of where I would refuse to cooperate with the officers. Here's another example that we see every once in a while. We have FBI offering twenty five thousand dollars rewards for information in a series of attacks against abortion clinics.

So just to translate reproductive health service facilities means baby murder clinics. So am I going to help them out to get the twenty five thousand dollars so that they can? You know, so what they're saying is somebody did something to help protect babies from being tortured and murdered. And now they want me to help them find that person and put them in jail. I'm not going to do that. I am not going to cooperate with the officers of the government to put somebody in jail that did whatever they could to stop a baby from being tortured and murdered.

And so we see some examples and there's probably an endless list of examples where we would say that's not it's not right to help out these officers and that we would say it's morally reprehensible to help them out. So I just want to give those examples of what James Madison talked about in Federalist 46 when he talked about not cooperating with the officers when they are violating the natural rights, when they're violating the Constitution. It is our job to help enforce the Constitution by not cooperating with these officers.