From the January 2007 Idaho Observer:

The clause of all persecutions

All across the spectrum of political viewpoints, from liberal to conservative, one thing they agree on is the abuse of the "commerce clause" in the Constitution to create the federal police state and destroy state Sovereignty and the Individual Rights of The People.

There is also widespread understanding that it is the federal Courts who are at the root of this problem for their failure to uphold the Constitution, or rather their direct subversion of it to institute their own social engineering agenda. In cases like U.S. v White Plume 447 F.3d 1067 (8th Cir. 2006), Senior Circuit Judge C. Arlen Beam writes: "[Defendants/Appellants] ask this court to be the first to find that farming and, by extension, farming hemp, is a fundamental right subject to strict scrutiny protection under the Fifth Amendment..."

If ever there was a more fundamental purpose for property rights at common law, it is the right to farm ones own food and clothing and building materials since the concept of "private" property ever came into existence, yet neither Judge Beam nor our Supreme Court have ever recognized this fact or much of the rest of the purposes and premises for the Ninth Amendment protections which apply to Rights which We The People preserved for ourselves.

Instead, Judge Beam writes: "We must refuse to infringe on the legislative prerogative of enacting statutes to implement public policy. The problems of public policy are for the legislature and our job is one of interpreting statutes, not of drafting them."

So, it is clear that the courts are no longer interested in our rights, but rather now act only as extensions of the executive branch and fully abdicate their true fundamental purpose as our guardians. In this way, they act by neglect of their duty, to be rubber stampers of wildly-treasonous usurpations of our Rights and subversions of our true form of government. The "commerce clause" is now expanded to allow persecution of the people if ANYTHING you "use" or "possess" involved the crossing of State lines at any time.

U.S. v. Smith 459 F.3d 1276 (11th Cir. 2006) upheld an expansion of the federal jurisdiction in a pornography case to prosecute someone because the camera and/or film or their components crossed state lines prior to their entirely intrastate use to take pornographic pictures.

Soon, if not already, we will see the case which grants federal jurisdiction simply because the shoes you wear were made in China.

Norman David Somerville

Commerce clause prisoner, Lexington, Kentucky