by Jason Austin

Created on: August 09, 2009   Last Updated: August 18, 2009

Today I was in a conversation with someone on the phone and we were talking politics. We were discussing Health care, Cap and Trade, Cash for Clunkers, Flag@whitehouse.gov and how all this relates to some pretty massive power grabs for the Federal Government. Suddenly I thought about how President Obama has identified himself with Abraham Lincoln.

As I thought about this, it occurred to me another thing that they have in common. One of the things that the Civil War was about was the rights of the States to self-govern and secede from the Union. The basic view commonly understood before the Civil War was that as a check and balance to the Federal government becoming too powerful and usurping their limit of powers, was the States right to secede from the nation.

I believe that this is a very powerful and necessary check and balance of the Federal government. Unfortunately, the South chose the wrong issue to put this understanding to the test.

What was the United States to do? They could not continue to allow slavery because it was immoral and violated our Declaration of Independence which grants us the right to liberty. They chose to do the morally right thing and end slavery but I believe they did it in such a way that it destroyed a necessary check and balance that our government had.

I blame the South for this. The South took away one of our nation's most powerful checks and balances it had because they forced a war over the issue of slavery. By the end of the war, the South was conquered and with it was the right to secede.

Consider what things would be like now if the Civil War had never taken place but the State which disagreed with the decisions of the Federal government still had the right to leave the Union if the Federal government was abusing its powers. It would keep our Federal government in check. Consider how many laws today violate the 10th Amendment.

The 10th Amendment guarantees that whatever powers are not granted by the Constitution to the Federal government or prohibited from the States belongs to the States. Yet if the Federal government does get involved in an area which is not their responsibility and the Federal Supreme Court doesn't rule against it, we are stuck with it.

This would not happen if our Federal Government felt the real threat of a secession. The problem though, is that we had a Civil War and that provision to our States was lost because it was abused through the issue of slavery. And now that we live in a time when we really need our Federal government to have that fear, it no longer exists.

It is here that I think that Presidents Lincoln and Obama have the most in common. Lincoln, in order to bring freedom to all Americans, fought against States Rights and by eliminating the right to secede gained greater power for the Federal government.

Today President Obama is fighting to bring the Federal government more power to rule over our lives through Federal health care, environmental regulations, banking regulations and more. The door which was unlocked by Lincoln and has slowly been opened wider and wider over the years, has now been thrown all the way open and is now falling off its hinges because of our new President's policies.

The difference between Lincoln and Obama, though, is that Lincoln did it reluctantly for the freedom of an enslaved people while President Obama is doing it for sheer, unadulterated power.

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