The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) - Federal Law within the States

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP...

State authorities are not required to enforce federal laws imposed against the people of the state (Printz v. United States (S.Ct, 1997)). But, the states must still obey federal laws that protect the individual rights of people.

That is, as in the Printz case, states' law enforcement agencies do not have to enforce federal gun control laws that impair access to guns by individuals.

Conversely, however, states are bound to obey provisions of the Privacy Act, for example, and therefore must maintain the records of private individuals in accordance with the protections within its provisions, must maintain logs of access to those records, must provide Privacy Act Notices as proscribed, and may not shirk those duties without becoming felony perpetrators.

The distinction is extremely important.

In the one case, we have impairments of autonomy commanded by the federal government that the states may resist, may protect people of the state from, rather than participate in.

In the other case, we have guarantees of individual rights and protections proscribed by the federal government that the states may not arrogate, that states may not adopt more totalitarian denigrations of those rights. In effect, the unbreachable power and control over those rights is reserved to the people, invested in the people, each individual, against the encroachments of any government or other powers.

This investment and reservation of power in and to the people is so powerful that state laws guaranteeing individual rights generally supersede more lax, more encroaching, federal laws – save for acts of judicial activism. This runs counter to the general case, apart from protecting individual rights, where federal law generally supersedes state law.

The importance of this distinction, and its importance to the preservation of liberty and democracy itself, cannot be overstated. In fact, at the roots of the U.S. Constitution itself, the powers of the federal government to protect individual liberties and freedom, to defend human rights everywhere within the nation, is one of the chief powers of the federal government. Conversely, the Constitutional investment of power in the federal government to police private natural-born individuals directly in any way (apart from protecting individual rights), to enforce encroachments upon liberty and freedom directly from the federal government, is virtually nonexistent, and Constitutionally dubious at best. Most such powers that the federal government modernly claims are rooted in its Constitutional power to regulate interstate and international commerce, but many of the powers claimed under that Constitutional clause ultimately have little or nothing to do with those forms of commerce in most cases that arise.

The implications of this include that, failure to protect those federally guaranteed rights within the states, as acts of corruption, violate both federal and state anti-corruption laws, even though the underlying protection is enumerated in federal law. There being little more important to the preservation of a democratic, representative government than suppressing corruption, such arrogations of rights must always be aggressively pursued and prosecuted under both federal and state laws.

Beware of mantras, rising in recent years and since Printz, espousing "states' rights" that advance notions that no federal laws apply within a state unless that state wants them to: federal laws, in text, generally provide more stringent protections of liberty and freedom, and such blanket 'anti-federal' claims serve to undermine personal liberty far more than not – and are in error. Specifically in large part, that error is in forgetting that freedom is about personal rights, rights of the natural born human being, and the investment of protections of any of those rights by federal law rests those rights with those individuals, ceasing to be federal powers – and "states' rights" notions that attack those federally protected rights do not wrest power from the federal government for the states, they wrest that power from the people, wrongly. In other words, changing a "states' rights" movement from an anti-federal movement into an anti-citizen, anti-freedom movement.

Indeed, in the preservation and protection of individual civil rights and personal freedoms, the federal government is well positioned statutorily and constitutionally, and is far more fit to such a role than to roles prosecuting individual crimes not related to corruption or civil rights violations. It is long overdue for the federal government to return to greater focus toward and adoption of such a role, and it is its neglect of this role and duty that has raised increasing animosity against the federal government in many sectors.