Stopping Usurpation: The Forgotten Power of Non-Compliance
You can’t comply your way out of tyranny.
This principle – central to the American Revolution – has been almost totally forgotten and ignored. And it was also forcefully repeated and reiterated a century later by Lysander Spooner.
The following are the top quotes and principles that make up this essential foundation.
VOID
To start, it was widely understood that the people are the source of all power, and government only acts as their agent. So it logically flowed from that principle that any act beyond powers delegated or authorized to government was a usurpation of power – and thus, void.
The 3rd Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, put it like this:
“If they make a law which the constitution does not authorize, it is void.”
This wasn’t anything new. As James Otis Jr, in his 1761 speech against the Writs of Assistance, made the same case – the same principle even under the unwritten British constitution.
“An act against the constitution is void.”
Reiterating this principle nearly a century later, Lysander Spooner wrote, “An unconstitutional statute is no law, in the view of the constitution. It is void, and confers no authority on any one”
PRECEDENT
The old revolutionaries understood that government always grows, and even the smallest steps beyond the constitution were a precedent for even more usurpations of power in the future.
John Dickinson made this case in his influential 1765 broadside urging non-compliance with the Stamp Act.
“IF you comply with the Act by using Stamped Papers, you fix, you rivet perpetual Chains upon your unhappy Country. You unnecessarily, voluntarily establish the detestable Precedent, which those who have forged your Fetters ardently wish for, to varnish the future Exercise of this new claimed Authority.” [emphasis added]
Dickinson continued with this same warning two years later in response to the Townshend Acts.
“When an act injurious to freedom has been once done, and the people bear it, the repetition of it is most likely to meet with submission. For as the mischief of the one was found to be tolerable, they will hope that of the second will prove so too; and they will not regard the infamy of the last, because they are stained with that of the first.”
Thomas Paine warned that we should treat precedent not as law – but instead, as a warning.
“In numerous instances, the precedent ought to operate as a warning, and not as an example, and requires to be shunned instead of imitated; but instead of this, precedents are taken in the lump, and put at once for constitution and for law.”
DON’T RELY ON GOVERNMENT
Stopping usurpations of power – and the “detestable precedents” that come with them – isn’t about trying to convince the government to stop doing what the government was never supposed to be doing in the first place. That is – in essence – a system of arbitrary and unlimited power, as Thomas Jefferson made clear.
“The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers.”
Even Alexander Hamilton understood what needed to be done.
“But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are NOT PURSUANT to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such.”
Treating usurpations “as such” – isn’t about asking or begging or demanding that the government stop violating the constitution. That doesn’t hold much sway, as Spooner made clear.
“Tyrants care nothing for discussions that are to end only in discussion. Discussions, which do not interfere with the enforcement of their laws, are but idle wind to them.”
REFUSE TO COMPLY. NULLIFY!
This viewpoint was also nothing new. As James Iredell – one of the leading legal minds during the founding and one of the first supreme court justices – put it, “the only resource against usurpation is the inherent right of the people to prevent its exercise.”
Back to Dickinson’s Stamp Act pamphlet, we see the same kind of message.
“THE Stamp Act, therefore, is to be regarded only as an EXPERIMENT OF YOUR DISPOSITION. If you quietly bend your Necks to that Yoke, you prove yourselves ready to receive any Bondage to which your Lords and Masters shall please to subject you.”
In other words, every usurpation of power is a test of the people – the strength of their convictions in support of liberty – and the amount of backbone they have. A willingness to bend the knee only assures there will be a LOT more bending in the future as well.
Spooner may have summed it up best:
“The lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continue to pay “National Debts,” so-called,—that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered,—so long there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection. But when they refuse any longer to pay for being thus cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered, they will cease to have cheats, and usurpers, and robbers, and murderers and blood-money loan-mongers for masters.”
99 years earlier, while Samuel Adams certainly used different prose, he emphasized this same essential principle that we can’t afford to ignore any longer.
“Let us remember, that “if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.” It is a very serious consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers in the event.”
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