Who Are The Seven RINOs That Voted Against Banning Sex-Selective Abortions?

“murder is a Federal offence in some cases, such as when committed on Federal property, etc”

Yes, but only because the law abhors a vacuum. If a life is taken on exclusively federal property, who else has jurisdiction to prosecute for murder? But if a state has jurisdiction, that trumps federal jurisdiction in the exercise of the police power to enforce crimes of violence.

Furthermore, the 14th doesn’t alter that equation, as the 14th is a restriction on states, not on private individuals. See United States vs. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883), which struck down a federal anti-KKK law because it usurped the police power of the state of Tennessee. According to Harris, Congress erred by attempting to restrict the actions of private persons, whereas the 14th, by design, could only limit the deeds of state governments, not private persons. So under the 14th, a state could not write a law that prevented blacks from seeking redress under the law like any other citizen. But the federal could not write a law punishing private acts of violence under state jurisdiction. Harris is still good law.

The analogy to abortion cannot be missed. It is impossible to argue against the premise that government’s most basic reason for existing is the protection of the lives of its citizens, and at any stage of life, from the moment of conception to natural death. The question is only one of method. Law exists for a reason. If everyone did what was right in his own eyes, human life and civilization could not exist. If everyone was forced to do what was right in the sight of an absolutely centralized government, then we would all become slaves to an anonymous elite, and that would not be life as God designed it either.

The founders understood this, and their startlingly foresighted solution was to recognize the power of partitioned jurisdiction. The federal could, by agreement, be apportioned certain enumerated powers. The remaining powers, including but not limited to the police power, were reserved to the states, each in their own sphere of jurisdiction. The contract setting forth that jurisdictional structure would become our Constitution.

But why would the states deliberately refuse to delegate the police power to the federal, except where no alternative existed? Because they had learned by hard experience that a remote monarchy would tend to exercise the police power with reckless disregard for local realities. The entire colonial rebellion was a whole-hearted rejection of England’s hyper-centralized police power. Such centralization can lead to grave abuses, and the Founders wanted us, their children, not suffer a like hardship. Thus they gave us federalism.

There is a price to pay for federalism. Yes, it shields us from tyranny. But it means we are not well positioned to deal with atrocities in our brother (quasi)sovereign states, except by the usual means of dealing with external sovereignties, such as diplomacy, treaty, and war. There was a great and costly war fought in this land to impose a federal mandate to prohibit slavery everywhere. It is ironic to me that some promoters of the federal prolife solution would ever rely on such a horrible, anti-life, carnage-filled event as a model for the imposition of federal laws, even good ones, on private citizens. There may be other arguments for a federal approach, but I would be too embarrassed to ever use the civil war as a model for the right way to go.

Furthermore, there is an outstanding argument that the civil war model not only failed to accomplish its substantive goal, but that it actually retarded a natural process of emancipation that was already in progress when the war started. My own father, who was a dedicated educator in the Chicago public schools for over 40 years, would come home at night and wonder how we could have botched Reconstruction so badly that generations later we were still dealing with the repercussions of its failure in our public schools.

Having thought this through more than when he and I first discussed it, if he were still alive, I would offer to him that it may be that the Founders were actually right in seeking to keep the punishment for private misdeeds under state and local jurisdiction, that the federal government, even when it has the best and noblest of motivations, is simply incapable of righting every wrong, and needs to stick to what it is good at, fighting international wars and making international treaties, while the rest of us, in our several states, drive our local laws, and our culture, ever closer to the ideals of natural law.

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