Quotes About States' rights

I always support secession, and I think that the founders made a mistake by not having that in the Constitution…

Conservatives deserve a consistent and thoughtful vision for the role of federal government in relationship to states.

In my eight years as governor, I did everything I could to resist federal control of issues that belong to the states.

I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.

But I am here concerned not so much by the abandonment of States' Rights by the national Democratic Party—an event that occurred some years ago when that party was captured by the Socialist ideologues in and about the labor movement—as by the unmistakable tendency of the Republican Party to adopt the same course.

Without question, I'm not a fan of the EPA. The EPA has overstepped their boundaries each and every day. They get into areas they shouldn't be involved in... the states have the right to regulate themselves if they have the ability to do so - and we do because we have the Department of Environmental Quality.

Congress has broad powers to regulate and control commerce. Congress also cannot force a state to 'un-decriminalize' something; states' rights are routinely upheld by the Court.

By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you can say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff.

That's what the founding fathers intended, that most decisions be made at the state level, not at the federal level.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

Southerners could not throw off the Constitution and at the same time invoke it to protect slavery.

We have to ask ourselves, is it really right that the E.U. should just continue to expand, conferring upon all new member states all the rights of membership?

Woodrow Wilson would write approvingly in his 1908 book, Constitutional Government in the United States, that "the War between the States established… this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers." 26 This was the Jeffersonians' greatest fear. Thanks to Lincoln's war, states' rights would no longer perform its most important function: protecting the citizens of the states from federal judicial tyranny.

it must seem odd that Christian nationalists loudly reject "government" as a matter of principle even as they seek government power to impose their religious vision on the rest of society. America's slaveholders, too, revealed a similar inconsistency when they championed "states' rights" and at the same time demanded the assistance of the federal government in catching runaway slaves and defending the slave system.

It's natural to defend the honor of your forebears, if only with arguments so facile that a well-educated child could see through them. He fought for states' rights. States' rights to do what?

monuments continued to be the most tangible reminders of the Lost Cause myth and the white South's continued loyalty to the principles of states' rights, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant the right to maintain a system of segregation based on white supremacy.

I don't have a problem with the Centre sanctioning funds to any state. However, when this is done for narrow political considerations, it damages the federal fabric mandated by the Constitution.

The South claimed the sovereignty of States, but claimed the right to coerce into their confederation such States as they wanted, that is, all the States where slavery existed. They did not seem to think this course inconsistent.

The Union next to our liberties the most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.

I really can't imagine how anyone could, in good conscience, oppose the proposition that the states should be able to deny the status of marriage to same-sex unions.

Wringing your hands about states' rights, forget it. They're gone. Basically, the federal government can do whatever it wants. Who's going to protect the states? My court? Ha - we're feds!

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power not longer susceptible of any definition

The Civil War had been about something other than states' rights after all. It began as a war to force or prevent the breakup of the United States.

Tyler had been the vice presidential nominee of the southern Whigs in 1836, carrying four states. Now, to balance the ticket with a states' rights supporter and Clay man, he was the vice presidential nominee of the national party.