Oklahoma Lawmakers Wasting Time?

The NRO-based blog "Bench Memos" has a post by Matthew J. Franck mildly taking Oklahoma legislators to task for House Joint Resolution 1003 which asserts, he says, that the federal government is passing laws in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

That's the amendment that says that all powers not reserved to the federal government or prohibited to the states, are reserved to the people and to the states.

Franck says the Oklahomans are right but ... so what?

But this resolution isn't much more useful than a handful of angry letters to the Tulsa newspaper. Once upon a time a state's legislature could go into high dudgeon and really affect politics in the nation's capital—as with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts (though it's widely forgotten that more states publicly disagreed with these two than agreed with them). But those were the days when state legislators chose U.S. senators, when legislatures still controlled or strongly influenced the choice of presidential electors, and when state governments in general were in a position to give national politics a hard shove just by announcing where they stood. Not so any longer. In D.C., this will hardly even be noticed.

That fact may be a result of exactly the federal depredations that Oklahoma rightly but bootlessly complains about. But the energy expended on thumping the table about the Tenth Amendment might be better spent on recruiting small-government conservatives, in Oklahoma and nationwide, to run for Congress and change things where change is possible. You say both of Oklahoma's senators and four out of its five representatives are Republicans who voted against the stimulus? That's a good start.

Actually, Matthew, conceded that you are right in every other respect, sending angry letters to the Tulsa daily newspaper is the greatest of all exercises in futility. I'm just sayin' ... At least the legislature can be reasonably sure their resolution will appear in print as they actually pass it.