Does America still need a president?

by Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 5/29/12

States’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights! – Texas Governor Rick Perry, April 16, 2009

California headed toward "nation state" status when it moved to link its carbon markets with Québec’s. But as Douglas A. Kysaw and Webb Lyons report in the Huffington Post, as much as California may envision itself a global player, “the fact remains that it is a state, and as such operates under a set of constitutional restraints that limit its involvement on the international stage.”

Has the American Presidency become an anachronism? Does centralized government today hinder the progress of mature states like California? Ours has become a government of political tribes and generations, not states – that idea was killed in 1913 by the 17^th Amendment. But centralized government may soon become a thing of the past. Tea Party is not just for us New Hampshire hillbillies any more. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Jersey’s governor Chris Christie have signing on.

California and Quebec ignore both American and Canadian governments and go ahead together as free states and regions. As governor, Schwarzenegger pioneered this approach.

Schwarzenegger declared California to be the modern equivalent of the ancient Athens and Sparta. “‘We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state,” he said in his inaugural address. “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

But federal governance presented problems.

Perry has made the same complaint.  The Founders were being forced to endure a king 3,000 miles away, he has written. “Is it not ironic that what we fought against 200-years ago is what we allow today, with the consolidation of power in Washington?”

Now Christie says he will move to allow casinos in his state to offer betting on the outcome of sporting events like football and basketball in violation of federal law.

"We intend to go forward," Christie said. "If someone wants to stop us, then let them try to stop us.”

Has he been talking to Judge Napolitano? It sounds like that thing Perry has on his cowboy boots: Come and take it.

“The president’s saga has a symbolism and sweep that his opponent hasn’t been able to match,” writes NYTs columnist Frank Bruni on Sunday. But match they will. They always do. The Clintons have turned the presidency of Bill into a globalist personality cult and Obama is more attractive. This is endemic to our structure of governance and became embedded in our DNA with the cult of George Washington, enshrined as an actual god on the dome of the Capital in the vast painting, “Apotheosis of George Washington.”

A function of the Senate was to bring detachment from the central authority to allow states to mature. A ploy, perhaps.  The marginalization of Jefferson off on the river banks in D.C. suggests it was.

Ambassador George Kennan proposed antidotes like a Council of Elders. An independent governors council - possibly a permanent one - of current and past governors (Schwarzenegger, Sarah Palin, Perry and Christie should begin to investigate the possibilities) would raise the status of governors and their states and regions and begin to address it.

These exist today, but politicians and we, the people, need to undergo a fundamental freeing from the creepy occultism of government symbolism (like the Vesica Piscis – divine portal – surrounding the Washington Monument which substitutes Washington for the Christ; separation of church and state? What if the state itself is the church?) and political indoctrination that has led us to accept with hard-wired religious fidelity the absolute authority of central government since Washington was portrayed as ascending to heaven body and soul on December 14, 1799.