Rick Perry’s ‘Fed Up!’ An Eagle Scout’s guide to states’ rights

If Rick Perry, governor of Texas, gets up here anytime soon — and I have a
feeling he will — he might take a look at Henry James’s classic, The Bostonians. He might find us today much as James found us in
1886 — feminists, utopians, New England Hindus, mesmerists and socialists — and
feel some kinship to the more stalwart Confederate cousin, Basil Ransom of
Mississippi, who eat his peas with a Bowie knife. But Perry, Eagle Scout, Texas
rancher, C-130 Air Force pilot and governor longer than any in Texas history,
is no Confederate. In fact, in his guide to states’ rights, Fed Up!
Our Fight to Save America from Washington,
he writes that it was the South’s unwillingness to give up a way of life
inexcusably based on the abominable practice of slavery that persuaded Congress
to pass the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled citizens of Northern
states to act against their conscience and help return escaped former slaves
into bondage.

“Thus,” he writes, “while the southern states seceded in the name of ‘states’
rights,’ in many ways it was the northern states whose sovereignty was violated
in the run-up to the Civil War.”

This book is one of the best things to emerge from the Tea Party movement, and
Perry is just the man to be doing the explaining. In time, it could be that all
of this, including Sarah Palin’s carrying the flag these two years, was just
prepping and plowing the fields to prepare for Perry’s arrival on the national
scene.

We are seeing an astonishing change of outlook in our times. Just one year ago
Nadeam Elshami, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) aide, said questioning the constitutionality
of ObamaCare was “not a serious question.” This week Judge Henry Hudson of the
Eastern District of Virginia said it is.

Perry’s book explains with the clarity of the Boy Scout Handbook the constitutional
history of the United States and the essential issues we might face just ahead.
Perry, with Mark Sanford, then governor of South Carolina, was the first to
bring a public challenge to government bailouts, writing in The Wall Street
Journal back on Dec. 2, 2008, “As governors
and citizens, we’ve grown increasingly concerned over the past weeks as Washington
has thrown bailout after bailout at the national economy with little to show
for it. In the process, the federal government is not only burying future
generations under mountains of debt. It is also taking our country in a very dangerous
direction — toward a ‘bailout mentality’ where we look to government rather
than ourselves for solutions.”

Perry sees the states as laboratories of democracy. “States can be free to
experiment with different ideas to deal with societal concerns and problems,
and they can do so at a level closer to the people so that those particular
trials can match the morals and beliefs of the people most affected,” he
writes.

“We are fed up with a federal government that has the arrogance to preach to us
about how to live our lives, and the chutzpah to haul every baseball player and
other ‘evildoer’ in the world before a congressional committee — or some comic
such as Stephen Colbert.”

He hopes his book will lead to a new conversation about the proper role of
government and perhaps be a step toward renewing our collective appreciation for
the genius of our nation’s federal system of government — when it works the way
it is supposed to.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.